Posts Tagged ‘CBS News’

LinkSwarm for April 9, 2021

Friday, April 9th, 2021

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Lying media and Biden’s Border Crisis dominates news this week:



  • 60 Minutes proves that they’re lying scumbags again:

    CBS’s “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an exchange that reporter Sharyn Alfonsi had with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) two weeks ago about the way the Sunshine State has rolled out its vaccination program.

    In the clip, Alfonsi suggested that Publix, the largest grocery store chain in Florida, had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with DeSantis where they donated money to his campaign in exchange for him awarding a contract to the grocery store chain to host vaccinations.

    CBS edited the interaction between DeSantis and Alfonsi when she showed up to a press conference a few weeks ago and repeatedly confronted the governor. The network cut out a lengthy portion of DeSantis’ response in which he explains what happened and how decisions were made.

  • The editing hit job was so egregious that even Palm Beach County’s Democratic Mayor Dave Kerner slammed it. “The reporting was not just based on bad information — it was intentionally false.”
  • What is it about tranny panders that it makes Republican governor’s destroy their careers defending them?

    The Arkansas General Assembly voted Tuesday to enact a ban on gender transition surgery for minors, overriding a veto by Governor Asa Hutchinson.

    Arkansas is the first state to ban transition surgery for minors, although similar legislation is under consideration in other states. The bill also prohibits doctors in Arkansas from administering hormones or puberty blockers to residents under age 18.

    Here’s a word to every single Republican office holder in America: this is not an optional fight. You fight on this hill or we’ll replace you with someone who will.

  • Remember how President Trump “detaining kids in cages” was the Worst Thing In The World? Well, Joe Biden is detaining 18,000 illegal alien minors, almost seven times as many. And Democrats aren’t uttering a peep of protest because they never really cared about those kids anyway, they just wanted to: A.) Bash Trump, and B.) Open up the border so they can amnesty a new wave of illegals as Democratic Party voters.
  • “Texas Governor Greg Abbott Orders Texas Rangers to Investigate Joe Biden Detention Facility for Sex Crimes Against Children.” It’s like Abbott has been in hibernation for six months and finally woke up last week.
  • Speaking of illegal aliens: “New York is reportedly going to spend $2.1 Billion on a fund to give illegal aliens COVID relief payments up to $15,600 per person.” Did any of these Democrats actively campaign on giving taxpayer money to illegal aliens? It’s like they want to live down to the most outlandish Republican parodies of Democrats.
  • Since Democrats will cry “racist!” no matter what, you might as well pass the strongest election reform and Voter ID laws you possibly can.
  • Related: “MOVE Texas Launches $100,000 Ad Campaign To Fight Against Election Integrity. Is this MOVE related to the crazy Philadelphia MOVE? I wanted to do some research into this but haven’t had the time.
  • Pennsylvania finally agrees to remove the dead from its voter rolls. Presumably the Pennsylvania Democratic Party will now removed BRAINS from their list of promised subsidies. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Trump adviser Stephen Miller (AKA “Not RedSteeze”) wants to launch his own lawfare group against Democrats. Good. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Liberal writer Thomas Frank says that fellow liberals are deluding themselves if they think “misinformation” is the source of all their problems and censorship is the answer:

    In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.

    What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.

    (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.)

  • 48 Of 79 ‘Catastrophic Climate Change’ Predictions Have Failed…The Other 31 Just Haven’t Expired Yet.”
  • Hmmmm:

  • New York wants to raise its tax rates higher than most European countries.
  • Largest Meth Seizure In Miami History Brings Cartel Arrests.”

    Authorities have charged Adalberto Fructuoso Comparan-Rodriguez, whose nickname is “Fruto,” the former mayor of Aguililla, Mexico, and the reported leader of the United Cartels in Michoacán, Mexico, with drug trafficking crimes, according to the indictment.

    Alfonso Rustrian, of Mexico, has also been charged as a co-conspirator. Another four defendants were charged for their roles in the alleged methamphetamine scheme.

    According to court filings, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian met in Cali, Colombia, with whom they believed were members of Hezbollah but were actually undercover DEA agents. Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian agreed to send 1,100 pounds of methamphetamine from Mexico through Texas to the Miami area, according to the charges.

    Once the meth arrived in Miami, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian allegedly cracked open the concrete tiles and dissolved the meth inside 5-gallon buckets of house paint. The men are alleged to have extracted the pure crystal meth from the paint.

  • The woke monster has come for Obama! Activists label him an ‘oppressor’ in their quest to rename Jefferson school.”
  • Another day, another fake hate crime hoax.
  • The mysterious case of “Dr. Jialun,” an anti-Trump Twitter troll who got his account verified despite having a fake profile and all of 100 followers.
  • Legal Insurrection is suing SUNY Upstate Medical University for refusing to comply with a New York Freedom of Information Law request on information related to Critical Race Theory training.
  • Man tells his estranged girlfriend he’s driving to Florida to kill her, is shocked when he gets there and gets arrested.
  • Sgt. Charles H. Coolidge, previously America’s oldest living Congressional Medal of Honor winner, went to his final muster. I previously mentioned him here. That makes Hershel Woody Williams America’s last living Congressional Medal of Honor winner from World War II.
  • Jordan Peterson jujitsus Red Skull.
  • Heh:

  • Heh II:

  • We expect nasty hit pieces on Republicans. But why did NBC publish this nasty hit piece on Paul Simon?
  • New MST3K Kickstarter.
  • “Biden Bans High-Capacity Assault Stairs.”
  • Google removes Georgia from Google maps.
  • Golden Retriever has had enough of your fake news:

  • LinkSwarm for October 23, 2020

    Friday, October 23rd, 2020

    The third and final presidential debate is in the books, Trump breaks 50% approval, and the hard left plans another riot and arson spree if they lose. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Consensus opinion seems to be that president Trump won last night’s debate with Joe Biden.

    That appeared to be one lesson from a Zoom focus group conducted after the debate by messaging expert Frank Luntz. Speaking to 15 undecided voters — and yes, they appeared to be really undecided — Luntz asked for a one- or two-word description of the candidates’ debate demeanor. For Biden, the words were mostly bad: among them were “vague,” “very vague,” “non-specific,” “cognitively impaired,” “old,” “uncomfortable,” “elusive,” “grandfatherly,” and “defensive.”

    For Trump, they were mostly much better: among them were “controlled,” “composed,” “constrained,” “reserved,” “poised,” “con artist,” “surprisingly presidential,” “calmer,” and “restrained.”

    There will be more coverage of the debate, of Biden’s promise to end the oil industry and, indeed, more about Mr. Luntz, in Monday’s BidenWatch.

  • President Trump just hit the “Holy Grail” of breaking the 50% approval rating, hitting 52% approval in Rasmussen polling. All the usual poll caveats apply.
  • The left is currently planning on how to peacefully protest if President Donald Trump wins. Ha, just kidding! They’re going to burn everything down:

    An activist group is planning large-scale and widespread ‘disruptive activity’ starting on the night of the election, in an attempt to stop what it predicts will be an “attempted coup” by President Trump in the form of a refusal to accept the election results.

    “Shut Down D.C.” is setting the stage for mass gatherings in D.C., noting that the “resistance” must begin during the “muddied” legal and political debate over the election outcome.

  • More on the same theme:

    “We need to show that we’re ungovernable under a continued Trump administration…That can mean blocking traffic at major intersections and bridges, shutting down government office buildings (why should ICE or the FBI be able to keep doing Trump’s bidding when he’s leading with a coup?!?), or blockading the White House.”

    The document bases its action plan upon the scenarios projected by the establishment leftist “Transition Integrity Project” for election night and sketches these activists’ response to each, explicitly rejecting the possibility that Trump could legitimately win. It continues:

    We’ll keep it going until Trump concedes. We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winter– maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable.

    As it becomes clear that Trump’s coup is failing, institutions and the elites will start to abandon him – or we will approach them as part of the problem. Either Amazon will shut down AWS for the Trump loyalists in the government or we’ll shut down their fulfillment centers. Either governors will tell their national guards to stand down or we’ll shut down their state capitals as well. Over time, Trump will grow increasingly isolated and his empire will crumble down around him.

  • Victor Davis Hanson on the Progressive Medusa:

    The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power.

    Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.

    The Left seeks to transform America into something never envisioned by the founders, a huge all-encompassing, panopticon state, one run by anointed Platonic guardians. Our elite watchmen will use their unlimited power to force upon us an equality of result society—with themselves properly exempted.

    The hard Left’s defense is that its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.

    Large swaths of the downtowns of America’s large cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland—are becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable. Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless. Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism. The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse.

    Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination unanimously approved by Senate Judiciary Committee. Democrats failed to show up. The senate confirmation vote is expected Monday. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The Great Southern Democratic Hope:

    Back in 2018, I wrote about the phenomenon of Great Southern Democratic Hopes — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-learning state who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.

    Prime past specimens of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes include Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Michelle Nunn and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But 2018 brought the modern king of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes, Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.

    You notice none of those candidates actually won, although O’Rourke deserves some credit for performing better than any other Democrat in decades. Still, next spring, Ted Cruz will be in the third year of his second term, and O’Rourke, having completed a presidential bid that also didn’t live up to the initial hype, will be teaching at Texas State University.

    This cycle: Amy McGrath.

    after McGrath won the primary, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin declared, “Democrats serious about winning chose Amy McGrath.” The Frankfort State Journal concluded, “McGrath has the name recognition and financial backing to give McConnell, well, a run for his money.” Fueled by Democrats across the country who are itching to see McConnell defeated, McGrath’s fundraising has been off the charts — $37 million in the last quarter, more than $82 million overall.

    And yet it is mid October, and McConnell does not appear to be running for his money. The newest Mason-Dixon poll puts the Republican ahead, 51 percent to 42 percent. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives McConnell a 96 percent chance of winning. In a year when Democrats are finding themselves in surprisingly strong shape from Maine to Colorado and from Montana to Arizona, McGrath is an afterthought and on pace to turn out like the last Democrat who took on McConnell. In 2013, Politico wrote of Grimes, “The fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.” Mitch McConnell won reelection in 2014, 56 percent to 40 percent, in what was not the fight of his political life.

  • President Trump is not having any of Leslie Stahl’s bias. I’m so old I remember when 60 Minutes was a revered journalistic institution…
  • “Meet NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny — The Woman In Charge of Doxxing and Destroying Trump Supporters.” Bonus: “While Zadrozny is passionately committed to doxing and silencing her political foes, there’s another group she is more sympathetic toward: Pedophiles.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Even Obama Administration officials were not believing the Steele dossier’s Russian collusion bullschiff
  • How Facebook uses Chinese nationals to work on technology to censor Americans:

    China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for ­Facebook to recruit social media censors?

    There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’”

    The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.

    When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”

    Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.

    To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”

    Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”

    It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”

    (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)

  • Texas joins DOJ antitrust lawsuit against Google. Oh, and the DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. I probably should have led with that. I blame this Topsy Turvey year.
  • Intel to sell it’s NAND business to South Korea’s Hynix. It’s a weird deal:

    In a joint press release issued early this morning, SK Hynix and Intel have announced that Intel will be selling the entirety of its NAND memory business to SK Hynix. The deal, which values Intel’s NAND holdings at $9 billion, will see the company transfer over the NAND business in two parts, with SK Hynix eventually acquiring all IP, facilities, and personnel related to Intel’s NAND efforts. Notably, however, Intel is not selling their overarching Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group; instead the company will be holding on to their Optane memory technology as they continue to develop and sell that technology.

