Posts Tagged ‘rape’

Kenosha Burning

Thursday, August 27th, 2020

Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioters seem determined to riot in every city in America (or at least every Democrat-controlled city), and this week it was the turn of Kenosha, Wisconsin, a city of some 100,000 on the shores of Lake Michigan between Chicago and Milwaukee, two other cities that have gotten to experience the same violence.

Kenosha, WI is under siege by mobs of violent rioters, looters, vandals, and arsonists. The mainstream media is spinning this as a normal reaction to the police shooting of Jacob Blake, but it’s obviously a gang of criminal thugs wreaking havoc and destroying lives and livelihoods because they can. No matter the impetus, this is not okay.

The man over whom rioters were destroying Kenosha was a repeat offender wanted on 3rd degree sexual assault charges and accused of rape.

However, things have obviously changed in the political landscape, because after two days of letting rioters run free, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor Tony Evers accepted President Donald Trump’s offer to send federal law enforcement officers to help stop the riots.

Some video:

Even the New York Times has the gall to say “The politically calculated warnings of President Trump and the Republican Party about chaos enveloping America should Democrats win in November are reverberating among some people in Kenosha.” I guess “politically calculated” is newspeak whenever a Republican says something that’s obviously true. The actual-reportage-mixed-with-special-pleading continues:

While many demonstrators have been peaceful [the ritual invocation!], others have set fire to buildings. At least four businesses downtown have been looted. Men armed with guns have shown up to confront protesters, leading to the shooting of three people, two of them fatally.”

In Kenosha County, where the president won by fewer than 250 votes in 2016, those who already supported Mr. Trump said in interviews that the events of the past few days have simply reinforced their conviction that he is the man for the job. But some voters who were less sure of their choice said the chaos in their city and the inability of elected leaders to stop it were currently nudging them toward the Republicans.

And some Democrats, nervous about condemning the looting because they said they understood the rage behind it [drink!], worried that what was happening in their town might backfire and aid the president’s re-election prospects.

Yes, that’s the big problem! Not the arson, looting and murder in Democrat-run cities, but the possibility that people might vote against Democrats!

That’s the real unforgivable crime.

The same concern is expressed by leftwing CNN hack Don Lemon.

CNN’s Don Lemon said Tuesday night that Democrats “ignoring” riots in some U.S. cities represents a “blind spot” for the party, and called on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to address the problem because it is “sticking” in polling and focus groups.

The perspective comes after deadly violence continued in Kenosha, Wis., with three shot and two dead amid rioting following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

Lemon called Kenosha a “Rorschach test for the entire country” during his handoff with 9 p.m. anchor Chris Cuomo.

“It’s showing up in the polling. It’s showing up in focus groups. It is the only thing right now that is sticking,” Lemon said ahead of “CNN Tonight” on Tuesday. “The riots and the protests have become indistinguishable.”

Maybe that’s because they’ve gone hand-in-hand from the very first, when radical Marxists saw George Floyd’s death, idle hands from the lockdown and widespread masking as an opportunity both to sow chaos, and to radicalize black Americans just when polls were showing President Trump managing to gain a larger share of their support.

“I think this is a blind spot for Democrats. I think Democrats are ignoring this problem or hoping that it will go away, and it’s not going to go away,” [Lemon] added before arguing the violence needs to be addressed by Biden before the election.

“The problem is not going to be fixed by [Election Day],” said Lemon. “But what they can do, and I think maybe Joe Biden may be afraid to do it … he’s got to address it. He’s got to come out and talk about it.”

“And they’re rioters, not protesters. They’re criminals,” he added.

Imagine that.

People have finally said “Enough!” Both in Kenosha and elsewhere.

The only reasons why the riots have been allowed to go on as long as they have is Democratic mayors, prosecutors and governors refused to let police restore order, either because they agreed with the goals of the rioters, found the riots politically useful, or lack the courage to confront leftwing radicals (“no enemies on the left”). Where police have been allowed to use sufficient force to maintain public order (including, ironically, Austin; good thing Texas has a Republican governor), either the riots stopped or protests were never allowed to escalate into riots in the first place.

Order cures disorder, and the very first role of government is securing the life, liberty and property of its citizens.

Democrats forget that at their (and the nation’s) peril.

Edited to add: Saw this on Twitter this morning:

China Perfidy Roundup for July 22, 2020

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020

Time for another roundup of China’s various crimes:

  • Inside China’s concentration camps for Uighers:

    Dawn breaks in the crowded prison cell. Not everyone is asleep — conditions are so cramped in the 70-square-yard space that 15 of the 60 inmates have to stand to give others their turn to lie down.

    The lack of privacy is absolute. Toilet breaks are rationed — two minutes at a time — and in full gaze of the others.

    Glass walls, cameras and microphones mean that every word and deed is recorded.

    Informants placed in each cell even note down what people say in their sleep and pass it on to guards.

    As with every other day, the morning begins with compulsory singing of Communist Party songs, praising the glorious motherland and its wise leader, Xi Jinping.

    Then their only meal of the day arrives. Watery cabbage soup, served with a small lump of steamed dough. If they’re lucky, they may get a few grains of rice as well.

    Snip.

    Morning is indoctrination. Inmates — hundreds of them, all shaven-headed — sit in a vast echoing room, listening to hours of lectures on the evils of religion

    The monotony of the lessons is mental torture. At the end of the class, inmates are asked ‘is there a God?’ The only permitted answer is ‘no’.

    Every waking moment is an onslaught on their cherished beliefs and traditions. The half-starved inmates are even forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, in defiance of their Muslim faith.

    Afternoon brings interrogations. To break their mental resistance, inmates are forced to watch others being tortured before their own sessions of questioning.

    They are made to denounce friends and family, to confess to fictitious crimes such as bomb-making and espionage, and to express abject contrition — even for such harmless acts as having a copy of the Koran. Any resistance brings beatings, electric shocks and sleep deprivation.

    Nakedness is another dehumanising tactic. Nudity is taboo in Islam, but prisoners of all ages are made to parade before each other and in view of the guards.

    For women, humiliating gynaecological inspections are mandatory. Rape is routine.

    (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.) Previous posts on China’s concentration camp system for Uighers can be found here and here.

  • This is pretty horrifying: “China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization.”

    The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.

    While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”

    The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

    The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

    It’s not just a “form of” genocide, it violates Article 2, Clause D of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which explicitly outlaws “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

  • More on the same subject:

    Last week, drone footage, verified by Western intelligence agencies, emerged from Northern China. It showed Uighur Muslims bound and blindfolded, with shaven heads, being loaded onto trains that were likely headed for detention camps. In a BBC interview, British journalist Andrew Marr demanded answers from Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom. Xiaoming accused “so-called Western intelligence agencies” of making “false accusations against China.” The population of Xinjiang had doubled in 40 years, he said, which clearly proved that “ethnic cleansing” and “so-called forced abortions” had not occurred. Marr, unconvinced, retorted, “According to your own local government statistics, the population growth in Uighur jurisdictions in that area has fallen by 84 percent between 2015 and 2018. 84 percent.”

    How can that be so? A recent report by the Associated Press, compiling “government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor” gives an idea.

    Over the past four years, the Chinese government has spent tens of millions of dollars to violently hijack the functioning reproductive systems of minority women. In 2017, according to official directives uncovered by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, government officials backed by armed law-enforcement officers were instructed to “leave no blind spots,” “contain illegal births and lower fertility rates,” “test all who need to be tested,” and “detect and deal with those who violate policies early.”

    The AP report found that “having too many children” is a “major reason people are sent to detention camps,” that “parents of three or more [children] are ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines,” and that “police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.” The report also contains shocking witness testimony:

    • “Tursunay Ziyawudun said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb.”
    • “Gulbahar Jelilova confirmed that detainees in her camp were forced to abort their children. She also saw a new mother, still leaking breast milk, who did not know what had happened to her infant. And she met doctors and medical students who were detained for helping Uighurs dodge the system and give birth at home.”
    • Gulzia Mogdia was also forced to have an abortion when she became pregnant with her third child. “Medics inserted an electric vacuum into her womb and sucked her fetus out of her body,” after which she was “taken home and told to rest, as [officials] planned to take her to a camp.”
  • What does the “reproductive freedom” crowd have to say about this outrage? We all know what: Exactly nothing.

    (I tried alternate spellings as well.)

  • U.S. announces it’s tired of China’s South China Sea shenanigans:

    The United States champions a free and open Indo-Pacific. Today we are strengthening U.S. policy in a vital, contentious part of that region – the South China Sea. We are making clear: Beijing’s claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea are completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them.

    In the South China Sea, we seek to preserve peace and stability, uphold freedom of the seas in a manner consistent with international law, maintain the unimpeded flow of commerce, and oppose any attempt to use coercion or force to settle disputes. We share these deep and abiding interests with our many allies and partners who have long endorsed a rules-based international order.

    These shared interests have come under unprecedented threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Beijing uses intimidation to undermine the sovereign rights of Southeast Asian coastal states in the South China Sea, bully them out of offshore resources, assert unilateral dominion, and replace international law with “might makes right.”

    Beijing’s approach has been clear for years. In 2010, then-PRC Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told his ASEAN counterparts that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact.” The PRC’s predatory world view has no place in the 21st century.

    The PRC has no legal grounds to unilaterally impose its will on the region. Beijing has offered no coherent legal basis for its “Nine-Dashed Line” claim in the South China Sea since formally announcing it in 2009. In a unanimous decision on July 12, 2016, an Arbitral Tribunal constituted under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention – to which the PRC is a state party – rejected the PRC’s maritime claims as having no basis in international law. The Tribunal sided squarely with the Philippines, which brought the arbitration case, on almost all claims.

