Posts Tagged ‘Jim Geraghty’

Hamas’ Hospital Hideout

Tuesday, November 14th, 2023

Turns out Hamas was always doing what Israel and opponents of jihad terror accused them of doing: Operating out of hospitals to avoid being bombed (in violation of international law). I was already going to write about this when I saw that Jim Geraghty had already done the heavy lifting.

What would you like Israel to do about the Hamas operations under the Al-Shifa hospital complex and other hospitals in the Gaza Strip?

A lot of those currently demanding a cease-fire would likely answer, “Leave those operations alone.” That’s a good way to ensure that the threat of Hamas continues. This is the same dynamic as the proposal to deploy U.S. Naval hospital ships off the coast of the Gaza Strip to treat Palestinian children discussed yesterday. Anytime you declare, “Israel will not strike in this spot,” Hamas will move its forces and its equipment to that spot.

The decision before Israel is to either attack the Hamas targets underneath hospitals while attempting to avoid civilian casualties, or to leave the Hamas operations intact. Attack, and you run the risk of higher Palestinian civilian casualties, even greater outrage on the world stage, and even more propaganda victories for Hamas, painting the Israelis as cruel monsters. Hold back, and Hamas gets to keep more of its men and arms safely in place to fight another day and plot more massacres.

For those who wonder if Hamas really does operate underneath the Al-Shifa hospital, here’s an account from Taghreed El-Khodary and Ethan Bronner of the New York Times, back in 2008:

At Shifa Hospital on Monday, armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roved the halls. Asked their function, they said they were providing security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.

In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late twenties asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Hajoj was carried out of his room by young men pretending to transfer him to another hospital section. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head. A bit of brain emerged on the other side of his skull.

Hajoj, like five others who were killed at the hospital in this way in the previous 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges, and when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.

Another account from El-Khodary in 2009 described a young Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighter demanding he be treated first, ahead of civilians, even if their injuries were more severe:

A car arrived with more patients. One was a 21-year-old man with shrapnel in his left leg who demanded quick treatment. He turned out to be a militant with Islamic Jihad. He was smiling a big smile.

“Hurry, I must get back so I can keep fighting,” he told the doctors.

He was told that there were more serious cases than his, that he needed to wait. But he insisted. “We are fighting the Israelis,” he said. “When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.” He continued smiling.

“Why are you so happy?” this reporter asked. “Look around you.”

A girl who looked about 18 screamed as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded looked around helplessly. A man lay with parts of his brain coming out. His family wailed at his side.

“Don’t you see that these people are hurting?” the militant was asked.

“But I am from the people, too,” he said, his smile incandescent. “They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”

Like everything else in the Gaza Strip, it appears that the hospital’s operations were intertwined with Hamas — a deliberate strategic choice to make the line between military operations and innocent civilians as blurry as possible.

So the left has known that Hamas was committing war crimes for decades, but was willing to ignore it in service of the holy cause of slaughtering Jews.

Here’s an Israeli soldier narrating what they found in a Gaza hospital, namely weapons and a prepared area for hostages.

Speaking of Al-Shifa hospital, there’s quite a lot of military activity happening there right now:

There should be no cease in Israeli operations until they’ve finished the tasking of killing or capturing every Hamas terrorist they can lay their hands on.

LinkSwarm for November 7, 2022

Monday, November 7th, 2022

Greetings, and welcome to a special Election Eve Monday LinkSwarm! My Internet is back up, and tomorrow night I will be liveblogging the election returns starting around 7 PM.


  • A red tsunami?

    For the past week or so, my back-of-the-envelope math envisioned a GOP House majority somewhere between 229 and 241, and I’m sticking to that. Give the Republicans the 212 seats in Cook Political Report, with two-thirds of the 35 races in the toss-up category, and you end up with 235 Republicans and 200 Democrats, so put those down as my final prediction numbers.

    Snip.

    With Bolduc, Laxalt, and Johnson winning, I come out to a 51–48 GOP advantage by the end of the week, with Walker and Warnock headed to a runoff. It wouldn’t shock me if Oz or Masters or both won, giving Republicans a 53- or 54-seat majority.

  • “Dem Strategist Admits Her Party ‘Did Not Listen to Voters’ and Will Lose Midterms.”

    On Sunday, Hilary Rosen, a longtime Democratic strategist, predicted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that her party will have a bad night on Tuesday because they did not listen to voters.

    “I’m a loyal Democrat, but I am not happy. I just think we did not listen to voters in this election, and I think we are going to have a bad night,” she said.

    She faulted the Democratic Party for ignoring voters’ concerns about the economy, and implored them to “stop talking about democracy being at stake.”

    “When voters tell you over and over and over again that they care mostly about the economy, listen to them,” she said. “Stop talking about democracy being at stake. Democracy is at stake because people are fighting so much about what elections mean. Voters have told us what they wanted to hear. I don’t think Democrats have delivered this cycle.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • Republican senators release more details of Hunter Biden’s suspicious finances.

    Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson gave the federal prosecutor probing Hunter Biden a little nudge Wednesday — sending him more than 200 pages of bank records showing millions in transactions between the first son’s companies and Communist Chinese-tied entities.

    Snip.

    The senators’ analysis of banking records, first reported by Fox News, finds that between August 2017 and October 2018, $6 million was transferred to a company allegedly set up by Hunter Biden called Hudson West III, $5 million came from Northern International Capital, a [Chinese energy compan] CEFC affiliate, and $1 million was transferred from CEFC itself.

    From the pool of cash, $4.8 million was transferred from Hudson West III to other Biden companies, such as Owasco P.C. and Owasco LLC, and to a company associated with President Biden’s brother James, the Lion Hall Group.

    The bank records also show that Hunter Biden and his aunt and uncle, Sara and James Biden, went on a “spending spree,” in the senators words, after Hudson West III received the millions in payments from CEFC, through a line of credit that was opened.

    “We are also providing bank records showing that credit cards were collateralized by a $99,000 preauthorized withdrawal from Hudson West III,” Grassley and Johnson write, noting that the money was spent for airfare, at Apple stores, hotels, and restaurants, as they detailed back in 2020.

    Grassley and Johnson also mention two $3 million wire transfers sent to Robinson Walker LLC, another Hunter Biden-associated company; and by State Energy HK Limited, another CEFC affiliate, saying the purpose of those transfers “is unclear.” The Post reported on those mysterious transactions back in 2020.

    The senators also make reference to JiaQi Bao, Hunter Biden’s Chinese secretary, who reportedly pushed for “Uncle Joe” Biden to run for president and has been linked to the Chinese government. The bank transactions included in Grassley and Johnson’s letter show that Hunter Biden made payments to Bao totaling $29,795.84 after Hudson West III received the $6 million from the Chinese firms.

    Some names and entities will be familiar to BattleSwarm readers, but other bits are new.

  • Big ballot-havesting operation busted in Orlando, Florida.”

    Ballot harvesting, according to the California Democrats who’d like to take it national, is an innocent practice where union members and activists, some of them illegally present in the country, do voters the favor, see, of helping voters fill out their ballots and then collecting those ballots for them so that they need never go to the polls. They call it “a new service.” It’s part of their “make every vote count” agenda, and who could be against that?

    But out in Florida, where there’s still some semblance of objectivity, investigators found another story.

    According to the Washington Times:

    JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Florida’s newly created Office of Election Crimes and Security is requesting a criminal investigation into charges of ballot harvesting in Orlando, a Democratic stronghold in the critical swing state.

    Cynthia Harris, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for District 6 commissioner in Orange County, which includes Orlando, provided a sworn complaint to the election crimes office, alleging left-leaning organizations have been perpetrating a scheme to encourage residents in black neighborhoods to apply for mail-in ballots and to fill out those ballots, which she said have been collected by paid canvassers, and sometimes altered, all in violation of state law.

    In an interview with The Washington Times, Ms. Harris said she has video evidence of paid ballot harvesters operating in Orlando neighborhoods in both 2014 and 2017, and that the scheme has been going on for decades, continuing through the 2020 election and the 2022 primary.

    If voting fraud is this massive in Florida, how widespread and massive is it in states controlled by Democrats? (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • “Pennsylvania Supreme Court Orders Undated, Wrongly Dated Ballots To Not Be Counted…siding with national and state Republican groups in a lawsuit filed just over two weeks ago.”
  • “GOP Reps Go Public After Uncovering What Biden Gave to Soros-Backed Group.”

    Two members of Congress from Texas and one former Trump administration official who now serves in the Texas House of Representatives are asking for answers from the Biden administration after discovering that an open borders group funded by George Soros received millions of dollars in federal grant money last year.

    Alianza Americas, a nonprofit that says it is “committed to a human rights agenda for all people, with an emphasis on the inclusion and support of Latin American immigrant communities, and people on the move in Latin America,” received $7.5 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February 2021, according to the Washington Examiner, and then another $1 million from the Health Resources and Services administration in July.

    Both organizations fall under President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services organization, and both grants were to fund COVID relief and vaccination efforts.

    The group has also received nearly $1.4 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation from 2016 through 2020.

    Federal law prohibits government grant money from being spent on lobbying, but Alianza Americas may have violated that prohibition in its activities as a “political advocacy group,” according to a letter from former HHS Chief of Staff Brian Harrison.

  • Chicago teacher’s unions want to pass an Illinois state constitutional amendment that would basically let them run the state.

    If approved by Illinois voters in November, Amendment 1 will give government teachers’ unions an unfettered constitutional right to demand not just anything in their interests, but in what they see as the interests of every Illinoisan. The amendment is not limited to employee matters at the workplace.

    Don’t take my word for that. Look at the first sentence of the argument in favor of it as written in the official summary as published by the Illinois Secretary of State: “This amendment will protect workers’ and others’ safety.” [Emphasis added.]

    hat particular sentence is just about safety, but it shows the broad interpretation of the amendment beyond the workplace that government unions will assert. The language of the amendment itself supports that broad interpretation, and will extend to anybody’s “economic welfare,” which is pretty much everything.

    What will government unions, especially radical teachers’ unions, demand with that new constitutional right?

    The Chicago Teachers Union has long been quite open about its purpose. It sees itself as the vanguard of a national movement, led by unions like itself, that is textbook Marxism.

    That purpose is well documented. It goes beyond the radical curriculum they teach in schools and encompasses an entire rearrangement of how America works.

    Among the first things we wrote about on this site, ten years ago, was the role of the CTU and other teachers’ unions at a Marxism conference held that year:

    The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond” between Socialism and teachers’ unions according to reports, and Chicago teachers were on the stage. Chicago Teachers Union [then] VP Jesse Sharkey spoke at one breakout session. Becca Barnes, a Chicago Teachers Union teacher and organizer with Chicago Socialists, proclaimed at the beginning of the conference that “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike….”

    Since then, militant radicalism has become still more firmly embedded in the CTU. That history is well documented – quite proudly by radicals themselves. The International Socialist Review, for example, lays out a good history of the CTU, saying the CTU “transcended a simple labor dispute and was transformed into a social movement, with the teachers fusing their struggle with that of the community they serve…joining in the Occupy Chicago movement that pointed out the root of societal problems—social and economic inequality.”

  • Shockingly, those who suffer the most from spiking urban crime hate defunding the police.

    A poll that shows ridiculously low support from black voters for defunding the police should be the final nail in the coffin for Democrats’ anti-law and order campaign of the last seven years.

    TheGrio.com commissioned a poll, along with the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that 82% of black respondents want police funding either to be kept about the same (48%) or increased (34%). Only 17% wanted it decreased.

    It’s just like Kari Lake said in a recent confrontation with a reporter. If you go into most black neighborhoods and talk about defunding the police, they’ll look at you “like you’re the craziest person on the planet.” But it’s one thing for a white, conservative Republican to say it — it’s far more important to hear black respondents in a poll confirm it overwhelmingly.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Things that make you go “hmmmm“: “San Francisco DA Won’t Release Police Bodycam Video, 911 Calls From Paul Pelosi Attack.”
  • Great line in the middle of this Ben Shapiro election roundup video: “Andrew Cuomo came to kill all the old people and grab ass, and he ran out of old people.”
  • Twitter Is Still Censoring Conservatives.”
  • Remember all those stories of how bad it sucked for workers in Foxconn’s iPhone factory? It’s worse now.

    Hundreds and perhaps thousands of workers fled a Chinese manufacturing complex that accounts for 85% of iPhone assembly capacity. The mass migration, which began this weekend, called into question that country’s COVID-control measures and, more broadly, its reliability as a part of global supply chains.

    “Something snapped over the weekend,” Bloomberg News reports. Employees suddenly fled the Zhengzhou plant of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., better known as Foxconn. Videos show, in what is now called the “Foxconn Great Escape” or the “iPhone Long March,” workers scrambling over high chain fences at the plant, known as “iPhone City.”

    To avoid detection, workers traveled through cropland by day. At night, they took to the roads. “Some people were walking amid wheat fields with their luggage, blankets, and quilts,” said a poster on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform. “I couldn’t help but feel sad.”

    Residents of neighboring areas rallied, for instance leaving water and provisions in the open on roadsides. Social media postings reported signs such as “For Foxconn workers returning home.”

    Truckers also pitched in. Risking criminal prosecution, they took workers in pick-up, dump, and flatbed trucks. One video shows a woman standing on the back of a big tank truck speeding down a highway in the rain.

    Workers fled Foxconn’s “closed loop” system, which isolated the plant from the rest of society. Inside the loop, the company went to great lengths to stop COVID. As a disease-control measure, it had ended canteen service on October 19, forcing workers to eat boxed food in dormitory-style sleeping quarters. Food was reportedly scarce, and conditions in the dorms rapidly deteriorated. On Sunday, Foxconn announced it would resume cafeteria dining.

  • Democrats want a “covid amnesty” so moms won’t destroy them at the ballot box.

    The political establishment—left and right—want desperately to move on, to pretend the last 30 months didn’t happen. With very few exceptions (Ron DeSantis, Kirsti Noem, Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Ron Johnson, and a few others, later), they betrayed their core values. Many Republicans and so-called Libertarians quickly capitulated the primacy and importance of individual liberties. Whereas supposedly equality-loving democrats embraced policies that in no uncertain terms screwed women, children and the poor. The 2020 democrat campaign slogan might as well have been “protect the rich, infect the poor.” Or “only the rich need to learn.” They’d all very much like that you forget about that. They’d like to go back to the fights they know how to fight, the golden oldies that turn the bases out, and turn us against each other. But COVID policies turned the whole thing on its side, jumbling us all up and resulting in all sorts of hitherto unheard of alliances. And when your business is maintaining the status quo, that is very dangerous.

    Which is why Emily Oster is pleading for an amnesty.

    First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. The damage done by these policies is at its beginning, not its end. Dr. Oster, would like women to believe that it was all just a mistake, a mis-understanding, and remember that it is the Republicans who are looking to limit the freedoms that really count. That while democrats had no problem sacrificing the well-being of our living children for three years in support political power, it is Republicans that pose the real threat.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Blue city blues: “Nearly 20% Of Seattle Shootings Happened Near Homeless Encampments.”
  • Man who used to get all his information on conservatives from the mainstream media realizes he’d been lied to.

  • Questions that shouldn’t even have to be asked: “Should Schools Notify Parents if Their Child Claims to Be Transgender?”

    Wendell Perez received a call from the elementary school that would alarm any parent. School officials told him that his 12-year-old daughter had attempted suicide in the school’s bathroom. He was told it was because she wanted to be a boy, with a male name and pronouns.

    Wendell couldn’t believe it. At home, his daughter hadn’t shown any signs of gender dysphoria or discomfort in being a girl. The Perez family is Catholic, and they raised their children with a biblical and scientific understanding of biological sex.

    But when Wendell and his wife Maria arrived at the school, they found out that school officials had been having confidential meetings with their daughter and discussing her discomfort with her gender. Wendell and Maria found out that teachers and staff at school had begun treating their daughter as a boy at school without their consent or knowledge. Wendell was told by staff that they didn’t share information about his daughter’s “transition” with him or his wife because of “confidentiality issues.”

    Whatever happened to in loco parentis? Or does that just not apply when there are radical transexual activists to mollify?

  • When it comes to school boards shoving radical transexism down students throats, it doesn’t just happen in big cities.

    When the school called his 14-year-old son to the principal’s office for refusing to say a female student was a boy, Matthew Duncan decided he’d had enough.

    When the school called his 14-year-old son to the principal’s office for refusing to say a female student was a boy, Matthew Duncan decided he’d had enough.

    “There was never a push towards dominance and control like it is now,” said Duncan. “You can’t voice your opinion.”

    In response, many families in Grants Pass have withdrawn their children from public school, enrolling them in private school or starting to homeschool, Grants Pass teachers, school administrators and parents told The Epoch Times.

