Kent is not a first-hand witness and much of his testimony is based off of second-hand knowledge. [Page 206-207]
Kevin Bacon has fewer degrees of separation to the Trump Zelensky call than George Kent.
That being said, his closed-door testimony revealed far more devastating pushback on the Democrat narrative than anything else.
Kent testified that it is appropriate for the State Department to look at the level of corruption in a country when evaluating foreign aid. [Page 103]
(Reminder: The Trump administration sent Ukraine lethal aid.)
Kent also testified that Hunter Biden being on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma while Joe Biden was VP was a conflict of interest. [Page 226-227]
And according to his testimony, when he raised corruption concerns with the Obama White House, he was rebuffed and was told “There was no further bandwidth to deal” with Hunter. [Page 226-227]
Reminder: Chargé d’affaires for Ukraine, Bill Taylor, is not a fact witness to the Trump Ukraine call.
Taylor was not on the July 25th call and he did not read the transcript until it was publically released for the world to see.
Furthermore, Taylor doesn’t have relationships with any of the players involved. He has previously testified that he did not have direct communication with President Trump, Rudy Giuliani or Mick Mulvaney. [Pages 107-108]
Yet even worse for Democrats’, Taylor’s closed door testimony has undermined their phony narrative.
Taylor testified that at the time of President Trump’s call with Ukraine, the Ukrainians were unaware of the hold on the U.S. aid. [Page 119]
Taylor also testified that combatting corruption in Ukraine is a “constant theme” of U.S. foreign policy. [Pages 86-88]
Surprisingly, McDaniel reports that opposition to the hearings among Democrats is up 6 points. Could it be that there are still some sane members left in the Democratic Party who see this spectacle for what it is? Regardless of what new information is learned, no matter how favorably it may reflect on President Trump, there are a large number of Democrats who will not be swayed. Most Democrats hate Trump so much that, even though they’re well aware of how unfairly he’s been treated, they’re willing to go along with anything that will remove him from office. A six point shift doesn’t seem like much, but even a small move can swing an election.
This shift also makes sense in light of the recent rally data released by Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale…He reported that 27% of those who attended Trump’s Tupelo, MS rally on November 1st identified themselves as Democrats. At an October 17th rally held in Dallas, TX, 21.4% identified as Democrats. These figures are stunning.
1) Impeachment 24/7. The “inquiry,” supposedly prompted by President Trump’s Ukrainian call, is only the most recent coup seeking to overturn the 2016 election.
Usually, the serial futile attempts — with the exception of the Mueller debacle — were characterized by about a month of media hysteria. We remember the voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti-Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup.
2) False whistleblowers. The “whistleblower” is no whistleblower by any common definition of the noun. He has no incriminating documents, no information at all. He doesn’t even have firsthand evidence of wrongdoing.
Instead, the whistleblower relied on secondhand water-cooler gossip about a leaked presidential call. Even his mangled version of the call didn’t match that of official transcribers.
He wasn’t disinterested but had a long history of partisanship. He was a protégé of many of Trump’s most adamant opponents, including Susan Rice, John Brennan and Joe Biden. He did not follow protocol by going first to the inspector general but instead caucused with the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff’s impeachment inquiry. Neither the whistleblower nor his doppelganger, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, was bothered by the activities of the Bidens or by the Obama decision not to arm Ukraine. Their outrage, in other words, was not about Ukraine but over Trump.
At publication, Texas’ crime rate is the lowest it has been since 1965. Similarly, violent crime in Texas is at a 40-year generational low with 410.8 incidents per 100,000 residents, a rate not seen since 1977. This trend follows a decades-long aggregate decrease in both violent and property crime rates. As illustrated in Figure 1, murder—the most heinous crime that can be committed using a firearm—has mimicked the decline as well with the drop in constituent subcategories of homicide. (Note that the rifle and shotgun homicide rates are reflected on the secondary vertical axis on the right in order to display the drop in these rare incidents.)
Further, the percentage of total homicides committed with a firearm in Texas has been trending downward as well. Similar to Figure 1, Figure 2 shows declines across all major categories of firearm homicide, with rifles and shotguns being displayed on the right-hand vertical axis. During the preceding two decades, a handgun has been used in an average of 46.53 percent of all homicides, while rifles and shotguns were used in 3.57 percent and 4.10 percent, respectively. For handguns, the highest use was 54.55 percent in 2005; the lowest was the most recent year, 2018, at 40.12 percent.
Also: “These trends persist in tandem with a proliferation in concealed carry permits being issued. Between 1998 and 2018, the number of concealed handgun licenses issued have increased 568 percent.”
Writer Derek Cohen examines possible solutions to violence involving guns, and finds all of them but one wanting:
The Legislature should consider implementing and funding a Texas program similar to federal initiatives, which uses a multi-pronged strategy of policing and prosecution, agency integration, and identification of violent crime hot spots. The focus would be on criminals with guns, not law-abiding Texans (Governor’s Texas Safety Action Report).
Of all the recommendations made in this report, this enjoys the strongest scholarly backing. This essentially describes what is known as “focused deterrence,” a holistic public safety strategy that includes law enforcement, prosecutors, social services, and analysts. The process begins when on-the-street law enforcement describes gang conditions in the area they patrol, both in terms of geography (what is the gang’s “territory”) and identifying key members. The analysts then create a gang map as well as a relational network of the gang. Those in the gang are notified that they have been identified as such and invited to a “call-in.” During this meeting, attendees are informed of the strategy and, should violence persist associated with the gang, not only will state and federal prosecutors seek the maximum punishment for all potential criminal charges, but gang members stand to face these charges should others within the network be responsible for furthering violence. Conversely, attendees are offered the option of enrolling in relevant social services to ease the transition to a more law-abiding life.
These programs have gone by multiple names during their ascendency: Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV), Operation: Ceasefire, and the like. Their efficacy has been demonstrated in individual and meta- analyses, suggesting “that focused deterrence strategies are associated with an overall statistically significant, medium-sized crime reduction effect.”
Probably should have included a link to this in my Austin homeless roundup, but there’s a YouTube channel dedicated to drunken brawls on Sixth Street, which seems to have gotten much worse in the last year or so. (Hat tip: Paul Martin of KR Training.)
Nine deaths at USC since August? That starts to seem like a startlingly high number. And, accord to feminists, there must have also been thousands of student rapes in the same period…
Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton became the first the secure his reelection in 2020. How? Within hours of the filing deadline closing, his legal team challenged false statements by his only Democratic opponent, who promptly withdrew.
ProTip: Try not to drop your four baggies filled with cocaine. Especially at the airport. Especially if you’re Democratic state representative. Texas Democratic State Representative Poncho Nevarez evidently had to learn that the hard way, and now he’s not running for reelection.
