Archive for the ‘Social Justice Warriors’ Category
Monday, March 16th, 2020
Between almost everyone dropping out, Biden continuing to rack up victories, and the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic, almost all the air has been sucked out of the Democratic Presidential race. So this is going to be a relatively short and subdued Democratic Presidential clown car update.
Delegates
Right now the delegate count stands at:
- Joe Biden 885
- Bernie Sanders 732
Elizabeth Warren 72
Michael Bloomberg 61
Pete Buttigieg 26
Amy Klobuchar 7
- Tulsi Gabbard 2
Polls
Eh, not posting any individual polls this week, as Biden is stomping Sanders in every single one of them, usually by just shy of a 2-1 ratio. The closest thing to a surprise is that Hill/Harris X has Gabbard at 5% nationally, which suggests that 4% is the level of “Operation Chaos”-type effects.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets. Biden’s first at a whopping 87.3%. However, second place is not Sanders, it’s Hillary at 5.1%. (strokes chin)(stops)(washes hands annoyingly long period of time) (strokes chin again)
Pundits, etc.
Biden won Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho and Washington (where results were close), while Sanders won South Dakota.
Coronavirus is one of the topics that dominated last night’s Biden-Sanders debate, as well it should, as both Biden and Sanders are part of the target demographic most likely to drop dead of it. Plus coronavirus provides Biden the perfect excuse to run the first “front porch” campaign since Warren G. Harding.
Liveblog of the Biden-Sanders debate.
Another one from 538.
Older Democrats and blacks may have pushed Biden over the top, but young and Hispanic Democrats are going socialist:
The electoral patterns in Texas, which Biden narrowly won, were marked by divisions of age and ethnicity. Voters over 65 went for Biden nearly four to one, according to Washington Post exit polls. By contrast, among voters under 30, Sanders cleaned up, beating Biden 59 percent to 13 percent. African-Americans, who constitute 20 percent of the state’s electorate, gave nearly three-fifths of their votes to Biden, almost four times Sanders’s share. Carroll Robinson, who served on the Houston City Council for six years and is chairman of the Coalition of Black Democrats, notes that Sanders failed to connect, particularly with older black voters; he cites in particular his being the only major candidate not to attend the 55th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as reflective of his “signaling problem” with African-American voters.
Black voters, Robinson notes, were critical to Biden’s small margin of victory, boosting his totals in Harris County, which includes Houston, and in Dallas County. In contrast, Latinos, already roughly one-third of the state’s Democratic voters, voted heavily for Sanders. The Vermont senator won roughly 40 percent of Latino voters, compared with about a quarter who opted for Biden. Sanders won easily in heavily Latino Bexar (San Antonio), Hidalgo (the Rio Grande Valley), and El Paso Counties.
Sanders also appealed to younger voters in Texas, as elsewhere, beating Biden among voters under 30—making up some 15 percent of the electorate—by almost four to one. He won hugely in Austin, the state’s epicenter of millennial culture, with its high concentration of tech workers. Sanders easily took Travis County over Biden, 83,000 to 52,000.
Moderate Texas Democrats can take heart in halting the momentum of a socialist candidate, but the broader trend is against them. According to exit polls, some 56 percent of Texas Democrats view socialism favorably. In Houston, voters elected an inexperienced 27-year-old progressive, Lina Hidalgo, as judge of Harris County in 2018. Despite its title, the role is nonjudicial; Hidalgo is actually the chief executive of the nation’s third most-populous county. This year, Christian Menefee, a young social-justice advocate, won the primary for Harris County Attorney over more mainstream opposition, on a platform of progressive criminal-justice reform. “There’s an incipient change among the grassroots activists,” notes Bill White, former Houston mayor and deputy energy secretary under Bill Clinton. “There’s a whole new group who are very anti-establishment and gaining influence.” White suspects that the ascendency of these forces may just be beginning. Sanders and Warren—before she dropped out of the race on Thursday—enjoyed a combined 40 percent support of the Texas Democratic electorate, running strongest among the fastest-growing demographic groups.
This leftward transformation is even further along in California. As Morley Winograd, a longtime Democratic activist and former aide to Al Gore, suggests, the state is not only “unique politically, but also big enough to have its own weather system. Democrats in the state feel the economy is strong enough to allow it to maintain its current high-tax, high regulation environment without causing a major downturn.” Socialism remains in vogue. At last year’s state party convention, when former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, then a presidential aspirant, suggested that “socialism is not the answer,” he was lustily booed.
As in Texas, Sanders won biggest among Latinos and millennials, who represent the party’s future. He won an astounding 55 percent of Latino voters, according to New York Times exit polls, compared with a mere 21 percent for Biden. He won 72 percent of voters under 30 and 57 percent of voters in the 30-to-44 age range, beating Biden by wide margins. Biden did win older voters and among African-Americans, but blacks constitute only 7 percent of the state’s Democratic electorate, barely a third of their Texas share.
You may have wondered “With everyone else out, will Tulsi Gabbard start picking up protest votes?” Looking at the various vote totals, the answer appears to be “No.” She does not appear to have broken 1% in any state last week.
Here’s a piece that argues that Cory Booker could have been the nominee if only he hadn’t taken that hard-left turn. There’s a bit of truth to it, but Booker was already looking a little goofy before the pandering began, and primaries are littered with candidates who looked formidable on paper.
Bloomberg last month: Oh sure, I’m going to pay you campaign staffers through the end of the year whether I stay in or not. Bloomberg this month: Psych!
Heh:
Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. We need to talk about Joe Biden:
Joe Biden is clearly not well. The comeback front-runner for the Democratic nomination hasn’t lost a step; he’s lost the plot. You’re not supposed to diagnose or psychoanalyze people from afar, I know. It is rude. Having any conversation about the frailty of an elderly public figure always feels rude. Such conversations are difficult to have even about elderly family members, behind closed doors.
But this subject needs to be broached right now. Accusations that Hillary Clinton was unwell were treated as a conspiracy theory up until the moment she seemed to collapse at a 9/11 memorial and was pushed into the side of a van like a sack of meat. Though that viral clip surely hurt Clinton, it was a one-day story and she performed reasonably well on the campaign trail afterward. Biden is amassing a series of viral clips that are much worse. He’ll forget the name of former president Barack Obama, or the state he’s in, or stock phrases of American oratory: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women created by . . . you know . . . you know the thing.” He’ll announce to a baffled crowd that “I’m Joe Biden’s husband and I work for Cedric Richmond” (Richmond is a congressman, in case you were wondering.)
Yes, we need to make room for verbal slip-ups among people who are tirelessly barnstorming around the country and giving public speeches. But any look at a video of Biden in a previous campaign for president shows that the former vice president has diminished.
I assume you saw my piece on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Speaking of which, welcome to the 21st century, Joe:
For some damn reason, Biden decided that he needed to put Beto O’Rourke’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon in charge of his campaign. Certainly the lackluster Biden campaign has needed a shakeup for a long time (current run of success notwithstanding), but why you’d hire the person who couldn’t even get their candidate to the primary is beyond me. (Who he should be hiring is Buttigieg’s head of fundraising.) In the debate, Biden promised to pick a woman as Veep, which is exactly the sort of pander you expect of Democrats these days:
James Clyburn and James Carville say the quiet part out loud, that debates should be shut down so Biden doesn’t embarass himself. Thanks to the Wuhan Coronavirus, Biden’s fundraising is now being done on the intertubes. Also: “According to campaign finance records, Biden raised $11 million immediately after his South Carolina primary win and $7 million following his Super Tuesday victories. The victories helped alleviate some of the campaign’s money woes, but it’s unclear how a ban on actual campaign events and fundraisers may impact his ability to raise money.” Those are good but not out-of-the-park numbers. He got endorsed by the NEA. Also endorsed by Andrew Yang. Joe Biden’s “bioethics advisor” (and ObamaCare architect) Ezekiel Emanuel wants people to die at age 75 (i.e., younger than Biden is now).
What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.
A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no. Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics.
I’m sure that will go over great with Biden’s core of supporters…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Does Tulsi have any chance in the race? I could say “if both Biden and Bernies keeled over dead,” but even then I would expect someone like Warren or Bloomberg to jump back into the race and do better than Gabbard. She goes full Andrew Yang in calling for a Universal Basic Income, which should douse any remain fires for her on the right. “Tulsi Gabbard Says Her Sick Friend and Three Others Were Denied Coronavirus Testing in Hawaii.” Interesting (especially since Democrats absolutely dominate Hawaii), but rather peripheral to the race.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. By and large, women don’t like Bernie. “Bernie Bros warn of ‘massive exodus’ if Democrats nominate Joe Biden.” Well, they would. But some said the same in 2016, and a “massive exodus” was not apparent. “Just Like Socialism, Bernie’s Campaign Collapsed Under Its Own Contradictions:
What can only be characterized, at best, as an election-year makeover campaign began to fall apart on Feb. 23 in an interview Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes.” Among other things, Sanders stated: “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Right afterward, Sanders doubled down, which was really his only play, lest he come off as a flip-flopper. Despite his proclamation “Truth is truth,” his point wasn’t clear. Does improved literacy that occurred in the context of indoctrinating the population in communist ideology redeem Cuba in any way? Should the United States become more like such countries? Ultimately, these remarks went nowhere, perhaps because there wasn’t anywhere to go but down.
Again, these remarks aren’t new and are entirely consistently with Sanders’ history. But, as even left-wing Vox conceded, it made for a bad look: “The other read, though, is more in line with Sanders’ past. Time after time, he has apologized for the actions of brutal left-wing dictatorships from Cuba to Nicaragua to the Soviet Union, partly out of a critique of America’s meddling in these countries but also – some argue – because of his ideological sympathies toward them.”
In a single interview, Sanders may’ve forever demolished the effort to convince the American electorate the 78-year-old career politician is a perfectly benign “democratic socialist” and not the hard-left socialist he’s always been.
Bernie’s ceiling shows that the limits of socialism in America, even among Democrats:
Sure, socialism carries much less of a stigma in Democratic politics than it did a decade ago. Polling continually indicates that America’s young people have a much more positive attitude toward socialism than their parents and grandparents did. But that is a separate question from whether an openly socialist candidate can win elections — though it is worth noting that the two biggest Democratic Socialists of America victories in 2018 came from the wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in the Democratic primaries of deep-blue House districts.
The response of the rest of the party to Sanders’s rise proved illuminating. Democrats feared that a 2020 cycle with Sanders atop the ticket would risk their House majority, destroy them in swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania, and obliterate them in red states.
In theory, socialism is supposed to appeal to the working class, including the white working class, which drifted toward Trump in 2016. But on Super Tuesday, Joe Biden ran ahead of Sanders among white non–college graduates in the states that Biden won, and the former vice president largely kept it close among this demographic in the states that Sanders won.
Bernie doesn’t let facts get in the way of True Belief:
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
Actor Alec Baldwin
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
li>Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
Former California Governor Jerry Brown
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Stated again and again she’s not running, but there’s still a cottage industry in predicting she’ll displace Biden at the DNC or be the veep pick. Not really seeing either, but stranger things have happened this year…
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)
California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Andrew Yang, Austin, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, California, coronavirus, debate, Democrats, Ezekiel Emanuel, Harris County, Hawaii, Hillary Clinton, James Carville, James Clyburn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, National Education Association, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, socialism, Stephen King, Texas, Travis County, Tulsi Gabbard
Posted in Austin, Democrats, Elections, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Sunday, March 8th, 2020
Young Turks host Cenk Uygur is having a very bad week.
Last week’s uproar over him fighting unionization hadn’t even died down before Ungyer lost his carpetbagger bid for the 25th Congressional District that Democratic incumbent Katie “Naked Bong Hits” Hill resigned from.
In fact, Uygur came in fourth in the jungle primary, behind not only Democrat Christy Smith and Republican Mike Garcia (who are in a runoff May 12), but also behind Republican Steve Knight (who had previously represented the district before losing to Hill in 2018). Ungyer didn’t just lose, he lost badly, garnering just 5.4% of the vote and coming in at one fifth of Smith’s vote total.
Then, on top of that, he had his flight delayed for four hours. How did he take that?
Not. Well.
I can understand being upset over a plane being delayed four hours. However, taking it out over service personnel isn’t going to make the plane magically appear. Moreover, filming yourself being a complete dick to those same service personnel isn’t going to help the plane appear either, or encourage normal, non-crazy people to watch your show.
Still another problem with the Social Justice Warrior left is how overt outbursts of anger are always seen as righteous and validating rather than a dangerous lack of self-control.
And the kicker is that Uygur uploaded this video himself, as though he would be the one who came off well for yelling at random employees. Oh, you get angry when you get hungry? Then pack some food, idiot!
