Add to that the fact that the most recent polls in Iowa show the race there tied after Hillary being up some 40 points a few points ago.
In New Hampshire, recent polls have Sanders up anywhere from 3 to 14 points.
And even though Clinton has raised more money, Sanders has done very well in fundraising, bringing in $33 million in the final quarter and $73 million for all of 2015. That’s not the fundraising total of someone running a token campaign. A huge number of Democrats (more than 2.3 million of them, a number which surpasses Obama’s 2011 reelection efforts) believe in Sanders enough to donate to his campaign.
Finally, Sanders just got endorsed by MoveOn.org. The irony here, of course, is that MoveOn was created entirely as a medium for attack proponents of Bill Clinton’s impeachment for lying under oath and obstruction of justice. Given their genesis as an extension of the Clintons, it’s a surprise that MoveOn has moved on from them.
Hillary’s campaign was always predicated on her supposed inevitability, her fundraising prowess, her supposed viability, and voter familiarity with her due to her extremely high profile. But with a myriad array of ongoing scandals dogging her (Benghazi, her email server, the Clinton Foundation “pay for play” donations, etc.), familiarity seems to have bred contempt among a large number of Democratic Party faithful.
And one additional scandal not her own, rape and sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby, have brought renewed scrutiny to Bill Clinton’s serial sexual assault and rape allegations, bringing up Hillary’s complicity in smearing Bill’s accusers, as well as turning one of Hillary’s biggest potential assets (having the once-popular 42nd President campaign for her) into a potential liability.
Finally, 2016 is shaping up to be The Year of the Outsider, when voters on both sides of the political spectrum said “Enough!”, embracing the unscripted bluntness of Donald Trump over the poll-focused banalities so beloved by consultants and the chattering classes. Hillary proved less than overwhelmingly popular with Democratic Party voters in 2008, and there’s precious little reason to believe she’s gotten more popular since then. She’s not a bright fresh face, and she lacks both Obama’s personal magnetism and his unique appeal to both black voters and white liberal guilt.
If Democratic Party voters decide that Bernie Sanders is a viable candidate, then he’s a viable candidate for the nomination. It may simply come down to the fact that Democrats wish to cast their votes for a candidate without feeling they need to take a shower afterwards.
Dan Morenoff is an unhyphenated, full-spectrum Conservative who grew up in the suburbs, went to the only public high school in America named for a baseball player, and married a girl who sat next to him in a 7th grade history class.
He studied economics and political science at Columbia, while running the school’s Conservative newspaper (he believes it was the only one in Manhattan at the time) and working with a think tank on entitlement policy.
After college, Dan worked again on entitlement reform with Senator Phil Gramm for a number of years,before leaving for law school at the University of Chicago. There, too, Dan led the institution’s leading Conservative organization.
Since 2001, Dan’s lived in Dallas, where he’s worked as a lawyer and raised three girls with his wife Erica. In that time, Dan has led the local chapters of both the Federalist Society and the Republican Jewish Coalition, while serving on the boards of various local charities (including his kids’ Jewish day school and his synagogue).
At Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, she promised she would take “extraordinary steps…to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Later, more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity, according to foundation disclosures.
Six things a Washington Post reporter found out following Ted Cruz around. “The majority of the undecided voters I have spoken with have said they were very impressed after hearing Cruz speak. Many of them said they were undecided coming into a rally and supported him when it was over.”
“Unfortunately, 2016, the little of it that we have so far seen, is already beginning to look like another year of Grim Slide, of a world stumbling down a slippery slope to become less secure, less stable, and less free.”
Iran and Saudi Arabia have severed diplomatic relations over Saudi execution of a Shiite cleric, and Kuwait has recalled their ambassador from Tehran; don’t be surprised if the other Sunni nations follow suit. Good thing we have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House…
Turkey’s Prime Minister: Hey, you know who was a model of effective leadership? Adolf Hitler.
It looks like Karachi, Basra, and Mogadishu all rolled into one. People sell drugs openly just next to the Gronland subway station.
It’s not Norway or Europe anymore, except when there is welfare money to be collected. The police have largely given up. Early in 2010 Aftenposten stated that there are sharia patrols in this area, and gay couples are assaulted and chased away.
