Posts Tagged ‘Israel’
Friday, January 10th, 2020
Iran news, analysis, etc. dominates today’s LinkSwarm!
“The targeting of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force and arguably the second most powerful man in Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a major blow to the Islamic Republic of Iran. His death will likely result in a devastating chain of suspicion and insecurity in Iran’s nodes of power.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“Reports Ukrainian Airliner Shot Down By Iranian Missile.” A Russian-made one, at that. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Trump’s Iran Policy Isn’t the Problem; Barack Obama’s Was“:
This week, President Donald Trump launched a global round of teeth gnashing when he ordered the killing of the greatest terrorist leader in the modern Middle East, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani was unquestionably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in Iraq and thousands of others throughout the Middle East — mostly Muslim. His global terror network ran from South America to Europe to Africa to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Soleimani was an unparalleled organizer and a pitiless murderer. His death was richly earned.
But for many in the media and on the domestic and international left, Trump’s action was precipitously “provocative.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Soleimani’s killing — which came directly after a Soleimani-approved terror assault on America’s embassy in Baghdad and amidst reported further plans for escalated terror against American targets — “disproportionate.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., suggested that Trump, not the Iranians, had “escalated” the situation. Former Vice President Joe Biden said that Trump had “just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.”
This reaction has been magnified by the media, many of whom have been speculating about the possibility of all-out war between the United States and Iran. Think pieces have been written about whether the United States will reactivate the draft (spoiler alert: No, we won’t). Musings have filled the newspapers about the supposed conflagration prompted not by Iranian evil but by Trumpian reactivity.
All of this smacks less of legitimate concern about what comes next than it does of sheer panic that Trump has overturned a decade of American and European appeasement of the Iranian regime. Ben Rhodes, former President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, architect of the Iran deal and an overt liar who told the American public that Iran was on its way to moderation if only the United States would loosen economic restrictions on the terror state, has placed blame for volatility squarely before Trump. Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser during the Iran deal and another overt liar who told the American public that Islamic terror against our Benghazi embassy was rooted in anger over a YouTube video, soberly informed Americans that “Americans would be wise to brace for war.” Biden suggested that in throwing out the Iran deal, Trump had paved the way for war — and, oh, by the way, the Iran deal was “airtight.”
This is a deliberate misreading of history designed to absolve the Obama administration of its Iran policy debacle. The administration pursued a policy of strengthening Iran economically — and did so while openly acknowledging that Iran would use that newly gained economic strength to pursue terrorism and ballistic missile testing. In speaking of the sanctions relief given to Iran, then-Secretary of State John Kerry explained in January 2016, “I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.”
Snip.
Then Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani. Suddenly, we have been informed by dishonest Democrats and their media allies, Iran has gone rogue.
Nonsense. Iran has been rogue for decades. The Iran deal was simply an attempt to whistle past the graveyard with the terror regime — to pay it off long enough so that President Barack Obama could declare the problem handled. This was, after all, the Obama strategy in Crimea and Syria: Declare a red line; run away from it; pretend that pusillanimous inaction is bravery and deterrence provocation.
Did Iran deliberately miss American troops? Seems possible.
“Israel Bombs Weapons Depot Run By Iranian Militia.”
Extensive statistics on defensive gun use. (Hat tip: Karl Rehn of KR Training.)
“Democrats Just Betrayed Working-Class Americans To Appease Environmentalists.” We just can’t have blue collar workers earning six figure incomes in the oil and gas industry, now can we?
Reporter Sharyl Attkisson files suit against Rod Rosenstein and four other Obama Administration Justice Department officials over the illegal hacking of her computer.
Besides Rosenstein, the other defendants named in the complaint are Shawn Henry, Sean Wesley Bridges, Robert Clarke, and Ryan White.
In 2010, then FBI Director Robert Mueller named Shawn Henry as the executive assistant director (EAD) of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch (CCRSB).
Henry left the FBI in 2012 and now is president of CrowdStrike Services, the cybersecurity firm hired by Democratic National Committee to examine its computer network in 2016 after it had been hacked. Crowdstrike ultimately determined Russia had hacked the DNC emails.
Shaun Wesley Bridges served as a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service for approximately six years, according to the complaint.
Between 2012 and 2014, he was assigned to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road, a covert online marketplace for illicit goods, including drugs.
In 2015 and 2017, Bridges was convicted of corruption related to his government work, and is now serving a prison sentence.
Defendant Robert Clarke was also a member of the Silk Road Task Force and Ryan White worked as an undercover informant for the DOJ.
White also worked as a contractor operating out of the Baltimore office under a group supervised by Rosenstein, according to the complaint.
Lots of interesting information here, especially the Crowstrike connection. Funny how the same names just keep coming up again and again when it comes to Justice Department abuse of power under Obama… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Hey look, it’s another Democratic Party dark money group! “Mind the Gap, the secretive group quietly reshaping big-money politics in Silicon Valley, is aiming to spend as much as $140 million to boost Democrats in the 2020 election.”
Waiting for President Donald Trump in Toledo:
Longer lines than an Apple Store opening!
Oh come on!
No longer news: Mexicans kill four other Mexican. Why it should be news: In Kansas City.
Some places in the United States have a long history of Latino settlement, with communities stretching back for generations, even centuries. One is not surprised by the large Mexican-American populations in California, Arizona or Texas, and we’re accustomed to Cubans in Miami, Puerto Ricans in New York, etc. However, on does not think of Kansas City this way, so when the headlines inform us that three guys named Villanueva-Morales, Alatorre and Caballero are charged with killing a combined total of seven people named Meza, Calderon, Anaya, Rodriguez-Gonzalez, Rodriguez and Rodriguez-Santilla in Wyandotte County, Kansas — well, what the heck is going on here? It appears, for example, that two gunmen can open fire in a Kansas City bar without risk that any of their bullets will hit someone who was actually born in America.
As evidence that our immigration problem is absolutely out of control, this situation in Kansas City is rather conclusive, but notice that this criminal mayhem in Kansas is just “local news.” If some deranged “alt-right” white guy had shot four Mexicans in Kansas City, CNN would be providing around-the-clock updates, but because it’s Mexicans killing Mexicans, nobody at the networks seems to care.
Homeless adler murders man in south Austin.
“Harris County Releases Illegal Immigrant DWI Suspect Slated for Deportation to Honduras.” On all of $100 bond.
Feminists attack Alcoholics Anonymous. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Heh, indeed:
And of course lefties on Twitter were triggered by it…
CNN is very upset that the Babylon Bee is honing in on its fake news business. “The Internet Is Only Big Enough For One Fake News Site.”
Ricky Gervais’ 2020 Golden Globes monologue. (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter via Director Blue.)
Mike Resnick, RIP.
Leonardo DiCaprio helps save drowning man.
Bullitt Mustang goes up for auction today.
You have to be a certain age to appreciate this one:
Pretty cool.
Dog Twitter:
Tags:aircraft, Ali Khamenei, Austin, Ben Shapiro, Border Controls, Crime, defensive gun use, Democrats, Department of Justice, dogs, Donald Trump, FBI, Guns, Harris County, Hollywood, homeless, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, Leonardo DiCaprio, LinkSwarm, Obama Scandals, Obituary, Qassem Suleimani, Ricky Gervais, Rod Rosenstein, science fiction, Sharyl Attkisson, Shaun Wesley Bridges, Shawn Henry, Social Justice Warriors, Ukraine
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, January 3rd, 2020
Start your new decade out with another LinkSwarm!
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Leader and Qods force commander Qasem Soleimani was killed in an airstrike in Baghdad.
Further thoughts from Graeme Wood:
Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force who was killed in Iraq yesterday, was the most successful military figure of his time. One should grade success not in absolute terms, but by how much is done with how little—and on that scale, Soleimani was a prodigy. The end of his career is as pivotal in the region as the retirement of an athlete who has dominated his sport, or a musician whose sound, once unique, somehow has become imitated by every young crooner out there. One difference is that Bob Dylan is still touring and Michael Jordan has moved on to hawking sneakers and steaks. Soleimani has earned the only retirement befitting a man of his long and appalling record, which is to be vaporized in a U.S. air strike.
Soleimani’s obituaries will note his involvement in numerous wars along Iran’s periphery (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen). But all these wars are in fact one war, the sole war he was fighting for his entire career, starting from his days as a young officer in the early 1980s fighting against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Consider Iran’s pathetic fortunes then: Its civilian population cowered in terror at Iraqi air raids; its military wasted itself in “human wave” attacks that generated “martyrs” at a startling pace. The territory Iran and Iraq traded, at immense cost, was minimal, and strategically worthless. Iran’s goal (and Soleimani’s) then would have been to avoid annihilation by Iraq—and then, only as a distant dream, to overrun its enemy and capture the Shiite holy places in Najaf, Karbala, Samarra, and Baghdad.
Now the notion of Iranian control of these cities hardly beggars the strategic imagination. The Iran-Iraq War has lasted three decades longer than history supposed, and the machinations of Soleimani have been largely responsible for its outcome now looking favorable to Iran. (The other contribution to this outcome was the botched occupation of Iraq by the United States.) Because the Iraqi side of the war against the Islamic State was fought in part by Iranian-backed militias, Soleimani in 2015 could appear in the city of Tikrit while supervising a take-back operation. The power of that image to an Iranian audience that remembered the sorrows of the 1980s cannot be overstated—the most recognizable Iranian general striding confidently through Saddam’s hometown!
Reciprocity is the key to President Donald Trump:
Reciprocity has been the key to understanding Donald Trump. Whether you are a media figure or a mullah, a prime minister or a pope, he will be good to you if you are good to him. Say something mean, though, or work against his interests, and he will respond in force. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be polite. There will be fallout. But you may think twice before crossing him again.
That has been the case with Iran. President Trump has conditioned his policies on Iranian behavior. When Iran spread its malign influence, Trump acted to check it. When Iran struck, Trump hit back: never disproportionately, never definitively. He left open the possibility of negotiations. He doesn’t want to have the Greater Middle East—whether Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, or Afghanistan—dominate his presidency the way it dominated those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. America no longer needs Middle Eastern oil. Best keep the region on the back burner. Watch it so it doesn’t boil over. Do not overcommit resources to this underdeveloped, war-torn, sectarian land.
The result was reciprocal antagonism. In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by his predecessor. He began jacking up sanctions. The Iranian economy turned to shambles. This “maximum pressure” campaign of economic warfare deprived the Iranian war machine of revenue and drove a wedge between the Iranian public and the Iranian government. Trump offered the opportunity to negotiate a new agreement. Iran refused.
Mess with the bull and you get the horns. (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)
Remember the reckoning Donald Trump brought to our smug, out-of-touch elites in 2016? Victor Davis Hanson says that in 2020, he’s bringing it even harder:
In my hometown near my central California farm, I spent autumn 2016 talking to mostly Mexican American friends with whom I went to grammar or high school. I had presumed then that they must hate Trump. Remember the speech in 2015 announcing he was going to stand, when he bashed illegal immigration, or his snide quip about the ‘Mexican judge’ in the Trump University lawsuit, or his expulsion of an interrupting Univision anchor, Jorge Ramos, from one of his campaign press conferences? But I heard no such thing. Most said they ‘liked’ Trump’s style, whether or not they were voting for him. They were tired of gangs in their neighborhoods and of swamped government services — especially the nearby Department of Motor Vehicles — becoming almost dysfunctional. I remember thinking that Trump of all people might get a third of the Latino vote: of no importance in blue California, but maybe transformative in Midwest swing states?
During the last two weeks I made the same rounds — a high-school football game at my alma mater, talks with Mexican American professionals, some rural farm events. Were those impressions three years ago hallucinations? Hardly. Trump support has, if anything, increased — and not just because of record low unemployment and an economy that has turned even my once-ossified rural community into a bustle of shopping, office-construction and home-building, with ‘Now Hiring’ signs commonplace. This time I noticed that my same friends always mentioned Trump in contrast to their damnation of California — the nearby ‘stupid’ high-speed rail to nowhere, the staged power shutoffs, the drought-stricken dead trees left untouched in flammable forests, the tens of thousands of homeless even in San Jose, Fresno and Sacramento, the sky-high gas prices, the deadly decrepit roads, the latest illegal-alien felon shielded from ICE. Whatever Trump was, my friends saw him as the opposite of where California is now headed. His combativeness was again not a liability but a plus — especially when it was at the expense of snooty white liberals. ‘He drives them crazy,’ Steve, my friend from second grade, offered.
One academic colleague used to caricature my observations in 2016 that Trump’s rallies were huge and rowdy, while Hillary’s seemed staged and somnolent — and that this disconnect might presage election-day turnouts. ‘Anecdotes!’ I was told. ‘Crowd size means as little as yard signs.’ If anything, Trump’s rallies now are larger, the lines longer. Maybe the successive progressive efforts to abort his presidency by means of the Electoral College, the emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller investigation and now Ukraine only made him stronger by virtue of not finishing him off.
When I talked to a Central Valley Rotary Club in November 2016, I assumed on arrival that such doctrinaire Republicans would be establishment Never Trumpers. But few were then. When I returned this week to speak again, I found that none are now. These businesspeople, lawyers, accountants and educators talked of the money-making economy. But I sensed, as with my hometown friends, that same something else. There was an edge in their voices, an amplification of earlier fury at Hillary’s condescension and put-down of deplorables. ‘Anything he dishes out, they deserve,’ one man in a tailored suit remarked, channeling my grade-school friend Steve. I take it by that he meant he and his friends are frequently embarrassed by Trump’s crudity — but not nearly so much as they are enraged by the sanctimoniousness of an Adam Schiff or the smug ‘bombshell’ monotony of media anchors.
It is easy to say that 2020 seems to be replaying 2016, complete with the identical insularity of progressives, as if what should never have happened then certainly cannot now. But this time around there is an even greater sense of anger and need for retribution especially among the most unlikely Trump supporters. It reflects a fed-up payback for three years of nonstop efforts to overthrow an elected president, anger at anti-Trump hysteria and weariness at being lectured. A year is a proverbial long time. The economy could tank. The president might find himself trading missiles with Iran. At 73, a sleep-deprived, hamburger-munching Trump might discover his legendary stamina finally giving out. Still, there is a growing wrath in the country, either ignored, suppressed or undetected by the partisan media. It is a desire for a reckoning with ‘them’. For lots of quiet, ordinary people, 2020 is shaping up as the get-even election — in ways that transcend even Trump himself.
“Anything Trump dishes out, they deserve.” I should put that on a T-shirt. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
President Trump’s reelection committee goes in to 2020 with $200 million on hand, which is probably more than all of the remaining Democratic contenders combined. Ann Althouse: “The news this morning is making me think of 1984. Not the book. The election. Remember that? Biggest difference: The ex-Vice-President who got his party’s nomination to fend off the hated, show-biz, imposter President… was so fresh-faced!” Oh for the youthful excitement of a 56-year old Walter Mondale…
“The reality may be the very opposite of what Democrats planned. The more the Left tries to abort the Trump presidency before the election, the more it bleeds from each of its own inflicted nicks.”
What Boris Johnson’s win says about political realignment:
The 2016 Brexit vote revealed that a large portion of the British population was unrepresented in Westminster party politics, and its aftermath exposed the fact that a large number of politicians would stop at nothing to keep that group unrepresented. To be sure, these MPs would not have put it in such words — they thought that attempting to stop Brexit for three years was acting in their constituents’ best interests. But constituents express their beliefs at the ballot box, and most of them simply did not think that their representatives knew what was best better than they did.
There is plenty to criticize about Johnson and the government that he will now lead, but the same accusation cannot be leveled against them. Johnson ducks scrutiny, avoids substance, and can often seem entirely devoid of empathy. His campaign consisted of the three words “Get Brexit Done,” spun around like a broken play toy. But these words had more power than Labour’s message of social justice, just as the Brexit slogan “Take Back Control” held more sway than the countless predictions that Brexit would bring about economic doom in the run up to the referendum. Both phrases were fashioned by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s infamous chief adviser, and their success point to a very simple fact: Voters believe in democracy, and they do not take nicely to politicians who don’t. No handout can compensate for the snobbery of those offering it, because voters disdain moral superiority more than they appreciate moral purity.
The roots of this tension go back decades, as successive British governments implemented EU treaties and constitutional reforms without democratic assent. In 1992, when the European Economic Community turned into the European Union, John Major’s government refused to offer the public a referendum on the issue. And in 1997, under Tony Blair, monetary policy was placed in the hands of the Bank of England. The same Blair government pushed for executive asymmetrical devolution in Scotland and Wales, without considering its extreme constitutional implications for England’s representation in Westminster. Then came the 2007 EU Lisbon Treaty, a major change to the U.K.’s constitution that Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided he could ratify without asking for voters’ consent. This move effectively rendered any future promise on migration numbers a lie, because the United Kingdom’s borders were made subservient to Eurozone economics. Voters are not stupid: They realize that an open-borders policy raises problems for the welfare state. Ignoring this fact only made room for extremism when the Eurozone’s economy eventually fell into crisis in 2008.
These were the beginnings of a political realignment that has found its voice in liberal democracies across the continent and beyond — a realignment based on the divide between democratic politics and technocratic politics, in which liberals turn to the courts in order to entrench cultural values for which they cannot not secure democratic consent. The Blair years might have seen continuous government, but they also saw a significant drop in voter participation. Labour’s 2001 and 2005 electoral victories saw turnouts of 59.4 percent and 61.4 percent, respectively — some of the highest levels of voter apathy recorded since World War II. This was rule under the primacy of law and economics masked by the pretense of political consent and temporary economic stability. Divides between the electorate and their representatives on questions of immigration, foreign policy, and national identity were buried under a centrist carpet.
Brexit brought the divide into the open, because it gave voters an opportunity to reject the new constitution of a United Kingdom that had been radically transformed since it joined the EU in 1973. An unprecedented number of people did exactly that, and it is no surprise that this vote then took on the political and cultural significance that it did. Politicians across the Commons agreed to let the voters decide, only to explain away the referendum’s result as an aberration of common sense. Such arrogance meant that Brexit became a symbol of the cultural divide between those who had political control and those whose wishes were considered problems to be solved.
Any politician unwilling to reckon with the scale of the referendum was destined to shrivel into electoral insignificance. Corbyn had no easy way out, because Labour was effectively three different constituencies mashed uncomfortably into one party: middle-class Remainer liberals, woke millennial students, and socially conservative workers. These groups hold irreconcilable views on Brexit and stand in different places along the democratic–technocratic divide. It is a split similarly represented by their Westminster MPs, albeit in distinctly different ratios.
When Corbyn tried to win over Brexit voters, he could not deny that he had allowed a majority of his MPs to prevent Brexit’s implementation. And when he tried to win over Remainers, he was forced to face the fact that he had never been a Remainer (not to mention the fact that his anti-Western brand of foreign policy is antithetical to many Remainers’ liberal internationalism). The only group that truly stuck by him were the students, and anyone who knows anything about democracy knows that students don’t win you elections.
President Donald Trump is at 50% approval rating in the latest Zogby poll. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Top DOE official arrested for trying to set up sex with underage boy.” That’s de Blasio’s NYC Department of Education Deputy Chief of Staff David Hay.
“Sex offenders, MS-13 gang member nabbed near border checkpoints.” You know, the same border checkpoints Democrats want to do away with…
“African Americans Are Taking Back Jobs Stolen By Illegal Aliens.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Two dispatches from Adler’s Austin. First: “Man allegedly made bomb threat then stood in traffic and threw himself at car.”
Second: “Austin attacker sentenced to 200 days in jail released two weeks later.” That’s the Congress Avenue Bridge attack case. (Hat tip: Austin_Network.)
Bad cop sentenced.
“Black Israelites” attacking Jews in New York is deeply inconvenient:
The Jersey City murders are the culmination of years of incitement against Jews. But the perpetrators in that case were themselves minorities from the African American community. The perpetrators have been identified as coming from an extremist religious group called Black Hebrew Israelites, making them a minority of a minority. The perpetrators are seen as a “militant” fringe within that minority.
