Posts Tagged ‘Illegal Alien Crisis’

The Illegal Alien Bus War

Thursday, January 11th, 2024

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s strategy of bussing illegal aliens to sanctuary cities is having its desired effect, namely sharing the pain of the Biden Administration’s refusal to enforce border controls with the blue cities that encourage such behavior.

  • By declaring themselves a “sanctuary city,” New York brought this catastrophe on themselves. Here’s New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul rhapsodizing about all those “benefits” illegal aliens would bring New York City:

    As you know, the Statue of Liberty is inscribed. It says “Give me your tired, you’re poor, your huddled young [sic] masses yearning to be [sic] free/The wretched refuse to [sic] a teeming shore.” That statement encapsulizes our values. We want people to come here, despite where they came from from, where despite the circumstances that drove them to this country, into this state, we see, say, you are welcome here. We are welcome with open arms, and we’ll work to keep you safe. We’ll not only house you, but we’ll protect you. And the richness of the culture and the diversity and the food and the restaurants that we know are going to be coming, uh, because of these efforts are, are are beyond measure. It’s just, it’s an extraordinary part of our story and it’s woven into the story of New York and it makes us more vibrant.

    That “vibrant” includes higher crime rates, soaring budgets and kicking Americans out of their schools and dwellings to make room for the illegal aliens Democrats are desperate to flood the country with. And since when did anyone, illegal alien or otherwise, have a right to free housing at the taxpayer’s expense?

  • So too says New York City Democratic mayor Eric Adams: “New York City is the welcoming mat for the entire globe.”
  • Nate the Lawyer: “So the city of New York wanted migrants? Texas and Arizona sent them migrants.”
  • Abbott: “It was just Texas and Arizona that bore the brunt of all of the chaos, and all the problems that come with it. Now the rest of America is understanding exactly what is going on.”
  • Nate the Lawyer: “So we’re all on the same page. New York: ‘We love migrants, we want migrants, we need migrants.’ Texas and Arizona: ‘We have millions of migrants, we’ll send them to you, then, since you want the migrants.’ And now all hell is broken loose in New York and they don’t want the migrants anymore.”
  • Adams has declared a state of emergency, saying the city is burning through $1 billion this fiscal year on illegal aliens, leaving no funding for other issues.”
  • Adams: “If these Trends continue we will be over 100,000 in the year.” Aw, you didn’t seem worried about millions flooding into Texas, but 100,000 arrive in the city you welcomed them into and it’s the end times.
  • Adams: “This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.” Then shouldn’t you repeal the sanctuary city law?
  • Now Hochul is saying don’t come to New York City.
  • Nate the Lawyer: “New York City has decided to pass laws and regulations to close its own border to stop migrant buses from coming into the city and even going as far as to sue the bus companies to stop them from bringing migrants into the city.”
  • “Why is it good enough for New York to close their, border but not good enough for the country to close their border? It’s almost like they’re saying ‘We’re okay with the migrants coming into the country and being someone else’s problem but they can’t come to New York.” That’s exactly what they’re saying: “Illegal alien costs for thee, but not for me.”
  • Some weather discussion snipped.
  • They pushed illegal aliens into a school for shelter and sent the kids home. “That has a lot of parents fighting mad.”
  • Without schools as babysitters, parents have to stay home.
  • “Migrants are literally killing each other to stay in the shelters.”
  • “The immigration system is is destroyed it’s messed up, and I am extremely happy that the liberals in the Northeast are experiencing the fruits of their labor…They begged for migrants, they wanted migrants, and it was all great to have an open border policy when you didn’t have to pay for it. Now they have to pay for it.”
  • As previously reported, there are long dates for court waits for “asylum seekers.”
  • “I think that more and more and more migrants should go to New York, and then hopefully the Democrats will realize that, hey, just allowing millions of people to come across the border isn’t really a great idea, because we can’t take care of it.”
  • “And I also want to hammer home the point that it was all great when it was someone else’s problem, but it’s horror show, it’s a state of emergency, it’s immoral when it’s their problem.”
  • Indeed.

    Illegal Immigration Crisis Reordering French Politics

    Thursday, December 28th, 2023

    All across the EU, unlimited illegal alien immigration by unassimilated Muslims is wrecking the post-Cold War neoliberal establishment. The effect has already been seen in France, but it was felt more keenly recently when France passed laws cracking down on illegal immigration more in line with Marine Le Pen than President Emmanuel Macron.

    Far-right leader Marine Le Pen has claimed “an ideological victory” as Emmanuel Macron’s government reached a compromise with hardline conservatives on a beleaguered immigration bill.

    The French president’s centrist coalition moved towards introducing a much tougher immigration bill than initially planned on Tuesday, with the government agreeing to harden the access to state benefits for recently-arrived immigrants. The proposals echo some of the far right’s long-time obsessions, including the ideas of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Rally party, who campaigned in favor of a “national preference,” which meant excluding foreigners from state benefits and council housing.

    Funny how “France for the French” is a “far right obsession.”

    What welfare state benefits should illegal aliens receive upon moving to a country? How about nothing? Does nothing work for you? They should receive food and water only for the short period of time it takes to deport them back to their country of origin.

    Even legal immigrants should be ineligible for welfare benefits upon first arriving. Let them work a specified number of years before providing access to the welfare state.

    While the proposals put forward by Macron’s Renaissance party do not go that far, the National Rally has been jubilant over the government’s decision to take what they claim is a step in their direction.

    “Under pressure from National Rally voters, this bill will harden the conditions surrounding immigration,” Le Pen told reporters at the National Assembly. “We can salute ideological progress, an ideological victory of the National Rally, because it will now be etched in legislation that there is a national priority,” she said, adding that her MPs would vote for the compromise legislation.

    After a shock defeat of Macron’s flagship immigration bill last week, when it was dismissed by the National Assembly without a debate, the government has tasked a joint committee of senators and MPs with finding a compromise. But the government needs the support of the conservative Les Républicains party, which has become very hardline on immigration, to get their draft legislation through parliament.

    “Very hardline” is a codeword for “actually agrees with French voters.”

    On Tuesday, the joint committee reached a compromise on a draft that is much more hardline than the one initially tabled by the government. It includes a compulsory five year wait for non-European immigrants who don’t have a job before claiming housing and child benefits.

    Good.

    All across Europe, Euroskeptic parties fighting against allowing illegal unassimilated Muslim immigration are ascendant over traditional leftwing Euroestablishment parties. The EU elites insistence on pushing Muslim immigration on resisting populations have pushed Le Pen, long regarded as “unacceptable,” to the center of political consensus in France, at least on this issue, which is increasingly one of utmost importance to voters.

    It elite decree that valid issues are off the table for reputable politicians to discuss, then voters will turn to “disreputable” politicians to make their voices heard.

    Border Crisis Update For September 29, 2021

    Wednesday, September 29th, 2021

    More news bubbling up on the Biden Border Crisis, so let’s dig in:

  • Remember how stories said the Biden Administration was deporting those Haitian illegal aliens in Del Rio? Yeah, not so much:

    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted on Sunday that more than 12,000 Haitian migrants who had been camped out under a bridge near Del Rio, Texas, have been released into the US and more may follow them.

    He told “Fox News Sunday” that there are about 12,400 Haitians in the process of having asylum claims heard by an immigration judge, while around 5,000 are being processed by the Department of Homeland Security.

    About 3,000 are being detained.

    “Approximately, I think it’s about 10,000 or so, 12,000,” Mayorkas responded when asked how many migrants have already been released.

    He added that the number could go beyond 5,000 as other cases are processed.

    Both the Biden Administration and his directory of “Homeland Security” seem to view illegal aliens as a precious resource that they must avoid deporting at all costs.

  • Speaking of Del Rio, Val Verde county has announced they’ve had enough and will join with other border counties to sue the federal government over their failure to enforce immigration laws:

  • The Biden Administration has ordered Border Patrol Agents not to use horses over the ginned-up whipping hoax.
  • Speaking of which, here’s a video on horses with the Border Patrol that Twitter kept censoring:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Biden approval rating is 18 points underwater with Texas Hispanics:

  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he’s sending more National Guard resources to the border:

  • Think the situation is bad now? Things are about to get a lot worse when the Biden Administration fires every Border Patrol agent who refuses the Flu Manchu vaccine.
  • Democratic Clown Car Update for July 8, 2019

    Monday, July 8th, 2019

    Biden is down, Harris is up, Gravel is out, Swallwell is soon to follow out, Tom Steyer is getting in, and Williamson sends out a fundraising request…for Gravel. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Polls

    This week’s polls are really interesting, and divergent. Some show Biden with a huge slump and Harris with a huge bump, while others only show a tiny bit of movement each way:

  • ABC News/Washington Post: Biden 30, Sanders 19, Harris 13, Warren 12, Buttigieg 4, Castro 3, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2, Bennet 1, Booker 1, Hickenlooper 1, Inslee 1, Williamson 1, Gabbard 1. (Those are from the registered voters only screen, read from a list of candidates (question 6), which is what RealClearPolitics is tracking; the numbers are different if voters name their own candidate (question 5).)
  • Economist/YouGov (page 162): Biden 21, Warren 18, Harris 13, Sanders 10, Buttigieg 9, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Castro 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, de Blasio 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Inslee 1, Klobuchar 1.
  • Quinnipiac: Biden 22, Harris 20, Warren 14, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1, Gabbard 1, Yang 1.
  • CNN: Biden 22, Harris 17, Warren 15, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Klobuchar 2. Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Gabbard 1, Yang 1.
  • Harvard Harris (page 151; be prepared to zoom in): Biden 34, Sanders 15, Warren 11, Harris 9, Buttigieg 3, O’Rourke 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 1, Bloomberg (!) 1, Castro 1, Yang 1, Delaney 1, Hickenlooper 1, Ryan 1, Gillibrand 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Q2 Fundraising

    Q2 numbers continue to trickle out. Some polls show Harris within striking distance of Biden, but so far her fundraising doesn’t reflect it.

    1. Pete Buttigieg: $24.8 million
    2. Joe Biden: $21.5 million
    3. Bernie Sanders: $18 million (plus $6 million transferred from “other accounts”)
    4. Kamala Harris: $12 million
    5. Michael Bennet: $2.8 million
    6. Steve Bullock: $2 million

    Notice who hasn’t announced anything yet? Elizabeth Warren. Bad fundraising quarter?

