Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas we’re enjoying intermittant torrential rains, which means that walking your dog after one is like breathing warm soup.
Former President Barack Obama was unhappy with Hillary Clinton and her failed “soulless campaign” in 2016, saying he saw her loss as a “personal insult.”
The new details come from a recently released update to New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker’s book Obama: The Call of History.
The new edition, which includes Obama’s reaction to the 2016 election, said Obama compared himself to Michael Corleone, the titular character of “The Godfather.” Obama thought he “almost got out” of office untouched, like a mob boss avoiding a hit job.
Obama found himself shocked by the election results, thinking before Nov. 8 there was “no way Americans would turn on him” and “[h]is legacy, he felt, was in safe hands.”
The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than when he nearly swept the region in 2016. Polling shows Trump’s job approval rating in the Midwest is in the mid-forties, and his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating in the region is roughly the same as Obama’s was during the same point in his presidency, according to Gallup tracking polls.
The working class, the nearly 70 percent of Americans without a college degree who have been ignored and even ridiculed by both political parties, is flourishing. Five of the top ten cities enjoying the greatest job opportunities for lower-wage workers are in the Midwest. “A majority of the metro areas with the highest shares of opportunity employment are located in the Midwest . . . after adjusting for cost-of-living differences, median annual earnings tend to be relatively high in that region,” according to an April 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Finding enough workers “is a problem playing out in many parts of the Midwest, a region with lower unemployment and higher job-opening rates than the rest of the country,” according to an April 2018 Wall Street Journal report, citing hiring challenges by employers in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Southwestern Ohio, solid Trump country, is in the midst of a warehousing boom. The construction industry is thriving nationwide, but the Midwest is leading the pack.
The administration’s attempts to secure the southern border are gaining popularity in the Midwest. According to a recent Washington Postpoll, 40 percent of Midwesterners say Trump’s approach to illegal immigration will make them more likely to support him in 2020, compared to 36 percent who say they are less likely. Further, 83 percent of Midwesterners called the situation at the Mexican border a crisis or a serious problem. It will take some smooth convincing by the Democratic presidential candidate to not only disabuse Midwesterners of their views, but to assure them that open borders are best for families in Racine and Grand Rapids.
Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.
Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.
The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.
The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.
The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.
The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.
Oh, should we use the word “bombshell” or the phrase “the walls are closing on?”
The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.
And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.
The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.
Huge amounts of aid dollars — including $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency — have flowed to the small city of 90,000 residents to address lead in its water supply, even though it doesn’t have a chief financial officer and, until recently, its finance chair was a gun felon.
The federal money “should be a good thing for the city,” Worthing told TheDCNF, “but given the mismanagement of the pipe replacement program, I am concerned that it’s not going to get used properly.”
The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.
Hey, remember when journalists reported on all the scandals among Virginia’s state leaders, until they noticed the (D)s after their names? “Northam, who largely won on anti-Trump anger, is now less popular than the president in the state.”
Alabama Democratic state representative John Rogers last week: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.” Rodgers this week: “I am now a candidate for United States Senate.” He’s primarying incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who only got in because of the Roy Moore fiasco.
Recent data show that the U.K.’s gun control experiments are actually causing more harm than good. Like its Australian counterpart, which also implemented draconian gun control in the 1990s, negative criminal trends have started to surface since new gun control laws were enacted.
Sexual assaults have seen an alarming rise from 1995 to 2006, specifically increasing by 76.5 percent according to Howard Nemerov’s book 400 Years of Gun Control. All the gun control in the world has not been able to save the U.K. from steadily increasing rates of violent crime.
“The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”
Believe women…unless they’re raped by a homeless person. “Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes.”
I'm in Nebraska for a trip. The national media has done a horrific job covering the catastrophic flooding that has for months made homes inaccessible. It is all you see from the air, and a big deal. pic.twitter.com/XU9DmTb5Ju
Leaked Trump Peace Plan? I’d sort of like President Trump to stay away from all peace plans, as they all seem to be asking for trouble. This one is interesting. It calls for a two state solution, some Egyptian facilities for Gaza, incorporating settlements into Israel, a lot of non-U.S. countries picking up the bill, and penalties for rejecting the deal. It make so much sense that Palestinians will surely reject it out of hand…
More on China’s play for technological dominance: “Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The New York Times had a story in which they breathlessly told us that Trump lost a billion dollars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know, just like Trump himself told us in his book The Art of the Comeback. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.” Better idea: Make all social media companies publish clear, defined reasons for suspending or banning users, and make the processes by which those decisions are made transparent. Nah, they’d never go for that, as that would keep them from arbitrarily banning conservatives… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Jim Goad says Facebook should leave Louis Farrakhan alone…because he’s hilarious. “This cat is one of the most accomplished mind-fuckers in American history, and I’m glad to call him a fellow citizen.”
Moving The Extending Arms of Christ: This probably won’t mean anything to you unless you grew up in Houston, but there was a large, striking mosaic above the emergency room entrance on Houston Methodist Hospital that had to be moved to an interior atrium under construction due to the hospital’s expansion.