    As the United States has previously stated, and as specifically provided in the Convention, the Arbitral Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both parties. Today we are aligning the U.S. position on the PRC’s maritime claims in the SCS with the Tribunal’s decision. Specifically:

    The PRC cannot lawfully assert a maritime claim – including any Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claims derived from Scarborough Reef and the Spratly Islands – vis-a-vis the Philippines in areas that the Tribunal found to be in the Philippines’ EEZ or on its continental shelf.

    Beijing’s harassment of Philippine fisheries and offshore energy development within those areas is unlawful, as are any unilateral PRC actions to exploit those resources. In line with the Tribunal’s legally binding decision, the PRC has no lawful territorial or maritime claim to Mischief Reef or Second Thomas Shoal, both of which fall fully under the Philippines’ sovereign rights and jurisdiction, nor does Beijing have any territorial or maritime claims generated from these features.

  • “U.S. charges two Chinese nationals over coronavirus vaccine hacking scheme, other crimes.”
  • China plans to build two more aircraft carriers by 2035. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of China’s navy, with all the bad news of China’s increasing capabilities, it’s always good to find out about their limitations. So it’s encouraging to find out their naval officers are hamstrung by Communist political oversight:

    The Chinese long ago borrowed the concept of the political officer (“Zampolit”) from the Soviet Union. The political officer represents the Communist Party and has the authority to overrule any order a military commander gives. In reality, the political officer usually acts as a combined morale and special events officer. The political officers are primarily responsible for preventing anything happening in their unit that would embarrass the party. For naval zampolits that meant watching out for signs of mutiny or sailors planning to seek asylum in a foreign port.

    Unlike the Russian naval zampolit, the Chinese counterpart, called a political commissar is considered the equal of the regular naval commander and his superior when it comes to a “special mission”, like deliberately harassing foreign warships or opening fire on anyone. The political commissar is the same rank as the ship captain and can overrule the ship commander at any time and in any situation. It was not always that way.

    An important change took place in 2018 when naval political commissars were given equal authority with the captain as “mission commander” and is expected to replace the captain if the captain is disabled by injury or sickness. The normal second-in-command (the XO or executive officer) becomes the XO for the political commissar and the captain and third, not second, in command. The practical problem with this is that the captain and XO have spent their entire careers (fifteen or more years) learning how to run a ship and supervise the crew. In contrast, the political commissar learned enough tech stuff to be more annoying. The political commissar was a professional busybody, scold and snitch. The political commissar can end the career of the captain, XO or any other officer by simply making a series of uncomplimentary reports.

    The 2018 change was part of a program that began in 2016 throughout the military as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) sought to improve its control over the military. In the navy that meant the political commissar had the ultimate responsibility for achieving goals assigned to a ship. The captain is not the true commander of the ship in the Western sense. He is there to see that technical details are well taken care of and that would include taking change during very bad weather or some kind of technical (fire, explosion) problem aboard ship. The political commissar is expected to personally undertake particularly dangerous leadership missions, although only those he is qualified to deal with. That means political commissars have led boarding parties in dangerous situations but not entrusted with command during damage control situations.

    The full impact of the 2016-18 “reforms” to improve CCP control of the military are still working themselves out in the navy. Western, especially American, captains are being warned that their Chinese counterparts will probably not react as quickly to an emergency or unexpected situation that that should be taken into account, or taken advantage of.

    Another reason for the 2016-18 reforms was to reduce corruption in the military. In theory, political officers are supposed to prevent their commanders from getting involved in fiscal corruption, but often it’s the other way around, with the political commissars getting involved in illegal money-making schemes first. The CCP is trying to purge the political officer ranks of dishonest and unreliable elements. It is slow going. This has caused more friction between commanders and their political officers. That tends to reduce the effectiveness of the unit these two officers are in charge of. There is no easy solution to this problem.

    Snip.

    There’s another leadership problem China has to deal with, a problem similar to the one that seriously hurt Japan’s effort against the United States during World War II. This is the fact that the Japanese Army then, like the Chinese Army now, is the senior service to the extent that generals can overrule admirals and generally interfere in navy matters that the army generals really know little about. This is already causing China problems and there is no solution in sight. This is particularly true when it comes to joint training. In wartime, this “army runs the show” sort of thing is a serious problem, just read any history that covers the Japanese army and navy relationships during World War II.

    An offshoot of the army domination problem is that there is little real joint (all services working together) planning. Currently, the Chinese army tells the navy and air force what it wants done and that is the end of that. The Chinese understand that their next war will likely be in the Pacific, not mainland China. The navy should be in the lead here but it isn’t. Worse, naval officers who spend their entire careers learning how to run a ship, eventually as captain, have to accept being second-guessed or overruled by a less experienced (in running a ship) political officer.

  • “Pompeo imposes visa restrictions on Huawei, other Chinese tech companies, citing human rights abuses.”
  • State Department orders Chinese consulate in Houston closed.
  • “US House of Representatives passes NDAA amendment slamming Chinese aggression against India.” (From Hindustan Times. Judging from Google News, there’s precious little coverage of this resolution in American sources.)
  • UK Formally Suspends Hong Kong Extradition Treaty “Immediately & Indefinitely.”
  • “LA Times Publishes Beijing-Funded Propaganda.” “The eight-page advertorial, called “China Watch,” was tucked towards the back of the paper’s 61-page Sunday edition. With articles designed to look like legitimate newspaper columns, the insert presents a rosy view of the Chinese economy and its businesses.”
  • Sobering:

  • “Algorithm Error Causes YouTube To Accidentally Execute People Who Criticize China.”
  • BidenWatch for May 25, 2020

    Monday, May 25th, 2020

    Senile Joe became Racist Joe this week, with one of the most amazingly ill-considered answers since Gerald R. Ford said Poland didn’t suffer from Soviet domination. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

    Warning: This week is going to be Twitter-heavy.

  • Let’s jump right into the controversy that may convince DNC insiders that they can’t afford to go into the general election with Biden as their candidate:

  • Charlamagne tha God (AKA Lenard Larry McKelvey), the black radio host who interviewed Biden, did not find his apology compelling. “It has to come to the point where we stop putting the burden on black voters to show up for Democrats and start putting the burden on Democrats to show up for black voters.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Twitter reactions were…robust:

  • How is the media spinning Biden’s huge gaffe? Either the tried to gaslight us that it was a “joke” or says the real story is, as always, Republicans pounce.
  • Is this Biden’s “Northam in Blackface” scandal? Let’s hope not, since Northam is still in office. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Heh: “Ancestry.com Revokes Genealogies Of African Americans Who Don’t Support Biden.”
  • Of course that’s not the only bad news to befall the Biden campaign this week. The Ukraine scandal continues to look worse and worse for Biden and his spawn:


    

  • Dan McLaughlin analyzes ever aspect of Tara Reade’s rape allegation against Biden.

    None of this necessarily means that Tara Reade’s story is true. But the evidence is fairly convincing that Reade’s story is not just a campaign-season invention.

    One point in Reade’s favor, in contrast to Blasey Ford, is how she has handled her accusation. She made (as Young notes) a few edits to one of her blog posts to tailor it more closely with her current story, but unlike Blasey Ford, she did not delete her social-media history to erase all traces of political rants (even the embarrassing Putin stuff) before coming forward. She was not initially rolled out by a public-relations firm and a partisan lawyer (though she has since retained an attorney who is a Trump donor). She has not hidden behind her representatives to carefully stage-manage who could talk to her, and under what conditions; while she has canceled a few interviews and seems hesitant to appear on Fox News, she has sat for lengthy questioning on and off air by a diverse array of outlets ranging from left-wingers such as Halper, to ex-Fox personality Kelly, to the Times, Post, CNN, the Associated Press, Vox, and National Review. Maybe Reade is enjoying the publicity, but she is not hiding from questioners.

  • Biden wants to tax you till you bleed. Hiking taxes during a recession: What could possibly go wrong? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Biden wants to kill Charter schools:

  • The (D) after Biden’s name absolves him of all sins:

    One columnist declared that former Vice President Joe Biden could boil babies and she would still vote for him. Feminist leaders have said they believe Biden raped a Senate staffer but they still endorse him. Good government advocates have opposed any investigation into prior sexual harassment or corruption claims against Biden. It seems politicians and pundits alike have discovered the glory of the “presidential bull.” In this instance, Biden is akin to a papal indulgence that allows writers, members of Congress and journalists to forgive any sin in a holy crusade to retake Washington.

    In the 11th century, Pope Urban II formalized the use of indulgences, which could be purchased to forgive sins. A papal bull of the Crusade accompanied those who fought in the Holy Land and committed atrocities in the name of a higher order. The practice was defended as essentially drawing from the “treasury of merit” created by Jesus Christ, the saints and the faithful.

    Now the 2020 election has become the ultimate crusade, and President Trump’s critics seem to be enjoying indulgences in tossing aside moral and ethical considerations. The freedom that is Biden is nowhere more evident than in a recent column by The Nation’s Katha Pollitt, who wrote about the allegations of sexual assault made by former Biden staffer Tara Reade. Pollitt dispensed with any struggle over feminist or moral qualms, declaring, “I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them.”

    As Pollitt explained, “We do not have the luxury of sitting out the election to feel morally pure or send a message about sexual assault and #BelieveWomen.” Otherwise, Pollitt would have to deal with her column during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in which she denounced “some of his defenders [who] seem to be saying that even if the allegations are true, it shouldn’t really matter.”

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Heh:

  • The word salad continues:

  • Joe Biden pledges to beat Joe Biden. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Your modern technology frightens and confuses me!”

  • Yep:

  • “Poll: 28% of Democrats believe Biden will be replaced as party’s nominee.”
  • I’m sure that those shock at every single thing President Donald Trump does will be shocked at this as well:

  • Amy Klobuchar gets her turn in the veep vetting barrel. For those that wanted all the personal warmth of Hillary Clinton without the purported body count.
  • But actually having won election as U.S. Senator, Klobuchar clearly has a more plausible case than Stacey Abrams:

    Her attempt to leverage a failed Georgia gubernatorial bid into a spot on the Democratic ticket is so brazenly absurd that it’s hard to think of precedents.