    For sake of comparison, President Donald Trump raised $105 million for his reelection campaign.

    Pundits, etc.

  • Kurt Schlichter: Trump Just Won in 2020.

    I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty good about the election after last week’s two-day Democratic clusterfark, and the president has got to be feeling pretty good too, since he just won it. Oh, we have 17 more months of media pimping of whichever commie candidate is currently the least embarrassing, but the debates made it very clear that Trump is going to be POTUS until Ric Grenell is on the victorious GOP ticket in 2024.

    In the Dems’ defense, they do have an uphill battle. The economy is on fire, we’ve dodged all the new wars our garbage elite has proposed, Mueller (who went unmentioned) delivered only humiliation, and all 723 Democrats running are geebos. But say what you will, they are a diverse bunch in every way except thought – among the weirdos, losers and mutations onstage were a fake Indian, a furry, a guy so dumb he quotes Che in Miami, a raving weather cultist, America’s shrill first wife, a distinctly non-fabulous gay guy, T-Bone’s homie, whatever the hell Andrew Yang is, and Stevie Nicks.

    But it was the thought part where they came together in a festival of insane acclamation. They agreed on everything, and it was all politically suicidal. Yeah, Americans are thrilled about the idea of subsidizing Marxist puppetry students and getting kicked off their health insurance so that they can put their lives in the hands of the people who brought you the DMV.

    Exactly who, outside of Manhattan and Scat Francisco, think Americans are dying to stop even our feeble enforcement of the border, make illegal immigration not illegal, never send illegals home once they get here and – think about this – take our tax money to give these foreigners who shouldn’t even be here in the first place better free health care than our vets get? That should go well in places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I eagerly await Salena Zito’s interview with a bunch of construction workers at a diner near Pittsburg who tell her, “It really bugs me, Lou and Joe here that those people coming into the country illegally aren’t getting free heath care on our dime. We all want to work an extra shift so we can give it to ‘em. We need a president who finally puts foreigners first! Also, we all agree we ought to give up our deer rifles because people in Cory Booker’s neighborhood can’t stop shooting each other.”

  • Democrats are not on a winning track:

    Presidential candidates from both parties usually sound hard-core in the primaries to appeal to their progressive or conservative bases. But for the general election, the nominees move to the center to pick off swing voters and centrist independents.

    Voters put up with the scripted tactic as long as a candidate had not gone too extreme in the primaries and endorsed positions too far out of the mainstream.

    A good example of this successful ploy was Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. In the primary against Hillary Clinton, Obama ran to her left. But he was still careful not to get caught on the record going too far left. That way, he was still able to tack to the center against John McCain in the general election.

    As a general election candidate, Obama rejected the idea of gay marriage. He blasted illegal immigration. He railed against deficit spending. And he went so far as to label then-President George W. Bush as “unpatriotic” for taking out “a credit card from the bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt.”

    The result was that Obama was elected. After taking office, in cynical fashion he endorsed gay marriage, ran up far more red ink than did Bush, offered blanket amnesties, and relaxed immigration enforcement.

    Yet the current crop of would-be Democratic nominees has forgotten the old script entirely. Nearly all of them are currently running so hard to the left that the successful nominee will never be able to appear moderate.

    Bernie Sanders leads the charge for abolishing all student debt. Kamala Harris wants reparations for slavery. Joe Biden talks of jailing health insurance executives if they falsely advertise.

    The entire field seems to agree that it should not be a criminal offense to enter the U.S. illegally. The consensus appears to be that no illegal entrant will be deported unless he or she has committed a serious crime.

    Not a single Democratic candidate has expressed reservations about abortions, and a number of them have fought proposed restrictions on partial-birth abortions.

    Elizabeth Warren has said guns are a national health emergency and would not rule out the possibility of federal gun confiscation.

    Early in the campaign, no major Democratic candidate has questioned the Green New Deal and its radical proposals. No one has much objected to dismantling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or scrapping the Electoral College. An unworkable wealth tax and a top marginal income tax rate of 70 percent or higher are also okay.

    Yet none of these positions currently wins 51 percent of public support, according to polls.

    What are the Democratic frontrunners thinking?

  • The Democrats’ illegal alien schemes are completely unworkable, says Obama’s own DHS chief:

    Democratic presidential candidates have “unworkable” and “unwise” immigration policies, according to Obama administration Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson.

    “That is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders,” Johnson told the Washington Post on Tuesday, referring to a push to decriminalize illegal immigration. “That is unworkable, unwise and does not have the support of a majority of American people or the Congress, and if we had such a policy, instead of 100,000 apprehensions a month, it will be multiples of that.”

    Johnson’s comments follow sharp criticism of the 2020 Democratic contenders, who all raised their hands during the second night of debates when asked if illegal immigrants should receive taxpayer-funded health insurance (let’s not forget that Obamacare penalized American citizens who weren’t covered).

  • “Did the Russians pay the 2020 Democratic candidates to throw the 2020 election to President Donald Trump? Watching all four hours of the first Democratic debates, it became increasingly difficult to reach any other conclusion.”

    The candidates unanimously agreed on “Medicare for All” and that it should cover illegal aliens — or as the moderator and candidates generally called them, the “undocumented.” Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., even said that Medicare for All requires the elimination of private health insurance. Sanders correctly asserted that a majority of Americans support Medicare for All. What he did not say, however, is that support steeply drops once people are informed that their taxes will go up to pay for it or when they learn that they may experience longer waiting periods before receiving health care. But give Sanders credit. Asked whether he intends to increase taxes on the middle class to pay for his health care plan, Sanders, after talking about the elimination of premiums, co-pays and deductibles, said that, yes, the middle class would pay more taxes.

    Snip.

    The biggest loser at the Democrat debates, however, was the American taxpayer. In addition to “universal health care,” Sanders touted his plan to hit up taxpayers for “free college” and student debt forgiveness. The candidates agreed that illegal entry into the U.S. ought not be a crime but rather a civil violation. This would simply encourage more illegal entry. How much would this cost the taxpayers just for the education of their children in public schools?

    And a big issue was AWOL in the debate. Not brought up by any moderator, even though it enjoys the support of the most blacks, was the issue of reparations. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Harris all support reparations. Yet the only who brought it up, and then in passing, was fringe candidate Marianne Williamson. Why would the debate’s moderators omit a topic being widely discussed during the Democratic primary campaign? The answer is that the issue of reparations is a political loser. Polls and surveys suggest that the majority of blacks support it, but that’s about it. It appears that moderators did not want the candidates endorsing an issue so unpopular. The candidates, of course, could have volunteered their support for reparations. But with the exception of Williamson, they elected not to.

  • Why are Harris and Booker talking like it’s still the 1960s?

    After Obama served two terms as president; after Oprah became one of the richest people Earth has ever known; after America became history’s most diverse nation where the descendants of black slaves, as a group, are more successful than any that ever existed, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are talking about race as if we’re still living in the ‘60s. And they do it not to solve real moral and socioeconomic problems in poor black communities – but to get political power.

    It’s infuriating.

    Cory and Kamala are mixing anecdotal scraps from America’s bad old days with “microaggressions” from today’s classroom racism, to cobble together a political scarecrow that tricks people into believing that racial oppression still exists. It doesn’t.

  • Greg Gutfeld thinks that Biden looks tired and Harris will be the nominee. Eh, I think he’s falling prey to recency bias here. Biden has plenty of time to recover, and Harris to stumble, between now and Iowa.
  • Ten candidates appeared at the NEA convention in Houston, including Biden, Warren, Castro, O’Rourke. I’d love to tell you who else, but the Texas Tribune couldn’t be bothered to actually name the rest.
  • Candidates who will have a tough time making the fall debates:

    Currently, the only locks for the fall debates are former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, California Sen. Kamala Harris and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke is likely to qualify, but after an underwhelming debate performance last week, even he is not guaranteed to make the polling threshold. Only polls taken between June 28 and Aug. 28 will count.

  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Sheriff David Clarke notes that Abrams is no longer a rising star:

    Abrams continues to traverse the country in a state of delusion, telling audiences that she won her race for Georgia governor but that it was stolen from her through racist Republican gerrymandering. She lost by 55,000 votes, not even enough to trigger an automatic recount. Georgia has 156 counties. Abrams won—are you ready for this—20 counties. The only reason the race was as close as it was is because she won Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia and where 54% of blacks live. The reality is that she lost because her base of support didn’t go outside of Atlanta. It wasn’t diverse enough, ironically. She tried to get elected to the highest office in the state of Georgia by basically winning in one county. Maybe she should have considered building her bio by running for mayor of Atlanta first and governing from there. Her ambition wouldn’t allow that. She was trying to be the first—as in first black and female governor of Georgia. She could not fulfill being the first black mayor of Atlanta. Maynard Jackson beat her to it having become Atlanta’s first black mayor in 1974. Democrats are still trying to become the first in some office whether regarding skin color, gender, or sexual preference.

    Now Democrats want to force Stacey Abrams down the throats of the rest of America after the voters of Georgia rejected her. They mention her as a potential presidential or VP candidate. She has a thin resume just like a replay of Obama circa 2008. I hope that conservatives push back this time with the gumption they did not have in 2008 when they decided to flaunt their racial sensitivity because of the fear of being called racists.

    Let me get the drumbeat in rejecting Stacey Abrams for national office started. Too many in the GOP will be afraid to do so. She is a flawed candidate with no real political experience outside of activism. She is a career race-baiter having started a voter registration campaign called the New Georgia Project, which was investigated for voter fraud, and that was unable and unwilling to say what the organization did with the $3.6 million they raised to register voters. It failed.