The authorities are now looking at the case as domestic terrorism fueled by antisemitism. However major media have endeavored to dismiss the murders as unimportant and unique. The New York Times described the Black Hebrew Israelites as being “known for their inflammatory sidewalk ministers who employ provocation as a form of gospel.” It’s a bit more than that. In fact, the group and the milieu around it tend to view religion through a racial lens, such that Jews are described as “white” and “fake” and the “real Jews” are portrayed as black, along with all the prophets and religious figures. The ADL pointed out that this group views itself as the real “chosen people” and that it sees people of color as the real descendants of the 12 tribes. The group was in the media earlier in the year in Washington DC when they shouted insults at Catholic high school students.
Mainstream society wants to view this as “provocation,” because if they viewed it as a burgeoning racist violent movement targeting Jews then they would have to confront it and ask tough questions of why it is tolerated in a community. Expert J.J. McNab told the Associated Press that in fact this group takes pride in “confronting Jewish people everywhere and explaining that they are evil.”
In American society there is generally only place for one kind of racism. There are far-right white supremacists and everyone else. This Manichean worldview of antisemitism and racism means we are only comfortable with one type of perpetrator. An angry white man. Those are the racists. Dylann Roof, the racist who murdered black people in a church in 2015 is the most normal kind of America racist. The El Paso shooter or the Tree of Life Synagogue attacker are also the kind of killers that fit into an easy narrative. But when the perpetrators stray from that we have a problem dealing with it. In New York City, according to a post by journalist Laura Adkins, data shows that of 69 anti-Jewish crimes in 2018, forty of the perpetrators were labelled “white” and 25 were labelled “black,” the others were categorized as Hispanic or Asian.
To keep the focus on the white supremacists, headlines need to explain to us that “right wing terrorists” have killed more than Jihadists, as Slate.com said earlier this year. Other types of terrorism are watered down a bit. During the Obama administration Islamist-inspired terror was even rebranded as “violent extremism” so as not to mention the religion of the perpetrators. For some reason even though Islamist terror is also a far-right ideology, it is portrayed as something else. For instance, when Jews were targeted at a kosher supermarket in France they were called “random folk in a deli.” They weren’t random, they were targeted, like the Jews in Jersey City, but they needed to be random or we’d have to ask about the antisemitism that permeates Islamist terror.
In the wake of all the attacks in New York against Jews, culminating in the shooting attack at the kosher market, it became difficult to ignore the rising tide. But there is discomfort in looking at the depth of the perpetrators. The comfort society has with expecting perpetrators to be “far-right” and “white” even led Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib to blame “white supremacy” for the Jersey City attack. Her tweet was deleted. When it wasn’t white supremacy and there was no one to condemn, it didn’t fit the narrative and was less important.
Snip.
How did we get here? The motivation behind the Jersey City attack is clear from social media posts one of the perpetrators made, according to a research by the ADL. This included claims that Jews are “Khazars,” and that “Brooklyn is full of Nazis-Ashkenazis,” and that the “police are in their [the Jews] hand now.” The worldview matches with the larger milieu in which Jews are portrayed as not merely “white Jews” but in fact as controlling the slave trade and police violence. In this new antisemitism Jews are reframed as both being “fake,” as in not really Jews from the Middle East, and also being “white” and running white supremacism. This replaces German Nazis with Jewish Nazis; it replaces white supremacists with a hidden hand of Jews controlling both the American far-right and also the police. Instead of pushing back against this there are attempts to excuse it or just remain quiet about it and hope this antisemitism goes away.
Left out of this Jerusalem Post piece is the fact that blacks provide a disproportionate share of Democratic Party voters, while Jews are heavily over-represented among its big-money donor base. Pointing out that one part of the Democratic Party coalition routinely commits assault against the part actually paying the bills isn’t useful to the narrative…
“Forced organ harvesting has happened in multiple places in the People’s Republic of China and on multiple occasions for a period of at least twenty years and continues to this day.”
“Major US Companies Breached, Robbed, and Spied on by Chinese Hackers.”
“Navy Saved Money with Touch-Screen Controls, Sailors Paid with Their Lives.”
Remember how people used to joke that we supported Israel, the only country in the Middle East that didn’t export oil? Well, guess what?
“Media Disappointed To Learn Armed Citizen Stopped Mass Shooting.”
Shoe company cheers gun control bill. Shoe company goes broke. (Hat tip: Stehen Green at Instapundit.)
Speaking of idiots cheering gun control: “Tom Nichols is an insufferable elitist prick.”
Ireland fast-tracks law banning all gasoline-powered cars within a decade.
MSM fact-checking doesn’t.
Charles Murray on the statistical differences between males and females in America:
A look back on Galaxy Quest on it’s 20 year anniversary.
Will Betelgeuse go supernova? Supposedly it’s “not likely to produce a gamma-ray burst and is not close enough for its x-rays, ultraviolet radiation, or ejected material to cause significant effects on Earth.” A good thing, too, since it’s only 640 light years away, which is practically next door in galactic terms.
Dad takes son to Mongolia just to get him off his phone.
Moderately amusing Texas signs.
Rip tire.
Tumblegeddon.
Tags:1984 Presidential Race, 2020 Presidential Race, anti-semitism, astronomy, Austin, Betelgeuse, black, Black Hebrew Israelites, Border Controls, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Charles Murray, China, Colin Furze, Communism, Crime, David Hay, Democrats, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Get Woke Go Broke, Graeme Wood, gun control, homeless, impeachment, Iran, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Jews, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Middle East, Military, Mongolia, MS-13, Navy, New York City, oil industry, pedophilia, polls, Qassem Suleimani, Qods Force, sex, Social Justice Warriors, spying, Steve Adler, supernova, techn, terrorism, Texas, Tom Nichols, Tom's Shoes, tumbleweed, UK, Victor Davis Hanson, Walter Mondale, Welfare State
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | No Comments »
Friday, December 27th, 2019
Hope everyone had a great Christmas!
“Black voters ‘abandoned’ by Democrats warm to Trump.
Former NFL player Jack Brewer once raised campaign money for President Barack Obama, but now he’s among the increasing number of black voters who support President Trump.
“There is an awakening going on right now in the country,” Mr. Brewer said of black voters who traditionally support Democrats. “I’m going to take the guy who’s actually putting in the policies that are going to make life better for my young black son and my young black daughter, versus somebody who gives me lip service — like, unfortunately, the Democrats have done for our community for years.”
Mr. Trump and his reelection team are aggressively courting black voters amid a strong economy that has reduced black unemployment to 5.5%, lowest in history. The Trump campaign launched its “Black Voices for Trump” coalition in Atlanta last month.
Snip.
There’s some evidence that the president’s policies and campaign outreach are making inroads with black voters. Three polls in November showed Mr. Trump’s job-approval rating among black voters in the 30% to 35% range, a significant increase over other surveys that have generally shown black voter support of less than 10%.
“I’ll remind you, the president received 8% of the black vote in 2016,” said a senior Trump campaign official.
The president and his campaign advisers know that poll numbers and approval ratings don’t always translate into votes, but they think Mr. Trump has a good chance to significantly increase the level of support he receives from black voters in 2020.
“If you look at how they attacked him for being a racist during the [2016] campaign, I think his policies have [produced] results for the black community that have been extraordinary,” the campaign official said during a recent briefing.
Said another Trump adviser, “One thing the president’s done is to try to govern for everybody. Even those who didn’t vote for him in the last election are now seeing a lot of results in their communities, and we’re seeing the poll numbers amongst all those groups grow in a way that creates a lot of opportunities.”
Trump advisers point to other policies that are helping, such as criminal justice reform that lets more offenders win early release from prison and a second chance, and increased funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Mr. Brewer, a lifelong Democrat and entrepreneur who played for three NFL teams, said Mr. Trump is working much harder than any Republican candidate in his lifetime to reach out to black voters.
“Donald Trump will get over 20% of the black vote,” Mr. Brewer said in an interview. “That is what’s going to win the election. Why? Because there hasn’t been a Republican to even try to go in and talk to the black community. They don’t go there. They don’t even try. I think he’s trying, finally.”
More on the Labour wipeout:
It’s also worth noting that Corbyn’s interests and appearance—he’s a 70-year-old vegetarian with a fondness for train-drivers’ hats who has spent his life immersed in protest politics—strike many working class voters as “weird,” a word that kept coming up on the doorstep according to my fellow canvasser in Newcastle. He’s also presided over the invasion of his party by virulent anti-Semites and Labour is currently in the midst of an investigation by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission thanks to his failure to deal with this. One of his supporters has already blamed the Jews for Labour’s defeat.
Snip.
Plenty of better writers than me—Douglas Murray, John Gray—have debunked the notion that the only reason low-income voters embrace right-wing politics is because they’re drunk on a cocktail of ethno-nationalism and false hope (with Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin taking turns as mixologists). It surely has more to do with the Left’s sneering contempt for the “deplorables” in the flyover states as they shuttle back and forth between their walled, cosmopolitan strongholds. As Corbyn’s policy platform in Britain’s election showed, left-wing parties now have little to offer indigenous, working class people outside the big cities—and their activists often add insult to injury by describing these left-behind voters as “privileged” because they’re white or cis-gendered or whatever. So long as parties like Labour pander to their middle-class, identitarian activists and ignore the interests of the genuinely disadvantaged, they’ll continue to rack up loss after loss. Get woke, go broke.
Will the Democrats learn from Labour’s mistake and make Jo Biden the candidate—or even Pete Buttigieg? I wouldn’t bet on it. The zealots of the post-modern Left have a limitless capacity to ignore reality even when it’s staring them in the face. As I said to a friend last night after the election results starting rolling in, fighting political opponents like Jeremy Corbyn is a bit like competing in a round-the-world yacht race against a team that thinks the earth is flat. It can be kind of fun, even exhilarating. But until they acquire a compass and learn how to read a map, it’s not really a fair fight.
The Babylon Bee explains impeachment. “Trump has committed some very serious offenses, from not being a Democrat to being a Republican. He also won the 2016 election, which rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.”
More Democratic donors heard from:
Last week, a must-count indictment was unsealed against Ahmad Khawaja, the CEO of an online payment processing company. He and several others were charged with making and concealing improper and excessive campaign contributions, most related to the 2016 election cycle. Specifically, Khawaja is charged with two counts of conspiracy, three counts of making conduit contributions, three counts of causing excessive contributions, 13 counts of making false statements, 13 counts of causing false records to be filed, and one count of obstruction of a federal grand jury investigation.
Among the recipients: Hillary Clinton, Cory Booker, Adam Schiff and Amy Klobuchar. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Vox writer inadvertently reveals that Trump’s judicial picks are more qualified than Obama’s. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Canada’s new gun laws aren’t about saving lives, they’re about disdain for gun owners.
Chinese bond defaults grow. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Israel has a new laser system to shoot down incendiary balloons launched from Gaza.
Seattle waitress now unemployed thanks to minimum wage laws. “Today I’m struggling because of a policy meant to help me. I’m proudly progressive in my politics, but my experience shows that progressives should reconsider minimum-wage laws that hurt the very workers they’re trying to protect.” Just like conservatives predicted.
Penny Arcade discusses the latest Star Wars:
I think I’m gonna end up seeing Rise of Skywalker on an airplane at some point, on the back of the seat in front of me. That’s about my interest level. There were inklings of it in the first movie, if you want to go back that far, but it really seems like the new trilogy wasn’t conceived of as a trilogy at all. It’s genuinely hard to believe. And not just because of what Disney managed to accomplish with their Marvel project, making an ecosystem of movies in different genres and then somehow crafting a kind of metamovie to conclude it. Obviously, they can do it. That they didn’t – and that they expected us to go along with it – is incredible.
Star Wars isn’t Holy to me. Like a lot of people who grew up when I did, I do like it. But there’s a hard cap on precisely how disappointed I can be in it. Seeing the whole thing transformed into some kind of cultural shibboleth when it can barely hold itself together narratively film to film, it’s like… these movies aren’t up to the task. It doesn’t even matter what task you had in mind. A full-throated defense of these things is either unconscious, freelance PR, corporate ring-kissing, or invertebrate worship of a graven idol. They shouldn’t come back to theatres until they can deliver something that isn’t such a gruesome indictment of their hegemonic cultural control.
Speaking of Disney cultural hegemony, Hollywood box office is is down 4% from last year, despite Avengers: Endgame. Just imagine the horrific 2020 Hollywood is going to enjoy in 2020 without a big tentpole and TDS-suffering actors suppressing box office with wokeoffs during the 2020 election. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
How bad do Houston streets suck? A Houston police officer flipped his car chasing a drunk driver after hitting a pothole. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
A wistful look at abandoned Borscht Belt resorts, with past days of glory in picture postcards contrasted with the sad state of decay today. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Yikes:
I should really save this one for Halloween:
“Motorcyclist Who Identifies As Bicyclist Sets Cycling World Record.”
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Adam Schiff, Ahmad Khawaja, Amy Klobuchar, anti-semitism, black, Borscht Belt, campaign contributions, Canada, China, Cory Booker, Crime, Democrats, Disney, Elections, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Guns, Hillary Clinton, Hollywood, Houston, Israel, Jack Brewer, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, LinkSwarm, Military, minimum wage, Russia, Seattle, spiders, Star Wars, unemployment
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, November 22nd, 2019
Another week of the impeachment farce, another week of an embarrassing nothingburger and bombing ratings for Democrats:
Week one impeachment farce summary: “None of those three witnesses were have met with the President, none of them were on the July 25th phone call, and none of them have firsthand information, and none of them are aware of any criminal activity or impeachable offense. In short, why are we here?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The so-called “Whistleblower” has no statutory right to anonymity.
The impeachment farce is boring American voters to sleep. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
“Impeachment Inquiry Canceled After 5 Episodes Due To Low Ratings.”
How the impeachment farce has actually validated reports of Democrat skullduggery in Ukraine:
The half dozen seminal columns I published for The Hill on Ukraine were already supported by overwhelming documentation (all embedded in the story) and on-the-record interviews captured on video. They made three salient and simple points:
- Hunter Biden’s hiring by the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, while it was under a corruption investigation, posed the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father. That’s because Vice President Joe Biden oversaw US-Ukraine policy and forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor overseeing the case.
- Ukraine officials had an uneasy relationship with our embassy in Kiev because State Department officials exerted pressure on Ukraine prosecutors to drop certain cases against activists, including one group partly funded by George Soros.
- There were efforts around Ukraine in 2016 to influence the US election, that included a request from a DNC contractor for dirt on Manafort, an OpEd from Ukraine’s US ambassador slamming Trump and the release of law enforcement evidence by Ukrainian officials that a Ukraine court concluded was an improper interference in the US election.
All three of these points have since been validated by the sworn testimony of Schiff’s witnesses this month, starting with the Bidens.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Schiff and Pelosi are racing two clocks: The narrative clock for dropping the Horowitz IG report into FISA, etc. abuse, and the judicial clock against three different court cases that might derail the farce. And since they just went into their Thanksgiving break, the House only has eight voting days in December to do it and pass a budget before leaving for the Christmas brealk.
“Former FBI lawyer under investigation after allegedly altering document in 2016 Russia probe.”
Trump is surging with suburban women, raking in more donations than any of the Democratic candidates.
Trump Administration to start enforcing new asylum rules by sending asylum-seekers back to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“[Democratic] Former Baltimore Mayor Pugh indicted on 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion in ‘Healthy Holly’ book scandal.” (You only have to get six paragraphs in to learn that Pugh is a Democrat. Progress!)
Federal prosecutors have charged former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh with 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy in what they allege was a corrupt scheme involving her sales of a self-published children’s book series.
In a grand jury indictment made public Wednesday, prosecutors allege Pugh defrauded area businesses and nonprofit organizations with nearly $800,000 in sales of her “Healthy Holly” books to unlawfully enrich herself, promote her political career and illegally fund her campaign for mayor.
Though her customers ordered more than 100,000 copies of the books, the indictment says Pugh failed to print thousands of copies, double-sold others and took some to use for self-promotion. Pugh, 69, used the profits to buy a house, pay down debt, and make illegal straw donations to her campaign, prosecutors allege.
At the same time, prosecutors said, she was evading taxes. In 2016, for instance, when she was a state senator and ran for mayor, she told the Internal Revenue Service she had made just $31,000. In fact, her income was more than $322,000 that year ― meaning she shorted the federal government of about $100,000 in taxes, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
The charges Pugh faces carry potential sentences totaling 175 years in prison. Prosecutors are seeking to seize $769,688 of her profits, along with her current home in Ashburton, which they allege she bought and renovated with fraudulently obtained funds.
Uncle Sam is not omniscient, but if you’re a public official and you’re taking in ten times as much money as you declare, yeah, I bet they’re gonna figure that one out, Crooked Kathy.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
Speaking of Democratic Party mayors being indicted, Mayors Against Illegal Guns member Dennis Tyler, mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested by the FBI as part of a corruption probe. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More background on corruption in Muncie.
Last January, former Muncie Building Commissioner Craig Nichols pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
Others charged in the federal corruption probe include Muncie Sanitary District Administrator Debra Nicole Grigsby, Muncie Sanitary District official Tracy Barton; and local businessmen Jeffrey Burke, Tony Franklin and Rodney A. Barber.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
The U.S. just extradited a top Russian cybercriminal from Israel.
The Russian government has for the past four years been fighting to keep 29-year-old alleged cybercriminal Alexei Burkov from being extradited by Israel to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. That effort failed as well, and Burkov had his first appearance in a U.S. court last week. What follows are some clues that might explain why the Russians are so eager to reclaim this young man.
On the surface, the charges the U.S. government has leveled against Burkov may seem fairly unremarkable: Prosecutors say he ran a credit card fraud forum called CardPlanet that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards.
However, a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.
There seem to be very few elite Russian hacking organizations Burkov, AKA “K0pa,” didn’t have a key administrative role in.
Speaking of hacking: “Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai.” Somebody in Shanghai has been spoofing GPS signals to make ships (and anything else using GPS) appear they’re someplace else, and GPS experts don’t understand how they’re doing it. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
China is stealing our secrets from inside our own government:
Foreign-born researchers working at U.S. agencies secretly joined China’s payroll, sending sensitive U.S.-funded research to the country while U.S. government agencies took almost no defensive measures against a major recruitment operation, a Senate investigation found.
Researchers linked to the Chinese government formed a Chinese cell within the Department of Energy, attained access to American genomic data, and recruited other U.S. researchers to join, the bipartisan report stated.
China’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) aims to get foreign governments to finance the communist power’s military and economy by buying off researchers who are doing work abroad. The experts apply to the program, and if approved by the Communist Party, they join China’s payroll and sign secret side agreements that the experts will share their research with that country, according to the investigation.
China’s looming class struggle. As always, the proletariat get screwed by communism…
The Clinton Foundation suffered a $16.8 million loss in 2018. It’s a great mystery how that could have happened…
The upcoming UK election is no longer an election about Brexit, it’s an election about how incredibly unpopular Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson enjoys a mere plus 4% favorability rating. Corbyn has a minus 43% favorability rating. “This election is no longer primarily about Brexit, it’s primarily about Corbyn and his extreme socialist policies! Corbyn is rightfully getting clobbered.”
Snipers kill protestors in Iran.
The sudden move by the oil-rich regime to ration gasoline and hike fuel prices is a direct result of President Donald Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. While the regime thrived under the Obama administration, which handed billions of dollars to Tehran for signing the nuclear deal, the current administration has reinstated stiff sanctions against the ruling Mullahs.
After President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, the sanctions have crippled Iran’s state-run oil, shipping, and banking sectors. The U.S. government implemented the sanctions against the regime’s top brass and the IRGC, which controls critical sectors of the Iranian economy.
“Reuters Deletes Story Meant to Make Trump Look Bad After Realizing it Made Obama Look Bad.” The Ministry of Truth confirms that this story has been rectified.
“Google Is Blacklisting Conservative News Sites, Despite Denials Made Under Oath.”
Trump appointment flips the 11th circuit court, which covers Florida, Georgia and Alabama.
Jeffrey Epstein evidently had cameras in every bedroom…and every toilet. Makes the “honeypot for blackmail” idea seem all the more likely…
The MSM doesn’t trust you to handle the truth.