Biden is up big, Bennet is In, Beto is down and de Blasio is about to unite all of America together in ridicule against him. Plus the raw sex appeal of Walter Mondale. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
In a Harvard-Harris poll, Biden leads his Democratic opponents by a whopping 30 points. Biden 44, Sanders 14, Harris 9, Warren 5, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 3. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Quinnipiac: Biden 38, Warren 12, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 8, O’Rourke 5. First poll I’ve seen Warren edge Sanders. Maybe all that “free everything for everybody” pandering is paying off for her…
Election betting markets. Warren (5.7%) is now up over Yang (5.3%) who is now up over O’Rourke (5.1%).
The Eight Tiers In This Race
People usually sort candidates into “First Tier, Second Tier, Third Tier,” but that’s not applicable to a race this crowded:
Right now Biden is alone in the first tier, and…
Sanders is alone in the second.
The third tier is Warren, Buttigieg and Harris all bunched up together (Warren is enjoying a little bounce, Buttigieg’s bounce faded as soon as Biden joined, and Harris is just barely hanging on as the media-boosted SJW darling).
O’Rouke has probably free-fallen alone into the fourth tier, his telegenic hype long over and people scratching their heads as to why people ever thought he was exciting when not running against Ted Cruz.
The fifth tier consists of Booker and Klobucher, who seem to be running competent, unexciting campaigns awaiting their turn to catch fire in a hype cycle.
The sixth tier is Interesting Weirdos, lead by a rising Yang and a hasn’t-showed-us-anything-yet Williamson. Let’s also stick Gabbard here, since she generates tons of buzz only because the Democratic base seems to actively hate her, and she seems to have more followers than the lower tiers.
The seventh tier is Dead in the Water, people who have resumes that suggest they should be credible Presidential candidates (mostly senators and governors), but somehow aren’t: Castro, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Inslee, and probably the newly-joined Bennet.
The eighth and lowest tier (sorry Dante) is Wasting Our Time, including all the representatives other than Gabbard: Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, Delany, Messam. Maybe one could break out, but I rather doubt it.
Pundits, etc.
How much a candidate’s announcement coverage boosts them in polls. Caveat: They relied on cable news coverage, which leaves out a lot of things, like legacy MSM outlets slathering fawning coverage on Harris like ketchup on french fries.
“If you have an appetite for schadenfreude, one of the pleasures of the ongoing 2020 Democratic primary will be watching once-highly-touted politicians realize just how limited their appeal is, as they struggle to reach 5 percent in a crowded field.” Special mention of Castro, Gabbard and Gillibrand.
Stephen Green on electability. “If the economy is still booming in November 2020, maybe none of this year’s massive crop of Dems is electable. Maybe they’re all Mondales, albeit with far less of Walt’s raw sexual magnetism.”
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s not running for the senate. Maybe she’s regretting turning down that Biden VP trial balloon. She also got a voter suppression pander from O’Rourke.
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. Still nothing since that now four-week old tweet. But his estimated net worth is $85 million, and he was “a political science major at George Washington University (where he ran for student body president and lost).” Baldwin could probably talk himself into a run if he really wanted to…
Update: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. “Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., announced he will run in the Democratic primary to seek his party’s nomination to go up against President Trump in the 2020 election.” More: “Bennet has built a reputation as a bipartisan, policy-focused senator on Capitol Hill, trending toward the center of the Democratic spectrum. He opposes a single-payer health care system, instead hoping to expand Obamacare.” Oh yeah, that’s just what the Democratic base in crying out for: bipartisanship. Data point: The guy’s a U.S. senator, and I have exactly one entry for him before I started doing the Clown Car update, and that was just a mention in the 2016 election. If you stuck guns to the heads of Democratic voters and said “Pick Michael Bennet out of these photos of all 21 declared Democratic Presidential candidates or die,” then you just killed a greater percentage of Democratic voters than Thanos.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “A $1.5 billion sweetheart deal Hunter Biden’s private equity firm secured from the state-owned Bank of China is ‘looming on the horizon’ as a potential line of attack against his father’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen.” It’s going to be fun hearing Democrats claim that random contacts by low-level staffers constituted collusion with Russia for Trump, but that $1.5 billion from China to the Vice President’s son was just no big deal. Why Biden is not Jeb Bush. Four of these points I agree with, but the fifth (“unlike Jeb, who was weakened by the presence of his one-time protege Marco Rubio in the field, Biden has no immediate competitor in his primary ‘lane'”) is probably untrue, as Buttigieg, Moulton, Hickenlooper, Ryan and Bennet could all plausibly fill the “white moderate” lane. He appeared on ABC’s The View, where he promised to be less creepy. Biden picked up a very early endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters, another example of his strong play for union support. He appeals to forgotten blue collar Democrats. Flashback: In 1998, Joe Biden said Anita Hill was lying. (Right the first time.) Biden the liar. Speaking of which, the Washington Post gave him four Pinocchios for stating that the Trump tax cuts applied only to the rich. Biden’s campaign may be a well-oiled machine. Biden himself? Not so much:
How far will the left wing of the Democratic Party go to drag Biden? Here’s a Newsweek piece dinging him for opposing forced busing in 1974. Here’s a hint: everyone hated forced busing. “We’re going to take your daughter and ship her across town to a school in the ghetto because that’s a whole hell of a lot easier than spending more money to improve ghetto schools or take on teachers unions.” Democrats gave up on forced busing because it was a horrible idea that didn’t actually address the problem and they didn’t want be wiped out in elections.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Maybe? I didn’t think he was going to run if Biden got in, but what the hell is this? It came up as an ad when I Googled “Michael Bloomberg President.” That sure as hell looks like the website of someone who is thinking of running for President. Upgraded from “Probably not” after I stumbled across it.