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an LA Times interview. For a supposed moderate, there’s evidently nothing Obama did that Bennet hasn’t endorsed, including the Iran deal.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. The MSM finally takes a look at Hunter Biden’s business entanglements, something they failed to do when Joe Biden was Obama’s Vice President for eight years:

    In September, 2008, Hunter launched a boutique consulting firm, Seneca Global Advisors, named for the largest of the Finger Lakes, in New York State, where his mother had grown up. In pitch meetings with prospective clients, Hunter said that he could help small and mid-sized companies expand into markets in the U.S. and other countries. In June, 2009, five months after Joe Biden became Vice-President, Hunter co-founded a second company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, with Christopher Heinz, Senator John Kerry’s stepson and an heir to the food-company fortune, and Devon Archer, a former Abercrombie & Fitch model who started his finance career at Citibank in Asia and who had been friends with Heinz at Yale. (Heinz and Archer already had a private-equity fund called Rosemont Capital.) Heinz believed that Hunter would share his aversion to entering into business deals that could attract public scrutiny, but over time Hunter and Archer seized opportunities that did not include Heinz, who was less inclined to take risks.

    In 2012, Archer and Hunter talked to Jonathan Li, who ran a Chinese private-equity fund, Bohai Capital, about becoming partners in a new company that would invest Chinese capital—and, potentially, capital from other countries—in companies outside China. In June, 2013, Li, Archer, and other business partners signed a memorandum of understanding to create the fund, which they named BHR Partners, and, in November, they signed contracts related to the deal. Hunter became an unpaid member of BHR’s board but did not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father left the White House.

    In December, 2013, Vice-President Biden flew to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping. Biden often asked one of his grandchildren to accompany him on his international trips, and he invited Finnegan to come on this one. Hunter told his father that he wanted to join them. According to a Beijing-based BHR representative, Hunter, shortly after arriving in Beijing, on December 4th, helped arrange for Li to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel. Afterward, Hunter and Li had what both parties described as a social meeting. Hunter told me that he didn’t understand why anyone would have been concerned about this. “How do I go to Beijing, halfway around the world, and not see them for a cup of coffee?” he said.

    Hunter’s meeting with Li and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time, but some of Biden’s advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father’s visit, would expose the Vice-President to criticism. The former senior White House aide told me that Hunter’s behavior invited questions about whether he “was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn’t done in that White House. Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.” When I asked members of Biden’s staff whether they discussed their concerns with the Vice-President, several of them said that they had been too intimidated to do so. “Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a former adviser told me. Others said that they were wary of hurting his feelings. One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, “got deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It’s like you’ve hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him.”

    For another venture, Archer travelled to Kiev to pitch investors on a real-estate fund he managed, Rosemont Realty. There, he met Mykola Zlochevsky, the co-founder of Burisma, one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas producers. Zlochevsky had served as ecology minister under the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. After public protests in 2013 and early 2014, the Ukrainian parliament had voted to remove Yanukovych and called for his arrest. Under the new Ukrainian government, authorities in Kiev, with the encouragement of the Obama Administration, launched an investigation into whether Zlochevsky had used his cabinet position to grant exploration licenses that benefitted Burisma. (The status of the inquiry is unclear, but no proof of criminal activity has been publicly disclosed. Zlochevsky could not be reached for comment, and Burisma did not respond to queries.) In a related investigation, which was ultimately closed owing to a lack of evidence, British authorities temporarily froze U.K. bank accounts tied to Zlochevsky.

    In early 2014, Zlochevsky sought to assemble a high-profile international board to oversee Burisma, telling prospective members that he wanted the company to adopt Western standards of transparency. Among the board members he recruited was a former President of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who had a reputation as a dedicated reformer. In early 2014, at Zlochevsky’s suggestion, Kwaśniewski met with Archer in Warsaw and encouraged him to join Burisma’s board, arguing that the company was critical to Ukraine’s independence from Russia. Archer agreed.

    When Archer told Hunter that the board needed advice on how to improve the company’s corporate governance, Hunter recommended the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, where he was “of counsel.” The firm brought in the investigative agency Nardello & Co. to assess Burisma’s history of corruption. Hunter joined Archer on the Burisma board in April, 2014. Three months later, in a draft report to Boies Schiller, Nardello said that it was “unable to identify any information to date regarding any current government investigation into Zlochevsky or Burisma,” but cited unnamed sources saying that Zlochevsky could be “vulnerable to investigation for financial crimes” and for “perceived abuse of power.”

    Vice-President Biden was playing a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine, and took the lead in calling on Kiev to fight rampant corruption. On May 13, 2014, after Hunter’s role on the Burisma board was reported in the news, Jen Psaki, a State Department spokesperson, said that the State Department was not concerned about perceived conflicts of interest, because Hunter was a “private citizen.”

    Funny how the Clinton and Biden kin are always “private citizens,” but any low-level Trump staffer bumping into a Russian was cause for ruining his life. One amazing thing about that New Yorker piece is how it was obviously written by someone sympathetic to the Bidens, but which nonetheless paints a devastating portrait of a Vice President’s son deeply entangled in foreign interests. And I haven’t even talked about the cocaine and alcohol abuse. Joe Biden wants to bring back the ObamaCare individual mandate. Remember how super popular that turned out to be for Democrats in the 2010 election? Speaking of reruns, Biden says he’s open to renominating Merrick Garland. Something tells me that the activist base has discovered that Garland is, in fact, an old white man sometime since 2016…

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Cory Booker wants catch and release for illegal aliens, so no more of that icky “detention.” Booker is a “unifyer,” or so says that paragon of unity, Al Sharpton. “I’m shocked, SHOCKED that there’s big pharmacy money flowing into the Democratic Presidential Primaries!” “Your big pharmacy donations, Mr. Booker.”
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Among Bullock’s Q2 donors: Jane Fonda. “2020 Democratic candidate Bullock open to Keystone XL pipeline.” And there’s your first sign that Bullock is thinking of dropping out of the Presidential race and filing for a senate run against Steve Daines in 2020 (he’s term-limited as governor).
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Let the black pandering begin! “Pete Buttigieg Uses Essence Festival to Start His Rehab With Black Voters.” Also: “Democrat Buttigieg announces minority-focused small business investment plan.” With as much money as he’s raised, and with Harris and Booker in the race, I’m not sure making a play for minority voters is the best use of his time and money. He should be attacking Biden and making a play for what’s left of the Democratic Party’s white working class voters. I guess this support for striking workers qualifies, but given they’re striking on Martha’s Vineyard, I suspect the “working class solidarity” vibe is somewhat muted. Then again, he says Democrats need to veer further left to win in 2020, so maybe his “moderate’ reputation is overblown.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. For all this talk of Castro having a “breakout debate,” what it seems to boil down to is he went from 1% to 3% in the polls…at best. He says he’s feeling better, but can’t quote climb out of the corpse wagon on his own power. Like a good little social justice warrior, Castro is falling in line and declaring the Betsy Ross flag as racist. And speaking of being a good social justice warrior, he says the reason he can’t speak Spanish is “internalized oppression.” Said he had a “better” fundraising quarter, but hasn’t released his Q2 numbers yet.
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently “Look, I have a mixed race son!” isn’t quite the Ace-in-the-hole de Blasio thinks it is. “It’s beyond telling that he’s already relying on the same gimmick — rather than his record in office — to get him out of the 1 percent doldrums in the 2020 campaign.”
  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He was on Face the Nation. “We can’t act like bipartisan solutions are dirty words that we can’t say in Washington anymore.” Also: “”Medicare-for-All” is a great slogan. They’ve hijacked the good name of Medicare and applied it to a law that will cause upheaval in our health care system and I- I was the first person to actually talk about this. Now we’re seeing the debate change on this issue as people start to realize.” Yeah, not seeing the debate change among the candidates polling higher than him, which is most of them.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a “profile” in Business Insider, if you can call a 50-picture listicle a profile. Moving in the opposite direction, feel like reading a 2,000 word essay on the streak of gray in her hair? Not me, but I’m guessing there are some fashion aware out there might want to tackle that pressing issue…
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another entry in a rich genre: “The Ignoring of Kirsten Gillibrand“:

    I’d asked to attend the workout of the senator from New York and aspiring president after seeing her do chest presses on Instagram, thinking it would work as a facile metaphor for the strength she’d need to break out in a 24-person Democratic field. I’d hoped the sight of 52-year-old Gillibrand’s now-famous biceps might reveal some larger, heretofore obscured appeal. Some reserve of magnetism, also hiding under a navy blazer. A glimpse into the reasons she’s not gaining ground as a candidate.

    The majority of Democratic hopefuls have yet to experience a moment like the surge of interest in Mayor Pete or Beto or Elizabeth Warren, let alone the preexisting support afforded the two candidates approaching their 80th birthdays. But Gillibrand’s lack of anointing seems conspicuous. After all, on paper, she’s set herself up to succeed: Gillibrand has never lost an election in her 13-year career in politics. She’s an advocate for women and families at a time when the law has been lapped by societal sentiment. She’s progressive enough to have supported Medicare-for-all since 2006, but she had enough bipartisan reach to get Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to vote for her (as yet unpassed) Military Justice Improvement Act, which would protect those sexually assaulted while serving. She also co-sponsored the 9/11 first responders bill.

    Yet Gillibrand is currently polling between 0 and 1 percent in national surveys, nestled in the bleak data crevice between Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. “Kirsten Gillibrand Is Struggling,” announced the New York Times in May. “Will Abortion Rights Be Her Rallying Cry?” Two weeks later, a Politico headline read: “Kirsten Gillibrand’s Failure to Launch.”

    Yes, we’ve reached the point in the “why isn’t Kirsten Gillibrand doing better” genre where the piece namechecks previous entries in the “why isn’t Kirsten Gillibrand doing better” genre…

  • Update: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Dropping Out. Twitter. Facebook. Gravel announced that he’s ending his campaign. And that’s right after the Williamson campaign sent out a fundraising email…to support Gravel

    Williamson’s campaign on Sunday sent out an email asking people to donate to her opponent Gravel — who served as a U.S. Senator from Alaska from 1969 to 1981 — because he’s “only 10,000 donations short of qualifying for the July debates.”

    “Thanks to you, I’m on the debate stage. And that’s why today I’m using this platform, granted to me by you, to ask for your help,” Williamson wrote in the email.

    “You may not have heard of him,” she continued, referring to Gravel, “because he hasn’t yet qualified for any debates. But his voice is important.”

    Give Williamson credit: She really is a different kind of candidate… (Downgrade from In.)

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Kamala 2020 Makes Obama 2008 Look Positively Right Wing.”

