Posts Tagged ‘Tennessee’

LinkSwarm for June 24, 2022

Friday, June 24th, 2022

Two landmark Supreme Court cases drop, another woke social justice child-rapist exposed, Keith Olbermann channels John C. Calhoun, and the secret plans to nuke Yorkshire. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Just like the old gypsy woman said leakers indicated, the Supreme Court has overturned Roe vs. Wade.

    The Supreme Court on Friday overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion, allowing a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks to take effect.

    “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the 6-3 majority.

    Justice Alito was joined by Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority. Justice Roberts wrote in a concurring opinion with the majority that he would have taken a “more measured course” stopping short of overturning Roe altogether, but agreed that the Mississippi abortion ban should stand.

    The Court’s liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented….

    The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization means each state will now be able to determine its own regulations on abortion, including whether and when to prohibit abortion.

  • The Supreme Court also handed down a landmark pro-Second Amendment case.

    In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court affirmed that gun rights are due the same protection as all other constitutional rights.

    To which I can only reply “Duh. What took them so long?”

    Today’s Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen is not only the most important Second Amendment ruling since D.C. v. Heller, it is potentially the most important Second Amendment ruling in American history.

    Not sure about that, as Heller firmly established the gun ownership was an individual right unconnected to militia service. That laid the conceptual groundwork for today’s ruling.

    For all the brouhaha, the question at hand in Bruen was rather straightforward: Can the state of New York require that applicants for gun-carry permits “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community,” or is New York obliged by the Constitution to offer a “shall issue” regime of the sort that 43 of the other 49 states have adopted? By a 6–3 vote, the justices decided that the latter approach is required. In the United States, Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion concluded, “authorities must issue concealed-carry licenses whenever applicants satisfy certain threshold requirements, without granting licensing officials discretion to deny licenses based on a perceived lack of need or suitability.” Moreover, while there is nothing illegal about America’s existing state-level permitting systems, those systems may not be mere smokescreens for outright prohibition, unequal protection, or unacceptable delay. “We do not rule out,” Thomas added in a footnote, any “constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.”

    As Justice Alito was keen to note, this “holding decides nothing about who may lawfully possess a firearm or the requirements that must be met to buy a gun. Nor does it decide anything about the kinds of weapons that people may possess.” It concludes solely that:

    The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need. The Second Amendment right to carry arms in public for self-defense is no different. New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.

    Bottom line: New York is allowed to exclude carry-permit applications on a categorical basis (e.g., the applicant has a felony conviction), but not on a subjective one (e.g., the applicant doesn’t “need” a gun in the view of the determining officer).

    To get there, the majority first determined that “nothing in the Second Amendment’s text draws a home/public distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms.” Indeed, “to confine the right to ‘bear’ arms to the home,” the majority observed, “would nullify half of the Second Amendment’s operative protections.” This, Thomas explained, would not do, because “the constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’”

  • In light of the ruling, Borepatch offers up a rare word of praise for Mitch McConnell for black holing the Merick Garland nomination in 2015.
  • Liberals are taking the gun and abortion rulings well. Ha, just kidding! Keith Olbermann came out for nullification. Because nothing says “progressive liberalism” like adopting the policies of South Carolina from 1832.
    

  • Woke “socialist high school teacher” is “fighting for a better society” by filming himself having sex with a 13-year old student during lunch breaks.
  • Long, interesting twitter thread on how crime has soared under various George Soros-backed DAs.
  • Ukraine has banned the main opposition party. Not a great look. Though you know FDR would have tried that with Republicans if he thought they posed more of a threat to his agenda and the Supreme Court would let him get away with it…
  • Biden Administration to oil companies: “Hey, we need you to refine more oil! Also, we want to put you all out of business in five to ten years.”
  • “Court Rules Virtue-Signaling Minneapolis Mayor Failed to Protect Citizens With Enough Cops…The Minnesota Supreme Court has ordered kneeling Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and his band of defundanistas to hire more cops as required under the city’s charter or show why they can’t.”
  • Remember Andrew “failed Florida Democratic Gubernatorial candidate/gay meth orgy participant” Gillum? Well, he was just indicted on 21 counts of “conspiracy, wire fraud and making false statements” for raking off campaign contributions into his own pocket.
  • This week’s example of a reporter making up sources comes to you from Gabriela Miranda of USA Today.
  • Reason to worry: China has a new aircraft carrier the size of our own Nimitz-class carriers. But not too much: It probably won’t be ready for active service until 2025, and it’s oil-boiler powered rather than nuclear.
  • Israel is headed for yet another election. “After almost one year of taking power, Israel’s ruling coalition has agreed to dissolve the parliament and hold new elections. ‘Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office announced Monday that his weakened coalition will be disbanded and the country will head to new elections.'” (“How many elections is that now, five?” “Shut up! Don’t tell Mere!”)
  • International Swimming Federation bans men from competing. It’s astonishing that headline even needs to be written…
  • Twitter board recommends that they accept Elon Musk’s offer. Maybe he can get them to unlock my account.
  • The Denver Airport is expanding, and they’ve actually leaning into the conspiracy theories.
  • Powers that be in Tennessee are threatening YouTuber Whistlin Diesel with a year in prison for…splashing with a jet ski. Sounds like a clear abuse of power to me…
  • A review of one of the last production Trebants, the crappy, under-powered, plastic communist car East Germans had to wait years to buy. Let this be another reminder that commies aren’t cool and the consumer goods produced by commie companies that don’t have to deal with market competition are crap.
  • I’ve posted a lot of Peter Zeihan video this year, so you might be interested to know that his book The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization is now out.
  • “In my day, we had to work twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, and they set off a nuclear explosion underneath us! You tell that to kids these days and they don’t believe you!”
  • “After ‘Lightyear’ Bombs, Disney Quietly Cancels Their Upcoming Movie ‘Brokeback Woody.
  • LinkSwarm for October 1, 2021

    Friday, October 1st, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to the Halloween season! Manchin and Sinema are the only thing that stands in the way of a giant, economy-destroying meteor of leftwing pandering, energy crises ramp up in China and Europe, Biden nominates a commie, and more Flu Manchu shenanigans.

  • Inflation hits a 30 year high, yet Democrats are furious two of their own party aren’t letting them run even bigger deficits.
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin calls the giant runway Porkulus fiscal insanity.

    “What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity,” Manchin said in a statement Wednesday.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • And you know that $3.5 trillion price tag? Staggering though it is, they’re lowballing it:


    

  • Manchin says that any reconciliation bill must include a Hyde Amendment to bar federal taxpayer funding of abortion. I’m pretty sure Democrats would prefer kicking Manchin out of the party than give compromise on their holy of holies.
  • Manchin and Sinema are a feature, not a bug:

    ‘What if — and hear me out here,” writes Robert Reich, “we stopped letting two corporate Democrats singlehandedly block every single progressive policy we elected Democrats to pass?”

    Okay, Robert. But how, exactly? The Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate. To pass a bill through reconciliation, the Democrats need 50 votes in the Senate. Two of the people who hold those 50 seats do not agree with the rest of the party on “every single progressive policy.” If the other 48 senators do agree — which is far from clear — the Democratic Party will have 48 votes for its agenda, two short of what it needs. Those two, not the Robert Reichs of the world, are the ones with the power to “stop” things.

    “Should all of this just hinge on those two?” Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) asked yesterday. “Absolutely not.” But should doesn’t enter into it. The question is does “all of this” hinge on Sinema and Manchin? The answer is yes. Yes it does. And why? Because, again, “all of this” requires 50 votes in the Senate, and two of those votes aren’t on-board.

    Underneath the complaints that Reich and Bush have leveled sits the erroneous implication that, come election time, American voters are obliged to press a button marked “Republican” or “Democrat,” and that, having done so, they are shipped a drone-like representative of the winning team from a central repository in Washington, D.C. Reich complains that “we elected Democrats.” But this is correct only in the aggregate. In fact, 50 different “we”s elected one hundred senators and 435 Representatives, who between them make up our majority and minority parties. There is nothing in this deal that obliges those emissaries to agree with one another.

    Senators Manchin and Sinema are not a pair of uninvited interlopers who are unexpectedly gumming up the gears; they, themselves, are among the gears. This being so, the duo cannot be said to be “blocking” the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority so much as they are sustaining the Democrats’ de facto Senate majority. Why? Because their decision to caucus with the Democrats rather than the Republicans is the only reason that majority exists in the first place. To hear progressives talk, one would assume that in order to take one’s place within the firmament one must first swear a blood oath to Dick Durbin. Shockingly enough, one is obliged to do no such thing.

  • All this debt limit foo-fora is just kabuki:

    If there’s one thing we know about the looming debt limit crunch and the warnings about the dire consequences of default, it’s this: The government is not going to default.

    The recurring brinksmanship over the debt limit and the partisan refusal to get Republican fingerprints on the increase don’t say much for our political class. But the U.S. Treasury isn’t full of stupid people, and they’ve been through this drill before. Back in July 2011, when the debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion was about to be reached, the Washington Post reported:

    The Treasury has already decided to save enough cash to cover $29 billion in interest to bondholders, a bill that comes due Aug. 15, according to people familiar with the matter.

    You can bet they’re making similar plans today. The difference is that 10 years later the debt ceiling is $28.4 trillion, just about doubled, and we’re about to bump into it again.

    Back in that summer of discontent I talked to a journalist who was very concerned about the “dysfunction” in Washington. So am I. But I told her then what’s still true today: that the real problem is not the dysfunctional process that’s getting all the headlines, but the dysfunctional substance of governance. Congress and the president will work out the debt ceiling issue, probably just in the nick of time. The real dysfunction is a federal budget that doubled in 10 years, unprecedented deficits as far as the eye can see, and a national debt (more accurately, gross federal debt) yet again bursting through its statutory limit of $28.4 trillion and soaring past 120 percent of GDP, a level previously reached only during World War II.

  • John Durham subpoenas Clinton law firm Perkins Coie. I’m betting the Dlinton cronies aren’t wild about that at all…
  • Biden nominates an actual communist as Comptroller of Currency:

    The Cornell University law school professor [Saule Omarova]’s radical ideas might make even Bernie Sanders blush. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.

    Snip.

    Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. In two papers, she has advocated expanding the Federal Reserve’s mandate to include the price levels of “systemically important financial assets” as well as worker wages. As they like to say at the modern university, from each according to her ability to each according to her needs.

    In a recent paper “The People’s Ledger,” she proposed that the Federal Reserve take over consumer bank deposits, “effectively ‘end banking,’ as we know it,” and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.” She’d also like the U.S. to create a central bank digital currency—as Venezuela and China are doing—to “redesign our financial system & turn Fed’s balance sheet into a true ‘People’s Ledger,’” she tweeted this summer. What could possibly go wrong?

    It’s like an entire century of central planning failure means nothing to her, and Henry Hazlitt died in vain. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Democrats Would Prefer That You Ignore All of the Violent Crime Around You.”

    The FBI’s annual report Monday made official what most unfortunately presumed: The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murders since the start of national record-keeping 60 years ago.

