November 29, 2017
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Thousands of December flights on American Airlines <AAL.O> do not yet have pilots scheduled to work because of a system scheduling error, the carrier’s pilots union said as it gears up for one of the busiest travel periods of the year.
(Reporting by Alana Wise, editing by G Crosse)
Tensions mounted in a Senate hearing to approve two Trump administration nominees after a Democratic lawmaker compared a White House pick to a “horse.”
Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse summed up his thoughts about President Donald Trump’s pick to head head the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Kathleen Hartnett-White, by citing the story of Roman Emperor Caligula’s horse.
“There is a popular legend of the Emperor Caligula appointing his horse to the Roman Senate,” Whitehouse said in a Wednesday hearing.
“Had he done that, it would have raised important questions but the real questions would not have been about the horse,” Whitehouse said. “The horse was just a horse. The real questions would have been about the Emperor Caligula and the spine of the Roman Senate. Discussing the merits of the horse would be pointless.”
Democrats have come out in opposition to White’s nomination to head CEQ. Whitehouse and other Democrats have said her questioning of climate science and pro-fossil fuels stance disqualify her from heading the office.
“Approving this nominee for CEQ would be so preposterous that it would be like appointing Caligula’s horse,” Whitehouse said. “In that the real question becomes about the power of our fossil fuel emperors and the spine of the Senate.”
Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso shot back, calling Whitehouse’s comments “dehumanizing.” Barrasso chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which held the hearing to vote on White’s nomination.
“Let me just say that comparing Ms. White to a horse, as one of our Democrat colleagues just did, to me is a new low,” Barrasso said. “It’s disturbing, it’s demeaning, and it’s dehumanizing.”
Whitehouse’s is referring to a claim made by Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus who wrote in 121 A.D. that Caligula planned to make his horse, Incitatus, a consul. The move was one of many taken by the allegedly mentally-unstable emperor during his brief reign.
Suetonius, however, wrote about Caligula’s reign decades after it happened, and it’s unlikely the infamous emperor “went so far as to appoint the stallion,” according to History.com. By appointing his horse, Seutonius and others were insinuating Caligula wanted to humiliate the Roman senate.
Consul was the highest-elected office in the Roman Republican, but the office had lost much of its authority in imperial times. During Caligula’s reign, consuls were more symbolic but could still preside over Roman senate meetings.
Despite Democratic protests, nominations for White and EPA pick Andrew Wheeler passed out of committee and are headed to the Senate floor for confirmation.
Follow Michael on Facebook and Twitter
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
November 29, 2017
By Alexandria Sage
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – After Tesla’s Model S sedans and Model X SUVs roll off the company’s Fremont, California assembly line, the electric vehicles usually make another stop – for repairs, nine current and former employees have told Reuters.
The luxury cars regularly require fixes before they can leave the factory, according to the workers. Quality checks have routinely revealed defects in more than 90 percent of Model S and Model X vehicles inspected after assembly, these individuals said, citing figures from Tesla’s internal tracking system as recently as October. Some of these people told Reuters of seeing problems as far back as 2012.
Tesla Inc <TSLA.O> said its quality control process is unusually rigorous, designed to flag and correct the tiniest imperfections. It declined to provide post-assembly defect rates to Reuters or comment on those cited by employees.
The world’s most efficient automakers, such as Toyota <7203.T>, average post-manufacturing fixes on fewer than 10 percent of their cars, according to industry experts. Getting quality right during initial assembly is crucial, they said, because repairs waste time and money.
At Tesla “so much goes into rework after the car is done … that’s where their money is being spent,” a former Tesla supervisor said.
The Silicon Valley automaker said the majority of its post-assembly defects are minor and resolved in a matter of minutes.
Tesla has enthralled consumers with sleek designs, clean technology and legendary acceleration on its pricey cars. A Consumer Reports survey found 91 percent of Tesla owners would buy again.
Still, the magazine and market researcher J.D. Power have dinged the company on quality, citing troubles such as faulty door handles and body panel gaps. Bernstein analyst A.M. (Toni) Sacconaghi, Jr. test-drove one of the company’s new Model 3 sedans earlier this month, writing that the fit and finish were “relatively poor.” Tesla owners have complained on web forums of annoying rattles, buggy software and poor seals that allow rainwater to seep into the interior or trunk.
Auto industry experts say the company’s survival now depends on its ability to crank out high-quality cars in volume as it begins to build its first mass-market car, the Model 3, which starts at $35,000.
Tesla has never turned an annual profit and is burning through $1 billion a quarter. That is unsustainable without fresh cash or a big increase in sales to mainstream customers who may prove less forgiving of potential defects.
“We’ve never doubted Tesla’s ability to make exciting products with top specifications, but there’s a difference between unveiling something and then actually making it perfectly in large volume. Tesla has not perfected the latter yet,” Morningstar analyst David Whiston wrote earlier this month.