Update: Montana Governor Steve Bullock: All But In. “Montana Gov. Steve Bullock will announce his bid for the presidency in two weeks, MTN News has learned — adding to the 20 Democrats already running for the 2020 nomination to challenge President Trump.” Upgrade over Leaning Toward In.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Julian Castro hits 65,000-donor threshold to secure spot in first presidential debate.” That’s probably a great relief to him. He’s making a play for Nevada, which falls right after New Hampshire and has a large Hispanic population. That’s a strategically sound decision, and even if it fails, it can’t fail worse than anything else he’s tried…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But she says the 2016 election was “stolen” from her.
Update: New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: All But In. “It’s Now A Clown Bus: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Expected To Announce 2020 Run Next Week.” De Blasio unites all of America in contempt against him. “76 percent of New Yorkers say he shouldn’t run. Politico New York surveyed 30-odd members of Team de Blasio, and all but two said it was a bad idea, with one calling it ‘fucking insane.'” Also this: “He may have a shot if every Democratic candidate is caught sending racy selfies to minors.” Upgrade from Leaning Toward In.
According to the DNC, the max number of candidates participating will be a total of twenty even if all 21 announced candidates qualify as it threatens to eliminate candidates who had already made the cut – so much for “transparent, fair and inclusive.” Ten will appear on June 26 with the next ten on June 27th and selection will be determined by drawing lots. Conceivably, the Main Show of Bernie and Biden may occur on June 26th, or they may be split, appearing on two different nights. In any case, it may be difficult for the public to determine a clear ‘winner’ by virtue of candidate separation from the total field.
Snip.
Given her almost totally hostile reception by every MSM outlet who deigned to interview her, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has experienced, as an opponent of regime change wars, more bad manners and outright personal antagonism than any other candidate. While Gabbard easily qualified for the debates via the $65,000 requirement and continues to attract SRO audiences in NH, Iowa, California and elsewhere, yet until the newest CNN poll, she failed to register any % of public support. Something here does not compute given the ‘favored’ polls past history of favoritism. If the Dems continue to put a brick wall around her, Jill Stein has already opened the Green Party door as a more welcoming venue for a Tulsi candidacy. The Dems, who tend to be unprincipled and vindictive, better be careful what they wish for.
Caveat: Counterpunch, so grains of salt time. On the other hand, the author can smell the stench of the Russiagate corpse, so maybe actual clues are involved here…
Senator Kamala Harris was supposed to be a frontrunner. According to the rules of “the invisible primary,” in which donors and party activists coalesce around their chosen nominees, sending signals about candidate quality that primary voters, more often that not, eventually validate, Harris seemed to check all the boxes of a frontrunner. Her campaign team is full of veterans of the campaign of the last Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. She led the large donor fundraising race, with most of her big donors also being former donors to Clinton. Seth Masket, a political scientist and expert on the party system, conducted an informal poll last December of precisely the sort of party activists who are said to decide these things, and a healthy majority leaned toward supporting Harris. And in FiveThirtyEight’s weighted listing of endorsements, Harris ranked second among the declared candidates, losing out only to Senator Cory Booker (before Joe Biden formally entered the race last week).
Judging by all available polling, though, Harris is not even close to the frontrunner. (And Cory Booker’s campaign seems to be utterly foundering, suggesting that counting up endorsements may not be the best way to measure the viability of a candidate from a state, like New Jersey, with a powerful, old-fashioned party machine.) Most national polls put her in a distant third or fourth place, frequently trailing South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a relative neophyte who was polling at basically zero a month ago.
This doesn’t render “the invisible primary” obsolete as an explanatory factor. The seemingly overnight rise of Buttigieg is in fact evidence of the concept’s durability: People have heard of him, and tell pollsters they support him, because his press is managed by Lis Smith, a well-connected Democratic operative who formerly worked for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, and Politico’s big donor analysis shows he is extremely popular among former Obama and Clinton bundlers. The energy around Mayor Pete is partly a reflection of the political press translating its knowledge of his advisers’ records and his popularity with the donor class into stories about his candidacy that create a sort of aura of “viability.” The new frontrunner, the former vice president, has, as you’d expect, even more institutional support behind him, especially among Democratic mega-donors and longtime elected officials.
So, what has, thus far (there is a lot of election left to go), prevented Harris’s campaign from breaking out? And for that matter, how is Elizabeth Warren receiving so much glowing press for her transformative policy agenda, but still polling just as poorly as Harris?