The entitlement mentality of our left-wing media elites seems infinite.
Tags:2020 Election, airlines, American Airlines, California, California 25th Congressional District, carpetbagger, Cenk Uygur, Christy Smith, Democrats, Katie Hill, Media Watch, Mike Garcia, Social Justice Warriors, Steve Knight, video, Young Turks
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, video | 3 Comments »
Saturday, March 7th, 2020
The headline isn’t strictly true, as a good deal of enlightenment happened before the event:
If you had told me three years ago that I would ever attend a Donald Trump rally, I would have laughed and assured you that was never going to happen. Heck, if you had told me I would do it three months ago, I probably would have done the same thing. So, how did I find myself among 11,000-plus Trump supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire? Believe it or not, it all started with knitting.
You might not think of the knitting world as a particularly political community, but you’d be wrong. Many knitters are active in social justice communities and love to discuss the revolutionary role knitters have played in our culture. I started noticing this about a year ago, particularly on Instagram. I knit as a way to relax and escape the drama of real life, not to further engage with it. But it was impossible to ignore after roving gangs of online social justice warriors started going after anyone in the knitting community who was not lockstep in their ideology. Knitting stars on Instagram were bullied and mobbed by hundreds of people for seemingly innocuous offenses. One man got mobbed so badly that he had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the hospital on suicide watch. Many things were not right about the hatred, and witnessing the vitriol coming from those I had aligned myself with politically was a massive wake-up call.
Once again we see social justice warriors spreading light and happiness everywhere they go.
You see, I was one of those Democrats who considered anyone who voted for Trump a racist. I thought they were horrible (yes, even deplorable) and worked very hard to eliminate their voices from my spaces by unfriending or blocking people who spoke about their support of him, however minor their comments. I watched a lot of MSNBC, was convinced that everything he had done was horrible, that he hated anyone who wasn’t a straight white man, and that he had no redeeming qualities.
But when I witnessed the amount of hate coming from the left in this small, niche knitting community, I started to question everything. I started making a proactive effort to break my echo chamber by listening to voices I thought I would disagree with. I wanted to understand their perspective, believing it would confirm that they were filled with hate for anyone who wasn’t like them.
That turned out not to be the case. The more voices outside the left that I listened to, the more I realized that these were not bad people. They were not racists, nazis, or white supremacists. We had differences of opinions on social and economic issues, but a difference of opinion does not make your opponent inherently evil. And they could justify their opinions using arguments, rather than the shouting and ranting I saw coming from my side of the aisle.
I started to discover (or perhaps rediscover) the #WalkAway movement. I had heard about #WalkAway when MSNBC told me it was fake and a bunch of Russian bots. But then I started to meet real people who had been Democrats and made the decision to leave because they could not stand the way the left was behaving. I watched town halls they held with different minority communities (all available in their entirety on YouTube), and I saw sane, rational discussion from people of all different races, backgrounds, orientations, and experiences. I joined the Facebook group for the community and saw stories popping up daily of people sharing why they are leaving the Democratic Party. This wasn’t fake. These people are not Russian bots. Moreover, it felt like a breath of fresh air. There was not universal agreement in this group — some were Trump supporters, some weren’t — but they talked and shared their perspective without shouting or rage or trying to cancel each other.
I started to question everything. How many stories had I been sold that weren’t true? What if my perception of the other side is wrong? How is it possible that half the country is overtly racist? Is it possible that Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing, and had I been suffering from it for the past three years?
Snip.
I headed over an hour and a half before the doors were scheduled to open—which was four hours before Trump was set to take the stage—and the line already stretched a mile away from the entrance to the arena. As I waited, I chatted with the folks around me. And contrary to all the fears expressed, they were so nice. I was not harassed or intimidated, and I was never in fear of my safety even for a moment. These were average, everyday people. They were veterans, schoolteachers, and small business owners who had come from all over the place for the thrill of attending this rally. They were upbeat and excited. In chatting, I even let it slip that I was a Democrat. The reaction: “Good for you! Welcome!”
Once we got inside, the atmosphere was jubilant. It was more like attending a rock concert than a political rally. People were genuinely enjoying themselves. Some were even dancing to music being played over the loudspeakers. It was so different than any other political event I had ever attended. Even the energy around Barack Obama in 2008 didn’t feel like this.
I had attended an event with all the Democratic contenders just two days prior in exactly the same arena, and the contrast was stark. First, Trump completely filled the arena all the way up to the top. Even with every major Democratic candidate in attendance the other night, and the campaigns giving away free tickets, the Democrats did not do that. With Trump, every single person was unified around a singular goal. With the Democrats, the audience booed over candidates they didn’t like and got into literal shouting matches with each other. With Trump, there was a genuinely optimistic view of the future. With the Democrats, it was doom and gloom. With Trump, there was a genuine feeling of pride of being an American. With the Democrats, they emphasized that the country was a racist place from top to bottom.
Snip.
They don’t love him because they think he’s perfect. They love him despite his flaws, because they believe he has their back.
As I left the rally—walking past thousands of people who were watching it on a giant monitor outside the arena because they couldn’t get in—I knew there was no way Trump would lose in November. Absolutely no way. I truly believe that it doesn’t matter who the Democrats nominate: Trump is going to trounce them. If you don’t believe me, attend one of his rallies and see for yourself. Don’t worry, they really won’t hurt you.
Snip.
I think the Democrats have an ass-kicking coming to them in November, and I think most of them will be utterly shocked when it happens, because they’re existing in an echo chamber that is not reflective of the broader reality. I hope it’s a wake-up call that causes them to take a long look in the mirror and really ask themselves how they got here. Maybe then they’ll start listening. I tend to doubt it, but I can hope.
Read the whole thing.
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Democrats, Donald Trump, Elections, Social Justice Warriors
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »
Friday, March 6th, 2020
Been a hell of a week. Monday’s Clown Car update will be yuuuuuuuugggggeeeeee! Also remember that the horror begins anew this weekend.
Trump Administration: Sanctuary city? No federal funds for you!
Democrats lie about coronavirus budget cuts.
How tranny pandering damaged the Labour Party:
“Rebecca Long Bailey and Lisa Nandy have backed a 12-point plan put forward by the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights group that calls for sex-based rights campaigners to be expelled from Labour. Angela Rayner and Dawn Butler, who are in the running for deputy leader, also backed the group’s pledges. The trans rights group is calling for long debated changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would allow people to formally self identify as the opposite sex without paying for a certificate or demonstrating that they have accessed transitioning services. It also vows to ‘organise and fight against transphobic organisations such as Woman’s Place UK, LGB Alliance, and other trans exclusionist hate groups.’”
People were then asked whether they agreed with the pledge. Then they also answered the question about how likely they were to vote Labour.
The results show that being exposed to even this small snippet of news about the pledge seems to reduce support for Labour. As figure one reveals, the share of survey respondents who said they would likely vote Labour was 42.6 percent among those who read nothing and just 32.7 percent among those who read the paragraph about the Labour trans pledge.
One reason for the drop was the limited popularity of the trans pledge among many survey respondents. For instance, less than a third of this mainly left-leaning sample who read about the pledge agreed with it. Among Labour voters, agreement rose to 40 percent, with 18 percent opposed and the rest undecided. However, Green, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party (SNP) voters split fairly evenly between opposing and supporting the pledge, with many undecided.
It seems that most opposed the pledge or were undecided. Among the 40 people who agreed with the pledge, 70 percent said they planned to vote Labour. Among the 99 who either disagreed or were unsure about the pledge, just 20 percent planned to do so.
Democrats behaving badly: “Hawaii councilman led meth-trafficking ring, conspired with Samoan gang ‘shot caller,’ investigators allege.”
A Hawaii councilman pleaded not guilty Friday to multiple charges accusing him of leading a methamphetamine-trafficking ring, supplying weapons and conspiring with a gang leader while serving as an elected official, investigators said.
Arthur Brun, 48, operated the major drug-trafficking conspiracy involving 11 other defendants since at least June 2019, while serving as an elected member of the Kauai County Council and vice chairman of its Public Safety and Human Services Committee, the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged in a news release.
Also, another case of “name that party,” since Brun is a Democrat.
There are two middle classes: the yeomanry and the clerisy:
First there is the yeomanry or the traditional middle class, which consists of small business owners, minor landowners, craftspeople, and artisans, or what we would define historically as the bourgeoisie, or the old French Third Estate, deeply embedded in the private economy. The other middle class, now in ascendency, is the clerisy, a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.
Snip.
The yeomanry’s distress can be seen in everything from falling rates of business formation as well as declining homeownership, particularly among the young, most notably in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Even in the United States, a country that never experienced feudalism, the proportion of land owned by the nation’s 100 largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017.
Land ownership in Europe is also increasingly concentrated in smaller hands; in Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the continent, farmland is increasingly concentrated while urban real estate has fallen into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy.
Growing corporate concentration, in both the US and Europe, has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy. In Silicon Valley, the renowned garage culture is being supplanted by a gargantua of giant firms that have achieved market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 – 90 percent of their key niches like search, social media, cellular, and computer operating systems. One online publisher uses a Star Trek analogy to describe his firm’s status with Google: “It’s a bit like being assimilated by the Borg. You get cool new powers. But having been assimilated, if your implants were ever removed, you’d certainly die. That basically captures our relationship to Google.”
The decline of the yeomanry threatens the future of democracy as we have known it. Faced with growing assaults on their businesses, and in some cases, their communities, they have begun to fight back against many of the policies, notably climate policy, that are widely supported by the oligarchs and the clerisy. A policy to force the rapid replacement of fossil fuels with heavily subsidized renewables requires the development of the kind of largely unaccountable bureaucracies that both employ and empower the clerisy while providing the oligarchs both in the US and Europe with a unique opportunity to cash in on energy “transitions.”
In contrast, for large parts of the yeomanry, a call for a rapid, radical shift towards renewables imposes much higher energy prices. It also threatens to diminish industries in which many of them work and undercut the sustenance to the Main Street merchants in smaller cities and the countryside. Already attempts to impose such policies have led to yeoman rebellions in a number of countries.
Math is hard:
It’s indicative of a bigger problem:
This, right here, is why so many left-leaning Americans think that “the billionaires” can pay for everything. It’s why Elizabeth Warren was enthusiastically boosted by the media despite her ridiculous pretense that she could pay for a series of gargantuan initiatives without raising taxes on anyone but the extremely rich. It’s why Democrat after Democrat promises not to raise “middle class taxes” while promising programs that require the raising of middle class taxes. How did this bad tweet make it onto TV to be endorsed? Why did Mara Gay agree with it? Why didn’t Brian Williams notice? Because the people involved in this clip thought it was true. This is how they see the world.
But it’s not true. Not even close. Forget the million for a moment and make it Andrew Yang’s thousand instead. Would that be possible? Nope! If Michael Bloomberg were to try to achieve what Andrew Yang promised ($1,000 per American per month, forever), he would be able to give every American about $183 in the first month before he’d have $0 left. To make it through a single month, he would have to be five times richer than he is. And, after that single month, even at five times his current wealth, his fortune would be completely and permanently depleted. Elizabeth Warren’s unconstitutional wealth tax topped out at six percent. Filter Bloomberg’s money through that tax and you get $11 per American per year.
There is still no such thing as a free lunch. If Americans want expanded services — or a monthly stipend — they are going to have to pay for them themselves. There is no billionaire out there who can do it for them.
Iran is cheating on its nuclear commitments again. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
America doesn’t need more foreign workers.
Are we so “desperate” for more bodies to “fuel economic growth?” Let’s recap the demographic math: We live in a nation of 330 million, 44 million of whom are foreign-born. Upward of 30 million immigrants are currently living, working and going to school here illegally. One million new legal immigrants are granted green cards every year. An estimated 600,000 temporary worker visas are issued annually, including the H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and H-4 programs. That doesn’t include spousal visas or the more than half a million foreign “students” now working through the stealth guest worker plan known as the Optional Practical Training program, which allows foreign students to work with little monitoring, no wage protections, no payment of Social Security payroll taxes and no requirement for employers to demonstrate labor market shortages.
“We” ordinary Americans don’t need more immigrants. Corporations (and their trusty house organ, the Wall Street Journal) want higher profits, lower wages, and endless pipelines of cheap foreign labor. They’ve been cooking up manufactured worker shortage crises since World War II and crying apocalypse since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation’s Erich Bloch hyped a STEM shortage based on groundless projections to crusade for agency budget increases.
I don’t agree 100%; I think it behooves us to get the very best in some fields, people with PhDs in science and technology, and masters of various arts. But that’s a far cry from “Hey, my cousin Sanjay knows Sharepoint. Let’s write an H1B rec so we can get him over here.”
