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Don Tapia, a Trump-backer who served as U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica under former President Donald Trump, is making it crystal clear that his allegiance is behind the former president rather than Gov. Ron DeSantis, explaining why other major donors are turned off by the Florida governor well over five months into his presidential bid.In February, Politico described Tapia as one of many “defectors” who was leaving Trump for DeSantis. At the time, the outlet reported that he “gave more than $50,000 to DeSantis’ reelection bid and hosted a pair of fundraisers for him” and asserted that donors were growing “tired...

A super PAC set up to back Ron DeSantis with $50 million is closing as donors backed out - while its founder said the Florida governor's campaign was guilty of 'rookie s**t' mistakes and he will now back Donald Trump. John Thomas, a Republican strategist known as the 'Billy the Kid of Political Battles' set up 'Ron to the Rescue' in November and had secured financial commitments from mega-wealthy donors. But he said the donors began having second thoughts after the botched DeSantis campaign launch on Twitter Spaces in May.

Democrat President Joe Biden’s U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Amy Gutmann, has returned to the United States just days after first reporting for duty during the Munich Security Conference, taking a commercial flight back to the States after Vice President Kamala Harris refused to let her fly home on Air Force Two. Gutmann, who presented her credentials just days ago — Thursday of last week — to begin work as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, attended meetings at the Munich Security Conference with world leaders and fellow top U.S. officials, including Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Instead of staying...

An Atlantic depression left many parts of Germany with icy roads and weather warnings on Monday. Forecasters say this particularly cold winter period is almost over. The Kachelmann weather service recorded this season’s lowest temperature in the village of Kühnhaide, on the German-Czech border, Sunday night. The record low of –28.9 degrees Celsius (–20°F) is unofficial, as it was not picked up by the German Meteorological Service (DWD), whose network does not cover the village. The Kachelmann weather service announced the temperature on Twitter, reporting: “The cold depression last night, again in the east with some –20s. In Marienberg–Kühnhaide in...

Woodstock 50 music festival called off After trouble with obtaining permits and celebrity cancellations, Woodstock 50 has canceled the festival.

A report published this week by the NASA Office of Inspector General reveals that in April 2018 hackers breached the agency's network and stole approximately 500 MB of data related to Mars missions. The point of entry was a Raspberry Pi device that was connected to the IT network of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) without authorization or going through the proper security review. According to a 49-page OIG report, the hackers used this point of entry to move deeper inside the JPL network by hacking a shared network gateway. The hackers used this network gateway to pivot inside...

The Republican Party circulated a loyalty pledge to the 17 presidential candidates today. ** The Republican establishment is far more interested in the candidates pledging support to the party than the party’s pledge to the people. Even Bill Kristol thinks this is foolish. Trump should offer his own pledge to the party. He should force them to sign a pledge to support him when he wins. UPDATE: Trump will meet with RNC leader Reince Priebus tomorrow

Pic courtesy another major Japanese national TV network, TBS For those who have been following this, the Japanese press is filled with snippets, chortling and stories and about the keystone-cop-ish US White House (specifically the National Security Council under Tom Donilon) and the White House website, which mistakenly listed the first name of Japan's Prime Minister (the third largest economy in the world you recall) as a common Japanese "female first name", "Yoshiko" (sic), and now the Chunichi Shimbun News off a Kyodo News Agency story (which is the blue ribbon equivalent of AP), has run an article saying...

FOX News says Romney & GOP kept Gingrich off of Virginia ballot

Herman Cain's chief-of-staff Mark Block walked back accusations that Rick Perry's campaign was responsible for the leak of accusations of sexual harassment during the candidate's time as president of the National Restaurant Association, saying that he would "accept" the claim by a former staffer now affiliated with the Perry campaign that he was not the leak. "Until we get all the facts, I'm just going to say that we accept what Mr. Anderson has said, and we want to move on with the campaign," Block said on Fox News. Curt Anderson, the former Cain staffer, has flatly denied the accusations,...

Ed Gillespie tells National Review Online that President Obama’s demonization of political operatives reeks of desperation. “Can you imagine former president Bush talking about Bob Shrum?” he laughs. “It is just remarkable that he is so willing to diminish the office. It’s starting to look like the Oval Office is swallowing him up.” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, singled out Gillespie, the longtime Republican strategist and former counselor to Pres. George W. Bush, by name on Wednesday. At an afternoon press briefing, Gibbs cited Gillespie, along with fellow former Bush adviser Karl Rove, as a Republican leader involved...

