Posts Tagged ‘gun control’

John Cornyn Booed Over Guns

Monday, June 20th, 2022

Last month, Gun Owners of America blasted Texas Senator John Cornyn for playing footsie with the usual gun grabbers. (And not for the first time.) There have been a lot of pieces on why red flag laws (part of Cornyn’s pander) are unconstitutional garbage, to pick just one bad idea from the still nebulous proposal.

Given that, it’s no surprise that Cornyn was booed at last week’s Texas GOP convention.

Before he could get a word out, the boos descended upon Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) during his speech at the Texas GOP convention.

After getting up to the podium, about a minute and a half went by before Cornyn could even begin his speech. The crowd’s objections were a direct response to the role Cornyn is playing in the U.S. Senate in bartering a gun reform bill pushed in the wake of the Uvalde shooting.

Cornyn knew full well he was walking into the lion’s den, stating, “I will not approve any restrictions for law-abiding gun owners, and that’s my red line. And despite what some of you may have heard, that’s what our plan does.”

Citing conservative lodestar William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, Cornyn added, “Someone needs to stand athwart history, yelling stop.”

Each time he repeated this formula, the crowd returned fire, yelling “Stop!” at Cornyn.

The senior Texas senator did receive some applause when touting Trump-appointed judges and pro-life legislation, and when criticizing critical race theory and rising crime rates.

Right after Cornyn left the stage, Attorney General Ken Paxton took the stage and delivered a tacit shot at the senator — with whom he has sparred before.

“We have some Republicans who are trying to run from the fight (to preserve gun rights), and we need to remember their names next time they’re on the ballot,” Paxton warned. Earlier this month, Paxton said Texas “will be the first to sue” if the federal government passes a gun bill that “infringes on our Second Amendment Rights.”

Here’s some video to judge for yourself:

If it’s just a matter of “enforcing existing laws” as Cornyn states, why isn’t he holding hearings on why the Biden Administration refuses to enforce those laws? Why cooperate with the party that seeks complete civilian disarmament rather than actually stopping criminals?

Says Michael Quinn Sullivan: “The senator seemed stunned by the response, clearly not expecting grassroots activists to understand what he had been pushing in Washington with the Democrats.”

The longer Cornyn has been in office the squishier he’s gotten (a sadly familiar pattern), not only on gun control but also illegal alien amnesty. He’s gone from “pretty reliable conservative” to someone whose feet you have to hold to the fire to keep from drifting left on the latest burst of media hot air, and the latest chorus of boos shows that Republican activists know it.

The imperfect status quo in gun laws is vastly preferable to any “reform” the current congress is likely to cook up.

LinkSwarm for May 20, 2022

Friday, May 20th, 2022

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Biden Administration has done everything it can to worsen inflation, The Ministry of Truth’s Scary Poppins dissolves into a puddle, a whole lot of school groomer news from all across the country, and the world’s longest D&D game.

  • On inflation, Biden’s every move has been wrong.

    The Biden administration’s first response to any problem is to pretend that it isn’t a problem. That’s how inflation went from a minor problem to a major one. Unwilling to take the necessary steps to rein in inflation early — pushing the Fed to raise interest rates and slowing down the torrent of money going out the Treasury’s doors — Biden and congressional Democrats at first insisted that inflation wasn’t a real problem: “Transitory,” they called it.

    And then when inflation turned out not to be transitory, they thought they could just pin it on the Russians. Jen Psaki sniffed smugly at the “Putin price hike,” as though Americans were too stupid to understand that inflation at home had started long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That gambit fizzled, too.

    When you don’t have any fresh ideas or real principles — and when your long-term goals are limited by the fact that the president, who was born during the Roosevelt administration, isn’t exactly buying any green bananas — then the easiest thing to do is to throw money at every problem.

    Throwing money at things is how you make inflation worse.

    Washington had already thrown a lot of money at the economy during the COVID-19 emergency, and, predictably, the emergency spending outlasted the emergency. By the time Biden was elected in 2020, Washington had thrown $2.6 trillion in budgetary resources at COVID and had authorized as much as $4 trillion in subsidized federal lending. That was new money amounting to about a third of GDP sloshing around the economy. Biden’s first priority was pushing out another $1 trillion in a phony infrastructure bill (that has little to do with actual infrastructure) and a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, even though the Consumer Price Index was already rising steeply, according to the Federal Reserve.

    Stimulating an already overstimulated economy is how you make inflation worse.

    Our inflation problem is only partly an issue of dovish monetary policy and reckless spending. There are problems in the real-world physical economy, too, those “supply-chain issues” we hear about. The Biden administration has done extraordinarily dumb things to make these worse, too, keeping in place the worst of the Trump administration’s anti-trade policies. That “Made in the USA” talk sounds good on the stump, but the truth is we need a lot that we don’t make at home and aren’t going to — including much of the steel and other vital inputs for the high-value manufacturing we actually do here.

    The incredible fact is the Biden administration still had punitive tariffs on Ukrainian steel while it was seeking financial aid for the Ukrainians — it wasn’t until the Chamber of Commerce and conservative critics started making a stink that the administration changed its stance.

  • Historically, interest rates are are still too low to fight inflation.
  • Speaking of the Biden Administration spreading light and joy throughout America: “Energy Officials Issue ‘Sobering’ Warning About Widespread Summer Blackouts Triggered by Closure of Fossil Fuel Plants.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • More Biden magic: “Dow Suffers Longest Losing Streak In 99 Years.”
  • “Hunter Biden Took In $11 Million Over 5 Years.” I would treat NBC’s number as a floor rather than a ceiling…
  • Scary Poppins resigns from the Ministry of Truth because all those vicious right-wing bullies were mean to her about her gross bias and constant lying.
  • I know you’ll be shocked, shocked to find Taylor Lorenz attempt to ride to her rescue:

  • Democrats vote to create that national gun registry they swore up and down they were never going to create.
  • More and more Democrats are leaving the party over their fanatical treatment of abortion as the holiest of sacraments.

    I live in a manufacturing city with a very strong union voice speaking into the politics of our community. Yet a fascinating and unmistakable phenomenon has been occurring over the course of the last decade or two. Though the percentage of citizens in our area who post their “Proud Union Home” yard signs has likely increased, the percentage of them identifying as, or supporting, the Democratic Party has dropped precipitously during that same time frame.

    For the first time in my city’s history, Republicans swept all municipal offices in the last election. So what is happening, and is it a microcosm of some larger trend?

    I can’t offer any scientific study or analysis; I can only tell you what I have been told. Though former President Trump attempted overtures towards the “made in America” union mentality, that isn’t the most often cited rationale among Democrat dropouts. Instead, their disillusionment seems to stem from the prevailing belief that the party has been hijacked by single-issue ideologues that are willing to destroy party cohesion and solidarity if it means advancing their singular cause. More and more of these ex-party members now consider the Democrats the “Abortion First” party.

    Again, that may be just the frustrated sentiments of disgruntled Dems in rural Indiana who feel as though the once big tent that embraced them has become far more rigid and dogmatic in who they welcome under the awning. Gone seem to be the days of the party’s Rust Belt/Union Grit identity, replaced today with a coalition that obsesses over white guilt, pronoun pandering, and legal feticide.

  • “Tucson high school counselor accused of sexual misconduct with a 15-year-old student…police officials in the Southern Arizona city said Zobella Brazil Vinik turned herself in to detectives on May 11.”
  • I know you’ll be shocked to find out that Vinik is “a radical queer nonbinary leftist” who put on drag shows.
  • Speaking of public school administrators sexually grooming students, Washington state school board director Jenn Mason tried to throw a party for children in her sex shop.

  • Speaking of sexual predators after your children, this is pretty horrifying: “Texas Teen Goes to Bathroom at NBA Game, Is Found 10 Days Later Sold for Sex in Oklahoma Hotel.”
  • A parent-filed lawsuit comes for the president of McKinney Independent School District’s board of trustees.

    In another action-packed school board meeting in McKinney, the board president was served with a lawsuit for suppressing the free speech rights of citizens who disagree with her policies.

    Civil rights attorney Paul Davis served Amy Dankel, president of McKinney Independent School District’s board of trustees, during the public comments portion of Tuesday night’s meeting.

    “Your outrageous display of tyranny in how you trampled on the rights of the public at the last meeting was shocking,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

    In recent months, McKinney ISD’s school board meetings have featured a heavy police presence.

    On several occasions, police officers have ejected citizens, at Dankel’s direction, for failing to observe her rules of decorum during public comments.

    Davis said Tuesday that Dankel’s rules “placed an unconstitutional restraint on First Amendment rights by disallowing signs, clapping, and comments.”

    He also says Dankel enforced her rules unequally.

    She directed police to physically remove people who were wearing green—supporters of conservative trustee Chad Green, who Dankel is trying to oust from the board.

    “Those same rules were not applied to people wearing blue,” Davis said, referring to Dankel supporters. “For that, we have filed a civil rights lawsuit against you.”

    Kevin Whitt is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

    During last month’s school board meeting, the pro-family activist spoke against the district’s failure to proactively identify and remove sexually explicit books found in students’ libraries—a contentious topic in McKinney and other districts across the state since last year.

    Later in that meeting, Whitt was dragged out by City of McKinney police officers for uttering a single word—“disgusting”—after a local mom finished comments that included excerpts from one of the explicit books.

  • Speaking of Texas school boards getting sued parents, Round Rock ISD is being sued over violating parent’s rights.

    The contentious saga in Round Rock ISD continues after two parents filed a federal lawsuit last week against five school board trustees, the district superintendent, and several district police officers.

    Last year, the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office arrested Jeremy Story and Dustin Clark on charges of “hindering proceedings by disorderly conduct” following a September school board meeting. Both men were released the next day.

    The lawsuit claims the defendants violated Story’s and Clark’s rights under the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment. Additionally, the suit accuses the defendants of violating 42 U.S. Code 1983, or misusing their power to deny their constitutional rights.

    The two men attended last September’s school board meeting to protest Superintendent Dr. Hafedh Azaiez’s continued employment and a proposed tax increase.

    Texas Scorecard chronicled multiple scandals involving Round Rock ISD in a special report and a podcast series, Exposed, which included investigations into the school district and Azaiez. Five of the district’s seven trustees, dubbed the “Bad Faith Five,” were also brought under scrutiny for allegedly covering up domestic violence allegations against Azaiez.

    At the August 16 board meeting, Round Rock ISD officers removed Story after he referenced the investigation into Azaiez. Amy Weir, president of the school board, instructed district officers to escort Story from the building, claiming his concerns about Azaiez did not follow the meeting’s agenda.

    At the same meeting, trustees Mary Bone and Danielle Weston walked out after accusing the district of intentionally limiting seating under the guise of following COVID-19 safety guidelines. Clark then demanded the board let more citizens in to witness the meeting, and Weir subsequently instructed district officers to escort him out.

    Three days later, Williamson County officers arrested Story and Clark. Although Story’s charges pertained to the August 16 meeting, Clark’s charges dated back to a September meeting of the school board. Their lawsuit, filed May 11, accuses all defendants of suppressing Story’s and Clark’s constitutional rights and claims they were arrested illegally.

    If successful, the lawsuit would void Azaiez’s contract and prevent Round Rock ISD from restricting attendance at school board meetings due to COVID-19.

  • Groomer teachers are even popping up in Ohio:

  • But the school Social Justice bullshit doesn’t stop there: “Fairfax, Virginia Schools May Expel Elementary Students For ‘Misgendering’ People.”

    Tar.

    Feathers.

  • Michigan Businesses Sue Whitmer For Losses Due To COVID Lockdowns.”
  • Speaking of Michigan lawsuits over gross abuse of state power, a couple is suing Highland Park after the police seized their building and legal marijuana business, charged them with no crime, and then offered to give it back if they bought the police department two cars.
  • Speaking of crooked Democratic politicians, you would think that all that graft Bill De Blasio’s wife raked off would allow him to retire in style, but evidently that festering bucket of crooked failure just can’t stay out of the spotlight, and is now running for congress.
  • Texas counties ranks, from most Democratic to most republican.
  • Melvin Capital, the hedge fund that got clobbered when they were caught performing naked shorts of Gamestop stock, is shutting down.
  • Citadel head Ken Griffin threatens to leave Chicago over the spiraling crime rate.
  • People magazine may cease its print version. Bonus: “Sources told The Post that under Wakeford, People had been selling more than 200,000 copies at the newsstand a week. Since then, newsstand sales have been uneven, with a May 2 Prince Harry cover dipping to about 160,000 copies sold, and a March 14 Lizzo cover cratering to between 125,000- 150,000 copies sold, which is said to be one of the worst selling issues in People’s half-century history.” Funny how no one gives a rat’s ass about woke royals and the morbidly obese…
  • Larry Correia gives a deserved royal fisking to an article by a leftwing feminist who wonders why her boyfriend reads that primitive “science fiction” stuff rather than modern literary fiction that checks all the required Victimhood Identity boxes.
  • Archeologists in southern Turkey continue to uncover an 11,000 year old pre-agriculture civilization of six-fingered men protecting their penises.
  • Inside a D&D game that’s been running for more than 40 years. Including a truly jaw-dropping amount of painted miniatures and constructed terrain.
  • Good for a smile:

  • LinkSwarm for June 11, 2021

    Friday, June 11th, 2021

    Joe Manchin, controlling the border, and Soros-backed DA’s doing their best to bring back the high crime rates of the 1970s top this Friday’s LinkSwarm:

  • Seems like this should be a bigger story than it is: Mexico just had it’s midterm elections. But that’s not the big part: “97 politicians had been assassinated. Along with almost a thousand being attacked in some way, shape, or form. Just in this election cycle!”
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says that he will refuse to vote for the Democratic Voter Fraud Enablement Act of 2021. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For The People Act.”
  • Indeed, Manchin just crushed two anti-democratic Democratic power grabs:

    Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) will oppose the Democratic Party’s legislation that would federalize elections, the For the People Act, citing the bill’s overtly partisan nature.

    Manchin declared his position in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. According to Manchin, “voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.”

    “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act,” Manchin wrote.

    Manchin also laid to rest the possibility he would ever support ending the filibuster.

    “Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” he said. “For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator, I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Manchin is thwarting The Will of The Party, so naturally Jemele Hill is calling him a racist.
    

  • Remember how Democrats were sure Hispanics would usher them into permanent majority status? Not in Texas:

    Republicans swept key races for mayor in Texas on Saturday, setting back Democratic hopes that the state’s urban areas will deliver statewide majorities for them in the future. Most shocking: In McAllen, Texas, a border city of 150,000 people of which 85 percent are Hispanic, Republicans elected their first mayor since 1997.

    Other cities with strong Hispanic populations also elected Republicans to replace retiring mayors. Fort Worth is the twelfth-largest city in the country and has more than 1 million people. Only a third of them are Anglo. But 37-year-old Republican Mattie Parker easily defeated Democrat Deborah Peoples, becoming the youngest mayor of a major Texas city.

    The race was ostensibly nonpartisan, but the divisions were clear.

    “We’ve never had a race that was this partisan,” Kenneth Barr, the former Democratic mayor of Fort Worth, told Politico. “This particular election has moved as far in the partisan direction as any we’ve ever had.”

    Voters also elected Republican Jim Ross as mayor of Arlington, a suburb of 400,000 people that borders Fort Worth and is only 39 percent Anglo. Ross, a former Arlington police officer, was endorsed by several police associations who liked his anti-crime platform. He defeated Michael Glaspie, a former city-council member who was endorsed by the Dallas Morning News and leading Democratic politicians.

    But it was the victory of Javier Villalobos in the overwhelmingly Democratic Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico that shook political observers.

    Villalobos, a former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, defeated Democrat Veronica Vega Whitacre, a fellow McAllen city council member, to become mayor. He campaigned as a conservative and said he wanted to cut water and sewage fees. He called for compassion for undocumented migrants but said the safety of local citizens had to be the first concern. His supporters questioned Whitacre’s wooly-headed claim that if migrants were flowing the other way, toward Mexico, they would be treated with as much compassion by Mexican authorities.

    Whitacre’s loss was only the latest sign for Democrats that the Rio Grande Valley is slipping away from them. Biden won the region by 15 points last November, a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016. At the same time, Congressman Vicente Gonzalez won reelection by only 51 percent to 48 percent over Republican Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez in a district Democrats always carry.

    “Democrats have a big problem in Texas,” Rio Grande Valley congressman Filemon Vela told the Texas Tribune in January, shortly after he became vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “For the first time in generations, or maybe ever, we lost . . . South Texas counties with significant Hispanic populations,” he said. “And we are going to have to . . . wrap our arms around exactly why that happened. It may be a difficult issue to reconcile.”

    It’s not at all difficult to reconcile: The modern Democratic Party’s core policies of racist social justice, anti-police, soft-on-crime and pro-illegal alien are anathema to ordinary middle class Hispanic American citizens. Your ideas are unpopular and you’ll continue to lose as long as you let the radical social justice warriors set the agenda for the party.