Woke Charlie’s Angels is the latest box office disaster.
“Call us old-fashioned, but we don’t think the chairman of the Homeland Security committee should fly cocaine from the Mexican border into the interior.”
How NBA executive Jeff David stole over $13 million from the Sacramento Kings. That amount of money will get people’s attention…(Hat tip: Dwight.)
Climategate refresher.
Heh:
Florida Man, meet Wisconsin Man: “Man arrested for 4th OWI, fake license plates made of cardboard beer case.”
“Democrat Finally Releases Something Of Substance.”
Tags:Adam Schiff, Alexei Burkov, Baltimore, Border Controls, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Catherine Pugh, China, Climategate, Communism, corruption, Crime, data security, Debra Nicole Grigsby, Democrats, Dennis Tyler, Donald Trump, El Salvador, Eric Swalwell, FBI, Florida, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Google, GPS, Greta Thunberg, Guata, Guatemala, hacking, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Scandals, Hollywood, Honduras, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Indiana, Iran, IRS, Israel, Jeffrey Burke, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Jihad, Joe Biden, LinkSwarm, Luke Rosiak, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Media Watch, Military, Muncie, Nancy Pelosi, NBA, Poncho Nevarez, Reuters, Russia, Shanghai, Social Justice Warriors, spying, Supreme Court, technology, Texas, Tracy Barton, UK, Ukraine, Wisconsin
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 21st, 2019
Biden’s going broke, Clinton accuses Gabbard of being a Russian agent, Angry Amy came to play, Tom Steyer’s the Make-A-Wish candidate, and Messam pulls in a whole $5 in Q3 campaign contributions. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Q3 Fundraising
Updated numbers from candidate filings. One name jumps from the bottom to the top of the list, thinks to a big check from himself:
- Tom Steyer: $49,645,132.
- Bernie Sanders: $25.3 million.
- Elizabeth Warren: $24.6 million.
- Pete Buttigieg: $19.1 million.
- Joe Biden: $15.2 million.
- Kamala Harris: $11.6 million.
- Andrew Yang: $10 million.
- Cory Booker: $6 million.
- Amy Klobuchar: $4.8 million.
- Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: $4,482,284.
- Julian Castro: $3,497,251.
- Tulsi Gabbard: $3,032,158.
- Marianne Williamson: $3 million.
- Steve Bullock: $2.3 million.
- Michael Bennet: $2.1 million.
- John Delaney: $868,452.
- Tim Ryan: $425,731.
- Joe Sestak: $374,196.
- Wayne Messam: $5.
Steyer only comes out on top because he donated $47,597,697 of his own money to his campaign, as against $2,047,433 from other contributors.
Delany did not kick any of his own money in this time around, which indicates that he’s either thinking of hanging it up or just coasting to Iowa before packing it in.
Messam: SIC. See below.
I should go back and link to early actual Q3 FEC documents for early reporters for the sake of formatting consistancy, but I don’t have time right now.
Polls
USA Today/Suffolk (Iowa): Biden 18, Warren 17, Buttigieg 13, Sanders 8, Steyer 3.
Morning Consult/Politico: Biden 31, Warren 21, Sanders 18, Harris 7, Buttigieg 6, Yang 3, Booker 2, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2, Steyer 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Williamson 1.
Emerson (Iowa): Biden 23, Warren 23, Buttigieg 16, Sanders 13, Yang 5, Bullock 4, Booker 3, Steyer 2, Gabbard 2, Harris 2, Klobuchar 1, Williamson 1, Bennet 1. It appears that Buttigieg’s huge fundraising haul is starting to bring results from pouring organizational money into Iowa. And this is the first poll I can recall Bullock registering support above background noise.
Economist/YouGov (page 142): Warren 28, Biden 25, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Bennet 1, Delaney 1, Steyer 1.
PPP (Maine): Warren 31, Biden 19, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 9, Harris 4, Yang 3, Booker 2, Castro 1, O’Rourke 1.
Siena (new York: Biden 21, Warren 21, Sanders 16, Harris 4, Buttigieg 4, Yang 3, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1.
Quinnipiac: Warren 32, Biden 28, Sanders 10, Buttigieg 7, Harris 3, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, O’Rourke 2, Booker 1, Castro 1, Bennet 1, Steyer 1.
Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald (New Hampshire) (page 30): Warren 24.6, Biden 23.9, Sanders 21.6, Buttigieg 9, Harris 4.5, Klobuchar 2.4, Booker 1.9, Steyer 1.2, Gabbard 0.5, Castro 0.2, O’Rourke 0.0.
East Carolina State (North Carolina): Biden 29, Sanders 19, Warren 17, Yang 9, Harris 8, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 4. Klobuchar 3, Booker 1, Castro 1.
Real Clear Politics
538 polls
Election betting markets
Pundits, etc.
Lots of post-debate analysis.
Who spoke the longest?
Nice piece on Q3 fundraising by 538. You can click on the graphics and see where each candidate got the majority of their funding from.
Instapundit thinks Biden was one of the debate winners:
Joe Biden: He’s old, but he looked energetic and spoke clearly. He made a few errors — who’s “clipping coupons” in “the stock market?” But in general, he was forceful and seemed knowledgeable. In particular, he nailed Sen. Elizabeth Warren on how her health care plan would increase taxes on the middle class. And he was surprisingly sensible in dismissing “court-packing” schemes. His final remarks were a bit over the top, but after three hours I’d probably have been raving, too.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: When she challenged her colleagues who wanted to “end endless wars” but who were also criticizing President Trump from withdrawing troops from Syria, she didn’t back down, and blasted the New York Times and a CNN contributor for calling her a “Russian asset” for criticizing what she called the “regime change war” in Syria. She then challenged Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who says we shouldn’t have troops in the Middle East at all, on the issue. On this and other issues, she was firm, clear, and was willing to buck the herd. And in her closing remarks, quoting Lincoln, she said “I don’t see deplorables, I see fellow Americans.”
Mayor Pete Buttigieg: He made mincemeat of Beto O’Rourke, who dodged a question from Anderson Cooper on how he would enforce a ban on assault weapons. Beto was left looking flustered and trying to claim that Mayor Pete was insensitive to victims of violence, which was a bad look for him.
Bernie Sanders: A guy who can have a heart attack and come back a few weeks later, yelling louder than anyone else for three hours, is winning. He was asked about his health, and he answered loudly, and then charmingly thanked his post-attack well-wishers. And he scored on Biden with his remarks about bipartisan support for the Iraq war.
Losers: O’Rourke, Warren, Castro (“Several times I forgot he was even on the stage for 30 minutes or more.”) and Steyer.
Jim Geraghty liked Klobuchar and Buttigieg:
Notice that Buttigieg is at 12 percent in Iowa in the RealClearPolitics average, and 8.7 percent in New Hampshire. That may not sound like much, but nobody else outside of the big three is anywhere near double digits anywhere. The South Bend mayor’s rise is Exhibit A of counterevidence when other candidates whine that the process is rigged in favor of well-known candidates who have been in politics forever.
Yeah, but I’m convinced Buttigieg had big money recruiting and backing him before he ever got into the race.
Klobuchar had, until last night, been a strong contender for the biggest “why is she running?” status. She wasn’t the biggest centrist or the most progressive, she’s from a state that might, theoretically, be competitive this cycle but isn’t most cycles and up until last night, “Minnesota Nice” appeared to be a synonym for boring. What does Klobuchar do well? It turns out she can politely but firmly poke holes in Warren’s arguments, making the Massachusetts senator’s high-dudgeon “you’re attacking me because I’m the only one standing up for the people” schtick sound overwrought and ridiculous.
“At least Bernie’s being honest here and saying how he’s going to pay for this and that taxes are going to go up. And I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that, and I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice.”
“I appreciate Elizabeth’s work. But, again, the difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.”
“I want to give a reality check here to Elizabeth, because no one on this stage wants to protect billionaires. Not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires.”
What we saw last night — particularly in the one-on-one concern-off held by Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke on gun violence — is that progressive Democrats get really used to being able to play the “I care about people, and you don’t” card against their opponents, and they’re really shocked and indignant when their own style of criticism is turned against them. You get the feeling that Buttigieg really sees O’Rourke as a political dilettante, play-acting at leadership having never had that much executive responsibility in office.
Joe Cunningham at Redstate has his own list of winners and losers:
Winners: Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, was seemingly everyone’s target. Biden targeted her. Kamala Harris targeted her. Tulsi Gabbard and others seemed to think that she was the candidate to beat during the debate, and so they tried. However, none of the blows really stuck. She also had some help from the producers of the debate, covering for Warren against an attack from Gabbard in particular. Her ability to withstand the attacks helped her image a bit, and she is definitely going to come out at least breaking even here.
Pete Buttigieg stood out more than I think people expected. His shot at Beto O’Rourke knocked the Texas Democrat out. He scrapped with Warren and didn’t come across as foolish as others did. He appears now to be vying for the very base that Joe Biden has, and he looked very good doing it. If Biden falters, right now it’s not difficult to see those voters moving to Buttigieg.
Bernie Sanders was very Bernie Sanders, and that did not hurt him. In fact, a little added sympathy from his heart issues late last week helped him perhaps dodge some attacks from the others on the stage. Nothing really stood out, but like Warren and Biden, “not losing” a debate with their level of support and backing them is as good as a win IF no one else stands out. And… no one did.
The Losers: Joe Biden, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris
Joe Biden was, once again, seemingly left alone for the most part. Up until the end of the debate, he wasn’t really hit too hard, and even after the divisions over Medicare For All, Biden’s record in the Senate and as Vice President, and a rather chauvinist attempt to take credit for Elizabeth Warren’s time as head of the consumer finance agency she touted as a major accomplishment, Biden still stood tall. The problem is that all of this happened to Biden as an afterthought. Everyone was focused on Warren. Everyone was worried about Sanders’ health. Everyone was looking for Buttigieg and others to step up. And no one really cared how well Biden did. That is a bad thing for him.
Beto O’Rourke has a glass jaw, and everyone knows it now. When Pete Buttigieg landed a full-on blow, saying “I don’t need a lesson in courage from you,” it was pretty much over for the furriest Democratic candidate. Beto came off as weak and, when not talking about guns, he frankly appeared to lack the backbone necessary to advocate as equally for his other unconstitutional pursuits. If he doesn’t fold this week, then he’s even more foolish than we knew.
Plus this: “What on God’s green earth is Tom Steyer even doing here? He exists on this debate stage solely to make people wish he didn’t. There is no reason for him here. He’s not even a good distraction from the other candidates. He’s just… there.”
They debated breaking up big tech. And the hill Kamala Harris died on was…Trump’s Twitter account.
Why aren’t more candidates dropping out?
There are seven other active candidates legitimate enough to make major media lists who will not be on the stage — and are very unlikely to meet the tougher criteria for the November and subsequent debates — who are nonetheless still in the field….Messam hasn’t even made some lists and has been on others because, well, he’s an elected official, not some random schmo claiming to run for president to advertise his dry-cleaning business or whatever. The city of which he is mayor, Miramar, Florida, is actually larger that Pete Buttigieg’s South Bend. But he hasn’t come within a mile of a debate stage. Nor has former congressman and retired admiral Joe Sestak, who has been in the race since June but hasn’t made much of an impression.
There are five others, though, who did make the June and July debates, but none since then, and haven’t dropped out. Of these, author and self-help guru Marianne Williamson has shown some grassroots fundraising chops (she met the donor threshold for tonight’s debate, but only had one qualifying poll); she raised a non-negligible $3.1 million in the third quarter, double her second-quarter haul. There are two barely surviving candidates with fine résumés and theoretical paths to the nomination if Joe Biden ever crashed and burned: the self-styled moderates Colorado senator Michael Bennet and Montana governor Steve Bullock. Congressman John Delaney is kind of sui generis: His personal wealth makes fundraising for anything other than debate qualification largely unnecessary, but he’s been in the race longer than anyone and had one debate (in July) in which he got lots of exposure — yet still is in nowheresville in terms of measurable support. He’s said he’ll stay in until Iowa no matter what.
When Ohio congressman Tim Ryan suspended his campaign in the wake of the Dayton shootings in August, a lot of people figured he’d be formally out of the race before long. But he hasn’t dropped out, technically, though he’s simultaneously running a House reelection campaign.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. In his day job as a senator (you know, the one he’s keeping), he reintroduced a bill to ban congresscritters from becoming lobbyists. Good for him.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden or bust for big money donors?
The Democratic Party’s most powerful donors are running out of options in the presidential race. Their warhorse Joe Biden is stumbling, while the other corporate-minded candidates lag far behind. For party elites, with less than four months to go before voting starts in caucuses and primaries, 2020 looks like Biden or bust.
A key problem for the Democratic establishment is that the “electability” argument is vaporizing in the political heat. Biden’s shaky performances on the campaign trail during the last few months have undermined the notion that he’s the best bet to defeat Donald Trump. The latest polling matchups say that Biden and his two strong rivals for the nomination, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, would each hypothetically beat Trump by around 10 points.
As such realities sink in, the focus is turning to where the party’s entrenched power brokers don’t want it to go — the actual merits of the candidates in terms of political history, independence from big-money special interests, and longtime commitment to positions now favored by most Democrats.
With the electability claim diminished, Biden faces a steep climb on the merits of his record and current policy stances. The looming crisis for the Biden forces is reflected in the fact that his top campaign operatives have already publicly conceded he could lose the first two nomination contests, the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.
And in an era when small donations from the grassroots are adding up to big financial hauls, Biden is so uninspiring that he’s losing the money race by a wide margin. Despite his relentless harvesting of big checks from hedge-fund managers, rich CEOs and the like, Biden’s campaign raised a total of only about $15 million in the last quarter, compared to around $25 million that Sanders and Warren each received. The New York Times noted that the duo’s fundraising totals are markers for “the collective enthusiasm in the party for progressive candidates pushing messages of sweeping change.”
But Biden continues to greatly benefit from the orientations of corporate media outlets that loudly echo the concerns of corporate Democrats (often called “moderates” or “centrists”) and their kindred spirits in realms like Wall Street. Rarely inclined to dispel the longstanding myth of “Lunch Bucket Joe,” reporting has been sparse on his legislative legacy in service to such industries as credit-card companies, banks and the healthcare business.
Media affection for Biden is matched by the biases of corporate media that — for many years — have routinely spun coverage of Sanders in negative ways, amplifying the messages from people at the helm of huge corporations. Recent months have seen no letup of anti-Bernie salvos, with Sanders as a kind of “heat shield” for Warren, catching the vast majority of the left-baiting attacks that would otherwise be aimed at her. Yet, as Warren’s campaign gains momentum, she is becoming more of a prime target for wealthy sectors and their media echo chambers.
I haven’t seen much criticism of Warren from the MSM; mainly it’s been non-stop tongue bathes, at least since Harris faded. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Biden’s campaign blew $924,000 on private jets. That’s one out of every 16 bucks his campaign raised. Also, his warchest is down to $8.9 million. More on those implications:
Biden raised $15.7 million last quarter, spent $17.7 million and has about $9 million in the bank, according to the reports. In other words, for every $1 the campaign raised, it spent $1.12. If he continues to spend his third-quarter average of roughly $196,120 a day and continues to raise $174,904 each day, he can grind out until Election Day. But his future finances get ugly if he wants to build beyond the current footprint.
That rate of spending leaves Biden with a campaign nest egg smaller than Bernie Sanders ($33.7 million), Warren ($25.7 million), Pete Buttigieg ($23.4 million) and Kamala Harris ($10.6 million).
Biden also has a stupid gun control plan, including a restoration of the cosmetic “assault weapon” ban of 1994 and a “voluntary” gun buyback. (Hat tip: John Richardson.)
Update: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Thinking of Running After All? Remember how Bloomberg said he wasn’t going to run? Guess what?
Mike Bloomberg is still considering a 2020 run — if Joe Biden’s campaign implodes, according to a new report.
The CNBC report comes just days after The Post revealed that TV’s “Judge Judy” said the billionaire would be a “perfect presidential candidate.”
The former mayor in March announced he would not run for president because he believed it would be difficult for him to prevail in a Democratic primary. He also saw former Vice President Biden as a viable moderate voice.
But a CNBC report Monday claims Bloomberg is reconsidering after seeing Biden stumble and lose ground to Elizabeth Warren.
Get ready for Steyer 2: Billionaire Bugaloo.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Forbes reviews his tax plans:
Color me confused. In one breath, Booker has promised to repeal the [2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] for the highest-earning individuals, a move that would return the top rate to 39.6%. There is, of course, the 3.8% net investment tax, meaning the top rate on interest or passive business income would reach 43.4%.
But in another breath, Booker promises to tax capital gains and dividends at ordinary rates, and states that the top rate on capital gains would become 40.8%, which would seem to indicate that the top rate on ordinary income will not increase from 37% to 39.6%.
In any event, a top rate of 41 – 44% — should that be where Booker lands — will pale in comparison to the top rate of 70%(!) proposed by both Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. He was fundraising in Chicago, along with Booker and Buttigieg.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Progressives: “Don’t you dare attack Queen Liz!” The Anti-Fun Party: “Pete Buttigieg Criticizes Chappelle’s Latest Special, Even Though He Has Not Seen It.” Gets a Fox News interview. Krystal Ball (who is evidently a real person and not a Thomas Pynchon chracter), dissents from the post-debate Buttigieg lovefest:
Pete was praised for launching the same dumb Medicare for All attack that we’ve heard from someone or another at every debate and for obliging the CNN moderators by continuing the grudge match with Beto O’Rourke that no one wanted or asked for.
But maybe my favorite take was from Van Jones, who described the desire for everyone to have health care the way every other developed country does as “wokenomics,” and then went on to outright predict the field would narrow to Warren and Pete!
Pistol Pete versus Warren the selfie queen. There is no doubt that this would be the dream matchup of every post-grad holding, Harvard envying, McKinsey-adjacent pundit in the land. Just imagine the plans and the civility and the erudition. No word on what would have happened to Bernie and his 1.4 million donors and 33 million dollars in the bank to say nothing of his working-class supporters. Or for that matter where the older black voters who have solidly supported Biden would have magically vanished to.
Guys, I think we have enough evidence to officially declare that the media has decided to pull mayor Pete off the gurney and resuscitate his failing presidential run.
The Harvard-bashing is tasty, but this is a stupid take. Buttigieg has been raising money hand-over-fist and rising in the polls before the debate, so in no way is his campaign “failing.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile in The Stanford Daily, the school newspaper for the college he and his twin brother attended. It’s a fawning profile for a campaign where such things are now few and far between.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But see the entry for Tulsi Gabbard below. And I get an excuse to embed this:
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. On a tour of Iowa.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hillary Clinton accused Gabbard of being groomed by the Russians to run a third party campaign.
Appearing on Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s podcast, Clinton made a number of claims regarding Russian meddling in U.S. elections, including that Gabbard’s substantial social-media support relies on Russian bots. Gabbard was the most-searched candidate after the first and second Democratic debates.
“I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said on the podcast. “She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Although Clinton did not explicitly mention Gabbard’s name, when asked if the accusation was leveled at the Hawaii Congresswoman, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said “If the nesting doll fits.”
Result:
Notice how quickly CNN cut off Gabbard when she challenged Elizabeth Warren. “Even among the other frontrunners, Warren got almost a full 10 minutes extra vs. Biden and Sanders. That’s pretty remarkable given how absolutely boring and uncharismatic she is. But there’s a simple reason she got so much extra time. The moderators were favoring her big time.”
No wonder Clinton hates her…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris can’t answer a simple question. “Kamala Harris seems to lack any instinct for leadership.” And her campaign just keeps doing stupid stuff. Campaigned in Aiken, South Carolina.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Angry Amy Came to Play:
A confessed bird murderer who presided over a Senate office that former staffers described as “controlled by fear, anger, and shame,” Klobuchar (D., Minn.) traded her inside voice for her shouty voice, and lit into her Democratic opponents, accusing them of trying to deceive the American people with lies.
De facto frontrunner Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) bore the brunt of Amy’s rage, especially when it came to the issue of health care and Warren’s refusal to admit that middle class taxes will go up under her proposed “Medicare for All” plan.