As the horserace quants at FiveThirtyEight explained, both are victims of the Democratic electorate’s fixation on “electability.” Polling broadly shows Democratic voters thinking Joe Biden has the best chance at winning the general election. That is exactly what Biden would like everyone to think, and that belief practically constitutes the sole argument for his candidacy.
Wait, primary voters focus on electability? Do tell. The New Republic writer is pouting because he wanted Harris. That’s why he says “‘Electability’ is a crock of shit,” because he wants hard-left candidates and the majority of Democratic primary voters aren’t having any. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) There’s a ton of “Oh yeah, she went after AG Barr! She’s my hero!” schoolgirl crush media pieces I’m omitting here, since the default setting on Harris coverage is “Fawning.”
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Climate Change Guy offers a pie-in-the-sky “carbon neutral by 2030” that also promises to destroy the coal industry. I guess he figures “Hey, everyone else is offering impossible bullshit! Why not me?”
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. She too unveiled a mental health plan. Funny how people who hang out with Democrats all the time naturally assume that large numbers of Americans are crazy…
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. He visited all four early primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina) and got a WGBH profile. “Moulton is a centrist among more aggressively liberal candidates. The progressive base fawns over Bernie Sanders’s calls for economic revolution, and Elizabeth Warren’s lengthening list of plans, but it’s unclear that the majority of primary voters, let alone general-election voters, will opt for radically upending an economy that seems to be humming along pretty well.”
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. He appeared on Face the Nation, and spent his time nattering about the Russian Collusion Fantasy, which is far too precious for liberals to give up on despite being complete bunk.
The bill made it harder for individuals to file for bankruptcy and get out of debt, a legal change that credit card companies and many major retailers had championed for years. The bill passed Congress with large majorities, but most Democratic senators, including Barack Obama, voted no. Biden voted yes and was widely seen at the time as one of the bill’s major Democratic champions.
So far, her efforts haven’t yet translated into much success. Despite her Hollywood connections, she managed to raise just $1.5 million as of the end of the first quarter — not chump change, but it does put her toward the bottom of the list of serious contenders. Nor has she yet managed to clear the 65,000-donor threshold that would qualify her to participate in the first two Democratic primary debates, although according to her campaign website, she’s about 90 percent of the way there.
And although her books have sold 3 million copies, her name recognition is among the lowest in the field. In a national poll conducted by Change Research in mid-April, 66 percent of likely Democratic voters had never heard of her; the same was true of 53 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers in an early-April Monmouth poll of Iowa. Candidates with low name recognition can still have a shot at the nomination if they’re backed by a decent percentage of the people who have heard of them, but Williamson gets almost no support in horse-race surveys: She has gotten 0 percent support in 27 of the 35 polls in our database that have asked about her. And she is unlikely to become better known as long as cable news networks and newspapers continue to cover her far less often than the candidates with more traditional credentials.
She visited Iowa, where she spoke to about 60 people, and Nevada, where she got interviewed by Politics Now, where it looks like they’re using cameras and a set from 1979.
Jonathan Tobin has a nice piece up on the foolishness of Max Boot and the remaining rump of #NeverTrump trying to destroy the Republican Party to save it:
For a tiny group of prominent writers and political operatives, the Republican party has become the moral equivalent of Ben Tre, the Vietnamese village about which a U.S. army officer said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” But for historian and columnist Max Boot, not even that awful yet memorable quote fits the current situation. In a Washington Post column published on the Fourth of July, Boot claims that, “Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.”
Boot’s is just the latest public declaration from the dwindling band of Never Trumpers that merely condemning Trump’s bad behavior or foolish policies is not enough. In their view, a Republican party that continues to support and sustain the administration must be punished for the sin of inflicting this president on the nation. According to people such as Boot, George Will, Steve Schmidt, and Joe Scarborough, that means voting for Democrats this fall.
Each gives various reasons for his or her apparent apostasy, but it all boils down to a belief that opposition to Trump is the single most important issue facing the nation. Do any of them really share the Left’s conclusion that Trump is destroying democracy and leading us to the brink of fascism, as Boot’s remark about Germany and Japan implies? That’s not the point here.
It is not accurate to say that the party has left them, as Ronald Reagan frequently said of the Democratic party, after he transformed from New Deal Democrat into a Barry Goldwater conservative.
As I wrote in March about Boot, and as Charles Cooke has also discussed with respect to Jennifer Rubin (another of my former Commentary colleagues), the issue isn’t so much about how Trump has changed the GOP as how Trump derangement has changed them. Both now take positions that are contrary to the stands they took prior to 2016. If Trump is for something, they’re against it even if they used to support it. If he’s against it, they’re for it even if they used to oppose it.
I was particular struck by this paragraph quoting Boot:
Boot concedes that a vote for the GOP in November would indicate support for tax cuts and conservative judges. However, on the downside, he says, it would also be “a vote for egregious obstruction of justice, rampant conflicts of interest, the demonization of minorities, the debasement of political discourse, the alienation of America’s allies, the end of free trade, and the appeasement of dictators.”