“Billionaire Republican buys major Twitter stake, may oust CEO amid GOP concerns of bias.”
A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a “sizable” stake in Twitter and “plans to push” to oust CEO Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports, raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of the social media platform that conservatives have long accused of overt left-wing political bias.
Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. has already nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, Bloomberg News reported, citing several sources familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn’t have voting control over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock; and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter’s struggling user growth numbers and stock performance.
Singer, who opposed President Trump’s campaign in 2016, has since changed his tune, raising the prospect that some of the changes to Twitter could make the platform a friendlier place for pro-Trump users. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Singer donated $24 million to Republican and right-leaning groups in the 2016 election.
Defense contractor accused of passing classified human intelligence information to a Hezbollah-connected lover. “Mariam Taha Thompson, 61, formerly of Rochester, Minn., was arrested by FBI agents on Feb. 27.” Other reports have noted she herself was born in Lebanon. Who gave a foreign born contractor Top Secret clearance?
Fourteen Coronavirus cases in Texas, but only three in the wild (all in the greater Houston area), the rest evacuees in quarantine.
Heh:
Kinda news: Joyriding in a stolen car. Kicking it up a notch: Adler joyriding in a stolen police car.
Heh 2.
Dwight wanted this in the clown car, but since John “Whale Farker” McAfee isn’t a Democrat, I’m including it here:
Thew only problem is that once you install McAfee as your running mate, he slows your campaign down by 90%…
Come as you are:
Tags:Arthur Brun, Austin, coronavirus, Crime, Democrats, dogs, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Hawaii, Hezbollah, homeless, Iran, Jihad, Labour, Lebanon, LinkSwarm, Mariam Taha Thompson, Media Watch, Paul Singer, sanctuary cities, Social Justice Warriors, spying, Texas, transexual, Twitter
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 16th, 2020
I’ve talked about “social justice” being a cult before, but this Jonathan Kay piece in Quillette explicates the idea in detail.
The words “cult” and “cultish” often are used loosely to describe not only literal cults such as the one created by Jones, but also militant political movements, and even the fanatical followers of entertainers and sports teams. Yet I do think that the cult concept is precise enough to serve as a useful framework for modern forms of ideological tribalism.
In this regard, I would define a cultish movement as one that (1) purports to offer adherents a complete system of judging human worth on the basis of stated beliefs whose meaning is unstable, and which cannot be explained coherently outside the movement’s own self-reinforcing linguistic subculture; and (2) maintains both internally applied disciplinary mechanisms and externally applied rhetorical strategies as a means to categorize any critique of the cult as a manifestation of the critic’s own personal defects. Prominent examples include Scientologists’ efforts to brand critics as “Suppressive Persons” who must be silenced or punished, and social-justice extremists’ description of pushback against claims of racism as “white fragility.”
Cult doctrines are, by their nature, unfalsifiable. And so a milieu that becomes infected with cult-think always will be hostile to rational discourse. As the United States shows, multiple cult-like movements can dominate different sectors simultaneously. In the realm of politics, it is now seen as normal everyday news for Donald Trump and his minions to utter obvious lies about everything from Ukraine to the predicted path of a hurricane, and to expect followers and sympathetic media to parrot those claims. In the realm of academia, meanwhile, many students are expected to accede to the claim that sexual dimorphism is a myth, and that biology itself is a colonial construct.
Snip.
Cults can never be organized in any kind of democratic way because there is always some anointed class (often consisting of just one person) that monopolizes access to a critical body of revealed truths. And in this aspect, intersectionality is well-suited to a cult paradigm because its adherents presume that the “lived experience” that typifies every sub-group is fundamentally unknowable except to members of that sub-group. The conceit of secret knowledge confers an aura of mysticism on followers, especially in regard to the issue of gender identity, which is cast as an internally experienced secular rapture.
On one hand, this means that discussions within social-justice circles tend to be tortured and unproductive, as no one is allowed to presume a truth-telling power that extends beyond the narrow confines of one’s own intersectional constituency. On the other hand, this system of balkanized information monopolies helps protect intersectional dogmas from outside criticism, as no argument may contradict the internally experienced pain, trauma or perception of bigotry expressed by an acolyte who identifies as a member of an oppressed group. In this regard, social-justice cults diverge significantly from the interwar ideological cults that formed around various interpretations of Marxism (with which social-justice cultism is sometimes compared), as these older movements tended toward universalism in their underlying epistemological approach.
Read the whole thing.
Tags:Democrats, Social Justice Warriors
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Monday, February 10th, 2020
Iowa screws everything up, the Bernie juggernaut gathers momentum, there was another debate, and Biden calls a voter a “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Delegates
So Sanders got 6,000 more votes than Buttigieg in Iowa…and, somehow, two less delegates. That puts the actual delegate count at:
- Buttigieg 14
- Sanders 12
- Elizabeth Warren 8
- Joe Biden 6
- Amy Klobuchar 1
Klobuchar got her delegate with 12.3% of the vote. I guess the way Iowa did things that 15% threshold didn’t matter? Is that only for primaries? Or did it only matter at the precinct level? It seems like the DNC has rigged the process for maximum opaqueness…
Polls
The Iowa cock-up scrambled things so badly I’m ignoring most of these this week. All these are from Sunday and are for New Hampshire.
CNN/UNH (New Hampshire): Sanders 28. Buttigieg 21, Biden 12, Warren 9, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 5, Yang 4, Steyer 2, Bloomberg 1.
Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University (New Hampshire): Sanders 23, Buttigieg 20, Warren 16, Biden 14, Klobuchar 6, Yang, Steyer 2, Gabbard 0.
Suffolk (New Hampshire): Sanders 23.8, Buttigieg 21.80, Warren 13.4, Biden 10.4, Klobuchar 8.6, Yang 2.6, Gabbard 2, Steyer 1.8, Patrick .4, Bennet .2.
Emerson College (New Hampshire): Sanders 30, Buttigieg 20, Klobucher 13, Warren 12, Warren 12, Biden 11, Yang 4, Gabbard 3, Steyer 2, Patrick 1.
CBS: Sanders 29, Buttigieg 25, Warren 17, Biden 12, Klobuchar 10, Gabbard 2, Yang 1, Steyer 1, Patrick 1.
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets. Sanders 38.9%, Bloomberg 20.2%, and Buttigieg at 13.9%? Betting markets don’t seem overly impressed with Mayo Pete…
Pundits, etc.
Iowa screwing the pooch cocks up everything about the nomination process:
Maybe there will eventually be a decent-sized Iowa bounce despite all of this. But there’s a good chance that the candidates who did well in Iowa get screwed, and the candidates who did poorly there get a mulligan. To repeat: There’s very little importance in a mathematical sense to who wins 41 delegates. Iowa is all about the media narrative it produces and all about momentum, and that momentum, whoever wins, is likely to have been blunted.
Who might this help? Let’s pretend for a moment we don’t have any hints about how the results might have turned out. In fact, let’s pretend that Iowa didn’t happen at all. I reran our forecast model as though the Iowa caucuses were canceled….
The presence of Iowa was helpful to Bernie Sanders, whose chances of winning a national delegate majority would have been 24 percent without Iowa — as compared to the 31 percent chance that he had with Iowa, as of Monday afternoon. Iowa was hurtful to Joe Biden, however, whose chances of a delegate majority would have been 50 percent without it, rather than 43 percent with it.
And Iowa was extremely helpful to Buttigieg, whose chances of winning the delegate majority were fairly low even with Iowa — keep in mind that he had slipped to third in polls of Iowa and fifth in national polls — but would have been virtually nonexistent (less than 1 percent) without it.
By giving the winning candidates a boost, the presence of Iowa also reduced the chance of an unstructured race and a potential brokered convention. The chance of there being no delegate majority was 17 percent without Iowa, but would have been 20 percent with it.
Granted, none of those changes — say, 24 percent versus 31 percent — are necessarily that large. But that’s partly because, as of Monday afternoon, four or five candidates appeared to have a shot at winning Iowa. For the candidate who actually won Iowa, it would have been a much bigger deal. We estimate that Sanders’s chances of a majority would have shot up to from 31 percent to 58 percent with an Iowa win, Warren’s from 5 percent to 32 percent, and Buttigieg’s from 4 percent to 22 percent.
And in some ways that still discounts Iowa’s impact, because several of the campaigns — for better or worse — built their entire strategy around the state. Would Buttigieg have been a major player in the race without Iowa? Considering his lack of support among black voters, probably not. Would candidates such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Julian Castro have dropped out so soon? That’s a harder call, since Harris, Booker and Castro weren’t polling particularly well anywhere. But the Democratic field might have remained a little more diverse.
So we’ve arrived at a point of some ambivalence. On the one hand, candidates such as Buttigieg, who seemingly did well there, are liable to be injured by the muddled storylines in Iowa following the results-reporting disaster on Monday night. On the other hand, it’s not clear why Iowa was afforded so much importance in the first place, and Buttigieg possibly owed his entire presence in the campaign to this quirk in the nomination process. Nonetheless, these were the rules of the game, as every candidate understood them. So if Iowa turns out not to matter very much because of the results-reporting snafu, they have every right to be upset.
To be even more blunt: The Iowa Democratic Party’s colossal screw-up in reporting results will potentially have direct effects on the outcome of the nomination process. The failure to report results will almost certainly help Biden, assuming that indications that he performed poorly in Iowa are correct, as they won’t get nearly as much media coverage. And they’ll hurt whichever candidate wins the state — most likely Sanders or Buttigieg. (Although if Sanders winds up finishing in second place or lower, he also might not mind a reduction in the importance of Iowa, especially with one of his best states, New Hampshire, coming up next.)
What if burying bad Biden news was the entire point of engineering the cockup? After all, the DNC is backing Biden and battling Bernie.
Matt Taibbi: “Yesterday’s Gone: Iowa Was Waterloo for Democrats. In a fiasco for the ages, the blue party faceplants in Iowa.”
After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election — the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.
Coinciding with the flatulent end of the party’s impeachment gambit, and the related news that Donald Trump is enjoying climbing approval ratings, the Blue Party was exposed as an incompetent lobby for doomed elites, dumb crooks with nothing left to offer but their exit.
Snip.
Biden performed surprisingly well all year in polls, but he headed into Iowa like a passenger jet trying to land with one burning engine, hitting trees, cows, cars, sides of mountains, everything. The poking incidents were bad, but then one of his chief surrogates, John Kerry, was overheard by NBC talking about the possibility of jumping in to keep Bernie from “taking down” the party.
“Maybe I’m fucking deluding myself here,” Kerry reportedly said — mainstream Democrats may not have changed their policies or strategies much since Trump, but they sure are swearing more — then noted he would have to raise a “couple of million” from people like venture capitalist Doug Hickey.
Kerry later said he was enumerating the reasons he wouldn’t run, though those notably did not include humility about his own reputation as a comical national electoral failure, or because there’s already a candidate in the race (Biden) he’d been crisscrossing Iowa urging people to vote for, but instead because he’d have to step down from the board of Bank of America and give up paid speeches. French aristocrats who shouted “Vive le Roi!” on the way to the razor did a better job advertising themselves.
With days, hours left before the caucuses, there were signs everywhere that the party establishment was scrambling to find someone among the remaining cast members to stop what Kerry called the “reality of Bernie.”
But who? Yang said smart things about inequality, so he was out. Tulsi Gabbard was Russian Bernie spawn. Tom Steyer was Dennis Kucinich with money. Voters had already rejected potential Trump WWE opponents like the “progressive prosecutor” (Kamala Harris), the “pragmatic progressive” (John Delaney), “the next Bobby Kennedy” (Beto O’Rourke), “Courageous Empathy” (Cory Booker), Medicare for All can bite me (John Hickenlooper), and over a dozen others.
Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg seemed perfect, a man who defended the principle of wine-based fundraisers with military effrontery. New York magazine made his case in a cover story the magazine’s Twitter account summarized as: “Perhaps all the Democrats need to win the presidency is a Rust Belt millennial who’s gay and speaks Norwegian.” (The “Here’s something random the Democrats need to beat Trump” story became an important literary genre in 2019-2020, the high point being Politico’s “Can the “F-bomb save Beto?”).
Buttigieg had momentum. The flameout of Biden was expected to help the ex-McKinsey consultant with “moderates.” Reporters dug Pete; he’s been willing to be photographed holding a beer and wearing a bomber jacket, and in Iowa demonstrated what pundits call a “killer instinct,” i.e. a willingness to do anything to win.