  • Indeed, illegal border crossings hit 180,000 in May. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Governor Greg Abbott has announced plans to build the border wall in Texas the Biden Administration stopped work on.
  • Meanwhile, since being put in charge of the border crisis, Kamala Harris not only hasn’t visited the border, she laughs off questions about it. (Hat tip: Texas Public Policy Foundation.)
  • Speaking of illegal aliens, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that those who entered the country illegally and were allowed to stay for humanitarian reasons are not allowed to apply for a green card. Also note the Justice Elana Kagan-penned decision makes no mention whatsoever of the “undocumented.” She refers to them, using the standard statutory language, as “aliens.”
  • “LA Sheriff Attributes Crime Surge To Soros-Backed DA Gascón, Supports Recall.”

    The city of Los Angeles saw a sharp 36 percent increase in homicides in 2020—but the L.A. County sheriff said this year is looking even more grim, and he’s blaming the widespread uptick in crime on District Attorney George Gascón.

    “In 2021, that 36 percent has now become 92 percent, which is a huge statistical jump,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva told The Epoch Times.

    “We’re seeing increases in all the categories – assault with a deadly weapon, arson, rape… these things are continuing upward unabated.”

    The widespread uptick in crime is the direct result of Gascón’s election as DA of L.A. County and his failure to prosecute offenses, according to Villanueva. Since Gascón took office, 2,690 cases—about 30 percent—“that normally would have gone through were rejected,” he said.

    While Gascón has defended his reform policies, criminals in prison are toasting the DA to celebrate their early release, according to officials—and the sheriff said the DA’s policies are making it more difficult for him to do his job.

    “You’re supposed to have a district attorney who represents the people … but [he’s] acting like a public defender,” Villanueva said.

    “There’s no one left representing the people. I need to work in partnership with the person who’s representing the people. I don’t have that right now.”

  • Speaking of Gascón: “Double murderer approved for parole at third hearing; prosecutors barred from attending under Gascón’s reform.” “Howard Elwin Jones has been imprisoned at San Quentin state prison since 1991 for the December 1988 shooting and killing of 18-year-old Chris Baker and another boy at a party in Rowland Heights.” It appears that there’s nothing Soros-backed DAs enjoy more than putting violent, dangerous felons back on the street.
  • Dozens of Baltimore businesses plan to go Galt:

    It comes as no surprise to readers that dozens of Baltimore City businesses, located in the Inner Harbor, in a stretch called “Fells Point,” are threatening the new city government, run by Mayor Brandon Scott, with not paying their taxes because they’re “fed up and frustrated” with the outburst of violence.

    In a letter titled “Letter to City Leaders From Fells Point Business Leaders,” addressed to Mayor Brandon Scott, Council President Nick Mosby, Councilman Zeke Cohen, Madam State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and Commissioner Michael Harrison, the 37 restaurants and small businesses are threatening to stop paying city taxes and other fees until “basic and essential municipal services are restored.”

    What’s happening in Fells Point, known for its hipster pubs and taverns, as well as delicious seafood from the Chesapeake Bay, is experiencing an overflow of violent crime from other troubled areas.

    The letter comes after three men were shot in Fells Point over the weekend.

    “What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” said the letter.

    The 37 businesses are planning to place their city taxes in an “escrow account” and released them until these demands are satisfied:

    • Pick up the trash
    • Enforce traffic and parking laws through tickets and towing
    • Stop illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales
    • Empower police to responsibly do their job

    The letter continued to say that minor crime that police “ignore” is what is contributing to more violent crime. So Marilyn Mosby’s halt on prosecuting petty crimes appears to be backfiring.

    You don’t say. Baltimore has had a problem with open-air drug markets for over three decades. And the last Republican mayor left office in 1967…

  • “DeSantis Signs Bills Combatting Chinese Communist Party’s Influence In US.””The first bill is intended to safeguard public institutions from ‘undue foreign influence,’ DeSantis said at a press conference, noting that the bill will prohibit ‘agreements between public entities and the Communist Party of China or Cuba or any of these malignant forces.’ The second bill criminalizes theft and trafficking trade secrets under Florida state law.” If Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, right now DeSantis would be the early favorite for the GOP nomination.
  • More words from the man in question:

  • Things that make you go “Hmmmm”: “Obama Administration Lifted Block on “Gain of Function Research” Just Eleven Days Before President Trump Took Office, January 9, 2017.”
  • Own any of the estimated 40 million guns in America with a pistol brace? Congratulations! The Biden Administration wants to make you a felon.

    “Today’s proposed rulemaking on pistol-braced firearms represents a gross abuse of executive authority,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for Gun Owners of America, in a statement.

    [Pistol brace inventor Alex] Bosco said the rule would outlaw the vast majority of braces on the market and read like it was “reverse-engineered to make braces illegal.” He called it “arbitrary and capricious.”

  • How’s that socialized medicine working out for you, UK? “Hospital waiting list tops 5m in England.”
  • Old and busted: Young families buying homes. The new hotness: Pension funds buying homes. “The consulting firm found Houston to be a favorite haunt of investors who have lately accounted for 24% of home purchases there.”
  • The Kung Flu lockdowns were a war on the working class:

  • Fake Florida coronavirus “whistleblower” Rebekah Jones suspended from Twitter.

  • Charles C. W. Cooke wonders what use Chris Cuomo is to CNN?

    Andrew Cuomo’s little brother is a continuous embarrassment to the cable-news network that employs him. So why does he still have a job?

    At this point in the proceedings, one is tempted to conclude that Chris Cuomo must have laced CNN’s corporate offices with dynamite and informed the powers that be that, if he goes, they go, too. What else could explain the network’s eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by the man? Here, at the tail end of his long experiment in deficiency, Cuomo resembles nothing more keenly than the inadequate tee-baller who gets to stay in past eight or nine strikes because his uncle coaches the team. His ratings are poor. His insights are vacuous. His conduct is a permanent source of ignominy. All the perfumes of Albany could not sweeten this little man. “What’s in a name?” inquired Shakespeare. Little did he know.

    It is unclear why Cuomo was selected by CNN to begin with. He’s a lawyer who knows nothing of the law; a journalist who knows nothing of journalism; an American who knows nothing of America. His temper is third-rate, his interests are bewilderingly narrow, he possesses no discernible sense of shame or self-knowledge, and the opinions he proffers are so ruthlessly subordinated to expedience that hypocrisy is his default mode. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was meant as an extolment of the virtues of personal growth. Cuomo seems to have taken it literally.

    On no single topic has the man’s unique set of professional and personal shortcomings been more obvious than COVID-19. In April of last year, Cuomo’s attempt to fake a two-week quarantine was ruined by his failure to remember that, just a week earlier, he had admitted on the radio that he had left the house to visit a property he owns in East Hampton and gotten into an argument with a stranger. And yet, rather than demote him for telling such a galling and obvious lie, CNN encouraged him to inject his peculiar brand of mendacity into a series of interviews with his own brother. Thus it was that while Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was making the single worst mistake of the entire coronavirus crisis — herding the elderly into nursing homes and then covering up the death toll — Television Host Chris Cuomo of New York was using America’s most famous cable-news channel to portray him as a national hero. What America needed last year was a dispassionate examination of Andrew Cuomo’s official messaging. What America got was a smirking nepotist brandishing a comedy-sized nasal swab and tweeting obsequious fluff about his sibling. New York, Chris Cuomo concluded, was “doing way better than what we see elsewhere & no way that happens without the Luv Guv dishing the real 24/7.” In exchange, the “Luv Guv” dealt Chris in on a series of private, government-funded COVID tests that were unavailable to everybody else.

    Watching Chris Cuomo work is a little like watching a man jump out of an airplane without a parachute and then become irrationally angry at those who tell him he’s going to die.

  • Speaking of CNN, they also brought back Jeffrey “lubin his” Toobin. Proving yet again that the the Democratic Media Complex will alwaqys refuse to apply its rules to their own.
  • Jon Del Arroz wins his lawsuit against Worldcon for calling him racist:

    The snowflakes at Worldcon are having a very bad weekend. On Friday, the San Francisco chapter of Worldcon settled a lawsuit and agreed to pay restitution and to issue a public apology for banning conservative author Jon Del Arroz from their convention in 2018 and for besmirching him as a “racist.” Del Arroz is the most dangerous Hispanic voice in science fiction because he refuses to back down in the face of political bullies. He has also written an amazing series, The Saga of the Nano Templar, that my teen daughter is reading for the second time—that’s how good it is—and I don’t have to worry about garbage culture or leftist politics sullying her mind. The Adventures of Baron Von Monacle, a steampunk series, is also highly entertaining. (Always support freedom-loving artists!)

    At the time of the banning, Del Arroz was under serious mob attack from social justice warriors trying to drive him out of the sci-fi community. SJWs even sent a spring-loaded exploding can of penis-shaped glitter to his home, which scared his wife and children. The ban came about when Del Arroz asked Worldcon for security measures because he feared for his safety due to the mob-like attacks on him and his family from industry insiders. Instead of helping him, Worldcon banned him and made public statements claiming the author was a “racist” and a “bully,” with no substantiated evidence to back those statements up. I’ve known Del Arroz personally for many years. He is a devout and kind man with a good sense of humor and a love of the art of the troll. He is not vicious, but provocative in a way that is necessary for freedom of speech to be preserved. He’s the one brave enough to exercise the First Amendment in ways that ensure we will keep it. We all need people like Del Arroz in the fight to preserve liberty.

    Now we only need about a hundred such lawsuits to force institutional science fiction to regain its sanity… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Not-so-much news: Gun control bill fails. News: In California.
  • For all the disappointments of the Texas 87th legislature’s regular session, a number of pro Second Amendment bills were passed.
  • Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman resigns, said to be interested in running for Attorney General against incumbent Ken Paxton and George P. Bush.

    This is probably the wrong Eva to use as clip art here.

  • French France’s Emmanuel Macron Urges G-7 To Sell Gold Reserves To Fund Bailout For Africa. I imagine that the other G-7 members responses to this proposal ranged from “Are you high?” to “Die in a fire.” (Plus an “Is Matlock on yet?” from Biden.)
  • Chinese Police Storm Rare Student Protest Inside Nanjing Normal University.”
  • “50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat.”
  • Demolition Ranch’s Matt Carriker has his truck broken into while he was in San Antonio. The Democratic Party’s soft-on-crime stances just keep reaping their rewards…
  • Speaking of Carriker, he just hit 10 million subscribers.
  • Three reporters at the New York Post are breaking the first rule of Fight Club. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The world’s creepiest McDonalds is an abandoned barge.
  • Crazy criminals, UK edition:

  • Babylon Bee counts down genders:

  • How to Protect Your Shopping Trolley From Improvised Explosives.” However, I feel compelled to point out a technical error: The Trophy active protection system is not yet available on the British Challenger tank, making it deeply unlikely that the system would be made available for a Tesco shopping cart.
  • BidenWatch for November 2, 2020

    Monday, November 2nd, 2020

    Welcome to the very last BidenWatch before tomorrow’s election!

    Before BidenWatch was the Clown Car Update, so I’ve been doing this for almost two years. I’m really ready for a vacation…

  • Here’s links to stories about all the things pulled from Hunter Biden’s hard drive.
  • “Joe Biden’s Texts to Hunter Show Ex-VP Had “No Hesitancy” in Helping Son Get $1M From Chinese Communist-Linked Business Partner.”
  • Here’s one with him bitching about reimbursement expenses for Chinese partner CEFC.
  • Has ABC broke the embargo on the Hunter Biden corruption story?

  • “Feds Obtained FISA Warrant Against Hunter Biden’s Chinese Business Associate“:

    Federal investigators obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against one of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business associates, suggesting that the executive was suspected of acting as a covert agent of a foreign government.

    Prosecutors revealed the existence of at least one FISA warrant against Chi Ping Patrick Ho, known as Patrick Ho, in a Feb. 8, 2018 court filing obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

    Ho was charged on Dec. 18, 2017 with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering related to CEFC China Energy contracts in Uganda and Chad. Ho had been an executive at the multi-billion dollar Chinese energy company prior to his arrest.

    Hunter Biden was part of a business consortium that sought a partnership with CEFC in May 2017. A Senate report released last month said that an affiliate of CEFC wired $5 million to Biden’s law firm from August 2017 through August 2018.

    In addition to his partnership with CEFC, Hunter Biden also represented Ho during his legal battle.

    According to a report from The New Yorker last year, CEFC’s chairman, Ye Jianming, raised concerns with Biden in summer 2017 about a possible investigation into Ho.

  • “Hunter Biden’s business group shopped Joe Biden’s influence in Colombia in an investment pitch to Chinese energy firm.” Who had Colombia on their Hunter Biden Corruption Index Bingo card?
  • More on that pitch:

    In 2017, Hunter Biden and a group of business partners seeking a $10 million investment deal with a Chinese energy firm touted Joe Biden’s friendly relations with Colombia’s president in their sales proposal, which suggested a series of oil investments in the South American country, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

    Hunter Biden and four other businessmen, including his uncle James Biden, highlighted the former vice president’s positive relationship with Juan Manuel Santos in a May 15, 2017 investment outline for CEFC China Energy, a Chinese energy conglomerate.

    The Biden consortium, which would be called SinoHawk, sought a $10 million seed investment from CEFC China Energy, with a goal of eventually securing billions of dollars in investments in the U.S. and around the world.

    The report is part of a trove of records held by Tony Bobulinski, a California-based businessman who was part of the consortium with Hunter Biden, James Biden, and two other partners.

    (Hat tip: Tom Fitton.)

  • “Joe Biden: Trashing Fossil Fuel in the US While His Family Seeks to Make Money From It in Ukraine and China“:

    Undisputed is the fact that Hunter and other members of the Biden family have been involved in numerous complex, and sometimes controversial, multi-national, multi-million dollar deals involving Ukraine, Russia, China, Luxembourg, and the UK. Numerous observers have stated they believe the Bidens’ main qualification to conduct such business is simply that they are connected to a powerful political figure who has influence over policies and practices that can impact the businesses: Joe Biden.

    Summary of crooked dealings snipped.

    Still, there’s one nagging point that I haven’t seen considered. It’s the nature of the Biden family business ventures juxtaposed against Joe Biden’s position on oil and fossil fuels.

    Biden has repeatedly taken strong positions against fossil fuels— oil, coal and natural gas. He has made it clear he wants to “transition” away from them in the U.S. But as he’s advanced this position, his family members have been making money on deals that expand fossil fuel companies and ventures in foreign countries.

    For example, While Hunter Biden was getting himself a job on the board of Ukraine’s largest energy company, Burisma; Vice President Joe Biden was coincidentally put in charge of Ukraine policy. The same day the White House announced the vice president would handle Ukraine policy and make a visit there the following week, Hunter allegedly wrote to a business partner, “This could be the break we have been waiting for.” They inked a highly-compensated gig with Burisma in Ukraine.

    During Joe Biden’s first visit to the country in his new position just days later, he spoke of how Ukraine could make the right decisions and become “energy independent”— less reliant on other countries and more secure from a national security standpoint. Energy independence in this context implied good things for Ukrainian fossil fuel companies like Burisma to which Hunter was hitched. There was no bigger oil and gas company in Ukraine than Burisma.

    The point is, while Joe Biden has been pushing to end US the oil industry, his family has been cutting billion dollars in deals, profiting off of the oil industry in competing countries such as Ukraine and China. In fact, eliminating fossil fuel in the US while supporting it in other nations could be seen as putting America at a competitive and national security disadvantage.

  • How badly Biden stepped in it at the debate:

    3. Biden, on the other hand, said a bunch of dumb things. He repeated a plagiarized phrase about there being no blue states or red states, only United States—and then went on to urinate on red states anyway. He admitted under his presidency, a long, dark winter was ahead. His best zinger of the night—linking Trump to the Proud Boys (which we already learned was Iranian disinformation from the start)—was utterly muffed when he called them the Poor Boys. This provoked laughter as many Americans googled to figure out what sandwiches had to do with Trump. We could go on an on, but there were a number of stumbles by Biden that showed why Obama never gave him much to do.

    4. Biden said nothing good. Yeah, he had a pretty good riff on a bonehead question about Black Americans being pulled over, but Trump jujitsued that by twisting the question from sounding like “why are Blacks so often mistaken to be criminals” to “here’s what Black Americans have achieved over the last four years.” Everything else was either rehearsed or repeated talking points and a lot of bluster and blather that, at best, sounded like Trump’s vain boasting. And from what we’re reading today, many voters were put off by his blatant fear mongering about everyone dying from COVID.

    So you might be mistaken into thinking that this was the end of it. And for Trump, it pretty much was. He was wrapping up, for the most part, when the moderator (who wasn’t bad, really—she asked a lot uncomfortable questions of both candidates) asked Trump why so many Black Americans were suffering living near oil fields. Instead of taking the bait, Trump said that these Americans were living there because they were working there, under his economy. A nice answer, and Trump knew it. He pretty much started putting his coat on and turning off the lights when Biden was asked to respond.

    And did Biden respond. He announced that he would seek to end the oil industry. Trump wheeled around and asked him to repeat that. Biden did, and announced he would—as president—end America’s use of fossil fuels. Trump was handed gold, and he made sure Americans recognized this as big news, especially folks living in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Oklahoma.