  • Meanwhile, in a civilized state: “Florida Bans Puberty Blockers and Transgender Surgery for Minors.”
  • “Campaign Aide Threatens to ‘Punch You’ for Not Voting for Beto O’Rourke.”
  • Also, an O’Rourke rally too close to a voting location violated Texas law.
  • Still more Beto: “New poll shows Abbott gaining six points in eight weeks, 53/40.”
  • “More California companies moving headquarters out-of-state than ever before.” Texas once again tops the list of destination states, followed by Tennessee, Nevada, Florida and Arizona.
  • Life imitates Grosse Point Blank: “Man shot dead in NYC while bicycling to shoot someone else.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Democrat Nominee In Arkansas Arrested For Felony Terroristic Threatening. Law enforcement officials in the state of Arkansas arrested Diamond Arnold-Johnson, the Democrat nominee for Arkansas auditor, on Friday for first-degree terroristic threats.” Bonus:

    Arnold-Johnson’s husband was on trial in August for allegedly posting terroristic threats on Facebook, police said. During the trial, Arnold-Johnson, 32, admitted that she, not her husband, posted the threatening messages on Facebook that led to the criminal charges, KATV reported.

    A warrant was served for Arnold-Johnson’s arrest on October 13, but she refused to comply and a SWAT team was dispatched to resolve the matter.

    However, police made the decision to cancel using the SWAT team to force compliance from Arnold-Johnson in an apparent attempt to not risk an explosive situation happening right before an election.

  • The counterpoint to quiet quitting: Quiet firing.
  • I’m not much for baseball, but did want to note that the Astros won the World Series, and threw only the second No-Hitter in World Series history.”
  • Guy Who Decided To Ban The Babylon Bee Wondering If He Might Be In Hot Water.”
  • “Citizens Being Able To Vote The Ruling Party Out Of Power Is The End Of Democracy.”

    I cannot believe democracy is about to die in America, again.

    After years of living under a dictatorship, America rose from the ashes. Democrats took control of the Presidency, the House, the Senate, the university system, Big Tech, the entertainment industry, and major corporations – and thereby defeated fascism by seizing every major lever of power in the nation. With one-party rule established, and all of our critics silenced, democracy was once again free to flourish.

    Now, our dear democracy is under attack – by America holding a so-called “election” and allowing idiots to vote. Let us be clear about what the stakes are: if a single person I disagree with is elected in a free and fair election, democracy will be DEAD. If citizens have the power to simply vote the ruling party out of power – when I really like the current ruling party – all is lost.

  • “Galactic Empire Requests Amnesty For Anyone Who May Have Gotten Carried Away And Blown Up A Planet.”
  • Surf’s up:

  • Russo-Ukrainian War Update for February 27, 2022

    Sunday, February 27th, 2022

    The Russian offensive in Ukraine continues to bog down against stiff resistance, Putin puts his nukes on alert, a rumor of peace talks, momentum to suspend some Russian banks from SWIFT builds, and a whole lot of aid from the rest of the world is pouring into Ukraine.

  • Russia evidently didn’t expect the fierce resistance they received in Ukraine:

    Russia invaded Ukraine from three sides on Wednesday night Eastern time, and as of now, early afternoon Saturday, the Russian army has yet to seize any Ukrainian cities.

    This morning, a senior defense official at the Pentagon briefed reporters and declared, “We continue to believe, based on what we have observed that this resistance is greater than what the Russians expected and we have indications that the Russians are increasingly frustrated by their lack of momentum over the last 24 hours particularly in the north parts of Ukraine… As of this morning we have no indication still that the Russian military has taken control over any cities. As of this morning we still believe that Russia has yet to achieve air superiority. Ukrainian air defenses including aircraft do continue to be operable and continue to engage and deny access to Russian aircraft in places over the country.”

    There is an intriguing but unverified claim from Ukrainian intelligence that Putin is furious, that he expected a quick surrender from Kiev, and that the invading Russian forces weren’t equipped for a long war – and that after ten days, the Russian forces will face serious problems with supply lines, fuel, equipment, ammunition, etc. Maybe this is just Ukrainian propaganda, meant to keep up morale for the next week or so. But there are some intriguing anecdotes of Ukrainians hitting Russian supply columns and videos of Russian tanks running out of fuel. (It turns out supply chain problems are just everywhere these days!)

    Sending in armored columns without dedicated infantry, artillery and air support is a big risk, big reward move. Patton did it successfully in the race across France in 1944, but he had air superiority, a friendly population, and the greatest war machine ever assembled in the history of mankind up to that time backing him, and even he had to halt when he outran his supply lines.

    Putin’s initial goal, the Russian reabsorption of Ukraine or the transformation of it into a lackey state of a renewed Russian empire, is now probably impossible. Any Russian-backed Ukrainian puppet government is likely to be vehemently rejected by the Ukrainian people. Russian forces will find it difficult to go out on patrol when every citizen’s got a rifle and every grandma on every street corner is handing them sunflower seeds, telling them they are going to be fertilizer soon.

    Russia may take large chunks of Ukraine, but they will have an exceptionally difficult time keeping it.

  • Why the Russians are struggling:

    The last three days of combat should put a serious dent in the reputation of this new Russian army. We should, however, try to understand why the Russians are struggling. First, the Russian army’s recent structural reforms do not appear to have been sufficient to the task at hand. Second, at the tactical and operational level, the Russians are failing to get the most out of their manpower and materiel advantage.

    There has been much talk over the last ten years about the Russian army’s modernization and professionalization. After suffering severe neglect in the ’90s, during Russia’s post-Soviet financial crisis, the army began to reorganize and modernize with the strengthening of the Russian economy under Putin. First the army got smaller, at least compared to the Soviet Red Army, which allowed a higher per-soldier funding ratio than in previous eras. The Russians spent vast sums of money to modernize and improve their equipment and kit — everything from new models of main battle tanks to, in 2013, ordering Russian troopers to finally retire the traditional portyanki foot wraps and switch to socks.

    But the Russians have also gone the wrong direction in some areas. In 2008, the Russian government cut the conscription term from 24 to twelve months. As Gil Barndollar, a former U.S. Marine infantry officer, wrote in 2020:

    Russia currently fields an active-duty military of just under 1 million men. Of this force, approximately 260,000 are conscripts and 410,000 are contract soldiers (kontraktniki). The shortened 12-month conscript term provides at most five months of utilization time for these servicemen. Conscripts remain about a quarter of the force even in elite commando (spetsnaz) units.

    As anyone who has served in the military will tell you, twelve months is barely enough time to become proficient at simply being a rifleman. It’s nowhere near enough time for the average soldier to learn the skills required to be an effective small-unit leader.

    Yes, the Russians have indeed made efforts to professionalize the officer and the NCO corps. Of course, non-commissioned officers (NCOs) have historically been a weakness of the Russian system. In the West, NCOs are the professional, experienced backbone of an army. They are expected to be experts in their military speciality (armor, mortars, infantry, logistics, etc.) and can thus be effective small-unit commanders at the squad and section level, as well as advisers to the commanders at the platoon and company level. In short, a Western army pairs a young infantry lieutenant with a grizzled staff sergeant; a U.S. Marine Corps company commander, usually a captain, will be paired with a gunnery sergeant and a first sergeant. The officer still holds the moral and legal authority and responsibility for his command — but he would be foolish to not listen to the advice and opinion of the unit’s senior NCOs.

    The Russian army, in practice, does not operate like this. A high proportion of the soldiers wearing NCO stripes in the modern Russian army are little more than senior conscripts near the end of their term of service. In recent years, the Russians have established a dedicated NCO academy and cut the number of officers in the army in an effort to put more resources into improving the NCO corps, but the changes have not been enough to solve the army’s leadership deficit.

    Now, let’s talk about the Russian failures at the operational and tactical level.

    It should be emphasized again that the Russian army, through sheer weight of men and materiel, is still likely to win this war. But it’s becoming more and more apparent that the Russians’ operational and tactical choices have not made that task easy on themselves.

    First, to many observers, it’s simply shocking that the Russians have not been able to establish complete air superiority over Ukrainian air space. After three days of hostilities, Ukrainian pilots are still taking to the skies and Ukrainian anti-air batteries are still exacting a toll on Russian aircraft. The fact that the Russians have not been able to mount a dominant Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) campaign and yet are insistent on attempting contested air-assault operations is, simply put, astounding. It’s also been extremely costly for the Russians.

    To compound that problem, the Russians have undertaken operations on multiple avenues of advance, which, at least in the early stages of this campaign, are not able to mutually support each other. Until they get much closer to the capital, the Russian units moving north out of Crimea are not able to help the Russian armored columns advancing on Kyiv. The troops pushing towards Kyiv from Belarus aren’t able to affect the Ukrainians defending the Donbas in the east. As the Russians move deeper into Ukraine, this can and will change, but it unquestionably made the opening stages of their operations more difficult.

    Third, the Russians — possibly out of hubris — do not appear to have prepared the logistical train necessary to keep some of their units in action for an extended period of time. Multiple videos have emerged of Russian columns out of gas and stuck on Ukrainian roads.

    The classic saying is “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics” (attributed to Marines Corps commander Gen. Robert H. Barrow, but I suspect the general sentiment is much older). An army runs on its stomach, and a modern mechanized army runs on its gas tank, and something has clearly gone wrong in with Russian logistical support for this war.

  • Russia seemed to have expected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to fold. He hasn’t.

    America offered to evacuate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy replied, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

    Zelenskyy’s reply was reminiscent of past heroes in times of war: Gen. Anthony McAuliffe who replied in “NUTS” in response to the German demand for surrender at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944; and the Texans striving for independence from dictator Santa Anna’s Mexico with their “Come and Take it Flag,” which was itself appropriated from Spartan King Leonidas and his response the Persian surrender demand at the Battle of Thermopylae.

    This bravery, in a day when modern communications allow all Ukrainians and the world to see it, has rallied Ukrainians to defend their nation. And now that the fighting has gone on for three days, what might that mean?

    Russian President Putin is said to have assembled 200,000 troops for the invasion. It is estimated that half of them have been committed so far. Further, Putin has called on 10,000 battle-hardened Chechen mercenaries. More than half of Russian forces are likely committed to the battle of Kyiv.

    Ukraine has 245,000 active-duty members, but most are in the east, facing the Russian-led and equipped militia in the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine also has another 220,000 reservists. Many of these are spread across the nation slightly larger than the state of Texas.

    The strategic target is Kyiv and its independent government. To move the reservists to the fight, they must contend with Russian air superiority, slowing their march. More importantly, given this struggle for national survival, 7,000,000 men of military age and fit for military service are taking up arms. Every day, many more older men — and many Ukrainian women — are also being issued weapons, making Molotov cocktails, and joining the fight.

    The ongoing Ukrainian mobilization means that the Russian military will soon be outnumbered most everywhere on the battlefield. The Ukrainians may not have the same level of modern equipment — missiles, jets, helicopter — but they have numbers and will power. And, the Russians need to eat, they need fuel, and ammunition — their resupply trucks must get through. They won’t, not in large enough numbers; everyday Ukrainians will see to that.

  • General update from late yesterday:

    Russian forces’ main axes of advance in the last 24 hours focused on Kyiv, northeastern Ukraine, and southern Ukraine. Russian airborne and special forces troops are engaged in urban warfare in northwestern Kyiv, but Russian mechanized forces are not yet in the capital. Russian forces from Crimea have changed their primary axes of advance from a presumed drive toward Odesa to focus on pushing north toward Zaporizhie and the southeastern bend of the Dnipro River and east along the Azov Sea coast toward Mariupol. These advances risk cutting off the large concentrations of Ukrainian forces still defending the former line of contact between unoccupied Ukraine and occupied Donbas. Ukrainian leaders may soon face the painful decision of ordering the withdrawal of those forces and the ceding of more of eastern Ukraine or allowing much of Ukraine’s uncommitted conventional combat power to be encircled and destroyed. There are no indications as yet of whether the Ukrainian government is considering this decision point.

    Ukrainian resistance remains remarkably effective and Russian operations especially on the Kyiv axis have been poorly coordinated and executed, leading to significant Russian failures on that axis and at Kharkiv. Russian forces remain much larger and more capable than Ukraine’s conventional military, however, and Russian advances in southern Ukraine may threaten to unhinge the defense of Kyiv and northeastern Ukraine if they continue unchecked.

    Key Takeaways

    • Russia has failed to encircle and isolate Kyiv with the combination of mechanized and airborne attacks as it had clearly planned to do. Russian forces are now engaging in more straightforward mechanized drives into the capital along a narrow front along the west bank of the Dnipro River and toward Kyiv from a broad front to the northeast.
    • Russian forces have temporarily abandoned failed efforts to seize Chernihiv and Kharkiv to the northeast and east of Kyiv and are bypassing those cities to continue their drive on Kyiv. Russian attacks against both cities appear to have been poorly designed and executed and to have encountered more determined and effective Ukrainian resistance than they expected.
    • Russian movements in eastern Ukraine remain primarily focused on pinning the large concentration of Ukrainian conventional forces arrayed along the former line of contact in the east, likely to prevent them from interfering with Russian drives on Kyiv and to facilitate their encirclement and destruction.
    • Russian forces coming north from Crimea halted their drive westward toward Odesa, and Ukrainian forces have retaken the critical city of Kherson. Some Russian troops remain west of the Dnipro River and are advancing on Mikolayiv, but the main axes of advance have shifted to the north and east toward Zaporizhie and Mariupol respectively.
    • Russian forces have taken the critical city of Berdyansk from the west, threatening to encircle Mariupol even as Russian forces based in occupied Donbas attack Mariupol from the east, likely to pin defenders in the city as they are encircled.
    • Russian successes in southern Ukraine are the most dangerous and threaten to unhinge Ukraine’s successful defenses and rearguard actions to the north and northeast.
    • Russian troops are facing growing morale and logistics issues, predictable consequences of the poor planning, coordination, and execution of attacks along Ukraine’s northern border.

    Here’s a Livemap snapshot of the conflict:

    It appears that the various armored column incursions were secondary to or distractions from the attempted paratroop-powered decapitation strike to be launched from Antonov International Airport. When that went awry (as airborne assaults often do; see the SNAFU that was Operation Market Garden in World War II), there appeared to be no coherent backup plan.

    Indeed, the entire operation seems to have been hastily planned and executed, which is odd, since Ukraine has obviously been much on Putin’s mind since 2014.

  • Here’s a Twitter thread showing destroyed Russian (and occasionally Ukrainian) vehicles and equipment.
  • Here’s another one reportedly from Bucha, just north of Kiev:

  • From the same thread:

    This is not the way competent troops act in hostile urban environments. It’s like the Russian army forgot all they learned from getting their asses kicked in the First Battle of Grozny, where driving ill-supported mechanized columns filled with untrained conscripts into the city resulted in horrible losses for the Russians.

    The Kiev assault seems even less thought out, and their opponents appear much better equipped and trained than the Chechens were.

  • On the other hand, here’s a report that Kiev is surrounded. I’d take that with several grains of salt.
  • Putin puts Russian nuclear forces on alert. The idea that Putin would actually contemplate nuclear war with the west because his own ill-conceived and badly-executed invasion of Ukraine has gone off the rails is hardly credible. Russia would be annihilated.

    “As you can see, not only do Western countries take unfriendly measures against our country in the economic dimension – I mean the illegal sanctions that everyone knows about very well – but also the top officials of leading NATO countries allow themselves to make aggressive statements with regards to our country,” Putin said on state television.

    “Mommy, they’re saying bad things about me!” Those unfriendly measures would, of course, stop instantly if Putin were to withdraw his forces from the territory of other sovereign nations.

  • Here’s a video of Putin explaining himself:

    Does that look or sound like an all-powerful conqueror at the top of his game? No, that’s the tone and the body language of a guy trying to explain why he just fucked up. “We had no other choice!” Yeah, except, you know, not invading another country.

  • There are evidently plans for talks between Ukrainian and Russian delegations on the Ukraine border with Belarus. Don’t expect much. Zelenskyy: “I do not really believe in the result of this meeting, but let them try, so that no citizen of Ukraine would have any doubt that I, as president, did not try to stop the war when there was even a small chance.”
  • Ukraine says its been resupplied with air-to-air missiles.
  • The U.S. is sending $350 million in military aid. “The defense aid will include anti-armor, small arms and various munitions, and body armor and related equipment.” Let’s hope none of it disappears into the pockets of people connected to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee…
  • In a reversal of official policy, Germany is sending 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles to Ukraine, and also allowing countries that have bought German military equipment to reexport to Ukraine.
  • They’re also sending RPGS.
  • Speaking of reversing course, Germany has also done an about-face and is now in favor of removing some Russian banks from SWIFT. “The sanctions, agreed with the United States, France, Canada, Italy, Great Britain and the European Commission also include limiting the ability of Russia’s central bank to support the ruble.” I get the impression that the Eurocrats were hesitant to cut Russia off from SWIFT because they thought it would be a useless gesture. Now that Russia’s invasion has gone off the rails, they’re rethinking. The quick reverse also indicates how pissed they are at Russia right now.
  • Sweden will send military aid to Ukraine, including anti-tank weapons, helmets and body armour.”
  • Australia is sending money for lethal aid.
  • Even broke Greece is sending aid.
  • Europe has effectively closed its airspace to Russia:

  • “Viral tweet about Republican senators voting to deny Ukraine military aid is thoroughly debunked.”
  • We could be heroes, just for one day.

  • A final word: There are a few Twitter pundits suggesting that some sort of “wag the dog” scenario of a fake war might be unfolding in Ukraine. I don’t buy it. There’s too much real reporting from too many points in Ukraine for such an elaborate, two-part deception to be unfolding. Lots of weird things happen in warfare.

