MAYBE CARFAX NEEDS A LINE ITEM FOR “CRAZY CAR-POOPING LEFTY” UNDER PREVIOUS OWNERS:

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL JUST-IN-TIME MANUFACTURING: LUCAS Drones To Be Built In Containerized Robotic Micro Factories Designed To Be Forward Deployed. “The award to Machina is the latest example of the Pentagon’s push to use containerized 3D printing and other advanced fabricating systems closer to the front lines to shorten supply chains that could get severely degraded in a major conflict. Decentralizing production of drones also allows units to be more flexible and tailor their own production to their specific needs at any given moment. For instance, a unit can produce variations of multiple designs that are best suited to an upcoming mission instead of having to use whatever they are shipped.”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

HOW’S THAT “AFFORDABILITY” MIDTERM ELECTION WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA?

“SOMEONE NEEDS TO PUT TOGETHER A GRAPHIC OF ALL THE STUPID-ASS CLAIMS AND PRONOUNCEMENTS”:

Here’s a direct link to that Grok image — and it isn’t bad.

THAT’S ABOUT RIGHT: A Contrarian View on Election 2026: Trump Was Right, GOP Was OK, Voters Were Wrong.

Pundits condemn President Trump’s decision to bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran as the catalyst for electoral failure. I don’t care: I am glad Trump did it. If doing the right thing costs him congressional majorities, so be it. Part of making America great again is defending America from threats both foreign and domestic. President Trump has put America first, and that included taking out the megalomaniacal Ayatollahs and the IRGC.

Trump has put America first by cracking down on legal immigration and mass legal immigration, protecting kids and families, keeping men out of women’s sports, and improving our economy with drastic deregulation and energy production. Instead of measuring his successes, voters complained about pain at the pump. What’s the point of cheap gas if your city gets wiped out in a nuclear holocaust?

The angry Republicans and Independents who voted for Trump in 2024 will chime: “President Trump said no more wars. And he should have known that ‘No new wars’ means No New Wars to us!”

What planet do these people live on?

Read the whole thing.

Previously: That was… not well thought out: GOP voters turned out to smack Trump, not support Dems.

VERY LITTLE HONOR TO BE FOUND ANYWHERE ON CAPITOL HILL:

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Oh, NOW John Thune Wants to Listen to American Voters. “The guy didn’t seem upset at all about the butt-whuppin’ that his party was subjected to in the midterms. I’ve seen people share recipes on Instagram with more passion. Thune obviously doesn’t feel that he has any responsibility for the disaster.”

A VETERAN COMBAT INFANTRY OFFICER SPEAKS:

More:

Massie is merely an acolyte of the bloodless bureaucratic religion that puts the lawyer in the center of the kill chain, treats every American use of force like a moral emergency, and somehow always finds more sympathy for the enemy being hunted than for the American sent to hunt him.

His whole speech I began wondering who he actually was speaking for, and that’s not good.

GWOT vets know EXACTLY where that road leads. Another approval. Another review. Another JAG opinion. Another commander afraid to make a decision because one bad headline will destroy his career faster than losing the fight ever could.

We were lectured for years about “courageous restraint.” We were told that killing one enemy might create ten more. We were taught to fear our own lethality while the enemy studied our hesitation.

And then we spent twenty years bleeding into the fucking sand.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

MARCO RUBIO:  This year’s sold-out Barbara Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Conference will be given by Marco Rubio.  Ordinarily, I don’t like to listen to politicians give speeches.  They’re usually pretty boring.  On the other hand, as long as I don’t have to listen to them, I don’t necessarily have anything against politicians who give boring speeches.  When politicians are exciting, it’s often because they are bat-shit crazy.  But Rubio may be an exception to my ordinary view.  He knows how to give an inspiring speech with enough content to make it worth listening to.  And as far as I can tell he isn’t crazy.  So I plan to be there.

GOOD PEOPLE CAN BE HARD TO KEEP: Musk admits Tesla doesn’t have enough talent to build more than one car at a time after exodus.

“The biggest thing most people fail to understand is that there are a very limited number of smart, dedicated people! They can only do so many things.”

He added that if Tesla has to “maintain a complex production line, supply chain and allocate engineering for Cybertruck, we can’t use those people” for scaling Cybercab.

By this morning, the explanation had shifted again, to the “opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck.” But the Saturday version is the one that matters. Musk is telling us the bottleneck at Tesla isn’t factory space or money. It’s people.

The Cybertruck is the second casualty this year. In January, Musk announced the end of the Model S and Model X on Tesla’s Q4 earnings call and summed up the reason in one word: “Autonomy.” The Fremont line is being converted to build Optimus robots.

Don’t be surprised ten years from now if Tesla is known as the android company that got its start making cars.