    Biden had a definite look of panic on his face as Trump named those states. Even he realized he just gave Trump 83 electoral votes, mumbling something about “on public lands” and “subsidies,” but Trump drowned out his babbling by reminding voters in those states what Biden just announced. There would be no walking that back, even with the media’s certain (and ultimately proven) covering for him on Friday. It was said, and at this point, if polls in other states stay where they are, those 83 votes will put Trump over.

    Bear in mind, this doesn’t affect just four states. Shutting down oil and fossil fuels in this country will put nearly one million Americans out of their current jobs, in the form of drilling, mining, trucking, piping, distribution, distillation, manufacture, plasticization, and more. The Depression here will crush world markets that depend on us. Did Biden mean for all this? Probably not, but he reassured America that Biden, after 47 years in government, has literally no understanding of how the economy works.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • Want to view Joe Biden’s entire Pennsylvania speech? Me neither, but here it is. Even includes time markers for the bloopers. But it’s weird to hear a guy both yelling and suffering from a case of mush-mouth at the same time.
  • If Biden doesn’t win Pennsylvania, then he becomes an underdog.
  • Speaking of which: “Trump Takes The Lead In Pennsylvania; +3 Per New Poll.” As usual, take all polls with a grain of salt.
  • Speaking of polls and grains of salt, pollsters learned nothing from 2016:

    Early voting shows Republicans are waiting in line to vote. The pollsters say a far higher percentage of Republicans support President Trump than in 2016. If this is true then how can he be behind by 17 points in Wisconsin as ABC claimed its poll said?

    Republican registrations are up.

    People didn’t register in 2020 to vote against President Trump.

    Thomson was right when he wrote, “In 2020, we have the most stable race in decades.”

    Everyone decided months ago whether they will vote for President Trump. This election is a referendum on him, plain and simple.

    The election is about enthusiasm. The election is about getting your people to vote. President Trump has held huge rallies night after night for weeks.

    Biden draws flies to his rare rallies. But they are socially distanced flies. His rallies are short made-for-TV events designed to let TV outlets pretend to be fair. They show the best of his short presentation, then show the worst moment in an hourlong speech by President Trump.

    The Republican Party has an army of 2 million volunteers to get out the vote.

    Democrats have a phone bank.

    The pollsters should have adjusted to the new reality.

    Whether a person wants President Trump or Biden is nice to know.

    But what counts are the actual votes. A 10-point gap in enthusiasm trumps a 7-point lead in the polls. When the enthusiasm gap became obvious this summer, pollsters should have adjusted. They didn’t.

    And really they learned nothing from 2016. They view it as an anomaly, and cling to the false notion that they got the national vote right.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • Still more poll warning signs for Biden: 41% in Iowa:

    I’ve been covering American politics for a long time and I can’t remember a number that so dramatically altered the political community’s perception of a presidential campaign as that number did, last night, at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

    The source of the number was The Iowa Poll, which has been the gold standard for statewide polling in the United States for decades. The number itself was the percentage of likely voters in Iowa supporting Joe Biden’s candidacy for president.

    President Trump’s number was 48%, which put him ahead in the “horse race” by 7 percentage points. There was nothing really remarkable about that, in context. Mr. Trump won the state in 2016 by (roughly) nine percentage points.

    What was remarkable was Biden’s 41%. What made it doubly disconcerting was the way The Des Moines Register (accurately) described the poll results:

    “Republican President Donald Trump has taken over the lead in Iowa as Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden has faded…”

    Faded! Could there be a more terrible word in the last week of a presidential campaign? Off the record, Democratic elected officials and campaign operatives and financial backers have been saying throughout the campaign that their biggest fear regarding the eventual outcome was Biden himself. They saw him as an especially weak candidate and worried that he wasn’t “a closer;” even if he was ahead going into the last week, victory could slip from his grasp.

    Up until last night, Democratic elected officials and political operatives saw the presidential race standing at somewhere between a narrow Biden win and a “blue wave.” In their “blue wave” scenario, the Democrats would win both the presidency and a Senate majority and the Trump-McConnell nightmare would finally come to an end.

    That was the other piece of bad news in last night’s Iowa Poll release. It showed that Republican Sen. Joni Ernst had pulled ahead of her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield. Her lead (46%-to-42%) was within the margin of error, but it wasn’t Ms. Ernst’s lead that Democrats were focused on. It was the “faded” support for Ms. Greenfield, which almost exactly tracked the “faded” support for Joe Biden.

    For Democrats, last night’s Iowa Poll was the worst possible news at the worst possible moment. It foretold close results in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It undermined the Biden campaign’s momentum and morale. And it fracked Democrats’ self-confidence.

    (Hat tip: Christina Hoff Summers.)

  • “Biden Aides See Warning Signs in Black, Latino Turnout So Far.”

    Senior officials on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign are increasingly worried about insufficient Black and Latino voter turnout in key states like Florida and Pennsylvania with only four days until the election, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Despite record early-vote turnout around the country, there are warning signs for Biden. In Arizona, two-thirds of Latino registered voters have not yet cast a ballot. In Florida, half of Latino and Black registered voters have not yet voted but more than half of White voters have cast ballots, according to data from Catalist, a Democratic data firm. In Pennsylvania, nearly 75% of registered Black voters have not yet voted, the data shows.

    The firm’s analysis of early vote numbers also show a surge of non-college educated White voters, who largely back President Donald Trump, compared to voters of color, who overwhelmingly support Biden.

    The situation is particularly stark in Florida where Republicans currently have a 9.4% turnout advantage in Miami-Dade County, a place where analysts say Biden will need a significant margin of victory to carry the state.

  • Jim Geraghty on which states to watch and why. Pennsylvania (especially Bucks County), Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.
  • Twitter, Facebook both admit that there’s no evidence the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
  • Our media: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.”
  • Biden looked normal in the debates. Why does he look senile otherwise?

    Heaven knows Biden has a long history of making gaffes. And maybe some of his bungling can be attributed to him just being a natural-born blooper machine. But all of it? Unlikely. The volume of slip-ups is too much.

    Just as disturbing as the constant misstatements are his appearances in public and on video outside of the debates. He looks to be in a hard decline. His facial expressions are dull and empty. He seems to drift, get lost in his thoughts. Or simply has no thoughts and blanks out. He forgets where he is. Staffers feed him words when he can’t come up with them.

  • Don’t believe the polls: Trump is winning. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Stephen Green wargames the electoral college again. “Trump has more and wider paths to victory than Biden does.”
  • Now we know why Joe got angry.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • People who have raised at least $100,000 for the Biden campaign. Notable names (excluding Democratic senators, reps and governors) include Lisa Blue Baron, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, megalawyer Christopher Boies, Pete Buttigieg, Vanessa Getty, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and investment guru Andrew Tobias.
  • Instapundit on why a Biden victory wouldn’t return the country to “normal”—or even make Donald Trump go away:

    Trump was big on the national stage long before he was president. Why would he go away after the election is over? He’ll still have tens of millions of (probably angry) followers, deep pockets and a huge megaphone.

    There has already been some talk of Trump starting his own television network to rival Fox News, and/or his own social media platform — the latter made more plausible by the heavy censorious hands of those running Twitter and Facebook — and I suspect that Trump would regard a 2020 loss as a setback, not a defeat. Grover Cleveland came back to win a second term after losing the White House, Trump might reason. Why not me? He’ll probably hold campaign-style rallies around the country starting right after the election.

    And the deep toxicity of national politics, which grew worse after the 2016 election but which has been brewing at least since the turn of the millennium, is not going to go away. In fact, a lot of what we’re hearing from Biden supporters suggests that it will get worse under a Biden administration.

    Democrats are already calling for a Biden administration to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices until Democrats have a majority, to pack the Senate by admitting Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states, and even to establish a “truth and reconciliation commission” in which Republicans will be dragged in front of the public and forced to confess the error of their ways. And, of course, abolishing the Electoral College. None of that is normal.

  • Man attends Trump rally, is shocked to find happy people:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Kylee Zempel tears apart John Piper’s bad Biden-backing theology:

    It is only “baffling” if one first reduces conservatives to pro-life freedom-lovers and then decides human life and freedom are dispensable. Freedom and life, however, are not abstract, and they are not simply a means to accomplish earthly goals or gain temporal wealth. Freedom and life are part of our Imago Dei. They are gifts from God that we are to steward, and we use them in myriad ways to advance God’s kingdom.

    So is it “baffling” that a Christian would think God-given sex distinctions are important? Is it baffling that a believer would want to protect his family against the racially charged attacks of a violent mob? Is it baffling that a Christian would desire that his children learn truth, rather than government-sanctioned doctrine — not walking in the counsel of the ungodly? It is baffling that a Christian would desire for men to keep the hard-earned fruits of their labor, giving charitably to the poor and needy? Is it baffling that a believer would value the biblical family structure over the state? Of course, it’s not.

    Furthermore, if Piper believes this immoral gangrene that spreads throughout our country is a result of one unregenerate man instead of the result of the wickedness in the hearts of every sinful citizen, he is a fool.

    (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)

  • Maybe an extended election won’t blow up the country. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • Trump can still win even if the polls are right.

    (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)

  • Biden goes full tranny pander, demanding religions bow to to Democratic Party’s transgender mandates. “Religion should not be used as a license to discriminate.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden tells the blatant lie that Trump wants to send Cuban-Americans back to Cuba.
  • “The Kamala Harris Nervous Laugh is What Gamblers Call a ‘Tell’:

    Kamala Harris has a habit of launching into peals of laughter when she is asked questions, even serious ones. It’s likely a nervous tic, and it’s possible that she doesn’t even realize that she does it.

    In the world of gambling, this is called a tell. An unconscious and often uncontrollable behavior that serves as a clue to others that a player is bluffing or lying.

    Harris was interviewed on 60 Minutes this weekend, and when she was asked if her view on certain issues was progressive or socialist, she launched into a laugh.

  • Can Trump pull off an upset in Minnesota?

    In 2016, Trump lost Minnesota by about 45,000 votes. This year, he is clearly making an attempt to close the gap there and pull off a win that would sting Democrats for years to come.

    The left didn’t do itself any favors by burning down Minneapolis this summer, and Trump was also helped by gaining the endorsements of multiple mayors in the state’s ‘Iron Range’ region

    Snip.

    Trump’s campaign has booked more than $1.2 million in TV advertising in Minnesota in the final week of the campaign—more than it spent there in the preceding three weeks combined, according to Advertising Analytics, which tracks campaigns’ ad spending. Vice President Mike Pence held a rally in northern Minnesota on Monday, the latest in a series of visits to the state by Trump and top surrogates. Overall, the Trump campaign has deployed 60 staffers in Minnesota, a level of Republican intensity surpassing that of any race in memory, both parties say.

  • Speaking of which, I think I missed this earlier: “Trump Lands Major Endorsements From Democrat Mayors in Minnesota.”

    “Like many in our region, we have voted for Democrats over many decades. We have watched as our constituents’ jobs left not only the Iron Range, but our country. By putting tariffs on our products and supporting bad trade deals, politicians like Joe Biden did nothing to help the working class. We lost thousands of jobs, and generations of young people have left the Iron Range in order to provide for their families with good-paying jobs elsewhere. Today, we don’t recognize the Democratic Party. It has been moved so far to the left it can no longer claim to be advocates of the working class. The hard-working Minnesotans that built their lives and supported their families here on the Range have been abandoned by radical Democrats. We didn’t choose to leave the Democratic Party, the party left us,” the letter, signed by Virginia Mayor Larry Cuffe, Chisholm Mayor John Champa, Ely Mayor Chuck Novak, Two Harbors Mayor Chris Swanson, Eveleth Mayor Robert Vlaisavljevich and Babbitt Mayor Andrea Zupancich, states.

    

  • Facebook Removes Black Man’s Anti-Biden Ad. Sorry, comrade, you’re not allowed to express opinions contrary to the wishes of the Party… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • More gun-grabbing stupidity:

  • Slow Joe is getting worse:

  • Yep:

  • Boy, Biden and Harris both hate tax cuts:

  • “Ex-husband of Joe Biden’s wife claim two had an affair that split marriage.” He claims both worked on Joe Biden’s campaign in 1972. Really, would it shock anyone to find yet another chapter of Joe Biden’s autobiography was fiction?
  • Black women aren’t sold on Kamala Harris:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Biden supporters can’t even outnumber Trump supporters within 10 feet of their own bus:

  • “Chelsea Handler Patrols Polling Places To Make Sure No Black People Are Voting For Trump.”
  • Democrats Hand Out Extra Ballots To Trick-Or-Treaters.”
  • “Biden Calls A Lid Until Election Day.”
  • Heh:

  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    BidenWatch for July 6, 2020

    Monday, July 6th, 2020

    Biden wants to raid your wallet and destroy your suburbs. And the many, many, many oversea trips of Hunter. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Biden wants $4 trillion in tax increases.

    Biden’s tax increases would raise taxes on middle-class families by over $2,000 a year, with a $1,300 annual tax increase on a median-income, single parent with one child. Repealing Trump’s tax reform would cut in half the child tax credit and standard deduction, which currently help lower-income families the most.

    There’s more: Biden proposes to reinstate the ObamaCare individual mandate tax, which hits lower-income and middle-class households the hardest, with an estimated bill of $695 to $2,085 per family. Most households paying that tax made less than $50,000 a year. Remember, Trump’s 2017 tax reform zeroed out that ObamaCare tax, to help working people.

  • He also wants to abolish the suburbs:

    Biden and his party have embraced yet another dream of the radical Left: a federal takeover, transformation, and de facto urbanization of America’s suburbs. What’s more, Biden just might be able to pull off this “fundamental transformation.”

    The suburbs are the swing constituency in our national elections. If suburban voters knew what the Democrats had in store for them, they’d run screaming in the other direction. Unfortunately, Republicans have been too clueless or timid to make an issue of the Democrats’ anti-suburban plans. It’s time to tell voters the truth.

    I’ve been studying Joe Biden’s housing plans, and what I’ve seen is both surprising and frightening. I expected that a President Biden would enforce the Obama administration’s radical AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) regulation to the hilt. That is exactly what Biden promises to do. By itself, that would be more than enough to end America’s suburbs as we’ve known them, as I’ve explained repeatedly here at NRO.

    What surprises me is that Biden has actually promised to go much further than AFFH. Biden has embraced Cory Booker’s strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call “little downtowns” in the suburbs. Combine the Obama-Biden administration’s radical AFFH regulation with Booker’s new strategy, and I don’t see how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves. It will mean the end of local control, the end of a style of living that many people prefer to the city, and therefore the end of meaningful choice in how Americans can live. Shouldn’t voters know that this is what’s at stake in the election?

    It is no exaggeration to say that progressive urbanists have long dreamed of abolishing the suburbs. (In fact, I’ve explained it all in a book.) Initially, these anti-suburban radicals wanted large cities to simply annex their surrounding suburbs, like cities did in the 19th century. That way a big city could fatten up its tax base. Once progressives discovered it had since become illegal for a city to annex its surrounding suburbs without voter consent, they cooked up a strategy that would amount to the same thing.

    This de facto annexation strategy had three parts: (1) use a kind of quota system to force “economic integration” on the suburbs, pushing urban residents outside of the city; (2) close down suburban growth by regulating development, restricting automobile use, and limiting highway growth and repair, thus forcing would-be suburbanites back to the city; (3) use state and federal laws to force suburbs to redistribute tax revenue to poorer cities in their greater metropolitan region. If you force urbanites into suburbs, force suburbanites back into cities, and redistribute suburban tax revenue, then presto! You have effectively abolished the suburbs.

    Obama’s radical AFFH regulation puts every part of progressives’ “abolish the suburbs” strategy into effect (as I explain in detail here). Once Biden starts to enforce AFFH the way Obama’s administration originally meant it to work, it will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround. They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing. The latter, of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.

    That’s all bad enough. But on top of AFFH, Biden now plans to use Cory Booker’s strategy for attacking suburban zoning. AFFH works by holding HUD’s Community Development Block Grants hostage to federal-planning demands. Suburbs won’t be able to get the millions of dollars they’re used to in HUD grants unless they eliminate single-family zoning and densify their business districts. AFFH also forces HUD-grant recipients to sign pledges to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Those pledges could get suburbs sued by civil-rights groups, or by the feds, if they don’t get rid of single-family zoning. The only defense suburbs have against this two-pronged attack is to refuse HUD grants. True, that will effectively redistribute huge amounts of suburban money to cities, but if they give up their HUD grants at least the suburbs will be free of federal control.

    The Booker approach — now endorsed by Biden — may block even this way out. Booker wants to hold suburban zoning hostage not only to HUD grants, but to the federal transportation grants used by states to build and repair highways. It may be next to impossible for suburbs to opt out of those state-run highway repairs. Otherwise, suburban roads will deteriorate and suburban access to major arteries will be blocked. AFFH plus the Booker plan will leave America’s suburbs with no alternative but to eliminate their single-family zoning and turn over their planning to the feds. Slowly but surely, suburbs will become helpless satellites of the cities they surround, exactly as progressive urbanists intend.