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth … I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice,” Klobuchar seethed. “I believe the best and boldest idea here is to not trash Obamacare, but to do exactly what Barack Obama wanted to do from the beginning, and that’s have a public option.”
Klobuchar was just getting started, accusing Warren of wanting to kick 150 million people off of their preferred health insurance plans by forcing them to enroll in Medicare.
“And I’m tired of hearing whenever I say these things, ‘Oh, it’s Republican talking points,'” Klobuchar fumed. “You are making Republican talking points right now in this room … I think there is a better way that is bold, that will cover more people, and it’s the one we should get behind.”
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Gets a Dave Wiegel profile in the Washington Post:
Klobuchar, who struggled for attention in the Democratic primary, says this week’s debate helped her catch on at exactly the right time. Her town halls are crowded, with staffers running to get more chairs to pack breweries or event centers. She leads the field in local endorsements, especially state legislators, “with more to come,” she says. She kicked off her bus tour with the support of Andy McKean, a Republican state legislator who bolted his party six months ago and who pronounced Klobuchar the kind of Democrat who could unite America again.
“If you want to peak in this race,” she said after a stop in Waterloo, “you want to peak now, instead of six months before [the caucuses].”
A few other candidates still draw larger crowds, but Klobuchar is going for a particular kind of caucus-goer: the loyal Democrat who wants to win back those mysterious Trump voters. In interviews around the events, Klobuchar-curious voters tended to list her alongside South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.); and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) as the candidates who could have the longest reach, because they were not seen as too left-wing. Craig Hinderaker, a 71-year-old farmer who saw Klobuchar in Panora (population 1,069), said he’d committed to her months earlier after becoming convinced that she had centrist appeal and real campaign skills.
“Biden was my top choice, but he’s been dropping,” Hinderaker said. “Just too many errors.”
Klobuchar, who began running TV and digital ads in Iowa only this month, had methodically introduced herself to the state as the electable, relatable neighbor who Republicans had already learned to love. On the campaign’s official bingo cards, there are squares for “bio diesel plant” and “breakfast pizza,” as well as the more evasive “bridge that crosses over the river of our divide.” Her stump speeches and town hall answers are peppered with references to Republican colleagues — “Lindsey Graham, who took up my bill with John McCain,” or “James Lankford, a very conservative senator from Oklahoma” — who have helped her pass bills. Without mentioning Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), she describes the sort of Democrats she says wouldn’t win in 2020.
“People don’t really want the loudest voice in the room,” Klobuchar said in Mason City. “They want a tough voice in the room, which I think I showed I could do in the debate. They want someone that’s going to tell them the truth — look them in the eye and tell them the truth — and not make promises that they can’t keep. They want someone who understands that there’s a difference between a plan and a pipe dream, and that not everything can be free.”
Also got a CBS News piece.
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Wayne Messam brought in $5 in campaign contributions in Q3. Not $5 million. Not $500,000. Not $5,000. $5. Plus a timeline of his failing campaign. He says the $5 was a mistake, but I’m going to use this opportunity to move him down to the also-rans for the next clown car update.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still says he’s coming for your guns. Law enforcement officials are not about to carry out O’Rourke’s crazy gun confiscation scheme. “Backtracking on his claim earlier this month that religious organizations should be taxed if they did not perform gay marriage, O’Rourke said churches and other religious nonprofits should maintain their tax-exempt status, but that they should be legally obliged not to discriminate against gay and transgender people.” He panders to the far left and then walks it back without rhyme or reason. Not sure anyone has a reason to pretend to care about him anymore. Every time you think you’ve reached the depth of O’Rourke cringe, there’s always deeper cringe:
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. He gets a mini-profile in the Washington Post; it’s less informative than his Wikipedia entry or campaign site. His presidential fundraising is sucking wind. Surprise! So is his House reelection campaign!
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Trying to get back in the groove after his heart attack:
Bernie Sanders, just weeks after a heart attack took him off the presidential campaign trail, renewing questions about his age and health, roared back last week with a strong debate performance and the disclosure of a quarterly fundraising haul that vanquished all of his Democratic competitors.
But the 78-year old Vermont senator, whose powerful oratory and progressive message on income inequality lifted him to serious contention in the 2016 Democratic contest against Hillary Clinton, is less formidable this time, with polls in early states and beyond showing his status as a top-tier candidate at risk.
From the challenge posed by fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren to staff clashes and poor strategic communication, Sanders has struggled to compete in a larger field and a new political environment. His health scare added another major challenge.
Other than Tuesday’s televised debate in Ohio, Sanders has been largely off the trail since his heart attack Oct. 1. He held his first major campaign event since his hospitalization on Saturday, when New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders at a New York City rally to endorse his candidacy.
An estimated 26,000 people showed up for that rally, which was slightly larger than a New York City crowd Warren drew last month. Did the heart attack recharge his campaign?
For months, Sanders’s campaign was largely listless. Sanders still had a devoted following, though most polls suggested what was obvious on the ground: Fans were drifting to other candidates, most obviously Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. At events in Iowa, New Hampshire, and beyond, I heard the same comments from longtime Sanders supporters: They still loved him and were grateful for how he’d jolted Democratic politics to the left, but he was too old to be president, and it was time for someone else to step up. The heart attack seemed like a macabre metaphor for the state of Sanders’s campaign.
But contrarianism runs deep in the senator from Vermont—a 2016 campaign aide once described one of Sanders’s main animating principles to me as: “Fuck me? No, fuck you!” With his comeback, Sanders seems to be saying just that—not only to any detractors ready to write him off, but to the organ pumping inside his own chest.
And his supporters have responded.
“I kind of thought [his heart attack] was the end of the campaign, but the boost has been significant, and I’m encouraged by it,” said Quinn Miller, a 33-year-old city-government worker wearing a blue Unidos con Bernie T-shirt.
“It got everyone rallied,” said Erik Pye, a 45-year-old Army veteran and store owner from Brooklyn. “It gave everyone a sense of urgency.”
The incident seems to have made serious again all the Sanders supporters who’d recently wandered off, I observed to 28-year-old Elizabeth Johnson, who’d traveled from Rhode Island with her boyfriend. “Serious,” she joked, “as a heart attack.”
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Fox News profile on his walk across New Hampshire. “It’s a non-traditional journey. Sestak will often stop down and jump into the support vehicle to attend an event or make a campaign stop or two before heading back to the spot where he stopped his trip, so he can resume his journey. And each evening he returns to a home in southern New Hampshire, where he stays with friends.” He actually seems to be walking alone for significant portions of the trip. A candidate’s time is a campaign’s most precious resource. The fact that he’s spending it plodding alone and mostly ignored is the perfect metaphor for the Sestak 2020 campaign.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. America, meet Tom Steyer:
When billionaire Tom Steyer is up on the debate stage tonight and several serious-minded senators and governors are not, viewers can fairly ask what the heck is going on. Other Democratic candidates have explicitly accused Steyer of buying his way onto the debate stage. Per the Sacramento Bee: “In an email to supporters, former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke said Steyer has ‘succeeded in buying his way up there.’ New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker wrote to supporters in a fundraising email that Steyer’s ‘ability to spend millions of his personal wealth has helped him gain in the polls like no one else in this race.’”
Steyer has spent $20 million on television ads — boosting his name ID and poll support above that oh-so-high 2 percent threshold — and he’s collected donations from more than 165,000 individuals.
Tonight, many Americans will get their first look at Tom Steyer, and while there’s always the chance he surprises us, the odds are good that by the end of the night, viewers at home will wonder if he won his spot on the debate stage in some sort of auction or perhaps through the Make-a-Wish Foundation. If Tom Steyer did not exist, cynical conservatives would have to invent him as the embodiment of hilariously self-absorbed, hypocritical elitists who believe in wildly impractical happy-talk theories and who have only the vaguest notion of what the U.S. Constitution says.
Steyer is a billionaire hedge-fund manager who told the New York Times that he doesn’t think of himself as rich. At his hedge fund, Steyer helped “wealthy investors move their money through an offshore company to help shield their gains from U.S. taxes.” Back in 2005, he invested $34 million in Corrections Corporation of America, “which runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” Steyer says he regrets that past investment.
He’s an ardent environmentalist and climate-change activist who made part of his fortune in coal development projects. He has spent tens of millions of dollars on political ads because he wants to “get corporate money out of politics.” It’s unclear if he has other controversial investments, because he “declined to go into detail about significant segments of his investment portfolio, citing confidentiality agreements that bar him from publicly disclosing the underlying assets in which he is invested.” (Steyer believes President Trump has violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution because “has directly profited from dealing with foreign governments through his businesses in the U.S. and around the globe.”)
In January, he declared that he would be “dedicating 100 percent of my time, money and effort to one cause: working for Mister Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. I am not running for president at this time. Instead I am strengthening my commitment to Need to Impeach in 2019.” But by July — well before House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of impeachment proceedings — he changed his mind and decided to run.
“Tom Steyer Calls for Impeachment Inquiry to Be Made Public.” I think this may be the first issue Steyer and I agree on.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Suburban Democratic white women are not sold on Warren:
“But she would never get elected,” says Lowry. “There is no chance.”
“Why do you say that?” says White, a former navy officer with a PhD in health policy.
“All the people who voted for Trump are scared to death of socialism,” she says. Warren’s policies are far too left-leaning to appeal to most Americans, Lowry says. Living in this area, she adds, she understands the importance of selecting a moderate.
When pundits question Trump’s support among women, he will often allude to the “hidden” suburban women voting block that backed him in 2016.
Democrats should worry that Warren is the frontrunner:
Warren was taken to task during the debate for evading basic questions about how she would pay for her signature Medicare-for-all health-care plan, and how she would implement her controversial—and constitutionally dubious—wealth tax. For a candidate who brags about having a policy plan for everything, it didn’t look good.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar called Warren’s health-care plan a “pipe dream” and offered her a “reality check” on her wealth tax, attacks that were echoed and reinforced by the other candidates throughout the night. When Mayor Pete Buttigieg asked Warren, “yes or no,” whether her Medicare-for-all plan would raise taxes on the middle class, Warren hemmed and hawed, talked about her “principles,” and evaded giving a yes or no answer.
Buttigieg and others seized on this, calling into question Warren’s trustworthiness. When Sen. Bernie Sanders jumped in to explain that his universal health-care plan would increase taxes, Klobuchar and Buttigieg noted that at least Sanders was being honest and straightforward about his plan. Through it all, Warren seemed defensive and taken aback that her fellow candidates were coming after her like this.
The reason all this should concern Democrats is that if Warren can’t handle pointed questions about basic aspects of her major policy proposals in a primary debate, how is she going to weather the storms of the general election? If she can’t bring herself to admit that Medicare-for-all will mean higher taxes for everyone, which it certainly will, how will general election voters already skeptical of Washington be persuaded to trust her?
Trump won a crowed GOP primary in 2016 in part by saying things no other candidate was willing to say and putting himself forward as an honest outsider who tells it like it is. If Democrats want to put someone up against Trump who can beat him at this game, their candidate had better have a credible answer for how he or she will pay for a $32 trillion program that’s steadily losing support. The most recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found just 51 percent now support Medicare-for-all, a two-point drop from last month and a five-point drop since April, even as the share of those who oppose it is growing.
Questions about how Democrats plan to pay for these things are only going to intensify as we approach the general election, and as more Americans realize that they’ll certainly have to pay higher taxes for socialized health care and college, such policies will likely continue to lose support.
Floats the idea of ending aid to Israel over West Bank settlements.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s been too long since Williamson got one of those weirdly glowing profiles, so here’s one from her old ministry stomping grounds: “Soul on Fire: Marianne Williamson brings explosion of love to Encinitas town hall event.” (I saw Explosion of Love open for The String Cheese Incident at SXSW.) Williamson hits Clinton over the Gabbard smear: “The Democratic establishment has got to stop smearing women it finds inconvenient! The character assassination of women who don’t toe the party line will backfire. Stay strong @TulsiGabbard . You deserve respect and you have mine.” Also objecting to Clinton’s comments was…
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He says Gabbard “deserves much more respect” than Clinton gave her. “She literally just got back from serving our country abroad.” The Yang campaign is now treated seriously enough that we’re actually starting to see some hit pieces. First up: Slate: “Andrew Yang Is Full of It.” There follows a somewhat tedious and misguided discussion of automation vs. trade deals are responsible for the decline in manufacturing jobs. (Both are more wrong than right; union contracts and policies and the structure of tax laws probably had bigger effects than either.) “Andrew Yang, Snake Oil Salesman:
Not only has he exceeded expectations for his polling and fundraising, not only has he developed a cult following, not only has he got people talking about his signature idea, the universal basic income, he actually has other candidates expressing openness to it.
It’s too bad that Yang’s idea is a foolish response to a non-problem. Worse, Yang is trying to persuade people to fear and oppose something that we need more of and that is a key to economic progress and higher wages — namely, automation.
It is through technological innovation that workers become more productive — i.e., can create more with less — and society becomes richer.
To hear Yang tell it, robots are on the verge of ripping an irreparable hole in the American job market. He’s particularly alarmed by the potential advent of autonomous vehicles. According to Yang, “All you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society.” He predicts that in a few years, “we’re going to have a million truck drivers out of work,” and “all hell breaks loose.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, Yang’s fear of automation in general and self-driving cars in particular is completely insane.
It can’t be that the only thing holding our society together is the fact that cars and trucks must be operated by people. If innovations in transportation were really the enemy, we would have been done in long ago by the advent of canals, then railroads, then automobiles and highways.
At a practical level, Yang’s assumption that autonomous vehicles are going to wipe out all trucking jobs, and relatively soon, is unsupported. If progress has been made toward self-driving cars, we’ve learned that the jump to full autonomy is a vast one that will take many years to achieve. There will be time for the sector and people employed in it to adjust.
He outraised Buttigieg and Harris among big tech (which in this case means Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft).
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
Actor Alec Baldwin.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Former California Governor Jerry Brown
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Amazon, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Apple Computer, artificial intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Cory Booker, Democrats, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Facebook, Google, Hillary Clinton, Iowa, Israel, Jim Geraghty, Joe Biden, Joe Sestak, John Delaney, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Krystal Ball, Maine, Marianne Williamson, Michael Bennet, Microsoft, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pete Buttigieg, polls, South Carolina, Steve Bullock, technology, Tim Ryan, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, Wayne Messam
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Monday, September 23rd, 2019
De Blasio quits, Warren rises, Sanders falls, Harris freefalls, Booker’s going broke, Klobuchar shows signs of life, Messam registers, and everyone is all-in on Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
Lots of Iowa polls this time around:
Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom (Iowa): Warren 22, Biden 20, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 9, Harris 6, Klobucher 3, Booker 3, Gabbard 2, Yang 2, Steyer 2, O’Rourke 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1.
Fox News: Biden 29, Sanders 18, Warren 16, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, O’Rourke 4, Booker 3, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Bennet 1, Delaney 1, Steyer 1.
Monmouth (New Jersey): Biden 26, Warren 20, Sanders 18, Booker 9, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Gabbard 2, de Blasio 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1. Booker’s best showing, but it’s for his home state, and if he got that percentage in the actual primary, it would be below the 15% threshold he needs to pick up delegates.
Economist/YouGov (page 126): Biden 25, Warren 19, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 8, Harris 5, O’Rourke 3, Yang 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1, Bennet 1, Williamson 1, Bullock 1, Delaney 1.
SurveyUSA: Biden 33, Warren 19, Sanders 17, Harris 6, O’Rourke 4, Booker 4, Yang 3.
Iowa State University: Warren 24, Biden 16, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 13, Harris 5, Gabbard 4, Klobuchar 3, Yang 3, Steyer 2, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Williamson 1, Ryan 1. High as I’ve seen Buttigieg anywhere, much less Iowa. Sample size of 572.
Florida Atlantic University (Florida): Biden 24, Warren 24, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 5, Harris 4, Messam 3, Yang 2, O’Rourke 3, Bennet 1, Ryan 1, Bullock 1, Gabbard 1, de Blasio 1, Booker 1. Messam’s 3% in his home state is not only his highest anywhere, it may be the first time he’s actually registered as a choice.
NBC: Biden 31, Warren 25, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 7, Harris 5, Yang 4, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, O’Rourke 1, Gabbard 1, Delaney 1, Steyer 1, de Blasio 1, Castro 1.
Focus on Rural America (Iowa): Biden 25, Warren 23, Buttigieg 12, Sanders 9, Klobuchar 8, Harris 5, Steyer 3, Booker 2, yang 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1. Gabbard 1, O’Rourke 1, Messam <1. Sample size of 500. Highest I've seen Klobuchar since she announced. Of all the longer-shot candidates, I'd give her the best chance of an "all in on Iowa" strategy getting results.
Real Clear Politics
538 polls
Election betting markets
Pundits, etc.
It seems like everyone is now all in on Iowa:
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign said it would have 110 staff members in the state by the end of this month. Senator Kamala Harris has promised to visit every week in October. Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Sunday kicked off a John McCain-like, everything-on-the-record bus tour and is advertising on local television and radio. Senator Amy Klobuchar is 49 counties into her tour of all 99 in the state. And on Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders will begin a “Bernie Beats Trump’’ tour of eastern Iowa to highlight what he says is his strength as a general election candidate.
As a new poll suggested a significant shift in the primary race’s top tier — with Senator Elizabeth Warren overtaking Mr. Biden for first place — candidates at the annual Polk County Steak Fry in Des Moines on Saturday tried to cut through the furor surrounding President Trump, Ukraine and Mr. Biden to deliver their message to voters still sifting through their preferences from one of the largest fields in history.
The candidates’ renewed sense of urgency has set the stage for a four-month sprint to a night of caucuses that remains the single biggest prize in American politics.
“We know that Iowa is where we can turn heads,’’ Mr. Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., said aboard his campaign bus on Sunday. “Even the other early states will be looking at what Iowa did.”
The increasing focus on Iowa, where voters must attend an hourslong midwinter evening gathering to participate in choosing their party’s nominee, has come at the expense of New Hampshire, where the nation’s first primary election comes eight days later.
None of the Democratic presidential candidates are betting their entire campaigns on a strong performance in New Hampshire, meaning it may be the first time since 1984 that there is not a candidate focused solely on the Granite State in a contested presidential race.
Naturally, this turn of events has supposedly given New Hampshire Democrats a case of the sads:
Overall, an analysis by The Hill shows that this cycle’s presidential candidates are actually visiting New Hampshire more frequently than 2016’s field of candidates.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), who is from the neighboring state of Massachusetts, held 34 campaign stops between January and July of 2019, according to the NBC Boston candidate tracker.
Former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) held 79 campaign events in the same time frame, the most of any 2016 or 2020 candidate.
Former presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) also held more campaign stops than any 2016 presidential candidate, with 53 campaign stops before the end of July. She dropped out of the race at the end of August.
Fat lot of good it did her.
“Even though there are dozens and dozens of candidate visits, they’re not as visible as they used to be,” said Andrew Cline, the president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.
In an interview with The Hill, Cline, who follows New Hampshire politics closely, said the sense the state is being overlooked by candidates is widely shared.
“It definitely feels like there isn’t much going on in New Hampshire week to week,” he said.
New Hampshire people can sound a bit miffed about the whole thing.
“Yes, it’s annoying,” Cline said about the feeling of an overshadowed first-in-the-nation primary.
The sentiment has been felt in the state throughout the summer.
For example, the famed Amherst, N.H., Fourth of July parade usually serves as a hotbed for presidential hopefuls, but none of the top-tier candidates showed up this year.
Most of the top-tier no-shows had supporters marching in their absence but were met with lukewarm enthusiasm compared to the low-polling candidates, such as Delaney and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who marched in the hot sun and shook hands with dozens of locals.
After most called for reducing meat consumption, and some for banning cheeseburgers, Democrats descended on Iowa to grill 10,000 steaks.
Are Harris, Buttigieg and Booker playing for second place? If so Harris is failing at that. Booker may well be running for veep. I get the impression that Buttigieg is the insider big money backup choice if Biden’s brain goes completely kablooey.