    But the 46-year-old African-American activist isn’t one to be constrained by standard political practice — or reality. She refused to concede her narrow but clear 2018 gubernatorial loss, instead alleging she’d been undone by a massive voter-suppression scheme.

    As she put it at a recent event, “malfeasance and incompetence and my opponent, who was a cartoon villain, stole the voices of Georgians.” Usually, candidates who won’t acknowledge defeat are written off as sore losers. Such is the ­inflamed, paranoid state of Dems in the Trump era that rather than being embarrassed by the Georgian’s graceless and unsubstantiated claims of electoral theft, they have embraced and parroted them.

    Abrams could be forgiven for thinking that if she could get her party to accept she is the rightful governor of Georgia, she has a chance to convince it that she ­deserves to be a heartbeat away from the presidency in the administration of a 78-year-old man.

    By her own estimation, she’d be an “excellent running mate.” She has no doubt that she’s prepared to be president on Day One and touts her foreign-policy credentials of having visited more than a dozen countries.

    President Trump has rewritten the rules of political experience, yet it’s still a stretch to imagine someone who has only served in the Georgia legislature — and as a state representative, not even a senator — is ready to become leader of the Free World. Even Pete Buttigieg has more executive experience.

    Snip.

    Abrams can reasonably boast of an ability to stoke turnout among minority and young voters — she won more votes than any state-wide candidate in Georgia ever. But given her high-octane progressivism, she’d have limited appeal to working-class swing voters and suburban women. By picking her, Biden would also be undermining one of his chief arguments, namely, that he’s a low-risk, experienced, steady hand.

    This means that Abrams is likely to be passed over — and, if the past is any guide, conclude that she got robbed.

  • Meta-heh: “To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim.”
  • BidenWatch for May 11, 2020

    Monday, May 11th, 2020

    Still more evidence that Tara Reade complained about Biden surfaces, plus stories of just how extensively Beijing Joe pandered to China. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Remember all those polls showing Biden up big over Trump? Fugitaboutit. “According to an extensive survey by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government released in late April, only 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they have a favorable view of the former vice president, with just 8 percent saying they have a “very favorable” opinion of Biden. In the same survey, 47 percent of young people said they have an unfavorable view of Biden.”
  • Some Democrats are already gunning to dump Biden.

    The advantages for the Democrats in swapping in a different candidate should be obvious. While many, like DNC Chair Tom Perez, seem to be immune to embarrassment and can blithely ignore charges of hypocrisy, the public isn’t going to be so easily deceived. Holding Biden to the same standard that Brett Kavanaugh was (or at least giving the impression of doing that) would at least make them consistent.

    But there’s more to the story than that. Without intending to do so, Tara Reade could wind up providing a plausible cover story for removing a candidate that has a lot more problems than one sexual assault allegation. The fact that Uncle Joe has been locked up in his basement by the pandemic is probably the only thing stopping his campaign from turning into even more of a trainwreck. The few live interviews he’s done recently have ranged from being mild and uninteresting to downright alarming when his mind appears to wander, he stumbles over his words and careens from one topic to another.

    It just seems to be increasingly obvious that Joe Biden is well past his Best Sell By Date. And this is the guy that will have to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump on the debate stage sooner or later. Swapping him out for someone younger, sharper, and preferably without a sexual assault scandal dogging their heels would probably pay big benefits.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “1996 court document confirms Tara Reade told of harassment in Biden’s office.”
  • More on the same subject. “By now, it can’t genuinely be disputed that Reade told others about being sexually harassed while working for Biden. And although the husband didn’t mention assault or Biden himself, others have said that Reade alleged assault by Biden.”
  • Reade says she didn’t use “sexual harassment” (or “rape”) in the original announcement because she “chickened out.”
  • Megyn Kelly did a a 42 minute interview with Tara Reade.
  • Remember how New York unilaterally cancelled it’s Democratic presidential primary? A federal judge says “Not so fast.”

    Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang challenged New York’s decision to cancel its Democratic primary, scheduled for June 23. The state chose to do so because it’s obvious former Vice President Joe Biden will win the nomination and the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged the state.

    Judge Analise Torres ruled that New York must have its Democratic primary, finding the cancellation unconstitutional, and it must include “all qualified candidates.”

    New York removed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) because he suspended his campaign in April. He wanted to stay on the remaining ballots to gain delegates as a way to pressure the Democratic Party to bend its platform to his radical ideas.

  • Weekend at Biden’s:

    Tara Reade claims to be a loyal Democrat, and she might be doing her party a huge favor. Her accusation that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 gives Democrats a plausible excuse to ditch the former vice president as their 2020 presidential nominee, thus sparing themselves a likely disaster in the fall campaign. To put it as bluntly as possible, Biden’s mental decline is so obvious as to be an embarrassment, as he stumbles in every interview, even with the most friendly journalists. Democrats and their friends in the media attempting to push Biden’s candidacy forward resemble nothing so much as the cast of the 1989 comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, hauling around their dead boss’s corpse and trying to pretend he’s still alive.

    Many Democrats, of course, claim that Biden’s mind is unimpaired, or at least not bad enough to prevent him from defeating President Trump in November. Such Democrats apparently believe that Trump is so unpopular that doubts about Biden’s mental acuity will make no difference. This attitude is part of what can be called the “referendum” perspective on the fall campaign. Rather than seeing the election as a choice between two candidates, instead these Democrats expect voters to go to the polls to vote against the incumbent. The success of Democrats in the 2018 midterm election encourages this view, which was the subject of an Associated Press article over the weekend, reporting that “Biden campaign aides say they are bullish on the prospects of winning states Trump carried in 2016.”

    Maybe so, but maybe these Biden campaign aides are just blowing smoke. It is impossible to believe they haven’t noticed that their candidate is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Every TV interview provides further evidence that the 77-year-old Biden is non compos mentis.

  • The impossible dream: Making Joe Biden go viral (for reasons other than his Senior Moments). His team’s solution? Pure pablum. It’s the strategy that combines the honesty of a bank’s email laying out its Covid-19 strategy with the homespun forthrightness of an insurance company email announcing its Covid-19 strategy…
  • Hey hey ho, rapey Joe has got to go!

    Is it any wonder that Democrats are starting to wonder if they’ve bought a pig in a poke, and just how to pawn him off on somebody else?

    Just as bad for the Dems on the electability issue, a new poll shows that young voters — a key party constituency — just aren’t that into the 77-year-old who first ran for president before any of them were born. The Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics poll shows that “only 34 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they have a favorable view of the former vice president,” with just 8 percent at “very favorable.” Nearly half — 47 percent — said they have an unfavorable view of the former Veep.

    Trump voters might skew older, but they’ll crawl over broken glass to vote for POTUS in November. A recent Emerson poll found that Trump has a 19-point advantage in the enthusiasm gap, 64%-45%.

    After New York canceled its primary vote last week, we learned that while it would be both risky and difficult, it is still possible for Democrats to nominate someone other than Biden:

    As of April 27, the former vice president has 1,305 of the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch a first-round coronation at the party’s convention. New York offered 320 delegates up for grabs, 274 pledged to the primary winner; a prize that would have brought Biden closer to the nomination.

    If New York’s decision triggers other states to cancel their own primaries, it is entirely possible that Biden could arrive at the Democratic convention without a guarantee of the nomination.

    Larger states with upcoming primary votes include Georgia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, plus a few medium-size states like Maryland, Indiana, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Pennsylvania and Indiana have already delayed their votes, but if they and a few others like them decide instead to cancel as New York did, then that would be a clear indication that the DNC has decided to shove Biden out onto an ice floe for an ignominious retirement from presidential politics.

  • “Biden Has Become an Albatross for the Democrats.”

    Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment.

    Biden was also not Michael Bloomberg. The multibillionaire former New York City mayor jumped into the race when Biden faltered and Sanders seemed unstoppable. But Bloomberg spent $1 billion only to confirm that he was haughty, a poor debater, and an even worse campaigner. He often appeared to be an apologist for China and seemed clueless about the interior of the United States.

    The least offensive candidate left standing was Biden. Many Democratic primary voters initially had written him off as an inept retread, a blowhard, and an impediment to the leftward, identity-politics trajectory of the newly progressive Democratic party.

    On the campaign trail, Biden insulted several voters, using insults such as “fat,” “damn liar,” and, weirdly, “lying dog-faced pony soldier.”

    Long ago he spun tall tales about how in his youth he had taken on a Delaware street gang with a 6-foot chain or slammed a bully’s face into a store counter. More recently, he taunted President Trump with tough-guy boasts about taking him behind the proverbial gym and beating him up.

    Biden has been unable to keep his hands off women. Even his supporters cringed when he was seen sniffing the hair, rubbing the shoulders or whispering into the ears of unsuspecting females, some of them minors. Stranger still, Biden waxed on about his commitment to the #MeToo movement. The handsy Biden has insisted that women who made accusations of sexual harassment must be believed.

    The more House Democrats attacked Donald Trump for supposedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden’s wheeler-dealer son Hunter, the more Biden’s own suspect dealings with Ukraine surfaced. Such scrutiny followed from Biden’s boast, caught on video, that he had leveraged Ukraine by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless a Ukrainian prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor had wanted to investigate the Ukrainian company for which Hunter Biden worked.

    During the year-long rise, fall, and rise of his campaign, the 77-year-old Biden often appeared confused. He was occasionally unable to remember names, places, or dates. Biden would try to speak extempore but seemingly forget what he was trying to say.

    The coronavirus epidemic and subsequent lockdown seemed to offer rest for Biden. But the more he recuperated from campaigning and sent out video communiques from his basement, the more he appeared to confirm that his problem was not simple exhaustion or age but real cognitive impairment.