    The Uniform Crime Report detailed a murder increase of nearly 30 percent.

    The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase back in 1968. The national rate of murders per 100,000, however, still remains about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s.

    The FBI data show around 21,500 total murders last year, which is 5,000 more murders than in 2019. More than three-fourths of reported murders in 2020 were committed with a firearm, the highest rate ever reported.

    Now before you start jumping to conclusions about a correlation between the leftist fever to defund the police and a huge jump in the nation’s murder rate, you should probably be aware of the fact that the Democrats want you to know that there’s no problem at all.

    That’s right, the same people who want us all to live in mortal fear of being breathed on by a stranger at Kroeger are trying to poof away a pile of bodies.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Heh:

  • The Fairfax County School Board would really prefer that you not point out the gay porn in their library.
  • There’s stupid, and then there’s revealing a secret military aircraft on Tik-Tok stupid.

  • “Facebook Takes Down Project Veritas Video Featuring HHS Staff Denouncing the COVID-19 Vaccine.” I think they mean this one:

  • Speaking of Flu Manchu, here’s NBA player Jonathan Isaac calmly explaining why he doesn’t feel he needs the vaccine:

  • The Lancet just gives up on trying to determine the origins of Flu Manchu, much like OJ has given up on finding the real killers.
  • China is trying the classic idiot price controls strategy for its self-inflicted energy crisis:

    China is officially panicking.

    Now that the global energy crisis has slammed China’s economy, leading to the first contractionary PMI since March 2020 as a result of widespread shutdowns of factory and manufacturing, not to mention hundreds of millions of Chinese residents suffering from periodic blackouts, Bloomberg reports that China’s central government officials “ordered the country’s top state-owned energy companies to secure supplies for this winter at all costs.”

    Translation: Beijing is no longer willing to risk social anger and going forward China will be subsidizing coil and nat gas, which will lead to even higher prices, which will lead to even higher prices for other “substitute” commodities such as oil, which is why oil surged on the news.

    The news follows a report on Wednesday that China will allow soaring coal prices to be passed on to factories in electricity prices. But prepare for a surge in PPI, which will likely not be allowed to be passed on to CPI due to ‘common prosperity’. Which logically means margin collapse, and shutting down – so even more structural shortages. Unless we get state subsidies of some sort, or differential pricing for the foreign and domestic market. There used to be a name for that kind of economy. Wall Street used to pretend it didn’t like it.

  • European natural gas prices hit all-time highs.
  • Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh tests positive for Mao Tze Lung.
  • Cenk Uygur says he could take former MMA fighter-turned-comedian-turned-podcaster Joe Rogan in a fight. I’m sure Uygur will get right to it after completing that 3 minute mile and turning down Scarlett Johansson begging for sex…
  • Speaking of Rogan, he says that Trump beats Biden or Harris 100% in 2024. Also says someone other than Biden is running his White House.
  • So say the polls: In a hypothetical matchup, Donald Trump creams Joe Biden by 10 points in 2024.
  • Intel breaks ground on a $20 billion seminconductor fab in Arizona. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Smith & Wesson is moving from Massachusetts to Tennessee.
  • Crypto-Trading Hamster Performs Better Than Warren Buffett And The S&P 500.”
  • “Leftists Deeply Afraid Things Could Go Back To Normal.”

    “We don’t want normal,” said activist Earnest Greer. “We want radical change. What if everything goes back to the way it was without us completely dismantling and rebuilding the system?”

    Liberals saw the pandemic as an opportunity to get people less clingy to individual freedom and more accepting of government planning significant parts of everyone’s lives. Normal would mean relinquishing that power, which is anathema to the Left.

  • “I said get in the family photo!”

  • Biden Administration Blocking Flu Manchu Monoclonal Antibody Supplies To Red States?

    Thursday, September 16th, 2021

    So it appears:

    The Biden administration is imposing new limits on states’ ability to access to Covid-19 antibody treatments amid rising demand from GOP governors who have relied on the drug as a primary weapon against the virus.

    Federal health officials plan to allocate specific amounts to each state under the new approach, in an effort to more evenly distribute the 150,000 doses that the government makes available each week.

    The approach is likely to cut into shipments to GOP-led states in the Southeast that have made the pricey antibody drug a central part of their pandemic strategy, while simultaneously spurning mask mandates and other restrictions. That threatens to heighten tensions between the Biden administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who have emerged as vocal opponents of the federal Covid-19 response.

    “How dare they pay for treatments that work while ignoring the one true path of vaccine righteousness?”

    Which states are the feds rationing?

    Demand from a handful of southern states has exploded since then, state and federal officials said, raising concerns they were consuming a disproportionate amount of the national supply. Seven states — Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama — accounted for 70 percent of all orders in early September.

    Huh, I wonder what those states might all have in common? Maybe…Republican governors? Well, we can’t have those upstarts showing up vaccine-pushing blue states, can we?

    “President Joe Biden has sharply criticized DeSantis and others for resisting efforts to encourage mask wearing and ramp up vaccinations, vowing in a speech last week that if ‘governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.'”

    Evidently this is code for “Stop fighting the holy narrative or I’ll make sure your citizens die!”

    Monoclonal antibodies were one of the treatments Joe Rogan used to shake off Mao Tze Lung in three days.

    Rationing is a piss-poor way of managing finite resources rather than letting the private sector solve the problem.

    All this is a good reason not to put the federal government in charge of key medical treatment supplies…

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

    LinkSwarm for May 14, 2021

    Friday, May 14th, 2021

    The Biden Recession blooms, Bibby bombs, Baltimore burns, inscrutable Flu Manchu somehow infects the vaccinated, and Canada’s institutional religious hostility inflicts its revenge on the pastor that defied them. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Carter Malaise II: Inflation Boogaloo: The core inflation rate is now at 11%. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • If inflation wasn’t enough to remind you of Biden’s reboot of That 70’s Show, how about long gas lines? An east coast gas pipeline was shut down by ransomeware attack launched by a hacking group called DarkSide.

    Rendered with the magic of dyslexia

    We’re actually very fortunate that a for-profit gang carried out this hack, rather than a terrorist group or state actor.

  • “South Carolina Follows Montana In Ending All Supplemental Unemployment Benefit Programs.” Strange how the government paying people not to work hurts jobs numbers…
  • Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (WV) says he’s not going to let the Democrats’ election-theft bill pass. Good for him. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Seeing some reports stating that Israeli ground forces entered Gaza, but seeing some Twitter commentary that, no, they haven’t entered, but that IDF artillery and tanks are pounding Hamas tunnels.
  • Why won’t those violent Israelis just let themselves be killed?

    Two weeks ago Turkish forces launched a military assault in the Duhok region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Villagers were forced to ‘flee in terror’ from raining bombs. It was only the latest bombardment of the beleaguered Kurds by Turkey, NATO member and Western ally. It did not trend online. There were no noisy protests in London or New York. The Turks weren’t talked about in woke circles as crazed, bloodthirsty killers. Tweeters didn’t dream out loud about Turks burning in hell. The Onion didn’t do any close-to-the-bone satire about how Turkish soldiers just love killing children. No, the Duhok attack passed pretty much without comment.

    But when Israel engages in military action, that’s a different story. Always. Every time. Anti-Israel fury in the West has intensified to an extraordinary degree following an escalation of violence in the Middle East in recent days. Protests were instant and inflammatory. Israeli flags were burned on the streets of London. Social media was awash with condemnation. ‘IDF Soldier Recounts Harrowing, Heroic War Story Of Killing 8-Month-Old Child’, tweeted The Onion, to tens of thousands of likes. Israel must be boycotted, isolated, cast out of the international community, leftists cried. Western politicians, including Keir Starmer, rushed to pass judgement. ‘What’s the difference?’, said a placard at a march in Washington, DC showing the Israeli flag next to the Nazi flag. The Jews are the Nazis now, you see. Ironic, isn’t it?

    This is the question anti-Israel campaigners have never been able to answer: why do they treat Israel so differently to every other nation on Earth? Why is it child-killing bloodlust when Israel takes military action but not when Turkey or India do? Why must we rush to the streets to set light to the Israel flag but never the Saudi flag, despite Saudi Arabia’s unconscionable war on Yemen? Why is it only ‘wrong’ or at worst ‘horrific’ when Britain or America drop bombs in the Middle East but Nazism when Israel fires missiles into Gaza? Why do you merely oppose the military action of some states but you hate Israel, viscerally, publicly, loudly?

    The judgement and treatment of Israel by a double standard is one of the most disturbing facets of global politics in the 21st century. That double standard has been glaringly evident over the past few days. Israel is now the only country on Earth that is expected to allow itself to be attacked. To sit back and do nothing as its citizens are pelted with rocks or rockets. How else do we explain so many people’s unwillingness to place the current events in any kind of context, including the context of an avowedly anti-Semitic Islamist movement – Hamas – firing hundreds of missiles into civilian areas in Israel? In this context, to rage solely against Israel, to curse its people and burn its flag because it has sent missiles to destroy Hamas’s firing positions in Gaza, is essentially to say: ‘Why won’t Israelis let themselves be killed?’

  • Hamas is the instrument of Iran’s proxy war against Israel:

    Last year, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admitted for the first time that his country was supplying the Palestinian terrorist groups with weapons. “Iran realized Palestinian fighters’ only problem was lack of access to weapons,” Khamenei said in an online speech.

    “With divine guidance and assistance, we planned, and the balance of power has been transformed in Palestine, and today the Gaza Strip can stand against the aggression of the Zionist enemy and defeat it.”

    Khamenei went on to offer the reason why Iran was sending rockets, missiles and tons of explosives to the Gaza Strip: “The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous tumor in the region. It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”

    Khamenei’s admission shows how the mullahs in Tehran have been lying to the West for many years. In 2011, Mohammad Khazaee, the Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations, sent a letter to the President of the United Nations Security Council in which he vehemently denied that Iran was smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip.

    

  • Baltimore was one of the first cities to try “de-policing.” How did that work out for it? Not so hot:

    This experiment has been an abject failure. Since 2011, nearly 3,000 Baltimoreans have been murdered—one of every 200 city residents over that period. The annual homicide rate has climbed from 31 per 100,000 residents to 56—ten times the national rate. And 93 percent of the homicide victims of known race over this period were black.

    Remarkably, Baltimore is reinforcing its de-policing strategy. State’s Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby no longer intends to prosecute various “low-level” crimes. Newly elected mayor Brandon Scott promises a five-year plan to cut the police budget. Both justify their policies by asserting that the bloodbath on city streets proves that policing itself “hasn’t worked”; they sell their acceleration of de-policing as a “fresh approach” and “re-imagining” of law enforcement.

    The tried “broken windows” policing without understanding it:

    The motivation for de-policing traces to the city’s botched response to an earlier crime epidemic in the 1990s, when it averaged 45 homicides per 100,000 population, up 55 percent from the previous decade. So in 1999 Baltimoreans elected a mayor, Martin O’Malley, who promised to apply New York’s successful crime-fighting approach, where homicides had plunged by two-thirds over the decade (to one-ninth Baltimore’s rate) thanks to an expanded police force and innovative, proactive policing strategies.