    I will say one thing: The manifest incompetence with which Russia has tried to carry out this assault suggests that Putin felt he had to launch it then due to some sort of time pressure or deadline, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe Putin has late stage cancer, or he felt Ukraine was about to join NATO, or a major Russian oilfield is about to run dry. Whatever it is, this war appears to be a panic move that’s gone very badly for Putin.

    LinkSwarm for February 4, 2022

    Friday, February 4th, 2022

    The Carter-era “misery index” (inflation + unemployment) is rising, Canada’s truckers are still honking, more Democratic sleazebag activity, the far left is coming for your kids, China continues to misbehave, and a tragic cheese display collapse shocks onlookers. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden continues to work his magic on the economy. Expected job numbers: +200,000. Actual job numbers: -300,000.

  • But! There are other stories stating that jobs numbers “beat” expectations. Why? Some super sketchy “seasonal” adjustments.

    Why the BLS is applying such a grotesque seasonal adjustment to it, is unclear (actually, if one assumes that the Biden admin tapped the BLS secretary on the shoulder, then it is very clear).

    It’s not just outside analysts who reach this conclusion: in Table C to its report, the BLS showed “December 2021-January 2022 changes in selected labor force measures, with adjustments for population control effects” and confirmed that if one had used an apples-to-apples basis for the January numbers, the number of Employed workers (from the Household Survey) would be down -272K. Instead, thanks to the population control effect adjustment of 1.471 million, the final number was 1.199 million!

    In summary, while the markets had been trading for months on fake data when the BLS failed to catch up to covid reality, and was applying stale seasonal adjustments, they are doing so again today, only in the opposite direction with the BLS now overextending itself in the opposite direction, with a January seasonal adjustment that has never been greater!

  • Inflation hit 5.8% in 2021, the most in 39 years. Pretty sure this year is going to be a lot worse.
  • How bad is inflation? Dwight sent over this link on an Austin restaurant shutting down that includes an eye-opening inflation tidbit. “He pointed out that a container of fryer oil that a year ago cost about $17 had risen to about $50.”
  • Canada’s freedom truckers seem to be making headway with regional governments, some of whom have promised to lift vaccine mandates, but asshole authoritarian Justin Trudeau is refusing to budge.
  • Video footage of a voting fraud mule making 53 trips among 20 ballot drop-boxes.
  • Regular BattleSwarm readers have already seen extensive evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis for Flu Manchu, but National Review‘s Jim Geraghty has a new piece along those lines.

    There are two naturally occurring viruses that are par­ticularly similar to SARS-CoV-2. The first is RaTG13, which shares 96.2 percent of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli. This virus was collected from bat feces in a copper-mine shaft in Tongguan, Mojiang, Yunnan Province, China, that was the site of a small-scale deadly viral infection with some curious similarities to Covid.

    In April 2012, six miners were assigned to clean bat guano from the mine shaft. Four miners had been working at the site for two weeks, and two had been working there for four days when they all grew ill with a cough and fever and experienced difficulty breathing, aching limbs, heavy and bloody mucus and saliva, and headaches — symptoms of a viral respiratory infection that are similar to the effects of Covid. All six miners were admitted to a Kunming hospital in late April and early May, and three died — one after two weeks, one after a month and a half, and one after three months. The other three survived.

    Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a prominent Chinese pulmonolo­gist whose high-profile role has been compared to that of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States, consulted on the cases of the miners. Recognizing that the virus afflicting the miners could be comparable to SARS, researchers sent blood samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for antibody testing.

    In 2012 and 2013, teams of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted a study of coronaviruses in bats in that abandoned mine shaft — and one of the samples they collected was RaTG13.

    The second virus that is particularly similar to SARS-CoV-2 is really a cluster of three similar viruses discovered in Laos in autumn 2021. A team led by Marc Eliot, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, collected saliva, feces, and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos and found three new viruses that were each more than 95 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103, and BANAL-236.

    Some skeptics of the lab-leak theory contend that the BANAL viruses proved that SARS-CoV-2 is likely a naturally occurring virus, and because Laos was roughly 1,000 miles from Wuhan, this pointed away from the notion that the Covid pandemic could be traced back to a leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other labs in the city. But there is ample reason to believe that viruses from Laos — perhaps not the BANAL trio, but similar ones — were also shipped from Laos to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    In 2010, Wildlife Trust, a nonprofit international conservation organization dedicated to protecting wildlife, announced it was rebranding itself under the name EcoHealth Alliance. The organization’s president, Peter Daszak, declared that his group had become “the central organization defining the intersection of local conservation and global health” and touted itself as being “on the forefront of informing the public, businesses, and the scientific community about emerging diseases, including potential pandemics.” It is safe to say that EcoHealth Alliance is one of the largest, best funded, and best connected nonprofits, focusing upon “field research and develop[ing] tools to save ecosystems and predict and prevent pandemics.”

    EcoHealth Alliance/illegal gain of function section snipped.

    We know for a fact that the people collecting samples do not always follow the necessary safety procedures. And the risk of accidental infection does not disappear once the viruses and bats are brought back to the laboratories.

    Lab accidents happen. The first argument against the lab-leak theory that can be safely dismissed is the notion that Chinese scientists were simply too careful or too diligent to ever let a virus escape their lab. Accidents occur even in the most well-trained and highly regarded research facilities in the world. In June 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that they had unintentionally exposed personnel to potentially viable anthrax. A month later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found samples of smallpox, dengue, and spotted fever just sitting in a storage room. A decade earlier, the Chinese CDC’s National Institute of Virology in southern Beijing had accidentally released SARS. Twice.

    In February 2019, Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, laid out a report in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists detailing that from 2009 to 2015, a federal program “received a total of 749 incident reports from select-agent research facilities,” including “1) needle sticks and other through the skin exposures from sharp objects, 2) dropped containers or spills/splashes of liquids containing pathogens, and 3) bites or scratches from infected animals.”

    China obviously places the same importance on lab safety as it puts into quality control. Lets pick it up where more CCP perfidy kicks in:

    Finally, there is the undeniably suspicious behavior of the Chinese government since the first cases were reported in Wuhan in December 2019. Until January 21, 2020, the Wuhan Regional Health Commission insisted that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found.” On January 4, 2020, former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield was incredulous during a phone call with his Chinese counterpart, George Gao. Redfield described asking his old friend Gao, “George, you don’t really believe that mother and father and daughter all got it from an animal at the same time, do ya?” Gao insisted there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. But Redfield recounted that two days later, Gao broke down during a call, “audibly and tearfully distraught after finding ‘a lot of cases’ in the community who had never visited the wet market.”

    In late January and early February, the Chinese government ordered all labs processing samples of the strange new virus to destroy them. On January 3, China’s National Health Commission ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them. The justification for this order was public safety, although it is hard to see the public-safety benefit in suppressing information about the disease.

    It took a year to get a World Health Organization investigative team into Wuhan, and when that team arrived, it encountered angry refusals to turn over raw data about the earliest cases. According to the New York Times, “disagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts among the typically mild-mannered scientists on both sides.” The Chinese government has refused to allow another team of investigators to enter Wuhan or the labs in the city. The Chinese government does not care if it looks guilty.

    A much-hyped U.S. intelligence-community investigation completed in August offered almost nothing useful, declaring, “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.” Ninety days of effort, with all the resources of the U.S. government, generated nothing new.

    To paraphrase Ebright, in the autumn of 2019, there were three institutions in the entire world that were doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats. One was in Galveston, Texas, one was in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the third was in Wuhan, China.

    In theory, the pandemic could have started with some random Chinese person who didn’t have any connection to the bat coronavirus research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan CDC. This person would have a spectacularly unlucky run-in with a bat or other animal, and that random Chinese person caught the exceptionally rare naturally occurring animal virus that infects, sickens, and spreads among human beings like wildfire. This same hyper-contagious bat virus would have the exceptionally unusual trait of being ex­tremely difficult to find in bats.

    This extraordinarily unlucky person would then travel to the metaphorical doorstep of one of the three labs in the world doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats and start infecting other people in the city of Wuhan. Under the natural-origin theory, the Wuhan laboratories just happen to be mind-bogglingly unlucky that events played out in a way that so closely mimics the consequences of a lab accident.

    That would be a remarkable series of coincidences.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Data point. “Younger, working-age people began dying in greater numbers as vaccine mandates hit.”
  • More data:

  • Cyber-attack China hack?
  • Also in China: The Genocide Olympics get underway.
  • “Youngkin Governs For Parents Who Say: Get Away From Our Kids, You Freaks.”

    Glenn Youngkin is governing Virginia according to the implicit campaign slogan that powered his victory: stop messing with our kids, you freaks! That’s the polite version, anyway. Other Republican officials should follow his lead and solidify the GOP as the party of parents.

    Youngkin ran as a conservative champion of normalcy, especially in schools. His campaign was assisted when his opponent declared parents should not have a say in what their children are taught, thereby confirming everything Youngkin was running on.

    Since being sworn in, Youngkin has banned school mask mandates, banned teaching racist ideas from sources such as critical race theory, and requested the new state attorney general, Jason Miyares, to investigate the apparent coverup by Loudoun County officials of a rape committed by a skirt-wearing boy in a girls’ bathroom. He has also started cleaning house in the bureaucracy.

    These measures have provoked pushback from the usual suspects. Left-wing teachers are now worried they’ll get in trouble for teaching the race essentialism derived from critical race theory. Some counties have defied the governor over school mask mandates, and are punishing students who choose not to wear them. But Youngkin is holding firm, knowing this is what he was elected to do.

    Across the nation, parents are in revolt against the Democrat-led educational establishment, and Republicans should eagerly join the fray. After all, it was the Democrat-loving teachers unions that fought to keep schools shut down long after we knew that children were at almost no risk from Covid-19. Likewise, it has mostly been Democrats and their allies forcing children to wear masks when school is open, even though (as a few on the left are finally admitting) masks are particularly harmful for children, while offering no real benefits.

    There are other indignities and cruelties, of course, from shutting down outdoor playgrounds to forcing schoolchildren to study or eat lunch outdoors in freezing temperatures. And these miseries have been inflicted long after any plausible ability to defend them as emergency measures, or to plead ignorance of the consequences. Under pressure from the teachers unions and education bureaucracy, Democrats have chosen to sacrifice the well-being of children. Even many liberals now want an alternative to the endless school shutdowns, masks, and other pandemic security theater.

  • Speaking of leftists trying to get their hands on your children: “BLM ‘Week of Action’ Teaching Students Nationwide to Affirm Transgenderism, Disrupt Nuclear Family.”

    Students across the country as young as kindergarten-age are learning that “everybody gets to choose their own gender” and are receiving kid-friendly lessons on disrupting “Western nuclear family dynamics” as part of this week’s national Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.

    The activist-driven curriculum for the Week of Action, which kicked off Monday, is based off the 13 “Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles.” Those principles include a commitment to restorative justice, being transgender affirming and queer affirming, creating space for black families that is “free from patriarchal practices,” and “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other.”

    Black Lives Matter at School offers kid-friendly versions of the 13 principles designed for elementary and middle-school students.

    The Week of Action also includes a list of four national demands: end zero-tolerance discipline policies; mandate black history and ethnic studies; hire more black teachers; and fund counselors, not cops, according to a “starter kit” on the Black Lives Matter at School website.

    In the starter kit, New York City kindergarten teacher Laleña Garcia, author of a children’s book about BLM principles, writes that while “discussing big ideas with little people” it is necessary to “consider age-appropriate language so that our students or children can grasp the concepts.” For example, she suggests not talking about police violence with “our youngest children.”

    When discussing BLM’s principle of being transgender affirming, Garcia offers the following kid-friendly language: “Everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to their own heart and mind. Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”

    When discussing the BLM principle of a “Black Village,” which includes the goal of disrupting the Western nuclear family structure, Garcia suggests teaching kids that “there are lots of different kinds of families; what makes a family is that it’s people who take care of each other; those people might be related, or maybe they choose to be a family together and to take care of each other. Sometimes, when it’s a lot of families together, it can be called a village.”

  • Speaking of Democratic policies endangering kids: Repeat child sex offender illegal alien arrested at the border.
  • Now Twitter is kicking off accounts critical of teacher’s unions. Check out The Chalkboard Review.
  • Even in San Francisco, the backlash against the Soros-backed-Democrat-DA crime wave has begun: “S.F. police will no longer cooperate with DA Boudin over police shooting investigations.”

    San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said he intends to sever an agreement with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office spelling out the D.A.’s lead role in investigating police use-of-force incidents, in-custody deaths and police shootings.

    The agreement was originally struck in 2019 following intense debate in San Francisco over the role the city’s police department should play in investigating its own officers following a rash of police shootings. Police and the District Attorney’s Office renewed the agreement last year.

  • Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker gave $300,000 in federal Flu Manchu relief funds to #BlackLivesMatter.
  • Speaking of which, there’s more crooked Pritzker shenanigans.

    The more we learn about the Jenny Thornley affair, the more it appears that senior members of the Pritzker administration, including potentially the governor and his wife, may have facilitated a fraud on the state by a now-indicted former campaign aide to enrich her and then obstructed efforts to bring her to justice.

    This is a tangled web, so stay with me as I set forth a timeline of events and characters, according to the Chicago Tribune.

    The former executive director of the Illinois State Police Merit Board, Jack Garcia, discovered evidence that one of the employees under his direction, Jenny Thornley, was stealing money from the people of the state

    Garcia is a well-known, skilled investigator who previously supervised the divisions of internal investigations and forensic services, before becoming the first deputy director of the Illinois State Police. Thornley was a campaign aide for Gov. J.B. Pritzker (her husband, Jared, was also a senior political appointee at the Illinois comptroller’s office) and close enough to Pritzker and his wife, M.K., that she had their personal telephone numbers.

    After assembling the evidence and building the case, Garcia scheduled meetings to fire Thornley and refer her for prosecution on the morning of Feb. 3, 2020. However, on the eve of that day, Thornley contacted (at least) the governor’s wife (pictured, at left) and asked her to intervene, alleging that Garcia had assaulted her sexually a week or so earlier.

    The governor’s chief counsel promptly called the merit board (which is an independent agency created “to remove political influence” from State Police hiring, promotion and discipline) to “advise” it to: (a) cancel her firing and the referral for prosecution, (b) suspend Garcia (the experienced investigator who uncovered the Thornley fraud) and (c) retain an outside counsel proposed by the governor’s office. The merit board went along, but also suspended Thornley, and Garcia voluntarily took and passed a lie detector test.

    Then Thornley sued to stop the investigation of her own claim of sexual harassment.

    The outside counsel, Christina Egan, nonetheless completed an investigation by July 2020 (at the cost of $500,000 paid by the people of Illinois), confirming the evidence Garcia assembled that Thornley had stolen money and committed forgery, and finding no evidence of Thornley’s sexual assault allegation. The State Police Merit Board then reinstated Garcia, fired Thornley, referred her for prosecution. She has now been indicted for theft and forgery.

    However, after Thornley was fired, someone with clout in the Pritzker administration somehow granted her disability payments reserved for people that are actually state employees. These payments (amounting to some $71,000) went on for more than a year, ending days before she was indicted for theft and fraud. These extensive payments were for “injuries” sustained from an “assault” that Egan determined had not occurred.

  • Speaking of Democratic family corruption: “Smoking gun documents tie Nancy Pelosi’s son to fraud and bribery scheme to remove permit violations against squalid San Francisco flop house owned by his ex-girlfriend and probed by the FBI.”
  • Speaking of Pelosi corruption:

  • Speaking of crooked Democratic governors, Washington state’s Jay Inslee (he of the spectacular presidential race flameout) wants to criminalize voicing allegations of election fraud. “Shut up and do the will of the party, comrade!” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • But that’s not the only stupid idea he has! He also wants to drive out all the state’s billionaires with a wealth tax.
  • One swampy hand washes the other. “ATF Asks Judge to Order Hunter Biden Gun Inquiry Closed.”
  • Is national concealed carry coming?
  • “‘You Have Blood On Your Hands,’ Former Official Calls on Harris County Judge, Commissioners to Resign.”

    The criminal justice system in Harris County is broken,” said Aimee Castillo, sister of murder victim Josh Sandoval.

    Suspect Devan Kristopher Jordon was out on three felony bonds when he allegedly shot Sandoval during a home invasion robbery last May. Jordon had also missed a court date the week prior to the murder, but authorities did not issue an arrest warrant.

    “I think the criminal justice system is just a revolving door. They murder, they go in, and they come out, and they go in,” said Glenda Martin, Sandoval’s mother. “I think it’s a horrible thing.”

    Commissioner Tom Ramsey (R-Pct. 3) presented a resolution honoring Sandoval’s life and noted that the suspect was also affiliated with the same crime ring allegedly responsible for the murder in Houston of an off-duty New Orleans police officer last August.

    “There are people who are hurting people who are being allowed to walk around and they should not be period. That is the point,” intoned Commissioner Jack Cagle (R-Pct. 4).

    The fieriest moments of the meeting, however, came later from Steve Radack, former constable and former commissioner who said Democrats on the commissioners court had “blood on their hands.”