Musk has vowed Tesla would become “the best manufacturer on Earth,” helped by a new, highly automated assembly line and a simpler design for the Model 3. However, production woes have slowed deliveries of the much-anticipated sedan.
Snags are normal with any new launch. But chronic defects with Tesla’s established Models S and X show a company still struggling to master basic manufacturing, workers said.
Known as “kickbacks” within Tesla, these vehicles have glitches as minor as dents and scratches to more complex troubles such as malfunctioning seats. Easy fixes are made swiftly on the factory floor, workers said.
Trickier cases head to one of Tesla’s outdoor parking lots to await repair. The backlog in one of those two lots, dubbed the “yard,” has exceeded 2,000 vehicles at times, workers told Reuters.
Tesla denied to Reuters that such “repair lots” exist.
Reuters interviewed nine current and former Tesla employees, including a former senior manager, with experience in assembly, quality control and repairs on Model S and Model X. All requested anonymity because the company required them to sign non-disclosure agreements. Four of the people were fired for cause, including two last month as part of a mass dismissal of hundreds of workers for what Tesla said was poor performance. Sacked workers who spoke with Reuters denied they were poor performers.
People with knowledge of Tesla’s internal quality data shared those figures with Reuters. The news agency was unable to confirm the information independently.
Defects included “doors not closing, material trim, missing parts, all kinds of stuff. Loose objects, water leaks, you name it,” another former supervisor said. “We’ve been building a Model S since 2012. How do we still have water leaks?”
For a graphic on Tesla’s losses, click: http://tmsnrt.rs/2AgMYIB
BUILD FAST, FIX LATER
Tesla disputed workers’ portrayal of the automaker as struggling to produce defect-free vehicles. A spokesperson described a rigorous process that requires all cars to pass more than 500 inspections and tests. Any reworking of cars after assembly reflects the company’s commitment to quality, the spokesperson said.
“Our goal is to produce perfect cars for every customer,” Tesla said in a statement. “Therefore, we review every vehicle for even the smallest refinement. Most customers would never notice the work that is done post production, but we care about even a fraction of a millimeter body gap difference or a slight paint gloss texture. We then feed these improvements back to production in a pursuit of perfection.”
Employees who worked on Model S and Model X described pressure to keep the assembly line moving, even when problems emerged. Some told of batches of cars being sent through with parts missing – windshields in one case, bumpers in another – because there were none on hand. The understanding, they said, was that these and other flaws would be fixed later.
Quality inspectors would sometimes find more defects than those reported by workers in the internal tracking system when a car came off the line. “We’d see two issues, that’s pretty good. But then we’d dig in and there would be like 15 or 20,” one person said.
One persistently tricky area was alignment, where body parts had to be “muscled,” in the words of the senior manager, to a certain degree of flushness. Not every team follows the same rule book, workers said, resulting in gaps of different size.
Tesla denied that its quality control is inconsistent and said its “extensive” process for locating and fixing errors was “very successful.”
Some workers traced the challenges to Musk’s determination to launch vehicles faster than the industry norm by shortening the design process, skipping some pre-production testing, then making improvements on the fly. Such improvisation leads to high repair rates, employees said.
For a March report called “Beyond the Hype,” J.D. Power found creaks, scratches and poor door alignment on new Model S and Model X vehicles, issues it blamed on the company’s lack of manufacturing experience. The overall quality of Tesla vehicles, it concluded, was “not competitive” within the luxury segment, lacking “precision and attention to detail.”
Such sloppiness is a rarity in luxury brands such as Mercedes-Benz <DAIGn.DE> and BMW <BMWG.DE>, said Kathleen Rizk, director of global automotive consulting at J.D. Power.
“Those companies have been manufacturing forever,” she said. “They have stopgaps.”
Tesla said its high customer satisfaction proves it is building the “safest and best-performing cars available today.”
(Reporting By Alexandria Sage; Editing by Peter Henderson and Marla Dickerson)
With Zach Montellaro, Elena Schneider
The following newsletter is an abridged version of Campaign Pro’s Morning Score. For an earlier morning read on exponentially more races — and for a more comprehensive aggregation of the day’s most important campaign news — sign up for Campaign Pro today. (http://www.politicopro.com/proinfo)
Story Continued Below
MOORE PROBLEMS — “Moore buried under TV ad barrage,” by POLITICO’s Scott Bland and Daniel Strauss: “Doug Jones and Roy Moore both released new television ads on Monday. But many Alabama voters will see only one of them. That’s because of the massive disparity in TV ad spending between the two candidates in the Alabama special election to a Senate seat, where Jones, the Democratic candidate, is outspending Moore roughly 7-to-1. … Fueled by millions of online dollars pouring in to defeat Moore, Jones’ campaign has flooded the airwaves with over $5.6 million of TV ads overall in the general election campaign. Moore has answered with about $800,000 in ad spending, according to Advertising Analytics.”