    Per the terms of the unusual agreement, SK Hynix will be acquiring Intel’s NAND memory business in two parts, with the deal not expected to completely close until March of 2025. Under the first phase, which will take place in 2021 once all relevant regulatory bodies have approved the seal, SK Hynix will pay Intel the first $7 billion for their SSD business and Intel’s sole NAND fab in Dalian, China. This will see Intel’s consumer and enterprise SSD businesses transferred to SK Hynix, along with the relevant IP and employees for the SSD business, but not any NAND IP or employees. Similarly, while SK Hynix will get the Dalian fab, the first phase does not come with the employees that operate it.

    Following the first phase, Intel will continue to develop and manufacture NAND out of the Dalian fab for roughly the next four years. This period is set to last until the rest of the deal fully closes in March of 2025. At that point, SK Hynix will pay Intel $2 billion for the rest of their NAND business. This will finally transfer all of Intel’s NAND IP and related employees over to SK Hynix, along with the Dalian fab employees.

    NAND = Flash memory, and it’s a very profitable business to be in most times, but not part of Intel’s core microprocessor business. In Intel’s case, NAND is what you run once your fab is too old to crank out Microprocessors, and Fab 68 in Dalian was built in 2010 as a 65 nanometer fab. With Intel’s cutting edge currently at 7nm, you can see how it would be easy for them to part with, especially since the flash division was losing money despite record revenue in 2019. What Hynix gets out of the deal is harder to fathom. They’re buying a revenue stream in a sector that should be profitable, add another fab to their stable, and maintain parity with DRAM rivals Samsung and Micron. But that’s an awful lot to pay for a small revenue stream bump, a ten year old fab and no NAND IP until 2024.

  • Twitter backs down after Hunter Biden brouhaha.
  • Rapper 50 Cent endorses President Trump, says Biden’s tax hikes are too high.
  • Colorado Democratic Party committee member calls for killing political opponents on camera.
  • “U.S. Sanctions Have Caused ‘Serious’ Damage to Iran, Tehran Says.” Good. Maybe they could stop being jihadist scumbags who oppress your people with a brutal theocracy? Just a thought…
  • Armenia-Azerbaijan truce breaks down within hours.
  • Poland signs $18 billion nuclear power deal with the U.S.
  • Chairman of the Georgetown County (South Carolina) Board of Voter Registration and Elections resignes after stealing Trump signs. Note: Repeatedly stealing the signs of political opponents isn’t a “lapse of judgement.”
  • Detailed, even-handed analysis of the charges leveled at Ken Paxton.

    The Nate Paul scandal has, at its heart, allegations that federal and state law enforcement officials abused the rights of an American citizen. The facts from all sides seem to indicate an unwillingness by the OAG staff to investigate Paul’s complaint; their unwillingness to do so must be explored.

    If the 2019 raid was properly conducted, why has that not been confirmed? Why delay an investigation into the raid? If the raids were legitimate, why, after more than 13 months, has Nate Paul not been charged with a crime?

    On the other hand, Nate Paul might—indeed—be a notorious villain. But in the current environment, shouldn’t state investigators be willing to double-check that the actions of law enforcement officials are conducted properly? Even accused criminals have constitutional rights.

    Just as important, what if Mr. Paul is not a villain and merely a businessman targeted for less than honorable reasons? Is it merely a coincidence that U.S. Attorney Bash resigned from office three days after Mateer tendered his own resignation?

    Likewise, it is possible—as the seven OAG employees allege—that Paxton was acting “under duress” in pushing for this investigation into the complaint made by his friend Mr. Paul. Whether or not Nate Paul’s allegations have merit, Texans need to be certain their elected officials are not acting improperly or unethically in the course of their jobs. Was Mr. Paxton simply pursuing justice for a Texan, or was he acting under undue influence?

  • Bill Burr’s Saturday Night Live monologue.
  • Bret Weinstein kicked off Facebook, presumably for daring to voice anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts.

  • Max Boot manages to dig past the next level of the Hollow Earth in talking about just how swell China has handled the Wuhan coronavirus. Time to dig this out again:

    

  • Half Of Europe’s Small Businesses Face Bankruptcy.” I bet a number of Eurocrats overseeing their Wuhan coronavirus lockdowns see that as a feature rather than a bug.
  • Dwight has an interesting link up on the Quebec Biker War.
  • Phil Collins ex-wife took over his mansion with her new boyfriend and armed guards. He should su-su-sue them all.
  • Johnny Rotten on the antifa Borg. “This collectivism wrapped up in the ideology and dogma of communism is the exact opposite [of punk rock].”
  • Today’s Hollywood star dragged by the left for not bowing to their wokeness: Chris Pratt

    Since Starlord is an integral lead in two blockbuster franchises, I would say the chances of this costing him work are pretty much nil…

  • Australia bans all hentai. This doesn’t seem like a winning strategy in the Internet era…
  • Burning Zambonis give you so much more.
  • Happy Halloween!

  • Plenty of Fear and Favor

    Saturday, May 9th, 2020

    The mainstream media bristles at President Donald Trump’s description of them as “fake news” and “enemies of the people,” then go out of their way to prove his assessments accurate.

    This week, CBS News not only faked long lines at Wuhan Coronavirus testing centers, they pulled medical professionals off their real jobs to do it:

    CBS News crew pulled medical professionals off the floor at the Cherry Medical Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to line up in their vehicles so a CBS film crew would have a long line for their COVID-19 coverage.

    “Our insider witnessed the whole thing and came to Project Veritas, because he knew we would protect him,” said James O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Project Veritas.

    “The insider told us that medical personnel were taken away from treating patients and making the line longer for actual patients wait for the COVID-19 test,” he said.

    In an interview with the insider, O’Keefe asked the insider: “You’re telling me you’re a hundred percent certain that CBS News, CBS News Corporation–national, staged a fake event. They faked the news. They faked the reality and broadcasted that to all of their audience last Friday on “CBS This Morning.”

    The insider said to him: “A hundred percent. Absolutely.”

    Nick Ross, a corporate cleaning site supervisor at the Cherry Health facility, said he was there when the CBS News crew arrived and set up the video shoot at the COVID-19 testing site in the parking lot, “Apparently the news crew wanted more people in the line because they knew it was scheduled.”

    Maria Hernandez-Vaquez, a professional registration specialist, told the insider that Cherry Health Director of Quality and Informatics Glenda Walker helped to organize the facility’s workers into the COVID-19 testing line.

    The old school media used to claim that it reported the news “without fear or favor,” but today’s media shows plenty of both. Everyone involved in this piece at CBS News should be fired for cause for actively faking news. Of course they won’t be, since defeating President Trump and defending the Democratic Party (and its agenda) are far more important goals to them than reporting the news objectively.

    BidenWatch for April 20, 2020

    Monday, April 20th, 2020

    The rape allegation against Biden slowly percolates out into the mainstream media, Biden’s brain melts (more), Slow Joe stumbles through interviews (again), and more memes than you can shake a stick at. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Biden won the Wyoming caucuses. Try to contain your shock.
  • Vanquished foe Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden. Insert your own fourth house joke here.
  • I’m sure Sanders was filled with enthusiasm when he did it:

  • The New York Times is not fooling anyone with it’s sexual assault double-standard:

    A remarkable thing happened Monday: The New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, actually had to answer questions about his paper’s very different coverage of sexual-assault allegations against Joe Biden and Brett Kavanaugh. It did not go well. It is simply impossible to read the interview and the Times coverage of the two cases and come away believing that the Times acted in good faith or, frankly, that it even expects anyone to believe its explanations. The paper’s motto, at this point, may as well be “All the News You’re Willing to Buy.”

    For all their lectures to the public about transparency and fearless independence, prestige journalists tend to be very reluctant to face accountability of their own. Ben Smith, who only recently left his position as editor in chief of BuzzFeed for a perch as media reporter for the Times, deserves credit for putting Baquet to some tough questioning. Let’s walk through the Times’ very belated report on the Biden allegations and Baquet’s defenses of that reporting. The article, blandly titled “Examining a Sexual Assault Allegation Against Biden,” ran on page A20 of the Easter Sunday edition of the paper. On the same day, the Times opinion page ran a much more visible op-ed by Biden himself on his proposals to reopen the country.

    Snip.

    Tara Reade was one of the women who accused Biden in early 2019, but at the time, she did not accuse Biden of sexually assaulting her by penetrating her with his hands under her skirt, as she has now. Biden has never been asked personally to respond to Reade’s allegation. The Times assigned multiple reporters to the story but printed his campaign’s formal denials without addressing whether it had asked Biden himself to comment. Its report expressed no concerns that there has been inadequate investigation of the charge.

    Smith started off by asking Baquet why it took until April 12 for the Times to even mention the allegations, which were made in a podcast interview on March 25 and reported at National Review and elsewhere within days:

    Lots of people covered it as breaking news at the time. And I just thought that nobody other than The Intercept was actually doing the reporting to help people figure out what to make of it. . . . Mainly I thought that what The New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his party’s nominee. Look, I get the argument. Just do a short, straightforward news story. But I’m not sure that doing this sort of straightforward news story would have helped the reader understand. Have all the information he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing.

    So much for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” This does not pass the laugh-out-loud test. Does any sentient being believe that the Times would have waited more than two weeks to even mention such an allegation against a Republican or conservative figure, while it tried to figure out how to tell its readers what “he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing”? Recall its wall-to-wall instant coverage of the Trump “Access Hollywood” tape, which by the next day had a full news analysis by Maggie Haberman asking why Trump had not apologized yet.

    In Kavanaugh’s case, on September 14, 2018, before Christine Blasey Ford had even put her name to a public allegation against Kavanaugh, the Times published a 31-paragraph story on the then-anonymous charge. Two days later, the very day that Ford agreed to come forward publicly, the Times blared out a Sheryl Gay Stolberg story, which opened

    President Trump’s bid to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was thrown into uncertainty on Sunday as a woman came forward with explosive allegations that Mr. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers more than three decades ago.

    Unlike here, the story led with the most inflammatory line in Ford’s allegations (“I thought he might inadvertently kill me”) and contrasted that with what it described as “a terse statement” from the White House, terms it did not use in framing the allegations against Biden. Then, the Times complained that “some of the president’s allies on the right excoriated Ms. Ford — a registered Democrat — as a partisan.” Here, regarding Reade, the Times reported its reasons for skepticism of her political motivations (supporting Marianne Williamson, then Elizabeth Warren, then Bernie Sanders) without putting those accusations in the mouths of people primed to be disliked by Times readers.

    Snip.

    It got worse: When undeniably disreputable figures came out of the woodwork to offer lurid and preposterous tales of Kavanaugh’s supposed predations (many of which have since been recanted or thoroughly debunked), the Times ran with them. As Smith notes, when since-convicted lawyer Michael Avenatti pushed forward the charges by Julie Swetnick of Kavanaugh’s involvement in gang rapes, “The Times wrote that story the same day she made the allegation, noting that ‘none of Ms. Swetnick’s claims could be independently corroborated.’” Baquet’s response:

    Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And when I say in a public way, I don’t mean in the public way of Tara Reade’s. If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case. So I thought in that case, if The New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation. It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country. It was just a different news judgment moment. . . . Kavanaugh was a running, hot story. I don’t think it’s that the ethical standards were different. I think the news judgments had to be made from a different perspective in a running hot story.