Massachusetts to seize cars of people caught with untaxed vaping products. Even by the standards of Massachusetts crazy that’s Massachusetts crazy, and likely both and Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual) and a Ninth Amendment (neither necessary nor proper) violation.
Despite the roommates’ optimism, the system began to break down soon after its establishment. To settle disputes, the roommates held weekly meetings of the “Committee of Three.”
“I brought up that I thought it was total bullshit that I’m, like, the only one who ever cooks around here, yet I have to do the dishes, too,” said Foyle, unaware of just how much the apartment underscores the infeasibility of scientific socialism as outlined in Das Kapital. “So we decided that if I cook, someone else has to do the dishes. We were going to rotate bathroom-cleaning duty, but then Kirk kept skipping his week, so we had to give him the duty of taking out the garbage instead. But now he has a class on Tuesday nights, so we switched that with the mopping.”
After weeks of complaining that he was the only one who knew how to clean “halfway decent,” Foyle began scaling back his efforts, mirroring the sort of production problems experienced in the USSR and other Soviet bloc nations.
At an Oct. 7 meeting of the Committee of Three, more duties and a point system were added. Two months later, however, the duty chart is all but forgotten and the shopping list is several pages long.
The roommates have also tried to implement a food-sharing system, with similarly poor results. The dream of equal distribution of shared goods quickly gave way to pilferage, misallocation, and hoarding.
“I bought the peanut butter the first four times, and this Organic Farms shit isn’t cheap,” Eaves said. “So ever since, I’ve been keeping it in my dresser drawer. If Kirk wants to make himself a sandwich, he can run to the corner store and buy some Jif.”
Narwhale the Unipuppy. Which was trending over the impeachment hearings two days ago…
In keeping with all that global warming, Austin had an unseasonably early hard freeze this week. Stay warm out there…
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Lots of China and technology news this time around.
How much public, firsthand evidence is there of this so-called Ukrainian quid pro quo? Right now, zero: “The problem with this narrative is that all we have to rely on is Mr. [William] Taylor’s opening statement and leaks from Democrats. What we don’t know is how Mr. Taylor responded to questions, or what he knew first-hand versus what he concluded on his own, because like all impeachment witnesses he testified in secret. Chairman Adam Schiff, with the approval of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refuses to release any witness transcripts.”
Let ye who has never brushed a congressional aide’s hair in the nude, taken naked bong hits, gotten an Iron Cross tattoo, and posted wife-sharing pics to a wife-swapping site cast the first stone.
We all know that if she was a Republican, this would dominate news cycles for weeks on end…
Brett Kavanaugh: *has a beer*
Media: TAKE. HIM. DOWN.
Katie Hill: Does drugs, has multiple inappropriate sexual relationships with employees, posts exhibitionist pictures on Reddit, does "wifesharing," etc. etc.
Media: She's living her best life, give her some privacy.
>Parliament flooded with tractors >Doors rammed >Army deployed >Angry politicians
This has had little to no traction outside the Dutch sphere, so Ive decided to make an English thread detailing the events on the 3 major protests pic.twitter.com/u7W3RWWPdz
This is a bad look: “Apple CEO becomes chairman of China university board.” What’s a little widespread rape and torture next to the almighty buck? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Universe Is Made of Tiny Bubbles Containing Mini-Universes, Scientists Say.” An elegant, worm ouroboros structure which answers many questions, but since it’s from vice Motherboard, a salt shaker is probably in order.
Today, the vegetarian ideology is not a stand-alone philosophy. It is tied inexorably to other ideologies such as socialism, globalism and extremist forms of environmentalism. There are very few vegetarian promoters that are not politically motivated. This has caused a rash of propaganda, attempting to rewrite the history of the human diet to fit their bizarre narrative.
Even though human beings have been omnivores for millions of years, the anti-meat campaign claims that humans were actually long time vegetarians. They do this by comparing humans to our closest evolutionary relatives, like chimpanzees and gorillas, and arguing that these animals have a strict vegetable diet (which is not exactly true).
Of course, Native American tribes, living closest to how our prehistoric ancestors lived long ago, had meat heavy diets, but don’t expect the environmentalists to accept this reality. What they conveniently do not mention is that over 2 million years ago human ancestors broke from their vegetable diet and began eating meat. Not only this, but the diet changed our very physical makeup. We grew far stronger, and smarter.
Yes, that’s right, the rise of meat in the human diet tracks almost exactly with the rise of human intelligence and advances in tools and technology.
My theory is that “ethical humanism” among our chattering classes is a low-calorie substitute for traditional religion, and forgoing meat is our punishment for environmental sins. Either way, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it. Speaking of spinach…
Russian fighter with freakishly large biceps nicknamed Popeye gets clock cleaned by guy 20 years older. You’ve seen those “Skipped Leg Day” memes? This guy looks like he skipped everything but biceps day for five years.
I regard GNU Foundation head Richard Stallman as a fanatic who’s just a few steps shy of being a complete lunatic. But he’s right to defy Social Justice Warrior-types who want him removed for objecting to the lynch mob regarding the late Marvin Minsky’s minimal ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Biden and Warren tie in Iowa, another debate looms, Harris continues to plummet, LBGTCrazy, indestructible Bernie is back on his feet, Yang is the new Ron Paul, and Beto is coming after your church. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
The Steyer amount is how much he raised; we’ll have to wait until his FEC form is posted to see how much of his own money he tossed in.
Polls
CBS/YouGov (Iowa): Biden 22, Warren 22, Sanders 21, Buttigieg 14, Harris 5, Steyer 3, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1, Ryan 1. I think that’s the first time Warren has tied Biden in Iowa, but it’s essentially a three-way tie for the top. That’s also a really good showing for Buttigieg: Maybe all that money is finally have an effect.
CBS/YouGov (New Hampshire): Warren 32, Biden 24, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 7, Yang 5, Harris 4, Steyer 4, Klobuchar 2, Gabbard 2, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Ryan 1.
CBS/YouGov (South Carolina): Biden 43, Warren 18, Sanders 16, Harris 7, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, Steyer 2, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1, Williamson 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1.
While the event was called the “Equality Town Hall,” representation was not exactly equal. The vast majority of the questions concerned, and were asked by, gay men and trans women. There was one token bisexual and one token nonbinary person permitted to ask a question, but I’m not sure the word “lesbian” was uttered once. They did, thank goddess, let butch comic Julie Goldman ask Kamala Harris about the most lesbian issue of all: homeless cats children. But it really should have been called the CNN Gay and Trans Women of Color Town Hall since a few letters of “LGBTQ” were basically ignored.