Days before the caucus, a Buttigieg supporter claimed Pete’s name had not been read out in a Des Moines Register poll, leading to the pulling of what NBC called the “gold standard” survey. The irony of such a relatively minor potential error holding up a headline would soon be laid bare.
However, Pete’s numbers with black voters (he polls at zero in many states) led to multiple news stories in the last weekend before the caucus about “concern” that Buttigieg would not be able to win.
Who, then? Elizabeth Warren was cratering in polls and seemed to be shifting strategy on a daily basis. In Iowa, she attacked “billionaires” in one stop, emphasized “unity” in the next, and stressed identity at other times (she came onstage variously that weekend to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” or to chants of “It’s time for a woman in the White House”). Was she an outsider or an insider? A screwer, or a screwee? Whose side was she on?
A late controversy involving a story that Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn’t win didn’t help. Jaimee Warbasse planned to caucus with Warren, but the Warren/Sanders “hot mic” story of the two candidates arguing after a January debate was a bridge too far. She spoke of being frustrated, along with friends, at the inability to find anyone she could to trust to take on Trump.
“It’s like we all have PTSD from 2016.”
Read the whole thing for a detailed breakdown of how Democrats suddenly changed the caucus rules on people, followed by “a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude.” And even if I disgree with some of his lefty conclusions, you have to love this sentence: “Democrats went on to systematically rat-fuck every group in their tent: labor, the poor, minorities, soldiers, criminal defendants, students, homeowners, media consumers, environmentalists, civil libertarians, pensioners — everyone but donors.”
“If You Think It’s Bad for Mainstream Democrats Now, Just Wait“:
It is always darkest, John McCain used to say, before it gets totally black. So it is for the American center-left right now. Bernie Sanders is currently favored to win the nomination, a prospect that would make Donald Trump a heavy favorite to win reelection, and open the possibility of a Corbyn-esque wipeout. While Sanders has not expanded beyond a minority of the party, he has consolidated support of the party’s left wing, and while its mainstream liberal wing is split between numerous contenders, it is hard to see how the situation is likely to improve soon. Indeed, it could get worse, much worse.
The liberal conundrum begins with Joe Biden. The former vice-president led national polls until very recently, and has been the most plausible mainstream liberal candidate. At the same time, doubts about his ability to handle the rigors of the campaign at an advanced age have caused the Democratic Party to withhold the institutional support it gave Hillary Clinton. Yet his name was big enough to preclude a younger, more vigorous Democrat from emerging in the ideological space he occupied. Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris all tried and failed to run as ideological heirs of Barack Obama, because Obama’s actual partner was still there.
Actually all failed because all sucked to various degrees.
Yet Biden underperformed in Iowa, and his campaign appears to be deflating, at least momentarily. So what to do?
One strategy would be to rally around him, on the grounds that no other candidate has or will have his name recognition and ties to black voters. The other strategy is to hope his campaign collapses as quickly as possible, so that another contender can emerge. (More about them below.) At the moment it is not clear which strategy makes sense. And in the absence of an effective party to coordinate, the most likely scenario is a combination of the two: Some Democrats back Biden, others defect, and others wait to see what happens. That would be the worst possible outcome: a long, slow, painful death that prevents another liberal from taking his place and allows Sanders to gain unstoppable momentum.
In the meantime, it seems hard to imagine how Biden or a Biden alternative could emerge in the next three contests. The next contest is in New Hampshire, which borders the home states of both Sanders and his closest ideological counterpart, Elizabeth Warren. After that comes Nevada — which, like Iowa, uses the caucus system, which has a fraction of the voting participation of primaries and reward the kind of intense organization Sanders has mastered.
Then comes South Carolina. Biden has been pointing to this state, where he has always led, as his firewall. But will it hold if he is coming off three straight defeats? It is possible that by this point, Biden will have been supplanted in the center-left lane by Pete Buttigieg or even Amy Klobuchar. However, neither has the inroads to the state’s black community that Biden built, which means neither would be able to count on its support as a bulwark against the left-leaning electorates in the previous states. Also, as an additional morbid touch, the South Carolina primary will feature an organized influx of Republicans voting for Sanders in a specific plan to boost what they see as Democrats’ weakest nominee.
I suspect any “Operation Chaos” effects will be widely overstated.
So it is entirely possible that, following South Carolina, Sanders will have won three or all four of the contests. If nobody has emerged as a viable alternative by then, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign will be stepping in. It is extremely hard to estimate the probability of success of a candidate who has skipped the first four races. FiveThirtyEight’s model currently gives Bloomberg less than a one percent chance of winning.
To be sure, if Bloomberg is the last Democrat standing against Sanders, he may well attract substantial support from Democratic elected officials and put up a strong fight. Still, he would face enormous opposition from the left. This is, after all, a billionaire who endorsed George W. Bush in 2004. And while the left has previously whipped itself into an angry frenzy against, successively, O’Rourke, Biden, Harris, and Buttigieg, the rage against Bloomberg would reach a new level.
At that point, the victory scenario would involve a long, bloody struggle all the way to the convention, with the Sanders movement claiming at every step of the way that the party is rigging the race against them, culminating in a convention where his enraged supporters will again try to shout down the proceedings. Unless one of the non-Bloombergs can somehow get off the mat and defeat Sanders, this is probably the best-case scenario for liberals at this point. It seems more probable that Sanders crushes the field and brings his historically unique suite of liabilities to the ticket.
It’s interesting how little Chait mentions Buttigieg, almost as if he’s nothing more than a placeholder. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Low turnout for the Democratic Iowa Caucuses.
Seems like everyone took a shot at Mayo Pete in the New Hampshire debate.
Stephen Green drunkblogged the debate.
Van Jones says that President Trump is serious about trying to win over black voters. “That was a warning to us. A warning shot across the bow to Democrats that he’s going after enough black votes to cause us problems. It’s not just the white suburban voters, he’s going after black votes.”
Who got the biggest bang for their buck in Iowa spending? It’s no surprise that Steyer and Bennet wasted their money. More interesting is the fact that Biden actually got one of the best returns on his $4 million in TV ad spending. Which is another way of saying if his campaign wasn’t so bad at fundraising, he might not have been so embarrassed in Iowa…
A tweet expounded on at length yesterday:
Foreign policy? Not impressed:
Where candidates stand on legalizing weed. Biden and Nurse Bloomberg against, all the other Dems they bothered with for. Gabbard, Bennet and Patrick all ignored. Biggest caveat: This is from The Motley Fool, whose every ad I glimpse on those occasions I websurf without adblock seems to be pumping some marijuana-related stock.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of James Carville, he endorsed Bennet. So, you think Bennet’s going to bow out of the race Tuesday night, or will he wait until Wednesday morning?
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He released an attack ad against Buttigieg:
Pretty devastating to Buttigieg. But also pretty devastating to Biden, tying him as it does to two of the Obama Administration’s most outstanding failures: ObamaCare and the Iran Deal. Shockingly, the Biden campaign is gobsmacked by their own incompetence in Iowa:
Days before Iowa Democrats went to their precinct caucuses, the news dropped like a bomb.
Leaked poll numbers from what would have been the final Des Moines Register Iowa Poll showed Joe Biden in fourth place with 13 percent.
Biden’s Iowa staffers were floored, according to a person familiar with discussions among several aides at the time.
“None of us thought we were at 13 percent,” the person said. “We can’t be in fourth place. That just cannot be right.”
But it was right. And it confirmed what rival campaigns had whispered for months — Biden wasn’t inspiring Iowa voters and his support was inch-deep.
While the full Iowa caucus results still aren’t in, Biden’s unexpectedly weak performance Monday — he’s in fourth place with 16 percent with 97 percent of precincts reporting — has provoked frustration and recriminations within the campaign, according to interviews with more than a dozen campaign aides and surrogates.
Bet it did. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Quid Pro Joe gets testy over Ukraine. Everyone thought the impeachment farce was meant to protect Biden, but what it may end up doing is dooming him. Oh, and he did this:
Thing is, if you listen to all of that clip, the subtext you hear is “our organization sucked in Iowa.”
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 starts to pay more attention:
Bloomberg is a tricky candidate to forecast, given that his strategy of essentially skipping the first four states but then spending enormous amounts of money on the race is fairly unprecedented. Although Bloomberg is at only 11 percent in national polls right now — below the 15 percent threshold required to pick up delegates in states and congressional districts — he’s getting close enough to the threshold that the model actually has him picking up a decent number of delegates in its average simulation.
Forecast omitted, but they have him doing better in the delegate count than Klobuchar.
On the other hand, the model thinks it’s quite unlikely that Bloomberg can get a majority of delegates because he’s getting off to a late start. It’s not that skipping out on Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina is itself all that costly; those states have relatively few delegates. Rather, it’s that Bloomberg is unlikely to have a huge surge before Super Tuesday.
Here’s why that matters. Bloomberg could certainly do reasonably well on Super Tuesday and get a surge in later states. But at that point, 38 percent of delegates will already have been chosen. Say Bloomberg wins 30 percent of the delegates on Super Tuesday; that would certainly get him some attention, probably make him a real contender, and perhaps knock other moderate candidates out of the race. Bloomberg, however, would need to get 64 percent of the delegates in all the states beyond Super Tuesday to earn a majority of pledged delegates, which is an awfully high bar to clear.
Bloomberg getting a plurality of pledged delegates, on the other hand, is more likely. (There’s a 1 in 40 chance of that, or about 3 percent, according to our model — as compared to a roughly 1 in 100 chance he gets a majority.) More likely still is that Bloomberg appears to be the strongest candidate at the end of the process, even though he doesn’t necessarily have a plurality. There’s a 5 percent chance that Bloomberg will be leading in national polls at the end of the race, our model estimates.2 Being able to point to indicators like that could be helpful to Bloomberg in the not-at-all-unlikely event of a contested convention.
He’s really against marijuana legalization. He met with some Democratic governors, who might be looking for a new horse now that Biden looks like he’s going to be euthanized on the track.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Suddenly Buttigieg is right behind Bernie in New Hampshire. He’s the master of meaningless pablum. 1,800 people show up to Buttigieg rally in New Hampshire, which are pretty good numbers…for a non-Trump rally…in a small state. A piece on Buttigieg billionaire backer Seth Klarman and his backing of Shadow. The writer is really upset about Klarman being pro-Israel, so caveat lictor. “The Nevada State Democratic Party hired a former Pete Buttigieg campaign staffer as its new Voter Protection Director.” How convenient. Speaking of marijuana, ABC asks Mayor Pete why South Bend police arrest so many black people for smoking the devil’s cabbage.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Veep spot? Two different headlines, about the same Ellen DeGeneres apperance on the same day: “Hillary Clinton says her joining Democratic ticket as VP nominee is ‘not going to happen.’ “Hillary Clinton on being vice president: ‘Never say never.'” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Newsweek covers where Gabbard stands after Iowa. Gabbard sends best wishes to cancer-stricken Rush Limbaugh. Oooo, basic human dignity has no place in the modern Democratic Party…
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Klobuchar joins the swelling ranks of Democrats with a shot.” Ah, no. She got one delegate in Iowa. One. Uno. Exceeding expectations doesn’t mean she gets anywhere close to sniffing the nomination (though it probably does help raise her status as a possible veep pick). She tried to pop the Buttigieg bubble at the debate. I see little evidence she succeeded.
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Thinks he has a chance in New Hampshire. Also thinks he has a chance in South Carolina. Why Cory Booker Minus is still wasting our time at this point is anyone’s guess.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Once again, everything is coming up Bernie:
Bernie Sanders has by far the best chance of any candidate to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, according to the Nate Silver model. Moreover, the odds that Sanders wins that prize outright are twice as good as the odds for a brokered convention in Milwaukee, in Silver’s view. Sanders has a better chance than anyone else to win the Nevada caucuses, according to Silver’s site, FiveThirtyEight, and a better chance than Joe Biden to win the South Carolina primary.
California? Sanders. Texas? Sanders. North Carolina? Sanders. Virginia? Sanders. Massachusetts? Sanders. Minnesota? Sanders. Colorado, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah, Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Washington, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho, North Dakota, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Hawaii, Alaska, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island? Ibid.
At the moment, Silver gives Sanders a 44 percent chance of winning Delaware, against 40 percent for Biden.
Could Silver be wrong? Of course. Could Sanders slip? Certainly. Could Biden regain his momentum? It could happen. Could voters take a second look at Mike Bloomberg (whom Silver gives less than a 1 percent shot at winning the nomination)? Sure. But at the moment there is little doubt that Bernie Sanders is your Democratic Party frontrunner.