    This is entirely circular: If the media make something a story, it becomes newsworthy; if it’s not reported, the readers don’t know about it, so it’s not newsworthy. No purer distillation can be found of the idea that the media set their own agenda.

    How on earth do you pretend that Joe Biden’s character is not instantly newsworthy? He’s the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for president. He was the vice president of the United States for eight years. He’s been a front-page news figure since the 1980s. Thought experiment: Imagine that an allegation came forward against Ken Starr. We all know that, because Starr was involved in pursuing the Lewinsky story, any whiff of sexual impropriety would instantly be framed as a hypocrisy story even long after Starr has left public service. Biden chaired the Hill–Thomas hearings in 1991; how is that not the same thing?

    We were constantly told that the Kavanaugh allegations should be judged by a low bar because the hearings were “a job interview” and he’d be confirmed to a powerful, life-tenured job. Well, presidents have a lot more power than any individual Supreme Court justice, including the power to appoint lots of life-tenured federal judges and justices. Isn’t this Biden’s job interview?

  • “Harvey Weinstein Investigator Says That Tara Reade’s Story Has More Evidence Than Most Allegations.”

    Rick McHugh previously reported on Weinstein’s many victims, so he’s not new to this rodeo.

    In the interview below, he says the following:

    * Tara Reade says she told her mother, her friend, and her brother about the sexual assault just after it happened. The mother has passed, but the friend and brother confirm they were told about this at the time.

    * He further says his interviews of the friend and brother were “not short conversations,” but long ones, where he “drilled down” to discover if their recollections matched the story Reade was telling now. He says they do in fact match.

    * He notes further that the timing of this claim tracks with Reade’s sudden demotion at the Senate.

    * Tara Reade says she also filed a complaint with the Senate about sexual harassment (not assault, which happened later) after her complaint to the Biden staff was ignored. McHugh cannot find this document, but says it seems to be located (assuming it exists) at the University of Maryland’s collection of Joe Biden’s papers — which is conveniently under seal.

  • “NYT: We Looked Into the Accusations Against Joe Biden and Determined He’s A Democrat“:

    “While the charges of sexual assault by Biden’s former aide, Tara Reade, are something we would call extremely credible in any other situation,” reads the article, “our investigation revealed that legitimizing them would be politically unhelpful to Democrats. Thus we conclude the allegations are false for reasons we will fill in later — unless we can just go back to not talking about them and not give any reasons at all. We also find it absolutely necessary to consider Biden’s habit of inappropriately touching women to be ‘charming.’”

    (Hat tip: Regular commenter Howard.)

  • “Cracks in the Wall: CBS, PBS Finally Cover Joe Biden Sexual Assault Accuser.” How nice of them to bestir themselves to cover something as trivial as a rape accusation…(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • NPR also reported on the allegations.
  • CNN? Not so much. The published over 700 articles on Christine Blasey Ford, but as of April 16 had yet to mention Tara Reade.

    CNN’s political campaign against Kavanaugh included sympathetic articles toward Blasey Ford, hostile articles about Kavanaugh, supportive pieces about the importance of believing women even when they provide no evidence, hostile pieces about the danger of due process and empathy for men, and targeting of key Republican senators. CNN’s work culminated with their award-winning efforts to sway Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, broadcasting a confrontation between a professional activist and the wavering senator.

    It’s a low bar but Tara Reade’s accusation is undoubtedly stronger than the one made against Kavanaugh. Unlike Blasey Ford, she told multiple people about the alleged incident at the time it happened, not three decades later. And unlike Blasey Ford, she has evidence she met the accused, in her case when she worked for him in the U.S. Senate.

    Since then they’ve done one article on her April 17, then mentioned her in another.

  • Former Bill Clinton advisor Dick Morris doesn’t think Biden has the stuff. “It’s hard to see. It’s like a suicide march with them. But they’re pretty stubborn people.”
  • Former Bernie Sis Shoe0nHead on the hilarity of watching a Biden-Trump election. “Biden’s brain is melting. He doesn’t know where he is half the time, he loses his train of thought, he wanders off camera, and Trump is like a 12 year old on Xbox Live. The combination of these two these two titans coming together will be hilarious! Trump will beat Joe Biden like a pinata, an old, senile pinata, and the DNC will be forced to watch helplessly as their golden goose gets boiled alive right in front of their eyes! Hilarious!”
  • Speaking of Biden’s brain melting:

  • More on the theme:

  • Still more:

  • Lacking such a ring, Stephen Green tries unsuccessfully to decode from the Bidenese. “When most politicians speak, audiences have to suspend their disbelief. When it’s Biden speaking they have to suspend their incomprehension.”
  • What happens if Biden (or Trump) croaks before election day? Depends on when they croak…
  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is reportedly in talks with Biden.

    OC makes this comment and then poof, just like that, Biden calls her up and they are in talks for an endorsement. It’s almost as if the #metoo movement has been turned into a complete joke, able to be covered up at will via political agreements.

    Joe Biden obviously wanted no part of having AOC and her wing propagating the sexual assault claim against him. He’s succeeded in having outlets like the Times and the Post run interference for him, even trashing Tara Reade along the way, but he has no such control over Bernie’s fanbase. Getting an endorsement from their biggest star gives him that.

    I have to give it to her though. AOC is nothing if not cunning. She’s managed to go from a nobody freshman congresswoman to the upper echelons of Democratic party influencers in a very short period of time. We can make fun of her all we want, but that takes skill and a lack of shame usually relegated to the Adam Schiff’s of the world.

  • “Pro-Trump PAC hits ‘Beijing Biden,’ cites China cheerleading.”

  • Hey, remember that Chinese company Hunter Biden says he’s no longer affiliated with? Well, guess what?

    Hunter Biden received wall-to-wall media coverage and praise from his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, in October when he announced he would resign from the board of a Chinese private equity firm by the end of the month.

    But six months after Hunter Biden pledged to relinquish his position with BHR Partners, no evidence has surfaced to prove he actually followed through on his promise.

    Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in early November that his client had resigned from BHR’s board, but he did not provide any evidence of his departure from the Chinese private equity firm at the time.

    Chinese business records the DCNF accessed Tuesday still name Hunter Biden as a director of BHR. He also retains a 10% equity stake in BHR through his company, Skaneateles LLC, business records for the Chinese private equity firm show.

  • Related tweet:

  • Is Sen. Amy Klobuchar the frontrunner to be Biden’s running mate, if only by process of elimination?

    A global plague has shut down much of American society. The virus is particularly deadly to the elderly, and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will turn 78 later this year. In November, voters will want more than anything a VP who is ready on a moment’s notice to lead the country out of a crisis. So the Democratic veepstakes is suddenly much more important than it otherwise would be.

    Joe Biden has pledged to name a woman as his running mate, and he has indicated that he would very much like that woman to be an African American. Stacey Abrams checks both boxes, and she is auditioning for the job. But while she might excite the Democratic base, a failed gubernatorial candidate who has never held a public office more powerful than state legislator obviously has no chance of getting the nod during the present pandemic. Maybe the coronavirus will, against all odds, abate in the coming months. But it would be an act of political insanity for a geriatric presidential nominee to select a former state legislator as his running mate under the current circumstances.

    If Biden wants his VP to be a black woman, then, he is left with only one real choice: Kamala Harris. While the California senator has three years of experience as a senator and six years more as her state’s attorney general, her presidential campaign was a disaster, doomed by vacillation and equivocation on important matters of policy. She proved herself capable of delivering scripted attacks during debates, but her most famous such attack came at Biden’s expense: She hit him on his past opposition to forced busing, practically calling him a racist. That would be difficult, to say the least, for her to explain away were Biden to choose her. It shouldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle, and she still makes sense on paper. But her primary performance failed to generate much enthusiasm among Democrats, and her indecisiveness made her seem unready to step up in a crisis.

    What about Elizabeth Warren? If Biden wants ideological balance on the ticket, the senator from Massachusetts makes the most sense. But does he really need ideological balance?

    For most of the left, Biden’s pledges to lower the Medicare-eligibility age to 60, establish a public option for health care, and defeat Donald Trump will be enough. Bernie Sanders’s most alienated, angry, hardcore supporters are not going to turn out because of Warren; they hate her just as much as they hate Biden. The greater number of 2016 Sanders voters who didn’t turn out for Hillary Clinton in key Midwestern states could be swayed by Warren, but my hunch is that they were turned off more by Clinton’s persona than her ideology, and it’s hard to see how Warren would connect with them on a cultural level. More importantly, Warren’s pledges to radically transform the nation’s economy could scare away the moderate suburbanites who powered Democrats’ successful 2018 effort to retake the House — and Biden really can’t afford to lose those voters in 2020.

    All of which suggests that a relatively moderate woman from the Midwest would make much more sense as Biden’s VP.

    Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks, but a fair amount of it has been negative. Whitmer only has one year of experience as governor, and voters may come to view Michigan’s especially stringent lockdown restrictions as arbitrary and excessive in the coming months. She seems like a long-shot for the second spot on the national ticket.

    The darkhorse VP nominee from the Midwest is Tammy Baldwin, who has been a senator from the potentially decisive, perpetually polarized swing state of Wisconsin for the last seven years, and won re-election in 2018 by eleven points even as GOP governor Scott Walker lost his bid for a fourth term by just one point. The existence of Baldwin–Walker voters, plus the fact that Baldwin was the first openly gay women in Congress, must be attractive to Democrats. The major drawback is that Baldwin has never endured the national spotlight.

    That leaves just one name: Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator who is still the leading contender for the job. She won’t scare away crucial suburban voters the way that Warren would and Harris might. She is serving her 14th year in the Senate, so she has experience, and having run for the presidency this cycle, she has survived the scrutiny of a national campaign.

  • Politico also has a veepstakes roundup. Toward the end we have this from an unnamed Biden adviser: “Anyone who is telling you about who’s leading in the so-called ‘veepstakes’ is full of shit and doesn’t know anything.” Well then, I guess you don’t need to click that link…
  • People have been having too much fun with https://avatar.joebiden.com/:

  • What the hell:

  • Flashback to 2015:

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Dems Rush To Defend Kavanaugh After He Puts On Joe Biden Mask.”
  • Biden after Obama endorsement: “I’m Delighted To Have The Endorsement Of My Old Pal Corn Pop.”
  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for October 28, 2019

    Monday, October 28th, 2019

    Biden is up, Ryan is out, a poll has Buttigieg second in Iowa, and the Yang Gang takes on Bernie Bros. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Polls