As for the substance of the debate, the candidates were asked varying versions of five different questions: Will you make the Red Cross take blood from gay men? How will you make PrEP cheaper for gay men? What are you going to do about hate crimes and the “epidemic of violence against trans women of color”? What are you going to do about trans people in the military? And, are you going to pass the Equality Act? Everyone gave basically the same answers, which are as follows: Yes; force insurance to cover it; enforce hate crime laws through the Department of Justice; welcome them; and yes. If they wanted to distinguish themselves on matters of policy, asking questions everyone agrees on was not the way to do it.
The all distinguished themselves by proving how far they were willing to bend over to bow to tranny madness.
Ballotpedia offers a roundup. The 12(!) presidential candidates on a debate stage at one time beats the Republican record of 11.
All the Democrats want to do is cut up the pie; none of them are talking about how to expand it.
Shockingly, the party of Hillary Clinton sucks at cybersecurity. The irony here is that Williamson’s campaign gets higher cybersecurity ratings than Yang’s…
In 1973, one year after Joe Biden was elected to the Senate at age 29, James Biden opened the nightclub Seasons Change with what Politico, referencing contemporaneous local reporting in Delaware, called “unusually generous bank loans.” When James ran into trouble, Joe, as a senator, later complained that the bank shouldn’t have loaned James the money. “What I’d like to know,” Biden told the News Journal in 1977, “is how the guy in charge of loans let it get this far.” The paper investigated, and sources at the bank said that the loan was made because James was Joe’s brother.
James, in the ’90s, founded Lion Hall Group, which lobbied for Mississippi trial lawyers involved in tobacco litigation. According to Curtis Wilkie’s book “The Fall of the House of Zeus,” the trial lawyers wanted James Biden’s help pushing Joe Biden on tobacco legislation.
Also:
In November 2010, James Biden joined a construction firm. Seven months later, that firm that would go on to win a $1.5 billion contract building homes in Iraq.
The company’s founder, Irvin Richter, told Fox Business Network that having James on board helped. “Listen, his name helps him get in the door, but it doesn’t help him get business,” he said. “People who have important names tend to get in the door easier but it doesn’t mean success. If he had the name Obama, he would get in the door easier.”
He returned to Iowa this week for a four-day swing, his longest trip through the Hawkeye State since a May RV tour that was also four days.
But in between those May and October swings, Booker made just six trips to Iowa, where he spent nine days campaigning and attending events for members of the public or organizations or that were open to press, according to a CBS News analysis. During that same stretch, only former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, who entered the race in July, and Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam, who has been to Iowa once, spent fewer days publicly campaigning in Iowa.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Pushes back on O’Rourke’s plan to strip tax exempt status from churches. “That means going to war not only with churches, but I would think with mosques and a lot of organizations that may not have the same view of various religious principles that I do. But also because of the separation of church and state are acknowledged as nonprofits in this country.” He’s against socialized medicine. Gets a Hollywood Reporter profile. Why is Hollywood Reporter covering presidential candidates?
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Maybe? She’s on a book tour, but members of the Permanent Clinton Crony Circus say it’s only that. But: “‘A lot of people are talking to her, which isn’t helpful,’ another person close to Clinton told CNN. ‘They get into her head because she so dislikes Donald Trump that she can’t see straight.'” Well, someone so easily deranged sure sounds like who you would want in the White House…
Among her fellow Democrats, Representative Tulsi Gabbard has struggled to make headway as a presidential candidate, barely cracking the 2 percent mark in the polls needed to qualify for Tuesday night’s debate. She is now injecting a bit of chaos into her own party’s primary race, threatening to boycott that debate to protest what she sees as a “rigging” of the 2020 election. That’s left some Democrats wondering what, exactly, she is up to in the race, while others worry about supportive signs from online bot activity and the Russian news media.
Perhaps strangest of all is the unusual array of Americans who cannot seem to get enough of her.
On podcasts and online videos, in interviews and Twitter feeds, alt-right internet stars, white nationalists, libertarian activists and some of the biggest boosters of Mr. Trump heap praise on Ms. Gabbard. They like the Hawaiian congresswoman’s isolationist foreign policy views. They like her support for drug decriminalization. They like what she sees as censorship by big technology platforms.
Then there is 4chan, the notoriously toxic online message board, where some right-wing trolls and anti-Semites fawn over Ms. Gabbard, calling her “Mommy” and praising her willingness to criticize Israel. In April, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, took credit for Ms. Gabbard’s qualification for the first two Democratic primary debates.
Brian Levin, the head of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, said Ms. Gabbard had “the seal of approval” within white nationalist circles. “If people have that isolationist worldview, there is one candidate that could best express them on each side: Gabbard on the Democratic side and Trump on the Republican side,” Mr. Levin said.
Ms. Gabbard has disavowed some of her most hateful supporters, castigating the news media for giving “any oxygen at all” to the endorsement she won from the white nationalist leader David Duke. But her frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show have buoyed her support in right-wing circles.
Both Ms. Gabbard and her campaign refused requests for comment about her support in right-wing circles or threat to boycott the debate.
In the bold new world of the New York Times, even a Hindu of Samoan extraction gets to be a “white nationalist” for 15 minutes! Even by lazy smear job standards its a lazy smear job. Gabbard rightfully slammed it as bullshit. Gets a Reason interview with John Stossel. You might think she would approve of Trump’s withdrawal of troops from northern Syria. She doesn’t.
This theory takes the Harris surge in July more seriously — it was real and represented a real opportunity for the California senator. Her campaign simply squandered it.
Harris’s campaign launch speech was widely praised, and she was strong in the first debate. But she has not had a strategy of keeping herself in the news, the way Warren’s policy rollouts and liberal stances did earlier in the year. And Harris hasn’t built a clear brand and rationale for her candidacy along the lines of Buttigieg’s (“I’m young”), Biden’s (“I can beat Trump”), or Sanders and Warren (“I will take on the wealthy”).
I think this lack of clarity about the rationale for her candidacy — beyond appealing to a broad coalition of Democrats — has led to some of Harris’s stumbles. Her months-long waffling on Medicare for All likely stemmed from a desire to appease both the party’s left-wing (which favors MFA) and the center-left wing (which opposes MFA). But this field may be too big for anyone to straddle the left and center-left — and perhaps health care is an issue where you can’t equivocate. Similarly, while Harris attacked Biden’s past opposition to aggressive school integration plans, she was hesitant to offer much of a proposal of her own on that issue. It seemed like Harris wanted to use that issue to nod at her racial liberalism but wasn’t prepared to commit to a big school integration plan, which might be controversial.