“Jones’ campaign built a big financial advantage even before women came forward accusing Moore of sexual misconduct in early November. … A new campaign finance report from ActBlue, the widely used Democratic digital fundraising platform, shows Jones raised nearly $2.9 million online in October alone. But the firestorm that ensued after numerous allegations surfaced against Moore galvanized even more financial support for Jones, giving him the resources to relentlessly pound Moore on-air as a child predator.” Full story here.
— Pro-Moore super PAC backed by Uihlein: A pop-up super PAC that has spent six figures supporting Moore in recent months received the majority of its funds from Wisconsin-based conservative megadonor Richard Uihlein, according to a new FEC filing. The PAC, called Proven Conservative PAC, has spent $147,649 since being formed in August and received $100,000 from Uihlein. One of Uihlein’s donations came on Nov. 22, more than a week after the first allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore surfaced, according to the new disclosure.
RETIREMENT ALERT — Gutierrez won’t seek reelection, via POLITICO Illinois’ Natasha Korecki: “Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) a leading national voice on immigration reform, will not seek reelection and is expected to announce his decision [this] morning, three Democratic sources with knowledge of the decision told POLITICO. Gutierrez is expected to announce he’s withdrawing his nominating petitions [today].”
“The sources say that former Chicago mayoral candidate Jesus ‘Chuy’ Garcia will begin circulating petitions for Gutierrez’s post. Gutierrez’s spokesman, Douglas Rivlin, said he couldn’t comment.” Full story here.
AIR WAR — Tax reform ads fly ahead of votes this week: A slew of liberal and conservative groups are out with television ads pressuring senators ahead of this week’s Senate votes on tax reform. The DSCC is airing an ad featuring families receiving notices saying their tax bill is going up. “How much will the Republican tax scam cost you?” the ad’s narrator asks after the spot notes the elimination of the state and local tax, student loan and medical deductions. Watch it here.
— The Chamber of Commerce airs holiday-themed spots in three states: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is up with holiday-themed radio ads pressuring three GOP senators to support the bill: Maine Sen. Susan Collins, Montana Sen. Steve Daines and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. “What’s the best gift [the senator] can give this holiday season?” the narrator of the 60-second spots asks. “The gift of tax relief.” Listen to the ads here, here and here.
— Business for Responsible Tax Reform pressures Corker: Business for Responsible Tax Reform is up with a 30-second ad targeting Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker that notes the tax reform bill increases the deficit. Watch the ad here.
— Not One Penny targets Trump: Not One Penny, a coalition of Democratic groups, is out with a television ad set to air during “Fox and Friends.” The ad notes President Donald Trump’s frequent Twitter messages and challenges him to tweet about tax breaks for golf course owners. Watch the spot here.
— AAN adds $2.5 million in TV, digital ads on tax reform: American Action Network is out with a $2.5 million TV and digital ad effort, thanking GOP House members in 29 House districts who voted for the Republican tax bill. The ad will air in largely battleground seats. Check out the full list of districts here. Watch the ad here.
— National Immigration Forum launches DACA ad: The National Immigration Forum is spending five figures to run digital ads in five states and D.C. criticizing Republicans on DACA. The ads focus on a young, undocumented immigrant named Bernardo Castro. More here.
Days until the 2018 election: 343
Thanks for joining us! You can email tips to the Campaign Pro team at sbland@politico.com, eschneider@politico.com, krobillard@politico.com, dstrauss@politico.com and mseverns@politico.com.
You can also follow us on Twitter: @politicoscott, @ec_schneider, @politicokevin, @danielstrauss4 and @maggieseverns.
Playbook Interview with Marco Rubio — Join POLITICO Playbook Co-authors Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman for a Playbook Interview with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on end-of-year Senate priorities, policy, politics and the news of the day. Nov. 29 — Doors open 8:00 a.m. — The Liaison Capitol Hill. RSVP: here.
LONG-SHOT BID — “Former Kelly aide to mount last-minute Alabama Senate bid against Moore,” by POLITICO’s Cristiano Lima: “A former top aide to White House chief of staff John Kelly intends to launch a last-minute write-in campaign in the race for Alabama’s open Senate seat. Retired Marine Col. Lee Busby, 60, of Tuscaloosa, Ala., said Monday he plans to challenge Democratic candidate Doug Jones and embattled Republican Roy Moore for the state’s open seat. He also launched a bare-bones website counting down to the Dec. 12 special election.” Full story here.
MOORE ON THOSE ADS — Moore denies allegations in new TV ad: “A new ad announced by Alabama Republican Roy Moore’s campaign says the accusations that he pursued multiple women when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s are ‘false allegations,’” Strauss reports. Full story here. And read about Jones’ latest ad here.