And the Democratic establishment is in total freakout mode over it:
Sanders backers contend he is the only candidate capable of bringing out young people and others who normally wouldn’t vote. While there is evidence that Sanders did pull in more young voters in Iowa, overall turnout was significantly below record numbers posted in 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama rode a wave of enthusiasm to the White House. That casts doubt on Sanders’ argument that his brand of left-wing populism can inspire enough new voters to defeat Trump, said Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff and the ex-mayor of Chicago.
“There wasn’t this magic army” that materialized in Iowa, Emanuel said. “The cavalry wasn’t coming.”
Snip.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell called the bungled count a “fiasco.”
“We don’t look very good when one of our biggest arguments against Donald Trump is that he’s incompetent, and every day something happens where we screw something up,” Rendell, a Biden supporter and former DNC chair, told Reuters.
Two person race?
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s surging in South Carolina:
Tom Steyer has blanketed South Carolina in cash. Over the past seven months, he’s spent $14 million in TV and radio ads, spent over $100,000 on ads in black-owned newspapers, hired 93 staffers, an army of volunteers and assembled the largest state-wide operation of any other campaign.
The billionaire activist has poured more money into South Carolina in a short period of time than anyone in the state can remember — and it’s beginning to reshape the contours of the Feb. 29 primary.
“The unemployment rate in South Carolina has probably dropped an entire percentage point thanks to the Tom Steyer campaign,” said Tyler Jones, a Democratic strategist based in South Carolina. “Every YouTube video that comes on in South Carolina has a Tom Steyer ad in front of it. And he says things that every Democrat agrees with.”
While there hasn’t been much public polling in the state, Steyer’s been in double-digits in all three surveys released this month. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Steyer is second only to Joe Biden in the state, with Bernie Sanders a close third.
In a state where African Americans are expected to cast more than half of the primary vote, the Biden campaign has long held up South Carolina as his firewall due to the large amount of black voter support he has there. Rival campaigns have struggled to close the gap. But as Steyer continues to not only spend big on TV ads but also on local minority media, he’s been able to steadily gain ground among some African American voters.
He calls for $22 an hour minimum wage; enjoy your new $10 Big Macs, America. Steyer went after a Biden surrogate (SC State Sen. Dick Harpootlian) over allegedly saying something racist, but actually Harpootlian pointed out that Steyer “hiring” a black SC state rep for $50,000 a month looks shady as hell:
Evidently “social justice” means it’s forbidden for a white politician to point out a black politician’s graft.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Dark Money Group Behind Elizabeth Warren’s Rise:
As the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Obama administration’s consumer watchdog, Warren rewarded Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), which pressured the Obama administration to appoint her to the post in the first place. She gave the group unparalleled access to the CFPB while she led the agency, meeting with AFR associates on twice as many occasions as she did with any other Washington, D.C., interest group. As a member of the Senate, she has supported bills backed by the group. On the campaign trail, she has issued proposals that would benefit leaders of the group.
AFR, which represents more than 200 deep-pocketed liberal organizations including the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, is not required to disclose its donors. In 2010, it drummed up both grassroots and institutional support for Warren’s appointment to the CFPB. AFR representatives went on a media blitz to support Warren and directed rank-and-file members to sign pro-Warren petitions that were submitted to the Obama administration. One letter to the White House sent by AFR’s sister organization was signed by nearly two dozen of D.C.’s most powerful liberal interest groups.
Elizabeth Warren, racist. Fake Indian, real Indian casino. Remember, making sacrifices for “climate change” is always for the little people:
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yang is doing well enough that the New York Times published a hit piece on him.
“In his life before politics, they said they saw in Mr. Yang a man who was smart, had good ideas, was a persuasive speaker and was occasionally inspiring. But he sometimes stumbled in his dealings with gender and race, expressing what the former employees said were antiquated and unnerving views for a presidential candidate seeking the nomination from a Democratic Party that has been moving to the left,” the Times reported.
Former employees alleged that there was a “collective shrug” about previous reports on how Yang “treated women who worked for him” and that his “cavalier use of racial stereotypes about Asian-Americans” and a “lack of attention of his record as a chief executive” have “gnawed” at staffers who claim they “watched their boss similary fumble delicate topics and conversations for years.”
Sounds like he didn’t bow and scrape to Social justice Warrior pieties enough. He’s sounding better and better all the time…
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
Actor Alec Baldwin
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
Former California Governor Jerry Brown
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Deval Patrick, Dick Harpootlian, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Iowa, James Carville, Jerry Govan, Joe Biden, Jonathan Chait, marijuana, Matt Taibbi, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pete Buttigieg, Seth Klarman, Social Justice Warriors, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, Ukraine, Van Jones
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors | 3 Comments »
Sunday, February 9th, 2020
Key Bill Clinton political advisor James Carville is not high on the current Democratic Party presidential field…or their policies:
“I’m 75 years old. Why am I here doing this? Because I am scared to death — that’s why!” Carville said on MSNBC.
“We’ve got to decide what we want to be. Are we going to be an ideological cult? Or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party?” he went on to say.
Over the course of his lengthy interview, Carville declared that the Democratic Party needs to “wake up;” compared Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Jeremy Corbyn, a radical liberal who recently resigned as the head of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party; admitted Democratic voters are less than enthusiastic about their 2020 options; said DNC Chairman Tom Perez should be canned; and declared the Democratic Party was hurt by the media who have become “AOC crazy.”
Carville said he would vote for Sanders if he wins the Democratic nomination, but only begrudgingly because he wouldn’t have “another choice.”
“But look at the British Labour Party. We’re like talking about people voting from jail cells. We’re talking about not having a border. I mean, come on people,” Carville said.
In the end, Carville said that Democrats should focus on running smart campaigns that focus on retaking control of the Senate.
“You and I know that 18% of the country elects 52 senators,” he said, addressing former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. “The urban core is not gonna get it done. What we need is power! Do you understand? That’s what this is about!”
All this is true, especially the part about needing power, but not in the way Carville means it.
Broadly speaking, there are two wings to the modern Democratic Party: The corrupt wing, represented by the Clintons, and the insane wing, currently represented by Bernie Sanders. (The insane wing is, itself, probably split into two factions, the socialists and the social justice warriors, but the significance of that particular split is less important to the topic at hand.) The split in the factions dates back at least to the anti-Vietnam War New Left in 1968, with Eugene McCarthy facing off as their champion against Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, where the foundational myth of a racist, oppressive America was baked into the faction’s core beliefs. The New Left has been carrying out it’s long march through both the Party and various Democratic institutions ever since. George McGovern was its champion against Humphrey and Edmund Muskie in 1972, and the last insane wing factional candidate to win the Democratic Presidential nomination.
Obama was a fusionist candidate, with a background in both Alinsky radical politics and Chicago Daley machine corrupt wing politics. That, and a huge store of white liberal guilt, let him appeal to both wings, and Obama filled his cabinet with corrupt wing figures (Biden, Clinton, Kerry, etc.).
Sanders, a hardcore socialist who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, is the clear favorite of the insane wing, though almost half of the candidates who jumped into the race (Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Tom Steyer, Jay Inslee, Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, etc.) were vying for the insane wing’s “lane.” Sanders supporters were left very bitter by the DNC putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and they’re determined not to let it happen again.
If you read their writings, the insane wing is absolutely convinced that America is naturally a left-wing nation and that their triumph is “inevitable” thanks to changing demographics. George Soros and his ilk have been pumping money into the insane wing infrastructure for over twenty years, and they believe that only the inertia and opposition of the corrupt wing (which they refer to as “neoliberalism”) has halted their inevitable rise.
Before they can seize control of the means of production, they must first seize control of the Democratic Party. Only then can they assure that their personnel, and their ideas, take key positions in the Party. The corrupt wing, more in tune with electoral reality, more concerned with the immediate graft, and currently controlling most of the Party apparatus, stands in their way.
Just as the Bolsheviks purged the Mensheviks almost immediately upon taking power, the insane wing must push the corrupt wing out to seize control of the Party, something they were too poorly organized to carry out in 1972. (At the state level, liberal Democrats purged moderates and conservatives from the Party in Texas, encouraging them to vote in the Republican primary, because they calculated (correctly) that they could never seize control of the state Party as long as they were there. They calculated incorrectly that the Party rank and file would continue to vote for Democrats after their takeover; the result was over two decades of Republican control.)
The corrupt wing knows it’s toast if the insane wing takes over, which is why Tom Perez immediately purged all Sanders supporters after taking over as head of the DNC. That’s why the corrupt wing has Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Bloomberg as its champions. Both sides in the fight see the other as an existential threat to their control of the Party, and both sides have control of the Party as their most important and immediate goal. To quote Blazing Saddles, “Gentlemen, we have to protect our phony baloney jobs!”
To be sure, both sides hate Trump with the sort of white hot fury only reached by people whose Facebook friends seem to do nothing but share anti-Trump memes all day. But Trump isn’t the enemy at hand, or even really the enemy. (Old Cold War joke: An army general asks a colonel to name the enemy. “The Soviet Union,” says the colonel. “No!” says the general. “The Soviets are the opponent. The navy is the enemy!”) When push comes to shove, both sides see four more years of a Trump presidency as more survivable than letting the other faction control the Party.
Being creatures of the corrupt wing, the mainstream media hasn’t been covering this split, since Trump Derangement Syndrome sells better than interfactional fights. The irony is that this has let the Sanders brigades get to the foot of Mount Doom while nobody was paying attention. An additional irony is that the entire impeachment farce, designed to protect corrupt wing champion Biden, has backfired spectacularly, making Sander’s nomination much more likely.
If the DNC didn’t try to screw Sanders in the Iowa caucuses, they certainly gave every impression they were. It’s entirely possible that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and that the DNC will try to screw Bernie even more this year than they did in 2016. Expect dirty tricks to make 1968 and 1972 look like a cakewalk in comparison.
The insane wing is probably correct in that they make up a majority of voting Party activists. The corrupt wing is probably also correct in that Sanders is much too far left for the American electorate.
All that points to President Donald Trump winning in a 1972-style electoral blowout in November.
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Bernie Sanders, Bill Clinton, Communism, Democratic Party, Democrats, DNC, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Hillary Clinton, Hubert Humphrey, James Carville, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Social Justice Warriors, Tom Perez
Posted in Communism, Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors | 9 Comments »
Friday, February 7th, 2020
Another week chock-packed full of news:
Impeachment farce ends with President Donald Trump acquitted. Let’s hope Democrats are severely punished in November for wasting so much time on bogus garbage.
So Bernie Sanders won 6,000 more votes than Pete Buttigieg, but by the amazingly fair and in no way flawed or crooked process Mayor Pete won two more “state delegate equivalents” in Iowa than Bernie. How many actual national delegates get apportioned to who remains to be seen. Elizabeth Warren came in third, while Joe Biden came in fourth with just enough votes to put him over the 15% threshold to win delegates.
More than 100 official ballot discrepancies in Iowa?
Speaking of weird Iowa voting artifacts, enjoy a long, detailed, borderline tedious discussion of how “satellite” voting sites counting methods might or might not have screwed Sanders depending on which type of rounding is used.
This morning’s official Cornoavirus totals:
Total Infected:31,522 (up from 9,776 last Friday)
Total Deaths: 638
Total Recovered: 1,741
Number of Countries Where Cases Have Been Confirmed (new in bold): 29 (China (including Hong Kong), Singapore, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Germany, the United States of America, Malaysia, Vietnam, Macau, Canada, France, United Arab Emirates, India, Italy, Russia, Philippines, UK, Cambodia, Finland, Napal, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Sri Lanka; there’s also an “Others” which I assume is Chinese territory, but not mainland China or Hong Kong)
In the U.S. Coronavirus cases have been spotted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Benito (CA), Seattle, Phoenix, Madison, Chicago and Boston, plus London, Ontario and Toronto. No deaths in U.S. locations.
Of course, all that assumes that China isn’t lying about the extent of infections there. Briefly leaked graphics from China tech conglomerate Tencent suggests that deaths may be two orders of magnitude higher than what China has admitted to.
Coronavirus vs SARS, in visual terms. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Eric S. Raymond thinks the cornoavirus outbreak might be a bioweapon backfiring, though he partially walks one of the reasons back.
More on the same theme from ZeroHedge, also inconclusive. I don’t have the deep biological background to remotely evaluate the technical claims. “Plausible but thus far unproven” seems to be the most logical stance based on what we currently know.
Speaking of ZeroHedge, they were suspended by Twitter for fingering the identity of Wuhan biolab researcher Dr. Peng Zhou. Awfully shady, Twitter…
The Winter of NeverTrump Discontent.
The NeverTrumpers all follow and retweet each other, creating an echo chamber, amplifying and reinforcing their Trump Derangement Syndrome. As Bush establishment Republicans, they would be delighted with the open borders and the endless wars of past Republican presidents. When confronted with a truly conservative presidential administration, they run like scalded dogs.
(Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
President Donald Trump is more popular at this point of his presidency than Obama was.
Former #NeverTrumper Erick Erickson says to dial it back, you hysterical ninnies. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Boom! Another al Qaeda leader dirtnapped, this time “Qasim al-Rimi, a founder and the leader of al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and a deputy to al-Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri,” taken out in Yemen.
“Cook Political Report Shifts Alabama Senate Race to Lean Republican After Doug Jones Votes to Convict.” Wait, how was it not already Leans Republican based on the facts that: A.) It’s Alabama, and B.) It’s Alabama?
Former Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi has died. He was a corrupt and mildly brutal scumbag, but far from the worst on the continent, and he prevented Kenya from descending into the violence and instability that plagued Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe (among many others).
Colorado wants to drive restaurants out of business with a “climate” tax. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Is supporting diversity a criteria for getting hire at Berkley? No, it’s the only criteria.
Ammoland brings us John Knox’s picks on who to vote for on the NRA board. (Hat tip: John Richardson.)
He’s back!
A link for Andrew: A bridge that didn’t quite collapse. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Massive “monster” galaxy has died (i.e., it stopped producing new stars). Or rather, it did this some 12 billion years ago, due to that pesky “speed-of-light” thing. I blame Thanos. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Inside a dog’s brain.
Florida Man: Grand Master Champion Edition: “Florida troopers find narcotics in bag labeled ‘Bag Full of Drugs.'”
Old and busted: Grumpy Cat (RIP). The New Hotness: Angry Cat.
“Journalists Caution Against Blaming Empire For blowing up Alderaan.”
I did not watch the Super Bowl, or the halftime show, but this is pretty funny:
An oldie, but a Golden oldie:
Tags:#NeverTrump, 2020 Election, 2020 Presidential Race, al Qaeda, Alabama, Bernie Sanders, California, China, Colorado, coronavirus, Crime, Democrats, dogs, Doug Jones, Elizabeth Warren, Eric S. Raymond, Florida, Florida Man, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, impeachment, Iowa, James Woods, Jihad, Joe Biden, Kenya, Military, NRA, pandemic, Peng Zhou, Pete Buttigieg, Qasim al-Rimi, Social Justice Warriors, Super Bowl, Tencent, Twitter, Yemen, Zero Hedge
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »
Monday, February 3rd, 2020
It begins!
The Iowa Caucuses are finally here today, Bernie panic wracks the DNC, a key poll mysteriously vanishes, Delaney drops Out, and one Biden staffer provides handy voter appreciation. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
A special shout-out to longtime readers who have been with me on this journay since January of last year. What a long, strange trip it’s been!
Polls
Emerson (Iowa): Sanders 28, Biden 21, Buttigieg 15, Warren 14, Klobuchar 11, Yang 5, Steyer 4, Gabbard 1, Bennet 1, Patrick 0.
CBS: Biden 25, Sanders 25, Buttigieg 21, Warren 16, Klobuchar 5.
Civiqs (Iowa): Sanders 28, Warren 21, Buttigieg 15, Biden 15, Klobuchar 8, Yang 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 2. Hard left lean and sample size of 615.
Post and Courier (South Carolina): Biden 25, Sanders 20, Steyer 18, Warren 11, Buttigieg 7, Gabbard 3, Yang 3, Klobuchar 2. Bad news for Biden from his “firewall” state, as Steyer is making inroads into the black vote.
New York Times (Iowa): Sanders 25, Buttigieg 18, Biden 17, Warren 15, Klobuchar 8, Steyer 3, Yang 3.
Emerson (Iowa): Sanders 30, Biden 21, Klobuchar 13, Warren 11, Buttigieg 10, Steyer 5, Yang 5, Gabbard 5, Delaney 1, Patrick 0, Bennet 0.
USA Today/Suffolk (Iowa): Biden 25, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 18, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6.
Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University (New Hampshire): Sanders 29, Biden 22, Warren 16, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 5.
American Research Group (New Hampshire): Sanders 28, Biden 13, Buttigieg 12, Warren 11, Gabbard 8, Klobuchar 7, Yang 5, Patrick 2, Steyer 2, Bloomberg (write-in) 2, Bennet 1. Sample size of 600.
Berkeley IGS (California): Sanders 26, Warren 20, Biden 15, Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 5, Yang 4, Steyer 2.
Salt Lake City Tribune (Utah): Sanders 27, Warren 14, Biden 12, Bloomberg 10, Buttigieg 5, Yang 5, Klobuchar 3, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1. Tiny poll sample size of 132. You would think this was unrepresentative, but Bernie crushed Hillary in Utah in 2016, winning 79% of the vote. I think Utah has moved to a primary system this year (and one run by the state, not by the political parties).
Real Clear Politics polls.
538 poll average.
Election betting markets. Sanders leads Biden by 8 points here as well, Bloomberg is third, and Hillary Clinton is favored over Buttigieg, Yang or Klobuchar (in that order).
Pundits, etc.
Steyer and Bloomberg dropped $340 million in Q4.
Democrat presidential candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer spent a combined $340 million in the final quarter of 2019, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) data released on Friday.
Both billionaire candidates far outspent their Democrat rivals, according to the FEC. Former New York City Mayor Bloomberg, whose campaign is almost entirely self-funded, spent more than $188 million in the fourth quarter of 2019 and ended the fundraising period with $12 million cash available.
Steyer, a California businessman, spent approximately $153 million in the fourth quarter and ended it with $5.4 million cash available.
The figures from the FEC show that both billionaire Democrats spent more money on their campaigns than the top four Democrat contenders combined.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spent slightly over $50 million in the fourth quarter, while former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg spent $34 million.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) spent $33.7 million while former Vice President Joe Biden spent more than $23.3 million during the fourth quarter.
The DNC hates Sanders so much they’re actually talking about changing the rules back so superdelegates can screw him:
A small group of Democratic National Committee members has privately begun gauging support for a plan to potentially weaken Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and head off a brokered convention.
In conversations on the sidelines of a DNC executive committee meeting and in telephone calls and texts in recent days, about a half-dozen members have discussed the possibility of a policy reversal to ensure that so-called superdelegates can vote on the first ballot at the party’s national convention. Such a move would increase the influence of DNC members, members of Congress and other top party officials, who now must wait until the second ballot to have their say if the convention is contested.
“I do believe we should re-open the rules. I hear it from others as well,” one DNC member said in a text message last week to William Owen, a DNC member from Tennessee who does not support re-opening the rules.
Owen, who declined to identify the member, said the member added in a text that “It would be hard though. We could force a meeting or on the floor.”
Even proponents of the change acknowledge it is all but certain not to gain enough support to move past these initial conversations. But the talks reveal the extent of angst that many establishment Democrats are feeling on the eve of the Iowa caucuses.
Sanders is surging and Joe Biden has maintained his lead nationally, but at least three other candidates are widely seen as viable. The cluster raises the specter of a convention requiring a second ballot.
If Sanders wins the Iowa caucuses on Monday and continues to gain momentum, it is possible he could arrive at the convention with the most delegates — but without enough to win the nomination on the first ballot. It is also possible that he and Elizabeth Warren, a fellow progressive, could arrive at the convention in second and third place, but with more delegates combined than the frontrunner.
If, on the second ballot, superdelegates were to throw their support to someone else, tipping the scales, many moderate Democrats fear the upheaval that would cause could weaken the eventual nominee.
Democratic insiders enter the Danger Panic Zone over Sanders. “Democrats have valid reasons to be concerned. Bernie Sanders may play well to the Ocasio-Cortez wing of their party. Still, it’s hard to picture voters abandoning the booming Trump economy for the radical changes Bernie is proposing in a general election.”
Michael Brendan Dougherty thinks its going to come down to Biden and Bernie:
I’d bet on the field to narrow to these two for two reasons.
First, there’s a tendency for the top-polling candidates going into Iowa to overperform in the final results, because the caucusing process ultimately forces supporters of low-performing candidates to cast their votes for stronger ones. Second, the possibility of Bernie’s winning may drive a stampede toward Biden or vice versa.
The emergence of a head-to-head race between Biden and Sanders would immediately clarify the choices for Democrats.
One septuagenarian — Sanders — has recently suffered a heart attack. The other septuagenarian — Biden — frequently seems to have senior moments in the middle of his sentences. A race between these two could eliminate age as a relevant dynamic, leaving clear questions of electability and ideology on the table.
And what then? On one side there is Biden, the more moderate Democrat who scares nobody by design — he’s framed his entire campaign as a return to normalcy — but doesn’t excite progressive activists. On the other side there is Sanders, whose has argued in recent debates that he is electable because he has the backing of a large, young, grassroots movement whose enthusiasm will become contagious. The viability of one could drive the viability of the other.
After many pointless hours debating the ins and outs of Platonic health-care reforms that will never be implemented and many pointless minutes worrying about personality, a Biden–Sanders clash would focus the race on the only questions that really matter to Democrats: Should the party move to the left or to the center?
How should other candidate stop Bernie? I don’t know, maybe by actually attacking him? Too bad none of them have tried that.
Still, there is reason to believe that an attack on Sanders’ resistance to math would contain his rise. The Democratic Party has plenty of moderates who get nervous about overpromising and overreaching. Even Sanders’ best national poll, a 3-point lead within the margin of error in a CNN survey last week, shows the combined support of him and Warren to be 3 points less than the combined support of the four leading moderates: Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Mike Bloomberg. If Sanders can be shown to be unwilling to grapple with the finer points of policymaking, that would likely hamper his ability to forge a coalition beyond his initial democratic-socialist base, which would in turn prevent him from securing the nomination.
But a bigger shadow lurks over the Democratic field: the ghost of the Republican presidential campaign of 2016, when the candidates (like Jeb Bush) who attacked the outsider with the intense fan base lived to regret it. If you attack Sanders, and his democratic socialist platform, as mathematically challenged, you are not just attacking Sanders. You are attacking democratic socialism itself. And if you’re in a party with a young wave of democratic socialists as its newest and most unpredictable force, you risk disaster.
No one can say with certainty how many Sanders supporters would abandon the Democratic nominee if he lost the nomination. But we do know that his supporters are, on average, less loyal to the Democratic Party than voters who prefer other candidates. The Economist’s data guru G. Elliott Morris reported, based on two months of his operation’s polling toward the end of last year, that 87 percent of Sanders supporters would stick with the Democrats if he wasn’t the nominee. That’s a lot, but more than 90 percent of Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Warren supporters said they would vote for the Democrats this fall, no matter what. And just a few percentage points, if even that, could decide the presidency.
A look at why the frontrunners aren’t attacking others in their “lane”:
The relative tameness of this year’s race also stems from the candidates’ overlapping set of assumptions about how the primary will play out after Iowa. Biden’s camp is convinced that if the former vice president can’t win Iowa—and they are not sure he can if turnout is high—a Sanders win would be the best outcome for him. The reason, according to interviews with top Biden advisers, is that they believe Sanders has a ceiling on his support that will impede his ability to clinch the nomination. They believe that a victory for Warren, Buttigieg, or Klobuchar would pose a greater threat—a win for the latter two would also represent a meteor strike on the moderate voters Biden is relying upon.
The trio of Warren, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar are lagging behind Sanders and Biden, but they are betting that Iowa and the New Hampshire primary after that will not winnow the field as quickly as in the past. Instead, all three campaigns generally believe that the heightened media attention on the race, and the rise of online fundraising, will allow them to survive regardless of whether they win, or even finish in the top tier, in the first two states. “The idea that this is going to fit into the same mold as every other campaign you have covered in the past … is inaccurate,” Michael Halle, a senior adviser for Buttigieg told reporters this weekend.
But Iowa’s stakes may be higher than the candidates’ cautious strategy would seem to indicate. [Jeff] Link is one of several Democratic strategists who thinks that all of the campaigns are underestimating how powerfully the Iowa results may reshape the rest of the race. He believes the risks for the others are especially great if Sanders wins, because a victory here would likely further turbocharge the senator’s fundraising operation, which is already swamping those of his rivals. “There’s a kind of lack of urgency between Warren and Biden and Buttigieg and Klobuchar,” Link said. “Anyone who thinks it’s okay to let Sanders win anything is miscalculating.”
More on the fear of a Bernie Planet:
Dan “Baseball Crank” McLaughlin looks at the Democratic primary calendar:
Barring a last-minute surge in Iowa by Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesotan who has banked her whole campaign on her neighboring state, this is a four-horse race that increasingly looks like it could quickly become a two-horse race between Biden and Bernie Sanders. But funny things can happen at the last minute in Iowa. The most stunning late surge was in the 2012 Republican caucus, when Rick Santorum won after being in sixth place and single digits in the polling averages as late as a week before the vote.