    In 2008, Obama complained about “the orgy of spending” under President George W. Bush. He pledged that all his spending plans would be more than offset with expenditure reductions.

    “What I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut,” he said.

    Harris, in contrast, has a legislative agenda that would more than double the size of the federal government. She’s endorsed Medicare for All ($32 trillion over 10 years), the Green New Deal (another $50 trillion to $90 trillion or so), $6,000 in “tax credits” for each working family ($2.8 trillion), and a $78 billion renter-subsidy program. That’s just for starters.

    Obama advocated, half-heartedly to be sure, cutting what before Trump was a sky high corporate income tax rate, recognizing that it put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage. Harris wants to crank it back up.

    On immigration, Obama promised in his campaign to improve border security. “We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace,” he said.

    Harris plans to use executive orders to grant amnesty to millions of illegals.

    When Obama was pitching Obamacare in 2009, he made it clear that under no circumstances would it provide benefits to illegals.

    “There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally,” Obama told a joint session of Congress. That prompted Rep. Joe Wilson’s famous “You lie!” response.

    Harris, like every other Democrat running, has promised that, if elected, she will provide free health care to those who must now be referred to as “undocumented immigrants.”

    On the other hand, a lot of Harris’ positions are hard to pin down:

    Who is the real Kamala Harris?

    Ten days ago, the senator from California dominated the Democratic presidential debate when she excoriated Joe Biden for his opposition to mandatory busing to achieve school desegregation. Her poll ratings shot up; his sagged.

    Then came the details. When reporters asked Harris if she supports federally mandated busing in 2019, she seemed to say no. Busing should be voluntary, a “tool that is in the toolbox” if school boards want to use it, she said last week.

    “Absolutely right,” Biden replied; that’s his position too.

    A consensus? Not so fast.

    “We do not agree,” Harris insisted the next day. The real problem, she said, is that Biden has never admitted he was wrong to oppose busing in the 1970s.

    Lesson One: Harris’s debate gambit wasn’t really about busing — not busing in 2019, anyway. It was mostly about knocking Biden down a peg by reminding voters of the baggage he carries from nearly half a century in politics, and elevating her profile in the process.

    Lesson Two: Harris’ positions can be maddeningly elusive. She has staked out stances on some issues that sound bold, only to qualify them later. Her stances often seem designed to straddle the divisions in her party — to make her sound progressive enough for leftist voters but moderate enough for those in the center.

    CNN loves Kamala Harris, both in lavish on-air praise and their parent company showering her with money. “The second largest contributor to the Senator is AT&T Inc., the parent company of CNN. To date, she has received over $53,000 from this source.” Berkeley classrooms were integrated before Kamala Harris was born. Harris wants a repeat of the policies that lead to the 2008 subprime debacle. Willie Brown (yes, that Willie Brown) says that Harris and Buttigieg are a dream ticket. Note that this is the same Willie Brown who said just last week that Harris can’t beat Trump.

  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says he’s staying in the race and not running for the senate. Good news for Republicans. Says that Hickenlooper has been the problem with the Hickenlooper campaign.

    The frank assessment of his challenges come after a number of top staffers on Hickenlooper’s presidential campaign left the team, after Hickenlooper failed to gain traction in early polls and has struggled to raise money in the first few months of his campaign. But he told the Perry voters that, despite pushback from his staff, he plans to stay in the race and sees Iowa as his opportunity to break out.

    “Despite pushback from the staff.” Evidently even the people receiving paychecks think he should drop out.

  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Staying in the race is jamming up other Washington state Democrats:

    As Gov. Jay Inslee pursues his long-shot run for president, political dominoes are lining up for Washington’s 2020 elections.

    Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz, state Sen. Christine Rolfes and state Rep. Drew Hansen are among those waiting to see which way their domino will fall: Run for re-election or a new office?

    Inslee still has a gubernatorial re-election campaign committee on file with the state Public Disclosure Committee. It has raised some $1.4 million and spent $1.2 million since he was re-elected in 2016. But it has only collected about $2,400 and spent less than $1,800 since he formally announced his presidential bid early this year.

    Washington doesn’t term-limit its state officials, and Inslee hasn’t ruled out seeking a third term if he steps away from the presidential race, although that may be getting less likely with each passing week.

    Only one governor, Republican Dan Evans, served three terms. Since then, all three of Inslee’s two-term predecessors – Booth Gardner, Gary Locke and Christine Gregoire – discussed running again but ruled it out, usually announcing they were retiring during the summer before the election year.

    None of them pursued a different office while keeping open the option of seeking re-election.

    Under Washington law, a person can’t appear on the same ballot for two offices, so at some point Inslee will have to choose. Because governor stands at the top of the state election ladder, not knowing whether Inslee is in or out has created a bottleneck for the upward movement of others, especially Democrats, on the rungs below.

    My heart bleeds…

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She and Inslee unveiled education plans. Sounds like Democratic boilerplate, right down to opposing school choice and charter schools. She appeared in a photo-op with a misbuttoned shirt. Man, I can only imagine all the objects hurled at the staffer who let her go out like that… (Hat tip: Reader BrandoN Byers.)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Messam news is so thin on the ground, I’m having to resort to extreme measures: actually linking to a profile on Vox. “Like San Antonio, Miramar’s chief executive is technically a city manager appointed by its city council. This means Messam does not have the same power over policy or decision making that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — another primary candidate — has, for example.” The two policy proposals they highlight are eliminating student debt and gun control, which means there’s zero to distinguish him from better-known candidates, which is literally every single candidate in the race.
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Seth Moulton says Dems can’t keep ‘rehashing votes from 40 years ago.” Except that the debates, and Moulton’s approximate 0% standing, says they can…
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Beto O’Rourke: Let’s Forgive All Student Loan Debt For Teachers.” Given that his opponents are already going full on eliminating everyone’s student debt for everything, one wonders what he hopes to accomplish with this modest pander. “Beto O’Rourke says he’s not aware of his fundraising numbers.” The two possibilities are that he’s telling the truth, because he runs a disorganized campaign and isn’t on top of details, or he’s lying, because his fundraising numbers suck like a Dyson. We’re finally starting to get the first prebituaries on his campaign:

    Today, even as he’s assembled a stable of experienced operatives and released a spate of policy proposals, the former Texas congressman is polling at 2 percent nationally in the latest Morning Consult survey. One Iowa poll released this week put him at 1 percent in the state. A fundraising machine in his Senate campaign last year, O’Rourke has dodged questions about his latest performance in the money race.

    Yet O’Rourke returned to Iowa this week in seemingly high spirits, campaigning alongside his wife and young children as they toured the state in an RV. The candidate has been expanding his organization at his Texas headquarters and in early primary states. And his advisers and supporters insisted they aren’t worried: The race is nothing if not fluid, they said, and O’Rourke has the political talent to catch fire.

    He’s merely resting! Beautiful plumage on the Texas Beto…

  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Tim Ryan’s Uphill Battle with 2020 Fundraising, Second Round of Debates.” No Q2 numbers yet.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. The network boosting Kamala Harris says that Sanders campaign is in trouble:

    While much of the attention in post-debate polling has focused on the drop of former Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders’ polling looks far worse. Sanders’ Iowa and national polls are quite weak for someone with near universal name recognition.

    Sanders was at just 14% in CNN’s latest national poll. That’s down from 18% in our last poll. As important, Sanders is now running behind California Sen. Kamala Harris (17%) and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (15%). These are candidates who have lower name recognition than he does.

    It’s not just the CNN poll, either. Sanders doesn’t look much better in Quinnipiac’s latest poll, which puts him at 13%. A poll released Wednesday morning by ABC News and The Washington Post did have somewhat better news for him, putting him at 19%, second behind Biden, among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Still, an average of the three polls out this week puts him at 15%.

    History has not been kind to primary runner-ups of previous primaries polling this low of a position. I went back and looked at where 13 previous runner-ups since 1972 have been polling at this point in the primary. All six who went on to win the nomination were polling above Sanders’ 15%.

    Vast swathes of the Democratic Media Complex never forgave Sanders for interrupting Hillary’s coronation and relish the chance to start writing his political obituary. “Bernie Sanders didn’t give a definitive answer on sex work vs. sex trafficking.” Truly we live in stupid times. Profile of Sanders surrogate campaigner and Cleveland politico Nina Turner.

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a five minute Bloomberg video interview. As he yammers about the Green New Deal he displays all the raw political charisma of Michael Dukkakis.
  • Addition: Billionaire Tom Steyer: Getting In? So says The Atlantic:

    Billionaire investor Tom Steyer, who in the last decade has been both the top Democratic donor in the country and the prime engine for pushing for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, appears ready to become Democratic candidate number 26. Last week in San Francisco, Steyer told staffers at two progressive organizations he funds, Need to Impeach and NextGen America, that he is launching a 2020 campaign, and that he plans to make the formal announcement this Tuesday.

    Steyer certainly has the money to self-fund, but does he have the personality or know-how to win the nomination? My guess is no, but we’ll find out. I actually like him wasting money on his own candidacy than showering money on other candidates in down-ballot races who might actually know what to do with it.

    Does his focus on impeachment drag the field leftward? Well, it’s not like there was a lot of Democratic Presidential candidates firmly opposed to impeachment. The biggest winner may be Trump, who seems to thrive on confrontation. (Upgrade over Out of the Running.)

  • Update: California Representative Eric Swalwell: Dropping Out. Twitter. Facebook. Word is that Swalwell is dropping out of the Presidential race to run for reelection to congress instead. 1 PM Pacific Time conference, so it will be after I post this. Update: He’s Out.(Downgrade from In.)
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Sacremento Bee interview. Here’s a Chicago Tribune piece that says she’s pandering the black women in the right way. Color me skeptical that she’ll make any inroads there with Harris and Booker in the race. Speaking of unlikely: “Elizabeth Warren, Economic Nationalist. She’s no social conservative. But on economics, it isn’t so difficult to imagine her on a Republican debate stage.” Despite vaguely pro-American rehetoric, there’s nothing enticing about her concrete policy proposals, including a new Department of Economic Development and subsidies for American manufacturers. Hard pass on both.
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She and Yang have made it into the next Democratic debates. 10 wild facts about Marianne Williamson, including that she spent the 1970s enjoying “bad boys and good dope.” Vogue did a photoshoot of five female Democratic Presidential contenders…and left Williamson out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He got an interview on The View. He also got an interview with The Concord Monitor, where he talked about the automation menace. “This has been ongoing for a number of years and it’s only now going to accelerate. So if someone were to come and say, ‘Hey, we should stop the automation,’ it is essentially impossible to do so.”
  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • 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.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Removed from the master list for this update.
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • 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
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Democratic Clown Car Update for July 1, 2019

    Monday, July 1st, 2019

    Post-debate analysis, Biden is down a little, Harris is up a little, Buttigieg banks big Benjamins, Yang rises, and Williamson beams love into the cosmos. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update! And it’s absolutely packed to the gills this time.