538 can’t state the obvious, unspoken rationale for her campaign: black people would vote for her because of her skin color. Evidence suggests not.
Although the failed senatorial candidate hit the donor threshold long ago, he’s failed to secure the qualifying polls he needs. In fact, the qualifying and non-qualifying national polls alike have seen O’Rourke sink like a stone. His RealClearPolitics polling average stands at 2.3%, half a point behind Andrew Yang. Yang, by the way, needs just one more poll to become the eighth candidate to secure a spot on the November stage.
Theoretically, O’Rourke could go Steyer’s route and divert all of his efforts to early state polling, but it’s unlikely that a new field office or Instagram live is going to save him. O’Rourke claims he raised more money this past quarter than the $3.6 million he raked in from April through June, but with Yang posting $10 million and Bernie Sanders topping the fundraising with more than $25.3 million, the top six candidates in the race have absorbed the bulk of the cash. Steyer can self-fund his vanity project, but O’Rourke probably can’t without help from his billionaire father-in-law.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.) Bow to gay marriage or have your church’s tax exempt status revoked, comrade. “What Beto O’Rourke said last night is a perfect example of why many orthodox Christians who despise Donald Trump will vote for him anyway. The survival of our institutions depends on keeping the Democrats out of the White House (and Congress) for as long as we can.”
Steyer has spent an estimated $19 million on TV ads. The next-closest Democrat was Kirsten Gillibrand, who spent $1.1 million, according to an analysis by the FiveThirtyEight website. More than 70% of all ads from Democrats running for president on TV right now were purchased by his campaign. His digital buys are also high — at least $10 million since he entered the race in July.
Steyer’s ascent to his first debate has drawn criticism from some competitors who say it proves the Democratic National Committee’s qualifying requirements are too easily bought.
“His ability to spend millions of his personal wealth has helped him gain in the polls like no one else,” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said in an email seeking donations.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who didn’t make the debate, said the rules “have allowed a billionaire to bankroll his way onto the debate stage, while governors and senators with decades of public service experience have been forced out of the race.”
Elizabeth Warren has a moving story about being fired from a teaching job because she was pregnant, a story that perfectly complements her political narrative that she is the tribune and champion of those who have been treated unfairly by the powerful. Joe Biden has a moving — and horrifying — story about his wife and daughter being killed by a drunk driver, a story that similarly could not have been designed more perfectly to bolster his political image as a man who can be counted on to soldier on in the face of adversity.
Of course, neither story is true.
Are we still caring about that sort of thing?
Elizabeth Warren has long pretended to be a person of color — a “woman of color,” the Harvard law faculty called her. (That color is Pantone 11-0602.) What Senator Warren has in common with Jussie Smollett turns out to have nothing to do with skin tone. Smollett, you’ll recall, regaled the nation with the story of a couple of violent, Trump-loving, MAGA-hat-wearing white supremacists who just happened to be cruising a gay neighborhood in Chicago on the coldest night of the year, who also just happened to be fans of Empire, who also just happened to have some rope at hand. Who happened, as it turns out, to be a couple of Nigerian brothers and colleagues of Smollett’s.
Fiction, yes. Deployed, as we are always told when these lies are exposed as lies, in the service of a larger truth, a truth of which such habitual and irredeemable liars as Warren, Biden, Smollett — and Lena Dunham, and the so-called journalists of Rolling Stone, and the perpetrators of a thousand phony campus hate-crime hoaxes — are the appointed apostles.
“Does anybody seriously believe it was not as everyday as sunrise that employers made pregnant women leave their jobs 50 years ago?” CNBC’s John Harwood demanded in defense of Warren. Perhaps it has not occurred to Harwood, who purports to be a journalist of a kind, that the relevant question is not whether this sort of thing happened in the past to a great many women but whether this particular thing actually happened to this woman, which does not seem to be the case: The minutes of the local school-board meeting quite clearly document that Warren was offered a contract for further employment, which she declined. She was forthright in her account of the episode at earlier points in her life. She seems to have suddenly remembered the discrimination sometime between when she began advertising herself to the Ivy League as a Cherokee and the day when the Cherokee finally shamed her into knocking it off.
Was her “viral moment” a setup? Speaking of tranny madness, Elizabeth Warren wants men in women’s prisons, as long as they’re claiming to be women. What could possibly go wrong?
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. I was going to make the point that Yang was the Democratic Ron Paul after his impressive haul, only to find that others have already beaten me to the punch:
Long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang isn’t afraid to take a position on, well, anything. Browse through his campaign website, and you’ll see not just that he believes in universal basic income – the policy proposal for which he’s best known – but also that he wants to mandate the payment of NCAA athletes, to crack down on spam phone calls, and to secure $6 billion to revitalize dying shopping malls.
Many of his policy positions are tied to causes with little prominence in the mainstream but a devoted following on the internet, like his recent stance against childhood circumcision, the domain of an online community that refer to themselves as ‘intactivists.’
Anti-circumcision? Let the interminable flamewar begin!
Yang’s has a digital savviness – a longtime tech entrepreneur, he most recently founded and helmed a nonprofit called Venture For America – and a willingness to traverse the turf of Reddit and 4chan (as well as Joe Rogan’s podcast, which he appeared on roughly before his online following started to really take off). He has duly earned himself a following that refers to themselves as the #YangGang. And it would be an understatement to call them enthusiastic. They propelled Yang’s improbable candidacy to a threshold of 65,000 individual donations, which the Democratic party designated as the requirement to be included in the party’s first televised debate.
Many Yang fans say he’s the first candidate they’ve been excited about in a while, if ever. The Yang for President subreddit is lively, energized, and packed with ‘dank memes.’ Some have pointed to Yang’s popularity in corners of the internet that are best known for their early and fervent support of Donald Trump in 2016, or to followers of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders in the same year.
But comparing the #YangGang phenomenon to Trump or Sanders supporters isn’t quite accurate. Donald Trump was an international celebrity before he ran for office. Sanders is a somewhat closer parallel, but at the same time he was a sitting senator, and was additionally able to tap into an obvious demographic of disgruntled leftist voters who didn’t want to put another person whose last name was Clinton into office.
The most obvious parallel in recent American presidential politics is more likely Ron Paul’s candidacy for the Republican nomination in 2008, when he was an oddball Texas congressman whose anti-tax stance and opposition to the war in Iraq managed to build him a following of ‘techies, hippies, tax haters, and war protesters’ that largely congregated on the internet. ‘In recent months,’ Mother Jones magazine related in late 2007, ‘he was sought out on the blog search engine Technorati more often than anyone except a Puerto Rican singer with a sex tape on the loose.’ (Side note: Remember Technorati?) Paul’s candidacy arguably didn’t succeed because he was too unorthodox, but if Donald Trump’s win has taught us anything, it’s that American political media now has the infrastructure in place for unorthodoxy to succeed. No longer do people need to stand on a highway overpass with a handmade sign that says ‘GOOGLE RON PAUL’ to get the word out. The fringe can now pull the mainstream along for the ride.