    O’Malley’s first commissioner, NYPD veteran Ed Norris, initially showed promise. By 2002, Baltimore’s homicide rate was 20 percent below its 1999 level. As O’Malley pressed for more, however, relations soured, and Norris departed (and some financial shenanigans eventually earned him a stint in federal prison). His successor, Kevin Clark, another NYPD import, also became embroiled in personal and professional controversy; he was fired and succeeded by a Baltimore PD holdover. By the time O’Malley moved to the Maryland governor’s mansion in 2007, Baltimore’s homicide rate was back to its 1990s average.

    The problem was not just turmoil among BPD leadership and meddling (or worse) by O’Malley, but a fatal misunderstanding of what had worked in New York. There, the broad spectrum of criminal activity was addressed efficiently and with community engagement. Detailed data helped guide resources to crime hot spots. Chief William J. Bratton implemented the Broken Windows theory-inspired community-policing methods pioneered by social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, who understood how small manifestations of disorder could grow to larger ones. Minor offenses that made residents feel unsafe or hinted at acceptance of violence were addressed in order to improve quality of life, strengthen communities, and prevent serious crime.

    In Baltimore, however, Broken Windows was misunderstood and misapplied. It mutated into a malignant variant, “zero tolerance” policing—and BPD conduct became not just intolerant but unfocused and excessive. As David Simon, a veteran Baltimore crime reporter and creator of HBO’s The Wire, summed things up, O’Malley “tossed the Fourth Amendment out a window and began using the police department to sweep the corners and rowhouse stoops and [per Norris] ‘lock up damn near everyone.’” That sometimes even included Wire crew members on their way home from a long day of filming.

    True Broken Windows policing, in Kelling’s words, creates “a negotiated sense of order in a community” and involves collaboration between cops and residents. As one BPD vet put it, “You go to a community—before we come in, [we should ask], ‘What are the main things you all can’t stand?’ Everybody playing music at 11:30 at night, kids sitting on the corner, the prostitutes using the little park over there to work their trade. Now, ‘What don’t you care about?’ See the old guys sitting down at the corner playing cards every night? They could stay there all they want. . . . Then the police come in and do what the neighborhood wants. You just don’t go out and lock everybody up.” But, he concluded, “we went overboard.”

    Then they adjusted:

    O’Malley’s successor, Sheila Dixon (the city’s first female and third black mayor), defied her staff’s recommendations and named as commissioner Frederick Bealefeld, a BPD lifer with no college pedigree. “It was something in my gut that felt he was the best person,” Dixon explained. “I could just feel his passion.”

    Bealefeld understood community policing better than the New York imports, addressing disorder and crime efficiently. He attended community meetings tirelessly to find out what residents wanted done; got cops out of their cars and walking patrols more often; invested in better training; and supported cops’ work with kids. Partnering with a savvy federal prosecutor, Rod Rosenstein, he targeted known dealers and shooters, emphasizing quality arrests—including of cops on the take. It worked. Even as arrest totals fell (to 70,000 by 2010), so did the homicide rate, to a low of 31 per 100,000 residents by 2011.

    And then the Social Justice started:

    Dixon had embezzled gift cards meant for the poor—petty corruption is a Baltimore tradition—and in 2010 was succeeded by Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The Oberlin-educated former public defender was more liberal than Dixon, personally lukewarm to Bealefeld, and sympathetic to those embittered by O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” policies. And she faced budget problems. De-policing, then, seemed to tick all the right boxes—and, with the homicide rate at a 23-year low (though still almost seven times the national average), there would be little outcry against it.

    First came some defunding, with a 2 percent pay cut to help address a recession-related budget pinch; cops’ contributions to their pension funds also were raised to help address shortfalls there. The new mayor’s first proposed budget actually cut the BPD’s request by 10 percent, though the difference eventually was split. Demoralized, experienced cops started retiring in numbers.

    Rawlings-Blake did not replace them, and she trimmed staffed aggressively. BPD budgets had consistently authorized about 3,900 positions through the O’Malley and Dixon years. Rawlings-Blake took that down by 5 percent in her 2012 budget and another 6 percent in 2013. Bealefeld called the cuts “unconscionable” and retired. As he’d told the head of the police union at one point, “you can only beat down your horses for so long before they give up.”

    So even before Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015 and Baltimoreans rioted, the BPD had 460 fewer budgeted “horses” than under Mayor Dixon—with 300 fewer on patrol, conducting investigations, or targeting violent criminals. Not surprisingly, the homicide rate surged 20 percent by 2013. And after the city’s newly elected prosecutor, Mosby, criminally charged six uniformed officers in Gray’s death—though she failed to convict any—proactive policing essentially ceased. The city’s annual body count jumped and has remained tragically high since.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Baltimore’s Soros-backed City State Attorney Marilyn Mosby can’t be bothered to indict antifa rioters, but she can ask the FCC to investigate Tucker Carlson for daring to criticize her.
  • Speaking of defunding the police, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey admits that defunding the police was a huge mistake. If only the rest of the Minneapolis had realized this before all the deaths.
  • “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.”
  • Russia’s robot army is mainly vaporware.
  • Just about everything they told us about transmission vectors for Mao Tze Lung was wrong:

    Bars, gyms and restaurants. Those were just a few settings health experts warned could become hotbeds for COVID-19 spread as states began reopening in the spring and summer of 2020 following the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

    Yet, public data analyzed by ABC News appears to tell a different story. The data from states across the country suggests specific outbreak settings (including bars, gyms, restaurants, nail salons, barbershops and stores — for the full list, see graphic below in story) only accounted for a small percentage, if any, of new outbreaks after the pandemic’s inital wave in 2020.

    Snip.

    Based on ABC News’ analysis of public data of all coronavirus cases in four states and D.C., the outbreak settings accounted for less than 5% of all COVID-19 cases in those states.

  • “World’s Most Vaccinated Nation Sees Active COVID Cases Double In Under A Week.” Mysterious uptick in the Seychelles.
  • Another data point: “Yankees Suffer COVID Resurgence As 8 Fully-Vaccinated Players, Staff Test Positive.” A fluke? Bad batch of vaccines? Bad batch of tests?
  • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  • “Why Did Biden Census Bureau Add 2.5 Million More Residents to Blue-State Population Count?” The question pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it?
  • Kansas’ Republican legislature overrides Democratic governor’s veto of election integrity bill.
  • Texas congressman Chip Roy is running ran against Elise Stefanik for conference chair to replace Liz Cheney. (Oops, he lost, 134-46.)
  • Remember the Polish pastor who kicked police out of his Canadian church? Well, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before The State: “Calgary pastor Artur Pawlowski has been arrested for holding a church service.” That will teach him for daring to think Canada has freedom of religion…
  • How we got to the Ever Given. The first container ship only carried 58 boxes. Current container ships can carry as many as 24,000…
  • “Former Democrat Speaker of House in Oregon Arrested for Sex Trafficking.”

    Dave Hunt represented Clackamas County in the Oregon House of Representatives from 2003 through 2013. Hunt was the former Democratic Leader, Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House for the State of Oregon. As a legislator, Hunt the sponsor of a bill criminalizing sex trafficking in 2007. Hunt is currently a lobbyist working to influence the very chamber he left.

    However, even more ironic in 2011, Dave Hunt use his position to support and vote for HB 2714. That bill created the crime of commercial sexual solicitation, the exact crime police used to charge Hunt when he was arrested and cited.

    Sort of sounds like a garden variety prostitution solicitation charge. But if he’s one of the legislators to redefine that as “sex trafficking,” my sympathy is extremely limited.

  • Colorado Democrats give up on their gun control push. (For now.) Good. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • I-40 bridge over Mississippi closed due to a giant crack in a key structural beam.
  • Telsa plans more expansion in Travis County.
  • NRA’s bankruptcy petition has been dismissed. Understandably, since it seemed a transparent ploy to begin with. It’s too bad Wayne LaPierre seems intent on dragging the NRA down with him…
  • Mark Sebu follows up on the Kentucky Ballistics explosion. Evidently it would haven taken 161,520 PI to shear the threads off the Sebu RN 50. Also, there were no pre-cuts on the sabot, suggesting it may indeed have been a counterfeit SLAP round that caused the explosion.
  • Not the Babylon Bee: O.J. Simpson backs Liz Cheney, accuses the Republican Party of “dishonesty.” I don’t feel I can adequately parody this real-life event, even though I should probably take a stab at it…
    

  • Sign you may be in a cult: They keep keep the mummified body of the dead leader in someone’s home, covered by Christmas lights. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Top Gear/Grand Tour presenter James May found out that trickle charging a Tesla S’ main car battery didn’t charge the ordinary car battery, the one responsible for regular electric systems…like unlocking the hood latch to reach the same battery. Result: an hour of work just to reach the dead battery.
  • Speaking of impractical automotive accoutrements, here’s a Bugatti watch with a “working” W16 engine, yours for a mere $280,000…
  • Foamy: “Stop saving the stupid people!”
  • “Disney To Remove Problematic Kiss From Classic Movie, Snow White Will Now Remain Dead.”
  • Pipeline blues:

  • “Damnit! I had two sawbucks on Beatlebaum!”

  • LinkSwarm for July 31, 2020

    Friday, July 31st, 2020

    Idiot rioters and their identifying tattoos, more elected Democrats behaving badly, and a higher than usual helping of cute animals. Enjoy your Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Borepatch points out that U.S. Wuhan coronavirus deaths hit post-March lows. Also, all U.S. deaths are now far below the norms.

    This was not just a bad flu. The data are crystal clear on that.

    However, the data did not justify shutting down the economy. The data did not justify preventing you from saying goodbye to Grandma on her deathbed. The data did not justify prohibiting public gatherings at funerals. The data did not justify shutting down Sunday church. The data did not justify shutting down the schools. The data don’t justify mandatory mask wearing. The data don’t justify the hype.

  • Did Sweden’s herd immunity gambit work?
  • Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and onetime Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain dies of Wuhan coronavirus.
  • DC Circuit court decides to have an en banc hearing to consider whether it wants to continue screwing General Flynn.
  • George Soros-backed St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner, who charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies for using guns to protect their homes, illegally took several trips took several trips paid for by activist groups that she failed to disclose. Fair and Just Prosecution is the name of the activist group in question.
  • Tennessee Democratic state senator Katrina Robinson was charged with swindling $600,000 in federal funds to pay for her wedding and a lavish lifestyle.
  • Why did Breonna Taylor die? Partially because of a police raid gone wrong, and partially because she was a drug-dealer’s ex-girlfriend:

    “Say Her Name” is one of the slogans that activists have connected to this Louisville shooting, but if we want to understand why police shot Breonna Taylor, there is another name that needs to be said — Jamarcus Glover.