Lots of candidates aren’t even winning their home states. “The fact that so many Democratic candidates aren’t winning in their home states is not a good sign. These are the voters who know you best and should be the most behind you.”
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Natters about climate change and Citizens United, having learned nothing from the Inslee campaign. Starts an ad campaign in Iowa.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. All that Hunter Biden/Ukraine dirt is finally getting dragged into the open. “Joe Biden, now the Democratic presidential frontrunner for 2020, faced scrutiny for months over accusations that he pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who at that time was leading a corruption investigation into a natural gas company that had ties to Biden’s son.” Let’s go to the tape:
Inside the mind of a Biden voter.
Those so-called experts on TV keep saying that Biden is old. Well, you’re not as young as you used to be, either, but you’re not ready to be shuffled off into the retirement home or the grave just yet. When they say Biden’s past his prime and no good anymore, those smug young punks are saying you’re past your prime and no good anymore. You hope to live long enough to see those guys deal with a bad back and arthritis and diabetes.
Then there are the kids are complaining about what Biden said and did in the ’70s. C’mon now, it was the ’70s. Everybody was listening to disco and wearing bell bottoms and taking drugs and growing their sideburns longer than your middle finger. Nobody’s the same now as they were in the ’70s. That nice-looking kid mayor who’s running was, what, in preschool then? You want to judge him based on what he was doing back then?
He gets dissed by Ilhan Omar, which will probably only help him with his base of mostly non-insane Democrats.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Does Booker only have ten days left to fund his campaign?
The next 10 days will be critical for Sen. Cory Booker, who warned his presidential run may come to an end if he isn’t able to raise nearly $2 million by the end of the month. “We have reached a critical moment, and time is running out,” campaign manager Addisu Demissie warned in a memo to staff and supporters. “It’s now or never: The next 10 days will determine whether Cory Booker can stay in this race and compete to win the nomination.”
Booker confirmed that was the case in a series of tweets, acknowledging it was unusual “for a campaign like ours to be this transparent” but he insisted that “there can be no courage without vulnerability.” Booker specified that his campaign doesn’t “see a legitimate long-term path forward” unless the campaign can raise $1.7 million by the end of September. The New Jersey senator insisted that “this isn’t an end-of-quarter stunt” but rather “a real, unvarnished look under the hood of our campaign.”
Possibly true, possibly just another version of the direct mail “Dear DONOR, we need $X amount of money for CANDIDATE campaign in Y days or we can’t go on! Could you give $Z to keep us going?” solicitation that everyone who’s ever donated to a political campaign gets. Were Booker and Harris in on the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax? The Senator from Innsmouth.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Why Steve Bullock Refuses to Drop Out. Members of the Clinton diaspora are pleading with the Montana governor to stay in the race, even if the rest of the country doesn’t know who he is.” Because if there’s anyone who has their pulse on the finger of America it’s Clinton cronies.
The Democratic Party, and America as a whole, have changed so much over the past 30 years that comparing candidates from different eras can seem moot. But there’s a distinctly Bill Clinton–esque sensibility to many Democratic Party veterans urging Bullock to stick with his presidential campaign, despite his failing to make the September debate stage and remaining, at best, in the margin of error of most polls. They see another popular, moderate governor of a small, conservative-leaning state who started his campaign late and is being written off, and they don’t just feel nostalgic—they feel a little déjà vu. They insist they are not being delusional.
Paul Begala, the former Clinton strategist and current CNN pundit, earlier this week went on Twitter to encourage people to donate to Bullock’s campaign. Minyon Moore, one of the top political aides in the Clinton White House and now one of the most respected African American female operatives in the party, told me she didn’t know Bullock before they recently had dinner, but she was impressed by both his understanding of public policy and his campaign’s outreach, and encouraged him to stay with it. “They’ve been doing a lot of quiet meetings,” Moore said. “Unfortunately, time is not waiting for anybody, but I think he has an important voice that probably hasn’t been heard as much as it should be heard.” Mickey Kantor, the former Clinton Commerce secretary, told me this week that Bullock is “a terrific talent,” with “a résumé we would have prayed for in a Democratic candidate for president.”
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Buttigieg: ‘I can’t even read the LGBT media anymore.'” So the gay candidate isn’t gay enough for the gay mafia. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Dings Warren on how she’ll pay for her socialized medicine scheme.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He pandered to the impeach Trump crowd.
Update: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: Dropped Out September 20. It took a long time, but he finally got the hint.
Just 10 candidates met the polling and donor thresholds to participate in last week’s Democratic debate in Houston. And de Blasio was not among them, nor did it seem possible for him to qualify for the next debate, in Ohio in October. As of July, only 6,700 people had donated to his campaign (debaters need 130,000), and he has only hit 2 percent support in a handful of polls all year long (none of which are counted by the Democratic National Committee for debate qualification). In short, it’s no mystery why de Blasio called it quits.
De Blasio was always an extreme long shot. He entered the race quite late, on May 16 — after more than 20 other major candidates had declared and the field was already drawing headlines for being historically saturated. In fact, only one successful presidential nominee since 1976 (Bill Clinton) kicked off his campaign later than de Blasio did. And although de Blasio was arguably one of the most progressive candidates in the field — having brought universal pre-K and other liberal reforms to the five boroughs — he was crowded out of the primary’s left lane by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who combined for 56 percent support among “very liberal” voters in the most recent Quinnipiac poll (de Blasio had less than 1 percent).
But probably de Blasio’s biggest problem was simply that Democratic voters did not like him,2 which is quite an unusual place to be among voters of one’s own party. In an average of national polls of 2020 candidates’ favorability from May, de Blasio was the only candidate at the time whom more voters viewed unfavorably than favorably (his net favorability rating — favorable rating minus unfavorable rating — was -1). That’s especially bad because de Blasio wasn’t some little-known candidate; 46 percent of Democrats were able to form an opinion of him. All other candidates who were at least as well-known had net favorability ratings of +21 or better!
That’s one way to put it. “Almost universally loathed” is another.
The Post probably had the best postmortem:
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. His daughter is getting married. Congrats! So now Delaney has at least one good thing that happened in his life this year…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She flacked for the Iran nuclear deal and ending sanctions. So this was one of Gabbard’s “Bad Idea Weeks.”
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris is now polling fifth…in California. “Kamala Harris bets it all on Iowa to break freefall.” If that sounds like desperation, it’s only because it is.
Kamala Harris is putting her stumbling campaign on the line with a new Iowa-or-bust strategy: She’s shifting away from the closed-door fundraisers that dominated her summer calendar to focus on retail politicking in the crucial kickoff state.
Harris huddled with top campaign officials Tuesday in Baltimore to discuss the next steps as a series of polls show her plummeting into the mid-single digits. She’s not expected to significantly alter her message. Instead, Harris is planning to make weekly visits to the state and nearly double the size of her 65-person ground operation, sources familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.
The re-engagement in Iowa — where the California senator held a 17-stop bus tour in August but hasn’t returned since — is part of a broader acknowledgment inside the campaign that she hasn’t been in the early states enough. It’s designed to refocus her campaign and clarify her narrowing path to the nomination.
Harris has been backsliding since her summer confrontation with Joe Biden, dropping so far in recent surveys that her once-promising campaign appears in danger of becoming an afterthought.
An Iowa poll out Wednesday, conducted by her own pollster for another client, showed Harris well out of range of the frontrunners, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, and behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
More on the same subject:
By confiding (a little too loudly) to Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii that she’s “fucking moving to Iowa,” Harris inadvertently disclosed that her strategy now depends on getting a good result there. Another option would be to suggest to the nation that it’s not an optimal state for her, and thereby lower expectations. She could tell everyone that she’s putting her chips on New Hampshire. In truth, though, neither state is ideal for her.
Iowa and New Hampshire are among the least racially diverse states in the nation. At least in Iowa, Harris does not have to contend with two of the three frontrunners (Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts) representing bordering states.
Harris’s decision looks logical even if it’s a bit forced. The third contest is the Nevada caucuses, but they have historically not had influence in the perceptions game. Harris’s best early state is likely South Carolina, where there is a huge African-American population that has tremendous influence in the Democratic primary. But Joe Biden is dominating in the polls there and that’s unlikely to change (or benefit Harris if it does) if she does poorly in the first three contests.
She needs a win before South Carolina, or at least a much-better-than-expected result that gives people a reason to see her as a real option. Iowa is probably her best bet for accomplishing that.
Which is a problem, since Iowa doesn’t like her. She stumbled her way through a Jimmy Fallon interview.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Harris campaign craters while Klobuchar climbs in Iowa.”
According to an Iowa poll by Harris’ chief pollster, David Binder, released by Focus on Rural America, Klobuchar has jumped ahead of Harris in the Hawkeye State, in fifth place behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders after the third presidential debate in Houston.
Since the end of 2018, Klobuchar and Harris have jumped back and forth with one another in this particular poll. Harris had 10% support in September, while Klobuchar did not chart. By December, Klobuchar had 10% support and Harris dropped to 7%.
Harris jumped ahead of Klobuchar again in March by 3 points and following the California Democrat’s strong debate performance in Miami, after excoriating former Vice President Joe Biden, she received 18% support from Iowans in the poll, leap frogging into third place.
Klobuchar, on the other hand, spiraled downward at the time to the low single digits before rebounding to her current 8%.
Harris is an unlikable phony. Klobuchar, on the other hand, is just genuinely unlikable.
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. He broke 3% in Florida, but he’s still getting stories that he’s not paying his staff.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. O’Rourke’s gun-gabbing comments have made him the Republican MVP:
We’re swiftly marching into 2020, and as of right now, the Democrat party is in crisis with its 2020 candidates doing everything they can to appease the radical trend that has taken it over as Democrat leadership attempts to keep the party as centered as it possibly can.
It’s a war that is going to keep the left busy as the right continues to sail right through the election period with little to no difficulty. The great thing about O’Rourke’s comments is that, as Coons suggested, it will haunt Democrats going forward, specifically into 2020. O’Rourke essentially gave Democrats another problem to deal with, and so long as he’s is in the race, he’ll continue to make more problems for Democrats to deal with when it comes to gun control.
What’s more, it’s putting Democrat leadership in the position to tell demonstrable lies, and lies that will get other Democrats who do support that measure of gun control to turn on Democrat leadership.
So long as O’Rourke is around, the Democrats will continue to be forced to fight one another, and continue to give Republicans more momentum. It’s a house divided that will fall in 2020.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say O’Rourke is a Republican plant.
The NRA dubbed him AR-15 salesman of the month.
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Washington Examiner profile. It’s not enough that he wants to fund abortion in America, he wants America involved in family planning worldwide.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren is seriously eating into Sanders’ base.
Warren has begun to eclipse Sanders’s once-dominant standing among the Democratic Party’s most liberal voters and surpass him in some polls in the first two states in the nominating process: Iowa and New Hampshire.
They both support what would be a massive economic restructuring with ideas such as Medicare-for-all, but Sanders, 78, has carved out his brand as a democratic socialist while Warren, 70, has described herself as a capitalist who has operated more as part of the Democratic mainstream. While Sanders drew notice in 2016 for his avid fans and big crowds, it is Warren this time who is gaining traction that way.
These challenges have been compounded by volatility inside Sanders’s operations in Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign quietly fired its Iowa political director in the late summer and has yet to name a replacement — a key vacancy as the race enters a crucial phase, with less than five months to go before the February caucuses.
Sanders’s difficulties in Iowa have come into sharper focus over the weekend. The most respected pollster in the state released a survey late Saturday showing Warren surging to 22 percent, two points ahead of former vice president Joe Biden, with Sanders at 11 percent. That places him third in the state where he fought Hillary Clinton to a near draw in 2016, launching an electrifying national movement.
“Why many Muslims treat Bernie Sanders like a rock star“:
Other Democratic presidentialcandidates have visited mosques on the campaign trail this year or spoken to Muslim groups. But Sanders has done it first and done it bigger, building on relationships with Muslim communities that took off during his previous presidential campaign, said Youssef Chouhoud, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University who studies the role of Muslims in politics.
“Historically, engaging with Muslims when you’re seeking federal office has been seen as politically dangerous,” Chouhoud said. “Bernie Sanders seems to be doing something different.”
Since February, Sanders has named a Muslim to be his campaign manager, tapped a prominent Muslim Palestinian American activist as a surrogate and visited a Los Angeles mosque to commemorate the victims of a New Zealand terrorist massacre at two Islamic houses of worship.
Last month, he headlined the Islamic Society of North America convention in Houston, where he got a standing ovation for his promise to overturn President Trump’s travel ban blocking most visitors from five predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. It was the first time a presidential candidate addressed the largest and most prominent Muslim gathering in the country, and more than 7,000 people packed in to hear him.
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, the only other presidential candidate to speak at the event, followed Sanders, but many in the crowd left after hearing the senator.
Sanders’ campaign representatives said they hope Muslims will help him repeat his 2016 Michigan primary win and capture other states. The campaign credited outreach to Michigan’s large Arab American and Muslim communities — including Arabic campaign ads — as a factor in his win there.
Muslims and Islamic organizations, meanwhile, have sought out Sanders, inviting him to talk to their communities, praising his policy positions and offering endorsements. Many have taken to social media to show their support, using the hashtags #Muslims4Bernie and #InshallahBernie.
Over the summer, Latif, the Bay Area supporter, launched the website “Iftars with Bernie.” The name refers to the meals at sundown that end the daily fast during Ramadan, when extended families and friends take turns eating and praying together in each others’ homes. The website encourages Muslims to share literature about the senator at the dinners.
“Muslims appreciate how he is giving them opportunities to be part of his movement,” said Cynthia Ubaldo, a physical therapist in Columbus, Ohio, who hosted a similar event for Eid, a holiday at the end of Ramadan. She passed out homemade “Muslims for Bernie 2020” pins decorated with stars and crescent moons to her 30 guests.
Snip.
Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist, is flying to Islamic conferences and mosques around the country to speak on Sanders’ behalf as a campaign surrogate. The co-founder of the Women’s March was among the leaders who left the group recently after infighting and accusations of anti-Semitism, which she has denied.
Sarsour says Sanders has attracted followers because of his response to Trump’s statements on Muslims and the conflict in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. WWMT profile. That’s your Sestak morsel this week…
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Can Tom Steyer Disrupt the Democratic Primary?” Gonna go with “no,” but I bet he can waste a ton of his money trying.
Part of the challenge for Steyer, at this stage, is that his ideology does not especially distinguish him from many of his competitors. Were he a moderate, his late entry in the race might seem clearer—to rope the Party back toward centrist pragmatism. Instead, Steyer has cast himself as an outsider capable of realizing even the most progressive campaign promises. “My basic thesis is that we have a broken government,” he told me, adding that the top three candidates in the polls have served in Congress or the Senate for about seventy years. “We have to stop the corporations’ stranglehold on this government. So, if that is the issue, the question is who’s going to be credible in terms of making that happen.”
In his early visits to Iowa, though, his bid has felt somewhat abstract. When, at the diner, he roved from table to table, asking Iowans to name their top policy concerns, the impression was of a cheery executive crowdsourcing his own priorities. During another stump speech on his swing, Steyer outlined the five priorities central to his political identity—voting-rights protections, a clean environment, a complete education, a living wage, and good health—and pointed out that none of the candidates at the previous night’s debate had brought up the climate crisis. He later told me that the first debates, which he found uninspiring, had contributed to his decision to run. “I felt they weren’t really getting down to the nub of what’s going on in the United States,” he said, of the other candidates. “I am categorically, qualitatively different, and, in my opinion, what I am saying is much more realistic and much more significant than anything they’re saying. As far as I’m concerned, I have a very simple task—not an easy task, but simple—to try and see if I have something important to say to the American people.”
On Friday, a few dozen people, mostly seniors, convened in Maquoketa for a town hall hosted by Bob Osterhaus, a pharmacist who served in the Iowa state legislature until 2004. Osterhaus has seen a number of politicians pass through his home, including Bill Bradley, Chris Dodd, and John Dean, who told Osterhaus’s wife that her cinnamon rolls were the best he’d ever had. “It’s always interesting when a rich man decides to get in and try to act like a commoner,” Osterhaus said of Steyer before the event.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Just how “electable” is Warren?
In her first Senate race in Massachusetts, in 2012, Warren won by just 7.4 percent, while Barack Obama was carrying the top of the ticket by more than 23 percent. (Warren might have been facing the unique obstacle of being seen as a carpetbagger, but it’s worth noting that Obama was running against a former Massachusetts governor.) Six years later, Warren won reelection against a barely known opponent in a Democratic wave election. She won by a more commanding 24.1 percent, but still fell short of the 27.2 percent margin Hillary Clinton had amassed in that state in the much-less-favorable 2016 election year.
Election results are indicative, but not dispositive. No two races are alike, and it’s possible Warren’s traits translate better to a presidential election than to the Senate (or to a campaign against Donald Trump in 2020 than to the Republicans she faced in 2012 and 2018). A somewhat more subjective measure of her political appeal is the degree to which Warren’s platform tracks with popular opinion.
When she began positioning her candidacy last year, Warren seemed to consciously aim for the broad mainstream of her own party. While she formally had endorsed the Bernie Sanders health-care plan, she was promising more limited measures, which seemed to insulate her from its unpopular aspects like higher middle-class taxes and forcing everybody off employer-based insurance. She was also distancing herself from Sanders by labeling herself “capitalist to my bones,” and even pitching her most radical proposal, the “Accountable Capitalism Act,” as good for business in the long run in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
And Warren seemed also to understand the political appeal of policies that imposed their costs on corporations — both through taxes and through regulation — than on the public through general taxation. Her focus on corruption and corporate governance was substantively ambitious, but also presented a narrow target for attack — most voters are happy to stick costs on corporate America if they don’t worry about paying for new programs themselves. A year ago, I thought Warren had found the perfect sweet spot.
It didn’t work out that way. Despite an exhaustive Boston Globe report that her self-identification as Native American had never benefited her career, early media coverage fixated on the issue, and she drew scorn from left and right alike. To Democratic voters, she looked like another victim of Donald Trump’s bullying.
Months of dismal polling forced Warren to attract more attention from progressive activists and compete with Sanders for the energized left. She has thrust herself back into the conversation by releasing a blizzard of policy proposals, including a full-on embrace of Berniecare. Many of them poll quite well, though the totality of the programs — free college and debt forgiveness ($1.25 trillion over a decade), green energy investment ($2 trillion), universal child care ($700 billion), new housing subsidies ($500 billion), and Medicare for All (roughly $30 trillion) — would be impossible to fund entirely from the rich. Circa 2018, Warren had a strong case to make that she could avoid higher taxes on the middle class, but 2019 Warren couldn’t credibly make a promise like that without giving up most of her plans.
On top of all that, Warren has joined most of the field in embracing broadly unpopular stances that play well with progressive activists, like decriminalizing immigration enforcement, abolishing the death penalty, and providing health coverage to undocumented immigrants. Trump’s campaign clearly grasps that his only chance of success is to present the opposition as unacceptably radical, and the Democratic primary is giving him plenty of ammunition to make this case. (Trump has also stopped, for the moment, injecting his “Pocahontas” slur into the political news cycle, but that will return if she clinches the nomination.)
Ann Althouse has spotted the most embarrassing example of WaPo Warren sycophancy yet: “Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?” Sweet bleeding Jesus, do you have any idea how cringingly pathetic that makes you look? “Martin Luther King helped lift black Americans up to freedom. Could Wheaties do the same?” Matt drudge thinks it’s Warren’s nomination to lose. She and Biden joined UAW picket lines.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Her “spiritual but not religious” brand isn’t selling to Democrats:
The more voters learned more about her, the less they seemed to like her. According to an analysis by my colleague Nathaniel Rakich, Williamson’s name recognition is up, but her net favorability ratings are down. She now actually has negative net favorability, a dubious honor she shares only with mayor of New York Bill de Blasio and former Rep. Joe Sestak. And her failure to resonate with an audience that might have been receptive to her message — “spiritual but not religious” Americans — also reflects the difficulty of reaching a group that’s defined largely by what it’s not.