The only truly interesting data point from the latest batch of fundraising figures was Andrew Yang’s haul of more than $10 million. Yang has always been a long shot for the nomination, and this influx of cash doesn’t change that fact. But, as others have noted, it makes him look more like the Ron Paul of this cycle: someone with a signature idea (universal basic income for Yang, the gold standard for Paul), an uncommon political outlook (libertarianism for Paul, postliberalism for Yang), a devoted base of oddball followers, and the ability to rake in surprising amounts of cash.
Paul obviously never won the Republican nomination and the GOP never had a libertarian moment. But Paul’s dovishness and penchant for conspiracy theories became part of the GOP mainstream as Trump ascended to the nomination and the White House. Yang’s fundraising numbers suggest that some part of his approach and platform resonated deeply within a segment of the Democratic Party. So even if Yang loses, which he almost assuredly will, Yang-ism may survive to exert an unexpected influence in the future.
“You all heard at some point there’s an Asian man running for president who wants to give everyone $1,000 a month,” the 44-year-old New York Democrat said to laughter and cheers inside a packed union hall this month in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Then he turned serious: “We’re in an era of economic change, and we need to think differently.”
That way of thinking has propelled Yang, the Ivy League-educated son of Taiwanese immigrants who would be the country’s first Asian-American president, from what many considered to be an entertaining diversion to a mainstream contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
Now Yang’s campaign, which began in 2017 but has seen its fortunes rise sharply in recent months, is rushing to catch up with rivals.
He stands near 3% in the latest public opinion polls, putting him in sixth place in the 19-candidate field ahead of numerous sitting lawmakers. His $10 million fundraising haul in the third quarter was the sixth-most among Democrats and more than triple his total for the second quarter.
Most importantly, he continues to inspire a fervent following known as the Yang Gang, supporters who wear blue “MATH” hats – a tribute to Yang’s devotion to data that has since become an acronym for “Make America Think Harder” – and revel in his “nerdy” campaign.
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:
The Blaze has released an audio recording that they recently obtained that appears to show Artem Sytnyk, Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, admitting that he tried to boost the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton by sabotaging then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.
The connection between the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Ukrainian government was veteran Democratic operative Alexandra Chalupa, “who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration” and then “went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee,” Politico reported.
There’s Alexandra Chalupa again. Funny how often Democratic administrations tend to send bagmen on “diplomatic” missions… (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
Corruption in modern D.C. is shaped like a triangle. A person or entity seeking a favor doesn’t hand the money directly to the politician or public official. Instead, the money goes to a trusted family relation under a vague “consulting” or “speaking” arrangement. This golden triangle of corruption appears over and over again in the Russia collusion hoax.
The Clinton email scandal and the Biden/Ukraine scandal have a lot in common. Both originated with snooping into high-level triangle schemes but morphed into a counter-scandal against Trump. In Clinton’s case, she deleted 30,000 emails that likely contained more evidence of favors to donors and friends. The process was so formalized that one Clinton Foundation official actually wrote a memo bragging about how the foundation work led to lavish speaking fees for Bill Clinton. As an example, he obtained speaking fees for Clinton from UBS in the amount of $900,000, $750,000 from Ericson “plus $400,000 for a private plane.” The memo author bragged that he negotiated a $1,000,000 fee for a one-hour Bill Clinton speech in China. When Clinton lost to Donald Trump in 2016, she no longer had influence to sell and the donations to the “charitable” foundation dried up.
But there have been several other triangle arrangements. Consider the Ohrs. Then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Burce Ohr, a very senior attorney in the Justice Department, lent his credibility to Hillary Clinton’s opposition research contractor by sponsoring it to the FBI. The same contractor, Fusion GPS, paid Bruce Ohr’s wife tens of thousands of dollars to work on the same project.
Then there are the McCabes. On July 5, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would not refer Clinton for prosecution for the email scandal. In this announcement, he said, “I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.”
But in May of 2016, Director Comey initiated a string of emails to his Deputy Andrew McCabe (among others) titled, “midyear exam.” The FBI titled the release “Drafts of Director Comey’s July 5, 2016 Statement Regarding Email Server Investigation.” Thus, McCabe was involved in the early version of the statement exonerating Clinton (even though Comey said he didn’t coordinate his comments with anyone in government). This brought to close the FBI’s investigation which formally began in July of 2015.
But Clinton’s “oh shit!” moment came in March of 2015 when she realized she might face criminal charges. Coincidentally—ha!—close Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe approached McCabe’s wife to run for office in March of 2015. He then steered $675,000 into her campaign coffers.
Then there are the corrupt but yet unidentified reporters. In November of 2017, court documents revealed that Fusion GPS made payments to three journalists between June 2016 and February 2017. This period overlaps with the Clinton campaign utilizing campaign funds to secretly pay Fusion GPS to help promote the Russia collusion hoax. Thus campaign money was potentially used to influence journalists. If you look in the FEC’s cold storage bin, you might find the campaign finance violation complaint about campaign money secretly making its way from Clinton’s attorney to Fusion GPS.
Then there are the WilmerHale alumni that came home after working on the Mueller team. We just learned that the Justice Department waived a conflict of interest triggered by Robert Mueller’s work with WilmerHale. WilmerHale took money from Clinton to do legal work on some of the very same email scandals that involved the State Department/Clinton Foundation shenanigans. At the time Mueller’s team was gearing up, we were told that Mueller and several of his team members “gave up million-dollar jobs to work on special counsel investigation.” But did they? We’ve recently learned some of these WilmerHale alums have returned which raises concerns that these attorneys had informal outside agreements at the same time they’re supposed to be independently serving a special counsel investigating Clinton’s political opponent.
It’s 2019, and I’m still tagging things with “Hillary Clinton Scandals.”
The SuperGeniuses running California these days are cutting off power to large portions of the state because they refuse to let utilities trim trees near powerlines, which means lots of fires in high wind situations. Way to go, California Democratic Party!
Carl Icahn, one of America’s most well-known investors, has summoned the movers, joining what, in an average year, adds up to almost a half-million New Yorkers looking for a better place to live. As with the largest share of former Empire Staters, Icahn is moving to Florida, a state with no personal income tax.
Icahn isn’t just moving to Florida alone; he’s also offering each of his staff $50,000 in relocation benefits to move with him.
Icahn, 83, has been paying New York’s top 8.82 percent tax on income for his entire storied career. Why move now?
President Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act limited state and local tax (SALT) deductions to $10,000 per filing household. Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that Icahn earned $500 million in a year. The new $10,000 SALT deduction cap means that he’d not be able to take a deduction on about $44 million in state and local income taxes—not including additional property taxes. As a result, his federal tax liability would about $16.3 million greater—just for living in New York.
While most taxpayers in New York—and every other state—saw their overall taxes decline as a result of the 2017 tax cut, some wealthy taxpayers in high tax states like New York and California saw a far smaller tax cut or, in a few cases, a tax increase. That’s because the federal tax code no longer provides a generous subsidy—through an unlimited SALT deduction—for steep state and local taxes.
This led New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to complain via Twitter that “The elimination of the #SALT deduction (state and local tax) was an economic attack on Democratic states.”
Of course, he could also ask the New York legislature to cut taxes. But he won’t. As a result, wealthier New York taxpayers have likely shelled out an additional $38 billion in federal taxes over the past seven quarters as a result of changes to the tax code.
In California, the state with the highest marginal personal income tax rate in the nation at 13.3 percent higher-end taxpayers have probably seen their federal tax liabilities increase by about $45 billion over what their peers in the lower-taxed states like Florida and Texas would be paying.
Limiting the federal tax deductibility of high state and local taxes in late 2017 had the same economic effect as passing 50 state tax law changes at once.
Since the tax law’s enactment, private-sector job growth in the 27 low-tax states with average 2016 SALT deductions of under $10,000 has run at more than double the rate of those 23 states with average SALT deductions above $10,000, adding 3.7 percent more jobs compared to only 1. 8 percent. The gap in manufacturing jobs is even greater: 3.4 percent job growth in the low-tax states vs. 0.8 percent in the high-tax states from December 2017 to July 2019. New York saw its manufacturing jobs shrink by -0.4 percent.
Democrats want racial quotas even after voters eliminated it. Asians oppose them, because they know they will be the ones disadvantaged. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
CNN reporter shut down in NBA press conference when she tries to ask about China.
Phising attempts are getting more competent. Never assume a phone call from your bank is actually a phone call from your bank. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“I Am Godzilla, King of Monsters, and I Too Was Contacted By the Trump Administration to Investigate Hunter Biden.”
I am informing the council of this with no agenda; as a non-citizen of the United States I cannot vote. Even if I could, none of the candidates from either side have any policies that are of interest to me. I am, as mentioned before, a lizard who lives just off the coast of Japan. I breathe fire. Most of my needs are sudden, violent, and cannot be met through typical democratic legislation. In that sense, a two-party system is not practical to me.
Here’s an interesting thread by Lee Stranahan on how Clinton cronies at the State Department were building the Russian Collusion hoax story back in early 2016, before Fusion GPS hired Steele to assemble the fake dossier.
So that’s TWO State Department employees being briefed by Steele; Jonathan Winer & Victoria Nuland.
They both have 🇺🇦 Ukraine connections, as does Steele.
And there’s one more State Department who is VERY relevant to the whole story…Clinton’s Oxford roommate Strobe Talbott.
Strobe Talbott is one of the Clinton’s oldest and closest friends.
He headed the Brookings Instituion for years.
And is the THIRD State Department official briefed by Steele.
This is already looking very much like a State Department operation.
The 🇺🇦 Ukraine connections are everywhere.
Strobe link to a VERY important connection.
Back in the 1970s, Strobe married the twin sister of a man who would become a shadowy Clinton operative: Cody Shearer.
Read that Jonathan Winer op-Ed from earlier in the thread and you’ll that he was shown the little discussed “second dossier” that Cody Shearer assembled.
Steele gave it to the FBI.
But it’s totally misnamed. Why?
Because it came first, as you’ll see soon.
Snip.
Cody Shearer was assembling HIS dossier BEFORE STEELE WAS HIRED.
He was discussing Trump / Russia in MARCH OR APRIL of 2016.
Other names that play a role in the timeline: DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa, notorious Clinton crony Sidney Blumenthal, George Soros, John McCain and even convicted felony Brett Kimberlin, though those last three names appear to be involved in the Steele story only tangentially. Also, I don’t buy Stranahan’s “Ukraine bad/Russia good” positioning near the end of the thread. But the information about State Department/Clinton crony involvement in assembling the Steele hoax dossier information much earlier than most people know is worth pointing out.
The events of this week reveal the new standard. Like sharks to a whale carcass, our elites routinely feast upon precarious situations in other nations: The Podesta Group, Hunter Biden, and others were content to make a buck off the tensions in Ukraine along with Paul Manafort, just as the Clintons and others were happy to take tens of millions of dollars from Russian oligarchs. We all know that Manafort would be sitting in a house in Malibu right now with the same immunity deal the likes of Podesta, Biden, and the Clintons apparently possess if only he had never decided to work for Donald Trump.
Recall that the supposed original sin of the entire Russian-collusion gambit was that when approached (apparently mostly by agents of the United States government working for President Obama and friends) then-candidate Trump or his team were interested in recovering the emails that Hilary Clinton unwisely and illegally sent and then deleted from her private server so that no one could read them. There would be plenty of reasons for Americans and the U.S. government itself to seek out these emails, of course, if only to determine to what extent they threatened national security—never mind the power and wealth of the foundation engaged in international money collection that her husband ran while she was Secretary of State.
But while the supposed reasons for it change every week, the Ukraine fiasco reveals the real underlying cause of the Left’s outrageously hypocritical march towards impeachment. The ruling class is now effectively saying to President Trump: “We know that domestically we have nothing to fear from the media and the law—so how dare you ask other countries about us! You must be impeached for this crime and this crime alone—asking other countries about our wrongdoing! Only an insane or evil person would do this!”
“Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam pleads guilty to stealing $87K from youth basketball nonprofit he founded.” Hey, which political party do you think Mr. Gilliam is a member of? Let’s start scanning the article and see if we can guess. Headline? No. First paragraph? No. Second paragraph? No. Look, I’ll save you the suspense: You have to go all the way down to the eleventh paragraph to learn what you already assumed: Mr. Gilliam is a Democrat.
The whole “white nationalist” charge against President Donald Trump and his supporters was always garbage.
Saying goodbye to the extremely consequential GOP class of 1994, the first Republican House majority in 40 years, the one that ran on the Contract With America and passed welfare reform.
A very malevolent incarnation of Florida Woman: Rich Democrat wife files police report over man using a meme on Facebook. “Beth Jaffe, who is the wife of city commissioner Bryon Jaffe, felt that the meme was threatening her life. Ms. Jaffe contacted the district office of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and asked for them to investigate Van Antwerpen.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Ahem! I said I can’t possibly imagine how Sports Illustrated might have alienated their core—
The Guardian: “Women’s magazines are more progressive than ever – and they’re all closing down.” There’s this thing called “causality.” Maybe publishers should look into it while they still can… (Hat tip: Aceof Spades HQ.)
The real cause of these abuses is failure of university trustees to meet their fiduciary obligations, which in the case of public schools is to taxpayers. Weak boards allow university administrators to limit oversight of admissions. The administrators are allowed to see admissions criteria, but not the trustees who are supposed to be in charge. Board members who want admission favors for their own children or their friends go along, while others turn their heads to avoid the wrath of powerful alumni and politicians who benefit from the workarounds.
I witnessed this while serving as a member of the University of Texas System Board of Regents. My actions to expose the admissions scandal at UT-Austin, our flagship campus, resulted in impeachment hearings against me by the state legislature and even efforts to convince a grand jury to indict me. While neither worked, the university continues to hide all of the documents that would have exposed the scandal. Even the FBI knows only a fraction of the real corruption.
Details of the larger problem at the Austin campus were uncovered in a private investigation commissioned by our then-Chancellor and a minority of Board members. The problem is, our university president teamed up with a new Chancellor and the state’s most powerful elected officials to keep the findings sealed. The un-redacted report, which explains how hundreds of unqualified students manage to occupy spots in UT programs—including our law school—is locked in a courtroom after my lawsuit to make it public was challenged by the university. Every one of those students owes his or her presence on campus to a politician who controls state spending at the university, or to a well-connected donor or faculty member.
Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.
What’s really going on here? Why have the Democrats, to put it bluntly, gone berserk? Why are they risking a backlash of cosmic proportions (other than appeasing their psychotically-inflamed base, of course)?
One, distraction. They live in absolute fear of the coming revelations about the Russia probe, from Inspector General Horowitz but even more from the DOJ’s John Durham, who can actually put people in jail. The Dems know — if they have a brain (and a few do) — these revelations are likely to point up the line at the leaders of the Democratic Party all the way to President Obama. They were all involved to one degree or another with illegally spying on or undermining Trump and his administration and supporters before and after the election. The extent of this we are only beginning to understand.
To put it mildly, not good. Whether you call this treason is up to you, but you can be sure Middle America (i. e. those elusive independent voters) will not appreciate it.
But there’s something worse — and Pelosi’s knows it. The only hope for Democrats to defeat Trump is, remote and quixotic as it may be, impeachment. In the midst of the current brouhaha, Joe Biden — their great (alas white male) hope — is being exposed as not just a senile plagiarist, but a senile, corrupt plagiarist with a freaky family out of a Southern gothic novel with tentacles reaching into China and Ukraine. Again, not good.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Dems have tacked so far to the left that they wouldn’t be able to win an election in Shenyang. Sanders, speaking of senility, is almost risible. He wants to restrict population for reasons of “climate change” when every one of the myriad social programs he so vehemently urges depends on strong continued population growth for economic survival, irrespective of taxes. (Is he that stupid? I don’t think so. He’s just a liar.)
As for his somewhat subtle clone, Ms. Warren, her proposals are if anything more extreme because she fails to acknowledge (though Colbert did his best to encourage her) that they are going to cost a ton of taxpayer money that approaches national bankruptcy. Even taxing the rich at one hundred percent won’t come near supporting her ideas. Wait until Trump gets ahold of that.
What’s the magic word that made Democrats go extra apeshit over the Ukraine meeting? Crowdstrike:
To understand how important this is, we must remember the foundation for the entire Russian election interference narrative, ‘Muh Russia – writ large, is built on the claim Russians hacked the servers of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and subsequently released damaging emails that showed the DNC worked to help Hillary Clinton and eliminate Bernie Sanders.
Despite the Russian ‘hacking’ claim the DOJ and FBI previously admitted the DNC would not let FBI investigators review the DNC server or cloud-based network. Instead the original claim was that the DNC provided the FBI with analysis of a technical review done through a cyber-security contract with Crowdstrike.
According to the original FBI statements made by James Comey: Crowdstrike did the captured imaging of the DNC network (servers/cloud), then conducted analysis, then provided a report to the DNC with their findings; and that report was given to the FBI. At least that was the original 2017 claim. However, during court filings in the case against Roger Stone, the DOJ/FBI later admitted they never even saw the Crowstrike final report.
Lawyers representing Roger Stone requested the full Crowdstrike report on the DNC hack. When the DOJ responded to the Stone motion they made a rather significant admission. Not only did the FBI not review the DNC server or cloud data, the FBI/DOJ never even saw the final Crowdstrike report.
The narrative around the DNC hack claim was always sketchy; many people believe the DNC email data was downloaded onto a flash drive and leaked. Crowdstrike was a private contractor holding a strong conflict of interest over Clinton and DNC interests. With this FBI court admission the scale of sketchy increased exponentially.
There was, and still is, absolutely no evidence the DNC was “hacked” (WikiLeaks claims the information was an inside job of “leaking”), and even John Podesta admitted himself he was a victim of an ordinary “phishing” password change scam.
This admission meant the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party….. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor.
If politics were regulated the way that consumer goods are, Nancy Pelosi might be charged by the FTC with deceptive packaging for her ridiculous announcement yesterday that an “official” impeachment inquiry is underway. It is pure theater, designed to appease the radicals like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who two days ago denounced the failure to impeach as worse than Trump’s “crimes.” With radical primary challengers and a San Francisco constituency given to backing lunatic schemes and politicians, she fears for her political career.
The only way that impeachment begins is with a floor vote of the House, after which time subpoenas can be issued and the facts assembled for Articles of Impeachment to be presented to the House, and, if voted by a majority, submitted to the Senate for trial, which requires a two-thirds majority for conviction. What Pelosi offered was deceptively packaged oversight hearings by six committees. All she is doing is adding five more committees to the hearings already underway by Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s Judiciary Committee.
The obvious is that they are fishing for votes. Warren has a putative weakness with African American voters. Tom Steyer is unknown to them (as he is to a lot of people). Harris is sinking fast and needs to shore up her rep and Julián Castro’s campaign has barely been registering enough to keep him on the debate stage.
But beneath this are more disturbing beliefs, one of which is on the edge of disgusting and actually racist: that African Americans prefer to be lied to than told the truth. The corollary to this is that they are easily lied to if you stir them up. The level of disrespect in this is off the charts.
Also at play here, as it is everywhere in Democratic precincts, is Fear of Trump. African Americans are doing better under Trump than they ever have been in this country with unemployment at record lows and salaries up.
Further, Trump really did something never done before — spearheaded and signed criminal justice reform legislation. Better not remind black people of that. Distract them or lie to them instead. Call Trump a racist, though why would a racist do such a thing?
Man starts a program to help other men get off heroin. The Southern Poverty Law Center called him a white supremacist. Now he’s suing their ass for $4.8 million, and a district judge just gave the green light to start discovery.
“What’s Wrong With Chinese GDP Data?” “Since 2013, GDP figures look suspiciously smooth.”
If proven, this deserves serious prison time: “California Sheriff Under Investigation For ‘Pay To Play’ Concealed Carry Permits.” Namely to campaign donors. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
“Some 600,000 vacationers were stranded when Thomas Cook, a travel company that has been in business for 178 years, collapsed on Sunday.”
Shortly after House Democrats launched an unofficial official impeachment inquiry for the now-laughable “whistleblower” scandal, President Donald Trump released the transcript of the conversation at the heart of the non-scandal showing there was no talk of freezing Ukraine aid or of any “quid pro quo.”
2)As to call transcript itself: Trump’s actual “favor” is that Ukraine look backward, to what happened in the 2016 election. This is a legitimate ask, since election meddling looks to have come from both Russia and Ukraine.
4)It is actually Zelensky who brings up Rudy Giuliani—saying they can’t wait to “meet him.” And it is Zelensky who references “that investigation,” as he goes on to promise that “all investigations will be done openly and candidly.”
6)Trump's several references to Giuliani are mostly to say what a great guy he is. He says he will have Giuliani and AG Barr call. He asks Zelensky to speak/work with both.
8)Meanwhile, the IG back in August referred this to DOJ as potential violation of campaign finance law, based on whistleblower complaint. Criminal Division evaluated and determined no violation: “All relevant components of the Department agreed with this legal conclusion.”
The irony is that Democrats actually did what they laughable accused President Trump of doing:
Democrat Senator Chris Murphy gave a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, earlier this month: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats' support for future U.S. aid to Kievhttps://t.co/IqUo6ZruZN
WIll this cause Democrats to close their impeachment proceedings and apologize? Of course not. They’ll keep it humming along until their extensions in the media can gin up another fake scandal for them to hype until that nothingburger explodes in their face as well. Repeat until November 2020.
It’s nothingburgers all the way down, forever and ever amen.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) admitted her plans to put a resolution on the House floor Wednesday to investigate President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal, a process that will likely grow into an impeachment inquiry as Democrat demands for impeachment grow ever more insistent.
“Confirmed: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planning to put a resolution on the House floor tomorrow to address the Ukraine issue as there are increasing calls by Democrats to start the impeachment process for President Trump,” PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor tweeted.
In an interview with CNN Monday night, Pelosi declined to say whether or not she would fully endorse an impeachment inquiry, but she suggested a move toward impeachment proceedings was certain. “We will have no choice,” she said.
The renewed push for impeachment gained steam following reports that President Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter in cooperation with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. On Tuesday, Trump announced he would release the full transcript of the call, during which he reportedly pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden no fewer than eight times.
Hunter Biden was a board member of Ukrainian firm Burisma Group when Joe Biden served as secretary of State. During his tenure, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
Yes, a scandal where a sitting Democratic Vice President withheld aid from a foreign country unless they stopped investigating his crooked son’s crooked deals is somehow Trump’s fault. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Democrat party is covering up a pattern of corruption involving high level members of the Obama cabinet. The multi-million and billion dollar pay-for-play is mind boggling. Biden Family sale of office to Ukraine was not the only one or the most egregious. Slimy Joe is not alone.
Let this sink in , The democrats want to impeach our President for exposing the crimes that they have committed . SMH Joe Biden needs to be impeached .#Trump2020LandslideVictory
Democrats want to impeach a president with a 53% approval rating based on a whistleblower with ZERO firsthand knowledge of the Trump-Ukraine phone call
It’s ironic that this so-called whistleblower scandal is going to be the thing that kicks off an actual impeachment inquiry, since it looks like just another nothingburger in a long line of nothingburgers:
The democrats in the House of Representatives are at it again. Is this their third or fourth call for impeachment of the president? Each week it seems media bring us a new sensational story of theft and intrigue, that then very quietly falls by the wayside once the facts emerge.
This time the controversy centers around business dealings that former Vice President Biden’s son had in the Ukraine. Allegedly, Biden’s son was on the board of a company that bribed Ukrainian officials to end a corruption investigation into it. Democrats now allege that the President threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine should it not reopen the investigation into Biden’s son. The President denies this claim, and intends to release the transcript of the phone call in question. Currently Speaker Pelosi and her cohorts are planning impeachment, before any real evidence of misconduct has come to light.
The way the House is going about sounds less like an impeachment proceeding than a clown show:
BREAKING: Speaker Pelosi was shot down by her caucus in her bid to form one impeachment committee, similar to the Hyde Committee or the Rodino Committee, and capitulated to no fewer than 6 committee chairs to jointly "lead" the investigation, including volatile Rep. Maxine Waters
Perhaps because it’s obvious that the entire thing is politically motivated by Democrats’ irrational hatred of President Trump:
Nancy Pelosi suggests that Democrats have to impeach Trump because they desperately want to prevent him from getting re-elected: "He can't win, that is very serious" pic.twitter.com/JTS2mYIm1u
Democrats seem not to have noticed that Trump thrives in environments of opposition and chaos. There are a lot of people (not just among Republicans) who believe that actual impeachment is several bridges too far, that Br’er Trump is going to thrive in the impeachment brier patch, and that instead of derailing President Trump’s reelection, it’s going to ensure it.
So, you guys are just going to feed another roll of quarters into the dick punching machine on this impeachment thing, eh?
Lefties are tweeting about impeachment but have no idea what impeachment means. If they think that the 2/3 of the Senate would vote out Trump, they’re crazy. & if they do sincerely believe that, I hope they’re ready for President Pence, because we all know how much they love him
But it’s also possible that this is just a mime show for the hard left rubes, that Pelosi has no intention of allowing an actual a vote on impeachment:
Pelosi did not and has not promised a floor vote on impeachment. This is just the launch of an "inquiry." I'm told she deflected on the question of a floor vote in caucus today.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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:
Here is Joe Biden bragging about using extortion to have a Ukrainian state prosecutor fired for investigating the shady business dealings of Biden’s son.
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.
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.”
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.
NY Post de Blasio presidential campaign obituary – “it died doing what it loved best – being as far away from nyc as possible” 😂 pic.twitter.com/il0X9vs4aW
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.”