    Glover is a 30-year-old narcotics trafficker who police say was dealing crack cocaine and marijuana out of a “trap house” on Elliott Avenue in Louisville’s west side. According to a police affidavit, detectives had Glover and his accomplice Adrian Walker under surveillance, and had seen their car — a red Dodge Charger with Mississippi plates — “make frequent trips” from the Elliott Avenue “trap house” to an apartment 10 miles away on Springfield Drive. Detective Joshua Jaynes wrote in the affidavit that Glover was using the Springfield Drive apartment as his mailing address; Jaynes said he had witnessed Glover pick up a postal package at the apartment; and, citing his “training and experience,” Jaynes stated his belief that Glover “may be keeping narcotics and/or proceeds from the sale of narcotics” at the Springfield Drive apartment. All of this was stated in an application for a search warrant of the Springfield Drive apartment where Breonna Taylor lived.

    You see, Jamarcus Glover was Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend. They broke up a couple years ago, according to a lawyer for Taylor’s family who said she maintained a “passive friendship” with Glover. This “friendship” apparently included allowing Glover to receive his mail at her apartment, and, although there is no evidence that Taylor was ever involved in Glover’s drug operation, the “training and experience” of Detective Jaynes led him to believe there must be some connection. This was convincing enough for Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Mary Shaw, who approved the so-called “no-knock” warrant for Taylor’s apartment, and also approved nearly identical warrants for the four other addresses linked to Glover’s drug operation, including the Elliott Avenue “trap house.”

    Louisville police served all five warrants almost simultaneously, shortly after midnight on March 13. Glover was arrested at the Elliott Avenue address, but the raid on Taylor’s apartment went horribly wrong. Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who was part of the five-man squad assigned to serve the warrant on the Springfield Drive address, said the squad was told in a preliminary briefing that this was a “soft target” because Taylor was believed to be alone in the apartment. Therefore, Sgt. Mattingly said, the decision was made for officers to knock on the door and announce themselves as police, despite the authorization for a “no-knock” entry. Sgt. Mattingly knocked for about a minute, he said, before the supervising lieutenant ordered them to “hit it,” using a battering ram to breach the door.

    Inside the apartment, however, Breonna Taylor was not alone. She had a new boyfriend visiting her, and they were watching a movie in her bedroom. The boyfriend, Kenneth Walker (no relation to Glover’s accomplice Adrian Walker) had a legally owned pistol, and when he heard somebody pounding on the front door, he grabbed his weapon. Why? Because he was “scared to death,” believing that the person pounding on the door might be Taylor’s drug-dealer ex-boyfriend. Walker and Taylor emerged from the bedroom into the hallway of the apartment and, Walker said, Taylor called out, “Who is it?”

    The next thing that happened, in Walker’s description of the incident, is the door “comes off its hinges” — the police are busting in, but he doesn’t know it’s the police. If you’re dating a drug dealer’s ex-girlfriend and somebody busts through your door at 12:30 in the morning, what do you do?

    Walker fired a shot, hitting Sgt. Mattingly in the thigh, and Sgt. Mattingly immediately returned fire, getting off six shots. Two other officers also opened fire. In total, police fired at least 22 shots, none of which hit Walker, but Taylor was struck eight times and died on the scene. Although a grand jury indicted Walker on a charge of attempted murder of a police officer, that charge was dismissed in May at the request of Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Wine.

    Slogans are no replacement for facts.

  • 1-in-5 mail-in ballots tossed out in tight Congressional primary race.”
  • Trader Joe’s changes its mind, refuses to kowtow to cancel culture.
  • Lest people think I always follow President Trump’s policy position, here’s another one I differ on: Russia shouldn’t be let back into the G7 as long as they’re occupying parts of Ukraine.
  • U.S. withdrawing 12,000 troops from Germany.
  • Idaho becomes first state to ban men from competing in woman’s sports.
  • Oopsie! Alleged police car arsonist Timothy O’Donnell identified by his neck tattoo. (Hat tip: John Richardson.)
  • Speaking of super-genius rioters and tattoos, Edward Thomas Schinzing was arrested on federal arson charges in Portland thanks to the fact he was shirtless and had his own name tattooed across his back.
  • The New York Times sure loves them some UFOs.
    

  • How the press is willfully ignoring the Obamagate spying scandal:

    The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.

    It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking “wow” response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.

    The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.

    Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign. He opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring “viva the resistance.” He is now under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA court filing. The FBI used Trump adviser Carter Page as the basis for the original FISA application, due to his contacts with Russians. After that surveillance was approved, however, federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the CIA.

  • Meet the source for all the most salacious claims in the debunked Steele dossier: Russian-born habitual drunk Igor Danchenko, who used to work for the Brookings Institution.
  • Why no riots in Detroit? Detroit Police Chief James Craig: “We don’t retreat.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Weird or menacing? “People Are Receiving Mysterious Unsolicited Packages Of Seeds In The Mail From China.”
  • From the “facts pulled out of our ass” department:

  • Stupid questions asked: “Why aren’t you gun owners defending antifa from the government?”

    Well, every single gun nut in America has spent their entire adult life being continually mocked, insulted, and belittled by the left. You’ve done nothing but paint us as the bad guys.

    In Hollywood, we’re always evil, stupid, violent, malicious, redneck, racist, murderers. That’s so ingrained in the liberal religion that when “ally” Harvey Weinstein was trying to get out of being a sleazy rapist, his repentance consisted of promising to make more movies about how the NRA is bad.
    In the news, everything is always our fault. If there is a mass murder, we can always count on the vultures to swoop in and blame America’s gun culture. They flog it for weeks on end, 24/7 coverage, hoping for gun control. And if the identity of the shooter doesn’t fit the narrative, it drops off the news in mere hours.

    And then at the local, state, and federal level, legally speaking, the left fucks us at every opportunity. You ban everything you can get away with. You ban things that literally make no sense. You ban shit just out of spite.

    When we fight back against gun control laws, you declare we are stupid because only the police should have guns (hey, aren’t those the guys you are protesting right now?)

    “Stupid racist rednecks! We live in a civilized society! Don’t you realize the police will protect us?” until when your democrat cities are on fire, and you call 911 and the operator tells you sorry, the police can’t come to your house right now, please try not to get murdered… How is that strict gun control working out for you?

    Then you did everything in your power to chase gun owners out of your sainted liberal strongholds. You passed laws. You banned everything we like. Forced all the shooting ranges to close. Forced most of the gun stores to close. And just generally let us know that our kind is not welcome there.

    But now you’ve started some shit, YOU want US to go into democrat cities, with democrat mayors, and democrat police chiefs enforcing democrat policies which cause strife among democrats, in order to get into gun fights on your behalf?

    How fucking gullible do you think we are? 😀 Like holy shit. Damn dude!

    Because we all know that literally 30 seconds after a gun nut blows away a government employee on your behalf, then all the national media coverage of the riots will instantly cease (sorta like the Corona Virus coverage did) and it’ll be back to the news breathlessly reporting about right wing extremist gun nuts, and all you useless fucks would go back to whining for more dumb ass gun control.

    You’ve already thrown the black community under the bus, cheering as their neighborhoods get burned and yours are safe. Seriously, white liberals are the shittiest “allies” in history, and your moral foundation has the consistency of Play-Doh. Your moral compass is a wind sock.

  • Newly promoted Chicago deputy chief Dion Boyd dead in apparent suicide.
  • Chinese immigrant student sues Fordham University for sanctioning him over a social media post showing him holding a gun on the anniversary of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Antifa Member Lectures D-Day Veteran On How To Fight Fascism.”
  • “‘The Violent Riots Are A Myth,’ Says Rep. Nadler As Antifa Sets Fire To Congressional Hearing Room.”
  • “Portland Police Raise Millions By Letting Citizens Throw Tear Gas At Antifa For $5 A Pop.”
  • “Orcs March On Minas Tirith In Mostly Peaceful Protest.”
  • I LOLed:

  • Video game or not, this is pretty impressive:

  • Squirrel Ninja Warrior.
  • In restless dreams I walked alone…

  • “I’ll have the full massage, please.”

  • Super Tuesday Results: The Two-And-A-Half Men Race

    Wednesday, March 4th, 2020

    All that “Bernie is the inevitable nominee” talk?

    Yeah, not so much. They’re still counting, but it looks like Biden won:

  • Alabama
  • Arkansas
  • Oklahoma
  • Maine (though less than a point separates them there)
  • Massachusetts(!)
  • Minnesota
  • North Carolina
  • Tennessee
  • Texas
  • Virginia
  • While Sanders won:

  • California
  • Colorado
  • Utah
  • Vermont
  • Also looks like Michael Bloomberg is going to pick up delegates in Arkansas, Colorado, North Carolina, Tennessee, while Elizabeth Warren will pick up delegates of her home state of Massachusetts (coming in third), Colorado, Minnesota and Maine. Bloomberg also won American Samoa, picking up four delegates, where Tulsi Gabbard also picked up one, which is more than Tom Steyer, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris or James Inslee will ever pick up.

    Biden won all the states Hillary won in 2016, plus Maine, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

    Biden now has more projected delegates than Bernie, 397 to 356.

    It’s now the Biden and Bernie show, with a side-order of Mini-Mike for as long as he wants to waste his money. Warren is toast, but right now she says she’s going to continue running.

    Too busy this week to offer up much analysis than that. Likewise thoughts on Buttigieg and Klobuchar leaving the race and endorsing Biden, which will have to wait until Monday’s Clown Car Update.

    LinkSwarm for February 21, 2020

    Friday, February 21st, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Chinese Intel Officers Indicted for Stealing Personal Data of 145 Million Americans in Equifax Hack.”

    The Justice Department charged four Chinese intelligence officers on Monday with a 2017 hack of credit-reporting giant Equifax, which compromised the personal data of nearly 150 million Americans.

    “This was a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people,” Attorney General William Barr said in a press conference on the announcement.

    Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei, members of the People’s Liberation Army’s 54th Research Institute, are charged with three counts of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit economic espionage, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, as well as two counts of unauthorized access and intentional damage to a protected computer, one count of economic espionage, and three counts of wire fraud.

    The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in Atlanta last week, alleges that the soldiers used a vulnerability in Equifax’s online dispute portal to access its secure servers over several weeks. The group ran approximately 9,000 queries while routing traffic through 34 servers to secretly obtain names, birth dates, and social security numbers for nearly half of all American citizens, before compressing and exporting the data.

  • The Guardian reveals that the Sulemani strike was an even bigger blow to Iran’s terror network and regional ambitions than previously thought:

    “There were 11 bodies pulled from the wreckage,” said one official privy to the panicked conversations that swirled through the corridors of power that morning. “We are talking about the entire inner sanctum of the Quds Force. This wasn’t just Hajj Qassem [Suleimani] and Abu Mahdi [al-Muhandis]. This was everyone who mattered to them in Iraq and beyond.”

    Another source, a western intelligence agency, was more circumspect, suggesting that those killed may have been less decisive in the Iranian nexus than the Iraqis believed. “However, the [assassinations] may have significant repercussions for the relationship between the [Quds Force] and Iran-aligned groups in Iraq in the near term,” an official said.

    In the 40-day mourning period to mark the Iranian general’s death, which ended last Thursday, the fallout in Iraq has barely subsided. If anything, its impact has become more acute there, as well as in Suleimani’s homeland of Iran, and elsewhere in a region he had come to dominate like no other figure.