According to the Pew Research Center, about one-third of Democrats identify as “spiritual but not religious” — an amorphous identity that has a lot in common with Williamson’s nondenominational spiritual practice. She identifies as Jewish and still attends High Holiday services, but she also practices transcendental meditation. She rose to prominence as a commentator and teacher of “A Course In Miracles,” a mystical book published in 1976 whose author claimed to be dictating revelations from Jesus.
“She’s really the definition of spiritual but not religious,” said Laura Olson, a political science professor at Clemson University, about Williamson. “In that sense, she represents — and you’d think might be able to reach — a very sizeable group of Americans.”
Depending on how you measure it, between one-fifth and one-third of Americans identify as “spiritual but not religious.” It’s a group whose numbers have grown in recent years, as more and more people draw away from institutional religion. And like Williamson, most of the “spiritual but not religious” maintain some kind of link to an organized faith tradition. In fact, according to Pew, they’re about as likely to identify as Protestant as they are to say they’re religiously unaffiliated. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority are not churchgoers, nor do they necessarily have a strong sense of communal identity or group cohesion. And here we run into the hurdle that makes outreach to the less-religious and the non-religious perennially tricky for Democrats: It’s hard to marshal a group that doesn’t think of itself as a group.
Williamson’s followers seem to be people who want meaning in their lives, and who reject the materialist vision of finite human life as a briefly flickering candle in a howling void of meaningless existential nothingness, but also don’t want to believe in something as unfashionable as Christianity. She wants mandatory national service to combat climate changes. Way to draw in that youth vote! Evidently she “didn’t challenge” a 9/11 truther in a 2012 interview. Meh, that’s a pretty limp gotcha.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. “I Was Andrew Yang’s First ‘Freedom Dividend’ Recipient – When He Fired Me.” Accounts from disgruntled ex-employees should always be taken with a grain of salt. This week in stupid commentary: Vox attacks Yang for “reinforcing toxic Asian stereotypes. Because the Social Justice Patrol never sleeps…
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
Actor Alec Baldwin.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Former California Governor Jerry Brown
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead) Things that make you go “Hmmm“: “John Hickenlooper’s exit from the presidential race came on the same day he would have had to file his financial disclosure forms with the Office of Government Ethics.”
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Addisu Demissie, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Beto O'Rourke, Bill De Blasio, California, Citizens United, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, Hunter Biden, Ilhan Omar, Iowa, Iran, Israel, Jim Geraghty, Joe Biden, Joe Sestak, John Delaney, Julian Castro, Jussie Smollett, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Linda Sarsour, Marianne Williamson, Michael Bennet, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Paul Begala, Pete Buttigieg, Social Justice Warriors, Steve Bullock, Tim Ryan, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, UAW, Ukraine, Wayne Messam
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Friday, September 20th, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I thought fall started tomorrow, but various reference sources say the fall equinox doesn’t actually occur until Monday, September 23.
Flash flooding hits the Houston area from Tropical Storm Imelda. “Gov. Greg Abbott has declared a state of disaster for 13 counties.” Plus a post office roof collapsed and I-10 was closed in both directions for a while east of Houston.
Democrats remain stuck on stupid:
What happens when a political party is hijacked by fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics who don’t care whether they win or lose an election?
They lose elections.
That’s where the Democrats are headed because they’d rather be “right” than clever. And when it comes to the issue of race, Democrats think they have a corner on “right.”
They’ve got a small problem, though. In order to appeal to the fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics to tap them for money and support, they have to at least give lip service to their warped views on race. And that includes calling you and me and about 70 percent of the American voters “racist.”
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
How New York Times ignored the real bombshell in the Kavanaugh book:
Not only did Christine Blasey Ford’s key witness and friend — Leland Keyser — state that she didn’t recall the party where Ford claimed she was assaulted, she also says she doesn’t remember “any others like it.”
Her words were strong: “It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home,” she said. “I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.”
Even more, Pogrebin and Kelly uncovered a pressure campaign to get Keyser to alter her testimony, to back Ford. Keyser told the writers, “I was told behind the scenes that certain things could spread about me if I didn’t comply,” and they report on group texts containing ominous language about Keyser’s allegedly “f***ed up” life.
While the reaction to the allegations against Kavanaugh was almost uniformly partisan (Republicans rejected the claims; Democrats either believed them or thought they cast enough doubt on Kavanaugh to deny him the nomination), there is — in fact — a truth of the matter here. Kavanaugh did or did not assault Ford, and in any fair proceeding Keyser’s testimony would detonate like a bomb. Remember, this wasFord’s witness and friend. She’s a Democrat. And, moreover, there was now evidence of a pressure campaign that looked a lot like an attempt to suborn perjury.
And Pogrebin still doesn’t get what she did wrong:
Pogrebin is at the center of a discussion of gross journalistic malpractice after publishing a story Saturday night with colleague Kate Kelly that failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL. Pure confirmation bias.
Though the woman at the center of the story wants no part of it, Kelly and Pogrebin published her name anyway (in their book, albeit not in the Times). “You’re kind of directing attention at a victim and she’s gonna be besieged,” Pogrebin said on the radio show, in explaining why the Times piece left the name out. “Even if people can ultimately find her name, it’s not necessarily important to make it easier for them to do so.” Oh, so publishing her name in a book does not constitute making it too easy for people to find this private citizen? It’s a separate but serious scandal. This woman has been made a public figure in a national story without her consent. Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy? Is every woman in America to think of herself as potential collateral damage should she ever cross paths with any Republican whom Times reporters later tried to take down?
In her WMAL interview this morning, Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. Calling her a victim would be begging the question if the woman claimed this status for herself. She would then be only an alleged victim. But she isn’t even that. She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion. Pogrebin then impugns the woman by saying she was so drunk that her memory can’t be trusted. She also says that “everyone” at the party was massively drunk and that their memories are therefore unreliable.
Does she hear herself talking? If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter — the woman in question at the Yale party — in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.
Trump’s Kulturekampf:
A new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care and abortion on demand.
An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.
No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.
Trump variously goes after antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities and, above all, the media — especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
For all the acrimony and chaos — and prognostications of Trump’s certain failure — a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.
In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran Deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord mere virtue signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller’s bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.
Some of the most prominent Trump haters — Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci and Rep. Adam Schiff — either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.
Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved further to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.
In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Democrats are lying about healthcare. For starters: How much ObamaCare sucks. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Democratic megadonor Ed Buck finally arrested after overdosing a third black man. This one, unlike the previous two, survived. He’s also been charged with running a meth ring.
Chronicle of an apocalypse foretold. And foretold. And foretold. And foretold. And foretold… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Why Britain should ditch the EU:
The real issue is far older and more important than whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the increasingly anti-democratic and German-controlled European Union.
England is an island. Historically, politically and linguistically, it was never permanently or fully integrated into European culture and traditions.
The story of Britain has mostly been about conflict with France, Germany or Spain. The preeminence of the Royal Navy, in the defiant spirit of its sea lords, ensured that European dictators from Napoleon to Hitler could never set foot on British soil. As British admiral John Jervis reassured his superiors in 1801 amidst rumors of an impending Napoleonic invasion, “I do not say, my lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.”
Britain’s sea power, imperialism, parliamentary government and majority Protestant religion set it apart from its European neighbors — and not just because of its geographical isolation.
The 18th century British and Scottish Enlightenment of Edmund Burke, David Hume, John Locke and Adam Smith emphasized individualism, freedom and liberty far more than the government-enforced equality of result that was favored by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is no accident that the American Revolution was founded on the idea of individual freedom and liberty, unlike the later French Revolution’s violent effort to redistribute income and deprive “enemies of the people” of their rights and even their lives.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Hillary Clinton blames her 2016 presidential defeat on “voter suppression.” Which is a weird way to say “refusing to campaign in the Midwest.”
Poll of Palestinian opinions. I’m sure many will point out the 37-50% (depending on the question) who support war against Israel. I’m more interested in the 48% who believe in possession by djinn or demons. (To be fair, the percentage in America would probably be similar in 1973…)
Israel’s election is still up in the air. The liberalish Blue and White faction appears to have edged Likud 33 to 31, but 61 votes are required to form a government. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has 55 votes to form a coalition government with orthodox religious parties that Blue and White vows not to join a coalition with.
“Fmr DNC Chair Donna Brazile: ‘I get in trouble’ when I refuse to say that Trump is a racist.”
“‘Rats, All of You!‘ Comedians Bill Burr, Spade, Schneider Slam Cancel Culture.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
A tweet on the racist history of gun control:
How to get emails in a freedom of information act request from the LAPD. Bonus: In 2015, they were still using Groupwise… (Hat tip: Amy Alkon.)
Here’s a long study on the effects of red meat consumption. Conclusion?
Although meat has been a central component of the diet of our lineage for millions of years, some nutrition authorities—who often have close connections to animal rights activists or other forms of ideological vegetarianism, such as Seventh-Day Adventism (Banta et al., 2018 Banta, J. E., J. W. Lee, G. Hodgkin, Z. Yi, A. Fanica, and J. Sabate. 2018. The global influence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on diet. Religions 9 (9):251. doi: 10.3390/rel9090251.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar])—are promoting the view that meat causes a host of health problems and has no redeeming value. We contend that a large part of the case against meat is based on cherry-picked evidence and low-quality observational studies. The bald claim that red meat is an “unhealthy food” (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is wildly unsupported.
Based on misrepresentations of the state of the science, some organizations are attempting to influence policy makers to take action to reduce meat consumption. Simplification of complex science increases persuasive power but may also serve ideological purposes and lead to scientistic approaches. According to Mayes and Thompson (2015 Mayes, C. R., and D. B. Thompson. 2015. What should we eat? biopolitics, ethics, and nutritional scientism. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4):587–99. doi: 10.1007/s11673-015-9670-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), manifestations of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics can have various ethical implications for “individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being”. Well-meaning yet overemphasized and premature recommendations may eventually cause more damage than benefit, not only physiologically but also by unjustifiably holding individuals accountable for their health outcomes. We believe that a large reduction in meat consumption, such as has been advocated by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), could produce serious harm. Meat has long been, and continues to be, a primary source of high-quality nutrition. The theory that it can be replaced with legumes and supplements is mere speculation. While diets high in meat have proved successful over the long history of our species, the benefits of vegetarian diets are far from being established, and its dangers have been largely ignored by those who have endorsed it prematurely on the basis of questionable evidence.
(Hat tip: Powerline.)
Bill Gates says not to break up tech giants. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
Speaking of Gates, here’s a list of all the connections between Gates and Jeffrey Epstein. Plus lots of denials.
First Blood author David Morrell on the meta-genius of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which I highly recommend seeing if you haven’t already.
Baby Shoggoth found.
“Snopes: ‘The Claim That Trump Is Hitler Lacks Concrete Evidence But Alludes To A Deeper Truth.'”
“Millennial Diagnosed With Tragic Inability To Even.”
Heh: I seem to have my own Fark logo now: 
. Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…
Tags:2016 Presidential Race, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Atkins, Babylon Bee, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Burr, Bill Gates, Blue and White (Israel), Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Christine Blasey Ford, comedy, Crime, David Spade, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ed Buck, environmentalism, EU, flooding, Foreign Policy, Green New Deal, gun control, Guns, Hillary Clinton, Houston, Israel, Israeli Elections, Jeffrey Epstein, Jihad, LAPD, Leland Keyser, Likud, Microsoft, ObamaCare, Palestinians, Rob Schneider, Robin Pogrebin, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, technology, UK, vegans, Victor Davis Hanson, weather
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, Jihad, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court | No Comments »
Friday, August 23rd, 2019
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
Why evangelicals support Trump:
Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”
That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.
Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.
Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.
Snip.
Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.
Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.
Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.
First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.
He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.
Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.
Well, it’s about time!
It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.
Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.
Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.
No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Man goes to car dealership, finds it booming:
“It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.
He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”
If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.
The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.
The Trump Administration ends catch-and-release.
The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:
Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.
We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.
Snip.
In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.
They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.
But it won’t.
It’s all a lie and a scam.
And we know it.
How Boris Yeltsin defeated the 1991 Communist coup. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady.)
“The Department of Justice says one of its own “repeatedly” helped the Bloods street gang protect its interests by identifying and exposing informants and cooperating witnesses.”
Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.
If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.
Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
Israel reportedly hit a Hezbollah arms depot in Iraq. According to Wikipedia, Israel has 16 F-35s total.
Hong Kong’s leaderless protests:
Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.
Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.
WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Still true: “Red-light cameras undermine rule of law.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate-based scam that nearly caused me to be murdered.”
“Trump Executive Order Cancels Student Loan Debt for Disabled Veterans.” Bet none of them have degrees in feminist critical theory, either…
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
“Robert Mueller crushed their dreams, so Democrats pivot to race.”
They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.
And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.
Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.
With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.
“Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
Reporter discovers, much to her surprise, that, yes, you do have to pass a background check before buying a gun. She fails.
The army wants microwave weapons against drones.
“Man Accused Of Shooting 6 Philadelphia Police Officers Was Federal Informant.” (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
Gregory Benford says that the Epstein smear against Marvin Minsky is baseless. (Hat tip: Instapundit, which is a backup source if you can’t get to Greg’s Facebook page.)
Borepatch says that red flag laws are malicious:
False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.
But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.
This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.
To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.
And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.
Malice.
Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
President Trump may have failed to buy Greenland, but we can all learn from the failures of Greenland’s public housing.
Lt. Governor Dan Patrick frowns on Bonnen’s shenanigans. (Hat tip: Cahnman.)
Republican John Lee wins seat on LA City Council, beating Green New Deal supporter.
What it’s like to be a roughneck in west Texas.
Miss Nevada banned from competing for Miss America over supporting President Trump.
First picture of light as both a wave and a particle.
“When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”
I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.
As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.
Tags:Bloods, Border Controls, Boris Yeltsin, China, CNN, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Department of Justice, Donald Trump, drone, environmentalism, F-35, feminists, Five Star Movement, Foreign Policy, Greenland, Gregory Benford, Greta Thunberg, Guns, Hezbollah, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jeffrey Epstein, Joe Rogan, Kurt Schlichter, Los Angeles, Marvin Minsky, Media Watch, Military, Northern League (Italy), Obama, oil industry, public housing, red light cameras, science, Southern Poverty Law Center, Soviet Union, Tawanna Hilliard, Texas, WeWork
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »
Monday, August 5th, 2019
Gravel is out, Creepy Porn Lawyer threatens a return, the Biden bunch banks big bucks, Ryan hits the showers, and Michelle says no (yet again). It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
Morning Consult: Biden 31, Sanders 18, Warren 15, Harris 10, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Yang 2.
Harvard CAPS/Harris: Biden 34, Sanders 17, Harris 9, Warren 8, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2.
Real Clear Politics
538 polls
Election betting markets
Pundits, etc.
Who all has qualified for the September debates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders and Warren. Castro, Gabbard and Yang have hit the fundraising threshold, but not the polling threshold.
Matt Tabbi of Rolling Stone watches the Democrats wander around Iowa and is not impressed:
Traveling hundreds of miles across Iowa, passing cornfields and covered bridges, visiting quaint small town after quaint small town, listening to the stump speeches of Democrat after would-be Donald Trump-combating Democrat, only one thought comes to mind:
They’re gonna blow this again.
Imagine how it looks to Republicans. If that’s too difficult or unpalatable, just look at the swarm of 24 Democratic candidates in high school terms.
The front-runner — the front-runner! — is septuagenarian gaffe machine Joe Biden, who started running for president in the Eighties and never finished higher than “candidacy withdrawn,” with a career delegate total matching John Blutarsky’s grade-point average, i.e., zero point zero. The summer’s “momentum” challenger is California Sen. Kamala Harris, who spent all year sinking in polls but surged when she hit Biden with “I don’t think you’re a racist . . . but . . .” on national TV.
A third contender is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a famed red-state punchline who already has 10,000 Pocahontas tweets aimed at her head should she make it to the general. Her “I have a plan for that” argument for smarter government makes her a modern analog to Mike Dukakis — another Massachusetts charisma machine whose ill-fated presidential run earned him a portrait alongside the Hindenburg in a Naked Gun movie.
A fourth challenger, Bernie Sanders, is a self-proclaimed socialist born before the Pearl Harbor attack who’s somehow more hated by the national media than Trump. A fifth, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has never earned more than 8,515 votes in any election. The claim to fame of a sixth, Beto O’Rourke, is that he lost a Senate bid to the world’s most-hated Republican. It goes on.
The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says “We’re out of ideas” quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.
Snip.
With a few exceptions, all the candidates here are giving a version of the same stump speech, which by itself is a problem — voters tend to notice this sort of thing.
Then there’s the content, which, to paraphrase Lincoln, is thinner than a soup made from the shadow of a pigeon that starved to death. The Democrats’ basic pitch reads like a list of five poll topics: kids are in cages; let’s close the gun-show loophole; this administration’s policies are an existential threat; something something Mitch McConnell; and Trump is (insert joke here).
There are truths there, but in baseball terms, it’s weak cheese Trump will swat into the seats. Our walking civil war of a president reached office on a promise to burn it all down, which, incidentally, he’s doing. A core psychological appeal to destruction needs a profound response. Slogans won’t work. Poll-and-pander won’t work. True inspiration is the only way out.
The Democrats had years to come up with an answer to Trump that is fundamental, powerful, and new, solving the problem the elder George Bush once called “the vision thing.” What’s mostly been shown instead is more of the same. Literally more, as in three times the usual suspects. The sequel even Hollywood would never make is now showing in Iowa.
Nor is he any more impressed with the debates.
There was Klobuchar dunking on Inslee, Harris thrashing Biden over his past stance on school busing, former Housing Secretary Julián Castro walloping O’Rourke for not doing his “homework” on section 1325 of the immigration code, and O’Rourke providing an anti-moment of his own in an agonizing marathon effort at speaking Spanish in his introductory debate segment.
The gambit inspired hundreds of vicious Twitter memes. Someone forgot to tell O’Rourke and fellow en-Español adventurist Cory Booker that the debates were already translated into Spanish on NBC’s broadcast partner, Telemundo. Stephen Colbert called it an “Español-off” and joked that the remarks “really got through, really penetrated.” Trevor Noah of The Daily Show and Jimmy Fallon of The Tonight Show also hammered the effort, leading to an approving recap of late-night comedy by Breitbart, never a good sign for Democrats.
There are real, heavy ideas underlying the Democratic primary…but few of them are coming through in these melees. Mostly the Democrats are taking tweet-size bites out of one another’s hind parts in Heathers-style putdowns, or engaging in virtue-signaling contests, like they’re running for president of Woke Twitter.
Snip.
Biden’s early front-runner flubs are reminiscent of Jeb Bush’s $150 million failure to handle Trump tweets. There are many such parallels. Biden is Jeb. O’Rourke, running in what the Times calls the “younger face” lane, is Marco Rubio. Unseen Steve Bullock is unseen Jim Gilmore. Bill de Blasio is the same “Why is he running?” New Yorker George Pataki was. And this election’s version of John Kasich, the embittered realist barking, “What are we doing here?” from the literal edge of the debate stage, is former Maryland Rep. John Delaney.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
New York Times did a nice infographic roundup of where money for the top candidates is coming from. Sanders does well everywhere. Biden does well in Delaware and the D.C. suburbs. Buttigieg crushes it in South Bend (and Martha’s Vineyard). Until you take Sanders out, you can’t even see Harris in California.
When will the no-hope bozos drop out? “Most of the 2016 Republicans waited until at least the Iowa caucuses on February 1, 2016, before calling it quits. (Seven candidates, including heavy hitters like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, exited the race that month.) Others waited until so-called Super Tuesday in March. It wasn’t until May 2016 that the final holdouts, John Kasich and Ted Cruz, finally bowed out.”
“Nation Torn Between Watching Democratic Debates, Sticking Face In Blender.”
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Still not running for the senate.
