Mike Murphy

Infuriated frmr GOP Strategist. Co-director @USCPolFuture. OG Trump hater. Co-Host @HacksOnTap podcast. NBC News Analyst. @EVPoliticsUSA honcho. RT≠endorsement

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

New moniker pitch: J.D. “Surrender” Vance.

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

Iran just closed the Straits again… looks like the low intellect individual in the Oval Office got the whole “fools” thing backwards…
#https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-deal-reaction-trump-republicans-democrats/

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

Ha!

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Petraeus: There is a death zone of about 35 kilometers on the front lines in Ukraine. You do not drive a vehicle in it.

Commanders cannot visit their troops. There are no trenches, drones fly through trenches. Only survivability positions underground. You burrow in from the side. 1/

[Alan Sepinwall @sepinwall]

I wrote about the genius of the late James Burrows, the greatest sitcom director of them all: https://t.co/F5e5rnsJqc

[Pressure @pressurethefilm]

Watch PRESSURE at home now. The forecast that changed history. The untold true story behind D-Day.

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

A pro’s pro. RIP

[Variety @Variety]

James Burrows, the co-creator of "Cheers" who reigned as television’s preeminent sitcom director for more than 30 years, died on Friday. He was 85. https://t.co/drWXrDuZlE

[Mediaite @Mediaite]

Art of the Peel: Tourists Are 'Tearing Off Pieces' of the Reflecting Pool's Peeling Paint to 'Take as Souvenirs' https://t.co/d0FK6ycwix

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

Ukrainian drone strikes on the Moscow refinery didn't happen by accident. That billowing black smoke is the result of years of planning, plus European money. I wrote about Ukraine's long-range drone project last September:
https://t.co/IglpzzgIPS

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

This is so accurate. I miss real leadership.

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

Ha!!!!

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Hurry, while supplies last. Wait, there's more...

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

A fine, quality job I am sure…

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

This is Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor John Cafaro who got the no-bid contract to install a water purification system for the reflecting pool. He has 2 prior convictions, one for bribing a member of Congress and another for an illegal loan that violated campaign finance laws.

[Andrew Leyden @PenguinSix]

Went back to the reflecting pool with a waterproof camera. Here’s what it looks like underwater where a section has peeled up and was removed.

[Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 @joncoopertweets]

Imagine Trump ever being invited to join a photo like this — not in a million years.

Four presidents. Zero drama. Just smiles, respect, and a shared love of country. 🇺🇸

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

One of Trump’s biggest idiot achievements:
— Blew $14 million screwing up reflecting pool that’s been there and fine since 1923
— Razed WH to build gaudy blimp hanger
— Ruined Oval with wall to wall whorehouse gold leaf
— Started war, then surrendered
#LowIntellectIndividual

[ABC News @ABC]

ABC News' Jonathan Karl reports from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool where workers continue to battle algae – and the new paint job appears to be falling apart.

The Department of Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment. https://t.co/7TzBngVdyc

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

Data centers have, for many reasons, become a huge NIMBY (and symbolic) issue… amazing to me that the companies building these do stupid things like the turbine whine here … they should be focused on getting fantastically good at mitigation of impacts.

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

Sickening. Hegseth is not only a moron, he’s a thug.

https://t.co/qYT5xZqEFk

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

Amazing

[Handre @Handre]

In 1965 Malaysia kicked Singapore out of the Malaysian federation, and Tunku Abdul Rahman thought he had won. He had dumped a port city with no oil, no farmland, no fresh water, and two and a half million people crammed onto an island smaller than Lake Tahoe. Sixty years later Singapore's GDP per capita runs past $84,000 while Malaysia limps along under $12,000. The man who got expelled built the richest patch of dirt in Asia. The man who did the expelling built the New Economic Policy.

Let's study what happened.

Start with what Singapore lacked. No resources. No hinterland. No domestic market worth the name. By every theory that says a nation needs raw materials to prosper, Singapore should have starved. Instead Lee Kuan Yew made his country a place where capital felt safe. Low tariffs. Easy entry for foreign firms. Courts that enforced contracts instead of shaking down the parties. Corporate tax dropped to 17 percent, personal rates capped at 22, no tax on most capital gains. Money flowed in because money is not stupid.

Malaysia chose the opposite. The New Economic Policy was racial central planning dressed up as fairness. Bumiputera quotas demanded that ethnic Malays hold 30 percent of corporate equity, that government contracts favor Malay-owned firms, that universities admit by race rather than ability. The state picked winners by bloodline. Predictably, the productive Chinese and Indian minorities took their capital and brains elsewhere, much of it to (where else) Singapore. You distort prices and incentives long enough, the talented people leave. They always leave.

Lee Kuan Yew was not perfect. The man jailed opponents, sued journalists into poverty, and ran a soft authoritarian state with a fondness for caning. He banned chewing gum, which is the kind of thing a control freak does when he runs out of real problems. Singapore is no libertarian paradise. The government owns Temasek and GIC, sovereign wealth funds sitting on close to a trillion dollars combined, and public housing covers 80 percent of the population. Plenty there for a free market thinker to dislike.

But here is the lesson Malaysia missed. Lee understood the difference between an interventionist government and a parasitic one. Singapore's state stayed mostly out of the price system. It kept inflation low, the currency credible, the bureaucracy clean, and trade open. Transparency International ranks it the fifth least corrupt country on earth. Malaysia sits at 57th, with a former prime minister, Najib Razak, currently serving time for looting 1MDB to the tune of billions. One country treated public office as a trust. The other treated it as a buffet.

Capital responds to incentives, not slogans. When Singapore guaranteed property rights and kept the rules predictable, Exxon and Shell built refineries, banks set up regional headquarters, and the port became the busiest transshipment hub in the world. When Malaysia told investors that race would override merit and that the rules could change whenever a minister felt like it, the smart money discounted everything by a risk premium. Over fifty years that premium compounds into a $70,000 gap in living standards.

[Maggie Haberman @maggieNYT]

Via @GregJaffe me, scores fall ill at Air Force base after Hegseth makes the flu vaccine optional https://t.co/cDpq3EEi95

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

In the old days we’d get a great Pravda headline out of this: “Heroic Soviet Scientists Invent World’s First Flying Saucer, Dedicate It to Peace!”
#StarCity

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

The Ruskies are also getting a nasty taste of drone defense economics… where the air defense missiles often cost a lot more than the attacking drones. Plus the large number of cheap attack drones quickly burn up air defense magazines.

[ChrisO_wiki @ChrisO_wiki]

Here's the thing: any air defence system can be saturated beyond its ability to respond, even if it's as extensive as Moscow's. The Russians are claiming to have shot down at least 170 Ukrainian drones this morning. But each shot requires a reload, and there won't be an infinite supply of missiles at hand. What we're seeing here is drones getting past batteries that are either reloading or have run out of missiles.

This tactic shouldn't surprise anyone, least of all the Russians; it's exactly what they've repeatedly been doing to Ukraine over the past few months.