    From the bunkers of south Beirut to the battlefields of northern Syria and the combustible streets of Iraq, the loss of Suleimani and his entourage has derailed much of Iran’s momentum in the region and exposed to rare vulnerability the opaque Quds Force it has used to project its influence over two decades.

    The assassination has also shone a light on the complicated relationship between the Iranian leadership and the Iraqi government, senior members of which have scrambled ever since to resurrect Suleimani’s core regional projects located as far away as the Lebanese capital and Damascus. The reckoning started as soon as the dead were buried.

    Plus attempts by Iran to get Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to help fill the void.

  • “It’s Looking More and More Like Nevada Will Be Another Democratic Clusterfark.”

    In interviews, three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed preparations for the Feb. 22 election, including insufficient training for a newly-adopted electronic vote-tally system and confusing instructions on how to administer the caucuses. There are also unanswered questions about the security of Internet connections at some 2,000 precinct sites that will transmit results to a central “war room” set up by the Nevada Democratic Party.

  • Margaret Thatcher warned about the perils of European integration:

    In a major speech about the future of Europe, delivered in Bruges on September 20th, 1988, she “began with a grand historical sweep, taking in the Romans, Magna Carta, the Glorious revolution and much more, all designed to show that Britain was part of European civilization.” Thatcher also made it clear that “Britain wanted no ‘cosy, isolated existence’ on the fringes: ‘Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’”

    What Thatcher did oppose was the project of “ever-closer union,” and the resulting weakening of the influence of nation states. She believed that Europe should not be a centralizing power that incubated supranational institutions—particularly as this model of centralization was just then in the throes of spectacular failure within the Soviet Union. Instead, as she outlined in a speech at The Hague on May 15th, 1992, she favored a looser form of European co-operation, by which states retained their sovereign freedoms—including control of their borders. This, she believed, would accommodate the political and cultural diversity of Europe, including the eastern European countries that, she hoped, would be offered full EC membership. As Moore notes, in fact, she was one of the few prominent European politicians of the 1980s who had recognized that cities such as Warsaw, Prague and Budapest were very much European cities that had been cut off from their historical and cultural roots.

    In her speech at The Hague, as Moore summarizes it, “she prophesied that large-scale immigration caused by free movement would cause ‘ethnic conflict,’ and bring about the rise of extremist parties, that there would be ‘national resentment’ because of one-size-fits-all financial and economic policies under a single currency, and that a more centralized EC would not be able to work with the influx of new member states from the former Eastern Bloc.”

  • Washington Post is really concerned that elites don’t have enough say in choosing presidential candidates.
  • ICE isn’t having any of California’s nullification:

    ICE said in a statement that California’s law doesn’t supersede federal law and “will not govern the conduct of federal officers acting pursuant to duly enacted laws passed by Congress that provide the authority to make administrative arrests of removable aliens inside the United States.”

    “Our officers will not have their hands tied by sanctuary rules when enforcing immigration laws to remove criminal aliens from our communities,” David Jennings, ICE’s field office director in San Francisco, said in the statement.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Mexico is now the wall.
  • Clayton Williams, RIP. He was that close to beating Ann Richards for Texas governor in 1990 before he shot his mouth off, not realizing that you can never trusts journalists to keep something that hurts a Republican quiet. Had he won, it’s extremely doubtful that George W. Bush gets elected governor in 1994, and the modern history of America turns out very differently…
  • “The 25-year-old man accused of fatally stabbing a library security officer to death had been released without bail after being accused of trying to rape a woman at Montefiore Nyack Hospital in November.” Thanks to Democratic “reforms,” attempting to rape a woman in a hospital in New York is now effectively a misdemeanor.
  • Ilhan Omar DID marry her brother, reveals Somali community leader, who says both she and her husband told him Ahmed Elmi was her sibling and she would do what she had to do to get him ‘papers’ to keep him in US.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • See you in Hell. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • FATALITY!

  • One step closer to autonomous heroin-vending robots.
  • “Under financial stress, Oberlin College seeks to end unionized custodial and dining hall services.” Point and laugh, children…
  • Speaking of pointing and laughing: How #NeverTrumpers are the waterboys of the D.C. elite. “All of their predictions are based on the conventional wisdom and assumptions of an insulted and excluded D.C. intelligentsia, and all are wrong.”
  • White Bernie bro attacks black man wearing pro-gun T-shirt.
  • Trump plays the race card.
  • NASCAR driver Ryan Newman complained about safety so much that they added the “Newman bar” to their cars, which may have just saved his life.
  • Faster, Klingon! Kill! Kill!
  • How two different programmers made the same error in their code a decade apart, with the result that you can’t run two different programs if the other is running.
  • The pro-wrestling “heel” who helped desegregate Memphis.
  • Noble but sad dog tweet:

  • Funny dog tweet:

  • Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for May 20, 2019

    Monday, May 20th, 2019

    De Blasio and Bullock are In, which means I’m now tracking 24 declared Democratic Presidential candidates. That’s enough to field both side of a football team, plus Mike Gravel as the coach and Beto O’Rourke as the towel boy. It’s the latest Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Polls

  • Reuters finds Biden up five points since their last poll: Biden 29, Sanders 13, O’Rourke 6, Warren 6, Harris 6, Buttigieg 4, Booker 2, Klobucher 1, Gillibrand 1, Hickenlooper 1, Castro 1, Yang 1, Inslee 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1, de Blasio 1. That’s one more than I ever expected for de Blasio…
  • Fox: Biden 35 (up 4), Sanders 17, Warren 9, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, O’Rourke 4, Booker 3, Castro 2, Klobucher 2, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Inslee 1, Ryan 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1. I think two percent is a record for Castro.
  • Quinnipiac Pennsylvania: Biden 39, Sanders 13, Warren 8, Harris 8, Buttigieg 6, Booker 5, O’Rourke 2, Klobucher 1. Relatively good showing for Booker, but state polls tend to be more volatile.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Rich Lowry wonders if President Donald Trump has, paradoxically, driven Democrats sane.

    What if Donald Trump hasn’t driven Democrats insane, sending them into a spiral of self-defeating radicalism, but instead made them shockingly pragmatic?

    Biden’s early strength suggests it may be the latter, that the reaction to Trump is so intense that it has crossed some sort of event horizon from fevered fantasy of his leaving office early via resignation or impeachment to a cold-eyed, win-at-any-cost practicality.

    If this is true, one of the exogenous factors that could appreciably increase Trump’s odds of reelection — a zany Democratic nomination contest leading to a nominee much too far left for the American electorate — may not materialize.

    Snip.

    If hardly dispositive, Biden’s robust numbers at least suggest that this play is more likely than it seemed in the very early going, when candidates were stumbling over one another apologizing for sundry alleged offenses in the Woke Olympics.

    If that’s not going to be the true dynamic of the race, I’m as surprised as anyone. What’s extraordinary, though, is that almost every Democratic candidate might have been misreading it as well, and chasing the wrong rabbit down the track.

    Certainly, Bernie Sanders dominated the intellectual and policy debate in the wake of his 2016 run, driving other presidential candidates to embrace his signature proposals. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a genuine political star.

    It’s only because the center of gravity of the party has clearly moved left that Biden, always a standard liberal, now sounds like a centrist when he calls himself an Obama-Biden Democrat.

    But, as Harry Enten of CNN, among others, has been insisting for some time, the average Democrat is older, more moderate or conservative, and less likely to have a college degree than you’d guess from following Twitter or cable TV.

    These voters were underserved by the rest of the field, and Biden is taking dead aim at them with the simple message that he can beat Trump.

  • Your latest “There are two many Democrats running” thumbsucker:

    Others suggest that the size of the field highlights vulnerabilities of the two candidates now topping the polls, former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Biden has started strong, but it’s too early to judge his candidacy. Front-runners never coast to victory, and he will face adversity, whether self-inflicted or delivered by a rival who rises to the moment.

    One risk for Democrats is that, with so many candidates and so many voices, side debates distract from core issues and unifying messages. The debate over reparations sparks passions within the Democratic base but is not an issue high on the list of most voters who will determine who is the next president. The same is even more true of the issue of whether violent felons, terrorists or sexual predators should be allowed to vote while in prison, a topic recently injected into the Democratic conversation by Sanders.

  • Some states are moving from primaries to caucuses:

    At least 10 states are planning to switch from a caucus to a primary in 2020. As things stand, just two states — Iowa and Nevada — have firm plans to caucus again. Two other 2016 caucus states — Maine and Wyoming — are still up in the air. Maine lawmakers may establish a government-run primary, in which case the Maine Democratic Party plans to move to a primary. And Wyoming Democrats are still ironing out some details.

  • Ghost of Hillary Clinton haunts 2020 Democratic hopefuls.”

    “I think it’s also critical to understand, as I’ve been telling candidates who have come to see me,” she said last week, “you can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.”

    One third of that statement is true — she was the nominee; two thirds are not. Hillary Clinton did not run the best campaign. Her campaign was a disaster. She was a disaster. She insulted half of the electorate by calling them “deplorables” even before the first vote was cast.

    “So, part of our challenge is to understand what it will take to put together not only the popular vote, but the Electoral College,” she added.

    That is good advice. It is also advice she should have given herself in 2016 when, capturing the popular vote, she lost the Electoral College to Trump.

  • 538 on what the candidates are saying and doing.
  • And via Reuters, here’s a handy visual guide to the clown car:

  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Blah blah blah abortion blah blah blah. But she did finally pay off the $54,000 she owed the IRS, as well as student and credit card debt. Which shows that attention=money, so why wouldn’t she run for President?
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out. Somehow I missed the fact that Avenatti endorsed Biden after he entered the race. I’m sure Biden is just thrilled at that endorsement.
  • Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Far-left group Demand Justice is already running attack ads against him for voting for too many of Trump’s judicial nominees. Demand Justice is being run by Brian Fallon, who was press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run. Makes you go “Hmmmmm.”
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Little did I know when I posted about the John Durham appointment that I would be mentioning late Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger twice in one week, since Joe Biden’s son Hunter is doing business with his nephew, also named James Bulger, along with John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, in a deal with the Bank of China. Biden’s rhetoric suggests he’s already looking toward the general election. Biden’s popularity suggests that maybe voters don’t want change after all:

    A January poll by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of Republicans wanted their party to become more conservative. In contrast, 53 percent of Democrats wanted their party to become more moderate.

    That raises the question of whether the party’s center of gravity lies less with vocal activists than with a quieter group of voters that is less likely to join Twitter or show up at campaign events. “His candidacy may be different,” says Biden’s campaign pollster John Anzalone, “But it is the one that is working.”

    Feminist Jill Filipovic asks “Does Anyone Actually Want Joe Biden to Be President?” It’s yet another “Electability Sucks, Because White Male!” screed:

    The Democratic Party of 2019 does not look much like Joe Biden. Women, African-American, Latino and Asian voters are all much more likely to say they support Democratic candidates than Republican ones. White voters, male voters and especially white male voters generally support Republicans.