    Debate Roundup
    Lots of reactions to the first two debates:

  • Jim Geraghty thinks Biden has a glass jaw:

    The headline out of tonight’s debate is going to be Kamala Harris starting off the second hour by turning to Joe Biden and just kicking the snot out of him on the previously long-forgotten issue of forced busing in Delaware. No older white male wants to get into a fight about racism with a younger African-American woman in a Democratic presidential primary. Biden tried to defend himself by first contrasting his work as a defense attorney with Harris’ record as a prosecutor, then moved on to a not terribly convincing, “I did not oppose busing in America; I opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education,” and then he cut himself off. Septuagenarians who have been in the Senate longer than I’ve been alive should probably avoid the term “my time is up.” Biden would have been better off defending his stance on the merits, declaring that busing kids across town to new schools away from their homes was angering parents and exacerbating racial tensions instead of healing them.

    One night won’t sink the Joe Biden campaign, but boy, did he look like he had a glass jaw, and he also seems to have aged a decade since he left the vice presidency. When asked what his first priority as president would be, Biden answered that it would be defeating Donald Trump.

    Snip.

    It’s a shame Andrew Yang couldn’t be there tonight. . . . Oh, he was on stage? I must have blinked too many times. The man with a million ideas literally got three minutes over two hours to pitch his ideas. This is an egregious mismanagement of the debate by MSNBC, and the Yang Gang has every right to be livid over this.

    I wonder if non-Republicans felt about Donald Trump in 2016 the way I, and it seems quite a few other conservatives, feel about Marianne Williamson. Marianne, you beautiful lunatic. Every time you spoke, I didn’t know whether you were going to do a rain dance, cast a hex, or hold a seance. On those rare moments you got a chance to talk, I leaned forward because I had no idea what kind of absolute insanity was going to come out of your mouth. It was as riveting as a hostage situation. She contends American have chronic illnesses because of “chemical policies,” she wonders where the rest of the field has been for decades (er, in public office), and her first call will be to the prime minister of New Zealand, and she wants to harness the power of love for political purposes. In many ways, she is exactly the candidate that today’s Democratic party deserves.

  • The debates were the first chance voters got to look at the latest crop of Democratic presidential contenders, and they didn’t like what they saw.

    Voters see most of the Democratic presidential candidates as more liberal than they are and rate their agenda as outside the mainstream.

    A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 25% of Likely U.S. Voters consider most of the announced candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to be about the same as they are in political terms. Fifty-four percent (54%) say most of these candidates are more liberal than they are, while only 13% think they are more conservative.

    Wait, health care for illegal aliens, eliminating private insurance and taxpayer subsidized abortions for trannies aren’t popular with the American public? Who knew?

  • Andrew Sullivan points out how deeply disconnected the Democrats on the debate stage are on border control with the rest of the country:

    Immigration and Customs Enforcement forcibly removed 256,086 people in 2018, 57 percent of whom had committed crimes since they arrived in the U.S. So that’s an annual removal rate of 2 percent of the total undocumented population of around 12 million. That means that for 98 percent of undocumented aliens, in any given year, no consequences will follow for crossing the border without papers. At the debates this week, many Democratic candidates argued that the 43 percent of deportees who had no criminal record in America should not have been expelled at all and been put instead on a path to citizenship. So that would reduce the annual removal rate of illegal immigrants to a little more than 1 percent per year. In terms of enforcement of the immigration laws, this is a joke. It renders the distinction between a citizen and a noncitizen close to meaningless.

    None of this reality was allowed to intervene in the Democratic debates this week. At one point, one moderator tellingly spoke about Obama’s record of deporting “3 million Americans.” In that bubble, there were no negatives to mass immigration at all, and no concern for existing American citizens’ interests in not having their wages suppressed through this competition. There was no concession that child separation and “metering” at the border to slow the crush were both innovated by Obama, trying to manage an overwhelmed system. Candidates vied with each other to speak in Spanish. Every single one proposed amnesty for all those currently undocumented in the U.S., except for criminals. Every single one opposes a wall. There was unanimous support for providing undocumented immigrants immediately with free health care. There was no admission that Congress needed to tighten asylum law. There was no concern that the Flores decision had massively incentivized bringing children to game the system, leaving so many vulnerable to untold horrors on a journey no child should ever be forced to make.

    What emerged was their core message to the world: Get here without papers and you’ll receive humane treatment while you’re processed, you’ll never be detained, you’ll get work permits immediately, and you’ll have access to publicly funded health care and a path to citizenship if you don’t commit a crime. This amounts to an open invitation to anyone on the planet to just show up and cross the border. The worst that can happen is you get denied asylum by a judge, in which case you can just disappear and there’s a 1 percent chance that you’ll be caught in a given year. Who wouldn’t take those odds?

    This is in a new century when the U.S. is trying to absorb the largest wave of new immigrants in our entire history, and when the percentage of the population that is foreign-born is also near a historic peak. It is also a time when mass immigration from the developing world has destabilized liberal democracies across the West, is bringing illiberal, anti-immigration regimes to power across Europe, and was the single biggest reason why Donald Trump is president.

    I’m told that, as a legal immigrant, I’m shutting the door behind me now that I’ve finally made it to citizenship. I’m not. I favor solid continuing legal immigration, but also a reduction in numbers and a new focus on skills in an economy where unskilled labor is increasingly a path to nowhere. It is not strange that legal immigrants — who have often spent years and thousands of dollars to play by the rules — might be opposed to others’ jumping the line. It is not strange that a hefty proportion of Latino legal immigrants oppose illegal immigration — they are often the most directly affected by new, illegal competition, which drives down their wages.

    I’m told that I’m a white supremacist for believing in borders, nation-states, and a reduction in legal immigration to slow the pace of this country’s demographic revolution. But I support this because I want a more successful integration and Americanization of immigrants, a better future for skilled immigrants, and I want to weaken the populist and indeed racist movements that have taken the West by storm in the past few years. It’s because I loathe white supremacy that I favor moderation in this area.

    When I’m told only white racists favor restrictionism, I note how the Mexican people are more opposed to illegal immigration than Americans: In a new poll, 61.5 percent of Mexicans oppose the entry of undocumented migrants, period; 44 percent believe that Mexico should remove any undocumented alien immediately. Are Mexicans now white supremacists too? That hostility to illegal immigration may even explain why Trump’s threat to put tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t crack down may well have worked. Since Trump’s bluster, the numbers have measurably declined — and the crackdown is popular in Mexico. I can also note that most countries outside Western Europe have strict immigration control and feel no need to apologize for it. Are the Japanese and Chinese “white supremacists”? Please. Do they want to sustain their own culture and national identity? Sure. Is that now the equivalent of the KKK?

    The Democrats’ good ideas need to be put in contact with this bigger question if they are to win wider support. In the U.S. in the 21st century, should anyone who enters without papers and doesn’t commit a crime be given a path to citizenship? Should all adversely affected by climate change be offered a path to citizenship if they make it to the border? Should every human living in violent, crime-ridden neighborhoods or countries be granted asylum in America? Is there any limiting principle at all?

    I suspect that the Democrats’ new position — everyone in the world can become an American if they walk over the border and never commit a crime — is political suicide. I think the courts’ expansion of the meaning of asylum would strike most Americans as excessively broad. I think many Americans will have watched these debates on immigration and concluded that the Democrats want more immigration, not less, that they support an effective amnesty of 12 million undocumented aliens as part of loosening border enforcement and weakening criteria for citizenship. And the viewers will have realized that their simple beliefs that borders should be enforced and that immigration needs to slow down a bit are viewed by Democrats as unthinkable bigotry.

    Advantage Trump.

    What Sullivan can’t say is that activists in the Democratic Party, including almost all of the 2020 Presidential candidates, do want more illegal aliens crossing the border, as they view every single one of them as a likely Democratic voter, either illegally or though amnesty.

  • Geraghty says we’re seeing the emergence of the post-Obama Democratic Party:

    The first question of last night’s debate, asked by Savannah Guthrie to Elizabeth Warren, was a good one: “You have many plans — free college, free child care, government health care, cancellation of student debt, new taxes, new regulations, the breakup of major corporations. But this comes at a time when 71 percent of Americans say the economy is doing well, including 60 percent of Democrats. What do you say to those who worry this kind of significant change could be risky to the economy?”

    Warren answered that the public is wrong to feel that satisfaction with the economy, that the economy is only “doing great for a thinner and thinner slice at the top.” Apparently, those 71 percent of Americans have all been hypnotized or something.

    A more honest answer would be that the Democratic party is interested in a drastic overhaul of the economy because of two factors relating to the outcome of the 2016 election.

    First, the departure of Barack Obama from office means it is safer for Democrats to openly discuss how his presidency disappointed them. Think back to how much wild optimism surrounded Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency in 2007-2008. Think of Oprah declaring that he was “the one.” Think of the massive crowds chanting, “O-ba-ma!” Think of the downright messianic coverage of Obama. Many Democrats genuinely believed that Obama’s election would usher in a golden age.

    Different Democrats will give Obama different grades, but many would acknowledge that on some level they were disappointed by the outcome of his presidency — if for no other reason, the gradual decimation of the Democratic party at the local, state, and national levels from 2009 to 2016. George Soros called Barack Obama “my greatest disappointment.”

    Matt Stoller contends Obama was far too cozy with big corporations and backed bailouts. The Affordable Care Act turned out to be a much more mixed bag than Democrats expected. As Michael Brendan Dougherty observed, last night ten Democrats discussed health care at length and never mentioned Obamacare.