Let’s break that down:
“A vote for egregious obstruction of justice”: Really? Seems like the people doing the most obstructing and stonewalling have been President Trump’s deep state opponents in the FBI over their FISA abuse.
“Rampant conflicts of interest”: President Trump’s conflicts of interest seem like pretty small potatoes compared to the graft and favors machine Hillary Clinton ran out of the State Department.
“The demonization of minorities”: Really? Which minorities has Trump “demonized”? Insisting on border enforcement to deport illegal aliens is not “demonizing,” it’s merely enforcing existing law. Likewise his temporary ban on travel from terrorism-exporting nations, as recently affirmed by the Supreme Court.
“The debasement of political discourse”: Boot has half a point here, as Trump’s discourse could certainly be considered “debased” compared to Bush41 or Bush43. But here again, President Trump’s critics have far more debased discourse than the object of their ire. Robert De Niro, Stephen Cobert and Kathy Griffin have debased political discourse far more than Trump’s Twitter feed has. Or, as Tobin puts it, “Does he think, for all of Trump’s faults, that civil political discourse is the specialty of the party of Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Keith Ellison, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?” And where was Boot decades ago when leftists were calling Republicans “Nazis,” “racists,” etc.? Maybe Boot made polite “tut-tut” noises at the time, but #NeverTrump seems deeply offended that Trump found effective ways to fight back. It seems they’d rather lose gracefully as long as doing so never threatened their own social status. (Kurt Schlicter has made this argument at pungent length: “Trump threw the Fredocons out of the family business. They are nothing to us…We ruined their scam. They miss the cruise ships, filled with marks handing over cash to mingle with second-tier scribes from magazines put out by lesser sons of greater fathers that we stopped reading when they stopped mattering. Never Trump wants to once stand on a sold-out cruise ship’s bridge, pale puny arms spread wide, shouting, ‘I’m a minor duke of the world!'”)
“The alienation of America’s allies”: Which of America’s allies has been permanently alienated by Trumpian rhetoric? Canada? Has Germany pulled out of NATO? Has Japan asked U.S. troops to leave? Is South Korea displeased at eased tensions on the peninsula? Relations with Saudi Arabia have never been better. France backs Trump much more fully in his war against the Islamic State than they ever backed Bush43 in Iraq. Evidently Boot equates acquiescing to meaningless Paris climate accords or the disasterous Iran deal to “respect.”
“The end of free trade”: Don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin. Free trade hasn’t ended, and President Trump’s use of tariffs as a negotiating strategy already has some countries lowering trade barriers as a result. Also, previous administrations have hardly been as pure as the driven snow when it comes to imposing tariffs. Obama imposed tariffs on Chinese tires, and the Presidents that imposed steel tariffs includes Bush41, Bush 43, Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Johnson.
“The appeasement of dictators”: That depends on how you define “appeasement.” Obama did far more to appease the mullahs in Iran than President Trump has done to placate North Korea. Also, President Trump’s “appeasement” of North Korea seems to have cost us very little to notably ease tensions on the Korean peninsula, and may yet open the path to North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. If not, those modest wins have still achieved more there than any president since Eisenhower.
Max Boot and #NeverTrump seem to be making the same mistake college socialists make: Just as socialists compare capitalism to the fantasy socialism that exists only inside their own heads rather than the messy failures found in the real world, so too Boot seems to compare President Trump’s messy-but-real successes against a golden age of Republican purity that never existed, rather than remembering all the flawed compromises under Reagan, Bush41 and Bush43.
And President Trump only looks all the better on every front compared to the burning clown car that was the Obama Administration. Yet that’s the party which Boot and his ilk would have us pull the level for in November to teach Trump a lesson about “moral purity.”
President Donald Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un in Singapore, and they signed a broad joint agreement to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. Which is all well and good, if not terribly meaningful if Kim doesn’t follow-through and allow U.S. inspectors access to verify denuclearization. North Korea has broken several agreements in the past, and there’s no guarantee they won’t break this one, but President Trump has been a lot better about keeping economic pressure on North Korea to comply than Clinton or Obama was. But even if nothing ever comes of it, we’ve already come out ahead:
I do not fault Trump for throwing out the status quo playbook, which has led to many years of bipartisan failures vis-a-vis North Korea. Shaking things up, grabbing Kim’s attention, and alternatively using sticks (“fire and fury”) and carrots (charm offensive) to land the Hermit Kingdom’s dictator at the negotiating table, in person, involved a series of bold strokes. Ramping up biting sanctions while ratcheting up bellicose rhetoric seems to have spooked the regime, at least to some degree. Kim released three hostages (let’s not forget the one his goons murdered), allegedly destroyed a nuclear test site, and agreed to leave the safety of his country for a face-to-face meeting. For all of this, Trump deserves some real credit.
(Some Facebook friends were apoplectic when I pointed out that President Trump got hostages released in North Korea, which they furiously insisted happened a month ago and thus had absolutely nothing to do with this summit. Sure, sport, if that’s the hill you want to die on, whatever you say. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a hell of a drug.)