    “I never dreamed that after serving 32 years on this court that there would be three members of this court — Hidalgo, Garcia, and Ellis — who would kiss the rears of hardened criminals, who victimize law-abiding citizens, including law enforcement officers,” said Radack. “I’m calling on you three to resign from office so the healing can begin.”

  • Hmmm. “Two Texas inmates killed at Beaumont federal prison in fight involving MS-13.”
  • Speaking of criminal scumbags, Michael Avenatti was convicted of defrauding Storm Daniels of $300,000. This is, what, his fourth felony conviction?

  • On the “Washington Football Team”

  • Heh:

  • This is a pretty crazy IT hiring story. You’ll just have to read it…
  • Get a rope. “Tulsa police find stolen $300,000 1967 Ford Mustang Shelby stripped and hidden in field.” (Hat Tip: IowaHawk.)
  • The scam of New York City sidewalk sheds.
  • Heh:

  • Quel formage!

  • Minneapolis names some snowplows. I do rather like Ctrl Salt Delete…
  • “Joe Biden Beats Out Brussels Sprouts For America’s Least Favorite Vegetable.”
  • “I said all the frisbees!”

  • 2021 Election Results: Republicans Sweep Virginia, Prop A Loses

    Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021

    That was a pretty consequential off-year election.

  • Not only did Glenn Youngkin win, but Republicans swept statewide offices in Virginia, with Winsome Sears winning Lieutenant Governor and Jason Miyares winning Attorney General. (And for those that worry that Youngkin wasn’t quite beyond the margin of fraud, Terry McAuliffe conceded.)

    Turns out that Critical Race Theory and radical transgenderism are deeply unpopular among actual voters. Who knew?

    Republicans also won control of the Virginia House of Delegates, flipping six seats held by Democrats. Democrats still control the Virginia Senate.

    Jim Geraghty:

    Here in Virginia, the sun is shining a little brighter, the birds are chirping sweetly, the leaves are turning vibrant colors, and Republicans just stomped the bejeebers out of Democrats up and down the ballot. A “bloodbath,” as University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato told Rachel Maddow last night. “A five-alarm fire,” as Van Jones declared on CNN.

    Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race by about 70,000 votes over Terry McAuliffe, Winsome Sears won the lieutenant-governor’s race by about 56,000 votes, and Jason Miyares won the state attorney-general’s race by about 34,000 votes. Democratic incumbent AG Mark Herring was the guy who called upon governor Ralph Northam to resign, despite his own past wearing of blackface. The night was so bad that McAuliffe’s surrogates canceled on Chuck Todd and wouldn’t come out and eat their humble pie.

    Republicans picked up six seats to win control of the House of Delegates — the oldest continuous legislative body in the Western Hemisphere — with 51 seats to the Democrats’ 49 seats. This is one of the indicators that even though Terry McAuliffe was a deeply flawed candidate, the problem for Democrats was not just him. (With McAuliffe’s defeat, the last gasp of the Clinton political legacy ends.) This should dispel the defeatist “Virginia is a blue state now” talk among Republicans.

    Snip.

    Once schools did come back, some parents didn’t like what they saw in their children’s curricula and also how schools handled some big issues. What did it mean if teachers were instructed to “embrace critical race theory,” “engage in race-conscious teaching and learning,” “teach code-switching in positive, nonjudgmental ways,” and “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems”? What kinds of materials are appropriate for sex education, and what kinds of materials are age-appropriate for school libraries? Do schools quickly and accurately report sexual assault and violence, or are they trying to sweep it under the rug?

    And when parents objected, the National Association of School Boards labeled them “domestic terrorists” and demanded “the resources of the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service, and its National Threat Assessment Center” to investigate them.

    As Robby Soave summarized, “The public school system abused families’ trust during the pandemic, and the reckoning has just begun.”

    Nebraska senator Ben Sasse contended that the teachers’ unions delivered the governor’s mansion to Youngkin.

    “The Virginia GOP’s MVP has to go to Randi Weingarten, the leader of a radical teachers’ union that ignored actual teaching, politicized everything, shut down schools, and literally tried to tell parents to shut up. Congrats, Randi, you really turned out the vote,” Sasse declared in a released statement. “Congrats to Glenn Youngkin as well, on a sane, well-run campaign — and may all American politicians finally reject drunken, anti-parent rage from radicals like Randi Weingarten.”

    Some Twitter reactions to Virginia:

    If Sears were a Democrat, the leftwing media would never tire of telling us how historic her election was. Since she’s a Republican, the MSM tried to make her all but invisible. What was the media’s reaction to Republican ticket with a black Lt. Governor and a Hispanic attorney general winning? It was because of racism:

    To the surprise of absolutely no one who’s been paying attention to the execrable members of the mainstream media, their response to this momentous occasion was to say that the Republicans won because of racism.

    They’re not only evil, but they’re also lazy too.

    As we have discussed on many occasions, the Democrats and their media mouthpieces are truly broken people. They were barely tethered to reality when Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016. His victory ripped them from any moorings that they had. Now incapable of rational thought, all they can do is reflexively belch “Racism!” whenever bested by a Republican. They’ve got nothing else, which is why that’s all they’ve got in response to the Virginia results despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

    They’re still lying about Critical Race Theory, which is just going to keep making them dig deeper holes for themselves. There were stories about anti-CRT conservatives taking over school boards, like this one in Texas. Of course, NBC News spun that as the victors being anti-diversity. The biggest of the lies about CRT is that it’s “anti-racist,” which it is not. It’s racist, it’s commie, and it’s all about fomenting division.

    It wasn’t just CRT that was on the ballot in Virginia last night, it was also a referendum on what the drooling idiot usurper in the Oval Office has done to the country since January. The media won’t dwell on that though, they’re still tasked with carrying all of the water for President LOL Eightyonemillion.

    I’ve been writing and saying for months that the egregious overreach by the Democrats would be their undoing. This is the first electoral manifestation of that.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    “Terry McAuliffe Baffled That Telling Parents The State Owns Their Children Wasn’t A Winning Strategy.”

  • If Virginia was a wakeup call for race and transgenderism-obsessed Democrats, then what are we to make of New Jersey? There Republican Jack Ciattarelli holds a razor-thin lead over Democratic incumbent Philip Murphy in the governor’s race. If that holds up, it would be a seismic event akin to Chris Christie’s victory there in 2009. That provided a foretaste of the red tsunami that would give Republicans control of the House and Senate in 2010, even if Republican enthusiasm for Christie himself waned considerably over the years. (Update: Murphy is now ahead.)
  • Bad news on for Austin residents: Proposition A, the proposal for adequately funding the police, went down to defeat. It wasn’t a small defeat, either. A whopping 102,791 against to only 46,433 for. And we’re left to figure out an electorate that voted to reinstate the homeless camping ban but didn’t want to refund police in the face of record murders. Maybe I should do a roundtable discussion on the topic.
  • Minneapolis voters took the opposite tack, voting against disbanding their police department.
  • All the Texas Constitutional Amendments passed.
  • Anti-CRT parents win control of the Carroll ISD school board. (Previously.)
  • I’m hearing the same about Cypress-Fairbanks, with three incumbents going down to defeat. Holly Hansen at The Texan is on that beat, and I’ll update this post when her piece is up. Update: Here it is:

    Following a year of heated controversy in the state’s third-largest school district, challengers have unseated three long-time incumbents for positions on the school board.

    The winners in the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD (CFISD) election — Natalie Blasingame, Scott Henry, and Lucas Scanlon — were all endorsed by the Harris County Republican Party (HCRP), the Conservative Coalition of Harris County (CCHC), and business political networking organization BIZPAC.

  • Scenes From The Afghan Debacle

    Wednesday, August 25th, 2021

    I’ve finally had time to sit down and properly sift through all the grim news coming out of Afghanistan to generate this roundup.

    And the news is very grim indeed. It’s hard to think of any president who could have botched the Afghan pullout as badly as the rudderless Biden Administration has.

    Here is a roundup of news from Biden’s Afghanistan disaster.

  • Did the Taliban take over Afghanistan merely by telling everyone they were already in control?

    I do know enough about the war to know that when the Taliban went toe to toe with American and NATO soldiers, the Taliban got its ass kicked basically every single time. No air force, no navy, and no artillery meant that whenever the Taliban revealed themselves on the battlefield they were guaranteed to be cut to pieces by various pieces of intimidating American hardware like A-10 Warthogs or .50-caliber rifles.

    It appears the Taliban tried something different this time around. Open source reporting shows that rather than rocking up and going toe to toe with the Afghan national army, they appear to have simply called everyone in the entire country, instead, told them they were in control, and began assuming the functions of government as they went.

    Evidently a lot of this communication was done via WhatsApp.

    What I think has not been considered enough is the degree to which WhatsApp DMs were a strategic blind spot for the United States.

    The Fog of War obviously makes it impossible to know what’s happening on the ground, right now, in Afghanistan, even for observers from the military and the D.C. political apparatus who do this for a living. Recalling, however, that the U.S.’ longtime strategy for crippling an opponent begins with decapitation strikes on radar and communications infrastructure, it is fairly obvious to anyone that as far as the Taliban were concerned, this never took place. The Taliban is setting up a government fairly expeditiously. Its propaganda circulates on Twitter in plain view.

    The Taliban are thus free, and have been free for a number of years, to take their fight not to American soldiers (where they always lose) but directly to the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, all using free-to-use American internet infrastructure like Facebook and Twitter (where they have now won).

    WhatsApp is an American product. It can be switched off by its parent, Facebook, Inc, at any time and for any reason. The fact that the Taliban were able to use it at all, quite apart from the fact that they continue to use it to coordinate their activities even now as American citizens’ lives are imperiled by the Taliban advance which is being coordinated on that app, suggests that U.S. military intelligence never bothered to monitor Taliban numbers and never bothered to ask Facebook to ban them.

  • Another reason the Taliban took over so much so quickly: they paid Afghan military commanders to surrender:

    [Hollie] McKay said corruption was largely to blame for the fall of city after city to the Taliban.

    “The level of corruption within the Afghanistan military and the government, that’s how the Taliban won a lot of this, is they would pay the commanders off to surrender a city before,” she explained. “So those who genuinely do want to fight—and there are a lot of men that wanted to genuinely fight—were kept in the dark and ANA [Afghan National Army] commanders were basically paid off in advance to surrender the city and they were left with no choice but ‘you have no choice but to basically run.’”

    “The level of corruption that has enabled the Taliban to come back to power is just mind-blowing,” she explained. “To see that and to see all the weapons that have gone to the Taliban’s hands when the Afghan army runs away—that we paid for.”

  • Biden lied his ass off about Afghanistan:

    President Joe Biden, August 10, 2021: “I’ll insist we continue to keep the commitments we made of providing close air support, making sure that their air force functions and is operable, re- — resupplying their forces with food and equipment, and paying all their salaries. But they’ve got to want to fight. They have outnumbered the Taliban. And I’m getting daily briefings. I think there’s still a possibility — you have a significant new Secretary of Defense — our equivalent of a Secretary of Defense in Afghanistan, Bismillah Khan, who is a serious fighter (emphasis added).”

    The Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2021: “In the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the U.S. pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.”

    President Biden, in his interview with George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday: “The idea that the Taliban would take over was premised on the notion that the — that somehow, the 300,000 troops we had trained and equipped was gonna just collapse, they were gonna give up. I don’t think anybody anticipated that (emphasis added).”

    The Wall Street Journal, today:

    An internal State Department memo last month warned top agency officials of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the U.S.’s Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the document.

    The classified cable represents the clearest evidence yet that the administration had been warned by its own officials on the ground that the Taliban’s advance was imminent, and Afghanistan’s military may be unable to stop it. The cable, sent via the State Department’s confidential dissent channel, warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces, and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation, the two people said.

    Biden to Stephanopoulos on Wednesday: “One of the things we didn’t know is what the Taliban would do in terms of trying to keep people from getting out, what they would do. What are they doing now? They’re cooperating, letting American citizens get out, American personnel get out, embassies get out, et cetera (emphasis added).”

    So far, there are no reports of the Taliban killing an American citizen or impeding an American from getting to the airport. (They are attacking Australians.) But they have accosted and threatened American journalists, fired off shots, attacked crowds, and have made getting to the airport impossible to do safely.

  • Leaked documents show the State Department warned about an imminent collapse of the Afghan government following American troop withdrawal:

    Using a special ‘dissent channel’ within the State Department, the cable – sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and another top State Department official – warned of ‘rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces,’ and offered suggestions on how to speed up evacuation and mitigate the obvious crisis slated to ensue, two people told the WSJ.

    In total, 23 US Embassy staffers – all Americans, signed the July 13 cable, which was given a rush status ‘given the circumstances on the ground in Kabul.’ In addition to Blinken, it was sent to the Director of Policy Planning, Salman Ahmad.

    Plus a reminder that Antony Blinken sucked so bad that even John McCain called him out for it…

  • Did the Biden Administration pay any attention to these warnings? No.

    Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas told the Washington Examiner the Biden administration ignored the bleak assessments from the Pentagon and the intelligence community, and he critiqued the U.S. Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who had negotiated the February 2020 deal in Doha, Qatar, with the Taliban and had continued to insist wrongly the extremist group was open to a peaceful settlement rather than taking the country by force.

    The IC assessments got grimmer by the briefing,” McCaul told the Washington Examiner when speaking of the time frame following President Joe Biden’s April announcement that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. “I have never heard more grim assessment on Afghanistan on these briefings, while at the same time the State Department gave this rosy picture … was giving a more rosy picture of the negotiations that special envoy Zal Khalilzad was entertaining.”

  • The evil that men do often outlives their time in office: “Taliban leader was freed from Guantanamo Bay in 2014 swap by Obama“:

    When President Barack Obama released five Taliban commanders from the Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for an American deserter in 2014, he assured a wary public that the dangerous enemy combatants would be transferred to Qatar and kept from causing any trouble in Afghanistan.

    In fact, they were left free to engineer Sunday’s sacking of Kabul.

    Soon after gaining their freedom, some of the notorious Taliban Five pledged to return to fight Americans in Afghanistan and made contacts with active Taliban militants there. But the Obama-Biden administration turned a blind eye to the disturbing intelligence reports, and it wasn’t long before the freed detainees used Qatar as a base to form a regime in exile.

    Eventually, they were recognized by Western diplomats as official representatives of the Taliban during recent “peace” talks.

    Earlier this year, one of them, Khairullah Khairkhwa, actually sat across the table from President Biden’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in Moscow, where Khairkhwa was part of the official Taliban delegation that negotiated the final terms of the US withdrawal. The retreat cleared a path for the Taliban to retake power after 20 years.

    Also this: “The mastermind of the regime change is former detainee Khairkhwa, the Taliban mullah whom Obama released from Gitmo even though the Pentagon classified him as too dangerous to release.”

  • More of that SuperGenius leadership from the Biden Administration: “Biden State Dept Moved to Abolish Crisis Response Bureau Months Before Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan. The Biden State Department moved in June to cancel a program overseeing the protection and evacuation of American citizens stationed overseas in the case of an emergency, just as the Taliban was taking over Afghanistan, according to an internal State Department memo.”
  • Biden Administration to Americans looking to flee Afghanistan: “You pay now!

    The Biden administration continued to inform American citizens in Afghanistan as of Thursday evening they could have to pay more than $2,000 to board an evacuation flight out of the country, despite the State Department telling the press hours before that it had no intention of levying any such charges.

    The U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan has stated in multiple security advisories since Monday that any U.S. citizen seeking to evacuate the country must complete an online form in order to secure their repatriation flight. “This form is the only way to communicate interest in flight options,” the embassy said in a security advisory Wednesday.

  • And don’t forget all the weapons the Taliban captured:

  • Not to mention all the rifles and night vision goggles.
  • Here’s another video of U.S. weapons captured by the Taliban, with music from a chase scene in a 1980s dystopian SciFi movie scored by Giorgio Moroder:

  • Our clueless media, Afghan division:

  • Biden’s interview with former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos shows Biden can’t even think clearly:

    The setup is Stephanopoulos asking about a soldier who served seven combat tours and was shot twice (for accuracy’s sake, some of his tours may have been in Iraq) with that soldier’s assertion being that we didn’t leave Afghanistan with honor. Note that at no point does the soldier in question indicate we should stay in Afghanistan. Rather, his critique is with the strategy of the disastrous withdrawal that is currently playing out.

    Yet, Biden apparently didn’t even comprehend what he was being asked by Stephanopoulos. Instead of speaking to the strategic failures at hand, the president brings up his deceased son Beau and things just go downhill from there.

    For example, the war in Kosovo was already over when Beau got there. He was a lawyer sent to train prosecutors, not a combat soldier. Biden then goes on to not only mistake what branch his son served in and his rank, but also what other country he was deployed to later in his career, mixing up Afghanistan for Iraq.

    As @politicalsock also notes, Biden’s mention of Beau having regrets is nonsensical. We still have troops in Iraq to this day, and there were a lot more of them there when Beau was still alive. So what withdrawal would Biden’s son have felt regrets about at the time? The answer to that question obviously can’t be Afghanistan either.

  • Something is wrong with President Biden, and we are all being asked to pretend we don’t notice.”