    Obama’s inability to deliver what Democrats truly wanted — and Democrats’ unwillingness to reexamine whether their expectations are realistic — leaves them wanting bigger, bolder changes. If the stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank didn’t do it, then the only thing that will is having the federal government cover the costs of every major expenditure in Americans’ lives — health care, college education, child care, etcetera.

    He also says that Republicans’ inability to even pretend to care about deficits has emboldened Democrats to ask for everything as though they had infinite money.

  • Positive and negative impressions of the candidates following the debates. Biden’s negatives went up and his positives went down…but his positives are still higher than Harris (though now ever-so-slightly behind Sanders).
  • Politico says that, following he debates, the primary is now wide open, because that’s the sort of headline political reporters always want to right after the first debate. I suspect pundits are overstating the case to how badly Biden has been bloodied or Sanders surpassed by the hard-left female candidate they favor.
  • Video roundup from The Five:

  • Senator John Kennedy (the living Republican from Louisiana, not the dead Democrat from Massachusetts), said the Democratic debates were a clear win for Castro. Fidel, that is. “I know many of the candidates running, but I felt like I was listening to folks who were Castro without the beard, or Cuba without the sun.”
  • See Saturday’s piece on the post-debate Twitter Primary update.
  • Polls

  • Morning Consult: Biden 33, Sanders 19, Harris 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2, Yang 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Moulton 1, Ryan 1. That’s good news for Harris and Yang, bad news for Biden (down 5, but still the frontrunner), O’Rourke and Castro.
  • Gravis (Maine primary): Biden 27, Warren 17, Sanders 15, Uncertain 11, Buttigieg 8, Yang 5, Ryan 4, Booker 3, Williamson 3, “Bennett” 2, Harris 2, O’Rourke 1, Swalwell 1, Gillibrand 1. Seems Maine likes Massachusetts liberals more than Vermont socialists. Of course, Maine used to be part of Massachusetts before becoming a state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when [long, tedious historical digression excised].

    (From here on down pre-debate polls)

  • Economist/YouGov: Biden 24, Warren 18, Sanders 15, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, Gabbard 3, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Moulton 1, Yang 1. That’s the highest I’ve seen Gabbard.
  • Emerson: Biden 34, Sanders 27, Warren 14, Harris 7, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, Gillibrand 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1, Inslee 1, Gravel 1. That’s as high as I’ve ever seen Sanders, but it’s pre-debate and a small sample size (457).
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets: Harris and Warren are now up over Biden.
  • Fundraising
    Lots of candidates claimed they got a bump off their debate performances, and we finally have our first Q2 number:

  • Buttigieg says he raised nearly $25 million in Q2. That is a huge, impressive haul for someone that’s not even in the top three, much less a frontrunner. That’s just under where Sanders was in a two-man race in Q2 2015. This suggests that a lot of big money donors are disastisfied with both Biden and his primary hard-left opponents. Buttigieg is in until Iowa and probably beyond.
  • Harris says she raised $2 million following the debates.
  • Castro sees strongest fundraising day post-Democratic debate.” “Over Wednesday and Thursday, the campaign raised 3,266 percent more money than it had the previous two days, according to the statement.” Absent a baseline, this jump if sort of meaningless. Maybe he pulled in all of $20 the previous two days…
  • “Inslee’s campaign said in a press release it enjoyed a record number of donations in a 24-hour period following his appearance in the debate Wednesday night, though it did not specify how much it had actually raised.” Sensing a pattern here.
  • Booker’s campaign said he had the second best donation day since his campaign launch. And that would be? Doesn’t say.
  • “Dem debates spark fundraising gusher for breakout stars. The Democratic digital fundraising platform ActBlue raised $6.9 million on Thursday alone — the party’s biggest day in more than two months.” Are there individual candidate numbers? There are not.
  • Finally some numbers here, though a lot of it is rumors, guesswork and speculation.

    Warren has built up one of the biggest campaign operations of any candidate, rapidly hiring experienced staffers in early primary and caucus states. In the first three months of 2019 alone, she spent nearly $1.9 million of the $6 million she raised to hire and retain more than 160 people.

    Since then, that number has swelled upward of 200 and she’ll need to show that she’s raising the money to keep her operation going. Still, her campaign finances have been bolstered in part by a $10.4 million transfer from her Senate campaign committee, and her growing political support bodes well for her second-quarter haul.

    Snip.

    So far, all signs point to a massive second-quarter haul for Biden. He’s devoted a substantial portion of his time to attending high-dollar fundraisers in traditional donor hubs such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

    He hinted earlier this month that he had raised nearly $20 million up to that point, and some prominent donors expect him to report as much as $25 million this quarter.

    Two weeks ago that might have looked impressive, but now the frontrunner merely tieing Mayor Pete is not going to get it done.

  • Pundits, etc.

  • “This One New Poll of Democrats Explains Why Donald Trump Will Be Reelected. Just 25 percent of Democratic voters want a candidate promising a “bold, new agenda,” which is exactly what party and media elites will cram down their throats.”

    One of the questions asked Democratic voters whether they will vote for a candidate with a “bold, new agenda” or one “who will provide steady, reliable leadership.” Fully three-quarters of respondents want the latter, with just 25 percent interested in the sort of “bold, new agenda” that virtually all Democratic candidates are peddling so far. This finding is consistent with other polling that shows that Democratic voters are far more moderate than their candidates. Even allowing for a doubling of self-described Democrats who identify as liberal over the past dozen years, Gallup found last year that 54 percent of Democrats support a party that is “more moderate” while just 41 percent want one that is “more liberal.”

    Yet with the exception of Joe Biden (more on him in a minute), all of the Democratic candidates—certainly the leading ones—are pushing a massively expansionist agenda, thus putting themselves at odds with their own base. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All would cost $37 trillion in new spending over a decade and his free-college plan would cost the federal government about $47 billion a year. He plans to spend much, much more, as does Elizabeth Warren, who is running on promises to spend $3.3 trillion over a decade in new giveaways that will be paid for by an unworkable, probably unconstitutional “wealth tax” that will at best raise $2.75 trillion.

  • “How the Democrats Could Blow the Election Over Health Care.” Notable for being from lefty Daily Beast, not notable in that it’s a “Members Only” story, so I guess I’ll never know how “these positions stand to lose the Democrats votes. Lots of votes.” Though I think I have an idea…
  • All those big Democratic plans? Fugitaboutit. “The Democrats have no plan for ‘Cocaine Mitch.'”
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s evidently highly in demand as a speaker and consultant. But: “Does the Stacey Abrams method — a charismatic figure painstakingly courting disadvantaged and often-ignored voters — really work for anyone besides Stacey Abrams?”

    In the end, Abrams came within fewer than 60,000 votes of becoming the first black woman to lead Georgia, or any other state for that matter, in a much better showing than the usual 200,000-vote loss for Democrats in Georgia. Republicans say a loss is still a loss; they call her complaints of voter suppression sour grapes, and the notion that she represents some brilliant new Democratic future a fantasy.

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Didn’t recognize his own quote when asked about it at his debate. “Oh, that sounded like me.” Here’s a New York Times profile of him, but given his current campaign trajectory, I can’t recommend wasting a free NYT click on it or wrestling with their ad blocker blocker over it. “Can Michael Bennet Climb Out of the Second Tier at the Democratic Debates?”

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ann Althouse thinks that Biden came off the better of his exchange with Harris.

    To me, it was clearly Biden. I didn’t like Harris’s attack on Biden when I was experiencing it emotionally, watching TV late at night, and I don’t like it now, as I examine the transcript this morning. She yelled at him, and she would have won if he had broken down and just yelled at her or if he’d gotten confused and said something wrong. But he made sense, and though I could see on TV that he was aggravated by the attack, on the page, he’s completely lucid. He gets his points in and the points are sound. That’s all I need him to do. I am not won over by Harris’s “That little girl was me” pathos or her prosecutorial aggression. But maybe a lot of people think she won the night. It didn’t work on me. I woke up this morning with an okay, it’s Biden feeling.

    The Washington Post wants you to know that Joe Biden is filthy stinking rich:

    The Georgian-style home — from the front a brick version of the White House — once belonged to Alexander Haig, the former secretary of state. Nestled on a wooded lot in McLean, the nearly 12,000-square-foot residence has five bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, marble fireplaces, a gym and a sauna.

    “Surrounded by Washington elite and sitting high above the Potomac River, there is an undeniable grandeur in the design of this home,” said the British-accented agent in a video released when it went on the market in 2015. “This property makes an imposing statement with parking for over 20 cars and creates a perfect setting for the most lavish of events.

    “This may have already been the residence to a very important person,” he continued. “But I suspect it will be home to many more.”

    It is currently home to Joe Biden. He and his wife, Jill, rented it after leaving the vice presidential quarters at the Naval Observatory in 2017. The house had been purchased for $4.25 million in June 2016 by Mark Ein, a wealthy venture capitalist who lives next door.

    Biden points out on the presidential campaign trail that he was often the poorest member of the U.S. Senate and, for at least a decade, has referred to himself as “Middle Class Joe.” But since leaving office he has enjoyed an explosion of wealth, making millions of dollars largely from book deals and speaking fees for as much as $200,000 per speech, public documents show.

    Snip.

    Since leaving the vice presidency, Biden has rented the McLean home and purchased a $2.7 million, 4,800-square-foot vacation house near the water in Rehoboth Beach, Del., to go along with his primary residence, the nearly 7,000-square-foot lakeside home he built more than two decades ago in Wilmington, Del.