Mass sexual assaults involving up to 1,000 Arab men on New Year’s Eve in Cologne.
Rahm Emanuel’s failure in Chicago is emblematic of the blue model failure in America’s cities. “The city’s bloated pension obligations have already forced Emanuel to make severe education cuts. It will continue to force cuts in city services in various cities, making it harder and harder for mayors to govern, and increasing the antagonism among various constituencies.”
Confessions of a social justice warrior white knight. “Their communities thrive on self loathing disguised as elitism…SJWs insist their goal is to make everyone equal, and for a long time I believed it, but their communities actually enforce factionalism and division.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I hope everyone had a merrier Christmas than I did. (My father recently went on hospice care after a two year fight with cancer, so I was back home helping my mother care for him.) Here’s a LinkSwarm to start your week with.
What would Democrats do to defeat the Islamic State? Not a damn thing.
Iraqi government forces retake Ramadi, the Anbar province city the Islamic State took in May.
“Two weather occurrences – the Arctic Oscillation and El Niño – are combining to shake up temperatures from coast to coast in the U.S., bringing springlike conditions to the Northeast for much of this month and leaving parts of the West colder and wetter than usual.”
Adjusting for inflation, the gross domestic product of the 19 countries now sharing Europe’s common currency, the euro, was less in 2014 than it was in 2007. Widespread joblessness and diminishing opportunities confront an entire generation of young Europeans, especially in Spain, Italy, France and Greece. The economic malaise tinges everything: Young people resist marriage for lack of economic opportunity. Poorer European countries are experiencing brain drains as many of their best young professionals and college graduates move abroad. Numerous Greek doctors, for instance, now work in more prosperous Germany while Greece’s health system is in crisis.
Pennsylvania’s insane, disgraced Democratic Attorney General Kathleen Kane accused of suborning perjury.
Democrats in congress have proposed a sweeping gun control bill. Because that’s always such a big electoral winner. It just kills liberals that free citizens are allowed to remain armed…
Merry Christmas! Instead of a Friday LinkSwarm, enjoy something more in keeping with the festive nature of the holiday: Dave Barry’s 2015 year-end roundup:
“Wait a minute! Surely there were some positive developments in 2015! How about the fact that, after so many years of sneering judgmentalism and divisive, overheated rhetoric, we were able to have rational, open-minded conversations about such issues as gun ownership, gay marriage, race relations and abortion, so that, as a nation, we finally began to come together and … Whoa! Sorry! Evidently I am high on narcotics.”
“In Paris, two million people march in a solidarity rally following the horrific terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Eyebrows are raised when not a single top U.S. official attends, but several days later, Secretary of State John Kerry arrives in France with James Taylor, who — this really happened — performs the song You’ve Got a Friend. This bold action strikes fear into the hearts of terrorists, who realize that Secretary Kerry is fully capable, if necessary, of unleashing Barry Manilow.”
“NBC suspends Nightly News anchor Brian Williams after an investigation reveals inaccuracies in his account of being in a military helicopter under fire in Iraq. ‘Mr. Williams did not actually come under fire,’ states the network. ‘Also technically he wasn’t in a helicopter in Iraq; it was a Volvo station wagon on the New Jersey Turnpike. But there was a lot of traffic.’ A contrite Williams blames the lapse on post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from killing Osama bin Laden.”
“In business news, troubled retailer RadioShack files for bankruptcy, citing the fact that in the past six years, the chain’s 4,000 stores had made a nationwide total of one sale, that being a home email server purchased by Hillary Clinton.”
“There is troubling news from Baltimore, where the death of an African-American man in police custody touches off a conversation on race that lasts several days, resulting in 250 arrests and extensive property damage. The Rev. Al Sharpton rushes to the scene but is unable to prevent things from eventually calming down.”
“Hackers announce that they have broken into the Ashley Madison website and obtained personal data on millions of clients allegedly seeking to have affairs. A statistical analysis will later reveal that, of the 37 million accounts hacked, only 23 belonged to actual women, 21 of whom were Ashley Madison employees posing as clients. The remaining two belonged to Miley Cyrus.”