In December 1975, a month before Jimmy Carter won the Iowa caucus with 27 percent of the vote, a nationwide Gallup poll showed Hubert Humphrey in first place at 30 percent, George Wallace at 20 percent, Henry “Scoop” Jackson at 10 percent, and Birch Bayh at 5 percent. Some 29 percent of Democrats said they would back Ted Kennedy if he ran. Carter wasn’t even on the radar. Carter was in better shape in the Des Moines Register’s Iowa polling, but his victory still totally overturned the race. National poll leaders in January lost the Democratic nomination in 2008, 2004, 1992, 1988, and 1972. Polling has gotten more sophisticated since then, but large fields and sequential primaries make it a lot less reliable than general-election polling.
Iowa is particularly unsettled in this year’s Democratic race because of the way the 15 percent threshold interacts with the caucus process. Unlike the 2016 Republican race, and even many past Democratic primaries, there are no winner-take-all Democratic primaries this year. Various states have different ways of dividing up delegates — some statewide, some on a district-by-district basis — but many have a 15 percent or similar threshold that prevents minor candidates from gathering any delegates. And Iowa’s caucus rules have a particular wrinkle: In each individual polling place, after the original votes are counted, all the candidates below 15 percent are eliminated and their supporters must switch to one of the remaining candidates (or band together to make one of the under-15% candidates viable) if they want their votes counted. That means that even a candidate who wins the statewide popular vote may be effectively wiped off the ballot in some polling stations. Second choices could decide Iowa.
Go over and read it for a long, detailed, and hard-to-summarize breakdown of the race. “After South Carolina, the calendar and the map are new, and they could make this race less predictable than in years past. Buckle up.”
It’s going to be hard for Democrats to win the White House without Pennsylvania, so maybe they shouldn’t have promised to put hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians out of work with a fracking ban.
A look at how the race got where it is today:
Take your mind back there. Miami. June 2019. Two nights, 20 candidates. A portrait of the Democratic Party in miniature assembled onstage, mics on, ready to debate.
They are U.S. senators and House members, governors and a mayor, a refreshingly human economic futurist and a self-help guru best known as Oprah’s spiritual adviser. They are young and old, black and white and Asian and brown, wealthy and in debt, gay and straight, war veterans, hailing from all parts of the country. They are, as Democratic chairman Tom Perez proudly points out, “the most diverse field in our nation’s history.”
Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?
There was a sense of possibility and optimism on that stage. Fast forward six months. The leading Democratic candidates are all white. Three are men, and three are older than 70. Meanwhile two old white billionaires are buying their way into contention by spending hundreds of millions of their personal fortunes. At this point four years ago, the top candidates for the Republican nomination were more diverse than the Democratic frontrunners today. Many politicians hailed as the Future of The Party — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O’Rourke — are gone, exiting the race before a single vote was cast.
Reasons: Trump is inside their heads driving them crazy, the DNC rules ostensibly designed to make the contest fairer backfired spectacularly, and the press sucks. Left out is the fact that all the dropped out candidates sucked to various degrees as well…
President Trump slams Biden, Warren, Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Sanders at Iowa rally. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
538 does a district by district breakdown in Iowa.
Behold the totally fair and in-no-way-biased coverage of the Warren-and-Klobuchar-endorsing New York Times:
Unverified rumor thus far:
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still all in on New Hampshire. So we have to wait until at least February 11 to bid goodbye to him.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s betting on Catholics in Iowa. How many of those haven’t been completed alienated by the Democratic Party by now? Amalgamated Transit Union backs Biden, after backing Bernie in 2016. Just how much muscle organized labor still has left remains to be seen. Sanders supporters arrested for trespassing at Biden’s Iowa HQ. (Hat tip: TheDonald.win, which appears to be where the Reddit group went after they got siloed in the isolation tank.) Score this one for Joe:
Panders to Obama voters by suggesting Michelle as veep pick. Hunter Biden magnanimously agrees to actually heed a judge’s order and pay child support. Now enjoy some scurrilous, unfounded gossip that’s still completely hilarious:
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bloomberg dropped $200,114,049.18 on his own campaign. The DNC changed the debate rules to make it easier for Moneybags Bloomberg to qualify:
The Democratic National Committee eliminated Friday a fundraising requirement to qualify for the February debate in Las Vegas, potentially paving the way for former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to make the stage for the first time.
Under the new criteria, candidates can meet either a delegates threshold or a polling threshold to qualify for the Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas, just three days before the Nevada caucuses.
Specifically, candidates must have been allocated at least one pledged delegate at the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary.
Candidates can also qualify by reaching 10 percent support in at least four national polls or surveys of South Carolina and Nevada released between Jan. 15 and Feb. 18.
Alternatively, a candidate can qualify for the debate by reaching 12 percent support in two sanctioned national or early-state surveys.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Slipping Buttigieg under heavy pressure to finish strong in Iowa.” Yeah, if he doesn’t at least place, with his money and organizational advantages, I don’t think he has a prayer; Bernie, Biden and Bloomberg can all solider on without Top Two finishes in either Iowa or New Hampshire; Buttigieg can’t. He already has five town halls scheduled in New Hampshire. Was on This Week, along with Yang. He doesn’t think there’s any room for pro-life Democrats in the party. (Hat tip: Mike Huckabee.) Not just pandering, but really stupid and ineffective pandering:
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But why won’t she shut up? Is she angling for a veep spot? Does she not realize how much of the Democratic base actively hates her? “Hillary’s ego blinds her to the fact that nobody in either party wants to hear from her, and the fact that criticizing Bernie just reminds his supporters that the Democratic machine is out to get him.” She refused Tulsi Gabbard’s process servers. I was unaware you could even do that. Are we a nation of laws or a ruling nomenklatura?
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: Dropped Out January 31, 2020. I mean, why not wait three days until the Iowa caucuses give you an excuse to bow out anyway? Did he hit a self-imposed spending limit? Did he have no staffers left? Did the campaign office space lease agreement run out in January? Could he not book the Dubuque Pizza Hut banquet room for the “victory” party Tuesday night? This is like getting 100 yards from the end of a marathon, and then going “Yeah, screw it, I’m done.”
In fact, most Democratic voters didn’t even know who Delaney was. In a recent average of national polls that asked Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the candidates, less than 40 percent of Democrats knew enough about Delaney to have an opinion of him. (This was also true of other long shot candidates like Sen. Michael Bennet and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.)
Delaney did have millions at his disposal to self-fund his bid, which probably helped him stay in the race longer than some other also-rans, but unlike billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and billionaire activist Tom Steyer, his ample cash reserves didn’t help him make headway in the race. But like Bloomberg, he was running as a moderate candidate. In fact, Delaney’s attempt to contrast himself with the progressives in the field during the second Democratic debate in July maybe gave him his one big “moment” in the race. It ultimately didn’t help his poll numbers, but in that debate he got a lot of airtime attacking the Medicare-for-all health care plans of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, illustrating a major division between the moderate and progressive “lanes” of the Democratic Party.
Delaney was probably the least likely of all Democratic candidates to destroy America’s economy. No wonder he never had a chance…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. So why did CNN snub her? Other than the fact they’re total garbage? She campaigned in New Hampshire.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s on the rise in Iowa.
A late surge for a candidate in Iowa wouldn’t be unprecedented either. Some notable past shifts include the 2004 Democratic race, in which John Kerry and John Edwards ended up capturing 38 and 32 percent of the vote, respectively, after polling at 24 and 19 percent going into the caucuses. And then, of course, there is the 2012 GOP contest, when Rick Santorum made a remarkably late push and actually won the caucuses with around 25 percent support despite polling at 13 percent going into caucus night.
I don’t think she can win or place, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see her pick up delegates, and to do better than Warren and/or Buttigieg. She campaigned in Iowa and said she was going to campaign in New Hampshire no matter what. Doesn’t think Sanders should lead the ticket. (Hat tip: CutJibNews on Ace of Spades HQ.)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Focusing on New Hampshire and South Carolina. Lasting longer than Cory Booker is no achievement if you can’t best his 3%…
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bernie’s brand is left but not woke:
Sanders is a Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot. Class relations are foundational; everything else is epiphenomenal. Sanders may have outgrown the revolutionary socialism of his youth. He seems to think in terms of ameliorating bourgeois hegemony rather than overthrowing it. He is not necessarily hostile to transgender claims. He has co-sponsored the current version of the Equality Act, which includes transgender people in the classes to be provided equal public accommodation and to be protected from job discrimination. But Sanders certainly does seem to think that such concerns are secondary. Compare and contrast the answers that he and Elizabeth Warren gave at the December 19 Democratic debate in Los Angeles.
Yamiche Alcindor of PBS asked:
Senator Sanders, at least 22 transgender people were killed in the United States this year, [most] of them transgender women of color. Each of you has said you would push for the passage of the Equality Act, a comprehensive LGBTQ civil-rights bill. But if elected, what more would you do to stop violence against transgender people?
Sanders’s answer quickly pivoted away from the cultural to the material.
We need moral leadership in the White House. We need a president who will do everything humanly possible to end all forms of discrimination against the transgender community, against the African American community, against the Latino community, and against all minorities in this country.
But above and beyond providing the moral leadership of trying to bring our people together, what we also need for the transgender community is to make sure that health care is available to every person in this country, regardless of their sexual orientation or their needs.
And that is why I strongly support and have helped lead the effort for a Medicare for All single-payer program, which will provide comprehensive health care to all people, including, certainly, the transgender community.
The question went next to Warren. She plunged directly into the question of identity.
The transgender community has been marginalized in every way possible. And one thing that the president of the United States can do is lift up attention, lift up their voices, lift up their lives.
Here’s a promise I make. I will go to the Rose Garden once every year to read the names of transgender women, of people of color, who have been killed in the past year. I will make sure that we read their names so that as a nation we are forced to address the particular vulnerability on homelessness. I will change the rules now that put people in prison based on their birth sex identification rather than their current identification. I will do everything I can to make sure that we are an America that leaves no one behind.
Sanders checked a box of support for the identity issue, then returned to regular programming. For Warren, the identity issue was the regular programming.
Bernie Sanders is a fragile candidate. He has never fought a race in which he had to face serious personal scrutiny. None of his Democratic rivals is subjecting him to such scrutiny in 2020. Hillary Clinton refrained from scrutinizing Sanders in 2016. It did not happen, either, in his many races in Vermont. A Politico profile in 2015 by Michael Kruse argued that Sanders had benefited from “an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters, and local reporters who have steered clear” of writing about Sanders’s personal history “rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.”
The Trump campaign will not steer clear. It will hit him with everything it’s got. It will depict him as a Communist in the grip of twisted sexual fantasies, a useless career politician who oversaw a culture of sexual harassment in his 2016 campaign. Through 2019, Donald Trump and his proxies hailed Sanders as a true voice of the people, thwarted by the evil machinations of the Hillary Clinton machine. They will not pause for a minute before pivoting in 2020 to attack him as a seething stew of toxic masculinity whose vicious online followers martyred the Democratic Party’s first female presidential nominee.
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary Clinton says in a forthcoming documentary. She stood by those words in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last week. At the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this past weekend, Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, that Sanders—alone among the Democratic aspirants in 2020—had refused to meet with her. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, you will hear Clinton’s negative assessment of him repeated so often by pro-Trump talkers that you will almost think Clinton is Trump’s running mate.
Trump will terrorize the suburban moderates with the threat that Sanders will confiscate their health insurance and stock holdings, if not their homes. Trump accused Democrats of pro-ayatollah sympathies for noticing that his story about the killing of Qassem Soleimani was full of holes. [Should have put a “David Frum Warning” beforehand. -LP] In 1980, Sanders joined a left-wing party whose presidential candidate condemned “anti-Iranian hysteria around the U.S. hostages” being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, suggesting that “many of them are simply spies … or people assigned to protect the spies,” as Ronald Radosh reported in The Daily Beast. Imagine what Trump and his team will do with that.
The members of the team around Sanders are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle. They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.
Bernie’s human shield of Millennials:
A specter is haunting centrist Democrats — the specter of a Bernie Sanders nomination. As the democratic socialist has taken the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire, and narrowed Joe Biden’s advantage in national polls, the high clerics of Clintonism have begun calling for a (political) counterrevolution.