    After making no public appearances for four days — during a major foreign crisis — President Biden read a 20-minute speech off a teleprompter on Monday afternoon and took no questions. He immediately returned to Camp David. He had no events on his schedule Tuesday. On Wednesday, he gave another 20-minute speech about vaccine boosters off a teleprompter from Camp David, and again took no questions. Also on Wednesday, the president sat for an on-camera interview with George Stephanopoulos that did not go well. According to the White House public records, Biden has had two phone conversations with foreign leaders in the past ten days — one with Boris Johnson and one with Angela Merkel.

    As of this writing, Biden has no public events on his schedule for today. He is scheduled to receive the president’s daily briefing from the intelligence community and meet with his national-security team. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, he is scheduled to return to his house in Delaware today.

    This is a highly unusual schedule for a president during a foreign-policy crisis. Yes, a president can perform his job anywhere, whether it’s Camp David or his own private residence. But Biden is barely appearing in public, not saying much of anything when he does, not answering any questions outside of his lone scheduled interview, and sounding angry when he did face questions from Stephanopoulos.

  • The UN remains consistent. Consistently incompetent:

  • Statistics show that there’s no way to get all Americans out of Afghanistan before the end of August:

    There are only 4-5 days left to get these people out due to the logistics of the 8/31 deadline, and according to the cable, there are perhaps 20,000+ Americans still stranded throughout Afghanistan. Even if you take the low-end estimate that only 10,000 Americans were originally stuck, that means we are still way behind schedule, and the situation on the ground in regards to getting to the airport is only getting worse. In other words, you will likely see fewer, not more Americans making it to planes over the next few days.

    There’s no magic solution in reserve to fix this situation. The only thing we can do is what Biden should have done almost two weeks ago. He should have told the Taliban to vacate Kabul or we start blowing things up. Instead, we’ve bent the knee over and over and now we have no backup plan. This evacuation is doomed to fail no matter how many misleading tweets Ronald Klain makes. Americans will be left behind. When that happens, what’s the next move? Full-scale war again? Just abandoning our citizens in hopes of paying ransoms down the road?

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Republican Senator Ben Sasse says (correctly) that the fall of Kabul is worse than the fall of Saigon:

    “Our troops promised them that the U.S. would never turn tail and have another cowardly moment like what happened in Saigon. This is worse than what happened in Saigon. What happened at the airport today is a more shameful moment than what happened in Saigon. And Biden comes out of his bunker trying to do a campaign photo-op speech where he attacks the Afghan people for coming to that airport,” he said.

    Sasse charged that the Biden administration bears responsibility for the collapse of the Afghan military. Biden suggested Monday that Afghan soldiers abandoned all hope and surrendered the mission to the Taliban, without providing further context about what prompted the dissolution.

    Some Republican lawmakers, such as Sasse, have rejected Biden’s assertion that the Afghan army simply lost the will to fight its own battles. Some have emphasized that the Biden administration’s move to pull air support from the country rendered the Afghan fighting force inoperative. Compounded with the fact that the U.S. also barred American contractors from staying in the country to service Afghan planes, some Republican legislators have contended that the Afghan military was positioned to fail under Biden’s direction.

  • More Sasse:

    While President Joe Biden cowers at Camp David, the Taliban are humiliating America. The retreat from Afghanistan is our worst foreign-policy disaster in a generation. As the Taliban marches into Kabul, they’re murdering civilians, reimposing their vicious Islamist law, and preparing to turn Afghanistan back into a bandit regime. The U.S. embassy has told Americans to shelter in place. Refugees are fleeing to the airport, begging to escape the coming bloodbath. None of this had to happen.

    America is the world’s greatest superpower. We ought to act like it. But President Biden and his national-security team have failed to protect even the American embassy in Kabul. They have broken America’s promises to the men and women who long for freedom — especially those thousands of Afghans who served alongside our military and intelligence services. They are turning their backs on the women and children who are desperate for space on the remaining flights out of hell.

    Gross incompetence has given the Taliban a terrible opportunity to slaughter our allies. Eighty-eight thousand of our Afghan allies have applied for visas to get out of the country, but this administration has approved just 1,200 so far. I’ve been among a bipartisan group of senators that has pushed Biden to expedite this process, but to no avail. At this point, it’s not clear how many we’ll be able to get out. Every translator and ally who stood by us is now at risk.

    This bloodshed wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. For months, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have warned the Biden administration that this would happen. Now the administration is acting like this is a surprise. It’s shameful, dishonest spin.

  • Mike Pence goes nuclear:

    The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country [of Afghanistan] is highly unlikely,” President Biden confidently proclaimed in July. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.”

    One month later, the scenario Mr. Biden deemed impossible has become a horrifying reality. In recent days, the world has watched panicked civilians cling to U.S. military aircraft in a desperate attempt to escape the chaos unleashed by Mr. Biden’s reckless retreat. American diplomats had to beg our enemies not to storm our embassy in Kabul. Taliban fighters have seized scores of American military vehicles, rifles, artillery, aircraft, helicopters and drones.

    The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.

  • Ted Cruz points out that the debacle is the Biden Administration’s fault. “What we have seen is an incredibly, poorly executed exit from the theater.”
  • Ouch!

    “This is a ‘Never Again’ moment in the making!” “Those people are still alive! We should be doing everything [to hold a beachhead] and get those people out no matter what it takes!”

  • Our allies are furious:

    Biden asserted that America’s reputation on the world stage has not been damaged amid the foreign-policy snafu, despite outraged reactions from major political figures suggesting the contrary. He also falsely claimed that al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that orchestrated the attacks on September 11, 2001, has totally disappeared from Afghanistan. And despite accounts proving otherwise, Biden rejected the notion that American nationals have been struggling to make it to the tarmac at the Kabul airport.

    “I have seen no questioning of our credibility from our allies around the world,” Biden asserted. “In fact I’ve seen the exact opposite.”

    The president’s statement comes after a number of members of the British Parliament condemned the United States’ haphazard departure from the country as “catastrophic” and “shameful,” with members uniting to “dishonor” the foreign-policy fiasco, the Telegraph reported.

    Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party in Parliament, said, “The American decision to withdraw was not just a mistake — it was an avoidable mistake, from President Trump’s flawed deal with the Taliban to President Biden’s decision to proceed, and to proceed in such a disastrous way.”

  • The reaction? “US general tells British special forces: Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you’re making us look bad.”

    I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.

    Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations. I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.

  • Roger Kimball:

    These days, when the Americans decamp from Afghanistan they leave behind tons — literally tons — of lights, not to mention munitions of various sizes and lethality, roads, buildings, communication devices of all sorts — you name it. A few days ago, we were told that the Afghan government might fall within 90 days to the newly resurgent Taliban. Over the weekend, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby assured the world that ‘Kabul does not face an imminent threat from the Taliban’. Whew. That gave the team at our Kabul embassy time to shred or otherwise render inoperative all the sensitive information they were sitting on — that stash of Pride flags, for example, which the new masters will not have much use for, unless it is to drape over the shoulders of the gays they execute by pushing them off roofs.

    Well, it turns out the embassy workers did not have quite enough time. If we still used ink, the bit used to record Kirby’s words would not have been dry before his words were replaced by headlines that Kabul had fallen to the Taliban, who now occupied the presidential palace, the president himself having fled the country, and that the country as whole was in a state of crisis.

    President Biden — or, as I like to denominate him these days, due to the deference shown him by all those eager-beaver members of the press, President Ice Cream — was hors de combat when this important news came over what counts as the wire these days. He had left the White House for Camp David. Monday, I think, is when Ben and Jerry’s makes its deliveries, and all we could glean was that he would be addressing the nation ‘in a few days’.

  • You can tell that Democrats are back in charge:

    This always happens when Democrats hold the key positions of power in the White House and in Congress — the world begins to rock, the foundations begin to shake, the stability and peace and comparative calm of better days begin to wither and disappear. But my, do the taxpayer dollars begin to flow.

    It happened under Jimmy Carter, with his double-digit inflation and gas lines and government cheese programs.

    It happened under Barack Obama with his red-line foreign policy that ultimately handed Russia big wins with Syria — not to mention with a watching, mocking, anti-America world.

    It’s happening now under Biden.

    “Jen Psaki ‘out of the office’ as Biden remains silent on Taliban takeover of Afghanistan,” one Fox News headline ran.

    “Joe Biden faces calls to make public address on Afghanistan,” another headline from The Guardian stated.

    “Biden’s botched Afghan exit is a disaster at home and abroad long in the making,” yet another headline from CNN read.

    Where was Joe while all this chaos was cracking?

    You’d have better luck finding Waldo.

    Honestly, this White House shows more aggression against Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida over face mask mandates than against Taliban members who now seek to enforce Shariah Law on the poor Afghan people America promised to protect.

  • The incompetence is onogoing:

  • “Team Organizing Private Flights Out Of Afghanistan Says The Biden Administration Has Been An ‘Impediment’ To Their Evacuations.”

    The Biden administration has been an “impediment” to a private effort to get people out of Afghanistan, Robert Stryk, who is arranging privately chartered flights to get Americans and vulnerable Afghans out of the country, exclusively told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday.

    “The Brits and South Africans have been fucking awesome and heroic in getting people through the Mil Gate,” Stryk told the DCNF.

    Stryk, whose Washington-based lobbying firm was in 2017 paid by the government of Afghanistan for “US Government affairs and commercial sector advice. Executive Branch and Legislative Branch Engagement; Defense consultation; strategic advice pertaining to extremism/terrorism; and promotion of democracy and foreign direct investment,” said he had reached out to the administration “dozens and dozens” of times and had yet to hear back.

    After reaching out to the White House, Stryk said he received a response acknowledging the request but got no follow up. Stryk said he started reaching out to the administration on Aug. 14.

    “What I am witnessing everyday is the very best and the very worst of America,” Stryk explained. “I have seen the humanity of private citizens who are contacting me and pledging their time, monies, and in some cases their lives to bring our citizens and these Afghan patriots out of harm’s way, while at the time personally experiencing the Biden administration’s abject failure to protect its citizens and those Afghans that fought and worked alongside of us.”

    “It’s morally reprehensible,” Stryk said. “It’s been the U.S. private sector who has stepped in to save the blood and treasure the Biden administration is leaving behind.”

  • “Our State Department just called on the Taliban to form an ‘inclusive’ government ‘with the full and meaningful representation of women.’ This is not the Babylon Bee!” I’m sure that will happen right after Hitler’s Bar Mitzvah…
  • Indeed, instead of giving women “full and meaningful representation,” the Taliban is banning co-education, calling it “the root of all evil.”
  • They also found an executed a “TikTok Comedian.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • While the American mission in Afghanistan was collapsing, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was looking to hire a “Public Engagement Assistant.”
  • “American In Taliban Prison Starting To Worry How This Will Affect Biden’s Poll Numbers.”
  • This are just the links and news stories I caught in passing, as I could probably have put up ten times as many links covering this colossal screw-up.

    Anyone remember back when the Democratic Media Complex was confidently predicting that President Trump allowing Turkey to establish a security zone in Syria would result in genocide against the Kurds? Now that the Taliban are launching an actual slaughter and Biden apologists are wailing that nobody could possibly foresee the rapid collapse in Afghanistan.

    As I mentioned before, if America’s political and military leadership wasn’t willing to do what it took to win in Afghanistan, then we needed to make an orderly retreat. Biden’s retreat has been anything but orderly. It’s been an absolute debacle and thousands, probably tens of thousands of lives, American and otherwise, will be lost thanks to his administration’s astounding incompetence.

    BidenWatch for September 21, 2020

    Monday, September 21st, 2020

    Greetings regular readers! I’m so glad you survived yesterday’s tragic mass die-off! Plus Biden campaign troubles, fundraising updates, the “Harris Administration,” and the Burisma report looms. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Biden says 200 million people will die from the Wuhan coronavirus by the time he finishes his speech.

  • “Biden Says Trump Is Responsible For All Deaths Throughout Human History Since The Dawn Of Time.”
  • Is the Biden Campaign Struggling?”

    One of the lessons of 2016 was that the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had all kinds of internal reports of problems, signs of insufficient support and enthusiasm in key states, and ominous indicators that they were nowhere nearly as strong and effective as most of the coverage suggested.

    The problem was that only a few reporters knew about those, and the ones that did had pledged to keep what they were seeing and hearing secret until after the election for their campaign narrative books. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, “over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred subjects, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly.” Florida Democratic political consultants warned the campaign they were in danger of losing the Sunshine State. Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking. The Service Employees International Union wanted to send more volunteers to Michigan and the Clinton campaign told them to keep their people to Iowa instead.

    If you had really good Democratic Party or liberal activist-group sources, you heard these portentous stories that look like really key indicators in hindsight. If you didn’t, you were dependent upon the polls and the dominant narrative in the media that the Clinton campaign was an experienced, well-oiled machine while the Trump campaign was a bunch of amateur stumblebums constantly beset by infighting.

    Fast-forward to today, and it feels like these kinds of, “hey, the Democratic nominee’s campaign may not be as strong as it looks” stories are leaking out into the general news coverage much more frequently.

    Earlier this week, the New York Times wondered aloud about Democratic strength in Nevada:

    Nevada’s Democratic political machine was held up as a model for other states where neither party has consistently dominated. But it was a machine built for another era.

    Its success relied on hundreds of people knocking on thousands of doors for face-to-face conversations with voters. Now, there are fewer than half as many people canvassing for Democratic voters as there were in September 2016. And some Democratic strategists warn that Nevada could be in 2020 what Wisconsin was in 2016 — a state that the Democrats assume is safely in their column but that slips away.

    The Washington Post reported that Latino Democrats are worried about Biden having lackluster numbers among this demographic:

    Top Latino Democrats are voicing growing concern about Joe Biden’s campaign, warning that lackluster efforts to win the support of their community could have devastating consequences in the November election.

    Recent polls showing President Trump’s inroads with Latinos have set off a fresh round of frustration and finger-pointing among Democrats, confirming problems some say have simmered for months. Many Latino activists and officials said Biden is now playing catch-up, particularly in the pivotal state of Florida, where he will campaign Tuesday — the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month — for the first time as the presidential nominee. Reaching out to Latino voters will be a key focus on the visit, according to a person with knowledge of the trip. Biden’s campaign said he will be in Tampa and Kissimmee, two areas with large Puerto Rican populations.

    Plus concerns about the campaigns in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

  • Speaking of which:

    “I can’t even find a sign,” [Don] Sabbe says outside a Kroger’s in Sterling Heights, where surrounding cars fly massive Donald Trump flags that say “No More Bullsh-t” and fellow shoppers wear Trump T-shirts for their weekend grocery runs. “I’m looking for one of those storefronts. I’m looking for a campaign office for Biden. And I’m not finding one.”

    The reason Sabbe can’t find a dedicated Biden campaign field office is because there aren’t any around here. Not in Macomb County, the swing region where Sabbe lives. It’s not even clear Biden has opened any new dedicated field offices in the state; because of the pandemic, they’ve moved their field organizing effort online. The Biden campaign in Michigan refused to confirm the location of any physical field offices despite repeated requests; they say they have “supply centers” for handing out signs, but would not confirm those locations. The campaign also declined to say how many of their Michigan staff were physically located here. Biden’s field operation in this all-important state is being run through the Michigan Democratic Party’s One Campaign, which is also not doing physical canvassing or events at the moment. When I ask Biden campaign staffers and Democratic Party officials how many people they have on the ground in Michigan, one reply stuck out: “What do you mean by ‘on the ground?’”

  • Speaking of swing states, voters believe Biden wants to defund the police and hasn’t done enough to condemn rioting.

    Among all Wisconsin voters, 56 percent say Biden hasn’t done enough to denounce the rioting versus just 31 percent who say he has. (Even among Democrats, 28 percent think he hasn’t done enough.) The numbers are similar in Minnesota at 54/35. Biden has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want to defund the police and he’s made several on-camera statements condemning the violence over the past few weeks, but that message isn’t getting through. And it’s helping to keep Trump close.

  • Biden took a campaign trip to Duluth, Minnesota. It didn’t work out so well:

    Democrats are concerned that a groundswell of support for President Trump outside of Minnesota’s Twin Cities may be enough to win him the state over 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

    Biden, the former two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator, visited carpenter apprentices and other union workers near Duluth on Friday, his first trip to Minnesota in more than 1,000 days, according to the Trump campaign.

    Yet, despite his team releasing scant details about his itinerary, even to the local press, Republicans outnumbered Democrats at Hermantown’s Jerry Alander Carpenter Training Center, worrying those who are opposed to Trump clinching a second term on Nov. 3.

    The Republican National Committee and the Minnesota GOP organized roughly 300 people to line Miller Trunk Highway for Biden’s stop. Democrats had less than half that number and told the Washington Examiner they didn’t know one another. Some, though, had traveled more than two hours from Minneapolis to see their party’s standard-bearer.

    Tommy Moe, a retired miner from Virginia, Minnesota, predicted that the presidential race in his state would be close again after 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by only 1.5 percentage points (or 45,000 ballots). Moe, 65, based his prediction on the number of union workers he knew who felt “an affinity” for Trump because of the China trade deal and his unorthodox approach to politics.