Update: Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Threatening To Get In. No, really, Creepy Porn Lawyer says he’s thinking of getting into the race after saying he wouldn’t run. Should he have done that before his multiple federal felony indictments? If those indictments are to be believed, Avenatti is not just a con man, he’s an amoral sociopath stealing from his own clients. Wouldn’t you have a better chance to rake off campaign contributions before the indictment? Couldn’t you more plausibly have railed that it’s just Trump trying to take you out of the race because he’s scared of you? If he does get in the race, that would make Bill de Blasio only the second most loathsome person running…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Good Morning America profile. Debate coach gives him a B.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden, Inc.:
The day the Bidens took over Paradigm Global Advisors was a memorable one.
In the late summer of 2006 Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Joe’s younger brother, James, purchased the firm. On their first day on the job, they showed up with Joe’s other son, Beau, and two large men and ordered the hedge fund’s chief of compliance to fire its president, according to a Paradigm executive who was present.
After the firing, the two large men escorted the fund’s president out of the firm’s midtown Manhattan office, and James Biden laid out his vision for the fund’s future. “Don’t worry about investors,” he said, according to the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
At the time, the senator was just months away from both assuming the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second presidential bid. According to the executive, James Biden made it clear he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.
At this, the executive recalled, Beau Biden, who was then running for attorney general of Delaware, turned bright red. He told his uncle, “This can never leave this room, and if you ever say it again, I will have nothing to do with this.”
A spokesman for James and Hunter Biden said no such episode ever occurred. Beau Biden died in 2015, at 46.
But the recollection of an effort to cash in on Joe’s political ties is consistent with other accounts provided by other former executives at the fund.
Snip.
Biden’s image as a straight-shooting man of the people, however, is clouded by the careers of his son and brother, who have lengthy track records of making, or seeking, deals that cash in on his name. There’s no evidence that Joe Biden used his power inappropriately or took action to benefit his relatives with respect to these ventures. Interviews, court records, government filings and news reports, however, reveal that some members of the Biden family have consistently mixed business and politics over nearly half a century, moving from one business to the next as Joe’s stature in Washington grew.
None of the ventures appear to have been runaway successes, and Biden’s relatives have not been accused of criminal wrongdoing in their dealings. But over the years, several of their partners and associates have ended up indicted or convicted. The dealings have brought Joe unwelcome scrutiny and threaten to distract from his presidential bid.
Read the whole thing, and at the very least look at that timeline of all the questionable business ventures the Biden clan has embarked on during Joe’s political career.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “If you were cooking up a candidate in a lab to take on Donald Trump, you might come up with someone a lot like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. (Well, except for the unmarried vegan part.)”
Like Pete Buttigieg, Booker was a Rhodes scholar and the dynamic mayor of a city afflicted by industrial decline, and unlike Buttigieg, he’d be sure to increase African-American turnout. He’s more talented than Joe Biden or Beto O’Rourke at summoning an inspiring and unifying civic gospel. His criminal-justice record is better than Kamala Harris’s. He is near the top of Greenpeace’s ranking of Democratic presidential candidates on environmental issues, behind only Jay Inslee and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Hell, he was even a reality TV star, albeit of the prestige type; his mayoral exploits were chronicled in the award-winning 2009 documentary series “Brick City.” He once ran into a burning building and carried a woman out over his shoulder. Long before Donald Trump, he was known for his innovative use of Twitter, responding to his Newark constituents’ complaints about things like potholes and snow removal. (In 2010, Time magazine called him a “social-media superhero.”) He looks like a movie star, and is dating one, the former Bernie Sanders surrogate Rosario Dawson. Booker is often mocked for showboating, but his ebullient theatrical streak would be useful in running against a carnival barker who is, as Marianne Williamson said on Tuesday, channeling a dark psychic force.
After Booker’s skillful performance on Wednesday, a CNN focus group and a flash poll of activists from the progressive group Indivisible both found him to be the night’s winner. That makes him, along with Elizabeth Warren, one of only two candidates who is widely viewed as shining in both the June and July Democratic debates. His sparring with Biden was particularly impressive; he was able to simultaneously make the case against the party’s front-runner and maintain a posture of optimistic, intraparty comity.
It’s a bit of mystery, then, why he’s yet to break into the top tier of 2020 Democratic contenders.
No it’s not. It’s because large swathes of the media have already chosen Kamala Harris as their Social Justice Warrior champion based on more instersectionality brownie points.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is electable, just not in the Democratic primary.”
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bankers love Buttigieg and Biden.
Federal Election Commission filings for the last quarter, reviewed by the Washington Examiner, show Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg were the top recipients of banker cash. The South Bend, Indiana mayor brought in $67,019.42 for the April through June period, followed by the former vice president at $45,456.25.
“The banking industry is more conservative than other industries. The biggest risk for them is uncertainty,” Kenneth Leon, director of equity research at CFRA, told the Washington Examiner. “The primaries are a noisy period. Bankers want a middle of the road Democrat. If you look at what happened under President Bill Clinton, where he and [Treasury Director] Robert Rubin teamed up and delivered big benefits to the financial sector and the American economy, that’s the kind of success bankers want.”
Rubin, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, has given a combined $8,000 to Biden, Buttigieg, and Sen. Kamala Harris of California.
Despite her polling surge after the first round of Democratic debates, Harris brought in much less money from bankers than her fellow front-runners, at $30,314.00. Those with connections to the banking industry, who only spoke with the Washington Examiner on background, said part of that hesitation could be because of her history as a prosecutor.
“Harris came into the Senate as a moderate, but her voting record is almost as liberal as Warren or Sanders,” the individual said. “Wall Street also doesn’t want to be sitting on the other side of a prosecutor. Think about how she treated [Supreme Court Justice] Brett Kavanaugh during his hearing.”
Unsurprisingly, both Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont received the least amount of money from those in the banking sector. Warren brought in $11,482.39 from those employed in some capacity by a bank or financial firm, but a breakdown of those contributors show many of them work in retail or design positions.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) More on Buttigieg’s bundlers:
Pete Buttigieg is drawing new blood into the world of big-league presidential fundraisers.
Buttigieg’s campaign has amassed 94 people and couples who have already raised more than $25,000 for him in the race, according to a list of his top bundlers obtained by POLITICO. But roughly two-thirds of those donors were not among the major fundraisers for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton during recent election cycles, according to a POLITICO analysis — though in many cases they are well-connected people in their own right.
Buttigieg’s roster of top bundlers, known inside the campaign as his “investor’s circle,” includes well-known hedge fund manager Orin Kramer and Esprit co-founder Susie Tompkins Buell — each of whom has raised upward of $25,000 for his campaign. The rainmakers were instrumental in making Buttigieg the biggest fundraiser in the Democratic presidential field this spring, as he brought in $24.8 million in the second quarter of the year.
And because Buttigieg is largely drawing from outside the ranks of traditional Democratic bundlers, the group’s loyalty could help the South Bend, Ind., mayor raise multiples more over the course of that campaign — helping him hire field staff, cut television ads and, they hope, break into the top of the polls at just the right time.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Washington Monthly has a “Why Julian Castro’s Candidacy Matters,” a whistling-past-the-graveyard piece.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. “De Blasio urges Dems to back the hard left to defeat Trump.” Because of course he did.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Delaney, we hardly knew you:
In his opening remarks, Delaney took direct aim at Warren, Sanders, and Medicare for All. “We can go down the road that Senator Sanders and Senator Warren want to take us, which is with bad policies like Medicare for All, free everything, and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get Trump reelected,” he said. “That’s what happened with McGovern. That’s what happened with Mondale. That’s what happened with Dukakis.”
Delaney went toe-to-toe with Elizabeth Warren on free trade, but his best moment of the night came during his exchange with Bernie Sanders on health care.
Not only would Medicare for All tell “half the country that your health insurance is illegal,” Delaney said, “the bill that Senator Sanders drafted, by definition, will lower quality in health care.”
Delaney explained that Medicare for All would fund all health-care expenditures at current Medicare rates — only about 80 percent of the real cost of health care, while private insurance pays 120 percent. “So if you start underpaying all the health-care providers, you’re going to create a two-tier market where wealthy people buy their health care with cash, and the people . . . like my dad, the union electrician, will have that health-care plan taken away.”
Sanders was visibly angry at times. When Delaney noted he was the only candidate with experience in the health-care business, Sanders snapped: “It’s not a business!” Sanders’s response to Delaney’s argument about the true cost of health care was that Medicare for All would save $500 billion a year by “ending all of the incredible complexities that are driving every American crazy trying to deal with the health-insurance companies.”
“Listen, his math is wrong,” Delaney replied. “I’ve been going around rural America, and I ask rural hospital administrators one question: ‘If all your bills were paid at the Medicare rate last year, what would happen?’ And they all look at me and say, ‘We would close.’”
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s hit the donor threshold for the September debates, but has yet to hit the polling threshold. She gets a New York Times profile, focused on her non-interventionist foreign policy, that also props up the “Russian Bot” talking point that the same people who were trying to push the Russian Collusion fantasy are now pushing:
“Tracking metrics of Russian state propaganda on Twitter, she was by far the most favored candidate,” said Clinton Watts, a former F.B.I. agent and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “She’s the Kremlin’s preferred Democrat. She is such a useful agent of influence for them. Whether she knows it’s happening or not, they love what she’s saying.”
See also last week’s Gabbard vs. Harris piece.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s finally found the issue to take down Biden with: opposition to a 1981 childcare tax credit.
Also:
Update: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Out. Twitter. Facebook. Tweets announced he was ending his campaign. Congrats for outlasting Eric Swalwell.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Tulsi Gabbard Calls Kamala Harris a Drug Warrior and Dirty Prosecutor. She’s Right… She also ramped up penalties or enforcement for not just drug crimes but prostitution, truancy, and many other misdemeanor offenses.” Polifact, on the other hand, things thinks there’s less there there.
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. How confident is the Hickenlooper campaign of his Presidential run? They just registered HickForSenate.com.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. There’s Inslee news, but it’s all stupid or really stupid.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s qualified for the September debates.
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Messam’s candidacy is “a joke,” going over his low standing, missing payroll, etc.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a piece that says he was one of the losers in last week’s debate. “Jen O’Malley Dillon is a star Democratic operative. Can she save Beto O’Rourke’s candidacy?” Even by the puff piece standards of the “female political reporter raves about Democratic female political operative” genre it’s a tongue bath.
O’Malley Dillon once helped eke out a 524-vote Democratic Senate victory in South Dakota. And before moving to the Obama camp, she was key to former U.S. Sen. John Edwards’ two second-place finishes in the 2004 and 2008 Iowa caucuses. While she started the 2008 cycle as the Iowa state director for Edwards, she eventually made her way to the Obama campaign and was his deputy campaign manager for the 2012 campaign.
She earned legendary status within Democratic circles in November 2012 when she was Obama’s deputy campaign manager in charge of field and data. That campaign pioneered analytics and turnout models and outperformed the late polls.
Man, the threshold for “legendary” among female Democratic political operatives is pretty low. Also, let me get the Betteridge’s Law answer to the headline out of the way: No.
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. He talks about showering after work, which is evidently the new trope for “blue collar.”
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. That Tabbi piece says of Sanders:
It’s unseemly, the degree to which the press is rooting for Sanders to get his socialist tuchis out of the race. This is an actual headline from Politico after the first set of debates: “Harris, Warren Tie for Third in New Poll, But Biden Still Leads.”
The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Biden dropping to 25 percent nationally, with Harris and Warren jousting for third at nine percent. Where’s Waldo? The missing data point is that Sanders doubled both Harris and Warren in said poll at 18 percent. He also has the highest number of unique donors, and is the leading fundraiser overall in the race.
That doesn’t mean Sanders is going to win. He’s the only candidate with a more or less insoluble base of voters, but unlike Warren, who seems really to want this, Bernie has sometimes seemed dispirited. Still, the undeniable truth is that the Democratic race is about Sanders. Most of the candidates either support Medicare for All or try to sound like they do. They also tend to support a $15 minimum wage and call for wealth taxes, a Green New Deal, antitrust actions, and some rejection of corporate donors. Even Joe Biden, he of the lengthy career deep-throating credit-card-industry bucks, has parroted Sanders’ anti-corporate themes, noting that the Constitution reads “ ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Donors.’ ”
There is an irony in the fact that Sanders has become the bête noire of Clintonian politics, given that Sanders represents the culmination of Bill’s 1992 electoral formula: “Change versus more of the same.”
Decades later, this is no longer just a marketing formulation. About 20 of the candidates exist somewhere on the spectrum of traditional Democratic politics, with Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and Biden on one side, and Warren on the more progressive end. Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.
Sanders endorses “strong border protections” to prevent illegal aliens from taking advantage of government education and health care. There are two possibilities here: 1.) He’s lying. 2.) He’s telling the truth (maybe on “Socialism in one country” grounds), and, if elected, wouldn’t lift a finger to stop Democrats from passing open border laws, since any Sanders Administration would mean an absolutely disasterous 2020 for Republicans in the House and Senate. How Sanders made the health care debates among Democrats all about how much to socialize medicine. “I’ll take Unlikely Teamups for $200, Alex.” “Cardi B joins Bernie Sanders for campaign video and talks student debt, climate change and the minimum wage.” Gets his own Ben & Jerry’s flavor. To really make it taste like Bernie, you have to wait until someone else buys some and then steals theirs…
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Business Insider profile.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 does the how he could win thing.
Low name recognition isn’t necessarily a serious liability, however. In fact, it can be an opportunity, if you have access to a lot of money — which Steyer certainly does. With a net worth of $1.6 billion, Steyer can easily afford to spend millions of his own dollars on campaign ads. The former hedge fund manager is already responsible for the largest TV ad buy of the Democratic primary thus far: a reported $1.4 million for two weeks of ads on national cable news and local programs in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Steyer has also outspent every other candidate in Facebook and Google ad buys since entering the race. And there could be much more to come: Steyer and his wife were the largest contributors to the 2014 and 2016 federal elections (ahead of the likes of Sheldon Adelson and George Soros!) and the third-most prolific donors in the 2018 cycle, giving a cool $74 million. And Steyer has claimed that he will spend at least $100 million on the presidential race.
Unfortunately for Steyer, all that money may not make a difference. (Just ask Presidents Ross Perot and Steve Forbes … oh wait.) Our research into 2018 Democratic primary races found that self-funders (specifically, candidates who loaned or donated $400,000 or more to their campaigns) didn’t have an advantage. If anything, self-funders historically have had poor electoral track records, especially in open-seat races. As FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote in 2010, they often suffer from inexperience when interacting with voters, a lack of adequate vetting and the diminishing returns of ad spending.
Steyer’s background in finance probably hurts him as well, as Democrats do not seem favorably disposed to nominating a businessman of their own. Steyer, Andrew Yang and now-declined candidate Michael Bloomberg have all tended to have lower favorability ratings than would be expected based on how well-known they are. And people without experience running for office are also generally less successful.
But Steyer does have one ace in the hole: his close association with the effort to impeach Trump. Until switching gears to run for president, he was the founder and primary funder of Need to Impeach, a group that advocates for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings. Impeachment is quite popular among Democrats, too. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said they supported beginning impeachment proceedings in a recent Quinnipiac poll, and the most recent Fox News poll found that 74 percent of Democrats wanted to see Trump impeached and removed from office. In addition, Sen. Elizabeth Warren experienced a small bump in the polls in late April — which happened to occur right after she became the first candidate to come out forcefully for impeachment, although it’s impossible to know if one caused the other.
On the other hand, both polling and anecdotal evidence suggest that impeachment isn’t that important to Democratic primary voters. For instance, in a HuffPost/YouGov survey from June, only 18 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners listed it among the three issues most important to them; the topic has also rarely come up at town halls with the presidential candidates.
Steyer’s best-case scenario probably relies on his ability to use his massive financial resources and to seize on a popular issue to introduce himself favorably to the Democratic electorate. Indeed, in less than a month, he has notched half of the polls he needs to qualify for the September debate (although his ability to amass 130,000 individual donors remains a big question mark). He has already begun to leverage the robust campaign operations of Need to Impeach, which has more than 8.2 million people on its email list, and NextGen America, an advocacy group he founded in 2013, to help his campaign. But Steyer is also starting from way behind, and it’s going to take every ounce of political muscle he’s got to crack into the top tier in such a crowded field.
So what it amounts to is: He can spend his way into the race. Thanks for that blinding flash of the obvious, 538…
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren and Sanders don’t understand math:
The line everyone is quoting is Warren’s riposte to John Delaney: “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”
Step back and you can see a media myth being created before your eyes. Everyone’s talking about the zinger, nobody can remember that allegedly unambitious agenda from Delaney that spurred Warren’s response:
I think Democrats win when we run on real solutions, not impossible promises, when we run on things that are workable, not fairy tale economics. Look at the story of Detroit, this amazing city that we’re in. This city is turning around because the government and the private sector are working well together. That has to be our model going forward. We need to encourage collaboration between the government, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector, and focus on those kitchen table, pocketbook issues that matter to hard-working Americans: building infrastructure, creating jobs, improving their pay, creating universal health care, and lowering drug prices.
That’s what makes Delaney such a naysayer and cynic? If the next president built up America’s infrastructure, created jobs, improved take-home pay, created universal health care, and lowered drug prices, would you look at that legacy and lament how timid and unambitious it was? Or would you say, “wow, that was an amazing presidency, I can’t believe so much got done”?
(This is all separate from the question of whether a zinger against one of the least-known, least-discussed, lowest-polling figures in the field really counts as the knockout punch that Warren fans want to believe it is.)
Delaney’s recurring refrain during the debate, particularly in reference to Sanders, was “I’ve done the math, it doesn’t add up,” and “his math is wrong.” The progressives hate him for it. Everyone wants their presidential campaign to be about brighter tomorrows and daring proposals and sunnier horizons and bold visions and all of that. But that doesn’t change the math.
Delaney may have exaggerated when he said that enacting Medicare for All would lead to all hospitals shutting down. But he’s pointing to a real problem. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, “more than two-thirds of hospitals are losing money on Medicare inpatient services and that the average Medicare inpatient hospital margin was -9.9 percent in 2017.” What happens when everyone’s paying through Medicare, and more hospitals are losing money on most of their treatment?
Over at Reason, Alex Muresianu calculates that Warren wants to spend her $2.75 trillion in new wealth taxes on $3.26 trillion in spending. When you use the trillion, it doesn’t look so bad, so let’s rephrase that: after enacting a gigantic new tax hike, Warren wants to spend $51,000,000,000 more. And she continues to insist her taxes will only hit “billionaires and big corporations.”
David A. Graham writes, “[Warren] seemed to be focusing on emotion.” Yeah, no kidding. Every presidential candidate prefers to focus on emotion. Obama talked about “hope” and “yes we can,” Trump vented his spleen and offered a vision of an America that was “great again.” Every candidate wants to focus on emotion because it’s easier than getting the math to add up. You would think the electorate would learn after getting so many consecutive cycles of believing in the next great inspiring hope and then being disappointed by the results.
Emotion is easy. Everybody’s got a sad anecdote about losing someone they loved, or knowing someone who faced an unfair, undeserved hardship. Everybody’s got some inspiring anecdote about someone who fought through adversity and is now living the American dream. Everybody’s heard about some kind of injustice that is technically legal but morally wrong, and that gets an audience’s blood boiling.
You know what kind of people want you to focus on emotion? Salesmen, con artists, cult leaders, and demagogues. Emotion empowered Bernie Madoff; math caught him.
You want to know why you have problems, America? Because you don’t like doing the math. Your checkbook doesn’t add up, you didn’t read the fine print, you didn’t realize how bad the interest rate on your credit card was, you didn’t think your adjustable rate mortgage would adjust so soon, and you can’t believe you agreed to buy that timeshare.
She said the U.S. should never use nukes first, so Russia should view a Wraren presidency as a great chance to get Alaska back. Anti-Israel BDS activist Max Berger is a Warren aide. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. That Tabbi piece is big on Williamson:
Marianne Williamson, the self-help author made famous by Oprah Winfrey, is speaking to about 50 people. “When we get bad news, when we learn that something really terrible is going on, so many superficial concerns drop away. And we become very intelligent,” she says, glaring and pausing for emphasis.
Williamson is a small, almost ethereal figure with silver-streaked hair and intense eyes that 19th-century authors would have described as being “like coals.” Her superficial eccentricities and occasional incautious statements (she once said “there’s a skepticism which is actually healthy” on the issue of vaccines) have caused reporters to chortle at her run.