    Statistics on who votes Democratic also suggest that the Democratic Party is more diverse than the experts deciding who is electable.

    Those assumptions about electability reflect entrenched biases more than political science, and have a dash of arrogance to boot. An electable candidate, the thinking goes, has to be authentic and broadly appealing. But authenticity itself is coded as white and male when it’s defined by white men.

    “Shut up and eat your intersectionality, white patriarchal oppressor!”

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Probably not.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a PBS profile; expect to read the Hassan Washington anecdote in every Booker profile. Plus an NPR interview. I’m just assuming the Booker campaign has friends at NPR.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Out.
  • Update: Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. He announced last week.

    According to Morning Consult data from the first quarter of 2019, Bullock is among the 15 most popular governors in the country, and one of the top Democrats to make the list (13 out of the top 15 most popular governors are Republicans; the other Democrat is Delaware governor John Carney). But that fact makes Bullock’s decision to run for president a bit more puzzling.

    In a field of 23 candidates, where Biden continues to lead the pack by double digits in many polls, it’s hard to imagine the Montana governor will have an easy time making an impression on primary voters. But it’s much easier to imagine Bullock putting up a decent fight against Republican senator Steve Daines, who is up for re-election in 2020.

    He launched his presidential campaign by coming out against free speech. 538 says that Bullock is talking about his plan to reach out to rural voters:

    In a May 8 tweet, he said, “As the only Democrat to win statewide re-election in a Trump state in 2016, I know firsthand: we must reach out to rural voters.”

    And this message might resonate. As we know from polls, many Democratic voters think it’s a very important consideration to nominate a candidate who can beat President Trump, and as a white man, Bullock may benefit from perceptions that he is “electable.” But he has empirical evidence for it, too: He has won three statewide elections in red, heavily rural Montana — one for attorney general and two for governor. In 2016, he won his second gubernatorial term with 50 percent of the vote, 15 points more than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

    He’s all in on Iowa, and has an endorsement from Iowa’s attorney general Tom Miller.

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He had a town hall on Fox. “Mayor Pete and the Order of the Kong: How Buttigieg’s Harvard pals helped spur his rise in politics.” One of those friends was “Joe Green, who was Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate.” Yep, just good old ordinary, salt-of-the-earth Mayor Pete…
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He jumped on the impeachment bandwagon. Because I’m sure trying to impeach Trump and year and a half before a Presidential election couldn’t possibly backfire on Democrats. He visited Tennessee, whose primary is on March 3. He also visited Santa Clarita University in California.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But Howard Stern thinks her refusal to go on his show may have cost her the election.
  • Update: New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. See my previous post on how he sucks and everyone hates him. (And honestly, actually running on the slogan “De Blasio 2020: He Sucks And Everyone Hates Him” would actually probably earn him more votes than he would get otherwise.) I note that his official Presidential website has exactly zero links to the actual policies he’s running on. Jonah Goldberg calls him “the Sponge of Woke Platitudes“:

    The reason it is very unlikely that de Blasio will replicate the success of Donald Trump in the Democratic primaries is that he cannot offer any contrasts that matter. He isn’t entertaining, he’s tiresome. He isn’t charismatic, he’s unctuous. He talks like the president of a small liberal-arts college, spouting clichés plucked from a flier on an assistant professor of Peace Studies’ door. He seems convinced that the glassy expression on the faces of the students and faculty in the audience is awe, not a soul-numbing tedium that is a few desperate heartbeats away from resorting to self-harm just to feel something again.

    De Blasio holds press conference at Trump Tower — and gets heckled. Come for the pro-Trump posters, stay for the “You suck!” chants. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. His name came up on The Viewand the hosts didn’t know who he was. That’s sort of Delaney’s campaign in a nutshell…
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She decried a possible war with China. Said gossip that her campaign is being supported by Vladimir Putin is “fake news.” You know, I think there’s something familiar about that claim…
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She appeared on Face the Nation. Another day, another Democrat lying about supporting the Second Amendment.
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. But the plea deal he cut on four of five charges with the Florida Ethics Commission is starting to look pretty smart now that new indictments are raining down on his associates.
  • Addition: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. The 18-year old running Gravel’s campaign.

    At first, they just wanted Gravel to run so he could perform the same function he did in his longshot 2008 campaign – yell at the other candidates on stage and push them as far left as possible, especially on an anti-war foreign policy.

    But at this point, nobody can rule anything out when it comes to election outcomes.

    “We’re running to win, of course, but we don’t expect to win,” Oks told the Forward. “I don’t think Mike expects to become president – it would probably be a hitch in some of his plans.”

    But earning enough donations and poll support to get him on the debate stage, he explained, would allow Gravel to “put forth criticism of war and the military industrial complex, and even domestic policy, that hasn’t been seen in many decades, even more radical than Bernie.”

    Pushing the Democrats even further left? There’s no way that could possibly backfire…

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hugh Hewett thinks it’s Harris’ race to lose. She wants to ban foreign-built AR-pattern rifles. And that ban would affect who, again? Heckler & Koch? AR manufacturers are overwhelmingly American firms. She also wants to fine companies that don’t pay women “equally” with men. That’s just the thing for helping American companies compete globally, inserting a member of the federal GenderStasi into every HR department…
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. He attacked fellow Democrats for daring to challenge the globalist status quo: “Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) on Sunday took swipes at unidentified Democrats he said ‘would have the U.S. withdraw from global engagement.'”
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Out.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Inslee wants to destroy the coal industry. Because that goal worked out so well for the Australian Labor Party.
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She wants to increase regulation on business, because that’s a surefire ticket for economic growth. “Klobuchar’s plan also calls for updating the tax code to support ‘gig workers’ by establishing a national paid leave program, mandatory sick leave and portable retirement savings accounts, funded by employers.” Thus ignoring the fact that the reason a “gig economy” exists at all is that government regulations have made regular full-time employees too expensive so expensive to hire.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Out.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Out.
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Onion: “Mike Gravel Can’t Believe His Polling Numbers Neck-And-Neck With Fucking Nobody Like Wayne Messam.”
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. He unveiled a national service proposal, which would not be mandatory. So another AmeriCorps to suck up tax dollars.
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama: Out.
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Out.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “O’Rourke stocks campaign with Obama and Clinton alums.” No names I’m familiar with. “O’Rourke’s recent hires come after the departure of Becky Bond and Zack Malitz, two senior strategists who worked on O’Rourke’s Senate campaign and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential effort — both evangelists for the distributed organizing model.” Snip. “[Jen] O’Malley Dillon, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and deputy campaign manager to Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, is bringing on a roster of staffers with long experience in the Democratic Party.” Pledges to “decriminalize truancy, address fines on parents.” That would be an interesting policy proposal…if he were running for the El Paso school board.
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a PBS NewsHour interview. He campaigned in Iowa. He’ll appear on a CNN town hall on June 2.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “An Our Revolution Staffer Fired For ‘Anti-Immigrant’ Remarks Is Suing The Pro-Bernie Group For Racial Discrimination.” As usual, “anti-immigration” is code for suggesting illegal aliens shouldn’t get government benefits. The staffer in question was part of the black outreach team. Also checkout this bedwetting overreaction from Our Revolution’s former political director Erika Andiola: “I became sick to my stomach and could not stop crying all night.” If hearing contrary opinions makes you ill and depressed, maybe you shouldn’t be working in politics. “Bernie Sanders is challenging two cherished theories of electability.”

    One of those theories is beloved by self-styled centrists, and has served as a way to gate-keep against more liberal candidates. It argues that Americans are ideological moderates who punish political parties for nominating candidates too far to the left or right.

    The other is beloved by leftists, and has served as a cudgel against more centrist candidates. It holds that there’s a vast working-class majority out there for any candidate willing to slough off the Democratic Party’s turn to corporatism, free trade, and identity politics and recapture the economic populism that made the New Deal Democrats dominant for a generation.

  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. “In the six years since Rep. Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) began earning the big salary that comes with being a member of Congress he has failed to pay down his student loans, cashed out his pension, and accumulated credit card debt.” Maybe a guy who can’t manage his own finances shouldn’t be managing America’s…
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. R.S. McCain thinks Warren is over: “My guess would be that, after the first round of debates, Warren will fade and Harris will rise, because Harris is black and is obviously better qualified than the other black candidate, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Such is the logic of identity politics, in which Democrats are heavily invested.” I expect that this is premature, especially with Warren also making a play for the hard left Sanders voters. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren Has A Plan For Everything — Including Your Love Life.”

    For all the praise The New Republic is heaping on her opioid crisis plan, it just sounds like more federal government money airdrops.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Heh: “‘Tom Perez Is Such a Goddamned Weenie’: What Marianne Williamson’s Candidacy Reveals About the Democrats.” After noting Oprah’s not running:

    Yet one of Oprah’s star guests, Marianne Williamson, is running—and has beat out several conventional politicians, including Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton and Colorado senator Michael Bennet, to qualify for the first D.N.C.-sponsored debate. That Williamson has qualified is irritating to some of her opponents—not because of who she is, but because of the rules that could make her one of the 20 contenders appearing on the prime-time stage: candidates need to score at least one percent in three certified polls or collect donations from 65,000 different people.

    She gets a profile in New York:

    Marianne Williamson deserves some serious attention, and not just because she’s written four books that hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. At a time when the leftward drift of the Democratic Party is regularly in the news, she is by any measure the most rigorously progressive candidate in the field of 23. That she wraps her progressivism in a syncretic spirituality instead of socialist materialism may even be an advantage for a politician in this God-haunted country of ours.

    Pick an issue, and odds are Williamson is going to out-Bernie Bernie and out-Warren Warren. She’s for Medicare For All, unsurprisingly, but she’s also for heavy investments in preventive medicine and nutritional education, and a pretty heavy regulatory arm on those she feels are poisoning our bodies, including those who produce “high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats.” So far as I can tell, she’s the only candidate committed to reducing national stress levels, too.

    And one at The Hill: “Those who say who can and cannot win now are the same people who were telling us that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in three years ago.”

  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Andrew Yang’s TED Talk version of politics.”

    Over and over again when I ask people who identify as members of “the Yang Gang” what attracted them to Yang, they cite Silicon Valley’s preferred solution to our economic woes: universal basic income (UBI) or, as he calls it, “the Freedom Dividend.” Yang argues that technology is going to eat up millions of jobs over the coming decade, wiping out everything from retail workers to truckers. “How many of you have seen the self-service kiosk at McDonald’s or another fast food restaurant?” Yang asks. “You kind of like them. I kind of like them too.” The only solution to this inevitability, Yang argues, is giving every American, beginning at age 18, $1,000 a month. He’d fund it by upping taxes on technology companies.

    Yang has translated his unlikely background and platform into something of a cult following, centered around men under the age of 40. The idea that anyone except the occasional oddball would thrill to carrying signs with the word “MATH” emblazoned on them — which stands for Make America Think Harder — may feel like a stretch in the United States, where an anti-intellectual streak is writ large, and our current president is prone to saying such things as, “I love the poorly educated.” But when people attending the rally talk about UBI, it feels more personal. “It makes a lot of sense, because a lot of Americans are struggling,” said Keegan Steinke, 24, a canvasser for a solar company. “It provides a safety net for everyone, and it doesn’t provide these perverse incentives like, ‘Okay, I made this much, I might lose these benefits,’ ” said Elliott Ribner, 32, a software engineer.