    With the Democratic nomination a lock, Biden assumed liberal reporters would allow him to campaign as a virtual candidate. They would forget his lapses and ignore prior controversies, including the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade, a former aide.

    At first, the media complied — as it always had with Biden’s troublesome habit of violating the personal space of women, his bizarre put-downs on the campaign trail, his exaggerated he-man stories, his mental lapses, and his dealings with Ukraine. Again, to the Democratic establishment, Biden was far preferable to Sanders. Had the socialist Sanders won the nomination, he likely would have wrecked the Democratic Party in 2020.

    But Biden misjudged the liberal media. Reporters were at first willing to overlook his liabilities. But the more Reade persisted in her accusations and the more the media ignored them, the more embarrassing the media’s utter hypocrisy became. Journalists had torn apart Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations of sexual assault, after all.

    So suddenly the press decided that Biden was no longer worth shielding. Yet the change of heart was not entirely for fear of appearing hypocritical. Rather, the media seems terrified of Biden’s increasingly obvious cognitive decline.

    In other words, the media was most certainly not going to be degraded on behalf of a nominee who may no longer seem viable.

    (Hat tip: Cut Jib News on Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Meanwhile, Lisa Bloom says she believes Tara Reade but is voting for Biden anyway. “Shut up and vote for the rapist!”

    Reade, at this point, has more people who she told around the time of the assault than Ford has had ever. She has more credibility than Ford ever had.

    What is remarkable is not the leftwing pundits and Democrats who deny this. It is expected that the very Democrats who condemned Kavanaugh would try to obfuscate on this. What is remarkable is the media. Where is Ronan Farrow or the New Yorker or Jane Meyer or NBC News or the rest of them? The only prominent talking head who currently has a justification for silence is Michael Avenatti and that’s because he is in jail. The very people who tried to bring down Kavanaugh hiding behind the veneer of objective reporters are now no where to be found or are trying to throw up Potemkin Villages of obfuscation to avoid having to deal with Reade’s allegations.

    If you realize that Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Joe Biden, and the laundry list of others were never about #metoo or sexual harassment or assault, but over whether or not people should be able to murder babies, you’ll understand the double standard. The Brett Kavanaugh attacks and Joe Biden defenses have never been about the patriarchy or power. They have always been about preserving the right to kill kids.

    Democrats should see themselves in the mirror when they see Trump supporters. So long as their guy can beat the right, they’ll embrace whatever it is. They’ll never admit it, but they’ll know it is true even as they try to distinguish.

  • Was Biden in on Crossfire Hurricane?

    On January 5, 2017, a meeting was held in the Obama White House in the Oval Office. Both President Obama and Vice President Biden attended. This meeting, it turns out, was critical to the anti-Trump operation by the Obama administration, reports Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. “It was at this meeting that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration,” she wrote.

    Also in attendance at this meeting was then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-national security adviser Susan Rice, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and other members of the national security council.

    It was at this meeting that Barack Obama spoke with Yates and Comey about wiretapped conversations of Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump transition, indicating that President Obama was directly knowledgeable of the efforts to surveil the Trump campaign and undermine the incoming administration.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • China Joe brags about his Beijing connections:

  • More on the same theme: “Biden Sold Out America to China While Working for Hollywood.”

    It was 2012 and Joe was thinking about his future. A year earlier his best friend, Senator Chris Dodd, had left the Senate to run the MPAA. The MPAA was Hollywood’s trade association and the movie industry, reading its own writing on the wall, wanted into China, and was willing to sell its soul to make a deal.

    Biden wanted Hollywood cash for a future presidential campaign.

    Dodd had been one of the sleaziest figures in the Senate, even by the low standards of the era, eager to do favors for any well-heeled industry from finance to entertainment. His friendship with Biden gave him a direct pipeline into the Obama administration. And Dodd gave Biden a pipeline into Hollywood.

    “Joe was our champion inside the White House,” Dodd later said.

    Two years later, in 2014, Biden began an address to the MPAA by joking, “there have been the rumors all those years when Chris and I served in the Senate that although I was chairman, he controlled me.”

    “We’ve just given new life to those rumors,” he continued, describing how he had left a meeting with Obama and Chancellor Merkel, telling Obama that he had to address the MPAA.

    “There is no question that you’ve got the right guy with the right influence,” Biden concluded.

    And that’s exactly what Biden had been proving in Los Angeles as he surrounded Xi with Hollywood tycoons, especially Jeffrey Katzenberg, a major donor to his 2020 campaign, and cut a deal with the Chinese thug to increase the quota of Hollywood movies allowed in by the Chinese Communist regime.

    Funny how the sleaziest Democrats have such lucrative employment after they leave office. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Once again, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is saying there seems to be some smoke in the Reade allegations. 🤔 (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Pick me, pick me, yeah. Everyone is hollow…
  • Politico pushes Kamala Harris as veep pick.
  • Remember, Scott Adams pegged Harris as the veep pick back in December, despite the fact that “Adams thinks Harris is the worst candidate to ever be in any presidential race.”
  • Michigan Democratic Governor Grethen “Obergruperfuhrer” Whitmer says she’s “quite comfortable” in believing that Joe Biden is innocent because “he has a (D) after his name.” (I may be paraphrasing a tad…)
  • Nebraska is still voting in their Democratic primary tomorrow.
  • Say what?

  • Yep:

  • This is evidently a real thing:

    Words fail me…

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    BidenWatch for May 4, 2020

    Monday, May 4th, 2020

    Is the Tara Reade rape allegation going to be the silver bullet that drops Biden? It seemed unlikely when the story first broke, but just enough supporting evidence has come to light, and just enough Democrats not acting like total hypocrites and supporting an investigation into the charges, that the scandal won’t go away.

    Oh, and New York just threw Bernie Sanders off the ballot. Funny how things like that happen when you cross the DNC. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Another witness who heard Tara Reade talk about being sexually harassed by Biden.
  • Reade wants Biden to released his sealed senate records.
  • The Washington Post called on Biden to address the Tara Reade accusations and release his records.
  • Cracks in the blue wall?

    The New York Times follows up the Tara Reade story with news that activist women’s groups and key Democratic officials have not remained entirely silent about the allegation of sexual assault. Over the last three weeks, those groups have pressed Joe Biden to speak out and deal with Reade’s allegations, and they have held their fire after being promised action.

    Now, however, they’re tired of getting strung along — and may soon make their unhappiness public:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • A quick recap of the evidence:

  • Potential veep pick Sen. Kamala Harris believed Biden’s accusers in 2019.
  • Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen “Lockdown” Whitmer saysnot every sexual assault claim is equal. Of course she does; her party has always treated those against someone with a (D) after their name as unworthy of investigation.
  • Women’s groups on Biden accuser Tara Reade: “Who?
  • Nancy Pelosi’s Brett Kavanaugh opinions updated for Joe Biden. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Reade Says Complaint Would Prove Biden Aides Dennis Toner And Ted Kaufman Lied About Not Knowing Her.”
  • “Senate Democrats Refuse To Acknowledge Sexual Assault Accusations Against Joe Biden.”
  • Can you still hear it, Tara? The Silence of the Dems?
  • “U of Delaware Must Release Biden Senate Records Amid #MeToo Scandal, FOIA Request Demands.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • TeamBiden lied enough that even the New York Times got miffed:

  • Speaking of the New York Times, they suggested the DNC assemble a team to go through Biden’s papers. DNC: “You’re high.”
  • More on that subject:

  • Speaking of the DNC, New York just removed Bernie Sanders from the ballot for the June 28 primary.

  • Powers of 10, how do they work? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Biden tosses more word salad. Will he get tossed by the DNC?

  • And sometimes he doesn’t even speak at all:

  • The Biden-Kavanaugh double standard:

    The operative question for many in the press as they assess Tara Reade’s assault allegation against Joe Biden is the correct one: Is Tara Reade telling the truth? It does not matter what other senators may or may not have done to other women in other places or at other times. It does not matter — for purposes of establishing Joe Biden’s culpability — whether the Long Arc of History Bends toward Justice, whether other women who look like Tara Reade were assaulted by men who look like Joe Biden, or whether it would facilitate a more equitable future if we jettisoned Joe Biden, guilt be damned. What seems to matter to the media, for purposes of assessing Biden’s candidacy, is whether then-senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. digitally penetrated Tara Reade in 1993.

    But this, crucially, is not what mattered to these same media players when then-judge Brett Kavanaugh was accused of assault, then indecent exposure, then gang rape in a series of successively more lurid allegations. What mattered then were not only the merits of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation — and that’s Dr. Ford, to you — but also the behavior of parties completely unrelated to those allegedly involved in the assault, parties who, by accident of birth, happened to look like Brett Kavanaugh, grow up like Brett Kavanaugh, and inhabit the “world of privilege” that Kavanaugh allegedly inhabited.

    Joe Biden is being treated as an individual — a man being accused of a specific crime that either did, or did not, occur. Brett Kavanaugh was treated as a totem — an antihero, an anti-messianic stand-in for all of History’s various Straight White Men who “got away with it,” who were cushioned from the vagaries of life by their unthinkable “privilege,” lashing out against the browning of America and the long-prophesied end of the Old Boys’ Club.

  • Biden wants the benefit-of-the-doubt, innocent-until-proven-guilty standard that he helped deny male college students.

    The problem with defending due process in a case like Biden’s with respect to Tara Reade is that Biden himself, when it comes to allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, doesn’t believe in it. Perhaps in part to atone for his shabby treatment of Anita Hill, Biden was especially prominent in the Obama administration’s overhaul of Title IX treatment of claims of sexual discrimination and harassment on campus. You can listen to Biden’s strident speeches and rhetoric on this question and find not a single smidgen of concern with the rights of the accused. Men in college were to be regarded as guilty before being proven innocent, and stripped of basic rights in their self-defense.

    Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen noted the consequences of Biden’s crusade in The New Yorker last year. “In recent years,” she wrote, “it has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, the evidence, the identities of witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses … According to K.C. Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on Title IX lawsuits, more than four hundred students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011 have sued their schools under federal or state laws — in many cases, for sex discrimination under Title IX. While many of the lawsuits are still ongoing, nearly half of the students who have sued have won favorable court rulings or have settled with the schools.”

    On Friday’s Morning Joe, Biden laid out a simple process for judging him: Listen respectfully to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or disprove her specific claim. The objective truth, Biden argued, is what matters. I agree with him. But this was emphatically not the standard Biden favored when judging men in college. If Biden were a student, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evidence provided, who was charging him, who was a witness, and no right to question the accuser. Apply the Biden standard for Biden, have woke college administrators decide the issue in private, and he’s toast.

    Under Biden, Title IX actually became a force for sex discrimination — as long as it was against men. Emily Yoffe has done extraordinary work exposing the injustices of the Obama-Biden sexual-harassment regime on campus, which have mercifully been pared back since. But she has also highlighted Biden’s own zeal in the cause. He brushed aside most legal defenses against sexual harassment. In a speech at the University of Pittsburgh in 2016, for example, Biden righteously claimed that it was an outrage that any woman claiming sexual assault should have to answer questions like “Were you drinking?” or “What did you say?” “These are questions that angered me then and anger me now.” He went on: “No one, particularly a court of law, has a right to ask any of those questions.”

    Particularly a court of law? A court cannot even inquire what a woman said in a disputed sexual encounter? Couldn’t that be extremely relevant to the question of consent? Or ask if she were drinking? It may be extremely salient that she had been drinking — because it could prove rape, if she were incapacitated and unable to consent and sex took place. But Biden’s conviction that young men on campus should be legally handicapped in defending themselves from charges of sexual abuse occluded any sense of basic fairness.

  • Consistency, Democratic Party style:

  • Meanwhile, if the DNC does whack Biden off the ticket, Grandma Death is ready for the call.
  • Speaking of which, those two titans of charisma were palling around on video:

    

  • Who best to vet female VP candidates? Would you believe Chris “Waitress Sandwich” Dodd?
  • Twitchy has some thoughts on that.
  • Early Presidential race dropout California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell thinks Reade’s claim should be investigated. How many of you had “Eric Swalwell” on your Biden Scandal Bingo cards? Now put your hands down you damn liars!
  • “Big money donors are pressuring Joe Biden against picking Elizabeth Warren for VP: ‘He would lose the election.'” For once, big donors and Bernie Bros are on the same page…
  • “Blue-check feminist who was AOK with innocent men losing jobs over false allegations believes Tara Reade but still voting Biden.”

  • How desperate are Democrats? Desperate enough to float a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket, Constitution be damned. (The author’s attempt to tapdance around the constitutional issue should cause thousands of legal scholars to faceplam themselves.)
  • “‘I Have Never Treated A Woman Inappropriately,’ Joe Biden Whispers Into Journalist’s Ear.”
  • “Biden Attempts To Win Over Youth With Appearance On ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.'”
  • “Judge Dismisses Sexual Assault Allegations Against Biden On Grounds That He Is Not A Republican.”
  • Heh:

  • Heh 2:

  • Titania McGrath weighs in:
    

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    Say Goodbye To The Clown Car And Hello To BidenWatch!

    Monday, April 13th, 2020

    Since Bernie Sanders dropped out, Slow Joe Biden is the default Democratic Party nominee for President in 2020, despite not having yet reached the required delegate threshold to clinch the nomination.

    That means the Clown Car Update has finally come to an end. But in its place, behold the birth of BidenWatch!

    This is going to be an ongoing roundup of Biden link, tweets, videos, etc. I plan to keep this up until the election, or the DNC replaces Biden at the convention, or Biden’s brain explodes, whichever comes first.

    But before we get to the BidenWatch itself, let’s list all the declared Democratic politicians Biden defeated for the nomination.

    The List of the Vanquished

    Listed in the order they dropped out:

    1. Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Dropped out January 29, 2019
    2. California Representative Eric Swalwell: Dropped out July 8, 2019
    3. Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Dropped out August 2, 2019
    4. Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped out August 21, 2019
    5. Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Dropped out August 23, 2019
    6. Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Dropped out August 15, 2019
    7. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Dropped out August 29, 2019
    8. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: Dropped out September 20, 2019
    9. Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: Dropped out October 24, 2019
    10. Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Dropped out November 1, 2019
    11. Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: Dropped out November 20, 2019
    12. Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: Dropped out December 1, 2019
    13. Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Dropped out December 2, 2019
    14. California Senator Kamala Harris: Dropped out December 3, 2019
    15. Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: Dropped out January 2, 2020
    16. Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: Dropped out January 10, 2020
    17. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: Dropped out January 11, 2020
    18. Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: Dropped out January 31, 2020
    19. Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Dropped out February 12, 2020
    20. Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Dropped out February 11, 2020
    21. Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped out February 11, 2020
    22. Billionaire Tom Steyer: Dropped out February 29, 2020
    23. South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: Dropped out March 1, 2020
    24. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Dropped out March 2, 2020
    25. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Dropped out March 4, 2020
    26. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: Dropped out March 5, 2020
    27. Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: Dropped out March 19, 2020
    28. Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: Dropped out April 8, 2020

    (Doing this list as a cheat-sheet for myself, and for (as Dwight likes to say) the Historical Record.)

    Now on to BidenWatch itself!

  • “Dems Are Suddenly Fans of Due Process Now That Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep Has Been Accused.”

    Ever since Brett Kavanaugh was falsely accused of sexual assault in 2018, the Third-Wave Feminist Shrieking Harridan Brigade has been telling us we must “believe all women” who level any charges. Due process be damned, all men are guilty, and that’s that.

    Until the Biden thing.

    The same media types who have been leading the #MeToo finger-wagging for a couple of years have now adopted an “ignore this woman” approach. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that they would circle the wagons for the presumptive Democratic nominee.

  • And then NYT whitewashes their own story:

  • The New York Post calls them out for it:

    Do you recall the Times searching the Twitter feed of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford? Or spending weeks digging up dirt that could make her seem a flake, as the Lerer-Ember story does with Reade?

    Reade is making charges about events in 1993, when she was in her 20s and Biden was 51. Ford’s claims were even older, about events in 1982, when all involved were in high school.

    Unlike Reade, Ford had no one confirming she’d told the same story at the time — indeed, everyone she cited as a witness said that nothing like the party she described had ever happened.

    Yet the Times (and ideological allies at other publications as well as in politics) played up every allegation against Kavanaugh, pumping up their apparent credibility exactly as it seeks to undermine Reade’s credibility now. Even months after he won confirmation, it ran a column presenting yet another “accusation” — without mentioning that the “accuser” didn’t remember it happening, and in fact wouldn’t even be interviewed.

    The Gray Lady is hardly alone in this hypocrisy: The actress and #MeToo leader Alyssa Milano, for example, has suddenly discovered due process now that a candidate she favors stands accused. “We have to societally change that mindset to believing women, but that does not mean at the expense of not giving men their due process and investigating situations,” Milano said in an interview. “It’s got to be fair in both directions.”

    It isn’t hard to come to the conclusion that for Republicans, it’s “guilty when accused.” Only Democrats deserve the benefit of doubt.

  • How the Wuhan Coronavirus has screwed Biden’s campaign:

    For starters, there’s money. Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee already have $225 million in the bank. That’s 17 times more than Joe Biden’s campaign has on hand now.

    The coronavirus has prohibited the kinds of back-slapping, elbow-cupping, look-them-right-in-the-eye access for solicitations that donors cherish in person. So, Biden is left to play catch-up from his Delaware mansion via time-consuming Skyping or Facetiming with small bands of rich people.

    Snip.

    Do you have any sense of exactly what a President Biden would do once he no longer had a Donald Trump to kick around?

    No, you don’t. Because all the six-term ex-senator and two-term ex-vice president has done recently is endorse whatever House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer want. Which is also what would likely happen once Nancy and Chuck had their own presidential puppet in the Oval Office.

    An incumbent of either party has a built-in fundraising advantage based on his prominence and accumulated power. The odds of incumbents winning are excellent in modern times.

    Perhaps you’ve noticed President Trump on TV daily talking about the national health crisis and anything else that crosses his mind. Perhaps you also remember the summer of 2012 when incumbent Barack Obama was assuring us that al-Qaeda was on the run just before militants sacked the Benghazi consulate and killed four Americans..

    With his built-in fundraising advantage, Obama’s campaign spent that summer on TV defining Mitt Romney as a wealthy elitist who transported the family dog on his car roof and may have caused cancer in elderly women. The under-funded Romney could not respond until his official nomination the last week of August gave him access to federal funds and general election donations. Too late.

    Come this June or July at the latest, expect to see the immense Trump campaign treasury financing a barrage of anti-Biden ads that make D-Day’s pre-invasion bombardment look like a beach picnic. Biden’s very long public record, his family’s sometimes shady shenanigans and his own unique panoply of verbal gaffes and garbled syntactical nonsense provide a target-rich environment of damaging video clips.

    Oh, look! That invisible virus just conspired to prompt Democrats to delay their national convention by five weeks to mid-August. That’s five fewer weeks of federal funding for the Biden camp to respond. With the Summer Olympics also postponed, that leaves the entire summer wide open for Trump’s team to define old Joe as, well, old, perhaps too old mentally for the demands of the commander-in-chief job.

  • “For $1,500, Joe, what year did the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 occur?” Joe: “1917?” “No. 10 seconds, Joe.” “1916?”
  • There’s rambling, and then there’s Joe Biden rambling:

    From his forthcoming TV show, Where In the World Is The End of Joe Biden’s Sentence?

  • It’s an ongoing theme:

    Here’s Sleepy Joe on health insurance.