  • Post and Courier (South Carolina): Biden 30, Warren 19, Sanders 13, Harris 11, Buttigieg 9, Steyer 5, Yang 4, Booker 3, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 3, Bennet 1, O’Rourke 1.
  • Quinnipiac: Warren 28, Biden 21, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 10, Harris 5, Klobuchar 3, O’Rourke 1, Booker 1, Castro 1, Yang 1, Steyer 1.
  • Civiqs/ISU (Iowa): Warren 28, Buttigieg 20, Sanders 18, Biden 12, Klobuchar 4, Harris 3, Steyer 3, Gabbard 2, Yang 2, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Bennet 1. That’s the first time Buttigieg has placed ahead of Biden in any poll, anywhere, ever. Could be an outlier (sample size of 598), or it could show his spending is finally having an effect there. My guess is some of each.
  • KQED (California): Warren 28, Sanders 24, Biden 19, Buttigieg 9, Harris 8, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 1, Williamson 1, Booker 1, Steyer 1.
  • SSRS/CNN: Biden 34, Warren 19, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Klobuchar 3, O’Rourke 3, Yang 2, Bennet 1, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1. Not only do the CNN and Quinnipiac polls diverge, but the divergence between the two seems to be getting larger.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 142): Biden 24, Warren 21, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 8, Harris 5, Yang 3, Gabbard 3, O’Rourke 2, Booker 2, Steyer 1, Castro 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Williamson 1, Bennet 1.
  • Monmouth (South Carolina): Biden 33, Warren 16, Sanders 12, Harris 6, Steyer 4, Buttigieg 3, Booker 2, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, O’Rourke 1.
  • Marquette (Wisconsin): Biden 31, Warren 24, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 7, Harris 5, Klobuchar 3, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Booker 1, Williamson 1.
  • WBUR (Massachusetts): Warren 33, Biden 18, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 7, Harris 3, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 1, Steyer 1, Delaney 1, Yang 1. But that poll notes than even liberal Massachusetts is not sold on her socialized medicine scheme.
  • Emerson: Biden 27, Sanders 25, Warren 21, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, Yang 4, Gabbard 3, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2, Klobuchar 1, Steyer 1.
  • The Hill/Harris X: Biden 27, Warren 19, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, O’Rourke 3, Yang 2, Booker 1, Bennet 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Messam 1, Sestak 1.
  • KGTV (California): Biden 33, Warren 18, Sanders 17, Harris 8, Yang 4, Buttigieg 4, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1, Steyer 1, Gabbard 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Nine candidates have made the November debates: Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, Steyer, Yang, Booker, Klobuchar.
  • 538 debates whether Iowa and new Hampshire matter as much as they used to:

    Winning Iowa or New Hampshire will likely be critical for someone in the 2020 Democratic primary, too, especially if the same candidate wins both states. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is currently in the lead in both places, according to a FiveThirtyEight average of polls in Iowa and New Hampshire since the third Democratic debate in September — although she barely leads in Iowa. She has a narrow 1-point lead over Biden in Iowa and a 4-point edge in New Hampshire, according to our analysis. (RealClearPolitics’s average puts Warren roughly 3 points ahead of Biden in New Hampshire and less than a point behind Biden in Iowa.) But in both states, we’re only talking about a few points separating the top two candidates, so to be clear, the race is still incredibly tight.

    And that’s important, because the margin by which a candidate wins Iowa or New Hampshire can have big consequences for the primary. A narrow defeat, for instance, wouldn’t necessarily spell doom for Biden’s campaign. Instead, it could give them an opportunity to spin the loss and talk about the relative lack of diversity in the first two states, said Josh Putnam, a political scientist and FiveThirtyEight contributor who tracks the nomination process. Putnam argued that a defeat by a wide margin would be harder to sell, and Caitlin Jewitt, a political scientist at Virginia Tech who studies presidential primaries, agreed. Jewitt stressed, however, that even a loss could be considered a good showing if the candidate lost by less than predicted. “It’s important to win in Iowa and New Hampshire,” said Jewitt. “But it’s almost more important to do better than you were expected to do.”

    Winning or exceeding expectations in Iowa or New Hampshire seems to have a real effect on Democratic primaries, too — especially as it pertains to a candidate’s ability to attract national support. Take John Kerry in 2004. He was polling at about 8 percent nationally before Iowa, but after he won both Iowa and New Hampshire, his numbers went through the roof — a 37-point gain in the polls in a couple weeks — as he steamrolled to victory at the expense of opponents like Howard Dean. Similarly, in 2008, Barack Obama trailed the favorite, Hillary Clinton, by double digits in national polls, but after he won Iowa, he gained nearly 10 points in national support, even though Clinton recovered to win New Hampshire. Eventually, Obama won the lengthy nomination battle. And while Bernie Sanders didn’t win the Democratic nomination in 2016, his strong start in Iowa and New Hampshire helped force Clinton, once again the favorite, into a drawn-out race.

    Case against: They’re both much whiter states than the general Democratic electorate. Also:

    As we saw in the 2016 Democratic primary, Clinton was able to fight on despite underwhelming results in Iowa (where she narrowly won) and New Hampshire (where she lost). Granted, she had overwhelming support from the party establishment that Biden can’t currently match, but her position as the likely nominee was never really in doubt despite a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire. What 2016 suggests, then, is that as long as expectations aren’t set too high, somewhat underwhelming results in Iowa and New Hampshire are survivable. Putnam described the Biden campaign’s efforts to discount the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire as “a gamble,” but “one that might pay off” if the results are relatively close and South Carolina still looks favorable for him.

    The media might also be more receptive to the idea that Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t representative of the Democratic Party, which may make them less important this year. Already there have been a number of stories about how the primary calendar — especially the Super Tuesday states — may shake up which states matter most to candidates. And as CNN analyst Ronald Brownstein wrote in February, the 14 states voting on March 3 “could advantage the candidates best positioned to appeal to minority voters, particularly African Americans.” So if Biden retains his solid support among African American voters and his campaign’s effort to lower expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire works, Biden might get what he wants — South Carolina and Super Tuesday as his real campaign tests.

  • Fortune tallies up the endorsement race while wondering if it actually matter anymore. (Spoiler: It doesn’t.) I note that every single Booker endorsement is from New Jersey…
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a PBS interview.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. His campaign gets a long profile in New York:

    Inevitably, he arrives late, by SUV or van. The former vice-president is thin and, yes, he’s old. He dresses neatly and always in blue. Staff envelop him. There’s the body man, the advance man, the videographer, the photographer, the digital director, the traveling chief of staff, the traveling press secretary, the local press secretary, the adviser, the other adviser, the adviser’s adviser, the surrogate, the other surrogate, and the bodyguard.

    Snip.

    And it is a production. This is true even when the event is small, which it often is, because the stakes never are — Joe Biden speaking off the cuff is something the entire campaign seems focused on preventing at all costs. Inside the community center or union hall or college auditorium, the stage is crafted just so. The red and blue letters — each roughly the size of a 9-year-old — spell IOWA 4 BIDEN. The American flag is stretched taut and stapled to the plywood. The lawn sign is stapled to the lectern. The delicate panes of teleprompter glass angle to meet his hopeful gaze, so that he may absorb the programmed speech as he peers out at his audience, which usually skews quite old and white, unless he’s in South Carolina.

    This first part — the reading of the speech — he almost always gets right. Even when he makes changes, rearranging the order of the words, skipping over a few, adding others, how could he not get it right? He’s been delivering some version of it for more than 40 years and living it for longer. He could deliver it in his sleep, if he ever sleeps. It’s like my father always said: Joey, a job is about more than just a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about being able to look your child in the eye and say, “It’s gonna be okay …” There is an undercurrent of shame that pulses throughout, this idea that the unequalness of our society is embarrassing for those who have access to less, rather than embarrassing for those who have more than anyone could need.

    Folks … Not a joke! He’s always saying something rather solemn, about cancer or immigration, and then adding, “Not a joke!” as if anyone thought it might be. I’m being serious here … Come on … The bottom line is … I’m not kidding around … The fact of the matter is … Barack and me … Folks … Folks … Folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … folks … FOLKS … folks … FoLkS … fOlKs … F. O. L. K. S. …

    And this next part — the greeting of the voters — he gets right, too. In this context, he possesses an almost mystical quality that, for whatever reason, does not come across when filtered through the kaleidoscope of newsprint or television. It’s the way he focuses his eyes, which are as blue as the seas, except for (yikes) that time the left eye filled with blood on CNN a few weeks back.

    He is swarmed. Women reach out to him, linking their arms in his. He bows his head and lifts their hands to his mouth for a kiss and, later, when you ask them if that makes them uncomfortable, they look at you like you have three heads. This is the best day of their lives. Are you insane? There are men, too, who embrace him, wrapping their hands around his neck. He calls every male-presenting human he encounters “man.” I watched him call a baby “man.” As in, Hey! How­areya, man?! He is as skilled a selfie-taker as any influencer, and in the span of 30 or 40 minutes, he snaps hundreds, leaning his body against the rope that separates him from the crowd, straining it one, two, three feet forward. He really does connect with every living being this way, talking about their jobs or their health care as he listens, sometimes crying with them, whispering in their ears, taking their phone numbers and promising to call them. He does, in fact, do that. Everybody is Joe Biden’s long-lost friend. Every baby is Joe Biden’s long-lost child. A little girl in Iowa City called him her uncle Joe. On the Fourth of July in the town of Independence, he took off, running through the parade like a dingo with somebody’s newborn. As hard as it might be to believe that anything in this realm could not be bullshit, it’s simply true that this isn’t.

    His own loss is staggering in its scale and cruelty: Neilia, his wife, and Naomi, his infant daughter, killed in a car crash. Beau, his oldest son, who survived that crash with his brother, Hunter, killed decades later by brain cancer. And it’s as though in that loss he’s gained access to an otherwise imperceptible wavelength on which he communicates in this way, with the eyes and the hands.

    “I don’t know how to describe it, but sometimes some people would walk up with a lot of emotion in their face, and without even hearing their story, he could connect with them,” John Flynn, who served as Biden’s senior adviser in the White House, said. “He would know it was either one thing or another, and he would just know how to approach them and to get them to gently open up if they wanted to. And if they didn’t want to, he just said, ‘Hey, I’m with you, and I’m there for you. I feel your pain.’ ”

    Snip.

    The pitch goes like this: Joe Biden ought to be the nominee because he’s electable, a meaningless concept if recent history is any guide, and presidential, that wonderful word — the thing Donald Trump could never be even though he literally is president — despite the fact that Biden, who appears by almost any measure to be a good man, a man whose lone sin in life is ego (and does that even count anymore?), has spent a half-century grasping for this position and watching it slip through his fingers.

    To anyone paying attention — the army of political professionals more wired to observe shortcomings than are those likely to actually vote for him or for anyone else — it looks, unmistakably, like it’s happening again. His vulnerabilities are close to the surface. There’s the basic fact of his oldness and the concerns, explicit or implicit, about his ability to stay agile and alive for four more years. This was true of Biden, who is 76, even more than it was true of Bernie Sanders, who is the oldest candidate at 78, up until Sanders had a heart attack while campaigning in Nevada earlier this month. (It’s not true at all of Elizabeth Warren, who is 70 but seems a decade younger. And it’s not exactly true of Trump, who is 73 and really just seems crazy, not old.)

    But it’s not just his age itself. It’s his tendency to misspeak, his inartful debating style, and — most of all — his status as a creature from another time in the Democratic Party, when the politics of race and crime and gender were unrecognizably different. It’s not just that the Joe Biden of yesteryear sometimes peeks out from behind the No. 1 Obama Stan costume. It’s that the Joe Biden of today is expected to hold his former self accountable to the new standards set by a culture that’s prepared to reject him. And though he’s the party Establishment’s obvious exemplar, he can’t seem to raise any money — spending more in the last quarter than he brought in and moving into the homestretch with less than $9 million in the bank (roughly a third of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders has on hand). For political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.

    Yet Biden is still the front-runner. Volatile and potentially worthless as they may be, it’s what the polls say. Biden leads the field on average by a handful of percentage points, though his lead has trended steadily downward, from a high of 33 in May to 20 in June to 11, and then to 9.9, and 6.6, and 5.4, according to RealClearPolitics. In the whole campaign, there has only been one day — October 8 — when he slipped to second place, an average of 0.2 points behind Warren. He’s also the front-runner in South Carolina, Nevada, California, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida. “There is this sense of hanging on. And perhaps he can. But that’s generally not the way the physics of these things work,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. “Generally, you’re either moving up or moving down. Warren is clearly moving up. There’s no sign that he is.”