    Politico asks: “Is Andrew Yang for Real?”

    Viewed from a great distance, Yang’s candidacy has a lot in common with the two political comets that streaked across the 2016 presidential campaign: Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. Yang runs essentially the same playbook: embracing economic grievance, hammering the tech giants and other darlings of the “new economy,” selling his case directly to the working American. Since he launched his campaign in November 2017, he has been retailing a vision of America in which educated, entitled elites have rigged the system and hoovered money away from middle America and toward the coasts, giving little in return. With no prior political experience or prominent backers, Yang is nonetheless gaining a peculiar traction, including some true believers who want him to be president and others who are mostly just intrigued.

    Unlike Trump and Sanders, however, Yang, 44, comes precisely from the same corporate, tech-soaked world he is trying to attack. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, he made his money prepping students to get into MBA programs and, in recent years, has spent months at a time living in Silicon Valley. He was once a successful startup CEO and head of a group that trains budding entrepreneurs, but in the wake of 2016 presidential election Yang soured on an industry that wreaths itself in promises of prosperity and transformation; he rejects the conventional policy wisdom—popular on the left and the right—that out-of-work Americans should retrain for jobs in tech. And in a Democratic Party reveling in its diversity, the Taiwanese-American candidate says he worries most about how displaced white men will react to their declining fortunes—a stance that has, strangely, won him some fans from the “alt-right.“

  • LinkSwarm for April 12, 2019

    Friday, April 12th, 2019

    At long last, the FISA abuse/FBI spying on the Trump campaign scandal is finally being dragged into the light again. At the same time, Wikileaks head honcho Julian Assange has been extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy arrested, pending extradition to the U.S. Coincidence? I report, you decide. “The US department of justice confirmed he has been charged with computer crimes, and added in a statement that if convicted he will face up to five years in prison.” Dang dude, if he had turned himself in when indicted, he’d already be out by now and working the talk show circuit.

    Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm, and remember that you have to finish doing your taxes this weekend.

  • Stating the obvious: “Barr is right, spying on Trump campaign did occur.”

    The baffling thing was why they were baffled. Barr’s statement was accurate and supported by publicly known facts.

    First, what Barr said. “I think spying did occur,” he told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “But the question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting it was not adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”

    That is entirely accurate. It is a fact that in October 2016 the FBI wiretapped Carter Page, who had earlier been a short-term foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. The bureau’s application to a secret court for that wiretapping is public. It is heavily redacted but is clearly focused on Page and “the Russian government’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Page was wiretapped because of his connection with the Trump campaign.

    Some critics have noted that the wiretap authorization came after Page left the campaign. But the surveillance order allowed authorities to intercept Page’s electronic communications both going forward from the day of the order and backward, as well. Investigators could see Page’s emails and texts going back to his time in the campaign.

    So there is simply no doubt that the FBI wiretapped a Trump campaign figure. Is a wiretap “spying”? It is hard to imagine a practice, whether approved by a court or not, more associated with spying.

    Anyone reading this blog (or any non-MSM news source) knew that Obama’s Justice Department was spying on Trump over two years ago. At this point it’s about as surprising as hearing that James Harden is good at basketball…

  • Barr Confirms Multiple Intel Agencies Implicated In Anti-Trump Spy Operation.” (Hat tip: J.J. Sefton at Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • In the same vein:

    Democrats seem both angry and frightened, and their kneejerk and perhaps even somewhat panicked response right now is to try to destroy Barr.

    You can feel the frisson of fear they emanate. They waited two years for the blow of the Mueller report to fall on Trump, and now other investigative blows may fall on them. The Mueller report combined with Barr’s appointment could end up being a sort of ironic boomerang (whether or not boomerangs can be ironic I leave to you to decide).

    How could this have happened? they must be thinking. How could the worm have turned? But they are spinning in the usual manner, hoping that—as so often has happened in the past—their confederates in the press will work their magic to make all of it go away and boomerang back to Republicans instead.

    But whatever comes of it all, if anything, Democrats cannot believe that at least right now their dreams have turned to dust and they taste, instead of the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.

    That’s from Neo, formerly NeoNeocon. I can see why she’d want to change the name, given how many neocons became #NeverTrump lunatics. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Newly released email from Platte River Networks, the firm that serviced the Emailgate server used by Hillary Clinton: “Its all part of the Hillary coverup operation.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Who’s Worse – Julian Assange or the NY Times and Washington Post?

    Deeply sourced? What a laugh. As we now know post-Mueller Report, these “respected” journalists were simply trafficking in collusion lies whispered to them by biased informants. In other words, they were a bunch of gullible, over-zealous propagandists. For that they received their Pulitzers, as yet unreturned, needless to say (just as the Pulitzer for Walter Duranty still hangs on the NY Times’ wall despite decades of pleas from Ukrainians whose countrymen’s mass murder by Stalin was bowdlerized by Duranty).

    So, in other words, these mainstream media reporters have gotten off with nary a slap on the wrist (indeed received fame and fortune) for lying while Julian Assange may be headed for prison for telling the truth. There’s a bit of irony in that, no?

  • Iraqi special forces launch an operation against islamic State remnants in the Hamrin Mountains. If you looked at the livemap, the Hamrin Mountains were the tiny sliver of ISIS-held territory between Tikrit and Kirkuk. No population centers, just some remote mountainous caves.
  • Avenatti indicted on 36 charges of tax dodging, perjury, theft from clients.”

    Avenatti stole millions of dollars from five clients and used a tangled web of shell companies and bank accounts to cover up the theft, the Santa Ana grand jury alleged in an indictment that prosecutors made public Thursday.

    One of the clients, Geoffrey Ernest Johnson, was a mentally ill paraplegic on disability who won a $4-million settlement of a suit against Los Angeles County. The money was wired to Avenatti in January 2015, but he hid it from Johnson for years, according to the indictment.

    In 2017, Avenatti received $2.75 million in proceeds from another client’s legal settlement, but concealed that too, the indictment says. The next day, he put $2.5 million of that money into the purchase of a private jet for Passport 420, LLC, a company he effectively owned, according to prosecutors.

    You can read the indictment itself here. Hey, remember the MSM treating Creepy Porn Lawyer like a rock star? Pepperidge Farm remembers:

  • When California Democratic Representative Ted Lieu went after Candace Owens, he probably had no idea he’d just make her star shine brighter. “She was a liberal, but during the #GamerGate controversy, she was ‘doxxed’ by the Left, and had a road-to-Damascus awakening: ‘I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.'”
  • Wendy Davis is going to run for congress against Rep. Chip Roy. In one way this makes sense, as Roy narrowly won over Joseph Kopser by 2% in 2018. However, Kopser was (by Democratic standards) a well-heeled businessman moderate. I don’t actually see Abortion Barbie being nearly as competitive after the walloping she took in 2014. Also of interest is her running for an Austin-to-San Antonio district rather than somewhere near her previous base of Fort Worth. (I emailed the Kopser for Congress address to ask if he’s running again, but the contact address is no longer valid.)
  • Fritz Hollings, RIP. Hollings was one of the last conservative southern Democrats, and co-sponsor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act, which temporarily limited spending growth until congress gutted it in 1990.
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin supports the reelection of Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins.
  • Georgia Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath lives in Tennessee.
  • “Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has warned China that his soldiers [are] occupying the island of Thitu in the South China Sea, which is currently surrounded by some 275 Chinese fishing militia and Coast Guard vessels.”
  • Why we need the electoral college:

    he core function of the Electoral College is to require presidential candidates to appeal to the voters of a sufficient number of large and smaller states, rather than just try to run up big margins in a handful of the biggest states, cities, or regions. Critics ignore the important value served by having a president whose base of support is spread over a broad, diverse array of regions of the country (even a president as polarizing as Donald Trump won seven of the ten largest states and places as diverse as Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, West Virginia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas).

    In a nation as wide and varied as ours, it would be destabilizing to have a president elected over the objections of most of the states. Our American system as a whole — both by design and by experience — demands the patient building of broad, diverse political coalitions over time to effect significant change. The presidency works together with the Senate and House to make that a necessity. The Senate, of course, is also a target of the Electoral College’s critics, but eliminating the equal suffrage of states requires the support of every single state. A president elected without regard to state support is more likely to face a dysfunctional level of opposition in the Senate.

    Consider an illustrative example. Most of us, I think, would agree that 54 percent of the vote is a pretty good benchmark for a decisive election victory — not a landslide, but a no-questions-asked comfortable majority. That’s bigger than Donald Trump’s victory in Texas in 2016; Trump won 18 states with 54 percent or more of the vote in 2016, Hillary Clinton won 10 plus D.C., and the other 22 states were closer than that. Nationally, just 16 elections since 1824 have been won by a candidate who cleared 54 percent of the vote — the last was Ronald Reagan in 1984 — and all of them were regarded as decisive wins at the time.

    Picture a two-candidate election with 2016’s turnout. The Republican wins 54 percent of the vote in 48 states, losing only California, New York, and D.C. That’s a landslide victory, right? But then imagine that the Republican nominee who managed this feat was so unpopular in California, New York, and D.C. that he or she loses all three by a 75 percent–to–25 percent margin. That 451–87 landslide in the Electoral College, built on eight-point wins in 48 states, would also be a popular-vote defeat, with 50.7 percent of the vote for the Democrat to 49.3 percent for the Republican. Out of a total of about 137 million votes, that’s a popular-vote margin of victory of 1.95 million votes for a candidate who was decisively rejected in 48 of the 50 states.

    Who should win that election? This is not just a matter of coloring in a lot of empty red land on a map: each of these 48 states is an independent entity that has its own governor, legislature, laws, and courts, and sends two senators to Washington. The whole idea of a country called the United States is that those individual communities are supposed to matter.

  • Can Jewish Exodus from Democratic Party keep Florida red in 2020?”
  • Five debunked feminist myths. Including that hoary 77¢ canard.
  • “On Thursday, Google canceled its AI ethics board after 2,476 employees signed a petition urging the company to remove Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James for opposing transgender activism. An anonymous Google employee told PJ Media the corporate culture resembles the stifling of debate on college campuses, and warned that Google’s caving to pressure on this issue will only embolden activists.”
  • Eurocrats issue absurd takedown commands under a new “terrorist content” law. Include all of Project Gutenberg.
  • A follow-up to last week’s LinkSwarm piece about Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh’s bribes-via-bulk-children’s book-orders scam: Critical Carlos reviews Healthy Holly. And don’t miss the video.
  • Via regular blog reader Howard comes this handy map of fake hate crimes.
  • That “far right extremist crimes are on the rise” talking point is absolute bunk.
  • More than 60 groups are considering suing SPLC. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Antifa gonna antifa:

  • “Man In Critical Condition After Hearing Slightly Differing Viewpoint.”
  • Casino Profits Collapse In Atlantic City.”
  • Pollen haboob. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • The word for the color orange didn’t exist in English until the introduction of the fruit.
  • “Oh no, not the bees! They’re in my eyes!
  • You just missed the 50th anniversary of the Japanese Penis Festival. (Hat tip: Ordy Packard on Twitter.)
  • Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 18, 2019

    Monday, March 18th, 2019

    It’s Betomania time among certain media outlets after Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke announced he was running last week. So there’s a ton of Beto news below. Also, two names I had pegged as Out are now making noises about (possibly) getting In.