    “We didn’t have a very good turnout,” he said. “If the Democrats don’t get their act together and start getting as fired up as the Republican side is … we need a turnout. Democrats win if they turn out.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Model that predicted 5 of past 6 presidential elections has Trump in 2020 by ‘landslide.”

    “I focus on early primaries and the way the candidates perform in those early contests,” Norpoth said in the press release. “It’s a very good predictor, and a leading indicator of what’s going to happen in November.”

    The professor said he was unsurprised at the model’s prediction this year, citing Trump’s performance in the primaries earlier in the winter.

    “When I looked at New Hampshire and I saw that Donald Trump got 85 percent of the votes … I was pretty sure what the model was going to predict,” he said in the release.

    Joe Biden, on the other hand, pulled down only 8.4% in New Hampshire, Norpoth said, a number that is “unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of being president,” he stated.

  • Enjoy some “Oh God, how I hate Trump, but Democrats are insane” hand-wringing from American Enterprise Institute wonk Danielle Pletka:

    [Three paragraphs of pro-forma #OrangeManBad snipped]

    I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues. I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses — almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November — would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy. That could include the abolition of the filibuster, creating an executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power; an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority; passage of devastating economic measures such as the Green New Deal; nationalized health care; the dismantling of U.S. borders and the introduction of socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown.

    I fear the grip of Manhattan-San Francisco progressive mores that increasingly permeate my daily newspapers, my children’s curriculums and my local government. I fear the virtue-signaling bullies who increasingly try to dominate or silence public discourse — and encourage my children to think that their being White is intrinsically evil, that America’s founding is akin to original sin. I fear the growing self-censorship that guides many people’s every utterance, and the leftist vigilantes who view every personal choice — from recipes to hairdos — through their twisted prisms of politics and culture. An entirely Democratic-run Washington, urged on by progressives’ media allies, would no doubt only accelerate these trends.

    Nor do Biden’s national-security positions reassure me. While he promises a welcome change in style and a renewed respect for U.S. alliances, Biden would, like Trump, pull our troops from the Middle East and South Asia. Worse yet, he would slash defense spending and likely renew the Obama administration’s misbegotten love affair with Iran’s tyrants. Then there is the Democratic Party’s hostility to the state of Israel. Biden supporters will clamor that the candidate’s history is very pro-Israel, but as president would he be strong enough to stand up to the new Democratic Party’s less-than-ardent support for the Jewish state?

    To which I can only reply: What the hell took you so long to figure this out? (And then, to prove the extent of her Beltway Blinders, she turns out a paragraph on “execrable gun-toting racists.”)

  • “The former vice president’s campaign reported on Sunday that it and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) began September with $466 million in the bank – roughly $141 million more than the cash on hand for the president and the Republican National Committee (RNC).” Snip. “The infusion of cash allowed the Biden campaign to vastly outspend Trump’s team to run TV ads in August and September.” Big ad spends and no ground game? Sounds like Team Biden is trying to rerun the Jeb! strategy…
  • The Burisma report is due out this week:

    Republicans are preparing to release a report in a matter of days on their investigation focused on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, a move they hope will put fresh scrutiny on the Democratic nominee just weeks from the election.

    The controversial probe, spearheaded by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is focused broadly on Obama-era policy and Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.

    The GOP report, which is set to be released this week, is expected to argue that Hunter Biden’s work impacted Obama-era Ukraine policy and created a conflict of interest given then-Vice President Joe Biden’s work in the area.

  • “Biden Institute Board Member, Obama-Era Cabinet Sec Met With Chinese Communist Party To ‘Create More Ties,’ Visited Communist Propaganda Front.” That would be Obama Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.
  • AOC thinks hard-left Democrats can make Biden dance to their tune.
  • Kamala Harris called the next Presidential Administration “the Harris Administration“…
  • … and so did Joe Biden.

  • Biden’s incoherent Iran policy:

    Trump, Biden claims, “could not rally a single one of America’s closest allies” to support the extension of the [arms] embargo. What he neglects to mention is that the expiration date on the embargo was set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration and described by Biden as “a policy that was working to keep America safe.” That policy was, per Biden, discarded by Trump in favor of one “that has worsened the threat.” So which is it: Did the Obama-Biden Iran policy keep America safe? Or is the best argument against the Trump administration that they have failed to successfully roll back Obama-era policies?

    Snip.

    He fails entirely, in his op-ed ostensibly addressing the Iranian threat, to come even close to describing the full extent of how its regime has targeted U.S. forces in the Middle East, committed grievous human-rights violations against its own people, and funded terrorist organizations and plots around the globe. His failure to reckon fully with the evil of Ayatollah Khamenei seems indicative of not only his less serious estimation of the Iranian threat, but also the fact that he has made his peace with the current regime staying in power over the long term. He makes this belief explicit when he calls “Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’” strategy “a boon to the regime in Iran.” He again avoids explaining how, probably because this claim is untrue by every available metric.

    Maximum pressure has effectively choked the Iranian economy. The JCPOA had helped Iran achieve GDP growth rates of 12.5 percent in 2016 and 3.7 percent in 2017. In 2018 — the same year the U.S. exited the deal — Iran’s economy contracted by 5.4 percent. 2019 was even worse, at -7.6 percent. Notably, this economic disaster has led to Iranians flooding into the streets many times over the last two years to protest not only pocketbook issues, but the regime’s restriction of basic freedoms. While Biden may be content to leave the ayatollahs in power, the Iranian people appear to be far less willing. Furthermore, Iran’s regional position has been undermined by the Trump administration’s successful efforts to strengthen Israel’s relationships with Arab nations, including the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

    Instead of backing maximum pressure, Biden supports what he calls a “smart way to be tough on Iran.” Ignoring Iran’s flagrant violations of the JCPOA even before the U.S.’s withdrawal, the sunset provisions on the agreement, and Israel’s discovery of documents detailing Iran’s nuclear program, Biden falsely asserts that the JCPOA had “verifiably block[ed] Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.”

  • Trump “Strongly Approve” number hits highest level ever.
  • Creepy Joe plays Spanish-language song “Despacito” whose lyrics translate into things Creepy Joe is famous for. “I want to breathe your neck slowly.”
  • “Biden Attempts To Appeal To Hispanics By Performing Authentic Mexican Hat Dance While Firing Pistols Into The Air.”
  • “A man featured in a campaign video with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is under federal investigation for soliciting sex with minors, according to USA Today.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Ace of Spades HQ has a Slow Joe speech roundup.
  • College professors give seven times as much to Biden as Trump. That’s quite shocking. I would have expected the ratio to be more like 20-1 or 50-1. Biden must have remarkably poor fundraisers. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • ” Democrats’ new strategy for winning the White House: Threaten riots if they lose.” The public doesn’t seem so hoit on the idea…
  • Team Trump isn’t messing around:

    (Hat tip: ConservativeTreehouse.)

  • “CNN Forum Throws Nothing But Softballs and Pathetic Biden Strikes Out Anyway.” “A real low point came when the declining Biden couldn’t remember what to call the place where the mail goes.”
  • It was even more slanted than the snippets suggest.
  • “Here Are Biden’s Biggest Lies From His CNN Town Hall.” Including his fracking flip flops and that golden oldie, the Fine People Hoax. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • It wouldn’t be a Democratic “Town Hall” if they’re weren’t at least one plant:

  • Feel the enthusiasm:

  • Slow Joe getting even slower:

  • More:

  • A theme emerges:

  • How old is he Johnny?

  • Profiles in pandering.
  • “Biden Getting Excited As Segregation Coming Back Into Style.”

    Segregation, what a blast from the past! I remember when I was already a full-grown man in the year 1960 and me and the boys would gather outside the soda shop to make sure only the white folks got in. Maybe those jeans and that jacket I wore are back in style again too. Jill? Where’s that trunk with all my old clothes?”

    “I was way ahead of the curve on this one, man.”

  • “Genius Trump Nominates Joe Biden To Supreme Court Forcing Dems To Accuse Him Of Sexual Assault.”
  • “Biden Forgets To Put On Clothes, Media Praises His Majestic Outfit.”
  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    China’s Lies Part 3: More Songs About Viral Labs And Propaganda

    Thursday, April 16th, 2020

    Little did I know that when I started blogging about all China’s that I was taking on a second* job.

  • With the “wet market” transmission idea untenable, the new “official” line on the origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus transmission is that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but was a natural virus they were studying that got out:

    There is increasing confidence that COVID-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory not as a bioweapon, but as part of China’s effort to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China’s government and seen relevant materials tell Fox News.

    This may be the “costliest government coverup of all time,” one of the sources said.

    The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus was bat-to-human, and that “patient zero” worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.

    The “increasing confidence” comes from classified and open-source documents and evidence, the sources said. Fox News has requested to see the evidence directly.

    (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)

  • Promoters of this new line include the Washington Post, which says that safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was craptacular:

    Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

    In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

    What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

    “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)

    The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

    As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.

    There’s that name again.

  • Jim Geraghty also notes that safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not the best:

    Two facilities in the city of Wuhan were researching coronaviruses in bats — the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

    The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China’s first biocontainment level-4 facility, inaugurated in 2015. It is still the country’s only one.

    Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, told the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last month that “bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2, which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.”

    Snip.

    in February 2019, Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, laid out a report suggesting that human errors at these sorts of labs not only had occurred, but occurred unnervingly frequently.

    Incidents causing potential exposures to pathogens occur frequently in the high security laboratories often known by their acronyms, BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) and BSL4. Lab incidents that lead to undetected or unreported laboratory-acquired infections can lead to the release of a disease into the community outside the lab; lab workers with such infections will leave work carrying the pathogen with them. If the agent involved were a potential pandemic pathogen, such a community release could lead to a worldwide pandemic with many fatalities.

    Such releases are fairly likely over time, as there are at least 14 labs (mostly in Asia) now carrying out this research. Whatever release probability the world is gambling with, it is clearly far too high a risk to human lives. Mammal-transmissible bird flu research poses a real danger of a worldwide pandemic that could kill human beings on a vast scale.

    Human error is the main cause of potential exposures of lab workers to pathogens. Statistical data from two sources show that human error was the cause of, according to my research, 67 percent and 79.3 percent of incidents leading to potential exposures in BSL3 labs. These percentages come from analysis of years of incident data from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) and from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

    Klotz described needle sticks and other through the skin exposures from sharp objects; dropped containers or spills and splashes of liquids containing pathogens; bites or scratches from infected animals; pathogens manipulated outside of a biosafety cabinet or other equipment designed to protect exposures to infectious aerosols; failure to follow safety procedures; failure or problems with personal protective equipment; mechanical or equipment failure; and failure to properly inactivate pathogens before transferring them to a lower biosafety level lab for further research. There are plenty of real-life examples for every medical menace in every Robin Cook novel. And this is separate from the other frightening examples of lab accidents laid out last week.

  • Speaking of Geraghty, he also notes more evidence leading back to a Chinese virology lab.

    The bat researcher that Xiao’s report refers to is virologist Tian Junhua, who works at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control. In 2004, the World Health Organization determined that an outbreak of the SARS virus had been caused by two separate leaks at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. The Chinese government said that the leaks were a result of “negligence” and the responsible officials had been punished.

    “Negligence,” yeah. Funny how China managed to unleash two plagues on the world from its virus research labs through “negligence.” The piece also mentions another Chinese bat researcher:

    In 2017, the Chinese state-owned Shanghai Media Group made a seven-minute documentary about Tian Junhua, entitled “Youth in the Wild: Invisible Defender.” Videographers followed Tian Junhua as he traveled deep into caves to collect bats. “Among all known creatures, the bats are rich with various viruses inside,” he says in Chinese. “You can find most viruses responsible for human diseases, like rabies virus, SARS, and Ebola. Accordingly, the caves frequented by bats became our main battlefields.” He emphasizes, “bats usually live in caves humans can hardly reach. Only in these places can we find the most ideal virus vector samples.”

    One of his last statements on the video is: “In the past ten-plus years, we have visited every corner of Hubei Province. We explored dozens of undeveloped caves and studied more than 300 types of virus vectors. But I do hope these virus samples will only be preserved for scientific research and will never be used in real life. Because humans need not only the vaccines, but also the protection from the nature.”

    The description of Tian Junhua’s self-isolation came from a May 2017 report by Xinhua News Agency, repeated by the Chinese news site JQKNews.com:

    The environment for collecting bat samples is extremely bad. There is a stench in the bat cave. Bats carry a large number of viruses in their bodies. If they are not careful, they are at risk of infection. But Tian Junhua is not afraid to go to the mountain with his wife to catch Batman.[SIC – LP]

    Tian Junhua summed up the experience that the most bats can be caught by using the sky cannon and pulling the net. But in the process of operation, Tian Junhua forgot to take protective measures. Bat urine dripped on him like raindrops from the top. If he was infected, he could not find any medicine. It was written in the report.

    The wings of bats carry sharp claws. When the big bats are caught by bat tools, they can easily spray blood. Several times bat blood was sprayed directly on Tians skin, but he didn’t flinch at all. After returning home, Tian Junhua took the initiative to isolate for half a month. As long as the incubation period of 14 days does not occur, he will be lucky to escape, the report said.

    Bat urine and blood can carry viruses. How likely is it that bat urine or blood got onto a researcher at either Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Alternatively, what are the odds that some sort of medical waste or other material from the bats was not properly disposed of, and that was the initial transmission vector to a human being?

    Virologists have been vehemently skeptical of the theory that COVID-19 was engineered or deliberately constructed in a laboratory; the director of the National Institutes of Health has written that recent genomic research “debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally.” And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.

    But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.

  • And all these exciting bat-catching activities mentioned above? Would you believe that U.S. taxpayers funded some of it?
  • The UK’s choronavirus task force thinks that the biolab origin theory is credible.
  • “Former FDA Commissioner: ‘China Was Not Truthful With the World’:

    The former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration said on Sunday that China misled the world about the CCP virus and that the World Health Organization should commit to creating a report on the repercussions of its obfuscation.

    “China was not truthful with the world at the outset of this. Had they been more truthful with the world, which would have enabled them to be truthful with themselves, they might have actually been able to contain this entirely and there is some growing evidence to suggest that,” Scott Gottlieb told CBS News in an April 12 interview on “Face the Nation.”

  • Yes, I’m linking to a Slashdot comment, but one that nicely summarizes all the coronavirus whistleblowers China disappeared, namely:
    • Dr. AI Fen
    • Chen Qiushi
    • Fang Bin
    • Li Zehua
    • Xu Zhiyong
    • Ren Zhiqiang
    • Dr. Li Wenliang
    • Xu Zhangrun
    • Xie Linka
  • You know that reporter that President Donald Trump asked if she was working for China? Yeah, she was working for China:

    While Phoenix TV is not wholly owned by the Chinese government, its content is widely considered to be sympathetic to Beijing.

    The Hoover Institution regards it as a “quasi-official” news outlet with links to the Chinese government’s ministry of state security.

    Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, said in a 2017 report that Phoenix TV is owned by a former Chinese military officer with close ties to Beijing officials.

  • And a second one. “[Chang Ching-Yi] responded that he was from Taiwan. While that is where he was born, he works for Shanghai Media Group, a company owned by the Chinese regime.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Of course, China is also using plain old paid advertising propaganda against President Trump as well.

    Chinese state media is flooding Facebook and Instagram with undisclosed political adverts whitewashing its role in the coronavirus pandemic and pinning blame on Donald Trump.

    Three official news outlets – Xinhua, China Central Television and the Global Times – have targeted users across the world with promoted stories in English, Chinese and Arabic.

    I’m sure those in the media who shrieked about how Russian Facebook ads were destroying democracy will speak up against China any day now… (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)

  • Indeed, our media can’t seem refrain from disseminating even obvious lies from the Chinese government:

    Even before reports on incinerators “working around the clock,” massive orders for urns, government bribes to keep mourners quiet, and total government censorship, China’s lies were obvious. Even before China concealed the outbreak, blamed the U.S. military, and expelled foreign reporters, their lies were obvious.

    Their lies were so obvious because China is an authoritarian regime that history plainly documents killing and starving millions while lying about it to this day. The press should know this, and they do know this, yet still corporate news outlets unquestioningly repeat Beijing’s line.

    Then it all got a little confusing Wednesday, when Bloomberg reported both that the United States leads China in coronavirus cases and that China is concealing cases and deaths inside the country.

    “China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country,” the latter story reads, “under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House.”

    And there it is. The news certainly checks out with what reporters could have confirmed if they’d actually been reporting this past month.

    Snip.

    Bloomberg News, notably, has a history of covering for Beijing and was allowed to keep its reporters in China when government authorities expelled The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal in March. Maybe the government was confident those reporters wouldn’t start checking in on their numbers, preferring to wait for their U.S. government sources to spoon feed it to them. No surprise. Michael Bloomberg’s fortune is deeply entangled with China (and he knows it).

    But his company is not alone. CNN uncritically repeats China’s false statistics over and over again. NBC, MSNBC, BBC, The New York Times — the list goes on, all without corrections or updates.