    It’s a long, generally balanced piece. Remember how Biden was toast an Warren was the inevitable nominee? Yeah, not so much:

    Joe Biden is enjoying one of his largest leads over the rest of the Democratic field since joining the presidential race, a new poll finds.

    A CNN survey conducted by SSRS finds that 34% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters currently back the former vice president to unseat President Trump in November. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts sits in second place, with 19% support. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont placed third with 16%.

    The rest of the pack is even further behind, with Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and California Sen. Kamala Harris earning 6% support, while Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke garnered 3% support.

    CNN/SSRS interviewed more than 1,003 Democratic voters for the poll Oct. 17-20, which has a +/- 3.7 margin of error.

    He got a 60 Minutes interview. Also, Biden called Castro “Cisneros.” Hey, Hispanic mayors of San Antonio whose last names start with “C”, I can certainly see how those neurons might get entangled. But as far as I know, Castro has never been convicted of a felony…

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Thinking of Running After All? Judge Judy backs a Bloomberg run.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. His emergency fundraising appeal worked. “Booker asked supporters to give $1.7 million in 10 days — donors ultimately chipped in $2.16 million, the campaign said.” But “Booker is still struggling to gain ground on his Democratic rivals and his campaign is still bleeding money. At the rate he’s been spending, the strong fund-raising performance bought him about an extra month of campaigning, making the next debate on Nov. 20 another critical moment.”
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “The Red-State Savior Democrats Don’t Want“:

    Polls of the Democratic primary occasionally show that not a single person in the survey picked Bullock. He made the second debate, in July, but was then bumped from the stage, unable to garner enough donors or hit the 2 or 3 percentage points of polling support needed to qualify. Last week, during the fourth debate, instead of standing onstage alongside the other 12, he watched it at home in Helena with his family.

    In an enormous field dominated by a famous former vice president and four diverse blue-state senators with intriguing backgrounds, Bullock has been almost invisible. He’s never graced the cover of a glossy magazine, like Beto O’Rourke (Vanity Fair) and Pete Buttigieg (New York), who play to the cultural predilections of so many Gen-X male writers who can talk Fugazi and Joyce. He doesn’t have a gimmicky new policy idea for attracting a niche online audience the way Andrew Yang does. He’s never had a jaw-dropping debate confrontation with Biden the way Kamala Harris did. He hasn’t even been interesting enough to have had a cycle of widespread negative attention, as with Tulsi Gabbard’s unusual affection for Bashar Assad or Amy Klobuchar’s unusual use of a comb. As a middle-aged white guy in a mostly white state, there is no social justice barrier Bullock would break as the party’s nominee.

    What does it say about the Democrats and presidential politics in 2019 that the candidate who has arguably the most impressive governing credentials in the race, aside from the former vice president, has been a nonentity?

    Bullock swears he will stay in the race until at least the Iowa caucuses on February 3. I spent enough time with the governor and his small staff over four days in September in Montana and Iowa to know that he and his closest advisers are not delusional. They all know how unlikely it is that he’ll be the Democratic nominee. And yet maybe—just maybe—his decision to keep running is not completely insane. Joe Biden, the other moderate white guy in the race, is not exactly lighting people on fire.

    Snip.

    Like anyone working for an extreme underdog, Bullock’s aides oscillate between utter despair and glimmers of hope. “What motivates the whole team and certainly me as a Westerner. and as someone who’s not from the coasts, is you’re like, ‘Oh my God, how are we going to ignore these people who won red states or these Democrats that are in red states?’” said Ridder. “If we don’t have someone like Steve Bullock at least as part of the conversation to show that there are Democrats in red states, we have a big problem and we’re going to lose out on a whole swath of our country pretty quickly.”

    Snip.

    His candidacy exists in a strange netherworld where he did everything you were once supposed to do as an ambitious Democratic politician—become a governor, win over lots of Republican voters, rack up progressive achievements, put out serious policy proposals—but none of it seemed to matter. The biggest bump in attention Bullock has received all year is when Jeff Bridges—the Dude from The Big Lebowski—tweeted out an endorsement of him.

    It’s hard not to be left with the feeling that at a certain point in the 2000s the romantic era of presidential politics that began with Carter ended. In the 70s, the old system of party elites controlling the nominating process gave way to a more democratic system of voters in state caucuses and primaries taking control. Gradually that system, which was once defined by local campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, became nationalized. Now, candidates who can’t run an aggressive national pre-primary campaign seem doomed. The casualties of the new system, which reward the elusive quality of fame, strong ideological views, or both, have been government service and careers outside of the coasts.

    It just seems like the week for long, detailed profiles of candidates whose names start with “B”…

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 debates whether his surge is real or not.

    natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I think the narrative is mostly bullshit. Just want to get that on the record nice and early…. I certainly think he had a good debate, and he’s probably gained a point or so, which isn’t nothing! But to say there’s been a big Buttigieg surge is so far from reality that, if you simply glance at a table of polls, it almost feels like gaslighting. He’s maybe gained a point or so in national polls.

    Snip.

    sarahf: Right, but how should we interpret his higher standing in Iowa or New Hampshire?

    Is that meaningful at this point?

    natesilver: He’s a good candidate for those states because (1) They’re really white, and his supporters are really white; (2) He’s got enough money to build out a good ground game; (3) He’s got a regional advantage in Iowa by being one of the few Midwsterners in the race.

    So I take his chances in Iowa pretty seriously! I just don’t think anything much has changed about them over the past week.

    julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I take Nate’s point about national polls, but an unexpected showing in Iowa seems like the kind of thing that could shape this race, especially if Joe Biden tanks and there’s an opportunity for someone else to wrestle the moderate mantle away.

    My guess money is on Buttigieg’s huge warchest starting to have a real effect in Iowa. As I suspected, he’s snatching up Biden donors.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Attended a forum in Las Vegas with Yang and Sanders.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Evidently she’s still not ruling out a run. Heh: “Asylum Orderlies Return Hillary Clinton To Padded Cell Disguised As Oval Office.”
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Win a trip to the World Series by donating to John Delaney. Do runner-ups get a Delaney bobblehead?
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s not running for reelection to her House seat. Kurt Schlichter on the conservative crush on Gabbard:

    Tulsi gets Strange New Conservative Respect for several reasons, but the primary one is that she doesn’t seem to hate our guts. She is what an opponent should be – an opponent, not an enemy. Let’s face it – the mainstream Democrat Party hates our guts, and given its malignant druthers it would strip us of our First, Second, and probably Third Amendment rights in order to make sure that we never, ever have a say in our own governance again. Then, with us silenced and disarmed, it would take our money, corrupt our children and generally oppress us in ways that make today’s punitive straw bans look tame. If you don’t believe that a scary number of mainstream lefties want us Normals enslaved or dead, well, you’re either in denial or not on social media.

    Make no mistake – Tulsi is not one of us conservatives, though the kind of leftism she embraces (which owes a lot to the socialism of Bernie Sanders) shares some superficial similarities to the populism that has swept the GOP base. In many ways, we share her critique of an inept, corrupt ruling caste eager to send non-elite citizens off to fight their endless, mismanaged wars. We also share a critique of Big Business as a crony capitalist simulacrum of free enterprise, basically a bunch of rich jerks sidling up to the leaders of both parties to repeatedly shaft us regular folks to pump up a few digits on their balance sheets.

    That Tulsi will take on the corrupt leaders of her garbage party, like Felonia Milhouse von Pantsuit, is certainly a welcome change from the lockstep stonewalling we have seen from the others – “Why, I see nothing wrong with Toots McHoover Biden peeing hot then getting 50 grand a month from an oligarch, and if you do you’re racist!” When Mee Maw got into the cooking sherry again and started calling her a “Russian asset,” you knew Tulsi was drawing blood from Ole Granny Reset Button. That charge is particularly amusing since Major Gabbard is an Army officer and a veteran of the elite’s dumb wars – another thing the right appreciates about her. But then everyone is a Russian agent these days. We cons get the same insane idiocy, and not just the president.

    Snip.

    Gabbard is far more open to Assad than many of us cons like, but her opposition to the Fredocon warmonger model (like the opposition of many woke conservatives) seems to come from a place of genuine concern for the troops she serves and served with. Unlike most of the rest of her rivals, dead American warriors are not an abstraction. Moreover, you get the idea that, alone among the faux Cherokees, naggy mistresses, and militant furries up there on the Democrat debate stage, Tulsi actually likes America, and Americans.

    The Gabbard Left and the Trump Right share the conclusion that our elite sucks and that it has forfeited any moral authority to lead our country, but the similarity ends there. She is not conservative and is not traditional. Just because she has doubts about offing babies in the third trimester, as opposed to supporting abortion until high school graduation, does not make her pro-life. She would take your guns, she would take your money, and she would generally make Barack Obama look like William F. Buckley.

    Sometimes we forget that Tulsi is a leftist, and that she would screw up health care, open the borders and impose all sorts of climate hoax nonsense. A key difference from us, when you get past the surface similarities, is that she and her ilk have faith in the idea that government can take on more and more responsibilities, despite the fact that it has demonstrated that it cannot handle those responsibilities it already has, which themselves are mostly far beyond what government should be doing in the first place.

    There’s another issue, the fox in the room if you will, that we need to address, and it is not an indictment of Tulsi Gabbard. It’s her storied looks. She is pretty, and she does not give off the man-hating vibe of the rest of her competitors (this also goes for the nominal men on the stage). Tulsi certainly plays it up – those yoga-pants workout videos are not just to reassure us about her cardiovascular fitness. But the fact that she is a woman comfortable with being traditionally feminine gives her a leg up on that squad of bitter, spinster librarians she is running against.

    “Tulsi Gabbard: a Gandhi in Lycra“:

    Gabbard isn’t a left- or right-wing politician. She is a spiritual revolutionary, defying the categories of material and contractual politics –– overcoming them, as Blavatsky and Nietzsche had it. Her positions fit no party template because they are what Peter Viereck called ‘metapolitics’. She wishes to overcome the intolerable binaries and compromises that have, as she rightly observes, gummed up the works of government and reduced swathes of the public to destitution, dependency and desperation. Being a modern Hawaiian rather than a 19th-century Bavarian, the voice of her inner authoritarian is as soft as the lining of her wetsuit. Still, it speaks quite clearly.

    Like Gandhi and George Harrison, who were also promoted beyond their competence, Gabbard is influenced by a strange medley of self-help and pop-Hinduism. Hence Gandhi’s George Bernard Shaw routine in a dhoti, or George Harrison’s deeply spiritual objections to capital gains in ‘Taxman’. Hence too the paradoxes of Gabbard the soldier-pacifist who supports our troops but dog-whistles about the ‘war machine’; who smilingly shares apocalyptic visions of government failure and corruption from her lush Hawaiian garden; and who supports human rights but never says a harsh word about Bashar al-Assad.

    It was squalid of Hillary Clinton to imply that Putin’s people were manipulating Gabbard as a ‘Russian asset’. In a season of universal political folly, every candidate is an asset to any rival power. No Russian or Chinese meddler has messed with the American system as successfully as a chorus of millionaires threatening war overseas and further legislation on public bathrooms at home. The blend of petty managerialism at home and delusional universalism abroad is a winning combination –– winning, that is, for Putin and Xi.