    “We should be making it easier, not harder, to make sure, to se-, to make sense. Let me put it another way, it makes no sense.”

    May we quote you on that, Lunch Bucket Joe?

    After apparently winning the Wisconsin primary, Biden went on CNN with Fredo Cuomo to take a bow, or something, about the results:

    “But look, it’s been done. We’re gonna get the election results in about, what, another week, in another week or so after that this… I forget the date, the 13th? And, uh, I you know but I I think that uh uh you know I I if if there’s an election, was an election, if people, depending on how many showed up, I think I will have done well but who knows?”

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Mr. Consistency:

  • Biden endorsed by Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis, who always gets described as “Civil Rights Icon” rather than “17 term congressman.” The endorsement came last week while Sanders was still in the race. From here on out I don’t think additional Democrats endorsing Biden is newsworthy.
  • Biden gets taken to the woodshed on the topic of pandemic preparedness by Ted Cruz.
  • John Yoo says that Biden doesn’t understand the chain of command. But it’s over the whole Brett Crozier/Theodore Roosevelt situation, which is a pretty abnormal peg to hang a sweeping opinion piece on.
  • “Biden Cronies Accused of Withholding Coronavirus Resources for Political Purposes“:

    Joe Biden’s campaign is offering to help states receive coronavirus resources through its own private connections.

    Let me repeat that for the CNN-impaired… Joe Biden is offering to help states get their hands on coronavirus resources through his own private connections.

    In other words, rather than offer these much-needed resources to the federal government or even the state and local governments, Biden’s connections are offering them to his campaign so Biden can pretend to be president while he hides out in his Delaware basement. And Joe Biden is okay with that.

    This is not a joke. This is really happening during the worst week of a pandemic where we are losing upwards of a thousand Americans a day:

    In the early hours of Monday morning, Joe Biden’s campaign sent an email to state leaders offering to connect them with desperately needed coronavirus resources.

    In the email obtained by The Post, Biden’s political chief of staff Stacy Eichner told state officials that the former veep’s presidential campaign had received a “significant number of offers” from organizations and people eager to offer resources.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Is Biden the Warren G. Harding candidate?

    In 1920, Harding was his generation’s “stay at home” candidate. Meanwhile, his opponent, Democrat James A. Cox barnstormed the nation. What did that get him? Cox lost the popular vote by 26 points and was swamped in the Electoral College (404-127).

    The point of this: the “less is more” that some experts think would work best for Biden – limited public appearances, abbreviated comments and media interaction – doesn’t work today. Especially not with an opponent who would be calling him out daily (hourly) on social media (”Lazier Joe”?) if Biden opted for a lower profile.

  • Veepstakes piece. All the usual XX chromosome names: Harris, Warren, Klobuchar, Whitmer, Abrams, Michelle Lujan Grisham, and The Tammys (Baldwin and Duckworth). No mention of Grandma Death.
  • Speaking of which:

  • A large majority of Legal Insurrection readers don’t think Biden will be the actual nominee.
  • And polled Democrats say: “Give us Barabbas Andrew Cuomo!”
  • Biden polling worse against Trump than Clinton at this point in 2016.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Can Joe Biden build the excitement for his candidacy amid coronavirus?” Yes, nothing says excitement quite like Sleepy Joe…

  • The Trump campaign dropped this devastating video on Biden and China:

  • The usual leftists types are spooked: “Democrats Fear Trump’s New 2020 Strategy Is Working. The president and his team aren’t hiding their plans to make Beijing the main villain in America’s fight against the pandemic.” Ya think? In other news, President Trump’s plan to depict Darth Vader as the main villain of Star Wars also appears to be working…
  • A common viewpoint expressed:

  • Evidently The Princess Bride was rerun recently:

  • Titania McGrath weighs in:

  • “Biden Cuts Hole In Mask So He Can Still Sniff People’s Hair.
  • And finally, some last jabs at Bernie Sanders, since we won’t have him to kick around anymore:

  • Sanders may be out, but he’s still keeping and racking up delegates to pull the party left.
  • “Bernie Sanders Struggling To Stay Six Feet Away From Americans’ Wallets.”
  • Bernie Sanders Drops Out As Campaign Goals Of Locking Everyone Up, Destroying Economy Already Achieved.
  • Bernie Tests Negative For President.
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    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 30, 2020

    Monday, March 30th, 2020

    The no campaigning campaign continues, Biden gets #MeTooed, a rare Bernie victory, and A New Challenger Appears! It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Joe Biden 1,217
    2. Bernie Sanders 914
    3. Elizabeth Warren 81*
    4. Michael Bloomberg 55*
    5. Pete Buttigieg 26
    6. Amy Klobuchar 7
    7. Tulsi Gabbard 2

    *Both these counts have dropped since last week. Do we blame these shenanigans on the media or the DNC?

    Polls
    Once again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, and polling itself seems to have dropped off to almost nothing, a victim of the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.

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

  • 13 Presidential Primaries Have Now Been Delayed Over The Coronavirus”: Connecticut, Indiana, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Delaware have all delayed primaries, and Pennsylvania is about to, while Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and Mississippi have all delayed runoffs. California, Maryland, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming are all changing various aspects of their respective voting processes.
  • Remember how all those Democrats swore off SuperPacs?

    The anti-super PAC frenzy reached new heights in this year’s Democratic primary. Candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and others effectively told their supporters to stay on the sidelines, either explicitly requesting that super PACs not support them, or blasting the groups at every turn.

    As things got desperate, many of these candidates appeared to realize their mistake. They scrambled to get a new message out: I’ll take any help I can get. Joe Biden was the first to reverse his opposition to super PACs, doing so by late October. A month later, as California senator Kamala Harris’s campaign was falling apart, she, too, dropped her rejection of independent support.

    The party’s backtracking on super PACs came full circle in February when Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren reversed course. Her early and forceful rejections of super PACs had set the tone for the field, and she went even further by making corruption and money-in-politics the top themes of her campaign. But that was when her campaign was a powerful front-runner — after poor showings in the early primary states, Warren needed a Hail Mary, and so changed her tune.

    For every candidate except Biden, the reversal was too late, and the campaign could not be saved.

    Warren claims she only dropped her opposition to super PACs because her opponents were accepting their help. But she surely knew that not every candidate would play by her rules. The pledges to reject super PAC support were an electoral ploy by candidates to brand themselves as cleaner than the other guy. It simply didn’t pay off.

    Instead, with independent speakers on the sidelines, the candidates who entered the primary with the biggest advantages coasted.

  • Interested in what Pete Buttigieg has to say about his presidential run? Me neither, but here it is.
  • Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Former congressional staffer accuses Biden of penetrative sexual assault. What do you bet those thousands of Democratic media figures who parroted “credibly accused of sexual assault” for the nonsense Kavanaugh charges won’t be using that phrase this time around? Let’s see what Biden previously said about the issue:

    When it comes to #MeToo sexual misconduct issues, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive 2020 presidential nominee, has made it no secret where he stands: automatically believe women.

    “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real,” said Biden during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations that as a teenager he had assaulted a woman at a party.

    As vice president, Biden played an important role in the Obama administration’s efforts to compel colleges and universities to take sexual violence more seriously—and to adopt policies that limited the due process rights and presumption of innocence for the accused. In recent years, his rhetoric on these issues has been in lockstep with #MeToo activists.

    Despite his public pronunciations on the subject of never touching women without their explicit verbal consent, Biden has previously faced accusations that he was too handsy with people. But now the former vice president is facing a much more serious accusation of sexual assault, from an alleged former staffer named Tara Reade.

    No, not that one.

    It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media will assign Reade’s story as much credibility and importance as that of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh; they certainly have not done so yet. In any case, supporters of Biden—as well as the candidate himself—should take this opportunity to reflect on whether automatic belief is a useful or practical approach for handling decades’ old claims of misconduct.

    What has the mainstream media had to say about these accusations? You know as well as I: virtually nothing. What is the main things Democrats expect of Joe Biden? A pulse:

    For the foreseeable future, there will be no more speeches in front of hundreds, or lines of people waiting to shake Biden’s hand. There may not even be the glossy fanfare of a convention with a prime-time address. But, truthfully, all those things were always sort of beside the point. Like on that morning in McClellandville, and countless other ones besides, Biden was never really convincing anyone on the stump—his political power at this point is an idea, held collectively, about how to defeat Trump. The work now is to keep that idea convincing enough, for long enough, among as many people as possible, for the corporeal man to actually win.

    Biden backed Pelosi’s obstructionism while millions lost their jobs:

    Amid this partisan wrangling, Biden released a video condemning Trump and McConnell for putting a “corporate bailout ahead of millions of families,” echoing the arguments Pelosi and others used for their obstruction.

    “President Trump and Mitch McConnell are trying to put a corporate bailout ahead of millions of families. You know, it’s families. It’s simply wrong. We should be focusing on families, but the White House and the United States Senate Republicans have proposed a $500 billion slush-fund for corporations,” Biden says in the video. “Republicans refused to increase social security at the same time, to forgive student loans, to take the necessary steps to stop evictions, ensure food and nutrition for vulnerable families.”

    Joe Biden called on McConnell to hold a vote on Democratic priorities, rather than voting on the compromise bill that had been worked out ahead of time. He suggested the compromise bill would not help small businesses, workers, and communities — even though it includes cash pay-outs to most Americans, an increase in unemployment benefits, and more.

    Pelosi’s busted power play hurts Biden:

    Unlike the 2008 financial crisis or any other burst bubble, the coronavirus is an outside force, a threat forcing the government to ask that all nonessential workers either work from home or forgo their paychecks. The nation has proved willing to take the immediate economic hit without any promises, but if the government wants to maintain the status quo for weeks or even months, workers and small businesses need immediate cash relief. This is a conclusion that has united the political spectrum from Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders and manifested itself in the Senate Republicans’ imperfect but necessarily broad relief package.