    The corporate media’s trumpeting of foreign propaganda is especially eager when it hurts the president they don’t like. Outlets like Vox and BuzzFeed relentlessly attack Trump for not taking the coronavirus seriously enough early enough, but rushed to edit their past coverage that had authoritatively declared coronavirus less dangerous than the common flu. Vox, The New York Times and their television peers declare the president’s use of “Wuhan coronavirus” racist, while editing and forgetting past coverage that used “Wuhan coronavirus” or explained why so many pandemics come from that country.

  • Speaking of our media, here’s a handy Twitter thread of various MSM outlets parroting the ChiCom line.
  • Twitter banned, then unbanned, Steve Bannon’s War Room : Pandemic account, without explanation. “Launched in January, Bannon’s podcast covered immense ground concerning the coronavirus – including the theory that the disease leaked from a Chinese laboratory which was experimenting with bat coronavirus; a theory Zero Hedge suggested in January which similarly earned us a permanent ban from Twitter.”
  • I swear, blogging about Chinese lies and propaganda makes me feel like I’m Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory

    *Actually more like a fifth…

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for October 28, 2019

    Monday, October 28th, 2019

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

    Polls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

    Is that meaningful at this point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

    “Tulsi Gabbard: a Gandhi in Lycra“:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Why aren’t more Democrats endorsing Warren?

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

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

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

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

    Also:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Snip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    CNN poll snipped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Out of the Running

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

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





    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for October 21, 2109

    Monday, October 21st, 2019

    Biden’s going broke, Clinton accuses Gabbard of being a Russian agent, Angry Amy came to play, Tom Steyer’s the Make-A-Wish candidate, and Messam pulls in a whole $5 in Q3 campaign contributions. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Q3 Fundraising

    Updated numbers from candidate filings. One name jumps from the bottom to the top of the list, thinks to a big check from himself:

    1. Tom Steyer: $49,645,132.
    2. Bernie Sanders: $25.3 million.
    3. Elizabeth Warren: $24.6 million.
    4. Pete Buttigieg: $19.1 million.
    5. Joe Biden: $15.2 million.
    6. Kamala Harris: $11.6 million.
    7. Andrew Yang: $10 million.
    8. Cory Booker: $6 million.
    9. Amy Klobuchar: $4.8 million.
    10. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: $4,482,284.
    11. Julian Castro: $3,497,251.
    12. Tulsi Gabbard: $3,032,158.
    13. Marianne Williamson: $3 million.
    14. Steve Bullock: $2.3 million.
    15. Michael Bennet: $2.1 million.
    16. John Delaney: $868,452.
    17. Tim Ryan: $425,731.
    18. Joe Sestak: $374,196.
    19. Wayne Messam: $5.
  • Steyer only comes out on top because he donated $47,597,697 of his own money to his campaign, as against $2,047,433 from other contributors.
  • Delany did not kick any of his own money in this time around, which indicates that he’s either thinking of hanging it up or just coasting to Iowa before packing it in.
  • Messam: SIC. See below.
  • I should go back and link to early actual Q3 FEC documents for early reporters for the sake of formatting consistancy, but I don’t have time right now.
  • Polls

  • USA Today/Suffolk (Iowa): Biden 18, Warren 17, Buttigieg 13, Sanders 8, Steyer 3.
  • Morning Consult/Politico: Biden 31, Warren 21, Sanders 18, Harris 7, Buttigieg 6, Yang 3, Booker 2, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2, Steyer 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Williamson 1.
  • Emerson (Iowa): Biden 23, Warren 23, Buttigieg 16, Sanders 13, Yang 5, Bullock 4, Booker 3, Steyer 2, Gabbard 2, Harris 2, Klobuchar 1, Williamson 1, Bennet 1. It appears that Buttigieg’s huge fundraising haul is starting to bring results from pouring organizational money into Iowa. And this is the first poll I can recall Bullock registering support above background noise.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 142): Warren 28, Biden 25, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Bennet 1, Delaney 1, Steyer 1.
  • PPP (Maine): Warren 31, Biden 19, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 9, Harris 4, Yang 3, Booker 2, Castro 1, O’Rourke 1.
  • Siena (new York: Biden 21, Warren 21, Sanders 16, Harris 4, Buttigieg 4, Yang 3, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1.
  • Quinnipiac: Warren 32, Biden 28, Sanders 10, Buttigieg 7, Harris 3, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, O’Rourke 2, Booker 1, Castro 1, Bennet 1, Steyer 1.
  • Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald (New Hampshire) (page 30): Warren 24.6, Biden 23.9, Sanders 21.6, Buttigieg 9, Harris 4.5, Klobuchar 2.4, Booker 1.9, Steyer 1.2, Gabbard 0.5, Castro 0.2, O’Rourke 0.0.
  • East Carolina State (North Carolina): Biden 29, Sanders 19, Warren 17, Yang 9, Harris 8, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 4. Klobuchar 3, Booker 1, Castro 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

    Lots of post-debate analysis.

  • Who spoke the longest?

  • Nice piece on Q3 fundraising by 538. You can click on the graphics and see where each candidate got the majority of their funding from.
  • Instapundit thinks Biden was one of the debate winners:

    Joe Biden: He’s old, but he looked energetic and spoke clearly. He made a few errors — who’s “clipping coupons” in “the stock market?” But in general, he was forceful and seemed knowledgeable. In particular, he nailed Sen. Elizabeth Warren on how her health care plan would increase taxes on the middle class. And he was surprisingly sensible in dismissing “court-packing” schemes. His final remarks were a bit over the top, but after three hours I’d probably have been raving, too.

    Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: When she challenged her colleagues who wanted to “end endless wars” but who were also criticizing President Trump from withdrawing troops from Syria, she didn’t back down, and blasted the New York Times and a CNN contributor for calling her a “Russian asset” for criticizing what she called the “regime change war” in Syria. She then challenged Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who says we shouldn’t have troops in the Middle East at all, on the issue. On this and other issues, she was firm, clear, and was willing to buck the herd. And in her closing remarks, quoting Lincoln, she said “I don’t see deplorables, I see fellow Americans.”

    Mayor Pete Buttigieg: He made mincemeat of Beto O’Rourke, who dodged a question from Anderson Cooper on how he would enforce a ban on assault weapons. Beto was left looking flustered and trying to claim that Mayor Pete was insensitive to victims of violence, which was a bad look for him.

    Bernie Sanders: A guy who can have a heart attack and come back a few weeks later, yelling louder than anyone else for three hours, is winning. He was asked about his health, and he answered loudly, and then charmingly thanked his post-attack well-wishers. And he scored on Biden with his remarks about bipartisan support for the Iraq war.

    Losers: O’Rourke, Warren, Castro (“Several times I forgot he was even on the stage for 30 minutes or more.”) and Steyer.

  • Jim Geraghty liked Klobuchar and Buttigieg:

    Notice that Buttigieg is at 12 percent in Iowa in the RealClearPolitics average, and 8.7 percent in New Hampshire. That may not sound like much, but nobody else outside of the big three is anywhere near double digits anywhere. The South Bend mayor’s rise is Exhibit A of counterevidence when other candidates whine that the process is rigged in favor of well-known candidates who have been in politics forever.

    Yeah, but I’m convinced Buttigieg had big money recruiting and backing him before he ever got into the race.

    Klobuchar had, until last night, been a strong contender for the biggest “why is she running?” status. She wasn’t the biggest centrist or the most progressive, she’s from a state that might, theoretically, be competitive this cycle but isn’t most cycles and up until last night, “Minnesota Nice” appeared to be a synonym for boring. What does Klobuchar do well? It turns out she can politely but firmly poke holes in Warren’s arguments, making the Massachusetts senator’s high-dudgeon “you’re attacking me because I’m the only one standing up for the people” schtick sound overwrought and ridiculous.

    “At least Bernie’s being honest here and saying how he’s going to pay for this and that taxes are going to go up. And I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that, and I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice.”

    “I appreciate Elizabeth’s work. But, again, the difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.”

    “I want to give a reality check here to Elizabeth, because no one on this stage wants to protect billionaires. Not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires.”

    What we saw last night — particularly in the one-on-one concern-off held by Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke on gun violence — is that progressive Democrats get really used to being able to play the “I care about people, and you don’t” card against their opponents, and they’re really shocked and indignant when their own style of criticism is turned against them. You get the feeling that Buttigieg really sees O’Rourke as a political dilettante, play-acting at leadership having never had that much executive responsibility in office.

  • Joe Cunningham at Redstate has his own list of winners and losers:

    Winners: Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders

    Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, was seemingly everyone’s target. Biden targeted her. Kamala Harris targeted her. Tulsi Gabbard and others seemed to think that she was the candidate to beat during the debate, and so they tried. However, none of the blows really stuck. She also had some help from the producers of the debate, covering for Warren against an attack from Gabbard in particular. Her ability to withstand the attacks helped her image a bit, and she is definitely going to come out at least breaking even here.

    Pete Buttigieg stood out more than I think people expected. His shot at Beto O’Rourke knocked the Texas Democrat out. He scrapped with Warren and didn’t come across as foolish as others did. He appears now to be vying for the very base that Joe Biden has, and he looked very good doing it. If Biden falters, right now it’s not difficult to see those voters moving to Buttigieg.

    Bernie Sanders was very Bernie Sanders, and that did not hurt him. In fact, a little added sympathy from his heart issues late last week helped him perhaps dodge some attacks from the others on the stage. Nothing really stood out, but like Warren and Biden, “not losing” a debate with their level of support and backing them is as good as a win IF no one else stands out. And… no one did.

    The Losers: Joe Biden, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris

    Joe Biden was, once again, seemingly left alone for the most part. Up until the end of the debate, he wasn’t really hit too hard, and even after the divisions over Medicare For All, Biden’s record in the Senate and as Vice President, and a rather chauvinist attempt to take credit for Elizabeth Warren’s time as head of the consumer finance agency she touted as a major accomplishment, Biden still stood tall. The problem is that all of this happened to Biden as an afterthought. Everyone was focused on Warren. Everyone was worried about Sanders’ health. Everyone was looking for Buttigieg and others to step up. And no one really cared how well Biden did. That is a bad thing for him.

    Beto O’Rourke has a glass jaw, and everyone knows it now. When Pete Buttigieg landed a full-on blow, saying “I don’t need a lesson in courage from you,” it was pretty much over for the furriest Democratic candidate. Beto came off as weak and, when not talking about guns, he frankly appeared to lack the backbone necessary to advocate as equally for his other unconstitutional pursuits. If he doesn’t fold this week, then he’s even more foolish than we knew.

    Plus this: “What on God’s green earth is Tom Steyer even doing here? He exists on this debate stage solely to make people wish he didn’t. There is no reason for him here. He’s not even a good distraction from the other candidates. He’s just… there.”

  • They debated breaking up big tech. And the hill Kamala Harris died on was…Trump’s Twitter account.
  • Why aren’t more candidates dropping out?

    There are seven other active candidates legitimate enough to make major media lists who will not be on the stage — and are very unlikely to meet the tougher criteria for the November and subsequent debates — who are nonetheless still in the field….Messam hasn’t even made some lists and has been on others because, well, he’s an elected official, not some random schmo claiming to run for president to advertise his dry-cleaning business or whatever. The city of which he is mayor, Miramar, Florida, is actually larger that Pete Buttigieg’s South Bend. But he hasn’t come within a mile of a debate stage. Nor has former congressman and retired admiral Joe Sestak, who has been in the race since June but hasn’t made much of an impression.

    There are five others, though, who did make the June and July debates, but none since then, and haven’t dropped out. Of these, author and self-help guru Marianne Williamson has shown some grassroots fundraising chops (she met the donor threshold for tonight’s debate, but only had one qualifying poll); she raised a non-negligible $3.1 million in the third quarter, double her second-quarter haul. There are two barely surviving candidates with fine résumés and theoretical paths to the nomination if Joe Biden ever crashed and burned: the self-styled moderates Colorado senator Michael Bennet and Montana governor Steve Bullock. Congressman John Delaney is kind of sui generis: His personal wealth makes fundraising for anything other than debate qualification largely unnecessary, but he’s been in the race longer than anyone and had one debate (in July) in which he got lots of exposure — yet still is in nowheresville in terms of measurable support. He’s said he’ll stay in until Iowa no matter what.

    When Ohio congressman Tim Ryan suspended his campaign in the wake of the Dayton shootings in August, a lot of people figured he’d be formally out of the race before long. But he hasn’t dropped out, technically, though he’s simultaneously running a House reelection campaign.

  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. In his day job as a senator (you know, the one he’s keeping), he reintroduced a bill to ban congresscritters from becoming lobbyists. Good for him.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden or bust for big money donors?

    The Democratic Party’s most powerful donors are running out of options in the presidential race. Their warhorse Joe Biden is stumbling, while the other corporate-minded candidates lag far behind. For party elites, with less than four months to go before voting starts in caucuses and primaries, 2020 looks like Biden or bust.

    A key problem for the Democratic establishment is that the “electability” argument is vaporizing in the political heat. Biden’s shaky performances on the campaign trail during the last few months have undermined the notion that he’s the best bet to defeat Donald Trump. The latest polling matchups say that Biden and his two strong rivals for the nomination, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, would each hypothetically beat Trump by around 10 points.

    As such realities sink in, the focus is turning to where the party’s entrenched power brokers don’t want it to go — the actual merits of the candidates in terms of political history, independence from big-money special interests, and longtime commitment to positions now favored by most Democrats.

    With the electability claim diminished, Biden faces a steep climb on the merits of his record and current policy stances. The looming crisis for the Biden forces is reflected in the fact that his top campaign operatives have already publicly conceded he could lose the first two nomination contests, the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

    And in an era when small donations from the grassroots are adding up to big financial hauls, Biden is so uninspiring that he’s losing the money race by a wide margin. Despite his relentless harvesting of big checks from hedge-fund managers, rich CEOs and the like, Biden’s campaign raised a total of only about $15 million in the last quarter, compared to around $25 million that Sanders and Warren each received. The New York Times noted that the duo’s fundraising totals are markers for “the collective enthusiasm in the party for progressive candidates pushing messages of sweeping change.”

    But Biden continues to greatly benefit from the orientations of corporate media outlets that loudly echo the concerns of corporate Democrats (often called “moderates” or “centrists”) and their kindred spirits in realms like Wall Street. Rarely inclined to dispel the longstanding myth of “Lunch Bucket Joe,” reporting has been sparse on his legislative legacy in service to such industries as credit-card companies, banks and the healthcare business.

    Media affection for Biden is matched by the biases of corporate media that — for many years — have routinely spun coverage of Sanders in negative ways, amplifying the messages from people at the helm of huge corporations. Recent months have seen no letup of anti-Bernie salvos, with Sanders as a kind of “heat shield” for Warren, catching the vast majority of the left-baiting attacks that would otherwise be aimed at her. Yet, as Warren’s campaign gains momentum, she is becoming more of a prime target for wealthy sectors and their media echo chambers.

    I haven’t seen much criticism of Warren from the MSM; mainly it’s been non-stop tongue bathes, at least since Harris faded. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Biden’s campaign blew $924,000 on private jets. That’s one out of every 16 bucks his campaign raised. Also, his warchest is down to $8.9 million. More on those implications:

    Biden raised $15.7 million last quarter, spent $17.7 million and has about $9 million in the bank, according to the reports. In other words, for every $1 the campaign raised, it spent $1.12. If he continues to spend his third-quarter average of roughly $196,120 a day and continues to raise $174,904 each day, he can grind out until Election Day. But his future finances get ugly if he wants to build beyond the current footprint.

    That rate of spending leaves Biden with a campaign nest egg smaller than Bernie Sanders ($33.7 million), Warren ($25.7 million), Pete Buttigieg ($23.4 million) and Kamala Harris ($10.6 million).

    Biden also has a stupid gun control plan, including a restoration of the cosmetic “assault weapon” ban of 1994 and a “voluntary” gun buyback. (Hat tip: John Richardson.)

  • Update: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Thinking of Running After All? Remember how Bloomberg said he wasn’t going to run? Guess what?

    Mike Bloomberg is still considering a 2020 run — if Joe Biden’s campaign implodes, according to a new report.

    The CNBC report comes just days after The Post revealed that TV’s “Judge Judy” said the billionaire would be a “perfect presidential candidate.”

    The former mayor in March announced he would not run for president because he believed it would be difficult for him to prevail in a Democratic primary. He also saw former Vice President Biden as a viable moderate voice.

    But a CNBC report Monday claims Bloomberg is reconsidering after seeing Biden stumble and lose ground to Elizabeth Warren.

    Get ready for Steyer 2: Billionaire Bugaloo.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Forbes reviews his tax plans:

    Color me confused. In one breath, Booker has promised to repeal the [2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] for the highest-earning individuals, a move that would return the top rate to 39.6%. There is, of course, the 3.8% net investment tax, meaning the top rate on interest or passive business income would reach 43.4%.

    But in another breath, Booker promises to tax capital gains and dividends at ordinary rates, and states that the top rate on capital gains would become 40.8%, which would seem to indicate that the top rate on ordinary income will not increase from 37% to 39.6%.

    In any event, a top rate of 41 – 44% — should that be where Booker lands — will pale in comparison to the top rate of 70%(!) proposed by both Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris.