    National Review‘s Dan Maclaughlin offers up a lengthy essay on the five lanes of the Democratic Presidential race. There’s lots of interesting analysis to chew on in terms of demographic and age trends and preferences among Democratic voters. I don’t agree with all his conclusions, but it’s well worth reading the whole thing. His summary:

    My own ranking, for now, of the likeliest nominee:

    1. Kamala Harris
    2. Beto O’Rourke
    3. Joe Biden
    4. Amy Klobuchar
    5. Cory Booker
    6. Bernie Sanders
    7. Elizabeth Warren
    8. [Field]
    9. Kirsten Gillibrand

    538 Presidential roundup.

    538 polls.

    Democratic Party presidential primary schedule.

    Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Now she’s saying a 2020 presidential run is “on the table.” Upgrade from Out.
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning Toward In. Not seeing any presidential run news on Bennet this week.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning Towards Running. He keeps dropping hints. Obama’s Vice President seems like he’s going to run against the “new left.” God help us all. He’s also rich:

    “Middle-Class Joe” Biden has a $2.7 million vacation home. He charges more than $100,000 per speaking gig and has inked a book deal likely worth seven figures.

    Since leaving office in 2017, the 76-year-old former vice president has watched his bank account swell as he continues to cultivate the image of a regular, Amtrak-riding guy. He’s repeatedly referred to himself as “Middle-Class Joe” on the campaign trail and in speaking engagements as he publicly mulls whether to run for president.

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Out.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “After months of speculation, actress Rosario Dawson confirmed Thursday that she and presidential candidate Senator Cory Booker are dating.” Evidently Booker is on the Dennis Kucinich Presidential dating plan. That should help quiet the “Booker is gay” whispering campaign.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Out.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Leaning Toward In, but is reportedly going to wait until Montana’s legislative session finishes, which would be May 1. Bullock announced he’s not running…for the senate.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Chicago Tribune profile. He also raised $600,000 after a CNN townhall where he slammed Mike Pence.
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Castro “dropped a list of 30 high-profile endorsement from Lone Star State politicians shortly after fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke announced his own bid for the presidency. The list includes San Antonio’s political powerhouse, Henry Cisneros; six current San Antonio city council members, including Rey Saldana and Rebecca Viagran; and multiple Bexar County officials, including Nelson Wolff.” That’s great…if you’re running for the president of Texas. Castro was always going to pick up San Antonio endorsements. How well can he run nationwide? He also visited Charleston.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out.
  • New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Leaning toward In. “Iowa has zero interest in de Blasio as presidential candidate: poll.” Much like the rest of the union…
  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Delany is asking for donations to meet the official DNC “65,000 donors from 20 states” threshold to appear in debates.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She .
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gillibrand did that “Oh, I was already running, but now I’m officially running” thing.
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Maybe? Thought he was out, but now he has an announcement on Wednesday. May be a Presidential run, maybe an endorsement, maybe a 2022 senate run, maybe a teamup with Stacey Abrams to form Sore Loser PAC 2020. Who knows? Upgrade from Out.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently all is not sunshine and roses for the Harris campaign, since Chelsea Janes in the Washington Post dinged her for “verbal miscues.” To wit: “In the first weeks of Harris’s campaign, the 54-year-old has fielded criticism for equivocal and imprecise answers to questions about her stances on specific policies and her record as a prosecutor.” She also had to return money from foreign lobbyists: “Three days after she announced her White House bid in January, Harris received $2,700 from Arthur R. Collins, a lobbyist for the government of Bermuda. Sometime in January or February, Harris also received $2,700 from Vinca LaFleur, a speechwriter for the royal family of Jordan.” But only, of course, after the media asked about them…
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Twenty-Two Things You Didn’t Know about John Hickenlooper. Including the fact he’s Kurt Vonnegut’s fake son and watched Deep Throat with his mother.
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Out.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. He got a Gaurdian profile. In his capacity as Washington Governor, Inselee signed a new law that shifts the election date from late May to the second Tuesday in March.” How convenient.
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. She talked about taxing big tech. There’s no problem so thorny government intervention can’t make worse…
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Probably Out.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run? Progressive blog Blue Virginia notes that McAuliffe sucks in all the polls. In one he was behind Andrew Yang…
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Maybe? “He’ll spend much of next week’s congressional recess in key presidential primary states, starting in New Hampshire on Saturday and then moving on to South Carolina and Iowa during the week.” He also wants to end the filibuster and the electoral college. There’s no think like groupthink…
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama: Out.
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Out.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. There’s so much O’Rorurke news it needs its own section:
    • After O’Rourke’s announcement, Reuters dropped the news of “Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group,” The Cult of the Dead Cow. Having been part of the Austin BBS scene way back in the pre-Internet days, I can tell you that all of this amounts to a whole lot less than meets the eye. The Cult of the Dead Cow were no Legion of Doom, and O’Rourke’s “hacking” seemed to consist mainly of trading warez (copied computer programs, sometimes hacked to remove the copy protection). Illegal, but just about everyone in the BBS scene did it; think of it as a very low-bandwidth version of Napster back when programs fit on a single floppy disk and had to been downloaded on 2400 baud modems. Though the fact this is coming out now does suggest lapses on both the media and Ted Cruz’s opposition research department.
    • Related: Tripmaster Beto, Psychedelic Warlord.
    • O’Rourke raised $6.1 million in his first 24 hours, edging out Bernie Sanders’ haul.
    • Matt Welch at Reason wonders if phony Betomania has already bitten the dust. He also digs up this preemptive Club for Growth video hitpiece:

      The problem, of course, is that it believes Democrats actually care about the ideas Democrats claim they care about.

    • David French roots for Beto against the Social Justice Warriors.
    • Beto O’Rourke, Weirdo:

      The former El Paso congressman’s spastic “Hey, I’m still figuring out these new hands” presidential-kickoff video, in which his upper limbs appeared to be subject to mad random yanks by an angry puppeteer, was merely the latest odd detail in the saga of Weirdo O’Rourke. It was even weirder than Elizabeth Warren’s “Greetings fellow earthlings, I too enjoy fermented malt beverages!” video. Robert/Beto is a man so apart from other human beings that he recently thought nothing of ditching his wife and three kids so he could drive around the country, alone, accosting unsuspecting dentists to help him apply Novocaine to his aching soul. He might be the first person ever to run for the White House on a platform of asking the nation to help him figure out who he is.

      The source of the angst is evident: Beto is a brainless rich kid who yearned to be cool and wasn’t very good at it. He flunked out of punk. He failed as a fiction writer. He belly-flopped as an alternative-newspaper publisher. And he’s so clueless that his apartment was once robbed while he was sitting in it. At his pricey Virginia prep school (Woodberry Forest School these days carries a sticker price of $48,000 a year), he thought he “just stuck out so badly” because of the “monoculture” there, which the Dallas Morning News called “white, wealthy and southern.” O’Rourke was and is white, wealthy, and southern, so he couldn’t have stuck out much more than Miracle Whip at the mayonnaise convention, yet he was wounded and alienated. Or maybe not. He put this in his high school yearbook: “I’m the angry son. I’m the angry son.” Below that: “I owe you everything, Mom, Dad . . .” You have to pick one, though, don’t you? You can’t be a seething rebel and a dutiful child. You can’t be Kurt Cobain and Kenny G. One pose nullifies the other. Or maybe O’Rourke was even then trying to position himself as acceptable to all constituencies.

      Snip.

      What’s the deal with his net worth, which is estimated at $9 million? I came across this line, on Heavy.com: “Peppertree Square Ltd. Imperial Arms is a real estate company, and Peppertree Square is a shopping center in El Paso, which was a gift from his mother.” Jeez, I remember when I thought my mom was sweet for buying me a blazer. I want Beto’s mom. When Beto’s dad died, he left the boy an apartment complex worth $5 million. Also his father-in-law William D. Sanders is worth a packet. Bloomberg once estimated he was worth $20 billion.

      So far, then, O’Rourke’s life story does not look like a fable about rising to meet fate’s challenge, but more like privilege and dilettantism.

    • Over at the New York Times, Gail “Team Kamala” Collins offers up a takedown of O’Rourke. Now I’m no O’Rourke fan, I’m happy to cheer on blue-on-blue attacks, and that Vanity Fair piece is eminently mockworthy, but this is a thuddingly bad piece of writing. It’s one long, smug, graceless sneer. You could have thrown a rock into a random crowd at CPAC and likely found someone capable of writing a better takedown of O’Rourke.
    • Scott Adams on the Beto dance.
    • Beto O’Rourke Announces He Starting Obama Cover Campaign.”
    • Finally, an observation: In addition to the contact harvesting splash screen, O’Rourke’s website only has four links: Shop, Jobs, Donate, Contact. No room for such trivia as “issues” or even a candidate biography. I guess the figure a three-term congressman is such a “rock star” that he doesn’t need to be introduced…
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan: Leaning Toward In? Gets an Atlantic profile that starts off with him doing yoga.

    Tim Ryan is a man containing multitudes. He is, as his contortions would suggest, a dedicated practitioner of hot power yoga and a meditation evangelist, but he sells himself as a champion of the American worker, and he speaks with the plain, sometimes brusque language of his mostly blue-collar constituents. In Congress, he has endorsed tax cuts for corporations, but he also supports progressive goals such as Medicare for all. And he’s a congressional backbencher—a relatively unknown Democrat from a rapidly reddening state. But he says he’s “very much looking” at running for president.

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Bernie Sanders Pledges To Do A Better Job Of Explaining Socialism.” Wait, I thought we wanted to win the race! Also:

  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning Toward In. Biggest Swalwell news: he shared a yearbook photo:

    I’m now imagining a an 80s teen comedy in which teenage jock Swalwell beats up teenage nerd O’Rourke…

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren campaigns in Memphis, kicking off three-state tour.” She also wants to break up big tech.
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets a “click through these 12 photos so we can display ads” bullshit listicle minibio from the Houston Chronicle that’s not worth your time and is only included here because other news about her is thin on the ground. Oh, she also has that world peace thing all figured out in a simple 4-step program: “expand economic opportunities for women around the world; expand educational opportunities for children globally; reduce violence against women; improve unnecessary human suffering wherever possible.” It’s so simple! I’m sure this would instantly end the fighting in Yemen and Syria. That same piece also compares and contrasts her ideas with Andrew Yang’s. I guess they’re both competing in the Weirdo Lunatic Outsiders lane.
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Running but no one cares. Twitter. Facebook. OK, Yang is a fucking idiot.