    But after a week of bipartisan discussions, congressional Democrats have tried to nuke the bill, denying direct cash payments to the overwhelming majority of the nation and small businesses. And now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is out with her own bill, a Trojan Horse of a socialist Christmas list disguised as an emergency aid package.

    As businesses shutter around the country and workers struggle to make their final paycheck for the foreseeable future last long enough to feed their children, Pelosi produced her own crisis bill that would bail out the U.S. Postal Service, provide $10,000 student loan bailouts, and demand that companies accepting federal aid offer $15 minimum wage and permanent paid leave.

    The entire thesis of the Biden campaign goes something as follows: Trump is a uniquely partisan president who engages in trollery and trickery unbecoming of the White House. Joe Biden, contrarily, is a respected statesman with a documented history of working across the aisle. If you want a president who doesn’t tank the stock market with vile tweets, or even one who doesn’t force the nation to obsess over the federal government, vote for Barack Obama’s (former) BFF.

    Biden can sell that message, and as his primary proved, he does so effectively. But the rest of his caucus cannot. It’s one thing for Democrats to try and tank openly bipartisan bills like Trump’s criminal justice reform legislation or even impeach him during a time of peace and prosperity. It’s entirely another to sabotage a week of negotiations in the hopes of passing the discount Green New Deal while laid-off workers wonder how they’ll pay their water bill next month.

    Joe Biden may value bipartisanship, and we already saw the Obama administration rise to the occasion and work with Republicans when crises arose. But the rest of the Democratic Party isn’t playing Uncle Joe’s game, and the voters who gave Democrats the House in 2018 are seeing the evidence in a horrifying, real-time display.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) “Biden’s First Coronavirus Shadow-Briefing Was a Disaster:”

    Biden’s first attempt at appearing presidential and ready to handle a crisis was another gaffe-prone disaster that his campaign most certainly regrets doing.

    In the middle of his Monday briefing, Biden apparently lost his train of thought while explaining what he thinks Trump should do during the crisis.

    “I’m glad the president has finally activated the National Guard. Now we need the armed forces and the National Guard to help with hospital capacity, supplies, and logistics. We need to activate the reserve corps of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with this crush of cases,” he said, before shuffling papers and then gesturing to someone off-camera that there was a problem. “And, uh, in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that, we are… Well, let me go to the second thing.”

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Like Obama, Biden only sounds smart and together when his TelePrompTer is working. A low-energy campaign for a low energy candidate:

    Sidelined and confined to his house by the dictates of coronavirus social distancing, the former vice president has been limited to intermittent appearances from a makeshift studio in his basement. They have been awkward and low-energy, but that doesn’t really set them apart from most other Joe Biden appearances.

    If there’s any candidate who could thrive by having very limited public exposure and existing mostly as a line of a ballot, it’s the longtime presidential aspirant who hadn’t won a primary until a couple of weeks ago.

    Biden is winning the Democratic nomination on the basis of not being Bernie Sanders and wants to get elected president on the basis of not being Donald Trump. He’s as purely a negative candidate as we’ve seen in a very long time, running largely on who he isn’t and what he won’t do.

    He’s the presidential candidate as cipher.

    Biden’s pitch to young progressives: Hey babe, talk a walk on the mild side. Is Biden launching a podcast? I look forward to listening to that in the same sense I look forward to watching the Cats movie: in joyous anticipation of an epic train-wreck. The Decline of Sundown Joe:

    Joe Biden on China: A triptych:

    This one, though, hey, we’ve all been there:

  • Update: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Convention Substitute? With more than half the possible delegates already allocated, it would be impossible for Cuomo to jump into the race and win an outright delegate victory, but there’s been a lot of chatter about him being a brokered convention substitute for Biden. Meet “Mr. Contingency Plan“:

    Democrats are publicly talking about “contingency options” for their July convention in Milwaukee in case the coronavirus persists in being a public-health threat. But privately, some are also talking about needing a Plan B if Joe Biden, their nominee apparent, continues to flounder.

    Some Democrats are openly talking up New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has soared during the crisis, as a Biden stand-in. Yesterday, a Draft Cuomo 2020 account on Twitter announced that “Times have changed & we need Gov. Cuomo to be the nominee. Our next POTUS must be one w/an ability to lead thru this crisis.”

    Snip.

    Democrats are increasingly worried that Joe Biden will have trouble being relevant and compelling in the long four months between now and when he is nominated in July. Lloyd Constantine, who was a senior policy adviser to New York governor Eliot Spitzer from 2007 to 2008, puts it bluntly: “Biden is a melting ice cube. Those of us who have closely watched as time ravaged the once sharp or even brilliant minds of loved ones and colleagues, recognize what is happening to the good soldier Joe.”

    Indeed, Biden seemed to disappear when the virus began dominating the news cycle early in March. Biden’s media presence “abruptly shriveled,” writes Kalev Leetaru, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. In contrast, daily mentions of Cuomo as of last Sunday “accounted for 1.4 percent of online news coverage compared with 2.9 percent for Trump.”

    Of course, if that actually came to pass, it would bring up two questions: What do Bernie Sanders fans think about the party deciding second place means bupkis when the DNC can just anoint a replacement? And how would millions of Biden’s black supporters feel upon finding out that their votes don’t matter compared to the will of a tiny clique of party insiders? How about Cuomo as Veep pick? Well, aside from the problem that Biden promised to pick a woman, there are other problems:

    Party poobahs would be against it: Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez tends hard left; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has no love for Cuomo, and African-American leaders, ­arguably the organization’s single most powerful bloc, see the governor as an impediment to party diversity and thus to their own interests.

    Certainly, Cuomo’s 10-year tenure itself bodes caution. Yes, he has been a reliable progressive, especially on guns, trendy egalitarian economic legislation and the various woke social causes. But he has also been aggressively pro-charter schools and thus a poison pill to teachers unions, an often thuggish and influential special interest; this alone could kill his candidacy.

    Moreover, Cuomo’s various ­upstate economic-development schemes — most disastrous in execution and each scandal-plagued along the way — are in the background now. But they’d move center-stage if he was on the ticket, so why would Biden want that to happen?

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He won the Democrats abroad primary, netting an estimated nine delegates to Biden’s four. Is he staying in the race until June? More on that theme:

    James Zogby, a Democratic National Committee member who is on the board of “Our Revolution,” said in an interview that he saw no reason for Sanders to give up his national platform now.

    “We don’t know what will befall us,” he said. “I mean, who knew two months ago that we’d be where we are with the virus. Who knows where we’ll be two months from now? Who knows what Bernie does, what Biden does, what else happens that will change the dynamics, so it would be irresponsible to leave the race, as some have suggested.”

    Zogby said Sanders should not exit the race unless Biden becomes the presumptive nominee — which he could do by hitting the necessary threshold of 1,991 pledged delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot at the convention.

    “But even then, don’t forget, Bernie Sanders is not just a candidate,” Zogby said, pointing to Sanders’ place atop the progressive movement. “He has every reason to stay in for that reason.”

    “Bernie’s supporters say that the coronavirus provides an opportunity for him to get back in the race, but of course they would. Bernie didn’t feel a need to vote on the stimulus package, preferring to livestream with members of the squad. 15% of Sanders supporters say they’ll vote for Trump if Biden is the nominee. Speaking of which:

  • Out of the Running

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

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020 and endorsed Warren)
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard (Dropped out March 19, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Bill Burr on ABC Spiking the Epstein Story

    Thursday, November 14th, 2019

    Enjoy comedian Bill Burr’s pungent take on ABC burying the Epstein story. Very little new information, but a good articulation of the outrage most of the nation feels over the story, at perhaps a slightly higher level of profanity.

    “Oh you mean the part where you had evidence of these f*cking super rich people banging kids, that’s a private moment of frustration, and it all goes away?”

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    LinkSwarm for November 8, 2019

    Friday, November 8th, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Trump is derailing the elite’s gravy train:

    Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America’s institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America’s institutions. So, let’s imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.

    What happens then?

    What happens then is that it’s back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.

    The difference is that in the future they will be much more careful to ensure that no one who is not in on the scam will ever again come anywhere near the levers of power. You can already see it – the demands that we defer to the bureaucrats they own, the attacks on the idea of free expression, and the campaign to disarm us. Their objective is no more Trumps, just an endless line of progressive would-be Maduros with the march toward despair occasionally put on pause for a term by some Fredocon Republican who hates us Normals just as much as the Dems, but won’t admit it until after he’s out of office.

  • So #NeverTrumpers are upset because Trump called them scum? Well boo freaking hoo:

    If you were involved in the 2016 election and, at any point, decided that Hillary Clinton was very bad for the nation and that Evan McMullin was a f***ing bug-eating tool and that Donald Trump was not Beelzebub incarnate, then you became the target of abuse. In my personal experience, there are people who I’d considered friends for several years who I would no longer pee on if they were on fire today because of the abuse and scorn the heaped upon people who disagreed with them and the cheap bullying that they engaged in. Trumpkin. Trumptard. Trumpaloo. Trumphumper. And all manner of other cute names.

    Snip.

    For three years these people have degraded, demeaned, and libeled anyone who simply decided that, for all his flaws, Trump was better than any Democrat. No grace was offered to people who had considered them friends and colleagues. No common cause was allowed to be made. They stopped being conservatives and Republicans who simply disliked the candidate and then the president and became active Democrat partisans who simply called themselves something else. Every hoax and bad faith allegation made against the President and his administration, from the Russia bullsh** to defending illegal FISA warrants to the “Muslim ban” to “kids in cages,” was spearheaded by NeverTrumpers flagellating themselves with their principles and yodeling “we’re better than that.”