And even if it is a meaningless agreement, at least it didn’t cost us $150 billion to produce the failure, unlike Obama’s Iran deal. All it cost us was a cancelled wargame with South Korea (a pretty nominal cost) and President Trump serving up some oleaginous flattery to his negotiating counterpart. None of that should obscure that Kim is, in fact, still a communist scumbag. Can he stop being a communist scumbag? Five years ago I would have said no. But no one expected Saudi Arabia to give up Wahabbism, but that seems to be happening, and President Trump had some role in that as well. Old approaches haven’t worked, and maybe Kim is smart enough to grasp what every non-leftist outside his country already has: communism is a miserable failure and capitalism is the only path forward to prosperity.
At least one person was overjoyed at the summit: Ex-basketball player Dennis Rodman.
Does that sound like the ravings of a naive fool?
Yes. Yes it does. (Though I can understand him being upset at receiving hundreds of death threats.) But that naive fool may have provided the crack through which President Trump could channel his persuasion techniques. And his much-derided basketball trip may turn out to be the equivalent of Nixon’s “ping-pong diplomacy” with China.
Also supporting President Trump’s North Korean initiative were…15 House Democrats? (Well, 14 if you discount the non-voting representative from Guam.)
The House Democrat letter is signed by Reps. Raul Grijalva (AZ), Barbara Lee (CA), Mark Pocan (WI), Pramila Jayapal (WA), Tulsi Gabbard (HI), Bobby Rush (IL), Zoe Lofgren (CA), Madeleine Bordallo (GUAM), Colleen Hanabusa (HI), Mark DeSaulnier (CA), Richard Nolan (MN), Karen Bass (CA), Jared Huffman (CA), and Jamie Raskin (MD)
Most interesting from that list: Both of Hawaii’s representatives support President Trump’s negotiations. Funny how being threatened with direct nuclear annihilation can clarify the mind.
The media rebuked Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. These days the media is demanding that Donald Trump isolate North Korea as one. Suddenly the peaceniks of the press corps deplore dialogue and demand to know why “Trump is legitimizing” Kim Jong Un.
On Monday night, MSNBC assembled a panel of spiteful Trump critics to throw a wet blanket over the summit. The doves turned into hawks and spent much of the evening trying to peck at Trump. Most of the people on the panel are apologists for this or that communist thug—just go back and look at MSNBC’s fawning coverage of Fidel Castro’s death—but on Monday night they played hardliners. Rachel Maddow, furrowing her brow as usual, objected to Trump even holding a summit. She has finally found a communist leader she thinks America should ostracize. When Obama met with the Castro brothers, she burbled with enthusiasm. But she covered this moment of historic diplomacy like a funeral, shuddering at the thought of North Korea joining the “community” of nations.
MSNBC saw the summit as just one more occasion for obsessive anti-Trump fault-finding. The disgraced Brian Williams is still hanging around for some reason and looked like he wanted to give the summit the kind of newsy, anchormanish treatment of old, but he couldn’t pull it off in the company of jabbering Trump haters, for whom wild opining is all that counts. Plus, Williams is too reduced a figure for the cocksure Maddow to give any equal time. But Williams’s ego still asserts itself from time to time. On Monday night he fed it by asking one of the sham historians on the panel an arcane, look-at-what-I-know style question about the USS Pueblo, a ship the North Koreans captured in 1968.
The utterly contemptible Nicole Wallace, whose smugness and nastiness are beyond caricature, drove much of the shrill coverage. She was at her whiny, know-it-all worst, droning on about Trump’s lack of “preparation” and so forth. But Trump seemed perfectly at ease, getting a stiff Kim Jong Un to crack a smile. Trump had said it would only take “a minute” for him to sense if the relationship between the two countries could improve. By that measure, the summit appeared to start promisingly. Normally such friendly gestures between an American leader and an adversary would warm the hearts of liberals. Not this time. The MSNBC panel looked on coldly and muttered suspiciously about Trump’s body language.
Are we supposed to have Strong Opinions and Takes of Elevated Temperature over the fact that President Donald Trump has cancelled the summit with North Korea? Because the MSM certainly seems to have no shortage of such takes, despite the fact that Scott Adams (who keeps explaining President Trump’s persuasion techniques again and again to a press that refuses to listen) called it a month ago:
It isn’t just that liberals, the MSM and #NeverTrump hate President Trump, it’s that they hate him with such a blinding, all-encompassing rage that they refuse to learn from their mistakes and keep making the same ones over and over again…
President Trump’s immigration crackdown is forcing companies to actually hire women.
The children of the ’60s — you know, the hippies — and their ideological offspring in academia, politics, and, most especially, the media, are now not only okay with a sitting president’s weaponizing the intelligence community against a rival presidential campaign; they are all rolling over like whipped dogs to believe everything the intelligence community tells them, most especially when it is coming from the CIA — the CIA! — and the FBI.
Basically, Trump has driven the hippies and their offspring so crazy they are not only A-okay with the CIA’s spying on American citizens, totally cool with FBI spies infiltrating a rival campaign, and feeling warm all over about wiretaps, unmasking, and lying to federal judges, they do not want any of this investigated.