— Pro-Jones super PAC dropped $1 million over last weekend: “Highway 31, the super PAC supporting Democrat Doug Jones in the Alabama Senate race, has disclosed spending another $1.1 million on ads boosting the candidate and hitting Republican Roy Moore,” reports Strauss. Full story here.
NEW ON THE AIRWAVES — Pittenger talks ‘War on Christmas’ in TV ad: North Carolina Rep. Robert Pittenger is out with a new TV and digital ad, which started airing over Thanksgiving weekend, about Christmas. “Christmas — a time we honor the birth of Jesus Christ, yet some choose political correctness, attacking our faith and values, refusing to say ‘Merry Christmas,’” the ad’s narrator says. “Let’s join together to honor the birth of Jesus Christ and Christmas traditions.” Pittenger, directly addressing the camera, concludes: “I’ve dedicated my life to sharing God’s love through Jesus Christ. Let’s end political correctness and put the true meaning of Christ back into Christmas.” Pittenger is up against a well-funded primary and general election opponent, both of whom outraised him last quarter. Mark Harris, a pastor who nearly beat him in a primary in 2016, is challenging him again. Watch the ad here.
— American Chemistry Council’s new spot backs Barrasso: The American Chemistry Council’s new ad praises Sen. John Barrasso as “Wyoming’s conservative force.” Watch it here.
SOMETHING TO WATCH — “Puerto Ricans could transform Florida politics, and parties are taking notice,” by NBC News’ Carmen Sesin: “So far, over 189,000 Puerto Ricans have migrated to the state after the hurricane left unimaginable destruction throughout the island. Planes arriving from Puerto Rico remain full and some estimate as many as half a million people will eventually make their way to Florida. Although some, particularly the older generations, will eventually return to the island, experts believe most will remain here. Central Florida is their preferred destination, but areas like South Florida and Tampa are also seeing an influx of Puerto Ricans.” Full story.
GETTING THE NOD — Club for Growth PAC backs Fulcher in ID-01 primary: “The Club for Growth PAC is endorsing former state Sen. Russ Fulcher in the crowded Republican primary to replace Idaho Rep. Raúl Labrador, who’s running for governor. … Fulcher initially launched a gubernatorial bid but dropped out in June and endorsed Labrador. Fulcher, who also ran for governor in 2014, led the pack of GOP candidates in fundraising last quarter, bringing in more than $100,000.” Full story.
2018 WATCH — “Virginia Republicans anticipating state Del. Nick Freitas to announce run for U.S. Senate,” by the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Patrick Wilson: “Virginia Republicans are anticipating that a state lawmaker will join the GOP primary race for a chance to challenge U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., next year, according to GOP insiders. The new contender would be Del. Nicholas J. Freitas, R-Culpeper, an Iraq combat veteran first elected to the General Assembly in 2015 and easily reelected this year. Freitas would join Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, in seeking the GOP nomination.” Full story.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “This so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us,” Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said, explaining why the newspaper published an off-the-record exchange with a woman who appears to have tried to scam the paper with a false Roy Moore allegation while acting on behalf of the conservative group Project Veritas.
November 29, 2017
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – General Motors Co’s <GM.N> 755-horsepower Corvette ZR1 super car will have a starting price of $119,995, with a convertible version from $123,995, its global product development chief, Mark Reuss, said on Tuesday.
The Corvette competes with Italian luxury sportscar Ferrari SpA <RACE.MI> in the elite, high-performance sports car segment, and is the opposite end of the automotive spectrum from the electric and self-driving cars GM is expected to highlight at an investor conference on Thursday.
Reuss revealed the price at an event ahead of the LA Auto Show.
(Reporting by Joseph WhiteEditing by Christopher Cushing)
10:32 PM 11/28/2017
Sen. Lindsey Graham appeared on CNN’s “Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” Tuesday to say that there’s going to be a “problem” is President Trump doesn’t use sanctions on Russia.
WATCH:
Sen. Graham, in reference to sanctions already approved by the president but not yet implemented, said, “I think the president is making a serious miscalculation here. The Russians will only respond when we push back. They did interfere with our election. They will keep doing it until the price for doing it is too great. Let’s impose these sanctions that the Congress passed overwhelmingly, and the only way you’re going to get Putin’s attention, in my view, is to push back.”
He also said, “I think [Trump has] got North Korea just absolutely right. We’re never going to let them hit the American homeland with a nuclear weapon, if we have to go to war to stop it, we will. I think he understands the Iranian threat very well. I think he’s done done a good job of suppressing ISIL.”
He continued, “But when it comes to Russia, I think he’s making a mistake here. And at the end of the day, we’re a separate branch of government and we’re going to push back and hopefully the president will respond and implement the law that we passed. If he doesn’t, then we’re going to have a problem.”
WhatsApp