But her speech is not a lifeless collection of policy positions. It’s an interesting, tightly written diagnosis of the American problem. Precisely because socioeconomic stresses have pushed them into heightened awareness, she says, the American public sees what she calls “a transition from democracy to aristocracy,” and the corporate sector’s “insatiable appetite” for money that dominates American life.
Williamson is not a traditional orator, with a voice that fills the room. You can barely hear her without a microphone. But she grabs crowds. Nobody is checking sports scores or Twitter. They’re in.
Williamson goes on to say that most Americans are aware that their government is now little more than a handmaiden to sociopathic forces. She describes a two-party system that, at its worst, operates in perfect harmony with the darkest impulses of corporate capitalism, and at best — presumably she refers more to Democrats here — sounds like institutionalized beggary.
“ ‘Pretty please, can I maybe have a hundred-thousand-dollar grant here?’ ” she says. “ ‘Pretty please, can we maybe have a million dollars in the budget for all this?’ ”
Heads are nodding all over the place.
“They say, ‘I can get you a cookie.’ ”
This elicits a few yeahs from the crowd.
Christ, I think. This woman is going to win the nomination.
Williamson was interviewed by the Council on Foreign Relations. Now it’s time to play: “Marianne Williamson or John Bolton?”
Q: How, if at all, should China’s treatment of the Uighurs and the situation in Hong Kong affect broader U.S. policy toward China?
A: China is aggressively engaging in theft, practicing commercial espionage, and ignoring intellectual-property rights as well as trampling on human rights and democracy in their drive to dominate global markets. The US must maintain a strong position regarding China with regard to economics, politics, and human rights.
China’s treatment of the Uighurs and of Hong Kong reflect their aggressive drive for domination and their disdain for human rights and democracy. The United States needs to stand up for human rights and call out the gross violations of human rights committed by China. It’s a good thing that this week Secretary Pompeo denounced China’s treatment of the Uighurs. We should also be speaking out against the authoritarian push for greater control in Hong Kong where thousands of people are demonstrating for their democratic rights.
Additionally, the US has the power to prevent China from buying strategically important companies, which we have done through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS). We should exercise this power more vigorously as we defend our economic interests and human rights for all.
Yep, that’s Williamson. Save a mention of military power, I’m not sure a Bolton response would be much different. But then she ruins it by backing the Iran deal. “Apparently, Bill Maher Agrees With Marianne Williamson on ‘Everything.'” Received opinion seems disturbed that anyone questions the widespread use of antidepressants. Donald Trump, Jr. calls her the harbinger of doom for the Democratic Party, given the wild applause for her very-farthest left positions. Noah Berlatsky pens a weak “Williamson is no friend of the left” hit piece, which amounts to antivax and “fat shaming” viewpoints. Way to focus on the important issues! “Marianne Williamson Not Sure What She’s Doing Up Here With All These Crazy People.” See also last week’s Williamson debate piece.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Hill talks about his $1,000 a month guaranteed income proposal. “‘It is a very Silicon Valley solution’…UBI has also failed to gain much traction in the 2020 race.” Yang is not wild about the debate process. “We’re up here with makeup on our faces and our rehearsed attack lines, playing roles in this reality TV show.”
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:
Actor Alec Baldwin
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Former California Governor Jerry Brown
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Attorney General Eric Holder
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
Former First Lady Michelle Obama. Oh, and an update: She just said, yet again, she’s not running.
Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
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Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, Bill De Blasio, Bill Maher, California, Cardi B, China, Clinton Watts, Cory Booker, Council on Foreign Realtions, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, Foreign Policy, Hong Kong, Israel, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden, John Delaney, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Marianne Williamson, Martha's, Matt Taibbi, Max Berger, Michael Avenatti, Michael Bennet, Mike Gravel, Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Steve Bullock, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard
Posted in Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy | No Comments »
Friday, July 26th, 2019
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
Democrats just keep making the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to President Donald Trump.
This month, Netroots Nation met in Philadelphia. The choice was no accident. Pennsylvania will probably be the key swing state in 2020. Donald Trump won it by only 44,000 votes or seven-tenths of a percentage point. He lost the prosperous Philadelphia suburbs by more than Mitt Romney did in 2012 but more than made up for it with new support in “left behind” blue-collar areas such as Erie and Wilkes-Barre.
You’d think that this history would inform activists at Netroots Nation about the best strategy to follow in 2020. Not really. Instead, Netroots events seemed to alternate between pandering presentations by presidential candidates and a bewildering array of “intersectionality” and identity-politics seminars.
Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged that, if elected, she would immediately investigate crimes committed by border-control agents. Julian Castro, a former Obama-administration cabinet member, called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But everyone was topped by Washington governor Jay Inslee. “My first act will be to ask Megan Rapinoe to be my secretary of State,” he promised. Naming the woke, purple-haired star of the championship U.S. Women’s Soccer team, he said, would return “love rather than hate” to the center of America’s foreign policy.
Snip.
Many leftists acknowledge that Democrats are less interested than they used to be in trimming their sails to appeal to moderates. Such trimming is no longer necessary, as they see it, because the changing demographics of the country give them a built-in advantage. Almost everyone I encountered at Netroots Nation was convinced that President Trump would lose in 2020. Earlier today, Roland Martin, an African-American journalist, told ABC’s This Week, “America is changing. By 2043, we’ll be a nation [that’s] majority people of color, and that’s — that is the game here — that’s what folks don’t want to understand what’s happening in this country.”
It’s a common mistake on both the right and the left to assume that minority voters will a) always vote in large numbers and b) will vote automatically for Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in part because black turnout fell below what Barack Obama was able to generate. There is no assurance that black turnout can be restored in 2020.
As for other ethnic groups, a new poll by Politico/Morning Consult this month found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics is at 42 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll showed Trump at 32 percent among Hispanics; another poll from The Hill newspaper and HarrisX has it at 35 percent. In 2016, Trump won only 29 to 32 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Netroots Nation convinced me that progressive activists are self-confident, optimistic about the chances for a progressive triumph, and assured that a Trump victory was a freakish “black swan” event. But they are also deaf to any suggestion that their PC excesses had anything to do with Trump’s being in the White House. That is apt to be the progressive blind spot going into the 2020 election.
Democrats’ strategy against President Trump has been a miserable failure. Even CNN agrees!
President Trump won the Mueller showdown and now is going on offense:
Trump is just beginning to advance his arguments about what has blanketed the country since the summer of 2016. The president is going to argue that the real scandal was the attempt to keep him from winning election and, once having won, from governing. And his opponents did so by shocking means far outside the norms of law and U.S. politics. In this offensive against his tormentors of the past 36 months, the president may be aided by the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and by John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to whom Attorney General William P. Barr has entrusted the investigation into what may well become “CoIntelPro 2.0.”
Even if not, Trump will make this argument simply by force of repetition of the facts we already know: The Steele Dossier was a con job from the start — opposition research passed off as intelligence and, at best, stupidly accepted as legitimate by a naive FBI. It could turn out much worse than this. Wise advice during the Mueller investigation was to wait for the endgame and not guess. The same holds for the inspector general and for Durham.
That the attack on Trump has decisively failed is not open to debate — except by people unfamiliar with sunk costs. Many political figures and folks in the commentariat heavily invested in the idea that Mueller would bring forth impeachment, and possibly even conviction and removal of the president. He did not. Impeachment proceedings, much less a successful vote on articles of impeachment, seem unlikely.
Trump has his economic boom, his deregulatory record, his military buildup and his remaking of the judiciary. He has criminal-justice reform to his credit and an overhaul of Veterans Affairs is underway. He now has a spending deal that would guarantee continuing fiscal stimulus via larger deficits, and he has four vacancies (to which he astonishingly has not nominated anyone) on the U.S. courts of appeals for the 2nd and 9th circuits, as well as scores of district court openings to remind his base of the stakes.
How long has Robert Mueller been like this?
In case anyone still isn’t clear on this point, Democrats still aren’t serious about impeachment:
Look at the last impeachment, that of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr delivered his report on the Lewinsky affair to Congress on Sept. 9. The House voted to start impeachment proceedings on Oct. 8. The formal impeachment vote was Dec. 19. The matter then went to the Senate, which voted to acquit Clinton on Feb. 12, 1999. The process took a few days more than five months.
Imagine a similar timeline today. The House stays out on recess until the second week in September. Say they vote to begin proceedings in October. The impeachment vote comes in mid-to-late December, and the Senate verdict in February — probably somewhere between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.
That is a crazy scenario, and that is what would happen if impeachment work got under way immediately after the House returns from recess. If it were delayed further, the whole thing would move weeks or months farther down the road. Why not a Senate trial during Super Tuesday, or the summer political conventions? The possibilities are mind-boggling.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi fears impeachment will backfire on Democrats, in large part because the Republican-controlled Senate will never remove Donald Trump from office. Her strategy appears to be to delay and delay until at some point it becomes obvious to all that it is far too late to make impeachment happen. Pelosi will then look at her watch and say, “Oh, my goodness, look at the time!” And that will be that.
The fact is, it is nearly too late for impeachment right now. Yet the possibility of impeachment is still being discussed seriously.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
While everyone was watching Robert Mueller ask when Matlock was on, the House, in coordination with the Trump Administration, passed a budget agreement that continues profligate spending as far as the eye can see (or at least two years), and which takes a government shutdown off the table until after the 2020 election. Not what I or any conservative activist would have done, but obviously President Trump feels he can continue to hold off the next cyclical recession long enough to get reelected. Kicking the can down the road has become a global pastime for almost all the nations of the world, and sooner or later there will come a reckoning. In America, this fight may have been lost when Bush41 let Gramm-Rudman-Hollings get whacked in 1990…
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this story of Washington, D.C. therapists whose patients’ Trump Derangement Syndromes are making their equally liberal TDS-suffering therapists depressed as well. (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
Another lovely side effect of living in a one-party state controlled by the far left: Los Angeles faces an imminent outbreak of Bubonic Plague
Dr. Drew told Adams that he had predicted the recent typhus outbreak in Los Angeles, which was carried by rats, transferred by fleas to pets, and from pets to humans.
Bubonic plague, Dr. Drew said, like typhus, is endemic to the region, and can spread to humans from rodents in a similar fashion.
Though commonly recognized as the medieval disease responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which killed one-third of the population of Europe, the last outbreak of bubonic plague in the U.S. was nearly a century ago, from 1924 to 1925 — also in Los Angeles. Only a “heroic effort” by doctors stopped it, Dr. Drew recalled, warning that conditions were perfect for another outbreak of the plague in the near future.
Los Angeles is one of the only cities in the country, Dr. Drew said, that has no rodent control plan. “And if you look at the pictures of Los Angeles, you will see that the homeless encampments are surrounded by dumps. People defecate there, they throw their trash there, and the rats just proliferate there.”
Incumbent Democrats gear up for the AOC-inspired blue-on-blue violence:
Representative Jerrold Nadler has served in Congress for 27 years, rising to become the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. He has become a boldface name in the age of President Trump, the linchpin of many Democrats’ hopes of impeachment.
Eliot Engel leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, after first being elected to the House in 1988. Carolyn Maloney was the first woman to represent her district when she was elected in 1992. Yvette Clarke, serving since 2007, has delivered some of the most consistently progressive votes in her party.
All four New York House members are facing primary challenges from multiple insurgent candidates.
Almost a year in advance of the June 2020 primary, more than a dozen Democrats in New York have declared their plans to run, forming one of the most contentious congressional fields in the country at this stage. They are targeting some of the country’s longest-serving or most powerful politicians — most as first-time or outsider candidates, and some in the same district.
The phenomenon is not unique: Progressives across the country are plotting primary battles, spurred on by the victories last year of figures such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as growing disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s old-guard wing. Early challengers have emerged in blue states including New Jersey and California.
How Democrats plan to turn Texas blue:
Texas Democrats have their eyes on taking over Texas, and a newly released plan lays out how they aim to finally turn Texas blue.
In a presentation given to political donors and Austin lobbyists this week, Texas Democrats made their case for heavy political investment in the Lone Star State.
First, they compare Texas to Ohio, a traditional swing state that often receives a heavy influx of cash from national Democrat donors. Both states, the presentation states, voted 43 percent Democrat in the 2016 presidential election. But while Ohio’s trajectory is “successively worse in the last two presidential elections,” Texas Democrats point out that they had their best showing in 20 years. They also highlight demographic differences between Ohio and Texas that they believe make the task easier, such as the Texas’ overall younger and larger minority population.
Snip.
Democrats need not worry, they say, about retaining [12 Texas House seats they flipped], as they claim there is “too much GOP defense to go on offense” in order to take those seats back. Recently released campaign finance reports, however, show that many of the newly elected “Democrat Dozen” have an astoundingly small amount in their campaign accounts, depicting what could be an uphill battle for many of them should Republicans wage serious campaigns to take those seats back.
In addition to John Cornyn’s senate seat, Democrats are targeting six U.S. congressional seats.
On the same theme, this piece says those six districts are:
- TX-10 — Mike McCaul
- TX-21 — Chip Roy
- TX-22 — Pete Olson
- TX-23 — Will Hurd
- TX-24 — Kenny Marchant
- TX-31 — John Carter
Minnesota, the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984, is trending Republican.
For example, last month, Trump moved to expand a major copper and nickel mining operation, one of the largest remaining reserves in the world, that Barack Obama had refused to renew in his final weeks in office. Obama’s backpedaling on approving new mining leases was widely unpopular. While liberal environmental groups are still vocally protesting Trump’s decision, polls show that Minnesotans, especially in the five counties surrounding the project, strongly approve.
Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has also found increasing favor. Minnesota is a major resettlement state for Muslim refugees, many of them from terror-prone Syria and Somalia. Some Somalis have also left Minnesota to join the Islamic State in east Africa. A November 2016 attack by a Somali American, who stabbed eight people in a shopping mall, has fueled support for Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Minnesota’s up for grabs for another reason: Massive fallout from the resignation of Sen. Al Franken, a prominent liberal Democrat, over sexual assault allegations that have damaged the party’s standing with voters across the board. Add to this the growing controversy over newly elected in-state Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is widely viewed as anti-Semitic and extremist, and the Democrats are confronting a major crisis of credibility with Minnesota’s electorate.
Nevada and Colorado could also flip red. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Takeover of federal judiciary by ‘larval Scalias‘ is devastatingly close to completion.”
Jeffrey Epstein found injured in New York jail sale after suspected “suicide attempt.”
Related: “According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on Thursday, people with inside, compromising knowledge of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial and political dealings are 843% more likely to commit suicide.”
The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger, wants to desilo the Corps and reintegrate it into the Navy’s overall structure. CDR Salamander thinks this is a good idea. Maybe. I haven’t followed recent strategic seapower debates much as of late. But it’s a devil-in-the-details move that could badly backfire if improperly implemented. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“Sen. Kyrsten Sinema pushes program to streamline removal of migrant families without valid asylum claims.” That’s Democrat Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Interesting profile of Boris Johnson in Quilette:
I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time. I knew who he was since my uncle Christopher was an ex-boyfriend of his mother’s and he had told me to keep an eye out for him, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight (and sound) of him at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. This was the world famous debating society where ambitious undergraduates honed their public-speaking skills before embarking on careers in politics or journalism, and Boris was proposing the motion.
With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.
He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics—theatrical, dramatic, self-serious—when—a few seconds in—he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled—Where am I?—and asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. “What’s the motion, anyway?” Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared above his head and he was off, this time in an even more orotund, florid manner. Yet within a few seconds he’d wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who’d been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plonked down at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.
I’d been to enough Union debates at this point to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. That was particularly true of freshmen, who were expected to have mastered all the arcane procedural rules, some of them dating back to the Union’s founding in 1823. But Boris’s chaotic, scatter-brained approach had the opposite effect. The motion was deadly serious—“This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment”—yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a Music Hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.
A long list of Johnson scandals that didn’t even remotely come close to derailing his ascent skipped.
Another quote that’s often dragged up by Boris’s enemies to discredit him is from a Conservative campaign speech in 2005: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” In their minds, this is appallingly sexist, as well as environmentally suspect. But if Orwell is right about the enduring appeal of the “overwhelming vulgarity,” the “smuttiness,” the “ever-present obscenity,” of Britain’s seaside postcards you can see why constantly reminding people of Boris’s politically incorrect remarks won’t necessarily hurt his electoral chances. It just serves to embed him in the public imagination as a stock British character whom many people still feel an instinctive affection for: the lovable rogue, the man with the holiday in his eye. He’s the guy that tries to persuade the barman to serve one more round of drinks after time has been called, the 14-year-old who borrows his father’s Mercedes at two o’clock in the morning and takes it up to a 100mph on the motorway with his friends shrieking in the back. He’s Falstaff in Henry IV, Sid James in the Carry On films. He’s a Donald McGill postcard.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the reference, here’s an example:
Iran is losing its confrontation with the west and will eventually have to cut a nuclear deal. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
in fact, Iran has already lost:
Israel has reportedly flown a modified version of the F-35 to Iran and back, circling major cities and military bases and taking surveillance photographs without being detected by Iranian radar or intercepted by Russian missiles.
That is the story that has been circulating throughout the Middle East for the past year. No one is certain whether it is true, but it has begun to appear in Western sources, especially since Iran recently fired the head of its air force.
The Israeli version of the F-35, known as the “Adir,” is reportedly the first version of the American-made Joint Strike Fighter that has ever been deployed in combat. But it may have already had a bigger impact in a non-combat role.
That so many believe the story is a sign Iran is already regarded as the “weak horse” in the middle east. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)
“Transgender Athletes Threaten Women’s Sports.”
Social justice warriors defy any and all pushback, calling it “transphobia.” They argue that gender is a social construct. It’s a theory in feminist sociology that states society and culture, not genetics, define whether one is male, female, or “other”.
While the argument about what constitutes “gender identity” and “gender expression” – other confusing facets of gender in contemporary society – remain up for debate, what isn’t up for debate is the fact that those born with male body parts and hormone levels have physical superiority over most biological females. It is settled science.
Ball-waxing tranny pervert keeps getting people banned from Twitter for pointing out he’s a tranny pervert.
Speaking of tranny madness, this piece is about a woke and naive Harvard professor who let himself be taken to the cleaners by a “lesbian” divorced from a tranny who had a one-night stand with him and then proceeded to rob him blind because he was too stupid/woke to resist her.
An eye-opening thread about health insurance fraud.
Not news: Man robbed at gunpoint in Baltimore. News: He’s the new deputy police commissioner. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Good Disney news: Avengers: Endgame passes Avatar as the highest grossing film of all time.
Bad Disney news: Former Disney vice president Michael Laney convicted of sexually abusing a 7 year old girl.
Here’s a horrifying story about how San Luis Obispo police chief Deanna Cantrell losing her gun in a toilet stall led police to conduct a warrantless search of an innocent man’s house and seized his children for “neglect” because the house was dirty.
Florida town levies hundred of thousands of dollars in fines for things like unmown grass.
“Snopes Publishes Helpful Fact Check On 1996 Basketball Documentary ‘Space Jam.'”
Tags:2020 Election, 2020 Presidential Race, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Baltimore, Border Controls, Boris Johnson, Bubonic Plague, Budget, California, Carolyn Maloney, Chip Roy, CNN, Colorado, Crime, David Berger, Democrats, Disney, Donald Trump, Eliot Engel, F-35, Foreign Policy, George H. W. Bush, Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, homeless, impeachment, Iran, Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, Jerry Nadler, John Carter, Kenny Marchant, Kyrsten Sinema, LinkSwarm, Los Angeles, Marines, Media Watch, Medicare, Michael Laney, Mike McCaul, Military, Minnesota, Nancy Pelosi, Netroots Nation, Nevada, New York, Ohio, pedophilia, Pete Olson, Philadelphia, police, Republicans, Robert Mueller, San Luis Obispo, Snopes, Social Justice Warriors, Sudden Clinton Death Syndrome, Texas, transexual, Trump Derangement Syndrome, UK, Washington D.C., Will Hurd, Yvette Clarke
Posted in Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »