“[T]hey will lose the lifeblood of the revenues they receive from property taxes in Texas,” Abbott explained. “What this does, in English, is it is going to defund cities and cities’ ability to operate at all if they try to defund law enforcement.
“We believe in law enforcement in Texas and we are not going to allow a replication of the types of policies we’ve seen destroying cities like Seattle and Portland and others.”
Abbott accused such liberal precincts of “caving to the forces of socialism” even as crime increases, and added that some are allowing their municipalities to be “hijacked.”
“So Texas is laying down a marker and that is, whether it be the city of Austin or another city, such actions are not going to be tolerated. In Texas, we embrace law enforcement, we will not accept turning power over to these socialistic forces that seek to abandon the rule of law and abandon the law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line to keep our communities safe.”
However, unlike Abbott’s various Wuhan Coronavirus mandates, this will require the Texas legislature to enact, which won’t happen until next year. And Socialist Austin city councilman Greg Casar says it won’t deter his anti-police agenda.
Meanwhile, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell blasted Austin’s defunding vote and asked Gov. Abbott to send more law enforcement. “In the correspondence, Gravell blasts Austin City Council members for cuts to the Austin Police Department valued at $150 million — including some $20 million in immediate budget cuts and a transfer of several departments away from police oversight to civilian functions, such as interacting with the homeless and dealing with mental health-related cuts.”
It always seems to go back to the decision to make Austin bumsville, doesn’t it?
“There were thousands of pounds of trash, human waste, and needles washing through our backyards and the creek bed.”
Kevin Ludlow struck a nerve after posting his time-lapse video of the Windsor Park creek, which runs from Cameron Rd., into the neighborhood behind Ludlow’s house, and continues east. It even runs past a new community pool and water park.
The video in question:
The portion of creek bed which runs the length of the Heritage at Hillcrest apartment complex, behind his back yard, and down a couple of blocks further is prime real estate for the city’s growing homeless population because of its shade and relative seclusion.
Since the beginning of 2020, Ludlow noted the population of homeless individuals living in the creek bed grew to a few hundred people until its apex a couple of weeks ago. A storm came on July 31, causing the creek to flood and wash the piles of debris further down the area.
The issues that have arisen downtown and in the city’s business-heavy districts have been well-documented, but it has extended beyond these areas.
Snip.
In his video, Ludlow was able to record footage of campers smoking crack and shooting up heroin. Multiple times, campers became confrontational over his documentation.
He added that because regular syringes can be hard to come by, campers turn to insulin needles — which are much smaller both in length and tip — of which he’s found numerous on the ground.
He underscored, “I’m a pretty progressive-left guy, but [allowing homeless camping] has helped nobody, especially the homeless.”
Snip.
Back in October, Austin Police Department Chief Brian Manley reported statistics showing a 15 percent increase in violent crimes wherein both the victim and the suspect were homeless from July through September of 2019 compared with the same time frame the previous year.
Austin’s homeless problem has been growing for decades, but a watershed moment occurred last year.
In June of 2019, the Austin City Council approved the rescission of its public camping and lying ban. It went into effect in July and has led to a massive uptick in the unsheltered homeless population ever since, as more transients made camp on public property ranging anywhere from parks, sidewalks, underpasses, and more.
The city’s stated intention was that the policy change would bring the homeless population into sheltered facilities wherein they could receive whatever aid they needed.
In this year’s homeless population survey, the city recorded a 45 percent increase in its unsheltered population and an 11 percent decrease in those sheltered. There was an unmistakable incentive to leave shelters or the woods and live on the streets.
The city eventually reinstated some of the restrictions in place before July 2019 but stopped well short of fully reinstating the ban. The issue has grown substantially and fractured the community and its elected council considerably.
Read the whole thing.
Speaking of crime and the homeless:
Adler emails his Senior Policy Advisor to confirm homeless crime stats as reported by the Statesman. Adler is advised that the Statesman did them a favor by not emphasizing the 5 yr homeless crime rise & instead focusing on the violent crime by the non homeless. That figures. pic.twitter.com/oTIqsUQU5n
Things that make you go “hmmmm”: “Austin council member Jimmy Flannigan has received more than $17,000 in contributions from members of a real estate development company that has worked on several city projects, as well as a lobbying firm that has many real estate, business and events clients, according to his latest campaign finance report.”
Speaking of Jimmy Flannigan:
This must be the email that got Jacob Aronowitz his new position as Jimmy Flannigan's field director. ATX you have been warned. pic.twitter.com/leJLtPt3rG
“Funding that upholds our dignity.” What bilious, gaseous nonsense. What he probably meant to say is “the graft that lines our pockets.”
Cahnman floats a radical solution: revoke the City of Austin’s charter, abolish the city council and have functions carried out by the county and state.
The long rumored and threatened (if you’re California) Austin-area Telsa Gigafactory is now official:
Tesla will build its newest Gigafactory near Austin, Texas, Chief Executive Elon Musk announced during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday.
The area takes up about 2,000 acres and will be roughly 15 minutes from downtown Austin, Musk said. He said the factory will be an “ecological paradise” and that it will be open to the public.
“We’re going to make it a factory that is going to be stunning it’s right on the Colorado River. So we’re actually going to have to have a boardwalk over you, hiking, biking trail. It’s going to basically be an ecological paradise,” Musk said.
The site will be used to build the company’s Cybertruck, its Semi and the Model 3 and Model Y for the eastern half of North America, Musk said.
Musk also added that Tesla will continue to grow in California, where it will build the Tesla Model S and the Model X for global deliveries and the Tesla Model 3 and Tesla Model Y for North America.
Travis County, where the new car plant will reside, voted earlier this month to give Tesla tax breaks worth a minimum of $14.7 million to build the plant to bring jobs to the area. Tesla employs about 10,000 people at its only U.S. car plant today in Fremont, California.
The site is evidently going to be out at SH-130 and Harold Green Road northeast of the airport, at the site previously owned by Martin Marietta.
That “15 minutes from downtown” line is pure real estate agent hyperbole. Sure, that’s 15 minutes from downtown…at 3 AM. If you’re willing to speed.
Welcome to Austin, Telsa! Enjoy the BBQ, but please leave any political liberalism back in California…
This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.
You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.
When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.
There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.
The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.
Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.
We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.
All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.
The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.
Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.
If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.
They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”
They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.
But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.
Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.
Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.
Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.
Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.
Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.
To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.
For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.
We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later
The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.
There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.
Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.
West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:
The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.
They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.
Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”
For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.
Snip.
The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.
It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.
Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:
“One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”
Important questions:
100 million dollar question that leftists are refusing to answer:
To what organization do the funds raised on the Black Lives Matter website go?
BLM raised 40 million dollars in 48 hours because of George Floyd’s death. But WHO did Act Blue direct that funding to?
Rioters in Philly deface a statue of Matthias Baldwin, an early abolitionist who fought against slavery 30 years before it ended. pic.twitter.com/1HKrDusPBh
President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.
President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.
The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.
“The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.
Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.
What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?
The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”
Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
Recall just days ago we reported that Tesla was sending people back to work at its Fremont factory in Alameda County before the area’s lockdown expired.
Late last week, Alameda County responded by telling Musk that he could not re-open his factory. “We have not given the green light. We have been working with them looking at some of their safety plans. But no, we have not said that it is appropriate to move forward,” Erica Pan, interim health officer for the Alameda County Public Health Department, said on an online town hall meeting on Friday.
That was enough to trigger a total Elon Musk meltdown. The CEO, who has been going off on diatribes about civil liberties on conference calls and podcasts alike, Tweeted out on Saturday that he is going to be suing Alameda County for not allowing him to re-open
Frankly, this is the final straw. Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately. If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependen on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA.
The question is what took him so long. Thanks to one party Democratic rule, California constantly ranks as one of the worst states to do business in. High taxes and a brutal regulatory environment made California prohibitively expense to do business in long before the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown provided the final straw.
Come to Texas! We would welcome Tesla HQ in Texas. We love jobs & Texans very much want to open up & get back to work (while still staying safe & following sound science). We make lots of cars & trucks in Texas, and we’d love more!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 https://t.co/F9O0N3yase
Come to Texas. Enjoy no state income tax, friendly people, best queso on earth, and freedom. Just don’t bring blue voting, or you’ll mess it all up. https://t.co/WJwyW6bEDEpic.twitter.com/E6tdO3edWj
Is this just a negotiating ploy to pressure the county into allowing Tesla to resume manufacturing? Possibly. But plenty of companies have already moved operations from California to Texas, including Toyota, Kubota, and Charles Schwab. And that exodus just keeps continuing.
I used to do a regular Texas vs. California update, detailing how bad California’s business climate was and detailing all the California businesses going bankrupt or moving to Texas. Eventually I got so far behind that the in-progress post simply got too huge to finish. (And this was right around the time I started doing the Clown Car Update, which sucked up huge amounts of my time.) And then the Wuhan Coronavirus came along to wallop everyone’s economy, so most of those links are probably moot. I have a very strong suspicion that ending the unreasonable lockdown conditions earlier than most states will help Texas recover more strongly, and increase it’s lead as a business-friendly environment over California.
Since the Wuhan Coronavirus has delivered a quick kick to the nads of the economy, I’m sure being out of work really sucks right now. Here’s a quick roundup on economic resources that might help, both in Texas and elsewhere.
Candor has a long list of companies that covers which are still hiring (and there are many), which have hiring freezes in place, which are having layoffs, etc., along with more info, links to company hiring portals, etc.
Some newly unemployed Texans have complained that they can’t get through to Texas Workforce Commission by using either the website or by either telephone numbers (800-939-6631 for claims or 800-558-8321 for Tele-Serve). Two pieces of advice: For the website, try late at night or early morning when it’s not so slammed. For the telephone, the listed hours are 8 AM to 6 PM on weekdays, and I hear the best times to call are between 5-6 PM (when the phones are still staffed in El Paso).
If you’re stuck home under quarantine, now is a good time to increase your skill stack by taking courses to give your resume buzzword compliance. If you’re signed up through TWC, they have free online courses in a variety of areas.
Cisco also has an online learning portal and access to some sandbox tools, not only for their own stuff but also several basic technology tools.
Welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm! There are five Saturdays in February this month, something that won’t happen again until 2048.
Giant water main break in Houston shuts down lots of schools and streets. The pipe, which is 8 feet across and supplies 40-50% of Houston’s water, burst during repairs. There’s a boil notice in effect for Houston for the next 24 hours. (Hat tip: Kemberlee Kaye.)