  • Don’t believe the BS about Biden’s inevitable triumph:

    Several things give me pause in the Biden Triumphant narrative. First, as we saw in 2016, Trump tends to run ahead of his polls. The Trump vote totals in the uncontested Republican primaries show a lot of enthusiasm—more than for Joe Biden, who doesn’t excite anyone. Aside from the usual problems and biases of polling these days, I think the number of “shy Trump” voters may have soared over the last month because of the riots. Back in 2016, the clever pollsters who got closer to the correct result did so by asking voters who they were voting for, and for Hillary responses, followed up with, “Who do you think your neighbor is voting for?” For the Hillary respondents who answered “Trump,” some pollsters correctly surmised (and adjusted their models accordingly) to count some of these supposed Hillary voters as Trump voters.

    Second, I also keep thinking of the last national election in Australia, where every poll for the previous 18 months had the Labour Party beating the [conservative] Liberal Party, and yet the Liberal Party prevailed in the vote, largely because the Labour Party campaigned on a hard-left platform. (I know, that could never happen with our good ol’ “centrist” Joe Biden! /sarc). Ditto the last general election in Britain, where the Conservative Party was favored, but ended up running way ahead of its polls in the biggest rout of the Labour Party in 80 years. The point is, leftist parties continue to be in retreat in most western democracies; why should our Democratic Party buck this trend?

    Third, there is one very significant cross-tab in the current polls. While Biden leads Trump in nearly every specific issue area, the one area where Trump is judged ahead of Biden is the economy, which may turn out to be the most important issue in the fall. Voters understand that our current economic crisis is not Trump or the government’s fault. It is hard to say right now whether the economy will be rising in the fall, or whether it relapses if a second wave of COVID-19 strangles the recovery. Either way Trump has a strong argument: does anyone think Biden’s proposed massive tax increases are a good idea for a struggling economy? Advantage Trump.

    Plus a mention of the Bush-Dukakis race, also covered in the link below.

  • The ephemeral nature of a lead in the polls:

    There are still four months before the election — and any number of ways for Biden to blow it.

    Even the best campaigns “can get f—– up,” said Kelly Dietrich, founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, which trains candidates across the country. “There are a million ways to lose.”

    Dietrich, like even the most circumspect observers of the 2020 campaign, does not predict that Biden will fall apart. But Democrats carry checklists in their minds of the universe of things that could alter the course of the campaign.

    Biden might say the wrong thing at a debate, or have an awkward moment in an interview or at a news conference. Trump’s massive advertising campaign might begin to resonate, hurting Biden’s favorability ratings. Biden’s campaign might make poor decisions about spending allocations in the battleground states, or the coverage of his campaign may sour if he loses even a percentage point or two in polls. Presidential candidates with large leads have all suffered from less.

    And then there are the factors outside Biden’s control. It is possible that Trump before November will announce a coronavirus vaccine, whether real or imagined. And it is possible that the economy will improve, a prospect Republicans are pinning their hopes on.

    So much has changed over such a short period of time — so far, much of it to Biden’s advantage — that it’s impossible to rule out any kind of black swan political event.

    Late this week, Les Francis, a Democratic strategist and former deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration, sent an email to a circle of friends, including a former congressman and former administration officials, with the subject line, “123 days until the election — and a sobering prospect.”

    Right now, he said, “Trump is more than vulnerable.” But then he went on to outline a scenario in which Republicans hold down turnout and sufficiently harden Trump’s base.

    “Think it can’t work?” Francis concluded. “Think again.”

    Biden’s polling lead over Trump is significant, but not unprecedented. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Biden running ahead of Trump by just less than 9 percentage points.

    Richard Nixon maintained double-digit leads over Hubert Humphrey throughout the summer of 1968, then was forced to scramble in the fall as Humphrey surged. Twenty years later, after that year’s Democratic National Convention, a Gallup Poll put Michael Dukakis’ lead over George H.W. Bush at 17 percentage points. As they do today, voters that summer appeared eager for change — before abandoning Dukakis and voting for Bush.

    “Sometimes things can look very, very comfortable and it changes, it can change very, very quickly,” said Ken Khachigian, a former aide to Nixon and chief speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. “The psyche of the American voter can be affected by events very dramatically between Labor Day and Election Day.”

  • Why Biden’s lead will evaporate. Namely because his black female veep choices all suck, and there’s no way Democrats will let him step on a debate stage. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “Stoke chaos, obstruct economic recovery, and hide Biden in the basement till Election Day.”

    Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity.

    I say “pretext” without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews, speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office.

    But there were always problems with placing Biden in suspended animation in his basement, even as he seemingly surged ahead of Trump in the early-summer polls.

    One, seclusion, quiet, and the absence of intellectual stimuli often only enhance dementia, while travel, conversation, and new imagery and experiences tend to unclog for a bit the congested neuron pathways. The more Biden “rests up,” the more he seems to be non compos mentis in his rare staged interviews. His brain is like a flabby muscle, and restful disuse does not make it firmer.

    Two, in theory there should be a shelf life to a virtual presidential candidate. True, Biden has climbed in the polls, as the public never sees or hears him — in the manner that an unpopular lame-duck Obama disappeared to the golf courses and retreats in 2016 and yielded the media spotlight to the dog and cat fighting between Trump and Clinton. Obama then discovered that the more he retreated from the public eye, the more the public liked the old idea, rather than the current reality, of him.

    Snip.

    But by avoiding the campaign trail, Biden is only postponing the inevitable. He is compressing the campaign into an ever-shorter late-summer and autumn cycle. If he really agrees to three debates (he may not agree to any at all), and if he performs as he usually now acts and speaks, then he may end up reminding the American people in the eleventh hour of the campaign that they have a choice between a controversial president and a presidential candidate who simply cannot fulfill the office of presidency. And if Biden is a no-show, Trump will probably debate an empty, Clint Eastwood–prop mute chair.

    Read the whole thing.

  • “Biden says he’s eager to compare ‘cognitive ability’ against Trump’s.”

  • Joe don’t know much about history:

    Joe Biden has once again demonstrated he knows little about U.S. history and the Second Amendment thanks to a recent sit down with Wired in which he was asked about his support for gun control.

    Biden responded by launching into a rambling tirade directed at AR-15s, which he says “should be outlawed.” After all, he continued, “From the very beginning you weren’t allowed to have certain weapons. You weren’t allowed to own a cannon during the Revolutionary War as an individual.”

    Oh, Joe, you silly, silly man. During the Revolutionary War, not only could individuals own cannons, they could own an entire ship equipped with them. Privateering was an important part of the war effort, especially since the new United States had virtually no real navy of its own.

    Snip.

    Of course semi-automatic AR-15s aren’t weapons of war, but they’re quite popular among civilians. In fact, they’re the most commonly sold rifle in the country today. When Biden talks about outlawing the possession of these rifles, he’s talking about turning tens of millions of Americans into criminals for simply maintaining possession of the guns they already own. Biden’s grasp on American history may be tenuous, but his commitment to criminalizing the exercise of a constitutionally-protected right is firm.

  • “‘President Biden’ Would Be Music to Russian and Taliban Ears.”
  • Biden is not on board with the statue demolition rampage, at least as far as Christopher Columbus, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are concerned. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Biden names his Florida campaign team:

    The former vice president is sticking with Jackie Lee as his Florida state director after Lee led Biden’s Florida campaign ahead of the March 17 Democratic primary, when he trounced rival Bernie Sanders.

    For its coordinated director — a position responsible for syncing operations with the Democratic National Committee and the Florida Democratic Party — the Biden campaign has hired Brandon Thompson. He most recently worked as campaign director for Organizing Together 2020 Florida, a political group focused on building campaign infrastructure early for the eventual Democratic nominee.

    Thompson previously served as director of national campaigns for California Senator and potential Biden running mate Kamala Harris.
    Biden’s campaign is also tapping two Florida strategists who have been involved in efforts to build back the Democratic Party’s registered voter advantage over Republicans in the state: Florida Democratic Party Executive Director Juan Peñalosa and former Organizing Together 2020 Florida political director Karen Andre.

  • Obama: “Nice country you’ve got here. Too bad all these riots are ruining it. Say, why don’t you hire this Joe Biden guy, if you know what’s good for you? Bet they’ll stop then.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The press is tossing Biden softballs like a grandmother to her four-year-old niece. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • One reason the media is hyping the Wuhan Coronavirus so hard is a desperate attempt to keep Biden off the debate stage.

    ♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot easily achieve ‘mail-in’ voting; which they desperately need in key battleground states in order to control the outcome.

    ♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot shut down rallies and political campaigning efforts of President Trump; which they desperate need to do in key battleground states.

    ♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot block the campaign contrast between an energetic President Trump and a physically tenuous, mentally compromised, challenger.

    ♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats do not have an excuse for cancelling the DNC convention in Milwaukee; thereby blocking Team Bernie Sanders from visible opposition while protecting candidate gibberish from himself.

    ♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats do not have a mechanism to keep voters isolated from each-other; limiting communication and national debate adverse to their interests. COVID-19 panic pushes the national conversation into the digital space where Big Tech controls every element of the conversation.

    ♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot keep their Blue state economies easily shut-down and continue to block U.S. economic growth. All thriving economies are against the political interests of Democrats.

    ♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot easily keep club candidate Joe Biden sealed in the basement; where the electorate is not exposed to visible signs of his dementia.

    ♦ Without COVID-19 panic it becomes more difficult for Big Tech to censor voices that would outline the fraud and scheme. With COVID-19 panic they have a better method and an excuse.

    ♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot advance, influence, or organize their preferred presidential debate format, a ‘virtual presidential debate’ series.

  • “Biden Trots Out Small Business Owner Who Got Thousands in Gov’t Assistance to Argue Trump Isn’t Helping Small Business.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Judicial Watch Obtains Secret Service Records Showing Hunter Biden Took 411 Flights, Visited 29 Countries.”
    • Ethiopia and India on June 14-22, 2009
    • Argentina on September 14-17, 2009
    • France and Spain on November 9-13, 2009
    • Canada on February 12-15, 2010
    • Dominican Republic on February 18-22, 2010
    • Puerto Rico on March 20-27, 2010
    • China on April 6-9, 2010
    • Belgium, Spain, and the United Kingdom on May 5-8, 2010
    • UK, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Ascension Island, U.S. Virgin Islands on June 6-13, 2010
    • Denmark and South Africa on August 9-24, 2010
    • Hong Kong, Taiwan and China on April 16-22, 2011
    • Mexico on May 15-17, 2011
    • Colombia, France, United Arab Emirates and France again on November 1-11, 2011
    • UK and Russia on February 15-18, 2012
    • Germany, France and UK on February 1-5, 2013
    • UK and Ireland on March 20-22, 2013
    • China on June 13-15, 2013
    • Switzerland and Italy on July 26-August 7, 2013
    • Japan, China, South Korea and the Philippines on December 2-9, 2013
    • China and Qatar on May 7-14, 2014

    Sure visited China a lot, didn’t he?

  • The Wikipedia edit war over potential Veep pick Kamala Harris’ entry:

    In 2016, The Atlantic published an article about Wikipedia edits and how a burst of activity could foreshadow Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick, noting that Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s page had seen significantly more edits than any other candidate’s in the weeks leading up to the announcement. The article also cited a 2008 Washington Post report about Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page seeing more than 65 edits in the hours leading up to John McCain’s announcement.

    Last month, a Reddit user remembered this Atlantic piece and wrote a Jupyter script to see which 2020 vice presidential contender had the most edits in a span of three weeks: Harris had 408, Stacey Abrams had 66, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had 22, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had four. Another Redditor pointed out that a majority of Harris’s edits were coming from a single person.

    Harris has been working to distance herself on the national stage from her prosecutorial record in California, which has increasingly become a political liability, while taking a lead on Democratic police reform legislation after the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. During the 2020 primary, she branded herself as a “progressive prosecutor” and shifted left on issues like health care and climate change. But the most drastic gap is between her current messaging on crime and her past.

    A section in her bio that detailed her decision not to prosecute Mnuchin for financial fraud, despite recommendations from her staff attorneys, has also been deleted:

    In 2013, Harris did not prosecute Steve Mnuchin‘s bank OneWest despite evidence “suggestive of widespread misconduct” according to a leaked memo….In 2017, she said that her office’s decision not to prosecute Mnuchin was based on “following the facts and the evidence…like any other case”. In 2016, Mnuchin donated $2,000 to her campaign, making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin, but as senator, she voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury.

    A section on an Ethics Commission finding Harris guilty of a campaign spending violation during her San Francisco district attorney race has also been deleted. A line about Harris traveling to Israel and the West Bank in November 2017, where she met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was removed altogether.

    The Wikipedia user, who goes by the username “Bnguyen1114,” has made hundreds of edits to Harris’s page throughout the last several months, often getting into fights over the proposed edits with other Wikipedia editors, who pointed out that the language was getting pulled directly from press releases and campaign literature. “You seem to have gone through a database of press releases from Harris’s office, cataloging every single one and adding it to the article,” one Wikipedia editor said. “That is not how we write encyclopedic articles.”

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Potential Veep Tammy Duckworth is fine with removing statues of George Washington.
  • Susan Rice is also pimping herself hard for Veep. Why the Iran deal and allowing the rise of the Islamic State would be seen as positive job qualifications by the American people eludes me.
  • Boom!

  • Back in 1975, Joe Biden embraced segregation. (Hat tip: Mark Levin.)
  • “Biden Proves Healthy Cognition By Flawlessly Reciting All The Sounds Animals Can Make.”
  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 23, 2020: And Then There Were Two

    Monday, March 23rd, 2020

    Biden wins again, Gabbard drops out, Slow Joe makes himself scarce, and everybody hunkers down due to The Current Unpleasantness. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    By now the clown car has shrunk so far that all the occupants could fit in a Smart Car. (Note: That reflects the name brand of the car, not the mental acuity of the occupants.)

    In theory, there’s nothing insurmountable about Biden’s 300+ delegate lead. In reality, it would take something extremely drastic (like Biden keeling over or wandering naked in front of a camera) to change the dynamics of the race. 538 gives Biden a 98% chance of winning the nomination. On the other hand, everyone thought they knew how the 2016 election would turn out as well…

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Joe Biden 1,193
    2. Bernie Sanders 888
    3. Elizabeth Warren 82
    4. Michael Bloomberg 58*
    5. Pete Buttigieg 26
    6. Amy Klobuchar 7
    7. Tulsi Gabbard 2

    *Three less than last week. Some settling may occur…

    Polls
    Once again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, so not much point in listing them here.

  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets.
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Biden wins Florida, Illinois and Arizona, padding his delegate count over Sanders.
  • “If elections can be bought so easily, why did Bloomberg and Steyer flop?”

    The political world is practically giddy at the failed campaigns of Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. The Democratic primary’s billionaire candidates rediscovered an age-old truth: money can’t buy love.

    It couldn’t buy love for Hillary Clinton, who nearly doubled Donald Trump’s spending in 2016 and had three times as many positive ads. Or for Jeb Bush’s wealthy backers in the Republican primary preceding that race. Or for self-funders from years past like Meg Whitman, Linda McMahon, and Steve Forbes. Money can help a campaign’s message get heard, but it doesn’t mean that listeners will like what they hear. Yet fears of campaign spending “buying” elections continue to drive our campaign-finance laws. The result is bad law and poor policy.

    Last year, the House passed H.R. 1, a sweeping rewrite of campaign-finance and election laws. The bill would have imposed a variety of new restrictions on paid political speech. Its authors asserted that current law lets wealthy individuals and special interests “dominate election spending, corrupt our politics, and degrade our democracy through tidal waves of unlimited and anonymous spending.”

    But as Bloomberg and Steyer found out, voters easily reject messages and campaigns with which they disagree. Congress shouldn’t assume that voters just buy whatever is advertised. They don’t.

  • How much money did Bloomberg waste on his presidential run? Would you believe…

    …yep, one BILLION dollars!

  • Hey, remember how Elizabeth Warren ranted about dark money and swore up and down she was different? Yeah, about that:

  • Indiana moves its primary out to June 2nd due to the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic.
  • Hill pundit pushes Klobuchar as veep pick.
  • Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. With Biden’s rise, the establishment comes out of hiding:

    As funny as it may be on the surface, there is something dark and sad about Biden’s rise. The Democratic Party establishment knows Biden is unfit for office. They don’t care. With Biden, the political machinery that usually operates in hiding, in the shadows, has come out into the light, in aviator sunglasses and a sunny grin. The powers-that-be are declaring, openly, that their right to rule will not be reined in by anything, least of all the perception that they are incompetent and out of touch.

    Thanks to decades of failed and corrupt leadership, many Americans are developing a creeping and cynical feeling that they don’t have a voice, that voting is like choosing from a carefully crafted menu of options with the same mediocre results. President Biden would prove them right. He would eliminate the mystique that once allowed them to believe our political system is one worth respecting and complete the decline into decadence that characterizes American managerial democracy, which is now at such a late stage of decay it no longer matters if a presidential nominee can tell his wife and sister apart.

    Biden’s comeback proves that many things which people thought mattered in the great American clown show of presidential politics actually don’t.

    The standards are through the floor: Biden has no policies, no core philosophy, and no special qualities to recommend him other than a perception of “electability” that is driven almost entirely by a sycophantic news media.