  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. He was fundraising in Chicago, along with Booker and Buttigieg.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Progressives: “Don’t you dare attack Queen Liz!The Anti-Fun Party: “Pete Buttigieg Criticizes Chappelle’s Latest Special, Even Though He Has Not Seen It.” Gets a Fox News interview. Krystal Ball (who is evidently a real person and not a Thomas Pynchon chracter), dissents from the post-debate Buttigieg lovefest:

    Pete was praised for launching the same dumb Medicare for All attack that we’ve heard from someone or another at every debate and for obliging the CNN moderators by continuing the grudge match with Beto O’Rourke that no one wanted or asked for.

    But maybe my favorite take was from Van Jones, who described the desire for everyone to have health care the way every other developed country does as “wokenomics,” and then went on to outright predict the field would narrow to Warren and Pete!

    Pistol Pete versus Warren the selfie queen. There is no doubt that this would be the dream matchup of every post-grad holding, Harvard envying, McKinsey-adjacent pundit in the land. Just imagine the plans and the civility and the erudition. No word on what would have happened to Bernie and his 1.4 million donors and 33 million dollars in the bank to say nothing of his working-class supporters. Or for that matter where the older black voters who have solidly supported Biden would have magically vanished to.

    Guys, I think we have enough evidence to officially declare that the media has decided to pull mayor Pete off the gurney and resuscitate his failing presidential run.

    The Harvard-bashing is tasty, but this is a stupid take. Buttigieg has been raising money hand-over-fist and rising in the polls before the debate, so in no way is his campaign “failing.”

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile in The Stanford Daily, the school newspaper for the college he and his twin brother attended. It’s a fawning profile for a campaign where such things are now few and far between.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But see the entry for Tulsi Gabbard below. And I get an excuse to embed this:

  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. On a tour of Iowa.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hillary Clinton accused Gabbard of being groomed by the Russians to run a third party campaign.

    Appearing on Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s podcast, Clinton made a number of claims regarding Russian meddling in U.S. elections, including that Gabbard’s substantial social-media support relies on Russian bots. Gabbard was the most-searched candidate after the first and second Democratic debates.

    “I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said on the podcast. “She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

    Although Clinton did not explicitly mention Gabbard’s name, when asked if the accusation was leveled at the Hawaii Congresswoman, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said “If the nesting doll fits.”

    Result:

    Notice how quickly CNN cut off Gabbard when she challenged Elizabeth Warren. “Even among the other frontrunners, Warren got almost a full 10 minutes extra vs. Biden and Sanders. That’s pretty remarkable given how absolutely boring and uncharismatic she is. But there’s a simple reason she got so much extra time. The moderators were favoring her big time.”

    No wonder Clinton hates her…

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris can’t answer a simple question. “Kamala Harris seems to lack any instinct for leadership.” And her campaign just keeps doing stupid stuff. Campaigned in Aiken, South Carolina.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Angry Amy Came to Play:

    A confessed bird murderer who presided over a Senate office that former staffers described as “controlled by fear, anger, and shame,” Klobuchar (D., Minn.) traded her inside voice for her shouty voice, and lit into her Democratic opponents, accusing them of trying to deceive the American people with lies.

    De facto frontrunner Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) bore the brunt of Amy’s rage, especially when it came to the issue of health care and Warren’s refusal to admit that middle class taxes will go up under her proposed “Medicare for All” plan.

    “I’m sorry, Elizabeth … I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice,” Klobuchar seethed. “I believe the best and boldest idea here is to not trash Obamacare, but to do exactly what Barack Obama wanted to do from the beginning, and that’s have a public option.”

    Klobuchar was just getting started, accusing Warren of wanting to kick 150 million people off of their preferred health insurance plans by forcing them to enroll in Medicare.

    “And I’m tired of hearing whenever I say these things, ‘Oh, it’s Republican talking points,'” Klobuchar fumed. “You are making Republican talking points right now in this room … I think there is a better way that is bold, that will cover more people, and it’s the one we should get behind.”

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Gets a Dave Wiegel profile in the Washington Post:

    Klobuchar, who struggled for attention in the Democratic primary, says this week’s debate helped her catch on at exactly the right time. Her town halls are crowded, with staffers running to get more chairs to pack breweries or event centers. She leads the field in local endorsements, especially state legislators, “with more to come,” she says. She kicked off her bus tour with the support of Andy McKean, a Republican state legislator who bolted his party six months ago and who pronounced Klobuchar the kind of Democrat who could unite America again.

    “If you want to peak in this race,” she said after a stop in Waterloo, “you want to peak now, instead of six months before [the caucuses].”

    A few other candidates still draw larger crowds, but Klobuchar is going for a particular kind of caucus-goer: the loyal Democrat who wants to win back those mysterious Trump voters. In interviews around the events, Klobuchar-curious voters tended to list her alongside South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.); and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) as the candidates who could have the longest reach, because they were not seen as too left-wing. Craig Hinderaker, a 71-year-old farmer who saw Klobuchar in Panora (population 1,069), said he’d committed to her months earlier after becoming convinced that she had centrist appeal and real campaign skills.

    “Biden was my top choice, but he’s been dropping,” Hinderaker said. “Just too many errors.”

    Klobuchar, who began running TV and digital ads in Iowa only this month, had methodically introduced herself to the state as the electable, relatable neighbor who Republicans had already learned to love. On the campaign’s official bingo cards, there are squares for “bio diesel plant” and “breakfast pizza,” as well as the more evasive “bridge that crosses over the river of our divide.” Her stump speeches and town hall answers are peppered with references to Republican colleagues — “Lindsey Graham, who took up my bill with John McCain,” or “James Lankford, a very conservative senator from Oklahoma” — who have helped her pass bills. Without mentioning Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), she describes the sort of Democrats she says wouldn’t win in 2020.

    “People don’t really want the loudest voice in the room,” Klobuchar said in Mason City. “They want a tough voice in the room, which I think I showed I could do in the debate. They want someone that’s going to tell them the truth — look them in the eye and tell them the truth — and not make promises that they can’t keep. They want someone who understands that there’s a difference between a plan and a pipe dream, and that not everything can be free.”

    Also got a CBS News piece.

  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Wayne Messam brought in $5 in campaign contributions in Q3. Not $5 million. Not $500,000. Not $5,000. $5. Plus a timeline of his failing campaign. He says the $5 was a mistake, but I’m going to use this opportunity to move him down to the also-rans for the next clown car update.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still says he’s coming for your guns. Law enforcement officials are not about to carry out O’Rourke’s crazy gun confiscation scheme. “Backtracking on his claim earlier this month that religious organizations should be taxed if they did not perform gay marriage, O’Rourke said churches and other religious nonprofits should maintain their tax-exempt status, but that they should be legally obliged not to discriminate against gay and transgender people.” He panders to the far left and then walks it back without rhyme or reason. Not sure anyone has a reason to pretend to care about him anymore. Every time you think you’ve reached the depth of O’Rourke cringe, there’s always deeper cringe:

  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. He gets a mini-profile in the Washington Post; it’s less informative than his Wikipedia entry or campaign site. His presidential fundraising is sucking wind. Surprise! So is his House reelection campaign!
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Trying to get back in the groove after his heart attack:

    Bernie Sanders, just weeks after a heart attack took him off the presidential campaign trail, renewing questions about his age and health, roared back last week with a strong debate performance and the disclosure of a quarterly fundraising haul that vanquished all of his Democratic competitors.

    But the 78-year old Vermont senator, whose powerful oratory and progressive message on income inequality lifted him to serious contention in the 2016 Democratic contest against Hillary Clinton, is less formidable this time, with polls in early states and beyond showing his status as a top-tier candidate at risk.

    From the challenge posed by fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren to staff clashes and poor strategic communication, Sanders has struggled to compete in a larger field and a new political environment. His health scare added another major challenge.

    Other than Tuesday’s televised debate in Ohio, Sanders has been largely off the trail since his heart attack Oct. 1. He held his first major campaign event since his hospitalization on Saturday, when New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders at a New York City rally to endorse his candidacy.

    An estimated 26,000 people showed up for that rally, which was slightly larger than a New York City crowd Warren drew last month. Did the heart attack recharge his campaign?

    For months, Sanders’s campaign was largely listless. Sanders still had a devoted following, though most polls suggested what was obvious on the ground: Fans were drifting to other candidates, most obviously Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. At events in Iowa, New Hampshire, and beyond, I heard the same comments from longtime Sanders supporters: They still loved him and were grateful for how he’d jolted Democratic politics to the left, but he was too old to be president, and it was time for someone else to step up. The heart attack seemed like a macabre metaphor for the state of Sanders’s campaign.

    But contrarianism runs deep in the senator from Vermont—a 2016 campaign aide once described one of Sanders’s main animating principles to me as: “Fuck me? No, fuck you!” With his comeback, Sanders seems to be saying just that—not only to any detractors ready to write him off, but to the organ pumping inside his own chest.

    And his supporters have responded.

    “I kind of thought [his heart attack] was the end of the campaign, but the boost has been significant, and I’m encouraged by it,” said Quinn Miller, a 33-year-old city-government worker wearing a blue Unidos con Bernie T-shirt.

    “It got everyone rallied,” said Erik Pye, a 45-year-old Army veteran and store owner from Brooklyn. “It gave everyone a sense of urgency.”

    The incident seems to have made serious again all the Sanders supporters who’d recently wandered off, I observed to 28-year-old Elizabeth Johnson, who’d traveled from Rhode Island with her boyfriend. “Serious,” she joked, “as a heart attack.”

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Fox News profile on his walk across New Hampshire. “It’s a non-traditional journey. Sestak will often stop down and jump into the support vehicle to attend an event or make a campaign stop or two before heading back to the spot where he stopped his trip, so he can resume his journey. And each evening he returns to a home in southern New Hampshire, where he stays with friends.” He actually seems to be walking alone for significant portions of the trip. A candidate’s time is a campaign’s most precious resource. The fact that he’s spending it plodding alone and mostly ignored is the perfect metaphor for the Sestak 2020 campaign.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. America, meet Tom Steyer:

    When billionaire Tom Steyer is up on the debate stage tonight and several serious-minded senators and governors are not, viewers can fairly ask what the heck is going on. Other Democratic candidates have explicitly accused Steyer of buying his way onto the debate stage. Per the Sacramento Bee: “In an email to supporters, former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke said Steyer has ‘succeeded in buying his way up there.’ New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker wrote to supporters in a fundraising email that Steyer’s ‘ability to spend millions of his personal wealth has helped him gain in the polls like no one else in this race.’”

    Steyer has spent $20 million on television ads — boosting his name ID and poll support above that oh-so-high 2 percent threshold — and he’s collected donations from more than 165,000 individuals.

    Tonight, many Americans will get their first look at Tom Steyer, and while there’s always the chance he surprises us, the odds are good that by the end of the night, viewers at home will wonder if he won his spot on the debate stage in some sort of auction or perhaps through the Make-a-Wish Foundation. If Tom Steyer did not exist, cynical conservatives would have to invent him as the embodiment of hilariously self-absorbed, hypocritical elitists who believe in wildly impractical happy-talk theories and who have only the vaguest notion of what the U.S. Constitution says.

    Steyer is a billionaire hedge-fund manager who told the New York Times that he doesn’t think of himself as rich. At his hedge fund, Steyer helped “wealthy investors move their money through an offshore company to help shield their gains from U.S. taxes.” Back in 2005, he invested $34 million in Corrections Corporation of America, “which runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” Steyer says he regrets that past investment.

    He’s an ardent environmentalist and climate-change activist who made part of his fortune in coal development projects. He has spent tens of millions of dollars on political ads because he wants to “get corporate money out of politics.” It’s unclear if he has other controversial investments, because he “declined to go into detail about significant segments of his investment portfolio, citing confidentiality agreements that bar him from publicly disclosing the underlying assets in which he is invested.” (Steyer believes President Trump has violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution because “has directly profited from dealing with foreign governments through his businesses in the U.S. and around the globe.”)

    In January, he declared that he would be “dedicating 100 percent of my time, money and effort to one cause: working for Mister Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. I am not running for president at this time. Instead I am strengthening my commitment to Need to Impeach in 2019.” But by July — well before House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of impeachment proceedings — he changed his mind and decided to run.

    “Tom Steyer Calls for Impeachment Inquiry to Be Made Public.” I think this may be the first issue Steyer and I agree on.

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Suburban Democratic white women are not sold on Warren:

    “But she would never get elected,” says Lowry. “There is no chance.”

    “Why do you say that?” says White, a former navy officer with a PhD in health policy.

    “All the people who voted for Trump are scared to death of socialism,” she says. Warren’s policies are far too left-leaning to appeal to most Americans, Lowry says. Living in this area, she adds, she understands the importance of selecting a moderate.

    When pundits question Trump’s support among women, he will often allude to the “hidden” suburban women voting block that backed him in 2016.

    Democrats should worry that Warren is the frontrunner:

    Warren was taken to task during the debate for evading basic questions about how she would pay for her signature Medicare-for-all health-care plan, and how she would implement her controversial—and constitutionally dubious—wealth tax. For a candidate who brags about having a policy plan for everything, it didn’t look good.

    Sen. Amy Klobuchar called Warren’s health-care plan a “pipe dream” and offered her a “reality check” on her wealth tax, attacks that were echoed and reinforced by the other candidates throughout the night. When Mayor Pete Buttigieg asked Warren, “yes or no,” whether her Medicare-for-all plan would raise taxes on the middle class, Warren hemmed and hawed, talked about her “principles,” and evaded giving a yes or no answer.

    Buttigieg and others seized on this, calling into question Warren’s trustworthiness. When Sen. Bernie Sanders jumped in to explain that his universal health-care plan would increase taxes, Klobuchar and Buttigieg noted that at least Sanders was being honest and straightforward about his plan. Through it all, Warren seemed defensive and taken aback that her fellow candidates were coming after her like this.

    The reason all this should concern Democrats is that if Warren can’t handle pointed questions about basic aspects of her major policy proposals in a primary debate, how is she going to weather the storms of the general election? If she can’t bring herself to admit that Medicare-for-all will mean higher taxes for everyone, which it certainly will, how will general election voters already skeptical of Washington be persuaded to trust her?

    Trump won a crowed GOP primary in 2016 in part by saying things no other candidate was willing to say and putting himself forward as an honest outsider who tells it like it is. If Democrats want to put someone up against Trump who can beat him at this game, their candidate had better have a credible answer for how he or she will pay for a $32 trillion program that’s steadily losing support. The most recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found just 51 percent now support Medicare-for-all, a two-point drop from last month and a five-point drop since April, even as the share of those who oppose it is growing.

    Questions about how Democrats plan to pay for these things are only going to intensify as we approach the general election, and as more Americans realize that they’ll certainly have to pay higher taxes for socialized health care and college, such policies will likely continue to lose support.

    Floats the idea of ending aid to Israel over West Bank settlements.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s been too long since Williamson got one of those weirdly glowing profiles, so here’s one from her old ministry stomping grounds: “Soul on Fire: Marianne Williamson brings explosion of love to Encinitas town hall event.” (I saw Explosion of Love open for The String Cheese Incident at SXSW.) Williamson hits Clinton over the Gabbard smear: “The Democratic establishment has got to stop smearing women it finds inconvenient! The character assassination of women who don’t toe the party line will backfire. Stay strong @TulsiGabbard . You deserve respect and you have mine.” Also objecting to Clinton’s comments was…
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He says Gabbard “deserves much more respect” than Clinton gave her. “She literally just got back from serving our country abroad.” The Yang campaign is now treated seriously enough that we’re actually starting to see some hit pieces. First up: Slate: “Andrew Yang Is Full of It.” There follows a somewhat tedious and misguided discussion of automation vs. trade deals are responsible for the decline in manufacturing jobs. (Both are more wrong than right; union contracts and policies and the structure of tax laws probably had bigger effects than either.) “Andrew Yang, Snake Oil Salesman:

    Not only has he exceeded expectations for his polling and fundraising, not only has he developed a cult following, not only has he got people talking about his signature idea, the universal basic income, he actually has other candidates expressing openness to it.

    It’s too bad that Yang’s idea is a foolish response to a non-problem. Worse, Yang is trying to persuade people to fear and oppose something that we need more of and that is a key to economic progress and higher wages — namely, automation.

    It is through technological innovation that workers become more productive — i.e., can create more with less — and society becomes richer.

    To hear Yang tell it, robots are on the verge of ripping an irreparable hole in the American job market. He’s particularly alarmed by the potential advent of autonomous vehicles. According to Yang, “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society.” He predicts that in a few years, “we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work,” and “all hell breaks loose.”

    Not to put too fine a point on it, Yang’s fear of automation in general and self-driving cars in particular is completely insane.

    It can’t be that the only thing holding our society together is the fact that cars and trucks must be operated by people. If innovations in transportation were really the enemy, we would have been done in long ago by the advent of canals, then railroads, then automobiles and highways.

    At a practical level, Yang’s assumption that autonomous vehicles are going to wipe out all trucking jobs, and relatively soon, is unsupported. If progress has been made toward self-driving cars, we’ve learned that the jump to full autonomy is a vast one that will take many years to achieve. There will be time for the sector and people employed in it to adjust.

    He outraised Buttigieg and Harris among big tech (which in this case means Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft).

  • Out of the Running

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

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