Why we need to secure the border to fight coronavirus: “U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 1,155 Chinese migrants this fiscal year after they illegally entered from Mexico, Canada, or coastal boundaries. More than 95 percent came over the southwestern border between October 1, 2019, and January 31, 2020.”
Woke Rule No. 1 is that anything with “Principles” in its name is a grift. Now, something called “Principles First” – ugh – is trying to shoehorn into CPAC’s spotlight with its “National Summit on Principled Conservatism” to be held in D.C. on February 29th, and for the low, low, almost certainly lib tech tycoon-subsidized price of $10, you can attend this sexless Never Trump Freaknik.
It’s an opportunity to get one-on-one with all your favorite relevancy-challenged B-list MSNBCNN guests for a full day of complaining about Donald Trump and having them show you on the doll exactly where Trump hurt them. Brace yourselves for impassioned pleas by impotent weirdos to vote for the crusty commie curmudgeon because Trump sends mean tweets, plus plenty of “Oh well I nevers” and “We’re better than thats” as Pearl Clutchfest 2020 gets well and truly lit. Just don’t be surprised if the marquee outside reads “Puppet Show and Never Trump.”
From political consultants who are no longer consulted to writers who are no longer read, this is the Woodstock for conservatives who never actually conserved anything.
Excited? Worried you might miss out? Calm down. There are plenty of tickets left. And I hear they’ve got loads of Doritos and Zima at the buffet, if you can squeeze in between the ravenous Bulwark staffers stuffing their talk holes.
Who’s coming to this soiree? Well, just imagine the universe’s worst county fair dino-rock concert line-up, and this is its political equivalent. Mona Charen! Bill Kristol! David Frum! It’s basically the Swamp’s version of Bachman Turner Overdrive, Blue Öyster Cult, and Average White Band – except this band of totally white people are well below-average, though I’m sure we’ll get a fussy email reading “Excuse me, but we have a/an __________.” The closest thing to diversity I could detect in their line-up was the aptly named Heath Mayo – he’s diverse because he’s a younger kind of white person. I’m sure Mayo is ready to unleash the full benefit of his life experience upon the eager crowd – he can explain how learning about Reagan in high school in 2008 totally changed his life.
Sadly, Ana Navarro isn’t on the bill, but she probably has important work to do completing Dr. Stephen Hawking’s string theory research. And there’s no sign of Jennifer Rubin, probably because the event occurs during the hours of daylight.
Young Turks founder fights unionization. “In the staff meeting, the network’s co-founder and influential host, Cenk Uygur, urged employees not to do so, arguing that a union does not belong at a small, independent outlet like TYT, according to two workers who were present. He said if there had been a union at the network it would not have grown the way it has.” See, it’s always different when they do it…
There’s a California bill that would require porn stars to get a license. Inspector: “Yeah, I’m going to need to see your license.” Porn star (opens blouse): How about these licenses?” (Bowchickawowow…)
Hosni Mubarak dead at age 91. Of all the strongmen who have ruled Egypt, Mubarak falls in about the middle; less brutal than Morsi or Nasser, but more corrupt than Sadat or Sisi. His real downfall came from trying to install his son as a dynastic successor, at which point the army let the popular revolt oust him, leading eventually to the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief reign. He kept the peace with Israel, was a fairly reliable US ally for the region, and suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood (obviously not well enough).
Today’s elite facepalm: “Immigration to America is down. Wages are up. Are the two related?” Hey, you just might be on to something with that radical ‘supply and demand’ theory there, Einstein… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
With Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction, let’s remember what a huge Democratic Party donor he is. Also: “He faces an L.A. criminal trial soon, where 90 women have filed complaints against him, including well-known actresses Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman, and Salma Hayek.”
How a treasure trove of aviation drawings was saved from destruction thanks to a single engineer, including those for the P-51 and the B-25.
Scientist: Here’s a journal article. Editor: Think you could provide the raw data? Scientist: (Hissses, holds up arm to shield the crucifix from it’s sight, withdraws paper.)
The Trump-Cocaine Mitch Judicial Appointment Juggernaut continues apace.
That Wuhan hospital built for 1,600 coronavirus victims in a week? There are only 90 patients in it, but they report no spare beds while they herd victims into stadiums.
The gulf between the vision of vast new hospitals created and thrown into action within days and the more complicated reality on the ground is a reminder of one of the main challenges for Beijing as it struggles to contain the coronavirus: its own secretive, authoritarian system of government and its vast censorship and propaganda apparatus.
Communist party apparatus well honed to crush dissent also muffles legitimate warnings. A propaganda system designed to support the party and state cannot be relied on for accurate information. That is a problem not just for families left bereft by the coronavirus and businesses destroyed by the sudden shutdown, but for a world trying to assess Beijing’s success in controlling and containing the disease.
“China’s centralised system and lack of freedom of press definitely delay a necessary aggressive early response when it was still possible to contain epidemics at the local level,” said Ho-fung Hung, a professor in political economy at Johns Hopkins University in the US.
Just when you think it’s impossible to slam #NeverTrump harder than Kurt Schlichter, Kurt himself tweets a piece to this Ian Samuel piece:
The “Never Trump” guys. How can you not love these guys? They really thought they owned the place, didn’t they? Strutting around in their little bow ties, swapping erudite bon mots about William F. Buckley’s jowls. Masters of the universe, with their little magazines and affected mid-Atlantic accents that made them sound like Frasier Crane’s gay uncle, perpetually explaining the subtle parallels between George W. Bush and Seneca. And then—boom! The guy from the Apprentice walked into their house, ate their lunch, kissed their wives, peed in their brandy snifter, and now their son (Romulus) calls him dad. Come on. That’s funny!
Sadly, after Trump won, they mostly bent the knee. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, whoever. They all turned out to be pushovers. (Big surprise). I don’t know if John Kasich is still a Never Trump guy, because I could not honestly tell you whether John Kasich is still alive.
But some of these precious little lads and lasses held out, and oh, am I ever glad they did.
Because now they’ve got a new line in the sand. And, of course, we all better listen this time. Because although these guys might be willing to vote for a Democrat, they are putting their foot down about one thing. So get clear on this. If you want their help? Don’t even think about nominating that guy. You know who I mean.
“The rise of socialist Bernie Sanders is frustrating Never Trump Republicans.”
Stop. No. It’s the first sentence and I already don’t want this to be over. I am printing this article out so I don’t lose it.
Tell me: has anything ever not been “frustrating” to “Never Trump Republicans?” Frustration is basically who they are, isn’t it? They stood, watching, getting more and more frustrated as Trump became the only 2016 candidate who actually could break a “ceiling.” Then they stood watching, getting more and more frustrated as he actually won the election. And now, it’s 2020, it’s time for payback, and this time we’ll just see whose pants get pulled down in math cl—wait, what? No! It can’t be! Bernie Sanders is winning now, too? Okay. Alright. Tell me, honestly, how bad is it? Tell me how far behind exactly David French is in the delegate race. I mean, how far behind could he be? He was a JAG!
“If Sanders is the Democratic nominee, many will sit out the election and be deprived of the opportunity of voting against President Trump, they said.”
Did you hear that? These extremely good boys and girls will be deprived of the opportunity of voting against President Trump! No! Oh, God, anything but that! First the Weekly Standard collapses, now this? Please. No. This is not a joke. Here! Take my commemorative “Mitt Romney ’12” dog carcass. Take my signed copy of “Hope for America: Evan McMullin and a New Generation of Leadership,” by Diane Sheafor. (Real book). Take my “¡yo quiero Jeff Flake!” fidget spinner. Anything but the opportunity to post a ballot selfie on Twitter so it pops up in the feed of the MSNBC producer that might actually like me!
This week, Democrats want to tax…(rolls dice)…insulin. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Internal audit has been highly effective showing the district disregarded state law when it came to Job Order Contracts or JOC’s for 4 years and potentially overpaid for the work,” [auditor Steven] Martin said.
Two of his audits found the district overpaid $330,000 to contractors, but he says that’s just the beginning.
“We estimate over payments on only nine contracts at $1.7 million. There are over 400 JOC’s,” Martin said.
Did the district immediately investigate how this could happen? They did not. Instead:
“Last month, the superintendent proposed raising the threshold for investigating fraud to $250,000.”
“Dallas ISD has established the Procurement Compliance Committee that meets regularly with the superintendent and Board of Trustees regarding compliance priorities.”
“Dallas ISD trustee Miguel Solis said he felt blindsided by the auditor’s statements. ‘I have not once been contacted by internal auditor to discuss any of this. Probably most unprofessional acts that I have ever seen in seven years on school board.'” So the big problem isn’t graft and corruption, it’s uncovering it and announcing it without contacting me first.
Sounds like Dallas ISD needs a lot more audits, including those of the overseer’s bank accounts. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
Two reactions: 1. Good for him! 2. And the moon became as blood…
Happy dog:
WELCOME HOME: Astronaut Christina Koch recently returned home after a record-breaking 328-day space mission — and her adorable dog couldn't have been happier to see her. https://t.co/JTBzJnLM1xpic.twitter.com/2RIYeGKaok
Bloomberg is getting in, Holder is thinking about it, Yang boosts Williamson, the Steyer campaign commits a felony, and Biden keeps bide bide biding along at the top of polls. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Maine People’s Resource Center (Maine): Biden 26.8, Warren 22.1, Sanders 15.4, Buttigieg 9.1, Harris 5.0, Booker 2.7, O’Rourke 2.2, Yang 1.7, Other 6.5. 723 respondents. What I don’t get is that Maine Democrats show overwhelming majorities for every far left socialist scheme anyone has proposed (socialized medicine, Green New Deal, etc.), but Biden still comes out on top of their poll.
Emerson (Nevada): Biden 30, Warren 22, Sanders 19, Yang 5, Harris 5, Buttigieg 5, Steyer 3, Gabbard 1, Booker 1, Klobuchar 1, Bennet 1, Castro 1. I think this is the first poll that’s had Yang even tired with Buttigieg.
Texas Tribune (Texas): Biden 23, Warren 18, O’Rourke 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 6, Harris 5, Yang 4, Castro 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2. Poll conducted before O’Rourke dropped out (obviously), but it has to sting for Castro to be losing to Yang in his home state…
538 offers up post-debate poll aggregation. Buttigieg and Sanders are up the most, while Warren is down the most.
Election betting markets. Bloomberg has already zoomed up to fifth place, above Clinton, Yang, Gabbard and Klobuchar…
Pundits, etc.
Jonathan Chait has a bracing message for Democrats: “New Poll Shows Democratic Candidates Have Been Living in a Fantasy World“:
In 2018, Democratic candidates waded into hostile territory and flipped 40 House districts, many of them moderate or conservative in their makeup. In almost every instance, their formula centered on narrowing their target profile by avoiding controversial positions, and focusing obsessively on Republican weaknesses, primarily Donald Trump’s abuses of power and attempts to eliminate health insurance for millions of Americans.
The Democratic presidential field has largely abandoned that model. Working from the premise that the country largely agrees with them on everything, or that agreeing with the majority of voters on issues is not necessary to win, the campaign has proceeded in blissful unawareness of the extremely high chance that Trump will win again.
A new batch of swing state polls from the New York Times ought to deliver a bracing shock to Democrats. The polls find that, in six swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona — Trump is highly competitive. He trails Joe Biden there by the narrowest of margins, and leads Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Normally, it is a mistake to overreact to the findings of a single poll. In general, an outlier result should only marginally nudge our preexisting understanding of where public opinion stands. This case is different. To see why, you need to understand two interrelated flaws in the 2016 polling. First, they tended to under-sample white voters without college degrees. And this made them especially vulnerable to polling misses in a handful of states with disproportionately large numbers of white non-college voters. The Times found several months ago that Trump might well win 270 Electoral College votes even in the face of a larger national vote defeat than he suffered in 2016.
All this is to say that, if you’ve been relying on national polls for your picture of the race, you’re probably living in la-la land. However broadly unpopular Trump may be, at the moment he is right on the cusp of victory.
What about the fact Democrats crushed Trump’s party in the midterms? The new Times polling finds many of those voters are swinging back. Almost two-thirds of the people who supported Trump in 2016, and then a Democrat in the 2018 midterms, plan to vote for Trump again in 2020.
Snip.
The debate has taken shape within a world formed by Twitter, in which the country is poised to leap into a new cultural and economic revolution, and even large chunks of the Democratic Party’s elected officials and voting base have fallen behind the times. As my colleague Ed Kilgore argues, the party’s left-wing intelligentsia have treated any appeals to voters in the center as a sign of being behind the times.
Biden’s paper-thin lead over Trump in the swing states is largely attributable to the perception that he is more moderate than Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Three-quarters of those who would vote for Biden over Trump, but Trump over Warren, say they would prefer a more moderate Democratic nominee to a more liberal one, and a candidate who would find common ground with Republicans over one who would fight for a progressive agenda.
There are lots of Democrats who are trying to run moderate campaigns. But the new environment in which they’re running has made it difficult for any of them to break through. There are many reasons the party’s mainstream has failed to exert itself. Biden’s name recognition and association with the popular Obama administration has blotted out alternatives, and the sheer number of center-left candidates has made it hard for any non-Biden to gain traction. Candidates with strong profiles, like Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, have struggled to gain attention, and proven politicians like Michael Bennet and Steve Bullock have failed even to qualify for debates.
But in addition to those obstacles, they have all labored against the ingrained perception that the Democratic party has moved beyond Obama-like liberalism, and that incremental reform is timid and boring. The same dynamic was already beginning to form in 2016, though Hillary Clinton overcame it with a combination of name recognition and a series of leftward moves of her own to defuse progressive objections. Biden’s name brand has given him a head start with the half of the Democratic electorate that has moderate or conservative views. But it’s much harder for a newer moderate Democrat lacking that established identity to build a national constituency. The only avenue that has seemed to be open for a candidate to break into the top has been to excite activists, who are demanding positions far to the left of the median voter.
Golly, who else has been saying such things? Besides, you know, me and pretty much every right-of-center blogger over the last three years.
A consulting firm representing Burisma Holdings used the Biden name to leverage a meeting between the gas company and State Department officials, according to documents released this week.
The firm, Washington-based Blue Star Strategies, mentioned the name of Hunter Biden, who then sat on Burisma’s board, in a request for the Ukrainian natural gas company executives to meet with State Department officials, according to internal State Department email exchanges obtained by journalist John Solomon and later reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Blue Star representatives also mentioned Biden’s name during the resulting meeting, which they claim was scheduled as part of an effort to rehabilitate Burisma’s reputation in Washington following a corruption investigation.
Biden allies are worried about Bloomberg getting in. As well they should be. I doubt Millionaire McMoneyBags is going to be pulling too many Warren or Sanders voters over. Biden slams Warren’s sneering elitism: “If only you were as smart as I am you would agree with me.”
Update: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Getting In? Twitter. So the prophecy has foretold:
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is preparing to jump into the 2020 Democratic primary for president.
Bloomberg, 77, a billionaire, has mulled over a presidential bid for months, according to the New York Times. Bloomberg has publicly downplayed and, at times, outright denied that he would enter the race for 2020.
Bloomberg still has not yet made a decision on whether to jump into the crowded Democratic primary field, but he is expected to file paperwork in at least one state, Alabama, designating him a contender in the primary. He has hired staff and sent them to Alabama to collect enough signatures to qualify for a run. The deadline to file paperwork for a presidential run in Alabama is Nov. 8.
“We now need to finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated — but Mike is increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well positioned to do that,” said Howard Wolfson, a Bloomberg adviser. “If Mike runs, he would offer a new choice to Democrats built on a unique record running America’s biggest city, building a business from scratch and taking on some of America’s toughest challenges as a high-impact philanthropist.”
The reason, though, why Bloomberg is considering a last-minute bid is that he is reportedly worried about the way the Democratic primary is unfolding, as one adviser told the Times. Back in March, Bloomberg said he believed that it was essential that the Democratic nominee be able to defeat President Trump, and last month it was reported that he would reconsider his decision not to run if former Vice President Joe Biden continued to struggle. Presumably, Bloomberg has now changed his mind after seeing Sen. Elizabeth Warren — whose ideas, especially the wealth tax, he has lambasted as socialism — gain ground in the polls and Biden struggle with fundraising.
But there is arguably very little appetite among Democratic voters — donors may be a different story — for yet another presidential candidate. In October, a YouGov/HuffPost poll found that 83 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters were either enthusiastic or satisfied with their presidential choices. And it looks like there is even less appetite for Bloomberg specifically. According to last week’s Fox News poll, just 6 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said they would definitely vote for Bloomberg should he enter the race. And a hypothetical Harvard-Harris Poll of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Bloomberg mixed in with the rest of the Democratic field gave Bloomberg the same 6 percent of the vote.
And those polls would probably qualify as good news for Bloomberg, given that he was generally registering around 2 or 3 percent in national primary polls before first taking his name out of consideration in March (which is also when pollsters largely stopped asking about him).
In a field this crowded, entering the race in the high single digits wouldn’t even necessarily be a bad thing, but the problem is that it might be harder for Bloomberg to build on that support than it would be for other candidates. In an average of polls from January and early February, I found that 62 percent of Democrats knew enough about Bloomberg to form an opinion (which was pretty high), but his net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) was only +11 (which was pretty low).
“History suggests Bloomberg’s low favorability ratings would be a major obstacle to winning the nomination.” You don’t say. The last candidate to have a lower rating was also a New York City mayor.
On the other hand, de Blasio didn’t have billions of his own money to throw at the campaign. Bloomberg’s net worth is around $52.3 billion, so if he wanted to, he could just buy every single minute of airtime on every TV station in Iowa and New Hampshire.
That would certainly have a negative effect on longshot candidates trying to break through. Of course there is that tiny little problem that he recently said we need to take guns away from male minorities between the ages of 15 and 25. Because hey, what’s a little racism, collective guilt, and trampling civil rights next to the holy goal of gun control? Besides, the Northam blackface scandal showed that Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) don’t care about racism as long as the person committing it has a (D) after their name. President Donald Trump has already dubbed him “Little Michael” and says he relishes the opportunity to run against him. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) But this is the real kiss of death:
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He attended an “environmental justice” forum in South Carolina. Also attending: Warren, Steyer, Delaney, Williamson and Sestak. Pictures on Twitter of Warren speaking there suggests it was sparsely attended.
Pete Buttigieg was quickly locking down a solid lane in the Democratic primary: a young, vibrant, gay, midwestern, war veteran mayor with progressive ideas and plenty of money — but both feet planted in fiscal prudence.
Young Wall Street and tech-entrepreneur types were starting to fall in love — with his poll numbers and fundraising totals underscoring the Buttigieg boomlet. He was the “Parks and Recreation” candidate in the Democratic field and an alternative to seventy-somethings Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who are both looking to lock down the hyper-online progressive, anti-Wall Street crowd as well as blue collar workers across the Midwest.
And Buttigieg is a lot younger than former Vice President Joe Biden, who has lagged in fundraising and hardly taken off in the big-donor crowd the way many expected. Buttigieg was poised to perhaps emerge as the leading moderate alternative to Biden.
But then a funny thing happened last week: Another 70-something candidate beloved on Wall Street — billionaire mogul Michael Bloomberg — made an unexpected splash by suggesting he may still enter the race.
Bloomberg will not steal Buttigieg’s momentum with younger, wealthier Democratic voters and donors, people close to the South Bend mayor say. But the former NYC mayor does give Big Finance, Big Tech and other more corporate-friendly Democrats another progressive prospect as an alternative to Biden, Sanders and Warren.
(Which raises the question: Why would anyone donate to Bloomberg? Let moneybags 100% self-fund.) “Why Pete Buttigieg Annoys His Democratic Rivals.” “Many of their campaigns have griped privately about the attention and cash directed toward Buttigieg. They said he is too inexperienced to be electable and that his accomplishments don’t merit the outsize appeal he has with elite donors and voters. His public punditry about the race has prompted eye rolls from older rivals who view him as a know-it-all.” I linked a very similar story about a month ago. Is Buttigieg really annoying, or does one of his rivals keep pitching this story to a compliant press? “Pete Buttigieg Pitches Himself As The Obama Of 2020.”
Like a gay white thirty-something mayor is going to tap two centuries of white guilt. That trick only works once, and not for you. OK, now I see why they say he’s annoying…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “With an Eye Toward Beto Voters, Castro Campaign Limps On.” Oh yeah, that’s what you want to do: add the 1% of voters who supported the guy who just dropped out to your 1%.
When former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the race last week, Castro made the call and then made some more. And it worked. As the last Texan standing, he flipped nine Lone Star State endorsements that previously belonged to O’Rourke to his own campaign.
He also launched a new ad campaign in Iowa. That, plus the endorsements, are evidence, his campaign manager said, of how Castro is prepared to “supercharge the coalitions needed to beat Donald Trump.”
You snagged nine second-hand endorsements from your own state. Hoo freaking ray. That would almost matter in a statewide, but he won’t run one of those because he knows he’d lose.
Except a supercharger requires an engine with some gas, and Castro bus appears to be dangerously close to empty. The endorsements come at a moment when the candidate has stripped his campaign down to bare bones. He laid off campaign teams in New Hampshire and South Carolina over the weekend.
CONCORD, NH — About 50 of her most devoted and bundled-up supporters gathered in the cold on the state house steps last week to watch Rep. Tulsi Gabbard firebomb the establishment.
Over the next half hour, her fire was directed left and right: At Democratic leaders and President Donald Trump, at Saudi Arabian monarchs and at plutocratic warmongers, all of whom have become the bogeymen — or bogeywomen, in the case of Hillary Clinton — of her scrappy presidential campaign.
She brought up Tim Frolich, a 9/11 survivor, to allege a conspiracy at the highest levels to conceal information about the true Saudi Arabian masterminds of the terror attack.
It’s an unusual speech to deliver directly after filing paperwork to run in the state, especially amid a presidential primary field almost preternaturally occupied with health care. But Gabbard is an unusual candidate. And that’s exactly what is giving the four-term representative’s improbable presidential run a toe-hold in this early primary state.
Her campaign got a polling bounce here after Clinton implied on a podcast that Gabbard is a Russian stooge and Gabbard replied in a tweet that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers” leading a conspiracy to destroy her reputation. Clinton is not exactly beloved in New Hampshire, after all; Sen. Bernie Sanders blew her out in the 2016 primary before she went on to beat Trump by just under 3,000 votes.
“When I heard Hillary do that, the first thing I said was, ‘Oh my god,’ and the second thing I said is, ‘This is going to be great, because that’s going to really help Tulsi,’ — and it has,” said Peggy Marko, a Gabbard supporter and physical therapist in Candia, New Hampshire. “She has crossover appeal … and I think the folks in New Hampshire especially value that.”
Gabbard recently polled at 5 percent here, outlasting sitting senators and governors by securing a spot on the November debate stage. Just 1 percent higher in two more New Hampshire polls would meet the Democratic National Committee’s threshold for entry to the next debate in Los Angeles in December. And from there on, who knows?
So as candidates like Sen. Kamala Harris and Julián Castro have all but given up on the Granite State, Gabbard is digging in. This notoriously nonpartisan state is her ticket to staying in the race. Independent voters make up 40 percent of the electorate, and the state’s semi-open primary laws allow anyone to change affiliation up to the day of the primary to vote for whomever they want.
“We’re seeing support coming from people across the political spectrum and building the kind of coalition that we need to be able to defeat Donald Trump, and it’s encouraging,” Gabbard told VICE News.
Usual grains of salt apply, especially when it says she’s pulling in Trump voters. I can see a few, but not remotely enough to lift her up even to the 15% delegate threshold in New Hampshire. But Democrats are still freaking out about her:
In 2012, Nancy Pelosi described Tulsi Gabbard as an “emerging star.” In 2019, Hillary Clinton decried the Hawaii congresswoman as a “Russian asset.” Suffice to say, the honeymoon is over.
Gabbard is a major target of the liberal elite’s disgust. She feuded with the party organs in 2016 over her backing of Bernie Sanders. Now, during the 2020 election, she is upping the ante — Gabbard isn’t just criticizing the party mainstream; she’s doing so as a candidate for president. She hasn’t pulled punches, toed the party line, or been silenced by criticism from her peers or intraparty backlash. She’s an outsider and a long shot, but her poll numbers have edged slightly higher as she battles the Democratic old guard.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Just when you thought Democrats couldn’t find new ways to make ordinary people hate them, Kamala Harris wants to expanded the school day to match the work day. So she found a way to piss off students, parents, teachers, bus drivers, and anyone who actually understands how the real world works.
Eric Holder, the former attorney general and self-proclaimed “wingman” to President Barack Obama, may be on the brink of diving into the Democrats’ nomination fight, Newsweek reported Friday.
The hint came from Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who tweeted that Holder has been “consulting strategists” about launching a campaign.
Holder’s potential bid follows Michael Bloomberg’s late entry into the race last week – and would swell the historically huge Democratic field, with only 86 days to go until the Iowa caucuses.
I just don’t see it. He’s not independently wealthy, and he’s never run in any political race, ever. Does he expect to yell “Obaminations, conglomerate!” and the Obama 2012 Campaign will magically come flying in, perform a superhero landing, and carry him off to contention?
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Thursday released a sweeping immigration plan that would impose a moratorium on deportations, “break up” existing immigration enforcement agencies, grant full welfare access to illegal immigrants and welcome a minimum of 50,000 “climate migrants” in the first year of a Sanders administration.
The plan effectively establishes Sanders at the far left of the immigration debate, as he aims to energize a base that helped drive his 2016 primary campaign amid competition from other liberal candidates in the field this time around.
Following the heart attack and flush with cash, Bernie is going to buy more ads. Also, please stop:
I didn't realize 💕✨ was the emoji combination that stood for "painfully staged."
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bad week for Tommy Make-A-Wish: Not only is he stuck at 1% in the polls, but, with Bloomberg getting in, he’s no longer the richest guy in the race either, Plus It looks like the Steyer campaign committed a federal felony by privately offering “campaign contributions to local politicians in exchange for endorsing his White House bid.” Oopsie!
It is hard to overstate how utterly insane and dishonest this is. Warren claims that in order to finance the $52 trillion her plan would entail over its first ten years, she’d ‘only’ need to raise taxes by approximately $20 trillion, to cover new spending. This math amounts to a $14 trillion shortfall, based on the nonpartisan consensus about the true mathematical cost of her plan (overall, her basket of proposals would double the annual federal budget). She does not even attempt to account for this staggering amount of money. Experts and commentators have been punching gaping holes in Warren’s proposals, including proving that her ‘not one penny of tax increases on non-billionaires’ assertion (even ignoring the $14 trillion gap) is a dramatic, fantastical, bald-faced lie.
Not only does this pie-in-the-sky funding scheme rely on dubious — some would say, “dishonest” — number crunching, it self-evidently breaks her promise not to raise middle-class taxes….
Warren and her team are relying on a compliant media and other allies to hide her tax hike. That $9 trillion payroll tax is not coming from the super-rich or the undeserving wealthy. It won’t bleed billionaires or stick it to the upper class. That “head tax” will fall squarely on the shoulders of the American worker. And Warren’s shameful dishonesty is more than political posturing. It’s an assault on the middle class.
Are presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and WeWork founder Adam Neumann the same person? I mean, they have different hairstyles and all, but their philosophies are more alike than not.
They both claim, falsely, to be capitalists. Ms. Warren told the New England Council last year, “I am a capitalist to my bones.” She then told CNBC, “I am a capitalist. Come on. I believe in markets.” It was almost as if she didn’t believe it herself. Then came the caveat: “But only fair markets, markets with rules. Markets without rules is about the rich take it all, it’s about the powerful get all of it. And that’s what’s gone wrong in America.” She clearly doesn’t understand capitalism.
Neither does Mr. Neumann, who said of WeWork, “We are making a capitalist kibbutz.” Talk about mixed metaphors. In Israel, a kibbutz is often defined as “a collective community, traditionally based in agriculture.” WeWork’s prospectus for its initial public offering mentioned the word “community” 150 times. Yet one little secret of kibbutzim is that many of them hired outsiders to do menial jobs that the “community” wouldn’t do, similar to migrant workers on U.S. farms. A capitalist kibbutz is a plain old farm, much like a WeWork building is plain old shared office space. Big deal.
Ms. Warren wants to reshape capitalism, while Mr. Neumann wants to “revolutionize your workspace.” Meanwhile, the Vision Fund, with capital from SoftBank and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has thrown good money after bad, writing off $9.2 billion in its quest toward this WeWork revolution. The same mismatch between communitarian vision and market realities would doom Ms. Warren’s economic reshaping. It’s hard to repeal good old capitalism.
The commonalities go on. Last year, Ms. Warren proposed the Accountable Capitalism Act. If it became law, large companies would have to obtain a federal charter that “obligates company directors to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders,” or dare I say, community. For each company, Ms. Warren insists that “40% of its directors are selected by the corporation’s employees.” Back to the kibbutz?
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Rival Yang fundraises for Williamson, much the way she herself did for the now-departed Mike Gravel. If only all the longshots could Voltron themselves together into one viable candidate…
He’s a true nerd, and he’s making arguments common in the nerd capital of the world, Silicon Valley. Except for one thing: Much of his stump speech lacerates Silicon Valley.
Yang’s candidacy is something of a toxic bouillabaisse for the tech industry. He presents himself as someone of the industry, wearing a lapel that says “math” instead of one with a flag. Pundits call him a tech entrepreneur, though he actually made his money at a test-prep company. He talks about breaking problems apart and finding solutions. He played D&D as a kid, read science fiction, and understands blockchain.
He has run his campaign in the most modern of digital ways too. The guy is dynamite on Reddit, and he spends time answering questions on Quora. And that is part of why he’s going to win, he hollers from the stage. He can beat Trump on his own terrain—“I’m better at the internet than he is!”
But the tech-friendly trappings mask a thorough critique of technology itself. His whole message is premised on the dangers of automation taking away jobs and the risks of artificial intelligence. He lambastes today’s technology firms for not compensating us for our data. If there’s a villain in his stump speech, it’s not Trump—it’s Amazon. (“We have to be pretty fucking stupid to let a trillion-dollar tech company pay nothing in taxes, am I right, Los Angeles?”)
If Yang is the candidate of Silicon Valley, he’s the one driving a Humvee up the wrong side of the 101. Or, as Chris Anderson, one of my predecessors as editor of WIRED and now a drone entrepreneur, tweeted the night of the fourth Democratic debate, “I turned on the radio for 6 seconds, enough to hear that the Dem debates were on and @AndrewYang, who I thought I liked, was talking about how autonomous trucks were endangering driver jobs. Head slapped, vote changed. Bummer.”
As Yang wraps up, he has another message: “What does this look like to you, Los Angeles? This looks like a fucking revolution to me.” That may be a bit much. It’s more an evolution, and it’s a killer party. Still, Andrew Yang has found his voice, found his message, and found his people.
So it’s entirely possible that, long after most of the other candidates have dropped out, Yang will still be there tweeting, jumping onto Reddit threads, grabbing microphones, and using the best of modern technology to explain why modern technology is leading America into the abyss.
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, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
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.