“People need to start taking Bernie pretty seriously — there is a really substantial risk of him becoming unstoppable if he wins these early states by large numbers,” Matt Bennett, vice-president of the centrist think tank Third Way, told the Washington Post this week. Bennett went on to chastise his fellow moderates for getting anxious instead of organized, lamenting, “It’s not like our phone is ringing from people saying, ‘Let’s do something.’ ”
Third Way has been flooding influential Iowa Democrats’ in-boxes with memos on Sanders’s general-election liabilities and seeding similar stories in the mainstream press. Meanwhile, the Democratic Majority for Israel super-PAC is warning Iowans that a vote for a septuagenarian socialist with a heart condition is, in effect, a vote for four more years of President Trump. But a broad-based, deep-pocketed “Anyone But Sanders” push has yet to take shape. Allies of Michael Bloomberg have indicated that the billionaire’s burgeoning campaign will transform itself into such an entity, if necessary. If Biden suffers damage in the early states, the last thing he’ll need is for Bloomberg, an alternative anti-left candidate, to ramp up his (already gargantuan) ad spending, and likely eat into Uncle Joe’s margins on Super Tuesday. But by the time Iowa and New Hampshire are in the books, it may already be too late
Snip.
Even if one accepts Third Way’s memo as gospel, the hazards of mounting a massive “Anyone But Sanders” campaign still outweigh the benefits.
The reason for this is simple: Democrats will need high turnout among young, left-leaning voters in November, and Bernie Sanders is overwhelmingly popular with such voters.
The age gap between the support bases of the two leading Democratic candidates is unprecedented in scale. According to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday, Bernie Sanders boasts the support of 53 percent of Democratic voters under 35 nationwide, while Joe Biden lays claim to just 3 percent. That poll’s margin of error is 3.4 percentage points — which means that the percentage of younger voters who support the Democratic Party’s current front-runner could, technically, round down to zero. In other national surveys, age polarization among Democratic primary voters tends to be a bit less severe. But in virtually all of them, Biden’s support among the young is historically low for a front-running candidate, while Sanders’s popularity with the contingent is exceptionally high.
It will be hard enough for Biden to mobilize younger voters after beating Sanders in a relatively friendly primary fight, free of conspicuous interference from Establishment forces. If Uncle Joe has to win millennial and Gen-Z hearts and minds — after riding to the nomination on the back of a wall-to-wall anti-Bernie ad blitz from Third Way and friends — his task may be impossible. Although Sanders’s 2016 backers did not sit out (or defect) during the general election in aberrantly high numbers, the age gap between Biden and Bernie backers this year is even larger than the one that prevailed between Clinton and the Vermont senator four years ago. One recent Emerson College poll found that only 53 percent of Sanders’s current supporters plan to vote for the Democratic nominee in November, no matter who that person turns out to be.
Eh, I don’t find this argument entirely persuasive. Young voters are notoriously bad at actually showing up at the polls. What they gain in youth votes they lose in the “not voting for crazy socialists” vote. Besides, we should realize that the DNC was going to go all in to screw Bernie no matter what anyway… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Would Trump-Sanders 2020 be a replay of Nixon McGovern 1972?
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Steyer raised $156,640,495.93 in Q4, though only a million of that came from other people. He’s up to third in South Carolina, which speaks to the power of money. He’s so horrible a candidate that buying his way into vague contention is an actual achievement…
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren’s tranny pander is pure cringe. Even Bill Maher slammed her for it. Shoe0nHead slams Warren the snake. (Shoe used to stan for Tulsi, but now stans for Bernie.) Ted Cruz said her impeachment shenanigans helped insure President Trumps’ acquittal.
Ms. Warren’s question during Thursday’s session sought to impugn the credibility of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. by saying his credibility was on the line in the impeachment trial.
Mr. Cruz, Texas Republican, said the question seemed desired to boost Ms. Warren’s struggling presidential campaign, but its immediate effect was to irk key GOP senators who realized Democrat’s‘ strategy to prolong the trial was centered on trying to drag the chief justice ever deeper into the action.
“Elizabeth Warren helped defeat the impeachment of the president of the United States,” Mr. Cruz said late Friday on a new episode of his podcast “The Verdict.”
“That stunt helped deliver the votes of Lisa and Lamar.”
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Transcript of an Andrew Yang speech in Iowa. There are actual interesting nuggets of truth in here.
So I went to our leaders in D.C. and I asked them, “What are we going to do to help our people manage this time – this transition?” And what do you think the folks in D.C. said to me when I said, “What are we going to do?” The three big responses I got from the folks in D.C. were these: No. 1: “We cannot talk about this”; No. 2: “We should study this further”; and No. 3: “We must educate and retrain all Americans for the jobs of the future.” How many of you have ever heard something like that?
But I’m a numbers guy and I looked at the studies. So I said to the folks who said we’re going to educate and retrain everyone, I said: “Hey, do you want to know what the effectiveness rate of government-funded retraining programs were for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs?”
You all want to guess what those effectiveness rates were? So, I’m anchoring you very low, so you know it’s low, but you also know it’s low because you’re human beings and you know what other human beings are like, and if you had 1,000 manufacturing workers walk out of the factory that closed, they don’t all say, “Alright, I’m ready for my coding skills training.” And they don’t go in being like, “Oh, this is what I wanted to do the whole time!” And six weeks later they aren’t being like, “Time to get hired by I.B.M.” I mean, we know that’s ridiculous.
The real-life success rates of those government-funded retraining programs were between 0 and 15 percent. Almost half of the workers who lost their jobs in the manufacturing industry in the Midwest never worked again. We then saw surges in suicides and drug overdoses in those communities because half of them filed for disability and they did not find new work. When I said this to the folks in D.C., they said, “Well I guess we’ll get better at the retraining programs then.” And then they went back to their lunch.
Watching Yang tour Iowa.
The centerpiece of Andrew Yang’s final push in Iowa is a 17-day-bus tour: Bouncing around rural Iowa, hitting three to five towns a day, instilling the fear of automation and the hope of a large monthly check from the government in would-be caucus-goers.
The route of the tour is an indication of the campaign’s strategy to try to nibble around the edges, popping up in areas that aren’t as delegate-rich but that other candidates aren’t paying as close attention to. The expectations for Yang are so low, his advisers know, that he just needs to surprise.
Meat of piece snipped. Near the end:
Publicly, Yang tells Iowans he’s ready to “win in Iowa,” but behind the scenes his campaign is under no illusions. They feel confident their rural strategy can yield a fifth-place finish and give them enough to move on to New Hampshire with their heads held high.
Gets endorsed by the Lowell Sun. I don’t think newspaper endorsements move the needle, but endorsing someone outside the ostensible frontrunners is unusual. (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.) This is a pretty good get for your phone bank:
Why Yang won’t win the nomination, and why he might be formidable if he did, in one tweet:
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
Actor Alec Baldwin
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
Former California Governor Jerry Brown
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. But! There was actually a report floated that he was considering getting in, that he actually had to come out and deny. Maybe, like Hillary, he’s secretly hoping to be called on at a brokered convention. Even better: Why not both? CLINTON-KERRY 2020: BECAUSE WE REALLY REALLY HATE YOU
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Dave Chappelle, David Frum, Democrats, Deval Patrick, DNC, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, fundraising, Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Iowa, Joe Biden, Matt Bennett, Media Watch, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Obama, New Hampshire, New York Times, Pennsylvania, Pete Buttigieg, ShoeOnHead, Social Justice Warriors, South Carolina, Superdelegates, Ted Cruz, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, unions
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Friday, January 24th, 2020
Burisma, Chinese plagues and falling iguanas all feature in this Friday’s LinkSwarm!
Emails tie “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella to Obama White House meeting on Bursima.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham reported Wednesday evening that she obtained a chain of State Department emails stemming from a standard request for comment from New York Times journalist Ken Vogel, whose reporting helped generate scrutiny of Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Hunter Biden, 49, is the son of Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, and Republicans have called for him to testify during the Ukraine-related Senate impeachment trial against President Trump.
On May 1, 2019, Vogel contacted State Department official Kate Schilling about a story he was working on regarding an Obama administration meeting in January 2016 with Ukrainian prosecutors and mentioned the name of the CIA analyst believed to be the whistleblower whose complaint sparked impeachment proceedings that led to two articles of impeachment: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Would you believe that the New York Times had and killed the story of the meeting? Of course you would. It reflected badly on Democrats. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Top seven lies Adam Schiff has told to booster impeachment. Pretty much all of these should be familiar…
“Democrats Warn That American People May Tamper With Next Election.” “‘When the Founders wrote that founding document thing, they never imagined there would be electoral outcomes that Democrats did not agree with.’ Democrats also said they even have hard evidence that the 2016 election was compromised by Republicans voting for Trump.”
Final Brexit bill passes. The EU is reportedly quite eager to hurt its largest trading partner to spite its face…
John Bercow is so very, very upset that Tories are blocking his peerage, in much the same way he blocked Brexit…
Giant warehouse explosion in Houston. No reports of injuries, but the explosion was said to be heard 20 miles away… Update: Now hearing it was a manufacturing facility, with a propylene tank as the suspected cause, with two dead and one missing.
China’s birthrate hits historic low. Mark Steyn always said that China would get old before it got rich.
China is also trying to control the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic:
The Chinese government has placed the city of Wuhan under quarantine in an attempt to stop the spread of the deadly, pneumonia-like virus called 2019-nCoV.
According to a Chinese news bulletin, all passenger transportation out of the city has been temporarily suspended. That means that the city’s 11 million residents, hundreds of whom have fallen ill and at least nine of whom have died from the viral outbreak, are trapped unless they receive special permission to leave.
The virus quickly spread to nearby Japan, Thailand, and South Korea, and a traveler from Wuhan also carried it to the U.S.
In the face of a global outbreak, the Chinese government has been trying to maintain control of the narrative, censoring media and deleting social media posts that don’t align with its official statements.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Last coronavirus death count is 26 people, with more than 30 million people under quarantine. By contrast, the 2014-2016 west African Ebola outbreak killed more than 11,000 people.
But wait! Wuhan is also home to a lab studying the world’s most dangerous pathogens.
Coronavirus case in Brazos County, Texas? That’s home to College Station and Texas A&M University.
For its new White House correspondent, CNN hired the guy who got caught asking the DNC what he should ask.
First! Rule! You! Fucking! Idiot!
Smear someone as a “white nationalist” on the says so of the SPLC, just because they want to enforce border control laws? Enjoy your $5 million lawsuit.
Hungary to abolish Gender Studies. Good.
Hungary’s Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen has stated that such programs “ha[ve] no business in universities” as they represent “an ideology, not a science,” with a market profile “close to zero.” Similarly, Orban’s Chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said, “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best [and] the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area.”
Media estimates of 22,000 for the Second Amendment rally are probably too low. “I think when all is said and done, the crowd of gun rights supporters attending Lobby Day on Monday probably was double the official figure and approached 50,000.”
Speaking of Virginia Democrats trying to override inconvenient passages in that pesky Bill of Rights: “Virginia Democrats File Bill To Make Online Criticism of Elected Officials a Crime.
Norway’s government falls over Islamic State bride.
“Austin’s Homeless Policy May Be Implicated in the City’s First Murder of 2020.”
In addition to Steve Adler all but personally inviting every transient drug addict in the state to take up residence in Austin, the killer was out on personnel recognizance bond after committing a burglary, thanks to yet another Austin City Council decision.
Fun things from the SHOT Show. (Hat tip: CutJibNews on Ace of Spades HQ.)
Amazon sues to stop to stop Microsoft $10 billion “war cloud” project for the Pentagon, evidently because President Trump is a big meanie who didn’t let them get the contract. Eh, Pentagon procurement bidding is pretty opaque under the best of circumstances, much less under the zillions of possible variations on setting up a cloud infrastructure. There’s no way whether to determine this is a real grievance or just sour grapes over losing a big contract.
Denver Post writer fired for insisting there are two sexes.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald charged with hacking in Brazil. Though in this case, “hacking” seems to amount to “publishing embarrassing information about members of the Brazilian government.”
In praise of Christopher Tolkien. It’s probably only a matter of time until Disney buys the Tolkien estate now…or someone far worse.
Terry Jones has eaten his last mint.
Lost Klimpt recovered. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit. )
Tradwife. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Icy with a chance of falling iguanas.
Again?
Enjoy your weekly funny dog tweet:
Tags:Adam Schiff, art, Austin, Brexit, Burisma, China, CNN, College Station, coronavirus, Crime, Democrats, Denver Post, dogs, Eric Ciaramella, EU, Florida, gun shows, Guns, homeless, Houston, Hungary, impeachment, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jihad, John Bercow, Ken Vogel, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Monty Python, New York Times, Norway, Obama, Obama Scandals, Obituary, pandemic, Second Amendment, Social Justice Warriors, Southern Poverty Law Center, Steve Adler, Texas, Texas A&M, trade, UK, Ukraine, Viktor Orban, Virginia, Zsolt Semjen
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