    That blend also happens to be the recipe of religious cults like the one in which Gabbard was raised, and whose members she appointed to her campaign staff. This crankish background shapes the attitudes which make Gabbard a Democratic misfit, like hostility to homosexuality, gay marriage and Islam, fondness for Narendra Modi’s Hindu revivalism. Even the attitudes which might endear her to the Democratic left, her metapolitically mixed feelings about the Jews, have been a core feature of spiritual revolution from Blavatsky to Nietzsche, Gandhi to John Lennon.

    More an arch hit piece than actual analysis. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Snit fit: “On Friday, the campaign of presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced the senator will skip a forum on criminal justice reform in South Carolina this weekend. Her reason for that decision was the equivalent of an adult woman throwing a toddler-style temper tantrum. She is angry that the organization holding the weekend forum honored President Trump with an award Friday.”
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Klobuchar is finally having her moment:

    “Right here in New Hampshire, last weekend,” Klobuchar said, “we were at a meet-and-greet, and everyone had these little stickers on: ‘I’m a Supreme Court voter.’ ‘I’m a climate-change voter.’ And there was one guy that had no sticker on at all. And he came up and whispered in my ear — true story — ‘I’m a Trump voter. I don’t want anyone to know. But I’m not voting for him again.’ If we want to win big, we have to build this coalition.”

    The enthusiastic reception in Nashua for Klobuchar’s message of cross-party appeal capped a 12-day stretch that has been the best to date for the Minnesota Democrat’s campaign for president. Now all Klobuchar needs is to do even better. And time is running short for a candidate who still distantly trails the race’s front-runners.

    For months, Klobuchar struggled for attention in a huge field of rivals. But, following a widely praised performance at the Oct. 15 Democratic debate, she’s seen a spike in fundraising and national press coverage. In her most aggressive showing yet, she prodded several other candidates about some of their more hard-to-deliver promises, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on her support for Medicare for All.

    “We’re feeling a lot of momentum since the debate,” Klobuchar said in a live TV interview later Friday night from outside a Democratic Party banquet in a Manchester restaurant.

    In the days following the debate, Klobuchar tallied 3% in separate national polls. That’s far below candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden, Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, but it was enough to qualify her for next month’s Democratic debate in Georgia.

    She wants free community college, but not four year colleges, which is unlikely to win over the “Free free free!” Twitter crowd.

  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s Hitler all the way down. He’s still clueless when it comes to guns. He’s stopped visiting Iowa, evidently under the delusion he’s a national candidate.
  • Update: Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: Dropped Out. Twitter. Facebook. He left the race October 24.

    On Thursday, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan dropped out of the race to focus on his reelection bid in the House. On the surface, the congressman’s electoral pitch as a moderate, blue-collar Democrat from the traditional swing state of Ohio had a fair bit of potential, too. But unlike South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg or even Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Ryan failed to attract enough support to carve out some sort of lane for himself in the primary.

    Some of Ryan’s struggles came down to the nature of the field and his relatively low profile coming into the race. As a House member, Ryan might have started out at a disadvantage compared to some candidates who held or had held higher offices. If Ryan had been, say, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown — who opted not to run for president — things might have gone differently. Even after six or so months of campaigning, Ryan wasn’t that well known. Only about half of Democrats had an opinion about him back in late August, and recent polling suggests that he wasn’t becoming better known, either. Of course, if former Vice President Joe Biden hadn’t gotten into the race, it’s possible that some moderate Democrats would have considered Ryan as an alternative. In the end, Ryan wasn’t even able to attract the very low threshold of support necessary — 2 percent in four qualifying polls and 130,000 unique donors — to qualify for the third and fourth debates (he wasn’t on track to make the fifth debate, either).

    Ryan’s lack of financial resources also factored into his campaign’s difficulties and eventual demise. In the second quarter of 2019, he raised roughly $900,000, which would have been a great fundraising haul for his House race but was woefully inadequate for a presidential candidate (and the second-lowest amount of any “major” presidential candidate at the time, per FiveThirtyEight’s criteria). And in the third quarter he fared even worse, bringing in only $425,000 with just $160,000 in the bank. Although Ryan could theoretically have stayed in the race for months to come — Ohio law permits someone to run for president and the House at the same time — it’s tough to maintain a presidential campaign if you have virtually no money, so Ryan’s poor fundraising was probably the nail in his campaign’s coffin.

    What Ryan’s lack of traction show the woke left’s control of the party:

    Even if Ryan’s candidacy fades to the insignificance of a footnote in the story of the 2020 presidential election, the fact that Ryan was so thoroughly ignored and dismissed by the rest of his party is indeed significant.

    Here’s a guy who doesn’t just represent the demographic that Democrats lost to Trump in 2016, he embodies it: a 40-something white guy from the Youngstown area who hunts, hates China’s guts because he thinks it steals jobs, and supports natural gas plants because they create union jobs. He wanted a gradual approach to Medicare for All, thinks you can’t pay for health care for illegal immigrants while Americans pay for their own, and when people started complaining about tax breaks to lure Amazon’s headquarters, he declared, “I would love to have Amazon’s HQ2 in northeast Ohio. We need the jobs . . . We need the free enterprise system. If we’re going to try to compete with China, if we’re going to try to innovate our way to reduce carbon in the United States, we need the innovation and entrepreneurship of the free market, we can’t be hostile to business.”

    Trumble County, Ohio, voted for Trump, 51 percent to 45 percent, over Hillary Clinton. When reporters want to talk to blue-collar union members who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump, they go to Trumble County. About 45,000 people in Ryan’s congressional district voted for both him and Trump in 2016.

    Tim Ryan was probably the least wealthy Democrat running for president; according to financial disclosure forms required of members of Congress, his net worth ranged from just under $65,000 to $48,998. He’s a populist who’s done his research, noting in speeches that eighty percent of venture capital goes to three states: California, New York, and Massachusetts. (The most recent figures I can find suggest 82 percent goes to four, which includes Texas.) He could echo Trump’s rhetoric sometimes — “We collectively should be helping the people who have gotten screwed for the last 30 years, and not apologize for it.”

    To the extent Ryan got any attention in this race, it was as an ambassador from the rural Midwest, trying to explain his strange and alien culture to the rest of the party: “I think Donald Trump is a complete slimeball, but he doesn’t want to take my job, or take my health insurance. My friends work at GM, in the building and construction trade. These are the guys I drink beer with. I know ‘em. These positions [the rest of the Democrats] are taking are untenable with the vast majority of them.”

    Around here, the usual suspects who read the headline but not the rest of the article will scoff that Ryan sounds like a Republican and should run in that primary. Never mind that Ryan is completely pro-choice, denounced the Trump administration’s treatment of children crossing the border, and changed his mind on universal background checks and lost his ‘A’ rating from the NRA. He wanted to ban states from enacting Right-to-Work laws and Janus v. AFSCME. (There goes any hope of a National Review endorsement.) His September 24 statement on impeachment consisted of two sentences: “President Trump is a mobster. We must impeach.” Heck, the guy wrote a book on yoga. He’s voted with the Trump administration position 18 percent of the time. If Tim Ryan isn’t considered a “real” Democrat, it means the criteria for being a Democrat is now set entirely by the Woke Twitter crowd.

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another member of The Squad, Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, endorses Sanders. “Bernie Sanders tells student to respect police officer “so that you don’t get shot in the back of the head.” Gee, it seems like Bernie understands communism after all!
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. “OSSIPEE — Joe Sestak, the long-shot Democratic presidential hopeful and former congressman who walked across the width of New Hampshire, met with the Sun on Wednesday night at a local McDonald’s to outline his plans to take on China and make the United States united again.” With this picture:

    To tell you the truth, I’m starting to dig the Dadist vibe of Sestak’s anti-campaign…

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Why Tom Steyer’s Spending $100 Million to Run for President.” Why is Variety interviewing presidential candidates?
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Get ready for $4.2 Trillion in new taxes to support Warren’s spending spree:

    Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything. Some of those plans are expensive. With Warren emerging as a front-runner in the Democratic presidential contest, Yahoo Finance tallied the cost of her plans.

    Altogether, the Massachusetts senator’s agenda would require $4.2 trillion per year in new federal spending, and a like amount in new taxes, if she paid for everything without issuing new debt. The federal government currently spends about $4.4 trillion per year, so Warren’s plans would nearly double federal spending.

    The Treasury takes in about $3.4 trillion in tax revenue each year, so if Warren levied new taxes to pay for everything, federal taxation would rise by 124%. She could pay for some of her plans by issuing new debt instead of raising taxes, but with annual deficits close to $1 trillion already, that might be unwise.

    The biggest chunk of new spending in Warren’s agenda, by far, would be Medicare for all, the single-payer health plan she would impose to replace all private insurance. Warren explains how she would pay for all of her plans—except this one. With fellow Democratic candidates pressing her for details, Warren says she’ll provide financing options for Medicare for all soon.

    A single-payer plan covering every American would cost about $3.4 trillion per year, according to the Urban Institute and other analysts. Again: that’s equal to all federal tax revenue in 2019.

    Why aren’t more Democrats endorsing Warren?

    So a big part of the story here may be less about Warren and more about the large Democratic field and the lack of a clear front-runner, just as it was with Republicans in 2016. The big field, in particular, creates incentives for elected officials to remain neutral for as long as possible.

    “For the faction of elected Democrats who want the party to move to the left, the fact that both Warren and Sanders are in the race and polling in the double digits makes it tough — and somewhat politically risky — to publicly choose between them at this point in the process,” David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College and co-author of “Asymmetric Politics,” said.

    Or take members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “At this stage,” Hopkins said, “with Harris, Booker, and [Julián] Castro in the race and many of their constituents backing Biden, these members have other considerations besides candidate ideology — both in terms of their own personal objectives and their political incentives. Again, a wait-and-see strategy seems much safer.”

    Democrats may also be gun-shy after the outcome of the 2016 election. Hans Noel, a scholar at Georgetown University and co-author of “The Party Decides,” said of party elites: “They controlled the process, and they lost.”

    Also:

    Warren has two obvious problems with party elites. First, there is the perception among some of them that her left-wing stands, such as Medicare for All, are too risky for the general election and decrease the party’s chances of defeating President Trump. For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not outright endorsed Biden or specifically declared that she does not support Warren, but Pelosi has argued that the party needs to have a big, sweeping electoral victory in 2020, and that such a win requires more moderate policies, likefocusing on improving Obamacare instead of pursuing Medicare for All. Those are sentiments decidedly on the side of Biden and Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg and against Warren and Sanders.

    Secondly, electoral considerations aside, there is a center-left wing of the Democratic Party that fundamentally disagrees with Warren’s more leftward positions. It’s hard to imagine some of these figures endorsing Warren before she has effectively already won the nomination. (That fits with Shor’s findings — Warren’s endorsers at the state legislative level are more liberal than the endorsers of any of the other candidates.)

    These problems are not unique to Warren. Sanders was perceived as too far to the left by many Democratic elites in 2016; he got very few endorsements back then and is not getting many this cycle, either. (Sen. Amy Klobuchar actually leads Sanders in endorsement points.)

    Warren also has a third challenge with party elites that is less obvious. The Massachusetts senator clashed with senior aides to President Obama for much of his tenure in the White House. She, like Sanders, isn’t quite in line with the party’s establishment. A Warren administration would probably be less likely to hire former Clinton (Bill and Hillary) and Obama aides in key posts than, say, a Biden, Booker or Harris one. So people connected with the party establishment (like many DNC members) may be fine with Warren but prefer other candidates for more self-interested reasons.