It’s still far too early to start debating the nomination for the 2012 presidential election — and for that, Barack Obama can be grateful, at least for a while. In the latest CNN poll, voters overwhelmingly support his renomination … but not his re-election. Instead, half of all voters prefer a generic Republican, while Obama only gets 45%, as Hotline digs into the history: Pres. Obama trails a generic GOPer in a WH ‘12 re-election bid, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released today. Among registered voters, fully half, 50%, said they were more likely to vote for...

The Japanese daily equivalent to the American "Wall Street Journal", the "Nihon Keizai Shimbun" (or "Nikkei" for short) has run a Japanaese language story just now reporting the slamming that Obama and Gibbs are getting for not only cancelling the Obama Asian trip, but in the rather crass, cavalier, informal and rude way it was apparantly gingerly announced (by Gibbs apparantly) through "Twitter".Alludes in Japanese that this is insulting in an Asian context. Original article (link provided to Japanese) is: 米大統領のアジア歴訪延期、「ツイッター発表」で波紋Or my translation: "Obama's Asian Trip Postponement; (White House) Announcement Via 'Twitter' Causes Waves"

U.S. envoy Bosworth arrives in Pyongyang: N. Korean media SEOUL, Dec. 8 (Yonhap) -- A U.S. envoy on North Korea arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday, the North's media said, in the highest-level visit to the communist nation since the Barack Obama administration took power in Washington early this year. Stephen Bosworth and his entourage "arrived in Sunan Airport" just outside the capital, the Korean Central News Agency said. Bosworth departed from the U.S. Osan air base in South Korea at around 2 p.m. on a three-day mission to bring the North back to a multilateral forum on its nuclear program

Sitting here in Singapore as President Obama went through China and flew home from his 8-day trip to Asia, it is perhaps easier to see the true truth of his trip—it’s deep failure....

Obama Blunders Through Asia Undoing Bush's years of deft diplomacy. by Ross Terrill 11/30/2009, Volume 015, Issue 11 Much dire rhetoric has been unleashed in liberal quarters about the damage done by George W. Bush's foreign policy. The alleged damage, however, is not evident in Asia. When Ken Lieberthal, a respected China specialist and Democratic loyalist, spoke at Harvard early this year, I asked him to name a single year in memory when Washington had as good relations with India, Japan, and China as under Bush. He changed the subject. The White House stated as Obama left Asia for home...

Armchair astronomers have helped discover a batch of tiny galaxies that may help professional astronomers understand how galaxies formed stars in the early universe. Dubbed the "Green Peas," the galaxies are forming stars 10 times faster then the Milky Way despite being 10 times smaller and 100 times less massive. They are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away "These are among the most extremely active star-forming galaxies we've ever found," said Carolin Cardamone, lead author of a paper on the discoveries to be published in an upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

In all my years of watching news coverage in America, I don't believe I have ever witnessed more condescending, amateurish, purely politicized reporting than what just transpired among the liberal MSM covering America's Tax Day Tea Parties. The Tea Parties represented a very significant news event. Whenever close to 300,000 middle-class Americans put their productive lives on hold on a midweek workday, make original signs with their own hands, and travel miles and miles to stand with other private citizens just to demonstrate their anger with government, in more than 300 cities from coast to coast and everywhere in between,...

Digital utopians have heralded the dawn of an era in which Web 2.0 — distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing — ushers in the democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees. Yet as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen points out in his provocative new book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” Web 2.0 has a dark side as well. Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is...

Terror suspects very probably amateurs, say Italian police By Bruce Johnston in Rome (Filed: 02/08/2005) Italian police interrogating the suspected Shepherd's Bush July 21 bomber said yesterday he was "very probably" a member of a loose group of amateurs rather than an Islamist militant ring. Hussain Osman, 27, who was arrested in Rome on Friday, had no links to known terrorist cells, said the police official Carlo de Stefano at a press conference in the Italian capital. An armed police officer on patrol in Whitehall, central London, yesterday Investigations "lead us to believe as very probable that he belongs to...