    A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to remove Trump from office, not to elect Joe Biden. He would be the first president who upon election everyone, most of all his supporters, knows would not be calling the actual shots.

    Sanders supporters have now learned a harsh lesson: power, not ideology, is what matters most.

    With the win all but in the bag, Biden’s team doesn’t want to screw things up by letting him be visible to potential voters. “Three reasons Joe Biden will never be president.” Too long a tenure in the Senate (he spent 36 years there, and no one who served as long as 15 years there ever became President), the difficulty in moving from Vice President to President, and the 14 year rule. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Biden tries to become the Social Justice Warrior pandering grand champion by saying he’ll only consider black females for the Supreme Court. He was endorsed by “the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which represents 1.3 million workers in the health care, grocery, retail and other industries.” Everytown for Gun Safety, the latest head of the Brady Bunch Astroturf hydra bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg, endorsed Biden.

    This just in: Grandpa Simpson ain’t popular with the youn’uns. Biden plans to start vetting his affirmative action veep pick in the next few weeks. Incumbent Michigan governor Grethen Whitmer says it’s not going to be her. (A previous Michicgan governor, Jennifer Granholm, is constitutionally ineligable, being born in Canada to Canadian parents.) “Hunter Biden Trips Cost Taxpayers Nearly $200,000.”

  • Update: Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: Dropped Out. She dropped out March 19 and endorsed Biden. Postmortem from 538:

    Gabbard entered the race in January 2019 with an intriguing profile: a woman of color, a military veteran, a millennial who advocated for new voices within the Democratic Party (despite a congressional voting record that skewed more moderate than the rest of the party, she resigned as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders).

    But it was hard for Gabbard to make inroads with Democratic voters — the more Democrats got to know her over the course of the campaign, the less they liked her. This was probably compounded by the fact that perhaps the most attention Gabbard received all cycle long was when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested Republicans were “grooming” her to be a third-party spoiler and when Gabbard was one of only three Democrats who did not vote in favor of impeaching President Trump.

    There were many other long-shot candidates in 2020, but what set Gabbard apart was how long she stayed in the race despite not winning more than 4 percent of the vote in any contest except tiny American Samoa (where she was born). Other candidates stuck in the 1 to 2 percent range in national polls dropped out once voting began, if not before. She even gave up a safe House seat to stay in the presidential race, announcing in October that she would not run for reelection even though Hawaii is one of the few states that allows candidates to run for Congress and president at the same time. Even by March, after candidates like former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who were polling above 10 percent nationally, were dropping out of the race, Gabbard pushed on.

    By then, Gabbard’s campaign looked more like a protest campaign than one with any intention of winning. She did not contest multiple key states on the primary calendar, including Iowa, where she did not hold a public event after Oct. 24, 2019. In early March, she told ABC News she was staying in the race in order to speak to Americans “about the sea change we need in our foreign policy” and promote her pet issue of ending military intervention abroad. It was beginning to look like Gabbard would take her campaign almost all the way to the convention, following in the footsteps of past presidential candidates who were misfits in their own party, like former Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. But money may have been an issue for Gabbard; in January, she raised only $1.1 million but spent $1.8 million, an obviously unsustainable rate.

    Upon dropping out of the race, Gabbard also endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden, despite the fact that her 2016 pick, Sanders, is still in the race, albeit a heavy underdog. It was an interesting olive branch to the establishment wing of the party with which Gabbard has openly feuded so much in the past. It would also seem to foreclose the possibility that Gabbard will run as a third-party candidate in the general election.

    Farewell to the last Democratic candidate in the race born after World War II…

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Bernie’s Whole Campaign Was Based On a Misreading of the 2016 Election“:

    Four years ago, Bernie Sanders put up a surprisingly strong fight against Hillary Clinton on the strength of his support among white working-class voters, who proceeded to desert Clinton in November. On the basis of those two elections, the left quickly formed a series of conclusions. The working class had become alienated by neoliberal economics and was searching for radical alternatives. Because the Democrats had failed to offer the kind of progressive radical alternative Sanders stood for, voters instead opted for Trump’s reactionary attack on globalism. In order to win them back and defeat Trump, Democrats needed to reorganize themselves as a radical populist party.

    On the left, this explanation was accepted so widely it became foundational, a premise progressives would work forward from without questioning its veracity. The Sanders campaign argued that its connection to the white working class would enable Bernie to compete in areas that had abandoned Democrats years ago. “Some in the Sanders camp envision possibly making a play for Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana, as well as states such as Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Montana,” reported Politicoone year ago. Every left-wing indictment of the Democratic mainstream was made in explicit or implicit contrast to this imagined counterfactual of a Sanders-led party riding triumphant through the heartland of red America.

    Snip.

    The second Sanders campaign has shown conclusively how badly the left misunderstood the electorate. It is not just that Sanders has failed to inspire anything like the upsurge in youth turnout he promised, or that he has failed to make meaningful headway with black voters. White working-class and rural voters have swung heavily against him. In Missouri and Michigan, those voters turned states he closely contested four years ago into routs for his opponent. Some rural counties have swung 30 points from Sanders 2016 to Biden 2020. The candidate in the race who has forged a transracial working-class coalition is, in fact, Joe Biden.

    The factor that actually explains 2016, as some of us chagrined liberals insisted at the time, was Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic personal unpopularity. It turned out large portions of the public, even of the Democratic electorate, simply detested her.

    True, but not the entire truth. More and more of the electorate loathes Democratic policies as well, no matter how many carefully-worded, crosstab-slanted, cherry-picked polls say otherwise. And they hate the naked disdain the SJW-infected leftwing elites display when it comes to ordinary Americans. But this final quote rings true: “Sanders has inspired a sizable faction of one party. But his vision of mobilizing a hidden national majority is, and always was, a fantasy.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, a couple of whose commenters make some cognizant points: First: “The ‘chagrined liberals’ were unable to point out Hillary’s unpopularity because the woke feminists saw Hillary as their champion to ‘break the glass ceiling’ allegedly preventing a female President. Anyone like Jonathan Chait who might express misgivings about Hillary’s electability was promptly dismissed as ‘a cis white man’ who had no right to express his opinion on the issue.” Second: “There is another explanation, that Trump has basically dominated the populist lane by delivering on much of the agenda he had that overlapped with Bernie, you know, the popular and effective part of it. But that would require giving Trump some credit, so it won’t receive much consideration.”) The New York Times already has a prebituary piece on his campaign, the sort where insiders leak self-flattering “if only he had listened to my advice” tidbits while preparing to swim away from the wreckage:

    In mid-January, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pollster offered a stark prognosis for the campaign: Mr. Sanders was on track to finish strong in the first three nominating states, but Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s powerful support from older African-Americans could make him a resilient foe in South Carolina and beyond.

    The pollster, Ben Tulchin, in a meeting with campaign aides, recommended a new offensive to influence older black voters, according to three people briefed on his presentation. The data showed two clear vulnerabilities for Mr. Biden: his past support for overhauling Social Security, and his authorship of a punitive criminal justice law in the 1990s.

    And there’s your primary leaker/spinner.

    But the suggestion met with resistance. Some senior advisers argued that it wasn’t worth diverting resources from Iowa and New Hampshire, people familiar with the campaign’s deliberations said. Others pressed Mr. Tulchin on what kind of message, exactly, would make voters rethink their support for the most loyal ally of the first black president.

    And there’s your “But good old Bernie was just too high-minded!” positive spin.

    Crucially, both Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, consistently expressed reservations about going negative on Mr. Biden, preferring to stick with the left-wing policy message they have been pressing for 40 years.

    The warnings about Mr. Biden proved prescient: Two months later, Mr. Sanders is now all but vanquished in the Democratic presidential race, after Mr. Biden resurrected his campaign in South Carolina and built an overwhelming coalition of black voters and white moderates on Super Tuesday.

    While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination. His efforts to regain traction have faltered in recent weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has frozen the campaign, and perhaps heightened the appeal of Mr. Biden’s safe-and-steady image.

    In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events — most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign.

    Any excuse will do, as long as it’s not “socialist ideas are unpopular even with most Democrats.” Sanders has entered the dreaded “considering many options” phase of his campaign. 538 wonders what concessions Sanders can wring from the Biden campaign. I have a pretty good idea:

    Sanders Raised $2 million for “coronavirus relief”. But look closer: “The money raised will go to No Kid Hungry, One Fair Wage Emergency Fund, Meals on Wheels, Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.” With the possible exception of Meals on Wheel, it looks like all those are adjuncts to lefty organizing causes.

    Bulwerker hyperventilates that Bernie continuing his campaign is a threat to the Republic. Because mere voters must of necessity bow to the DNC’s candidate preferences. As if playing footsie with Castro wasn’t enough, Sanders has now been endorsed by history’s greatest monster. You know that “focusing on the crisis” he talked about?

    Heh:

  • 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 signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • 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)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 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.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
  • 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: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 2020)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    LinkSwarm for January 3, 2020

    Friday, January 3rd, 2020

    Start your new decade out with another LinkSwarm!

  • Iranian Revolutionary Guard Leader and Qods force commander Qasem Soleimani was killed in an airstrike in Baghdad.
  • Further thoughts from Graeme Wood:

    Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force who was killed in Iraq yesterday, was the most successful military figure of his time. One should grade success not in absolute terms, but by how much is done with how little—and on that scale, Soleimani was a prodigy. The end of his career is as pivotal in the region as the retirement of an athlete who has dominated his sport, or a musician whose sound, once unique, somehow has become imitated by every young crooner out there. One difference is that Bob Dylan is still touring and Michael Jordan has moved on to hawking sneakers and steaks. Soleimani has earned the only retirement befitting a man of his long and appalling record, which is to be vaporized in a U.S. air strike.

    Soleimani’s obituaries will note his involvement in numerous wars along Iran’s periphery (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen). But all these wars are in fact one war, the sole war he was fighting for his entire career, starting from his days as a young officer in the early 1980s fighting against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Consider Iran’s pathetic fortunes then: Its civilian population cowered in terror at Iraqi air raids; its military wasted itself in “human wave” attacks that generated “martyrs” at a startling pace. The territory Iran and Iraq traded, at immense cost, was minimal, and strategically worthless. Iran’s goal (and Soleimani’s) then would have been to avoid annihilation by Iraq—and then, only as a distant dream, to overrun its enemy and capture the Shiite holy places in Najaf, Karbala, Samarra, and Baghdad.

    Now the notion of Iranian control of these cities hardly beggars the strategic imagination. The Iran-Iraq War has lasted three decades longer than history supposed, and the machinations of Soleimani have been largely responsible for its outcome now looking favorable to Iran. (The other contribution to this outcome was the botched occupation of Iraq by the United States.) Because the Iraqi side of the war against the Islamic State was fought in part by Iranian-backed militias, Soleimani in 2015 could appear in the city of Tikrit while supervising a take-back operation. The power of that image to an Iranian audience that remembered the sorrows of the 1980s cannot be overstated—the most recognizable Iranian general striding confidently through Saddam’s hometown!

  • Reciprocity is the key to President Donald Trump:

    Reciprocity has been the key to understanding Donald Trump. Whether you are a media figure or a mullah, a prime minister or a pope, he will be good to you if you are good to him. Say something mean, though, or work against his interests, and he will respond in force. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be polite. There will be fallout. But you may think twice before crossing him again.

    That has been the case with Iran. President Trump has conditioned his policies on Iranian behavior. When Iran spread its malign influence, Trump acted to check it. When Iran struck, Trump hit back: never disproportionately, never definitively. He left open the possibility of negotiations. He doesn’t want to have the Greater Middle East—whether Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, or Afghanistan—dominate his presidency the way it dominated those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. America no longer needs Middle Eastern oil. Best keep the region on the back burner. Watch it so it doesn’t boil over. Do not overcommit resources to this underdeveloped, war-torn, sectarian land.

    The result was reciprocal antagonism. In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by his predecessor. He began jacking up sanctions. The Iranian economy turned to shambles. This “maximum pressure” campaign of economic warfare deprived the Iranian war machine of revenue and drove a wedge between the Iranian public and the Iranian government. Trump offered the opportunity to negotiate a new agreement. Iran refused.

    Mess with the bull and you get the horns. (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)

  • Remember the reckoning Donald Trump brought to our smug, out-of-touch elites in 2016? Victor Davis Hanson says that in 2020, he’s bringing it even harder:

    In my hometown near my central California farm, I spent autumn 2016 talking to mostly Mexican American friends with whom I went to grammar or high school. I had presumed then that they must hate Trump. Remember the speech in 2015 announcing he was going to stand, when he bashed illegal immigration, or his snide quip about the ‘Mexican judge’ in the Trump University lawsuit, or his expulsion of an interrupting Univision anchor, Jorge Ramos, from one of his campaign press conferences? But I heard no such thing. Most said they ‘liked’ Trump’s style, whether or not they were voting for him. They were tired of gangs in their neighborhoods and of swamped government services — especially the nearby Department of Motor Vehicles — becoming almost dysfunctional. I remember thinking that Trump of all people might get a third of the Latino vote: of no importance in blue California, but maybe transformative in Midwest swing states?

    During the last two weeks I made the same rounds — a high-school football game at my alma mater, talks with Mexican American professionals, some rural farm events. Were those impressions three years ago hallucinations? Hardly. Trump support has, if anything, increased — and not just because of record low unemployment and an economy that has turned even my once-ossified rural community into a bustle of shopping, office-construction and home-building, with ‘Now Hiring’ signs commonplace. This time I noticed that my same friends always mentioned Trump in contrast to their damnation of California — the nearby ‘stupid’ high-speed rail to nowhere, the staged power shutoffs, the drought-stricken dead trees left untouched in flammable forests, the tens of thousands of homeless even in San Jose, Fresno and Sacramento, the sky-high gas prices, the deadly decrepit roads, the latest illegal-alien felon shielded from ICE. Whatever Trump was, my friends saw him as the opposite of where California is now headed. His combativeness was again not a liability but a plus — especially when it was at the expense of snooty white liberals. ‘He drives them crazy,’ Steve, my friend from second grade, offered.

    One academic colleague used to caricature my observations in 2016 that Trump’s rallies were huge and rowdy, while Hillary’s seemed staged and somnolent — and that this disconnect might presage election-day turnouts. ‘Anecdotes!’ I was told. ‘Crowd size means as little as yard signs.’ If anything, Trump’s rallies now are larger, the lines longer. Maybe the successive progressive efforts to abort his presidency by means of the Electoral College, the emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller investigation and now Ukraine only made him stronger by virtue of not finishing him off.

    When I talked to a Central Valley Rotary Club in November 2016, I assumed on arrival that such doctrinaire Republicans would be establishment Never Trumpers. But few were then. When I returned this week to speak again, I found that none are now. These businesspeople, lawyers, accountants and educators talked of the money-making economy. But I sensed, as with my hometown friends, that same something else. There was an edge in their voices, an amplification of earlier fury at Hillary’s condescension and put-down of deplorables. ‘Anything he dishes out, they deserve,’ one man in a tailored suit remarked, channeling my grade-school friend Steve. I take it by that he meant he and his friends are frequently embarrassed by Trump’s crudity — but not nearly so much as they are enraged by the sanctimoniousness of an Adam Schiff or the smug ‘bombshell’ monotony of media anchors.

    It is easy to say that 2020 seems to be replaying 2016, complete with the identical insularity of progressives, as if what should never have happened then certainly cannot now. But this time around there is an even greater sense of anger and need for retribution especially among the most unlikely Trump supporters. It reflects a fed-up payback for three years of nonstop efforts to overthrow an elected president, anger at anti-Trump hysteria and weariness at being lectured. A year is a proverbial long time. The economy could tank. The president might find himself trading missiles with Iran. At 73, a sleep-deprived, hamburger-munching Trump might discover his legendary stamina finally giving out. Still, there is a growing wrath in the country, either ignored, suppressed or undetected by the partisan media. It is a desire for a reckoning with ‘them’. For lots of quiet, ordinary people, 2020 is shaping up as the get-even election — in ways that transcend even Trump himself.

    “Anything Trump dishes out, they deserve.” I should put that on a T-shirt. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • President Trump’s reelection committee goes in to 2020 with $200 million on hand, which is probably more than all of the remaining Democratic contenders combined. Ann Althouse: “The news this morning is making me think of 1984. Not the book. The election. Remember that? Biggest difference: The ex-Vice-President who got his party’s nomination to fend off the hated, show-biz, imposter President… was so fresh-faced!” Oh for the youthful excitement of a 56-year old Walter Mondale…
  • “The reality may be the very opposite of what Democrats planned. The more the Left tries to abort the Trump presidency before the election, the more it bleeds from each of its own inflicted nicks.”
  • What Boris Johnson’s win says about political realignment:

    The 2016 Brexit vote revealed that a large portion of the British population was unrepresented in Westminster party politics, and its aftermath exposed the fact that a large number of politicians would stop at nothing to keep that group unrepresented. To be sure, these MPs would not have put it in such words — they thought that attempting to stop Brexit for three years was acting in their constituents’ best interests. But constituents express their beliefs at the ballot box, and most of them simply did not think that their representatives knew what was best better than they did.