    It’s all about the Benjamins. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Kevin Williamson says that Warren wants to shear the rich:

    Jeremy Corbyn has a kindred spirit in the United States currently running for the Democratic presidential nomination — two of them, in fact: Senator Bernie Sanders, an antediluvian Brooklyn red who literally honeymooned in the old Soviet Union as dissidents were being shipped off to the gulags, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the counterfeit Cherokee princess who holds forth on “accountability” from her comfortable sinecure at Harvard Law, which once put her forward as the first “woman of color” on its faculty. The wretched old socialist from Vermont is making a good scrappy show of it — and I sincerely wish Senator Sanders the very best of health after his recent cardiac episodes — and, the times being what they are, apparently anybody can be elected president of these wobbly United States. But Warren — in spite of being a plastic banana of titanic phoniness, an ass of exceptional asininity, an intellectual mediocrity, and a terrible campaigner on top of it all — seems the more likely threat. Sanders, who cannot resist that old Soviet liquidate-the-kulaks-as-a-class rhetoric, insists that “billionaires should not exist.” Warren has a ghastly imbecilic plan for that.

    Snip.

    The most extreme of those is renouncing U.S. citizenship in favor of securing legal domicile in some more wealth-friendly jurisdiction. There was a boomlet of that during the Obama years, reaching a record in 2016. But it is a very small number: 5,411 in 2016, down to the numerically ironic 1,099 in 2018. Some of those former U.S. citizens renounce for reasons that have at least something to do with tax, but these decisions usually are complex and involve many factors. Tina Turner, who has been a resident of Switzerland for decades, “relinquished” her U.S. citizenship (which under U.S. law is slightly different from “renouncing” it) a few years after becoming a Swiss national. Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin renounced his U.S. citizenship in favor of Singapore just before the firm went public. Filmmaker John Huston died an Irishman. A common pattern is that of actor Jet Li and businessman Ted Arison, each having been born abroad (China and Israel, respectively), become a naturalized U.S. citizen, and then renounced that citizenship later in life (Li is a citizen of Singapore, while Arison returned to Israel). Uncle Stupid imposes an “exit tax” on those who are leaving, in essence collecting whatever capital-gains tax would be due on the renouncer’s assets if they had been sold the day before renouncing. There is also a fee of $2,350, because somebody has to pay the parasites to audit your portfolio, and it’s going to be you.

    But this is not good enough for Elizabeth Warren, who proposes to build a financial Berlin Wall to keep the rich guys in. That’s a little bit funny: Billionaires are awful, evil, wicked, and should not exist — but God help them if they try to grant Bernie Sanders his dearest wish and skedaddle. Singapore doesn’t think billionaires should not exist. Neither does Sweden. Neither does Switzerland. Neither does Italy. Why not let those horrible pinstriped social diseases just go where they are wanted?

    Because this is not about revenue. This is about revenge.

    Warren’s proposal would see the federal government expropriating 40 percent of the wealth of any American who decided to emigrate, provided that American has enough money to make it worth worrying about. And that number is not as high as you might expect: The current law ensnares those whose average income in the five-year period before renunciation was $162,000 or more, meaning that there are a lot of high-school principals who would need Washington’s permission to split.

    It is difficult to accept the proposition that in a free society the freedoms enjoyed do not include the freedom to leave. The right of exit is the great discipliner of social, romantic, and business relationships, and it is essential to the relationship between citizen and state, too: Ask all our of new neighbors lately arrived from Venezuela. They did not come to Houston for the weather.

    Walls have ideological purposes. The infamous one in Berlin was, officially, the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the “anti-fascist protection wall.” Senator Warren’s wall is, in theory, about “inequality.” But that is really hardly plausible as a rationale. “Inequality” simply refers to the financial distance between x and y, and reducing that inequality would be as effectively achieved by improving incomes and savings at the lower end as by reducing incomes and diminishing savings elsewhere. But that’s a rather trickier proposition than sticking a gun in somebody’s face and saying, “Hand it over.” Which is, of course, what Elizabeth Warren proposes to do.

    For what? Some trivial sum in federal tax revenue? No — for the joy of it. For the pleasure of exercising power. For vindictiveness. Elizabeth Warren’s Berlin Wall will not make one poor person in the United States any better off. It might make Elizabeth Warren better off, but she’s far from poor.

    Snip.

    Elizabeth Warren, like Donald Trump, wants to build a wall. The idea behind Trump’s is keeping certain foreigners out, while the idea behind Warren’s is locking Americans in, penning them in order that they may be shorn and milked as though they were livestock, which is more or less how Warren thinks of them.

    The Warren hype has gotten away from the facts on the ground.

    The media love Elizabeth Warren. She’s everything they want in a candidate. Someone to whisper sweet nothings into their ears and make them feel really smart. She’s got plans, the right amount of shrill in her voice, and is just focus grouped enough to get them excited.

    This love affair has led to an incredible amount of hype surrounding the Massachusetts Senator, who’s only accomplishment appears to be supporting an unconstitutional agency in the CFPB. It’s gotten to the point where she is routinely described as the presumptive front-runner. To be fair, I’ve bagged on Joe Biden to the benefit of Elizabeth Warren a bit in the past few months as well. I mean, he’s Joe Biden.

    Following the most recent debate though, where Warren stumbled repeatedly when pressed about raising middle class taxes, we are seeing some problems emerge.

    For starters, she’s still nowhere near the national front-runner.

    CNN poll snipped.

    Not only is Warren behind by double digits, Biden is enjoying his biggest lead since April, a time when it was all but assumed he’d be the nominee. There are other polls as well showing bad news for Warren. Emerson released their latest offering and she’s 6 points behind Biden. Worse, she’s 4 points behind Sanders, who just suffered a heart attack a month ago.

    In fact, in the last seven polls published, six of them have Warren down by at least 6 points. The only poll which continues to show her close is YouGov, which has held an incredible house effect for Warren throughout the primaries. You can view all these results at RCP here.

    But perhaps she’s leading in the early states? In New Hampshire, yes, but that’s to be expected. In Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina, and California, she’s behind Biden still. If Biden wins two of those four states, he’ll enter the southern primaries all but guaranteed to clean up, leaving Warren no real path.

    George Soros gives Warren the thumbs-up seal of approval.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says she’s not dropping out, even after missing the debate:

    Supported by its friends and sponsors in the corporate media, the Democratic National Committee has sought to narrow the field of presidential candidates at the very moment when it should be opening up. Placing a political straitjacket on our primary system, controlling the process via money and ridiculous rules, the party is risking disaster.

    The establishment’s paternalistic insistence that, in essence, “it’s time to shut this thing down” — making sure only its preordained category of people, discussing its preordained category of topics, is placed before the American people for consideration as contenders for the nomination to run against President Trump — has created a false, inauthentic piece of high school theater posing as the Democratic debates.

    Last night’s debate was a lot of things, but it was not exciting. It contained no magic. If anything, it reduced some very nice people to behavior their mothers probably raised them not to engage in. Which woman who claims feminist ideals can be the nastiest to another woman? Which young person can show the greatest arrogance toward those with decades of experience under their belts? Which intelligent person can best reduce a complicated topic to pabulum for the masses?

    Oh, this is brilliant, guys. Apparently, the strategy is to engage the American people by showing them the worst of who we are.

  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yang Gang vs. Team Bearnie:

    The outsider entrepreneur who refuses to wear a tie at the Democratic debates is attracting some of the same people as the outsider senator who spurns brushing his hair for rallies. Fifty-seven percent of Yang’s potential supporters are considering Sanders, according to a recent Ipsos/FiveThirtyEight poll. The mutual interest works in the other direction, too: 16 percent of Sanders’ potential voters are eyeing Yang.

    Though Sanders and Yang differ in significant ways, they’re both running anti-establishment campaigns that speak to an electorate frustrated with the status quo, wary of Democratic insiders, and looking for economic help. For Sanders, their overlapping bases may give him a small boost if Yang drops out of the race down the road or if he works to woo the so-called #YangGang.

    But it’s also a potential threat to Sanders even if Yang continues polling in the single digits. If Yang shaves off a few percentage points from Sanders’ voting bloc, particularly in early-primary states such as New Hampshire, that could turn a second- or third-place finish into something worse.

    Yang wants molten salt Thorium reactors on the grid by 2027. But lots of technical and industrial challenges remain to be overcome.

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In, but exiled to the also-rans after raising $5 in campaign contributions in Q3.
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    LinkSwarm for November 24. 2017

    Friday, November 24th, 2017

    I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy a short LinkSwarm for a short week!

  • “Unsealed court documents reveal that the firm behind the salacious 34-page Trump-Russia Dossier, Fusion GPS, was paid $523,000 by a Russian businessman convicted of tax fraud and money laundering, whose lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was a key figure in the infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower arranged by Fusion GPS associate Rob Goldstone.”
  • Fusion GPS, the DNC and Hillary Clinton sampaign-funded organization behind the fake Trump dossier, has been paying journalists.
  • In this week’s MSM scumbag sexual harasser sweepstakes, both CBS and PBS fire Charlie Rose after sexual harassment accusations from eight different women.
  • And three more accusers just came forward.
  • You know the Arab-Egyptian Peace Treaty signed after the Camp David Accords in 1979? Jimmy Carter did his best to derail it.

    Carter wanted his Geneva talks. He didn’t care that the peace process already begun by Sadat and Begin might lead to peace, Carter wanted his plan or nothing. You see Carter’s vision of a Geneva conference would be run by the U.S. and the USSR, and Israel would be facing the terrorist PLO, and Israel’s neighbors including, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, and Jordan. It would not be a negotiation because when one considers that the Arab countries were Soviet satellites, and the Carter administration’s ideological orientation was anti-Israel it seemed to ensure the conference would be all the participants vs. the Jewish State.

    Thankfully Carter couldn’t stop the approaching peace train. Within days Israeli journalists were allowed into Cairo, breaking a symbolic barrier, and from there the peace process quickly gained momentum.

  • Kevin Williamson examines more of the left’s Manson worship.
  • How congress runs its illegal sexual harassment slush fund out of the public eye.
  • Washington Post reporter Janell Ross helped secret Democratic donor conference “craft liberal economic message without notifying superiors.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Cop killer captured. Update: Authorities have now released the name of the slain officer, which was Damon Allen.
  • “California State Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra (D-Pacoima) announced Tuesday that he will resign next year after six women accused him of making unwanted sexual advances.”
  • Want to download Skype in China? Tough.
  • Brooklyn College doesn’t want police using campus bathrooms.” Because snowflakes must make painfully clear that the people who keep them safe are beneath them…
  • Can a Ketogeneic (low-carb) diet cure diabetes? Evidence suggests a firm maybe.
  • Environmental activist convicted. “A Montana jury found Leonard Higgins of Portland, Oregon, guilty of criminal mischief and trespassing. Higgins could face up to 10 years in prison and a $50,000 fine on the felony criminal mischief charge.” (Hat tip: Steve Malloy’s Twitter feed.)
  • Florida Woman Pro Tip: If you’re going to rob a bank, it’s best to rob one you didn’t formerly work at.
  • Larry Correia spells out exactly what writers “owe” their fans on unfinished series installments: namely “Jack” and “Squat.”
  • As A Male Feminist, I Really Think I’d Absolutely Crush It If I Ever Had To Publicly Apologize For Sexual Misconduct.” Heh: “I’d use the word ‘apologize’ and say ‘I’m sorry.’ I’d check off all the boxes that feminist Twitter looks for in an airtight apology, and I’d continue expressing remorse in the ensuing weeks to wow the world with the magnitude of my self-reproach.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Rama?
  • Gun Control as Charlie Brown’s Football

    Thursday, October 5th, 2017

    Following the Las Vegas shooting, we were treated to the same weary parade of liberal Democrats making the exact same noises they make after every shooting:

    “Now is the time for a national dialog and common sense gun laws. And by ‘dialog,’ I mean that Republicans shut up and let us shame them into voting for gun control. And by ‘common sense’ I mean ‘complete civilian disarmament of the sane and law-abiding.'”