    Let he who has never owned two 4,000 square foot homes and rented a third cast the first stone. Also:

    Biden released his tax returns in the past but has not done so since 2016, his last year as vice president. He has vowed to release the current ones as part of this campaign. A financial disclosure required of presidential candidates would have provided the first window into the financial boost he has received since leaving the vice presidency. The deadline for that document was set for last month, but Biden filed for an extension until July 9.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who also notes that Biden’s speech riders obligate hosts to serve him the exact same Italian meal every time: “angel hair pomodoro, a caprese salad, topped off with raspberry sorbet with biscotti.”) This is an interesting look state of the Democratic Party that Biden participated in the 1970s. “By the 1970s, opposition to ‘busing’ was strongest in Democratic strongholds, cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Baltimore — as well as Biden’s own Delaware.” Lindsey Graham: “Underestimate Joe Biden at your own peril.” Also says about Harris: “She is very talented, she’s very smart, and she’ll be a force to be reckoned with.” He’s not necessarily wrong with either assessment…

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Booker wants Biden to confess his racial sins. It’s an interesting approach for someone polling at 2%, which is even less than Biden was polling at going into the 2008 Iowa caucuses. A guy down in that range is usually thinking about possibly being a VP pick than taking down the frontrunner. Similarly unusual is his white knighting for Harris. Usually you’re attacking the candidate in your “lane.”
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Since he wasn’t in the debates, he visited New Hampshire and Iowa. He did pick up the endorsement of a Democratic County Chair in Iowa; Story is the seventh largest county in Iowa, so it’s not chicken feed, but such endorsements rarely move the needle. He appeared on Colbert. The skit isn’t funny, but Bullock actually got to make his pitch, so, eh. “Eh” is pretty much all Colbert tops out at these days…
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. His Q2 fundraising numbers are late-breaking news, so no reactions yet. South Bends’ police union isn’t happy with him, so he has one more thing in common with Bill de Blasio. Hugh Hewett thinks Buttigieg and Harris were the winners of their debate. “Both displayed an almost effortless eloquence and command of rhetorical devices. They did not need gimmicks and appeared completely unrehearsed. They connected.” Though I take his “Biden is doomed” take with several grains of salt. Rich Lowry had a lot less rosy assessment of Buttigieg’s chances:

    The elite media fell in love with Buttigieg, not just because he’s genuinely talented, but because he’s the type of candidate — young, earnest, credentialed, progressive but with a self-image as an ideologically moderate pragmatist — it always falls in love with.

    It is attracted to the idea of an intellectual as a presidential candidate. This doesn’t literally mean someone with deep intellectual interests or genuine accomplishments — think the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan — but an impressive academic résumé, a copy of The New Yorker on the nightstand and true verbal acuity.

    In this sense, Pete Buttigieg is the new Barack Obama, except with limits that will likely keep him from reaching the next level in the 2020 nomination contest and even if he did, would make him perhaps the weakest plausible prospective Democratic general-election candidate.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Castro is barnstroming through Texas bragging about his debate performance: “‘A few months ago they were writing me up as the other Texan,’ the former San Antonio mayor told supporters at a rally in Austin on Friday night. ‘But that’s no more. I am the Texan in this race.'” Honestly, neither his nor O’Rourke ‘s chances look particularly bright right now. Castro also did the same white knighting of Harris that Booker did. Maybe they all got the same memo…
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Nothing says “political SUPERgenius” quite like quoting Che Guevara in Miami. He also came out for “Medicare for all” paying for “gender reassignment surgery.” I’m sure “Taxdollars for Trannies” will play super-well in helping Democrats win back states in the Midwest. But this piece suggests his entire purpose in running is to push the Democratic Party to the left. They hardly needed any help.
  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Delaney debate meme roundup. Twitter roundup of same, including:

    Reason praised his health care plan:

    His plan would be a catastrophic insurance package that would cover only major, high-cost medical expenses. Everyone under the age of 65 would be enrolled, with individuals given the ability to opt-out and use a tax credit to purchase their own insurance. Those enrolled in the program would be free to purchase supplemental insurance, either individually or through their employers. His proposal calls for the new insurance system to absorb both Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies.

    Since his plan doesn’t socialize medicine nearly enough for Democratic activists, expect him to continue getting ignored.

  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She was the most searched candidate after the first debates. “Could Tulsi Gabbard represent the biggest threat to Trump in 2020?” Given that the activist base hate her, I’m going with “No.” She appeared on Bill Maher.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Behold the latest entry in the “why isn’t she doing better” thumbsucker genre:

    When she represented her upstate congressional district 10 years ago, Gillibrand had an “A” rating from the NRA and was against protections for sanctuary cities. She quickly changed those positions to jibe with her downstate constituents, a move that got her plenty of critique as disingenuous. That rapid evolution is part of what makes her 2020 campaign trail mix of progressivism and professed moderate appeal so interesting — it’s high-risk moderation, given that Gillibrand has already been labeled pliable to the whims of the electorate at any given moment.

    (For “interesting” I’d probably substitute a phrase like “nakedly political” or “lacking moral principle.”) “‘I honestly think that Sen. Gillibrand is closer to Kirsten Gillibrand the human being than the congresswoman was,’ David Paterson, the former governor of New York who appointed Gillibrand to her Senate seat told me.” Oh, that makes it all better! “Of course you have to lie to those gun-toting upstate rubes from JesusLand! She’s really one of us.” Gillibrand is all in on abortion (just in case you were unclear on that), including wanting to repeal the partial-birth abortion ban, but her own campaign is so moribund I doubt it makes it to the third trimester…

  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mike Gravel is the anti Joe Biden, by which I guess they mean he’ll never be a Presidential frontrunner. He spends a good deal of the interview yammering on about a “Legislature of the People,” which is some sort of direct democracy scheme that would require a constitutional amendment. It takes a certain kind of mind to come up with a proposal even less likely to be enacted than “Medicare for all” or the “Green New Deal”…
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Of all the many, many, many potential issues Harris could attack Biden over, possibly the most inexplicable is forced busing.

    1) It is unconstitutional and bad policy to assign students to public schools on the basis of their skin color.

    2) This means that Jim Crow segregation was unconstitutional and bad policy; it also means that racial balancing of schools (which I have no doubt is now supported to one degree or another by all the Democratic presidential candidates, including both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) is unconstitutional and bad policy.

    It wasn’t just unconstitutional, it was widely hated by the school districts it was inflicted on. Forced busing tore communities apart, engendered white flight, threatened the integrity of public school systems, and shifted suburban voters sharply towards the Republican Party. Biden was right when he called forced busing inherently racist.

    The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school,” he said in the same interview. “That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with. What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”

    Despite Harris’ claims, huge numbers of parents opposed forced busing for reasons other than racism:

    The implication is that all those “working-class Democrats” in Delaware who demanded that Biden take a firm stand against busing were racists, and so were all the other parents across the country who objected to a policy that forced their kids, because of their skin color, to take long bus rides to unfamiliar neighborhoods in the name of racial equality. Yet according to a 1978 RAND Corporation study of the demographic shifts spurred by mandatory busing, “racism does not explain white flight.” The study cited survey data indicating that most whites who opposed busing simply preferred schools in their neighborhood, mentioning “issues such as distance, loss of choice, lost time, and lost friends.” And “when asked about the benefits and harms of desegregation, a large majority of white parents believed it would improve neither minority education nor race relations, while it would increase discipline problems and racial tensions.” In other words, “most white parents believe they are being forced to give up something they value—the neighborhood school—in return for a policy that benefits no one and may even being harmful.”

    Most black parents took a different view, but that does not mean the white parents’ concerns were illegitimate or covers for racism. The RAND report noted that “the vast majority of whites accept desegregated schools when brought about by voluntary methods but reject them when their children are mandatorily bused or reassigned to schools outside their neighborhoods.” The study also cited data indicating that “whites with low racial prejudice scores were nearly as opposed to busing as persons with high prejudice.”

    As fundamentally dishonest as Harris’ busing attack may have been, her social justice warrior tactic may end up working because it might achieve a primary goal to help her nab the nomination: make Biden unacceptable to black voters, no matter how much collateral damage she inflicts on the Democratic Party (and the nation) in the process. Even Harris’ former paramour Willie Brown thinks she can’t beat Trump:

    The first Democratic debates proved one thing: We still don’t have a candidate who can beat Donald Trump.

    California Sen. Kamala Harris got all the attention for playing prosecutor in chief, but her case against former Vice President Joe Biden boiled down in some ways to a ringing call for forced school busing. It won’t be too hard for Trump to knock that one out of the park in 2020.

    Trump must have enjoyed every moment and every answer, because he now knows he’s looking at a bunch of potential rivals who are still not ready for prime time.

    Harris walks back eliminating private health insurance. “Kamala Harris Is An Oligarch’s Wet Dream.” This piece suggests her debate performance won her the California primary. I rather doubt it.

  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. John Hickenlooper vs. Socialism.

    Listening to Hickenlooper, it seemed to me that there was something else that bothered him about the socialist idea that he was not quite putting into words. He seemed drawn to projects in which people could take action on their own behalf, that existed at the human scale: the bottom-up economic plan, designed around what nurses and small-business owners wanted for their town. A brewpub that could revive a neighborhood; an ambitious light-rail project that helped connect Denver to its suburbs, which he had accomplished through diligent personal lobbying of suburban politicians; an apprenticeship program built through coöperation with Colorado’s business leaders, so that teen-agers who were not headed directly for college would graduate with “skills and a sense of direction.” What seemed to spook him about socialism was an implied passivity. “That rut of thinking that government’s going to solve all our problems,” he said. “I think, as long as we’re demonizing business, as long as we’re saying we have all the answers—the rest of you just wait while we provide you all the answers—I think we’re going to have problems.”

    Hickenlooper’s entire campaign summarized in one incident:

  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Democrats Still Don’t Know How to Talk About Climate Change.” Translation: Democrats still don’t know how to express their desire to destroy the economy to Americans voters and still get elected. He’s still demanding ice water in Hell.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Amy Klobuchar made a mark in the first Democratic debate, but was it enough?” A skidmark, perhaps. She went into the debate with zero momentum and went out the same way. Weirdly, her campaign’s popularity seemed to peak at the same time everyone was writing articles about how she abused her aides. “Amy Klobuchar owned Jay Inslee on abortion rights at the Democratic debate.” That’s like Kramer dominating his karate class.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mostly articles on him missing the debates. “Here’s Where 2020 Presidential Candidate Wayne Messam Stands on Cannabis.”

    Shortly after gaining office back in 2015, Messam spoke out in support of local legislation that would have seen small amounts of cannabis decriminalized in the county his jurisdiction resides in.

    “We have to ensure our city doesn’t become a place where lives are destroyed due to recreational possession of marijuana while providing real rehabilitation options that offer offenders resources to avoid a life of drug addiction and bad choices,” Messam said in a Facebook post.