“On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton continues to have no choice but to roll her eyes over all these pesky scandals that her enemies keep dreaming up to prevent her from serving the American people, especially women. The current scandal involves the email server she used as secretary of state, which, in a deviation from government-security standards, was located in her home and had Mrs. Clinton’s personal secret password (‘PASSWORD’) written on a sticky note stuck to the front. A Clinton spokesperson, speaking through another Clinton spokesperson who was briefed by a third Clinton spokesperson on condition of anonymity, denies that the server ever held classified emails and promises that it will be turned over to the FBI ‘as soon as it has been melted down to a softball-sized blob.'”
“After much agonizing, Vice President Joe Biden announces that he will not run for president, stressing that the decision had nothing to do with the severed horse head wearing a HILLARY! button he found in his bed, which Biden says he believes ‘was meant in a supportive way.'”
It’s been an odd week, for a number of reasons, so I’m a bit late on the “Washington Post cartoonist draws Ted Cruz’s 5 and 7 year old daughters as monkeys” story. Because nothing says “reasonable” and “rational” like attacking children because you dislike the politics of their father. On the off-chance you missed it, it featured Cruz as an organ-grinder and his daughters as monkeys on leashes. The ostensible rationale for the doodle was Cruz featuring his daughters in that parody Christmas ad that ran during Saturday Night Live, making them “fair game.”
Right.
Though the Washington Post editor took the doodle down (calling it a cartoon would suggest there was an actual attempt at humor), we all know that if someone attempted the same drawing featuring Obama and his daughters, it would have been denounced as racist and the cartoonist fired so fast they wouldn’t have been allowed to pack their desk. Of course, the MSM have always been hypocrites when it comes to different standards for Democrats and Republicans. Anything that hurts Republicans is fair game, while anything that hurts Democrats is a source of high moral outrage.
The question is: Will cartoonist Ann Telnaes pay any price for such a gross transgression of basic decency?
This time next month, @AnnTelnaes will be drawing blackboard doodles for the daily specials before her shift at Starbucks. @BoundaryStones
The irony is that the episode provided a palpable boost to the Cruz campaign, which had an outraged fundraising mailer (“They attacked my children!”) out within hours. I bet they raised at least $1 million off of it.
I included the DNC data breach story in my LinkSwarm roundup, but the more I look at it, the less the story seems like “data breach by Bernie Sanders team” and more like “dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s team.”
NGP-VAN, the company that stores this data, which is run by an old Clinton hand who worked for them in 1992, the company paid $34,000 by Ready For Hillary, was repeatedly dropping their firewall between the two major Dem campaigns, Clinton and Sanders.
A guy who’s now fired from the Sanders team observed this. They complained once and were given assurances by the company that it was a mistake and wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again. The guy decided to gauge how deeply the Clinton campaign was able to read into the Sanders campaign, by experimenting to see how much of the Clinton data he could get. That’s a bad call but by information security standards it’s not unthinkable: it’d be called a white hat intrusion, seeing how much of the firewall was down by probing the other side and assuming your own data was revealed exactly the same way. It does matter, but you still have to fire the guy.
One thing we can be sure of is, anything open to ‘stealing’ on the Clinton side was just as open on the Sanders side, literally. It’s the same system and the same firewall, and if the firewall keeps mysteriously going down for no good reason you have to wonder what’s up and more relevantly what’s being made available to those on the other side of the firewall, which might explain why the firewall’s going down like that.
The Sanders people did NOT throw a fit the first time this happened. But this time, the Sanders guy got caught crossing the nonexistent firewall. We have no information at all on whether anybody from the Clinton side was doing the same thing. During that time there WAS NO firewall and the guy wasn’t hacking, he was browsing, as anybody on either side could have done during those windows.
I think that’s accurate so far. The behavior of the firewall is important, whether or not it’s suspicious as a planned exploit of the Sanders data run by Clinton people who are at the DNC and at NGP-VAN.