    There was the ritual denunciation of the NRA. “Column after column is fired off about how much the National Rifle Association donates to congressional candidates (spoiler: it’s not much, about 200K a year). For every breathless declaration that the NRA has blood on their hands, it’s worth noting more journalists have committed mass shootings in this country than NRA members.”

    And don’t forget the four or five national media reports in which basic firearms details are so obviously and egregiously wrong that any knowledgeable gun owner could have spotted the error.

    Let me know where I can buy some of those “automatic rounds.” Ace of Spades has similar thoughts on that piece, including slamming them for this obvious lie about gun experts: “Those who are knowledgeable often don’t want to talk on the record.” Sayeth Ace:

    Are you fucking kidding me with that? You have 100 conservative gun expert bloggers and reporters trying to explain to you the difference between semi-auto action and full auto action (and revolver action, etc.) every time a fucking gun crime occurs, and you put your hands over your ears and say “My ears are hurting” like that childish retard on MSNBC.

    Every single time. This is not our first go-round on this, Media Gun Control Experts. It’s not even our hundredth go-round.

    Actual gun owners and experts are begging to explain the basics to you — but you won’t listen. Instead, you babble on ignorantly about “automatic rounds” and the modifications you need to make to your gun to get it to fire these exotic bullets.

    These rank stupidities get corrected again and again, but major media organizations still don’t bother to give their reporters the training or fact checkers necessary to catch these obvious errors. It’s as though they wear their ignorance on their sleeve as a badge of virtue signaling honor.

    But all this is off my central point: Why do Democrats persist in pursuing the exact same strategies when it is obvious they’ve not convinced voters any previous time before?

    Indeed, the Democrats’ most fervent advocacy for gun control comes during the same period when Democrats where hemorrhaging seats to Republicans. Gun control isn’t the only issue that’s made them unpopular everywhere but urban centers, but it’s certainly a contributing factor.

    So why do Democrats keep pursuing the same strategies over and over again even though they not only aren’t working, but seem to be counterproductive?

    Maybe complete civilian disarmament is the Democratic Party’s core value, and they feel a compulsion to spout it akin to a fervent Christian’s drive to “give witness” by reciting the gospel to unbelievers.

    Like Charlie Brown, Democrats just can’t keep themselves from trying to kick the gun control football, even though they must know by now that the scene ends with them lying on the ground in pain and humiliation.

    A smattering of other related gun pieces

  • 538 writer: “I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.”
  • Mass shootings are a poor lens through which to view violence involving guns.
  • Larry Correia slams Elizbeth Moon for her foolish, ill-argued opposition to suppressors. I’m friends with Elizabeth, but Correia has the far better argument here.
  • CBS’ Will Rahn on The Unbearable Smugness of the Press

    Thursday, November 10th, 2016

    This piece by Will Rahn of CBS News on the unbearable smugness of the press is so good it needs a post of its own:

    The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.

    It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

    This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

    So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

    And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

    It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

    We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

    Snip.

    That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.

    Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.

    That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.

    Read the whole thing, then check out the comments, which are running 99% in support of Rahn

    A Big Basket of Presidential Race Updates

    Thursday, September 15th, 2016

    Too much news and not enough time to blog about it, so enjoy a big ol dump of presidential race news:

  • Donald Trump up three in Florida, five in Ohio.
  • Former Secret Service agent says there’s something seriously wrong with Hillary’s health.
  • Jonah Goldberg on what Hillary’s health issue tells us about the media:

    As this pneumonia episode demonstrates, Clinton’s real problem isn’t her health but the entirely valid perception that she’s dishonest, secretive and exploits “the system” — including the support of the mainstream media — for her benefit.

    In 2008, news outlets openly speculated about whether Sen. John McCain was too frail to be president. NBC News ran an Associated Press story under the headline, “1 in 4 chance McCain may not survive 2nd term.”

    People remember these things. When Clinton faltered on Sunday, she not only humiliated her most loyal servants, who were kept in the dark by a campaign terrified of playing it straight with voters and the media, she also made countless people say, “Looks like Drudge was right again.”

  • Reporting on Hillary’s collapse means that I never had a chance to talk about her “basket of deplorables” comment, where she went full Social Justice Warrior and said that one-quarter of America is “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic.”
  • 50 Disgusting Hillary Facts Legacy Media are Hiding From You.”
  • More Guccifer 2.0 docs. Haven’t really looked at those yet either.
  • Oh, and Colin Powell’s email also got hacked, leading to the least surprising political revelation ever: Hillary Clinton still hates Obama. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Also, CBS News “run by Obama advisor Ben Rhodes’ brother, censors Powell’s accusation that Clinton is still ‘d***king bimbos,’ after editing Bill’s Monday admission that his wife ‘frequently’ suffers from fainting spells.”
  • A random Slashdot comment nails it:

    The most racist thing out there, is the whole DNC platform that expects black people to continue to vote DNC candidates, without so much as even pandering, simply by tossing out the race card over every little thing.

    It is obvious that crying Racism is the ONLY thing left the Democrats have with respect to Hillary’s campaign. And that is, by itself racist. And the black community is starting to wake up to the pure racism of low expectations that the DNC has of them.

    Can’t have voter ID laws, because the DNC says Black people can’t figure out how to get a free voter ID. But that isn’t racist.

    Can’t have single day voting, because DNC says Black People can’t figure out how to fill out an absentee ballot or get to the polls on time. But that isn’t racist.

    IF you simply look at the excuses being made on behalf of black people, they are all telling black people that they are incapable of doing normal activities, simply because … they are black.And I find that extremely distasteful and as fucking racist as anything.

    Black people aren’t as stupid, lazy, incapable as the DNC is making them out to be. But I am a racist for pointing out how stupid the DNC position is for these people.

  • How two trolls suckered the media into believing that a random frog meme was a racist symbol.
  • And hats off to whichever 4Channer did this one:

    Plus a bonus meme for your time:

    joker-pepe

  • Clinton Corruption/DNC/Election Update

    Wednesday, July 27th, 2016

    Yeah, I’m in a rush, so it’s going to be one big list tar-ball. (Or if you prefer, tarball. Call it clintoncorruption.tar.gz.)

  • Nate Silver at 538 now gives Donald Trump a 55% chance of winning the presidency over Hillary Clinton. This is a big, big reversal, given he had Clinton up by over 87% chance of winning at one point.
  • The Wikileaks drop of DNC emails is starting to yield some very interesting information, especially about just how far in the tank the MSM was for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders.
  • “The e-mails confirm the party establishment was in the tank for Clinton long before the primaries were decided.” To which I can only reply: Duh. Also this: “In one oddball e-mail chain, a DNC deputy communications director plotted to create a fake Craigslist ad that portrayed Donald Trump as sex crazed.”
  • Here are some quick and dirty highlights. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Washington Post and DNC hold joint fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Despite that being, you know, illegal.
  • Did CBS News actually change poll wording to be more favorable to Hillary and less favorable to Sanders?
  • Indeed, the emails reveal a pattern of the DNC not hesitating to bully news organizations for daring to mention Sanders favorably. “DNC communications director Luis Miranda, expressing his displeasure with “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough in a note to DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach, wrote: “(Expletive) Joe claiming the system is rigged, party against (Sanders), we need to complain to their producer.”
  • DNC confiscates the signs of Bernie Sanders supporters.
  • “Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to get this close to becoming president of the United States.”
  • Is the Clinton Foundation next up on the FBI investigation list. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Man admits to helping funnel illegal foreign contributions to Obama campaign.
  • Sanders supporters file suit over DNC and DNC law firm Perkins Coie LLP illegally favoring the Clinton campaign before Sanders dropped out. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Now it’s time for Hillary’s Thought Police to begin the hard work of grinding those kids down.”

    The idea is to turn those kids into useful political beings by using their own slogans and reference points against them. First, though, they must be softened up by shaming. And the pro-Hillary media (and most of the media is decidedly pro-Hillary) has been relentless at shaming them to keep them in line since that DNC leaks story broke.

    Shaming has been going on relentlessly on social media since these kids first touched a keyboard. They know how it works, they understand its conventions, if not its real purpose, which is to herd stubborn political ideas.

    They’ve been described by some pundits as spoiled children, as whiny babies too witless to understand simple arithmetic, even though the party arithmetic was rigged from the onset. The DNC supplied Superdelegates for Hillary, all but guaranteeing her victory, something first explained months ago by columnist Paul Jacob.

    And now many in my business who consider themselves progressives — even as they cleave to the Establishment Queen — are telling those Sanders kids two things:

    Shut up and behave.

    The goal is to take these scraggly revolutionaries, break them down and deliver zealots in November.

    And so now what you’ll see over the next few days from Philadelphia is the Democratic National Convention transformed into Operation Trust Hillary.

    Also this:

    Those leaked emails tell a story of supreme cynicism: The email asking that Sanders’ religious status be attacked in southern states; the emails outlining collusion between top officials and the Hillary camp. There are more to come.

    The most fantastic part of this moving story is that Hillary decided to blame it all on a singular villain: Russian strong man Vladimir Putin. Team Hillary said Putin was doing it to help Trump.

    (Full disclosure: Putin rode over and insisted on writing my column but my editor just said no.)

    Hackers targeted the DNC emails. And if hackers got Hillary’s vanished emails from her time as secretary of state, let’s hope they have the decency to release them before the presidential election.

    I must admit, there may be a Putin connection with the DNC leaks.

    But here’s the thing:

    Putin didn’t write the emails from the Democratic National Committee. Putin didn’t make fun of a black woman’s name; Putin didn’t scold American journalists and expect them to jump and help shape the news or offer government jobs to donors.

    The DNC officials did all that.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Disruption at the Texas Democratic delegation breakfast.
  • Yes, Hillary does want to ban guns.
  • Lifelong Democrat explains why he’s voting for Trump:

    Clinton Global (and its related entities) is a department store of political, multinational, corruption. The charity is under investigation, it was the middle man in weapons deals to foreign nations, it brokered a treasonous uranium deal to Russia, it stole money from Haiti and small contributors after the earthquake, it was deeply involved in a larcenous private college, Laureate University, it has allied with some of the worst dictators in the world and it may unravel slowly as the greatest charity fraud in history.

  • Hillary’s VP pick Tim Kaine is all over helping big banks dodge regulations.
  • So Paul Simon sang at the DNC. I love Simon’s work, but he’s not exactly the performer I’d pick to connect with today’s voters. However, Ann Althouse’s Meade came up with this inspired rewriting of Bernie’s theme music “America”:

    Let’s not be suckers, we’ll marry extortions together
    I’ve got some emails right here in my bag”
    So you’ll pay all of my campaign debts and I’ll buy your Wall Street lies
    And we’ll walk off and sell out America

  • DNC Day One: Soviet flags and Palestinian flags, but no American flags. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • A wall around the conevntion center wasn’t enough: Democrats actually built a makeshift wall around their own stage.
  • Clinton Cash dominates Facebook trends.