    I think Hickenlooper and Inslee both missed the boat by not becoming notable pro-pot candidates. As governors of legal pot states, they could have made the case for legalization and generated buzz for their campaigns that has been sorely lacking. (“Heh heh heh. He said ‘buzz!'” “Shut up, Beavis!”)

  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another guy with a lot of “he missed the debates” articles. He visited a gay pride parade in New Hampshire. Given his lack of attention and funding, he could do a lot worse than an “All in on New Hampshire” strategy. At least he could drive to all the events…
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. A look behind the O’Rourke-castro tiff and Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. With the two now polling more evenly, the Texas porimary is now wide open. Vanity Fair wonders if Castro dealt him a fatal blow. Probably not, because his campaign was already stumbling lisstlessly down a trash-strewn alley. Believe it or not, O’Rourke actually came up with a novel idea: A small “war tax” on households where no one has ever done military service. Shades of Robert A. Heinlein! But I don’t see that idea gaining a lot of traction among Democrats. He and Castro had dueling Austin rallies.
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Tim Ryan says Democratic party is not connecting with working class.” What, you mean open borders, higher taxes and abortions for trannies aren’t knocking ’em dead? He and Gabbard got testy over Afghanistan.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Sanders thinks he won both debates. Of course he does. WSJ thinks Sanders “won” the debate by pushing Democrats to the left. “President Trump is a lucky man. Typically a re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent, and Mr. Trump is losing that race. But the Democrats are moving left so rapidly that they may let him turn 2020 into a choice between his policy record and the most extreme liberal agenda since 1972 (which may be unfair to George McGovern).” He came out against forced busing. Maybe the super secret social justice warrior plan to take over America is to push the Democrats so far to the left on race issues that Bernie Sanders looks like a voice of moderation by comparison. He and Warren’s student debt plans make no sense.
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an interview with The National Interest. His take on a possible war with Iran is presumably well-informed by his navy experience:

    With an intricate knowledge that rivals any of the other contenders, Joe Sestak described in detail the difficulties the United States would have if it used a military strike against Iran. “[I]t would take us weeks if not months to destroy it [their nuclear facilities] if we go full bore to do so. Because part of it…is buried under three hundred feet of rock, hard rock.”

    A war with Iran would imperil our strategic naval positioning in the area and force us out of the gulf. “We cannot survive in the Persian Gulf with our aircraft carriers. I know, I’ve operated there. There are about two places that we operate because the depth of water to do fight operations is the best right there. Our sonar doesn’t work there in the Persian Gulf and we cannot find their nineteen midget submarines at all. So, we will withdrawal our carrier groups out of the Strait of Hormuz before we even begin to think about striking and have to do it from a greater distance.” While the United States is flying air sorties and launching Tomahawk missiles on Iranian positions, they have the strength to return fire in kind. “[T]hey can rain hundreds of long-range missiles on Israel and our regional bases there.”

    How Sestak was illegally offered a job in the Obama Administration in return for dropping his primary challenge to turncoat Arlen Spector. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a smallish Washington Post profile, as befits his campaign’s stature. Gets a Polifact profile, which lists one endorsement (Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego), and that he’s known as “the Snapchat king of Congress.” Well, Anthony Weiner isn’t there anymore…
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. The media wanted to anoint Warren the winner of the first debate before it even happened. Naturally health insurers aren’t wild about Warren wanting to eliminate their industry. I know you’ll be shocked to know that Warren’s plans for American diplomacy involve hiring more people for the state department. Policy wonk loves Warren’s policy wonk campaign.
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a People profile: “Williamson was raised Jewish in Houston and still practices today. Her teachings and writing draw from multiple religious practices, sometimes referencing Jesus and Buddha, and the book that inspired her spirituality, A Course in Miracles, is heavily influenced by Christianity.” “Marianne Williamson is the Kanye West of the Democratic Party, a hard to reconcile mix of truth, depth and kookiness that can baffle and lead to as much harm as good.”

    A couple of weeks ago, I drank human blood and ate human flesh. It was an expression of my belief in a higher power. No one mocked me for living out my faith the way Christians do, and yet many others have been mocking Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson since Thursday night’s debate.

    I wasn’t stuck near the summit of Mt. Everest and forced to become a cannibal in a desperate attempt to survive. It was a voluntary act to acknowledge that I was “born again” and freed from my sins. I was in my Christian church in South Carolina during a normal Sunday service taking what we call communion, an exercise in which we drink a juice and eat a wafer that we are told to imagine are the literal blood and body of Jesus Christ.

    Snip.

    If you understood the faith, you’d understand the power and beauty of those beliefs, we argue. And yet, when it comes to Williamson’s new age spirituality, we don’t hesitate to think her strange — even if we haven’t taken the time to understand her. Those of faith should remember that we live in glass houses, that it’s as easy for others to deem us whackos as it is for us to condemn others to that kind of mockery.

    The debates produced lots of awesome tweets about Williamson:

    And here’s just an amazing series of Williamson tweets going back many years. A taste:

    It’s like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for the healing crystal set. “Republicans Donate To Marianne Williamson To Keep Her In Democratic Debates.” BattleSwarm commentor T Migratorious made an interesting point: “The other thing that set her apart from the rest of the candidates was her lack of anger. I sense that a lot of Democrats and many more swing voters are tired of the Dems constant rage and are willing to give someone who is calmer and kinder a second look.”

  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a New York Post piece by Mary Kay Linge that notes Yang gained over 100,000 Twitter followers after the debate, and even quotes Your Humble Blogger. Yang claims his mic was not on so he couldn’t jump in to other candidates answers. A better question is why anyone but the designated speaker’s mic was on during these exchanges. How about you let one person speak at a time and provide a level playing field rather than playing favorites? Calls for “human-centered capitalism“:

    In his book The War on Normal People, Yang defines human-centered capitalism as an update to or the next stage of classical capitalism. Contemporary American culture, Yang argues, imagines capitalism as a natural fit for the human condition, especially when compared to the centralized mechanisms of socialism. In turn, our culture tends to view the two as binary, almost Manichaean, opposites.

    But these cultural arguments often miss some important points, including: Capitalism is not natural, and Western societies have experimented with many economic systems; there has never been a pure, laissez-faire capitalist system; and our form of corporate capitalism is but one of many.

    So how do we know if laissez-faire capitalist works if we’ve never tried it? “Andrew Yang’s Proposals Aren’t As Popular In Silicon Valley As You Might Think.” (Actually, I’ve long thought he was regarded as a fringe candidate there as well.) “It’s expected that [Universal Basic Income] would cost more than $3 trillion annually. For perspective’s sake, the proposed federal budget for 2020 is $4.746 trillion.” And the idea that we’ll just “consolidate” a lot of existing programs down into UBI ignores the sad fact that welfare programs are historically harder to kill than Thanos. But Yang did offer this:

    (Hat tip: Twitchy.)

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • 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.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Removed from the master list for this update.
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • 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
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Scenes From The Illegal Alien Flood

    Monday, July 14th, 2014

    You’ve got to hand it to the Obama Administration: They’ve taken an issue (a flood of illegal aliens) that was most heavily impacting the border states, and found a way to piss off pretty much the entire nation.

    As Senator Jeff Sessions noted: “The crisis on our border is the direct and predictable result of President Obama’s sustained effort to undermine America’s immigration laws. As the president’s previous director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), John Sandweg recently acknowledged: “if you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.” Enforcement has collapsed.” Sessions further notes that Obama’s $3.7 billion request does not ask for enhanced deportation authority.

    The leftist ideologues who form the core of the administration evidently never gave up their love of forced busing, since they seem to want to forcibly bus illegal aliens into every state (or perhaps fly them to Alaska and Hawaii).

    They’re certainly pissing off people in Arizona, as well as elsewhere. “Federal officials have been dumping illegal immigrants in places like Arizona, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Illinois without telling state and local officials beforehand and then demanding the states use their limited resources to care for the illegal immigrants.”

    Even Obama’s fellow Democrats in Texas are saying he should visit the border. Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke “added that he has been surprised by the anger he has heard toward the immigrants from many of his El Paso constituents, who “feel like we can’t take care of everyone, and these children and their families are gaming the system.’”

    And if Hispanic constituents in heavily Democratic El Paso are pissed off, how do you think people in other parts of the country feel about illegal aliens being force bused into their neighborhoods?

    And Obama has done absolutely nothing to complete the construction of the already authorized 700 miles of border fence. Despite the fact that where border fences have been completed, illegal alien crossings are down 95%.

    But doing that might keep out the illegal alien felons Obama so seems to love. Like the Mexican national who had already been deported four times being charged with molesting a 9-year old. Evidently molesting our children is one of those jobs Americans won’t do…

    And Americans know who is to blame for the problem: “Nearly half of U.S. voters believe the Obama administration has prompted the flood of illegal immigrant children at the border, and most want them sent back home right away.”

    If this is a scheme to panic Republicans into passing illegal alien amnesty, it seems to have backfired spectacularly.

    No wonder Democrats are nervous. 2014 is shaping up an awful lot like 2010, if not worse…

    No, The Illegal Alien Surge Is Not Obama’s Katrina

    Tuesday, July 8th, 2014

    USA Today reporter Susan Page wonders why, despite the surge of illegal aliens across our border, Obama would continue to attend lavish fundraisers rather than visit the border, calling the decision “Obama’s Katrina moment.” (Even Democratic Texas congressman Henry Cuellar expressed the same concern.)

    This comparison is deeply unfair.

    To George W. Bush.

    After all, Bush didn’t:

  • Invite the hurricane in by promising to make it a citizen.
  • Turn a blind eye while criminal cartels smuggled Katrina into New Orleans.
  • Demand FEMA employees stop pumping out flood water.
  • Prevent a U.S. congressman from Louisiana from visiting a refugee camp in his own state.
  • Schedule fundraisers in Dallas, Little Rock and Memphis, then insist on attending them and refusing to tour devastated New Orleans because it cut into his important golf schedule.
  • Katrina was a natural disaster. The illegal alien surge is a crisis of Obama’s own making for refusing to enforce existing border control laws and dangling a Dream Act amnesty to lure illegal alien children to cross the border.