The other day, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame was on CNN fuming over the fact that there will now be an investigation of the Obama administration, the Department of Justice, the CIA, and the FBI, after it was discovered they are all guilty of spying on the political rival of a sitting president.
Carl freakin’ Bernstein does not want the watchmen watched. Carl freakin’ Bernstein is swallowing every treat being fed to him by the CIA — the CIA! — and the FBI. Carl freakin’ Bernstein does not want an investigation, does not want to learn anything more than what he is being told (by the CIA!), and does not want the public to know anything more.
Bird is an annoying “scooter sharing” startup plaguing a few cities. Turns out that a recharging reward makes it even more annoying than it sounds, with rechargers gaming the system for maximum rewards by hoarding scooters. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
It was common knowledge in Hollywood that my grandfather, the director John Farrow, was a notorious drinker and serial philanderer. There were numerous alcohol-fueled arguments between her parents, and Mia told me that she was the victim of attempted molestation within her own family. Her brother, my uncle John, who visited us many times when we were young, is currently in prison on a conviction of multiple child molestation charges. (My mother has never publicly commented on this or expressed concern about his victims.) My uncle Patrick and his family would often come by, but those visits could end abruptly as Mia and Patrick would often wind up arguing. Patrick would commit suicide in 2009.
My mother, of course, had her own darkness. She married 50-year-old Frank Sinatra when she was only 21. After they divorced, she moved in to live with her close friend Dory Previn and her husband André. When my mother became pregnant by André, the Previns’ marriage broke up, leading to Dory’s institutionalization. It was never spoken of in our home, of course, and not even known to me until a few years ago. But, as I look at it – as a licensed therapist as well as an eyewitness – it’s easy to see the seeds of dysfunction that would flourish within our own home.
It was important to my mother to project to the world a picture of a happy blended household of both biological and adopted children, but this was far from the truth. I’m sure my mother had good intentions in adopting children with disabilities from the direst of circumstances, but the reality inside our walls was very different. It pains me to recall instances in which I witnessed siblings, some blind or physically disabled, dragged down a flight of stairs to be thrown into a bedroom or a closet, then having the door locked from the outside. She even shut my brother Thaddeus, paraplegic from polio, in an outdoor shed overnight as punishment for a minor transgression.
Snip.
The summer between first and second grades, she was having new wallpaper installed in the bedroom I slept in, across the hall from hers on the second floor of the Connecticut house. I was getting ready to go to sleep, when my mother came over to my bed and found a tape measure. She gave me a piercing look that stopped me in my tracks and asked if I had taken it, as she had been looking for it all day. I stood in front of her, frozen. She asked why it was on my bed. I told her I didn’t know, that perhaps a workman had left it there. She asked again and again and again.
When I didn’t give the answer she wanted, she slapped my face, knocking off my glasses. She told me I was lying and directed me to tell my brothers and sisters that I had taken the tape measure. Through my tears I listened to her as she explained that we would rehearse what should have happened. She would walk into the room and I would tell her I was sorry for taking the tape measure, that I had taken it to play with and that I would never do it again. She made me rehearse it at least a half-dozen times.
That was the start of her coaching, drilling, scripting, and rehearsing – in essence, brainwashing. I became anxious and fearful. Once, when I was given a new pair of jeans, I thought they would look cool if I cut off a couple of the belt loops. When Mia saw what I had done, she spanked me repeatedly and had me remove all my clothing, saying, “You’re not deserving of any clothes” and making me stand naked in the corner of her room, in front of my older siblings who had just returned from dinner with their father André.
Plus how Farrow had drilled her children into reciting the details of the alleged “assault” over and over again.
Rachel Dolezal charged with welfare fraud. That’s taking your “I was born a poor black child” cosplay way too far…
One of those “Yeah, you just have to put it up” tweets:
Very cool. After spending all day in the Senate Armed Services Committee, I went to dinner & suddenly, in to the restaurant walked…@TheSlyStallone From Rocky to Rambo to a ton of other movies that I’ve watched over and over, really enjoyed the chance to meet him! pic.twitter.com/20s66XeGQP
I foolishly thought I would have time to get more done this week…
By the way, the Korean War is ending. Something that couldn’t be ended by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush41, Clinton, Bush43 or Obama is being ended by President Donald Trump. I look forward to Jennifer Rubin’s forthcoming essay on why this is actually a bad thing…
All about China’s aircraft carrier fleet. Interesting stuff, though I’d take the “OMG, China’s economy will be double that of the U.S. by 2030!” alarmism with several grains of salt.
Why you shouldn’t use your fingerprint as a password: “The first rule of passwords is that if you think it may have been compromised, you change the password. If you use your fingerprint as a password, you can’t change it.”
Pompeo will have to be nominated and approved by the Senate before he can take Tillerson’s spot in the government. Republicans can approve anyone they want in the Senate as long as they stick together, and Pompeo was confirmed for his current post in a 66-32 vote.