In response to the Sanders guy browsing over and seeing data (how do they know? Because HE TOLD THEM. The Sanders team were the ones reporting this, that’s part of the story), the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time. In order to get access back, at least as of this morning, the requirement is for the Sanders campaign to prove it has destroyed all data that it didn’t necessarily even download (remember, Sanders guy claims he was exploring the Clinton system because it would mirror the vulnerability of the Sanders system, and he’s not IN the Clinton system to go and browse the Sanders side to see how much is revealed, but he was IN the Sanders side and could look at the Clinton side and reasonably conclude that his own side was equally compromised)
And social media is blowing the hell up, not unreasonably, because it’s a goddamn hatchet job combined with a kneecapping to yank access by the Bernie campaign to its OWN DATA because a guy from the Bernie campaign passively browsed through a firewall he didn’t himself disable, a firewall run by a company controlled by Clinton partisans which had been going down already for reasons unknown.
This seems consistent with the facts, consistent with the DNC being “all in” on the Hillary coronation, and consistent with the Sanders campaign suing the DNC for access to their own freaking data.
by their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.
We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction.
What is required here is a full and independent audit of the DNC’s handling of this data and its security from the beginning of this campaign to the present, including the incident in October that we alerted them to.
The incident is also consistent with Hillary’s own repeated Nixonian dishonesty. It’s not enough that she has the weakest slate of primary challengers for a non-incumbent since Nelson Rockefeller decided to bow out and let Nixon have the GOP nomination in 1960. Hillary is so used to winning through lies and dirty tricks she does it even when she doesn’t need to. It’s simply who she is.
The filing deadline has passed for 2016 races in Texas, and once again several U.S. House seats will go uncontested.
The first step to winning a race is showing up for one. Even token candidates force the opposition to expend time and attention on races they could use elsewhere. And having a candidate in the race helps you win during improbable circumstances (indictments, scandals, wave elections).
As usual, Democrats passed up more races than Republicans, but Republicans seemed to pass on a higher number of races as well.
Races Democrats Failed To Field a Challenger
Here are the races Democrats failed to show up in, and the current Republican incumbent:
4th Congressional District (John Ratcliffe, who drew two Republican primary opponents)
5th Congressional District (Jeb Hensarling)
8th Congressional District (Kevin Brady, who drew two Republican primary opponents)
11th Congressional District (Mike Conaway)
13th Congressional District (Mac Thornberry)
19th Congressional District (No incumbent, as Randy Neugebauer is retiring; five Republicans will be vying to take his place)
32nd Congressional District (Pete Sessions, who drew two Republican primary opponents)
36th Congressional District (Brian Babin)
With Democrats not contesting eight districts, it allows Republicans to shift time and effort into defending incumbents in more marginal districts (such as Will Hurd in the perpetual battleground 23rd).
Races Republicans Failed To Field a Challenger
Here are the races Republicans failed to show up in, and the current Democratic incumbent:
9th Congressional District (Al Green)
16th Congressional District (Beto O’Rourke, a white Democratic incumbent in a heavily Hispanic district whose drawn a Hispanic Democratic primary opponent, albeit one he already defeated four years ago)
20th Congressional District (Joaquin Castro)
On Republican missed opportunities, Joaquin Castro is the sort of rising star you want to force to defend his home territory, rather than go off gallivanting at the national level.
A few other points of interest:
Sheila Jackson Lee drew no less than four Republican opponents in District 18.
District 15, where Democratic incumbent Ruben Hinojosa Sr. is retiring, has seven Democrats (including Ruben Ramirez Hinojosa) and two Republicans vying for the seat.
Matt McCall (and two other Republican challengers) are gunning for Lamar Smith in District 21 again.
It was easy to dismiss the first poll that showed Ted Cruz up over Donald Trump in Iowa as an outlier. However, a new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll shows Cruz up a hefty 10 points over Trump.
“Seven weeks from the caucuses, Ted Cruz is crushing it in Iowa.
“The anti-establishment congressional agitator has made a rapid ascent into the lead in the GOP presidential race here, with a 21 percentage-point leap that smashes records for upsurges in recent Iowa caucuses history.”
Snip.
“‘Big shakeup,’ said J. Ann Selzer, pollster for The Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll. ‘This is a sudden move into a commanding position for Cruz.'”
Cruz is in a great spot. I just hope he’s not peaking too early…