    There is plenty to criticize about Johnson and the government that he will now lead, but the same accusation cannot be leveled against them. Johnson ducks scrutiny, avoids substance, and can often seem entirely devoid of empathy. His campaign consisted of the three words “Get Brexit Done,” spun around like a broken play toy. But these words had more power than Labour’s message of social justice, just as the Brexit slogan “Take Back Control” held more sway than the countless predictions that Brexit would bring about economic doom in the run up to the referendum. Both phrases were fashioned by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s infamous chief adviser, and their success point to a very simple fact: Voters believe in democracy, and they do not take nicely to politicians who don’t. No handout can compensate for the snobbery of those offering it, because voters disdain moral superiority more than they appreciate moral purity.

    The roots of this tension go back decades, as successive British governments implemented EU treaties and constitutional reforms without democratic assent. In 1992, when the European Economic Community turned into the European Union, John Major’s government refused to offer the public a referendum on the issue. And in 1997, under Tony Blair, monetary policy was placed in the hands of the Bank of England. The same Blair government pushed for executive asymmetrical devolution in Scotland and Wales, without considering its extreme constitutional implications for England’s representation in Westminster. Then came the 2007 EU Lisbon Treaty, a major change to the U.K.’s constitution that Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided he could ratify without asking for voters’ consent. This move effectively rendered any future promise on migration numbers a lie, because the United Kingdom’s borders were made subservient to Eurozone economics. Voters are not stupid: They realize that an open-borders policy raises problems for the welfare state. Ignoring this fact only made room for extremism when the Eurozone’s economy eventually fell into crisis in 2008.

    These were the beginnings of a political realignment that has found its voice in liberal democracies across the continent and beyond — a realignment based on the divide between democratic politics and technocratic politics, in which liberals turn to the courts in order to entrench cultural values for which they cannot not secure democratic consent. The Blair years might have seen continuous government, but they also saw a significant drop in voter participation. Labour’s 2001 and 2005 electoral victories saw turnouts of 59.4 percent and 61.4 percent, respectively — some of the highest levels of voter apathy recorded since World War II. This was rule under the primacy of law and economics masked by the pretense of political consent and temporary economic stability. Divides between the electorate and their representatives on questions of immigration, foreign policy, and national identity were buried under a centrist carpet.

    Brexit brought the divide into the open, because it gave voters an opportunity to reject the new constitution of a United Kingdom that had been radically transformed since it joined the EU in 1973. An unprecedented number of people did exactly that, and it is no surprise that this vote then took on the political and cultural significance that it did. Politicians across the Commons agreed to let the voters decide, only to explain away the referendum’s result as an aberration of common sense. Such arrogance meant that Brexit became a symbol of the cultural divide between those who had political control and those whose wishes were considered problems to be solved.

    Any politician unwilling to reckon with the scale of the referendum was destined to shrivel into electoral insignificance. Corbyn had no easy way out, because Labour was effectively three different constituencies mashed uncomfortably into one party: middle-class Remainer liberals, woke millennial students, and socially conservative workers. These groups hold irreconcilable views on Brexit and stand in different places along the democratic–technocratic divide. It is a split similarly represented by their Westminster MPs, albeit in distinctly different ratios.

    When Corbyn tried to win over Brexit voters, he could not deny that he had allowed a majority of his MPs to prevent Brexit’s implementation. And when he tried to win over Remainers, he was forced to face the fact that he had never been a Remainer (not to mention the fact that his anti-Western brand of foreign policy is antithetical to many Remainers’ liberal internationalism). The only group that truly stuck by him were the students, and anyone who knows anything about democracy knows that students don’t win you elections.

  • President Donald Trump is at 50% approval rating in the latest Zogby poll. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Top DOE official arrested for trying to set up sex with underage boy.” That’s de Blasio’s NYC Department of Education Deputy Chief of Staff David Hay.
  • Sex offenders, MS-13 gang member nabbed near border checkpoints.” You know, the same border checkpoints Democrats want to do away with…
  • “African Americans Are Taking Back Jobs Stolen By Illegal Aliens.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Two dispatches from Adler’s Austin. First: “Man allegedly made bomb threat then stood in traffic and threw himself at car.”
  • Second: “Austin attacker sentenced to 200 days in jail released two weeks later.” That’s the Congress Avenue Bridge attack case. (Hat tip: Austin_Network.)
  • Bad cop sentenced.
  • “Black Israelites” attacking Jews in New York is deeply inconvenient:

    The Jersey City murders are the culmination of years of incitement against Jews. But the perpetrators in that case were themselves minorities from the African American community. The perpetrators have been identified as coming from an extremist religious group called Black Hebrew Israelites, making them a minority of a minority. The perpetrators are seen as a “militant” fringe within that minority.

    The authorities are now looking at the case as domestic terrorism fueled by antisemitism. However major media have endeavored to dismiss the murders as unimportant and unique. The New York Times described the Black Hebrew Israelites as being “known for their inflammatory sidewalk ministers who employ provocation as a form of gospel.” It’s a bit more than that. In fact, the group and the milieu around it tend to view religion through a racial lens, such that Jews are described as “white” and “fake” and the “real Jews” are portrayed as black, along with all the prophets and religious figures. The ADL pointed out that this group views itself as the real “chosen people” and that it sees people of color as the real descendants of the 12 tribes. The group was in the media earlier in the year in Washington DC when they shouted insults at Catholic high school students.

    Mainstream society wants to view this as “provocation,” because if they viewed it as a burgeoning racist violent movement targeting Jews then they would have to confront it and ask tough questions of why it is tolerated in a community. Expert J.J. McNab told the Associated Press that in fact this group takes pride in “confronting Jewish people everywhere and explaining that they are evil.”

    In American society there is generally only place for one kind of racism. There are far-right white supremacists and everyone else. This Manichean worldview of antisemitism and racism means we are only comfortable with one type of perpetrator. An angry white man. Those are the racists. Dylann Roof, the racist who murdered black people in a church in 2015 is the most normal kind of America racist. The El Paso shooter or the Tree of Life Synagogue attacker are also the kind of killers that fit into an easy narrative. But when the perpetrators stray from that we have a problem dealing with it. In New York City, according to a post by journalist Laura Adkins, data shows that of 69 anti-Jewish crimes in 2018, forty of the perpetrators were labelled “white” and 25 were labelled “black,” the others were categorized as Hispanic or Asian.

    To keep the focus on the white supremacists, headlines need to explain to us that “right wing terrorists” have killed more than Jihadists, as Slate.com said earlier this year. Other types of terrorism are watered down a bit. During the Obama administration Islamist-inspired terror was even rebranded as “violent extremism” so as not to mention the religion of the perpetrators. For some reason even though Islamist terror is also a far-right ideology, it is portrayed as something else. For instance, when Jews were targeted at a kosher supermarket in France they were called “random folk in a deli.” They weren’t random, they were targeted, like the Jews in Jersey City, but they needed to be random or we’d have to ask about the antisemitism that permeates Islamist terror.

    In the wake of all the attacks in New York against Jews, culminating in the shooting attack at the kosher market, it became difficult to ignore the rising tide. But there is discomfort in looking at the depth of the perpetrators. The comfort society has with expecting perpetrators to be “far-right” and “white” even led Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib to blame “white supremacy” for the Jersey City attack. Her tweet was deleted. When it wasn’t white supremacy and there was no one to condemn, it didn’t fit the narrative and was less important.

    Snip.

    How did we get here? The motivation behind the Jersey City attack is clear from social media posts one of the perpetrators made, according to a research by the ADL. This included claims that Jews are “Khazars,” and that “Brooklyn is full of Nazis-Ashkenazis,” and that the “police are in their [the Jews] hand now.” The worldview matches with the larger milieu in which Jews are portrayed as not merely “white Jews” but in fact as controlling the slave trade and police violence. In this new antisemitism Jews are reframed as both being “fake,” as in not really Jews from the Middle East, and also being “white” and running white supremacism. This replaces German Nazis with Jewish Nazis; it replaces white supremacists with a hidden hand of Jews controlling both the American far-right and also the police. Instead of pushing back against this there are attempts to excuse it or just remain quiet about it and hope this antisemitism goes away.

    Left out of this Jerusalem Post piece is the fact that blacks provide a disproportionate share of Democratic Party voters, while Jews are heavily over-represented among its big-money donor base. Pointing out that one part of the Democratic Party coalition routinely commits assault against the part actually paying the bills isn’t useful to the narrative…

  • Forced organ harvesting has happened in multiple places in the People’s Republic of China and on multiple occasions for a period of at least twenty years and continues to this day.”
  • “Major US Companies Breached, Robbed, and Spied on by Chinese Hackers.”
  • “Navy Saved Money with Touch-Screen Controls, Sailors Paid with Their Lives.”
  • Remember how people used to joke that we supported Israel, the only country in the Middle East that didn’t export oil? Well, guess what?
  • “Media Disappointed To Learn Armed Citizen Stopped Mass Shooting.”
  • Shoe company cheers gun control bill. Shoe company goes broke. (Hat tip: Stehen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of idiots cheering gun control: “Tom Nichols is an insufferable elitist prick.”
  • Ireland fast-tracks law banning all gasoline-powered cars within a decade.
  • MSM fact-checking doesn’t.
  • Charles Murray on the statistical differences between males and females in America:

  • A look back on Galaxy Quest on it’s 20 year anniversary.
  • Will Betelgeuse go supernova? Supposedly it’s “not likely to produce a gamma-ray burst and is not close enough for its x-rays, ultraviolet radiation, or ejected material to cause significant effects on Earth.” A good thing, too, since it’s only 640 light years away, which is practically next door in galactic terms.
  • Dad takes son to Mongolia just to get him off his phone.
  • Moderately amusing Texas signs.
  • Rip tire.
  • Tumblegeddon.
  • LinkSwarm for December 20, 2019

    Friday, December 20th, 2019

    Although I know much of the Midwest has already been blessed with several feet of global warming, winter doesn’t officially start until tomorrow. In the meantime, finish up your Christmas shopping (if you haven’t already) and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Brexit bill passes by huge majority. Britain is set to leave the EU by January 31, 2020. I’m putting this first because Brexit is far more important in the long run than the impeachment farce.
  • The amazing psychic powers of Instapundit. From 2017: “Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait. They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control.”
  • Speaking of which: Washington Post reporters celebrate “Merry Impeachmas.” Brave firefighter, running toward fires…with buckets of gasoline.
  • “Unbiased Washington Post launches celebratory fireworks as Trump impeached.”
  • Is the whole impeachment sham battlespace preparation for the next Supreme Court nomination fight? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • But is it even a real impeachment if Nancy Pelosi refuses to transmit the articles of impeachment to the senate? “After denying Trump any due process, Pelosi is now denying him a speedy trial.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Related:

  • Is Trump the only adult in the room?

    But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

    Do we remember the effort to subvert the Electoral College to prevent Trump from assuming office?

    The first impeachment try during his initial week in office?

    Attempts to remove Trump using the ossified Logan Act or the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?

    The idea of declaring Trump unhinged, subject to removal by invoking the 25th Amendment?

    Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $35 million investigation, which failed to find Trump guilty of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election and failed to find actionable obstruction of justice pertaining to the non-crime of collusion?

    The constant endeavors to subpoena Trump’s tax returns and to investigate his family, lawyers and friends?

    Now, frustrated Democrats plan to impeach Trump, even as they are scrambling to find the exact reasons why and how.

    Most presidents might seem angry after three years of that. Yet in paradoxical fashion, Trump suddenly appears more composed than at any other time in his volatile presidency.

    Ironically, Trump’s opponents and enemies are the ones who have become publicly unhinged.

  • If you want to know how it’s playing out in America, check out this tweet from PolitiBunny, who was so hardcore #NeverTrump she voted for Egg McMuffin in 2016:

  • “Millions Of Voices Cry Out In Terror As Liberals Wake Up And Realize Trump Is Still President.”
  • “Political scientist makes surprising claim: Trump impeachment would guarantee his re-election in 2020.”
  • The House passes the USMCA free trade deal, and I expect senate approval to be quick. USMCA will have longer and more lasting consequences than the silly theater the Democrats put on Wednesday.
  • Of the 65 deadliest cities in America, over 90% have Democratic mayors, and over 70% have not had Republican mayors in a long, long time. The last Republican mayor of New Orleans left office in 1872… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Schlichter: “TIME’s Commie Nag Can Go Pound Sand“:

    Clearly Greta Thunberg is being exploited by her cynical puppetmasters, but equally clearly she’s a tiresome, bizarre Marxist scold whose exploitation of the hapless dummies who buy into the climate change hoax is part of what is an increasingly violent plot to undermine capitalism and freedom. Recently, the cretins at TIME, which shockingly still exists in 2019, named her “Person of the Year.” That’s appropriate, since 2019 has been a very annoying year.

    In 2029, after the world hasn’t ended but her usefulness has, she’ll be a Jeopardy question and probably shacked up with an unemployed performance artist named Björn in an Oslo suburb. Fun fact: “Greta Thunberg” is Swedish for “Cindy Sheenhan.”

    But today, we’re all supposed to fall over ourselves over Pippi Longnagging – at least that’s what our betters command – yet it’s unclear why. Teenagers are notoriously ignorant, and ones spewing recycled Marxism are the worst of all. But the idea is not that this tiresome truant is some visionary thinker. The idea is to leverage her youth and awkwardness to keep you from speaking the indisputable truth that she’s a weird brat who presses for an ideology that butchered 100 million people in the last century. And now, she is hinting she wants to run up that score.

    Snip.

    The other day, this malignant muppet “told cheering protesters … ‘we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall’ if they fail to take urgent action on climate change.” Now, maybe her English is bad, or maybe she’s just ignorant, but then again the murder of opponents is the Marxist way. Marxist? St. Greta? Well, let’s take a look at what was carved on the tablets she recently brought down from Mount Socialism:

    “Schoolchildren, young people, and adults all over the world will stand together, demanding that our leaders take action, not because we want them to, but because the science demands it,” she said. “That action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities.”

    Wait, “the science demands” that we “dismantle” all our “[c]olonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression?” Now, what science exactly is that? Is it geology? Physics? Phrenology maybe?

    How stupid do they think people are? Very. And to judge by the judges at TIME, they’re often right. Maybe Greta never heard of Siberia or Cambodia, but we have. Screw that – if she wants to impose her masters’ Marxist fantasies on us, she’ll need to be packing something deadlier than “How dare you!”

  • “Poll Finds Most People Would Rather Be Annihilated By Giant Tidal Wave Than Continue To Be Lectured By Climate Change Activists.”
  • Indian Muslims Outraged Over Law Granting Citizenship to Refugees Fleeing Islamist Persecution:

    Muslims across India staged angry protests over new legislation that grants citizenship rights for refugees fleeing Islamist persecution in the neighboring countries.

    The Citizenship Amendment Bill, passed by the Lower House of the Indian parliament by 293 to 82 votes, opens the path to naturalization for the followers of six faiths, including Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, but excludes Muslims.

    Muslim mobs took to streets in several Indian cities, setting fire to vehicles, throwing stones, and hurling home-made bombs at security forces called in to restore order, Indian newspapers report. Left-wing student groups joined the protesters. They blockaded campuses in India’s capital New Delhi.

    On the one hand, 95% of the time it is in fact Muslims who are persecuting the members of other religions. On the other, the trend in India under Modi has been toward a Hindu religious-ethno state, and things there could turn very bad, very quickly for the Muslim minority there. Muslims constitute only 14% or so of India’s population, but 14% of 1.3 billion is still some 182 million people. And by “very bad” I mean “possibly Rwanda-level bad,” only at 10 times the scale…

  • French strike lengthens, including power cuts.
  • Poland may have to leave EU, Supreme Court warns.” Hey, I bet I know at least a couple of countries who would be happy to sign free trade deals if they did…
  • The astroturf funding behind the “transsexual rights” campaign.
  • MomsDemand never demands facts:

  • Minimum wage hikes killing jobs in California and Washington state.
  • Speaking of which: Vox sports writer complains that he’s being let go thanks to new California law after “1,304 articles.”

    I do not think it is a secret that Vox Media’s employment model has long been unsustainable. They use “contractor” designations to avoid all sorts of labor laws, including providing minimum wage and benefits — and they well exceed the intended use of “contractor.” I’ve published 1,304 articles in 8 years at Clips Nation. That’s not contract work. When I am on the site every day and have day-to-day oversight from corporate, that’s not contract work. Everyone, including SB Nation, has known that this model is unsustainable. While I won’t publicly disclose the numbers, and SB Nation limits our access to a lot of data, I am certain that Clips Nation generates enough revenue to support multiple employees, even when you account for the money that needs to support other aspects of the site (marketing, software, etc).

    The state of California is cracking down on companies like SB Nation who are exploiting the “contractor” loophole, as it well should. Unfortunately, Vox Media is predictably unwilling to cease being greedy. In order to attempt to protect their disproportionate and exploitative revenue share from team sites, Vox has decided to eliminate about 200 of these contractor positions — every contractor in California, including myself, Robert, and our staff writers, editors, and podcasters in paid roles — and replace them with a handful of full-time employees who are going to work as a team to run SB Nation’s 25 team sites in California.

    I doubt he knows how profitable Vox is. It’s entirely possible it loses money, like many online “media empires.” But I sincerely doubt Vox held a gun to his head those eight years. If he feels exploited for work he voluntarily agreed to do at the wages offered, he only has himself to blame. This is not to say that Vox doesn’t suck; it does. But this situation sucks not due to Vox, but due to the California state laws of which this freelancer so obviously approves.

  • Where is all the world’s cash disappearing to?
  • Google engineer fired for using a security hole to push political popup out as emergency message to the entire company. Trust me: Anyone who pulled such a trick at any other company would be fired toot quick, no matter the message. Hell, just pushing out a non-QAed emergency patch to production without C-level authority is a firing offense all on its own…
  • The SJW mob comes for J. K. Rowling for daring to suggest that biological sex is real and immutable.
  • Bad cop sentenced.
  • Here’s an interview with Burt Ward, Robin on the 1960’s Batman TV show, about some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. Nowadays he and his wife run a dog rescue center, where they’ve eventuality saved the lives of more than 15,000. Good on you, Burt.
  • Merry Christmas!

  • LinkSwarm for December 6, 2019

    Friday, December 6th, 2019

    Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday! We’ve entered the portion of the year where everything gets compressed, rushing to finish up before Christmas or the new year, and work gets weird because everyone starts taking vacation. Yesterday I remember thinking “Hey, looks like I’ll finally have time to finish up that huge book catalog I’m working on!” only to have life pop up and go “Psych!”

  • The impeachment documents are embarrassing…for Democrats. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Evidently Adam Schiff can make private phone records public…even those with a man’s lawyer. Evidently privacy laws are non-existent if they inconvenience a Democrat…
  • This is a horrifying story:

    Lawyers from a Fort Worth hospital are harassing a conservative organization in North Texas as part of their plan to combat a judge’s interference in killing a 9-month-old baby.

    Tinslee Lewis was born with congenital heart disease. She is currently at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth and relies on a ventilator to live. On October 31, against the objections of Tinslee’s mother, the hospital announced it would remove the ventilator from Tinslee on November 10, thus killing her. No reasons relating to bodily health were given by the hospital. Instead, only a vague “quality of life” argument was provided.

    Fortunately, Cook Children’s Medical Center’s plans to murder a nine month old baby are currently on hold thanks to judicial intervention.

  • Speaking of medical horror stories, this harrowing tale of a back-injury operation gone wrong on a major league baseball closer is both horrifying and infuriating.
  • R.S. McCain really tears into #NeverTrumpers:

    The “Never Trump” crowd lack the political skill necessary to successfully run a winning primary campaign and yet, when all of their schemes to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 GOP nomination came to naught, the “Never Trump” crowd didn’t blame themselves for this failure. Instead, they blamed — well, you, if you voted for Trump.

    Among other things, this is poor sportsmanship. Auburn beat Alabama on Saturday, but Auburn wasn’t to blame — no, ’Bama lost that game, far more than Auburn won it, and no player on the Crimson Tide could deny that they failed, both individually and as a team. So, in 2008 and 2012, Republicans could have nominated anyone for president, but instead they nominated first John McCain and then Mitt Romney. Well, who is to blame that those two losers lost? Did John McCain ever admit his own political incompetence? Did Mitt Romney ever accept responsibility for his role in re-electing Obama? No, of course not. John McCain (and his supporters, including Nicolle Wallace) made a scapegoat of Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney . . . well, he spent six years campaigning for the GOP nomination (counting the two years he put into his failed bid for the 2008 nomination) and you might have thought that somewhere during that time he might have gotten a clue. But no, he was clueless the whole time and — hang on, I’ll check — yeah, he’s still clueless.

    What is it that these #NeverTrump losers don’t understand? Well, OK, everything — they’re completely without a clue. But what they specifically don’t understand is that Bushism is over. It’s finished. It failed. It’s “pining for the fjords,” so to speak. The so-called “center-right” strategy of Bush-era Republicanism (i.e., be nice and try not to offend liberals) never actually worked. Recall that Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in 2000, and that Bush just barely edged John Kerry in 2004. The illusion of “success” for the center-right strategy is what inspires the tantrums of the #NeverTrump crowd, who want to go back to what they see as the Golden Era of Republican prestige, when we had half-a-million troops in Iraq and middle-class suburbanites were all re-financing their homes and investing with Lehman Brothers. What Trump did in 2016 was to throw away the Karl Rove playbook and go after the votes of people who were sick and tired of “nice” Republicans.

    And, oh, by the way, how many kids does your typical Republican have? Because somewhere along the line, it seems that America developed a shortage of children, and this in turn led to the idea that we should just import foreigners as substitutes for children Americans weren’t having. Did John McCain or Mitt Romney — or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush — ever say anything about demographics?

    Much discussion of crashing white demographics snipped. I’m a lot more concerned with the GOP’s apparent inability to convince Asians and other nonwhite Americans of the value of their platform.

    Six years ago, Sen. Lamar Alexander’s chief of staff was arrested for child pornography. Ryan Loskarn was into “sexually explicit” videos of little boys. Loskarn committed suicide at age 35. That’s an extreme example of the degeneracy among Republicans in D.C., but less extreme cases are a dime a dozen. The extent to which the GOP machinery is staffed with drunks and perverts is not trivial. And, to return to my theme, this problem is related to the sociopathic tendency of some Republicans to scapegoat others for their own failures. There are a lot of people earning six-figure incomes as Republican operatives who are fundamentally incompetent, and who resort to blame-game rationalizations to explain away their failures. Bullies and backstabbers proliferate in the toxic environment of GOP politics, where consultants care more about getting paid than they do about winning elections.

    And I omitted the Ted Bundy comparison…

  • “Americans Bought Enough Guns on Black Friday to Arm the Marine Corps – Yet Again!”: “According to the FBI, over 200,000 background check requests associated with the purchase of a firearm were submitted to the agency on Black Friday, marking the second highest gun sales day ever.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “France Paralyzed By Largest General Strike In Decades.” But this time it’s pension reform rather than taxes…
  • Hunter Biden’s lawyer abruptly quit on Monday after the former Vice President’s son and Ukraine energy expert failed to show up for a child support hearing regarding his out-of-wedlock child with a D.C. stripper from Arkansas.” He’s really padding his lead in the “Father of the Year” standings…
  • Speaking of which:

  • Social Justice Warriors have even ruined sex worker support:

    In recent years, I have watched sex-work activism of the type PACE practices become co-opted by social-justice ideology, whose elements include intersectional feminism, critical race theory and radical socialism. The same hypocrisy that was captured on video when Jabbour denigrated an Asian event attendee plays out, writ large, in the way some activists now regularly prioritize their own moral grandstanding over a reasoned and tempered approach to advocacy. While sex-worker activism once was its own unique activist subculture, deeply informed by women with real experience in the field, it now has become just another branch office of the generalized, Twitter-mediated progressive movement that has colonized liberal politics. And sex workers are suffering for it.

  • EU court upholds restrictions against private gun ownership. You would think that most Europeans have already seen this movie, and aren’t going to like how it ends. At least they’re not calling the law Verordnung gegen den Waffenbesitz der Juden this time around…
  • U.S. Navy seizes Iranian missile parts being shipped to Houthi rebels in Yemen. (Hat tip: Prairie Pundit.)
  • Syria’s currency hits an all-time low against the dollar.
  • Smoking weed can lead to testicular cancer. Joe Rogan hit hardest… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Convicted murderer Lee Hall executed. Hall chose to die by the electric chair, which is still an option in Tennessee. Since he burned estranged girlfriend Traci Crozier alive, there’s a certain symmetry to his exit…
  • “New Greta On The Shelf Doll Will Track Your Climate Sins.”
  • Programmers: Beware finger traps.
  • “India farmer paints dog to look like tiger to protect coffee crop from monkeys.” Dogs, tigers, monkeys: What more do you need from a headline? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Heh:

  • Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for November 11, 2019

    Monday, November 11th, 2019

    Bloomberg is getting in, Holder is thinking about it, Yang boosts Williamson, the Steyer campaign commits a felony, and Biden keeps bide bide biding along at the top of polls. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Polls

  • New York Times poll of six battleground states:
    • Arizona: Biden 24, Sanders 16, Warren 15, Buttigieg 5, Harris 3, Yang 1, Klobuchar 1.
    • Florida: Biden 27, Warren 19, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 5, Klobuchar 2, Harris 1, Gabbard 1.
    • Michigan: Biden 30, Warren 21, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 3, Yang 1, Klobuchar 1, Gabbard 1.
    • North Carolina: Biden 29, Warren, Sanders 13, O’Rourke 2, Buttigieg 1, Harris 1, Gabbard 1, Booker 1.
    • Pennsylvania: Biden 28, Warren 16, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 4, Yang 2, Harris 1, Klobuchar 1.
    • Wisconsin: Warren 25, Biden 23, Sanders 20, Yang 2, Harris 1, Gabbard 1, O’Rourke 1, Booker 1.

    Very small samples sizes, ranging from 203 in Michigan to 324 in North Carolina.

  • Hill/Harris X: Biden 26, Warren 15, Sanders 14, Harris 6, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, Castro 2.
  • Monmouth: Biden 23, Warren 23, Sanders 20, Buttigieg 9, Harris 5, Booker 3, Yang 3, Klobuchar 2, Steyer 1.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 168): Biden 26, Warren 25, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 8, Harris 6, Castro 3, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 2, Williamson 1, Bullock 1, Steyer 1, Yang 1, Delaney 1.
  • Quinnipiac (Iowa): Warren 20, Buttigieg 19, Sanders 17, Biden 15, Klobuchar 5, Harris 4, Gabbard 3, Yang 3, Booker 1, Castro 1, Bennet 1, Bullock 1.
  • Nevada Independent (Nevada): Biden 29, Sanders 19, Warren 19, Buttigieg 7, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Klobuchar 3, Harris 3, Booker 1, Castro 1, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1.
  • Maine People’s Resource Center (Maine): Biden 26.8, Warren 22.1, Sanders 15.4, Buttigieg 9.1, Harris 5.0, Booker 2.7, O’Rourke 2.2, Yang 1.7, Other 6.5. 723 respondents. What I don’t get is that Maine Democrats show overwhelming majorities for every far left socialist scheme anyone has proposed (socialized medicine, Green New Deal, etc.), but Biden still comes out on top of their poll.
  • LA Times/USC: Biden 28, Warren 16, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 6, Harris 4.
  • Politico/Morning Consult: Biden 32, Sanders 20, Warren 20, Buttigieg 7, Harris 5, Yang 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1.
  • Emerson (Nevada): Biden 30, Warren 22, Sanders 19, Yang 5, Harris 5, Buttigieg 5, Steyer 3, Gabbard 1, Booker 1, Klobuchar 1, Bennet 1, Castro 1. I think this is the first poll that’s had Yang even tired with Buttigieg.
  • Texas Tribune (Texas): Biden 23, Warren 18, O’Rourke 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, Yang 4, Castro 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2. Poll conducted before O’Rourke dropped out (obviously), but it has to sting for Castro to be losing to Yang in his home state…
  • 538 offers up post-debate poll aggregation. Buttigieg and Sanders are up the most, while Warren is down the most.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets. Bloomberg has already zoomed up to fifth place, above Clinton, Yang, Gabbard and Klobuchar…
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Jonathan Chait has a bracing message for Democrats: “New Poll Shows Democratic Candidates Have Been Living in a Fantasy World“:

    In 2018, Democratic candidates waded into hostile territory and flipped 40 House districts, many of them moderate or conservative in their makeup. In almost every instance, their formula centered on narrowing their target profile by avoiding controversial positions, and focusing obsessively on Republican weaknesses, primarily Donald Trump’s abuses of power and attempts to eliminate health insurance for millions of Americans.

    The Democratic presidential field has largely abandoned that model. Working from the premise that the country largely agrees with them on everything, or that agreeing with the majority of voters on issues is not necessary to win, the campaign has proceeded in blissful unawareness of the extremely high chance that Trump will win again.

    A new batch of swing state polls from the New York Times ought to deliver a bracing shock to Democrats. The polls find that, in six swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona — Trump is highly competitive. He trails Joe Biden there by the narrowest of margins, and leads Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

    Normally, it is a mistake to overreact to the findings of a single poll. In general, an outlier result should only marginally nudge our preexisting understanding of where public opinion stands. This case is different. To see why, you need to understand two interrelated flaws in the 2016 polling. First, they tended to under-sample white voters without college degrees. And this made them especially vulnerable to polling misses in a handful of states with disproportionately large numbers of white non-college voters. The Times found several months ago that Trump might well win 270 Electoral College votes even in the face of a larger national vote defeat than he suffered in 2016.

    All this is to say that, if you’ve been relying on national polls for your picture of the race, you’re probably living in la-la land. However broadly unpopular Trump may be, at the moment he is right on the cusp of victory.

    What about the fact Democrats crushed Trump’s party in the midterms? The new Times polling finds many of those voters are swinging back. Almost two-thirds of the people who supported Trump in 2016, and then a Democrat in the 2018 midterms, plan to vote for Trump again in 2020.

    Snip.

    The debate has taken shape within a world formed by Twitter, in which the country is poised to leap into a new cultural and economic revolution, and even large chunks of the Democratic Party’s elected officials and voting base have fallen behind the times. As my colleague Ed Kilgore argues, the party’s left-wing intelligentsia have treated any appeals to voters in the center as a sign of being behind the times.

    Biden’s paper-thin lead over Trump in the swing states is largely attributable to the perception that he is more moderate than Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Three-quarters of those who would vote for Biden over Trump, but Trump over Warren, say they would prefer a more moderate Democratic nominee to a more liberal one, and a candidate who would find common ground with Republicans over one who would fight for a progressive agenda.

    There are lots of Democrats who are trying to run moderate campaigns. But the new environment in which they’re running has made it difficult for any of them to break through. There are many reasons the party’s mainstream has failed to exert itself. Biden’s name recognition and association with the popular Obama administration has blotted out alternatives, and the sheer number of center-left candidates has made it hard for any non-Biden to gain traction. Candidates with strong profiles, like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, have struggled to gain attention, and proven politicians like Michael Bennet and Steve Bullock have failed even to qualify for debates.

    But in addition to those obstacles, they have all labored against the ingrained perception that the Democratic party has moved beyond Obama-like liberalism, and that incremental reform is timid and boring. The same dynamic was already beginning to form in 2016, though Hillary Clinton overcame it with a combination of name recognition and a series of leftward moves of her own to defuse progressive objections. Biden’s name brand has given him a head start with the half of the Democratic electorate that has moderate or conservative views. But it’s much harder for a newer moderate Democrat lacking that established identity to build a national constituency. The only avenue that has seemed to be open for a candidate to break into the top has been to excite activists, who are demanding positions far to the left of the median voter.

    Golly, who else has been saying such things? Besides, you know, me and pretty much every right-of-center blogger over the last three years.

  • Look at New Hampshire voters. Buttigieg, Yang and Bennet all get mentioned.
  • Vox tells us that neither the current candidates nor voters are sold on Michael Bloomberg. Ya think?
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He seems to be pinning his hopes on New Hampshire. Him and Joe Sestak…
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “In midst of 2016 election, State Department saw Burisma as Joe Biden’s issue, memos show.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.) “Consulting Firm Hired by Burisma Leveraged Biden’s Name to Secure Meeting with State Dept.”

    A consulting firm representing Burisma Holdings used the Biden name to leverage a meeting between the gas company and State Department officials, according to documents released this week.

    The firm, Washington-based Blue Star Strategies, mentioned the name of Hunter Biden, who then sat on Burisma’s board, in a request for the Ukrainian natural gas company executives to meet with State Department officials, according to internal State Department email exchanges obtained by journalist John Solomon and later reported by the Wall Street Journal.

    Blue Star representatives also mentioned Biden’s name during the resulting meeting, which they claim was scheduled as part of an effort to rehabilitate Burisma’s reputation in Washington following a corruption investigation.

    Biden allies are worried about Bloomberg getting in. As well they should be. I doubt Millionaire McMoneyBags is going to be pulling too many Warren or Sanders voters over. Biden slams Warren’s sneering elitism: “If only you were as smart as I am you would agree with me.”

  • Update: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Getting In? Twitter. So the prophecy has foretold:

    Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is preparing to jump into the 2020 Democratic primary for president.

    Bloomberg, 77, a billionaire, has mulled over a presidential bid for months, according to the New York Times. Bloomberg has publicly downplayed and, at times, outright denied that he would enter the race for 2020.

    Bloomberg still has not yet made a decision on whether to jump into the crowded Democratic primary field, but he is expected to file paperwork in at least one state, Alabama, designating him a contender in the primary. He has hired staff and sent them to Alabama to collect enough signatures to qualify for a run. The deadline to file paperwork for a presidential run in Alabama is Nov. 8.

    “We now need to finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated — but Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that,” said Howard Wolfson, a Bloomberg adviser. “If Mike runs, he would offer a new choice to Democrats built on a unique record running America’s biggest city, building a business from scratch and taking on some of America’s toughest challenges as a high-impact philanthropist.”