    In 2020, these people have a choice to make. They can either earn their way back in–Prodigal Son, and all that–or they can stay gone. I don’t care who they vote for because Trump won last time without them and he’s in a much stronger position today than he was in November 2016. But, no matter what path they choose, there should be no forgetting of how these people have acted and what they’ve done. No one should allow them to forget why no one–right or left–wishes to have anything to do with them. No one should ever forget that they are dangerous, timorous and unfaithful allies and should not be allowed to do any more than hold the coats for the rest of us.

  • Full State Department review of Hillary Clinton’s emails show nearly 600 security violations.
  • Former Virginia democratic governor forgives current Virginia democratic governor for wearing blackface. “We’ve moved on,” says former Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe. As Stephen Green says, “it’s easy to move on when your side can’t be held accountable.”
  • President Donald Trump begins process to formally withdraw from the Paris climate accord. I’m not sure this is strictly necessary, as it was never binding on the U.S. because it was never submitted to the senate for ratification. As opposed to being nonbinding on the rest of the world because they’re just lying about following it anyway.
  • Sanctions against Iran really biting into its oil revenues, especially as the U.S. becomes more sophisticated about counter attempts to evade it.

    As recently as mid-2019, Iranian leaders openly boasted of selling its oil to foreign customers despite the 2017 sanctions. At the time of that boast, Iran was getting a million BPD (barrels per day) out to export customers. In contrast, before the sanctions, Iran exported two million BPD. But by July 2019 exports had been reduced to 365,000 BPD and in August it was a record low 160,000 BPD and that did not change much in September. What the Iranians don’t issue press releases about is how well sanction enforcement efforts have been at reducing those illegal exports to record lows.

    (Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)

  • The UK is finally having a general election after essentially a year of deadlock. If history is any guide, parties promising to deliver Brexit will win, then not deliver Brexit…
  • “Maryland Officials Drop Sanctuary Policy After Illegal Alien Sex Crimes.”
  • Related: Sanctuary city proposition goes down in flames in Tucson. Funny how not enforcing laws against illegal aliens enjoys crushing defeat when actual voters get a chance to chime in.
  • Meanwhile, the illegal alien debate in the Democratic Party is between the hard left and the loony left. “While the rest of America frets about illegal alien criminals escaping authorities with the eager help of liberal politicians, liberals are more concerned about proving to each other how wonderful and tolerant they are by opening the border and allowing anyone and everyone with a sob story to be welcomed and cared for.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Comedians Taking Sides In The Woke Wars.”

    A recent string of high-profile comments brought “Cancel Culture” to the fore. Stand-up routines by Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Sebastian Maniscalo forced the subject back into the limelight.

    “No Safe Spaces,” a documentary about the Left’s serial attacks on free expression, debuts this weekend at the near-perfect time. Comedian Adam Carolla and syndicated radio star Dennis Prager unite to explore how universities are clamping down on healthy debate, and why that woke sentiment is leaking into society at large.

    “Joker” director Todd Phillips, who previously helmed the “Hangover” series, amplified the cause. He told Vanity Fair he created “Joker” because making comedies is no longer fun.

    “Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he says. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’

  • Science Fiction tries to erase its past over crimes against Social Justice Warrior orthodoxy. To be fair, the people who handed out the (now being renamed) James Tiptree Award were always far-left radical feminist lunatics. The question is why have the theoretically more sober people behind the John W. Campbell and World Fantasy Awards also given in to this Orwellian, history-erasing lunacy?
  • Is anyone really surprised when a progressive treats institutional charity money as a personal slush fund?

    The former head of the L.A.-based anti-poverty nonprofit Youth Policy Institute improperly used the organization’s funds to pay the property taxes on his house, buy furniture for his home office and make national political donations, the group alleged in court documents filed this week.

    Dixon Slingerland, who was fired as the group’s chief executive in September, spent the nonprofit’s money on an array of unauthorized and personal expenses, including private tutoring for his children, contributions to his wife’s pension, and “lavish” dining, travel and entertainment, according to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing lodged by the nonprofit in federal court.

  • “Federal agents raided a Long Island tech firm early Thursday and arrested its top executives amid concerns the company was selling Chinese-made equipment to the U.S. military while claiming it had been manufactured in the United States. According to federal prosecutors, Aventura Technologies of Commack has been running the alleged scheme since 2006, selling equipment with “known cybersecurity vulnerability” to government and other customers.”
  • MSM amnesia:

  • Out-of-state Justice Democrats money props up Texas candidate:

    Texas candidate Jessica Cisneros has been one of the most high profile candidates backed by Justice Democrats, the liberal group seeking to defeat incumbents they perceive as insufficiently progressive. While Cisneros has received praise from freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), local residents appear more skeptical. She has received just $3,585 of her $190,000 (1.8 percent) in itemized contributions from inside the San Antonio district she hopes to represent.

    Cisneros is primarying Democratic incumbent Henry Cueller for the Texas 28th Congressional District. She does not appear to be former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros’ daughter.

  • “Democrat Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz and Republican Gary Gates are headed to a runoff to decide who will fill the unexpired term of State Rep. John Zerwas (R–Richmond)” for Texas House District 28. Gates is a seven time loser, the founding money behind the “Texas Citizens Coalition” (whose mailers I have not seen recently), and was last seen running a dishonest campaign against Wayne Christian for the Railroad Commission. Still, I can only imagine that he’ll be preferable to a Democrat, and even though Markowitz garnered more votes in the election, all the other candidates were Republicans for a Republican-leaning seat, giving Gates a good chance to retain it.
  • Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman tried to illegally transmit voting information over the Internet. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
  • Disruptive Democrats crushed in The Woodlands.
  • Plastikov 3D printed AK. 900 rounds on the front receiver, 550 on the rear – with no signs of damage. 7.62×39 goodness in a 7 dollar PLA receiver.” Not quite a revolution, since he used metal parts for the ejector and rails, and spent a total of $393 for all the parts, but definitely interesting, since the receiver is what the federal government counts as the “gun.” Caveat: 7.62x39mm evidently generates lower firing pressure than 5.56 NATO. But I’m hardly an expert here. Still: interesting. (Hat tip: Sal the Agorist.)
  • Samsung lays off it’s entire Austin design team. I used to work in the building where it was housed, a few jobs ago…
  • Rudy Boesch, decorated Navy SEAL. He was also evidently on some reality TV show.
  • America: Hey Berlin, you want a statue of Ronald Reagan? You know, “tear down this wall” and all of that? Berlin: Nein. America: Too bad.
  • Another day, another fake hate crim—wait, a real one? Oh, against a Catholic Church. In New York City. Now I get it.
  • “Fringe Conspiracy Theorist Believes Epstein Just Killed Himself.”
  • What It’s Like Inside China’s Gulags

    Sunday, October 20th, 2019

    Here’s a very grim look inside Chinese concentration camps for Uighers and other ethnic minorities:

    Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.

    Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.

    Such is life in China’s reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in “bye”), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. Few prisoners have succeeded in getting out of the camps and telling their story. Sauytbay’s testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration she was compelled to be a teacher in the camp. China wants to market its camps to the world as places of educational programs and vocational retraining, but Sauytbay is one of the few people who can offer credible, firsthand testimony about what really goes on in the camps.

    Snip.

    The camp’s commanders set aside a room for torture, Sauytbay relates, which the inmates dubbed the “black room” because it was forbidden to talk about it explicitly. “There were all kinds of tortures there. Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons. There were prisoners who were made to sit on a chair of nails. I saw people return from that room covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails.”

    Why were people tortured?

    “They would punish inmates for everything. Anyone who didn’t follow the rules was punished. Those who didn’t learn Chinese properly or who didn’t sing the songs were also punished.”

    And everyday things like these were punished with torture?

    “I will give you an example. There was an old woman in the camp who had been a shepherd before she was arrested. She was taken to the camp because she was accused of speaking with someone from abroad by phone. This was a woman who not only did not have a phone, she didn’t even know how to use one. On the page of sins the inmates were forced to fill out, she wrote that the call she had been accused of making never took place. In response she was immediately punished. I saw her when she returned. She was covered with blood, she had no fingernails and her skin was flayed.”

    On one occasion, Sauytbay herself was punished. “One night, about 70 new prisoners were brought to the camp,” she recalls. “One of them was an elderly Kazakh woman who hadn’t even had time to take her shoes. She spotted me as being Kazakh and asked for my help. She begged me to get her out of there and she embraced me. I did not reciprocate her embrace, but I was punished anyway. I was beaten and deprived of food for two days.”

    Sauytbay says she witnessed medical procedures being carried out on inmates with no justification. She thinks it was done as part of human experiments that were carried out in the camp systematically. “The inmates would be given pills or injections. They were told it was to prevent diseases, but the nurses told me secretly that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them.”

    What happened to those who did take them?

    “The pills had different kinds of effects. Some prisoners were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and men became sterile.” (That, at least, was a widely circulated rumor.)

    On the other hand, when inmates were really sick, they didn’t get the medical care they needed. Sauytbay remembers one young woman, a diabetic, who had been a nurse before her arrest. “Her diabetes became more and more acute. She no longer was strong enough to stand. She wasn’t even able to eat. That woman did not get any help or treatment. There was another woman who had undergone brain surgery before her arrest. Even though she had a prescription for pills, she was not permitted to take them.”

    The fate of the women in the camp was particularly harsh, Sauytbay notes: “On an everyday basis the policemen took the pretty girls with them, and they didn’t come back to the rooms all night. The police had unlimited power. They could take whoever they wanted. There were also cases of gang rape. In one of the classes I taught, one of those victims entered half an hour after the start of the lesson. The police ordered her to sit down, but she just couldn’t do it, so they took her to the black room for punishment.”

    Tears stream down Sauytbay’s face when she tells the grimmest story from her time in the camp. “One day, the police told us they were going to check to see whether our reeducation was succeeding, whether we were developing properly. They took 200 inmates outside, men and women, and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and simply raped her one after the other, in front of everyone. While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.”

    Read the whole thing, if you have the stomach to.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)