“His experience in the military, Congress, and as leader of the CIA have prepared him well for his new role and I urge his swift confirmation,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday, as he wished Tillerson and his family well.
Vice President Mike Pence backed Trump and urged the Senate to confirm Pompeo, “a man of highest integrity with unquestionable qualifications who will do an outstanding job.”
There were notable foreign policy improvements under Tillerson (the crushing of the Islamic State, significant reform in Saudi Arabia, the embassy move to Jerusalem, arming Ukraine, pressuring North Korea to the negotiating table, etc.), but most were attributable to either President Trump’s unique style of negotiating, or the fact the idiots in the Obama Administration were no longer in charge.
I thought I was ambivalent about Tillerson’s exit, until I read this:
His profound disagreements with the president on policy appeared to be his undoing: Mr. Tillerson wanted to remain part of the Paris climate accord; Mr. Trump decided to leave it. Mr. Tillerson supported the continuation of the Iran nuclear deal; Mr. Trump loathed the deal as “an embarrassment to the United States.” And Mr. Tillerson believed in dialogue to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis, but Mr. Trump repeatedly threatened military options.
“President Trump has been clear that the Iran deal is terrible policy and has sought ways to hold Iran accountable,” DeSantis told the Free Beacon. “With Mike Pompeo, Trump will have a Secretary of State who sees the threat posed by the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] and by Tehran in a similar light as he does.”
Alrighty then. It’s best Tillerson was shown the door…
Success as a reporter on the CIA beat inevitably meant finding out government secrets, and that meant plunging headlong into the classified side of Washington, which had its own strange dynamics.
I discovered that there was, in effect, a marketplace of secrets in Washington, in which White House officials and other current and former bureaucrats, contractors, members of Congress, their staffers, and journalists all traded information. This informal black market helped keep the national security apparatus running smoothly, limiting nasty surprises for all involved. The revelation that this secretive subculture existed, and that it allowed a reporter to glimpse the government’s dark side, was jarring. It felt a bit like being in the Matrix.
It’s a long and informative piece, even if you don’t accept all of reporter James Risen’s analysis. And it really does show how badly our national security agencies leak…
The recently discovered vulnerability in Intel chips is really, really bad. And fixing it requires about a 5-30% performance hit on every OS that runs atop Intel processors. (Here’s a nice layman description).
Germany outsources censorship. Evidently you’re not allowed to say anything critical of Muslims or “Muslim refugees,” ever. “How the Germans can’t see that such a law, in the hands of the wrong party, could be devastating is a mystery. I can only conclude such occurrences have no precedent in their country from which they could draw obvious lessons.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinds Obama-era memorandums on state-level legalized marijuana. Popehat thinks this is, at present, mostly cosmetic due to the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment. I oppose federal marijuana prohibition on constitutional grounds: Regulating marijuana is not an enumerated power of the federal government, regulation is neither necessary nor proper (thus no 9th Amendment justification), and thus a matter entirely for the states absent any interstate commerce under the 10th Amendment.
“Mayor Sylvester Turner’s press secretary was suspended for two weeks without pay after she failed to turn over thousands of documents required to be released under Texas law. Darian Ward was asked to turn over emails relating to her work on non-city related projects, including a private side business called ‘Joy in Motion Productions.'” She must have gone to the Hillary Clinton School of Email FOIA compliance…
Dave Chappelle has a point. As gross, disgusting and socially unacceptable as having Louis C.K. masturbate on the phone with you is, if you let that dissuade you from pursuing a career in a field as hotly competitive as standup comedy, that’s on you. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
The draft, seen by Reuters on Thursday, seeks to ban nearly 90 percent of refined petroleum product exports to North Korea by capping them at 500,000 barrels a year and demand the repatriation of North Koreans working abroad within 12 months.
It would also cap crude oil supplies to North Korea at 4 million barrels a year. The United States has been calling on China to limit its oil supply to its neighbor and ally.
According to South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo, U.S. recon satellites have photographed around 30 illegal transactions involving Chinese vessels selling oil to North Korea on the West Sea in October. The images allegedly showed large Chinese and North Korean ships transacting in oil in a part of the West Sea closer to China than South Korea. The satellite pictures even showed the names of the ships.
A government source said, “We need to focus on the fact that the illicit trade started after a UN Security Council resolution in September drastically capped North Korea’s imports of refined petroleum products.” Meanwhile, on paper, China’s trade with North has recently collapsed after U.S. President Donald Trump unleashed a barrage of sanctions in September targeting North Korea’s imports of refined petroleum products.
Back in November, the US. Treasury Department sanctioned an additional six North Korean shipping and trading companies and 20 of their ships after the satellite pictures surfaced. In the above picture, the North Korean ship named Ryesonggang 1, was easily identified and connected to the illegal sale of oil from China.
According to Chosun Media, “the department noted that the two ships appeared to be illegally trading in oil from ship to ship to bypass sanctions.”
Fostering rebellion using using balloons and flash drives? This strikes me as more naive wishful thinking the useful. For starters, I doubt whether anyone knows that “The majority of North Koreans have devices that can read the flash drives” is actually true…