    And indeed, he has filed paperwork for the Alabama primary. So I guess he’s already a declared candidate, even if he hasn’t made an official announcement. Should we take him seriously?

    The reason, though, why Bloomberg is considering a last-minute bid is that he is reportedly worried about the way the Democratic primary is unfolding, as one adviser told the Times. Back in March, Bloomberg said he believed that it was essential that the Democratic nominee be able to defeat President Trump, and last month it was reported that he would reconsider his decision not to run if former Vice President Joe Biden continued to struggle. Presumably, Bloomberg has now changed his mind after seeing Sen. Elizabeth Warren — whose ideas, especially the wealth tax, he has lambasted as socialism — gain ground in the polls and Biden struggle with fundraising.

    But there is arguably very little appetite among Democratic voters — donors may be a different story — for yet another presidential candidate. In October, a YouGov/HuffPost poll found that 83 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters were either enthusiastic or satisfied with their presidential choices. And it looks like there is even less appetite for Bloomberg specifically. According to last week’s Fox News poll, just 6 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said they would definitely vote for Bloomberg should he enter the race. And a hypothetical Harvard-Harris Poll of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Bloomberg mixed in with the rest of the Democratic field gave Bloomberg the same 6 percent of the vote.

    And those polls would probably qualify as good news for Bloomberg, given that he was generally registering around 2 or 3 percent in national primary polls before first taking his name out of consideration in March (which is also when pollsters largely stopped asking about him).

    In a field this crowded, entering the race in the high single digits wouldn’t even necessarily be a bad thing, but the problem is that it might be harder for Bloomberg to build on that support than it would be for other candidates. In an average of polls from January and early February, I found that 62 percent of Democrats knew enough about Bloomberg to form an opinion (which was pretty high), but his net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) was only +11 (which was pretty low).

    “History suggests Bloomberg’s low favorability ratings would be a major obstacle to winning the nomination.” You don’t say. The last candidate to have a lower rating was also a New York City mayor.

    On the other hand, de Blasio didn’t have billions of his own money to throw at the campaign. Bloomberg’s net worth is around $52.3 billion, so if he wanted to, he could just buy every single minute of airtime on every TV station in Iowa and New Hampshire.

    That would certainly have a negative effect on longshot candidates trying to break through. Of course there is that tiny little problem that he recently said we need to take guns away from male minorities between the ages of 15 and 25. Because hey, what’s a little racism, collective guilt, and trampling civil rights next to the holy goal of gun control? Besides, the Northam blackface scandal showed that Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) don’t care about racism as long as the person committing it has a (D) after their name. President Donald Trump has already dubbed him “Little Michael” and says he relishes the opportunity to run against him. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) But this is the real kiss of death:

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He attended an “environmental justice” forum in South Carolina. Also attending: Warren, Steyer, Delaney, Williamson and Sestak. Pictures on Twitter of Warren speaking there suggests it was sparsely attended.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an interview with Austin’s KVUE, which suggests he thinks he has a chance to make it to Super Tuesday, a rather optimistic assumption. Also got a USA Today interview.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “The new candidate of the young elite.”

    Pete Buttigieg was quickly locking down a solid lane in the Democratic primary: a young, vibrant, gay, midwestern, war veteran mayor with progressive ideas and plenty of money — but both feet planted in fiscal prudence.

    Young Wall Street and tech-entrepreneur types were starting to fall in love — with his poll numbers and fundraising totals underscoring the Buttigieg boomlet. He was the “Parks and Recreation” candidate in the Democratic field and an alternative to seventy-somethings Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who are both looking to lock down the hyper-online progressive, anti-Wall Street crowd as well as blue collar workers across the Midwest.

    And Buttigieg is a lot younger than former Vice President Joe Biden, who has lagged in fundraising and hardly taken off in the big-donor crowd the way many expected. Buttigieg was poised to perhaps emerge as the leading moderate alternative to Biden.

    But then a funny thing happened last week: Another 70-something candidate beloved on Wall Street — billionaire mogul Michael Bloomberg — made an unexpected splash by suggesting he may still enter the race.

    Bloomberg will not steal Buttigieg’s momentum with younger, wealthier Democratic voters and donors, people close to the South Bend mayor say. But the former NYC mayor does give Big Finance, Big Tech and other more corporate-friendly Democrats another progressive prospect as an alternative to Biden, Sanders and Warren.

    (Which raises the question: Why would anyone donate to Bloomberg? Let moneybags 100% self-fund.) “Why Pete Buttigieg Annoys His Democratic Rivals.” “Many of their campaigns have griped privately about the attention and cash directed toward Buttigieg. They said he is too inexperienced to be electable and that his accomplishments don’t merit the outsize appeal he has with elite donors and voters. His public punditry about the race has prompted eye rolls from older rivals who view him as a know-it-all.” I linked a very similar story about a month ago. Is Buttigieg really annoying, or does one of his rivals keep pitching this story to a compliant press? “Pete Buttigieg Pitches Himself As The Obama Of 2020.”

    Like a gay white thirty-something mayor is going to tap two centuries of white guilt. That trick only works once, and not for you. OK, now I see why they say he’s annoying…

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “With an Eye Toward Beto Voters, Castro Campaign Limps On.” Oh yeah, that’s what you want to do: add the 1% of voters who supported the guy who just dropped out to your 1%.

    When former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the race last week, Castro made the call and then made some more. And it worked. As the last Texan standing, he flipped nine Lone Star State endorsements that previously belonged to O’Rourke to his own campaign.

    He also launched a new ad campaign in Iowa. That, plus the endorsements, are evidence, his campaign manager said, of how Castro is prepared to “supercharge the coalitions needed to beat Donald Trump.”

    You snagged nine second-hand endorsements from your own state. Hoo freaking ray. That would almost matter in a statewide, but he won’t run one of those because he knows he’d lose.

    Except a supercharger requires an engine with some gas, and Castro bus appears to be dangerously close to empty. The endorsements come at a moment when the candidate has stripped his campaign down to bare bones. He laid off campaign teams in New Hampshire and South Carolina over the weekend.

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But: Another week, another Clinton strategist saying she might run, this time Mark Penn.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. criticized Warren’s health care plans, which have become the pinata everyone can bang on.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s in the November debates. Gets an extensive Vice profile:

    CONCORD, NH — About 50 of her most devoted and bundled-up supporters gathered in the cold on the state house steps last week to watch Rep. Tulsi Gabbard firebomb the establishment.

    Over the next half hour, her fire was directed left and right: At Democratic leaders and President Donald Trump, at Saudi Arabian monarchs and at plutocratic warmongers, all of whom have become the bogeymen — or bogeywomen, in the case of Hillary Clinton — of her scrappy presidential campaign.

    She brought up Tim Frolich, a 9/11 survivor, to allege a conspiracy at the highest levels to conceal information about the true Saudi Arabian masterminds of the terror attack.

    It’s an unusual speech to deliver directly after filing paperwork to run in the state, especially amid a presidential primary field almost preternaturally occupied with health care. But Gabbard is an unusual candidate. And that’s exactly what is giving the four-term representative’s improbable presidential run a toe-hold in this early primary state.

    Her campaign got a polling bounce here after Clinton implied on a podcast that Gabbard is a Russian stooge and Gabbard replied in a tweet that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers” leading a conspiracy to destroy her reputation. Clinton is not exactly beloved in New Hampshire, after all; Sen. Bernie Sanders blew her out in the 2016 primary before she went on to beat Trump by just under 3,000 votes.

    “When I heard Hillary do that, the first thing I said was, ‘Oh my god,’ and the second thing I said is, ‘This is going to be great, because that’s going to really help Tulsi,’ — and it has,” said Peggy Marko, a Gabbard supporter and physical therapist in Candia, New Hampshire. “She has crossover appeal … and I think the folks in New Hampshire especially value that.”

    Gabbard recently polled at 5 percent here, outlasting sitting senators and governors by securing a spot on the November debate stage. Just 1 percent higher in two more New Hampshire polls would meet the Democratic National Committee’s threshold for entry to the next debate in Los Angeles in December. And from there on, who knows?

    So as candidates like Sen. Kamala Harris and Julián Castro have all but given up on the Granite State, Gabbard is digging in. This notoriously nonpartisan state is her ticket to staying in the race. Independent voters make up 40 percent of the electorate, and the state’s semi-open primary laws allow anyone to change affiliation up to the day of the primary to vote for whomever they want.

    “We’re seeing support coming from people across the political spectrum and building the kind of coalition that we need to be able to defeat Donald Trump, and it’s encouraging,” Gabbard told VICE News.

    Usual grains of salt apply, especially when it says she’s pulling in Trump voters. I can see a few, but not remotely enough to lift her up even to the 15% delegate threshold in New Hampshire. But Democrats are still freaking out about her:

    In 2012, Nancy Pelosi described Tulsi Gabbard as an “emerging star.” In 2019, Hillary Clinton decried the Hawaii congresswoman as a “Russian asset.” Suffice to say, the honeymoon is over.

    Gabbard is a major target of the liberal elite’s disgust. She feuded with the party organs in 2016 over her backing of Bernie Sanders. Now, during the 2020 election, she is upping the ante — Gabbard isn’t just criticizing the party mainstream; she’s doing so as a candidate for president. She hasn’t pulled punches, toed the party line, or been silenced by criticism from her peers or intraparty backlash. She’s an outsider and a long shot, but her poll numbers have edged slightly higher as she battles the Democratic old guard.

    Says she’s not going to run a third party campaign.

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Just when you thought Democrats couldn’t find new ways to make ordinary people hate them, Kamala Harris wants to expanded the school day to match the work day. So she found a way to piss off students, parents, teachers, bus drivers, and anyone who actually understands how the real world works.
  • Update: Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Thinking of Getting In?

    Eric Holder, the former attorney general and self-proclaimed “wingman” to President Barack Obama, may be on the brink of diving into the Democrats’ nomination fight, Newsweek reported Friday.

    The hint came from Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who tweeted that Holder has been “consulting strategists” about launching a campaign.

    Holder’s potential bid follows Michael Bloomberg’s late entry into the race last week – and would swell the historically huge Democratic field, with only 86 days to go until the Iowa caucuses.

    I just don’t see it. He’s not independently wealthy, and he’s never run in any political race, ever. Does he expect to yell “Obaminations, conglomerate!” and the Obama 2012 Campaign will magically come flying in, perform a superhero landing, and carry him off to contention?

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She went all catfight on Buttigieg and Bloomberg. Angry Amy is Best Amy…
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Sanders joins the crazy immigration plan party:

    Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Thursday released a sweeping immigration plan that would impose a moratorium on deportations, “break up” existing immigration enforcement agencies, grant full welfare access to illegal immigrants and welcome a minimum of 50,000 “climate migrants” in the first year of a Sanders administration.

    The plan effectively establishes Sanders at the far left of the immigration debate, as he aims to energize a base that helped drive his 2016 primary campaign amid competition from other liberal candidates in the field this time around.

    Following the heart attack and flush with cash, Bernie is going to buy more ads. Also, please stop:

    “Bernie Sanders Promises Crowd He Will Lock Trump Up And Also Millions Of Others Once The Gulags Are Up And Running.”

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. He gets a USA Today interview on health care. Pitches defense reform. Maybe his entire campaign is a job audition to be Secretary of Defense.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bad week for Tommy Make-A-Wish: Not only is he stuck at 1% in the polls, but, with Bloomberg getting in, he’s no longer the richest guy in the race either, Plus It looks like the Steyer campaign committed a federal felony by privately offering “campaign contributions to local politicians in exchange for endorsing his White House bid.” Oopsie!
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. A lot of Democratic Wall Street rainmakers are telling dems that they get no money as long as Warren is in the race. Warren’s health care plan is “the longest suicide note in recorded history. There’s no reason for the entire Democratic Party to sign it.” More on that plan’s fundamental dishonesty:

    It is hard to overstate how utterly insane and dishonest this is. Warren claims that in order to finance the $52 trillion her plan would entail over its first ten years, she’d ‘only’ need to raise taxes by approximately $20 trillion, to cover new spending. This math amounts to a $14 trillion shortfall, based on the nonpartisan consensus about the true mathematical cost of her plan (overall, her basket of proposals would double the annual federal budget). She does not even attempt to account for this staggering amount of money. Experts and commentators have been punching gaping holes in Warren’s proposals, including proving that her ‘not one penny of tax increases on non-billionaires’ assertion (even ignoring the $14 trillion gap) is a dramatic, fantastical, bald-faced lie.

    Where is Warren going to get $20 trillion in new taxes?

    Not only does this pie-in-the-sky funding scheme rely on dubious — some would say, “dishonest” — number crunching, it self-evidently breaks her promise not to raise middle-class taxes….

    Warren and her team are relying on a compliant media and other allies to hide her tax hike. That $9 trillion payroll tax is not coming from the super-rich or the undeserving wealthy. It won’t bleed billionaires or stick it to the upper class. That “head tax” will fall squarely on the shoulders of the American worker. And Warren’s shameful dishonesty is more than political posturing. It’s an assault on the middle class.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Warren is the WeWork of Candidates:

    Are presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and WeWork founder Adam Neumann the same person? I mean, they have different hairstyles and all, but their philosophies are more alike than not.

    They both claim, falsely, to be capitalists. Ms. Warren told the New England Council last year, “I am a capitalist to my bones.” She then told CNBC, “I am a capitalist. Come on. I believe in markets.” It was almost as if she didn’t believe it herself. Then came the caveat: “But only fair markets, markets with rules. Markets without rules is about the rich take it all, it’s about the powerful get all of it. And that’s what’s gone wrong in America.” She clearly doesn’t understand capitalism.

    Neither does Mr. Neumann, who said of WeWork, “We are making a capitalist kibbutz.” Talk about mixed metaphors. In Israel, a kibbutz is often defined as “a collective community, traditionally based in agriculture.” WeWork’s prospectus for its initial public offering mentioned the word “community” 150 times. Yet one little secret of kibbutzim is that many of them hired outsiders to do menial jobs that the “community” wouldn’t do, similar to migrant workers on U.S. farms. A capitalist kibbutz is a plain old farm, much like a WeWork building is plain old shared office space. Big deal.

    Ms. Warren wants to reshape capitalism, while Mr. Neumann wants to “revolutionize your workspace.” Meanwhile, the Vision Fund, with capital from SoftBank and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has thrown good money after bad, writing off $9.2 billion in its quest toward this WeWork revolution. The same mismatch between communitarian vision and market realities would doom Ms. Warren’s economic reshaping. It’s hard to repeal good old capitalism.

    The commonalities go on. Last year, Ms. Warren proposed the Accountable Capitalism Act. If it became law, large companies would have to obtain a federal charter that “obligates company directors to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders,” or dare I say, community. For each company, Ms. Warren insists that “40% of its directors are selected by the corporation’s employees.” Back to the kibbutz?

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Rival Yang fundraises for Williamson, much the way she herself did for the now-departed Mike Gravel. If only all the longshots could Voltron themselves together into one viable candidate…
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s spending $1 million in TV advertising in Iowa.

    Gets a Wired profile:

    He’s a true nerd, and he’s making arguments common in the nerd capital of the world, Silicon Valley. Except for one thing: Much of his stump speech lacerates Silicon Valley.

    Yang’s candidacy is something of a toxic bouillabaisse for the tech industry. He presents himself as someone of the industry, wearing a lapel that says “math” instead of one with a flag. Pundits call him a tech entrepreneur, though he actually made his money at a test-prep company. He talks about breaking problems apart and finding solutions. He played D&D as a kid, read science fiction, and understands blockchain.

    He has run his campaign in the most modern of digital ways too. The guy is dynamite on Reddit, and he spends time answering questions on Quora. And that is part of why he’s going to win, he hollers from the stage. He can beat Trump on his own terrain—“I’m better at the internet than he is!”

    But the tech-friendly trappings mask a thorough critique of technology itself. His whole message is premised on the dangers of automation taking away jobs and the risks of artificial intelligence. He lambastes today’s technology firms for not compensating us for our data. If there’s a villain in his stump speech, it’s not Trump—it’s Amazon. (“We have to be pretty fucking stupid to let a trillion-dollar tech company pay nothing in taxes, am I right, Los Angeles?”)

    If Yang is the candidate of Silicon Valley, he’s the one driving a Humvee up the wrong side of the 101. Or, as Chris Anderson, one of my predecessors as editor of WIRED and now a drone entrepreneur, tweeted the night of the fourth Democratic debate, “I turned on the radio for 6 seconds, enough to hear that the Dem debates were on and @AndrewYang, who I thought I liked, was talking about how autonomous trucks were endangering driver jobs. Head slapped, vote changed. Bummer.”

    As Yang wraps up, he has another message: “What does this look like to you, Los Angeles? This looks like a fucking revolution to me.” That may be a bit much. It’s more an evolution, and it’s a killer party. Still, Andrew Yang has found his voice, found his message, and found his people.

    So it’s entirely possible that, long after most of the other candidates have dropped out, Yang will still be there tweeting, jumping onto Reddit threads, grabbing microphones, and using the best of modern technology to explain why modern technology is leading America into the abyss.

  • 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)
  • 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)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar: