Old and Busted: “Trump is guilty of treason!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of collusion!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of obstruction!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of something! Release the report!” (Report released.) “Ummm…Barr’s summary was slightly off on one point! Impeach!” Trump Derangement Syndrome is a helluva drug…
Checkmate. How President Trump’s legal team outfoxed Mueller.” From the newly resurrected Human Events, this is a detailed legal analysis of how a memo written by William Barr before he became Attorney General laid the groundwork for curtailed Robert Mueller using an overly-expansive definition of “obstruction.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016.” You know, a spy. Here’s a handy decoder for the “covering for Democrats” speak:
"level of alarm inside the F.B.I." = "Level of alarm in the Clinton campaign/Obama White House" "politically sensitive operation" = Spying on Trump "under extraordinary circumstances." = "The possibility Trump might win"@nytimes =Democratic operatives with bylines.
Alabama State Rep. John Rogers (D) on abortion: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later” pic.twitter.com/dxPg6X759h
Facebook banned Milo Yannopoulos, Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan for “extremism,” and the Washington Post headline initially called them all “far right” before a ton of criticism forced them to correct the headline. Because Louis Farrakhan is so well-known for palling around with conservatives. (Facebook is a private entity and can do what it wants, but I don’t want any of those people banned. Let them speak and let people debate their ideas/lunacy/etc. or not as they feel).
Even CNN is starting to get a clue:
CNN Poll: Trump’s approval rating on economy “is the highest number we’ve ever seen.” pic.twitter.com/sLjjW4Jd0p
The members of the Flint, Michigan City Council sound like real winners.
“Norwegian fisherman have discovered a beluga whale wearing a tight harness with a camera attachment – sparking speculation the animal belongs to the Russian Navy.” I wouldn’t be surprised, especially since we have our own dolphin program… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Lance Morrow reviews Robert Caro’s Working. “If I were teaching journalism or nonfiction writing, especially the writing of history and biography, I would build a course around Caro, with Working as my primary text and scenes from his Johnson books as case studies.”
In the “trouble in places you may not have heard of” department, clashes broke out on the African nation of Benin (between Nigeria and Togo on the Ivory Coast) when the ruling party held a parliamentary election from which opposition parties were excluded.
Dispatches from Social Justice Warrior land: “Trinity College professor tweets ‘whiteness is terrorism,’ refers to Barack and Michelle Obama as ‘white kneegrows.’”
Japan’s Emperor Akihito abdicated, Emperor Naruhito mounting the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1, marking the end of the Heisei era and inaugurating the Reiwa era.
Actor James Woods is still in the Twitter Gulag:
This is the tweet that got @RealJamesWoods suspended. It references a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote. And we all know how controversial and offensive RWE’s work is…🙄🙄🙄 pic.twitter.com/8k9k1zSqpV
Unhappy meals. Now if only every one came with mopping teenage Goth girl figurines…
“‘Mortal Kombat’ Introduces Brutal New Fatality Where Your Character Just States An Opposing Viewpoint…One character says, ‘There are only two genders,’ and his opponent instantly melts into nothing, being unable to handle the opposing viewpoint. Another character suggests that capitalism isn’t all bad, and his opponent’s head instantly falls off.”
Monmouth from April 23rd: Biden 27, Sanders 20, Buttigieg 8, Harris 8, Warren 6, O’Rourke 4. “California Sen. Kamala Harris has 8% support, off just slightly from 10% in March and 11% in January.” But she can’t be thrilled at that trendline…
UNH New Hampshire poll. Sanders 30, Biden 18, Buttigieg 15, Warren 5, Harris 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Klobucher 2, Yang 2, Ryan 2. That’s as high as I’ve seen Buttigieg.
Emerson Texas poll: Biden 23, O’Rourke 22, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 8, Warren 7, Castro 4, Yang 3, Harris 3, Klobucher 3. That’s an abysmal showing for Castro in his home state, and Harris should be doing better just off urban voters from Houston and the Metroplex. Indeed, Harris is down in every poll here.
Election betting markets. Yang is polling better at 4.9% for the Dem nomination than Warren at 4.7%. One wonders which Bulwerk-backer has Marco Rubio 2020 at 0.5%…
Old white guy? Joe Biden has hair plugs that are older than the median Democratic primary voter. Sanders and Biden are a year apart — and both of them are older than Trump. Creaky? Creepy stuff in his history? Dusty northeastern union-hall politics? Check all those boxes. Worst: Sanders and Biden, though they are miles apart in rhetoric, are in many ways a couple of outmoded Teddy Kennedy liberals in a party that wants nothing to do with dinosaurs of that particular species.
Snip.
The old-white-guy thing isn’t working out too well for Sanders. In Houston earlier this week for a cracked festival of progressive inanity called “She the People,” Sanders got read the old-white-guy riot act: Pressed about racial issues, Comrade Muppet started to launch into yet another retelling of the fact that he marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 — but the crowd shut him down, hooting and laughing at him. “We know!” someone shouted. They’d heard it all before. Sanders, visibly flummoxed, went on to talk up the fact that he’d supported Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, and the room responded with, approximately, “Jesse Who?”
The Reverend Jackson’s is a name to conjure with no more.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s entry into the 2020 presidential primary sets the stage for another knock-down, drag-out fight between the establishment wing of the party and the ascendant left, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Snip.
The 2016 primary contest left liberals fuming at what they viewed as establishment interference in the race, underscored by the hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails that showed favoritism toward Clinton.
And some mainstream Democrats are unnerved by what they view as a group of left-wing interlopers, online brawlers and sore losers trying to take over the party.
The same fight played out in 2017, when party officials elected Tom Perez to be the next DNC chairman. Perez, who was backed by Biden, narrowly defeated Sanders’s preferred candidate, former Rep. Keith Ellison (Minn.). That race similarly cut along establishment and grass-roots lines.
Snip.
But many centrist Democrats are just as worried about how the left will approach the primary contest.
They’re frustrated by Sanders’s steadfast refusal to officially join the Democratic Party and worried by what they view as his team of political assassins. And they wonder whether Sanders’s supporters will accept the outcome of the primary and turn out to vote for the nominee in the general election if Sanders falls short again.
“There is a ‘Bernie-or-bust’ coalition, and they have no allegiance to the party,” said the Democratic strategist. “They don’t care about campaign infrastructure or winning up and down the ballot. They’re just concerned about bullshit litmus tests and defending their guy no matter what and pretending that everyone else is a member of the big bad establishment.”
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. Still no news since his three week old tweet.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning toward a run. He’s been very quiet since his cancer surgery. Hard to blame him…
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. See last week’s post for his announcement video. Naturally, there’s tons of Biden news to wade through:
He raised $6.3 million within 24 hours of announcing, the most of any of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls, but not a “blow you away” number. “Biden’s campaign announced Friday that 96,926 donors contributed, with an average online donation of $41. His campaign also noted that 97% of his online donations were under $200.”
Biden has long since been close to lobbyists. Biden’s presidential campaign is currently being coordinated by his former chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, who was himself a lobbyist. In the past, Ricchetti’s role with Biden’s vice presidential office sidestepped the Obama administration’s ban on employing lobbyists: Ricchetti received a special waiver to take his role with Biden.
Thursday’s fundraiser will be rife with lobbyists — but not those registered in the federal system.
The Biden for President host committee includes Kenneth Jarin, a lobbyist with Ballard Spahr who is registered to work on behalf of toll road operator Conduent and several health care interests. Jarin is a major donor to both parties and has given to political action committees controlled by former Republican House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner.
Another host of the Biden fundraiser is Alan Kessler, another lobbyist who works with the firm Duane Morris. Kessler is registered to lobby in Pennsylvania for American Airlines and the global information tech firm Unisys Corporation, among other clients.
Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, another host of the event, is a senior adviser to the local lobbying operation at Dentons, a law firm with a vast government affairs operation. Nutter is also on the board of Conduent.
In another election, at another time, the late entrance of a well-funded candidate leading in the polls might send convulsions through the primary field.
But Joe Biden’s arrival into the 2020 race has not had that effect. No Democratic rival appears doomed. No one’s fundraising seems in danger of drying up. Instead, in joining the race, the former vice president has laid bare how unsettled the entire 20-candidate contest remains — and how many in the party don’t believe the 76-year-old Biden is prepared for the rigors of a modern campaign, or the demands of a party transformed.
What, you mean the other candidates didn’t immediately start rending their garments and proclaiming “Woe is me! All is lost!”? Do tell…
Carpe Donktum nails Biden on the “very fine people” lie:
I’ve written previously on how the Democratic Party is more moderate and older than you probably think it is. About 50% of Democratic voters call themselves moderate or conservative, which is about the same percentage that are at least 50 years old. Most Democratic candidates running this year don’t seem to recognize that fact.
We’ve seen a Democratic field in which the candidates seem to be falling over each other to move further left, where the youngest Democrats are.
Biden, meanwhile, is sitting all alone in his base. In a Monmouth University poll released earlier this week, he had a 19-point advantage over his nearest competitor with Democrats who called themselves moderate or conservative. He was up by 18 points among those who were at least 50 years old. A Quinnipiac University poll released last month (that had Biden in a similar overall position) gave him even bigger advantages with more moderate and older voters.
Now, Biden does trail with the youngest and very liberal Democrats. But they make up a minority of the party, and Biden’s competitors are splitting that vote.
R. S. McCain thinks that Biden’s 29% is his peak. I’m not so sure. I think there are a substantial portion of people who vote in Democratic primaries that haven’t swallowed the SJW line, and will show up at the polls for Biden.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Get’s a New York profile. Actually talks about meeting with Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Jared Kushner, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, as both Mayor of Newark and a Senator. “I value comity, I value finding common ground.” He posted 10 years of tax returns. “When I said we should crash the Booker campaign event, I didn’t mean literally!”
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Maybe. The Montana legislative session has already ended, and he had a closed event in Butte. But: “You know, the Legislature just left town, they left 300 bills on my desk, so I have quite a bit of work to do to sort the rest of that out, and haven’t made any decisions what I’d do after I get to serve governor.” Slight downgrade.
But another part of Buttigieg’s appeal rests on the fact that during and after the McKinsey stint, he did two very un-meritocratty things: First, he joined the Navy Reserve and was briefly deployed to Afghanistan, and then he moved back to the small, de-industrialized Midwestern city of his youth, not to join his parents in its academic enclave, but to run for mayor of South Bend and attempt to save a piece of the heartland from stagnation and decline.
These unusual steps away from elite self-segregation inform the way he sometimes seems to want to run for president: As a bridge-builder between the heartland and the coasts, as the Ivy League guy who takes Trump voters seriously as something more than just “deplorables,” as the first gay president who, like Nixon going to China, might be able to call a truce in the post-Obergefell culture wars and convince cultural liberals that they don’t need to bring every evangelical florist or Catholic adoption agency to heel.
But this bridge-building possibility coexists with another theory of Buttigieg, in which his unusual trajectory back homeward, far from a rejection of the meritocratic mentality, is actually just a clever meritocrat’s “hack” of the system of ascent — an advertisement for his own seriousness that, having served its purpose, can now be abandoned while he tries to vault insanely high, to return not only to Washington but to the Oval Office (or at least the Naval Observatory or a cabinet office).
This is the reading offered by Buttigieg’s pungent left-wing critics: I especially recommend a long takedown of the young mayor’s memoir by Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs, and a shorter critique by a scion of the Studebaker family (Studebakers being the cars whose manufacture once built South Bend’s blue-collar prosperity).
These anti-Buttigiegians look at his mayoral record and see a politician who never really escaped the mentality of Harvard and McKinsey, whose big idea for the city involved bulldozing poor people’s houses and encouraging internet companies to move in — a “creative class” theory of urban renewal that didn’t supply the jobs that working-class South Benders need.
Here’s that Current Affirs takedown of Buttigieg’s memoir Douthat mentions. Current Affaris is both progressive and uber-smarmy, so read it only if you want a hard-lefty hit-piece. But I’ve got to admit that the author’s deep reading of Buttigieg’s own extremely lengthy index entry for himself in his own memoir (“CrossFit phase of, 133”) has some definite zing to it.
Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Presidential hopeful John Delaney wants you to unfollow Trump on Twitter.” See, I would think if you have some 19,800 Twitter followers, you wouldn’t want to draw attention to that fact by telling people to stop following the guy who has just under 60 million…
It’s clear that Gillibrand has made women and “women’s issues” a focus of her campaign, and it is clearly reflected in her fundraising. More than half of all the individual donations to her campaign during the first fundraising cycle of 2020 were from women. That’s more than any other 2020 contender can say. She is prioritizing issues like national paid family leave, access to abortion and birth control, improving public education, and stopping sexual harassment and abuse. But is that a winning strategy?
Maybe her hot pink campaign logo and website splashed with the word “BRAVE” all over are a little too on the nose. Maybe constantly describing herself as a “young mom” is a label that just isn’t doesn’t seem to fit. Maybe women voters don’t liked to be courted simply because of their sex. Or maybe, she’s just too much like Hillary Clinton.
Ouch!
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. But there is this: “Andrew Gillum Agrees To Pay $5,000 Fine In Ethics Case Settlement.”
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. He gets a New York Times profile. “In its 191-year history, the Democratic Party has never nominated a presidential candidate from west of the Central time zone.” I doubt that’s the tidbit I would have led with. Also “He got all these lefty programs through but supports fracking.” He had a brain freeze and forgot what GDP stands for.
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. “Klobuchar hails Anita Hill as an inspiration,” because of course she does. Genuflecting to St. Anita is a required ritual on the left again, mainly as a way for “woke” candidates to bash Biden for the Clarence Thomas confirmation. But one wonders how much a confirmation hearing that occurred more than a quarter-century ago will mean to an electorate that doesn’t remember Jesse Jackson…
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Last week’s Clown Car Update noted reports that Messam had missed payroll for campaign staffers. This week: “The two-term mayor’s campaign staffers have scattered from the nest after Messam missed payroll, first reported by The Miami New Times. Reports from the road say rallies have been sparsely attended. Now, Messam is mum, referring people to his legal counsel.” Also this: “There was speculation that Messam has his eyes set on the seat of Congressman Alcee Hastings, 82, who is reportedly going through treatment for pancreatic cancer.”
Democratic congressman Seth Moulton (D-MA), an Iraq war veteran who announced his candidacy for president early this week, wants you to know that presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who are trying to push America towards more progressive policies are bad for our country, and he’s running to save us.
“We can’t go too far left or we will lose middle America.”
It seems like Moulton is competing with Biden, Buttigieg and Delaney for the “non-crazy” Democratic Party vote. Whether this is a viable strategy remains to be seen. I have my doubts. But I was mildly surprised to see that Moulton has 138,000 Twitter followers, which is more than any of the other representatives running save Gabbard. Of course, that says less about how well Moulton is running than how badly Swalwell, Delaney and Ryan are…
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got a KVUE interview: “I want to change the conversation. I’ve listened to some of these political shows and we’re not even talking about the real issues in the campaign. I think first and foremost, we need an industrial policy that actually lifts middle-class wages.”
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Inside Bernie’s army: “On Saturday, the campaign launched a nationwide organizing program with nearly 5,000 house parties in every state throughout the country, demonstrating a show of force for his volunteer network and an opportunity to mobilize supporters in a primary contest that could remain close through the early voting states and beyond.” He’s also building out Our Revolution as a “shadow campaign” in the Midwest. “Bernie Sanders Can Win, But He Isn’t Polling Like A Favorite,” which compares Sanders’ numbers to candidates with similar numbers in previous cycles from Jeb! in 2016 all the way back to Hubert Humphrey in 1972. “Three of these candidates [Romney 2012, Obama 2008, McCain 2008] won their nominations; the other 12 lost.”
Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Probably Out. But he did attract a sarcastic Trump tweet:
Weirdo Tom Steyer, who didn’t have the “guts” or money to run for President, is still trying to remain relevant by putting himself on ads begging for impeachment. He doesn’t mention the fact that mine is perhaps the most successful first 2 year presidency in history & NO C OR O!
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “A Guide to Elizabeth Warren’s (Many) 2020 Policy Proposals.” How Warren is threatening Bernie’s left flank. Op-Ed: “Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are bad for the Democrats.” “Both represent the purist liberal wing of their party, a faction that has failed to elect a single president since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. And with only one out of four Americans calling themselves liberals in the last election, the notion that a doctrinaire left-winger can win in 2020 is an exercise in self-delusion.” Warren was evidently well-received at an SEIU shindig that Sanders skipped.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Report on a Yang rally in Los Angeles, complete with comparison to cult bad film The Room. “He is the hyper-enthusiastic high school teacher and his supporters are the jocks, goths, and potheads who never knew school could be so fun.” He also campaigned in Iowa.
Now, it’s not really fair to imply that the Never Trumpers hate Trump solely because he’s vulgar and crude – or, as normal people see it, unwilling to meekly take the guff the Never Trumpers’ country club class pals dish out like a proper gentleman should. They do find him aesthetically displeasing, but it also gnaws at them because every time he stands up to the garbage Democrats, the garbage press, or the garbage jerks and pervs of Hollywood, his refusal to knuckle-under reminds Team Fail that they don’t have the stones to do the same. He shames their cowardly weakness.
It’s clear, in retrospect, that George W. Bush’s supine acceptance of the abuse the elite heaped upon him was not because he was too classy and too decent to respond in kind. Since Obama left office and he rediscovered his vocal cords, Bush has had zero problem trashing Trump and Trump supporters who, like many of us, stood by Bush in the ’00s while Bush was treading water in a sea of mediocrity. No, it’s clear that W was afraid to fight back against fellow members of the ruling class. He cared about being part of the club. Not The Donald. Trump, by fighting, demonstrates that the establishment GOPers are weak. And it eats at them.
But besides providing a manly contrast to their own gimp-like submission to the leftist establishment, Trump infuriates the Never Trumpers for another reason. He’s kicked them out of their comfy sinecures. One of Trump’s magical powers is to make his enemies reveal their own grift complicity, and boy, have they ever. As a result, while once the mandarins of Conservative, Inc., traded on their insider influence and privilege, under Trump they are outsiders. Copies of the Weekly Standard used to be all over the Bush White House. Now, if its inept crew had not slammed it into an iceberg, you would be lucky to find a few pages at the bottom of Barron’s pet iguana’s cage.
Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and all the rest are nobodies, relegated to occasionally joining CNN panels and fighting with Ana Navarro over the doughnuts in the green room. Where’s Bob Corker now? Jeff Flake hasn’t even got an MSNBC gig; I think last week he was the dude who offered to supersize my order.
it is not the abstract logic of liberalism that is flawed, but rather the attempt to apply it to fallible humans. Like communism, liberalism conflicts with immutable human characteristics. However, unlike communism, certain kinds of liberalism (the industrial liberalism of the 1900s, for example) work because they are moderated by the material conditions of society. But as those moderating conditions are obliterated by technology, the problems of post-industrial liberalism have become clearer. The ultimate problem is this: Humans desire unfettered freedom, but need the discipline that constraint provides. Without such discipline, they risk slumping into an empty and unsatisfying hedonism that is ruinous to communities and to society more broadly.
Those who are intelligent and self-controlled often create their own constraints and can therefore thrive in post-industrial societies that are radically unlike the societies in which humans evolved. Those who are less intelligent or self-controlled, however, often fail to create successful constraints and therefore suffer when once powerful cultural guardrails (such as religion, strict norms, civic groups, and so on) are destroyed by accelerating innovation and secularism. The result is a growing cultural and economic gap between segments of the population which, when coupled with the declining outcomes for a once thriving middle class, fuels growing bitterness and discontent. Combine this with a trend toward cosmopolitanism that increases ethnic and religious diversity and therefore potential sources of faction and conflict, and liberalism’s immediate prospects look bleak.
The authors also posit technological change as one of the biggest drivers of challenge to the old liberal order.
Hauling out boxes of “Healthy Holly” books and documents, dozens of federal law enforcement agents Thursday struck homes, businesses and government buildings across Baltimore as an investigation into Mayor Catherine Pugh’s business dealings widened.
FBI agents and IRS officials executed search warrants at her City Hall office, Pugh’s two houses, and offices of the mayor’s allies, as the growing scandal consumed the city’s attention, generated national headlines and provoked fresh calls for the embattled Democratic mayor’s resignation.
Snip.
Dave Fitz, an FBI spokesman, confirmed that agents from the Baltimore FBI office and the Washington IRS office searched at least six addresses. The U.S. attorney’s office confirmed the location of a seventh search. The actions were the first confirmation that federal authorities, as well as state officials, were investigating the mayor’s activities.
Snip.
Shortly after the raids began, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan called on Pugh, who has taken a paid leave of absence as mayor, to resign. The Republican governor had asked the Maryland Office of the State Prosecutor on April 1 to investigate Pugh’s sales of her self-published “Healthy Holly” children’s book series to the University of Maryland Medical System while she was on its unpaid board of directors.
“Today, agents for the FBI and the IRS executed search warrants at the mayor’s homes and offices,” Hogan said. “Now, more than ever, Baltimore city needs strong and responsible leadership. Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust. She is clearly not fit to lead. For the good of the city, Mayor Pugh must resign.”
When a raid involves both the FBI and the IRS, usually that’s a bad sign.
At times appearing unfazed by the severity of his circumstances, Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina was guided into a Pharr courtroom Thursday morning after he and his wife surrendered themselves to law enforcement to face multiple election fraud charges. The scene was notably different from when Molina entered a state of the city address just one year ago, shadowboxing and wielding a championship belt.
Now, allegations from a Texas Attorney General’s office investigation into the city’s 2017 municipal election have cast Molina as allegedly cheating his way into the mayoral seat by having people who live outside of the city vote for him.
An hour after he turned himself in at the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Edinburg office, Molina stood before Precinct 2 Justice of the Peace Jaime “Jerry” Muñoz, who presides out of Pharr, and was charged with two counts of illegal voting and one count of engaging in organized election fraud — second- and first-degree felonies, respectively.
Molina, 40, was then escorted to Hidalgo County jail where he was quickly booked in and out on a combined $20,000 cash surety bond, and promptly headed to a city workshop to discuss the future of a city golf course.
It was business as usual for a mayor who has faced scrutiny since he unseated Edinburg’s longtime mayor, Richard Garcia, in November 2017 by 1,240 votes. Such scrutiny has only increased over the past year as the AG’s office arrested more than a dozen people on illegal voting charges tied to the election.
And the voting fraud, sadly, seems business as usual in both the Rio Grande Valley in general and Hidalgo County specifically… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
You know what was fake news? Most of the Russiagate story. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, that thing we just spent three years chasing. The Mueller Report is crystal clear on this.
He didn’t just “fail to establish” evidence of crime. His report is full of incredibly damning passages, like one about Russian officialdom’s efforts to reach the Trump campaign after the election: “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”
Not only was there no “collusion,” the two camps didn’t even have each others’ phone numbers!
In March of 2017, in one of the first of what would become a mountain of mafia-hierarchy-style “Trump-Russia contacts” graphics in major newspapers, the Washington Post described an email Trump lawyer Michael Cohen sent to Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov. They called it “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government.”
The report shows the whole episode was a joke. In order to further the Trump Tower project-that-never-was, Cohen literally cold-emailed the Kremlin. More than that, he entered the email incorrectly, so the letter initially didn’t even arrive. When he finally fixed the mistake, Peskov didn’t answer back.
That was “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government”!
As outlined in his initial mandate, Mueller explored “any links” between the Russian government and the campaign of Donald Trump. His conclusion spoke directly to the question of whether there was any kind of quid pro quo between the two sides:
“The investigation examined whether these contacts involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump Campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the Campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future.”
In other words, all those fancy org charts were meaningless. Because there was no conspiracy, all those “walls are closing in” reports — and there were a ton of them — were wrong. We were told we’d hit “turning point” after “turning point” leading to the “the beginning of the end,” with Trump certain, soon, to either resign in shame, Nixon-style, or be impeached.
The “RNC platform” change story was a canard, according to Mueller. The exchanges Trump figures had with ambassador Sergei Kislyak were “brief, public, and non-substantive.” The conversations Jeff Sessions had with Kislyak at the convention didn’t “include any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.” Mueller added “investigators did not establish that [Carter] Page conspired with the Russian government.”
There was no blackmail, no secret bribe from Rosneft, no five-year cultivation plan, no evidence of any kind of any relationship that ever existed between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Michael Cohen “never traveled to Prague.”
The whole Steele dossier appears to have been bunk, with even Bob Woodward now saying the “highly questionable” document “needs to be investigated.” The Times similarly is reporting, two-plus years late, that “people familiar” with Steele’s work began to have “misgivings about [the report’s] reliability arose not long after the document became public.”
Reporters are going to insist all they did was accurately report the developments of a real investigation. They didn’t imply vast criminality that wasn’t there, or hoodwink audiences into thinking a Watergate-style ending was just around the corner, or routinely blow meaningless episodes like the Sessions-Kislyak meeting out of proportion, or regularly smear people who not only weren’t part of a conspiracy but had no connection to anything (see here for an example).
They’ll also claim they didn’t spend years openly rooting for indictment and impeachment via wish-casted predictions disguised as reporting and commentary, or denouncing people who doubted the conspiracy as spies and Putin apologists, or clearing their broadcast panels and op-ed pages of skeptics while giving big stages to craven conspiracy-spinners like Malcolm Nance and Luke Harding.
Mark Steyn notes that between the Notre Dame fire and the bombing of Christian churches in Sri Lanka, our journalists have reached new levels in truth avoidance:
It used to be said that ninety per cent of news is announcing Lord Jones is dead to people who were entirely unaware that Lord Jones was ever alive. Now the trick is to announce Lord Jones is dead and ensure that people remain entirely unaware of why he is no longer alive. One senses that a line was crossed in yesterday’s coverage. As one of our Oz Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, put it, the media have advanced from dhimmitude to full-blown taqiyya.
The lights are going out on the most basic of journalistic instincts: Who, what, when, where, why. All are subordinate to the Narrative – or Official Lie. All day yesterday and into today, if you had glanced at the telly, switched on the radio or surfed the big news sites of the Internet, you would have thought the Tamil Tigers were back “with a vengeance”, as The Economist put it – even though with one exception (the 1990 police massacre) the death toll was higher than any individual attack the Tigers had ever pulled off.
This seems like big news: “The National Security Agency has recommended that the White House abandon a U.S. surveillance program that collects information about Americans’ phone calls and text messages.”
Interesting thread on Gregory Craig, Obama’s White House Counsel who was recently indicted for crimes in his Ukraine work with Paul Manafort, and also Ted kennedy’s top foreign policy guy back when he was secretly asking for the Soviets to help him against Reagan.
“The partisan warfare over the Mueller report will rage, but one thing cannot be denied: Former President Barack Obama looks just plain bad. On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it.”
Russia launches world’s largest submarine. “The six hundred foot long submarine displaces more water than a World War I battleship and can dive to a depth of 1,700 feet.” More: “The nuclear-powered Belgorod is neither an attack submarine nor a ballistic missile sub. A special mission submarine, Belgorod will be a mothership to other undersea vessels. The sub can carry a payload on its back, behind the sail, or a Losharik class mini-submarine that attaches and detaches to the bottom of the hull.”
M. J. Hegar, the Democrat who unsuccessfully challenged Rep. John Carter for the Texas 31st congressional district last year, announced that she’s running against John Cornyn. If she couldn’t take Carter in the Betomania midterm of 2018, she stands approximately no chance against Cornyn in the Presidential year of 2020.
“Sarah Wickline Hull was 20 weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.”
According to the affidavit in support of the complaint and arrest warrant, which was unsealed today, Claiborne began working as an Office Management Specialist for the Department of State in 1999. She has served overseas at a number of posts, including embassies and consulates in Baghdad, Iraq, Khartoum, Sudan, and Beijing and Shanghai, China. As a condition of her employment, Claiborne maintains a Top Secret security clearance. Claiborne also is required to report any contacts with persons suspected of affiliation with a foreign intelligence agency.
Despite such a requirement, the affidavit alleges, Claiborne failed to report repeated contacts with two intelligence agents of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), even though these agents provided tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and benefits to Claiborne and her family over five years. According to the affidavit, the gifts and benefits included cash wired to Claiborne’s USAA account, an Apple iPhone and laptop computer, Chinese New Year’s gifts, meals, international travel and vacations, tuition at a Chinese fashion school, a fully furnished apartment, and a monthly stipend. Some of these gifts and benefits were provided directly to Claiborne, the affidavit alleges, while others were provided through a co-conspirator.
Notable is how cheaply her allegiance was bought: “Claiborne noted in her journal that she could “Generate 20k in 1 year” working with one of the PRC agents, who, shortly after wiring $2,480 to Claiborne.”
Senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander reportedly defects. “Brigadier General Ali Nasiri, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Protection Bureau, is said to have fled to the West after a fallout with the representative of the Supreme Leader in the IRGC….General Nasiri was said to have fled with hundreds of classified documents, which could be of great value to the United States.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Bail Project is an unprecedented effort to combat mass incarceration at the front end of the system…We pay bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence.” Like Samuel Scott. “Just hours after a nonprofit group posted bail for a man accused of assaulting his wife, the suspect went to the woman’s home and brutally murdered her.”
I was getting ready to do my “Biden is in” post when this news dropped:
Former Williamson County District Attorney Jana Duty was found dead Wednesday in South Texas, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell confirmed to the American-Statesman on Thursday.
Local authorities and Texas Rangers are investigating Duty’s death, but do not suspect foul play, Gravell said.
“We are heartbroken for her family, her kids and her grandkids,” he said.
Duty served two terms as county attorney before defeating longtime incumbent John Bradley to become district attorney in 2013. She was defeated in the 2016 Republican primary by current district attorney Shawn Dick.
Duty was at times controversial, and served a short time in jail on a contempt of court charge in 2016.
Rockport police say they responded to a call Wednesday morning of a deceased person in a condo complex on the Rockport Country Club. No other details were immediately available.
Duty was a bad DA who had serious professional and ethical lapses, had trouble working with other Wilco officials, was defeated in the 2016 Republican primary by Shawn Dick, and had a lawsuit filed to remove her from office for various transgressions, including not coming into work. In hindsight this suggests that Duty may have been struggling with an undiagnosed mental illness. Maybe if she had resigned from the high pressure post she was so clearly unsuited for, she would have been able to get the help she so obviously needed.
Happy Good Friday! Yesterday was a very good Thursday for President Donald Trump, and a very bad one for the media outlets that lied about the Russian Collusion fantasy for two years.
For approximately 3 million people, nothing in the Mueller report could exonerate President Trump of “Russian collusion,” obstruction of justice, and various other high crimes and misdemeanors of which they are certain he is guilty. For those 3 million people (a number reflecting the combined average weekday primetime audience of CNN and MSNBC) Trump’s guilt is an indisputable fact, his presidency an ongoing crime against humanity, his 2016 election a fraud. In a nation of 325 million people, of course, 3 million is less than a single percentage point. However, that hard-core audience of obsessive Trump-haters includes every Democrat in Washington and the vast majority of our nation’s journalists, university faculty, and other such members of the intelligentsia. Therefore, their deranged idée fixehas enormous influence, calling into existence a sort of anti-Trump industry that manufactures a constant output of rage-inducing propaganda. The CNN/MSNBC bubble is the cable-TV equivalent of a cult compound, where dissent from their political religion is forbidden. For the past two years, the fanatics have been told every night by Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, et al. that the final destruction of Trump was at hand — “the walls are closing in!” — and the left-wing faithful awaited their deliverance from the evil man in the White House.
“Orange Man Bad” — that’s a shorthand label for the anti-Trump mentality, coined by an anonymous contributor on a Reddit forum in 2017, mocking the robotic mindlessness of the president’s enemies. No fact that might contradict their Trump-hating beliefs has any validity to them, because Orange Man Bad. By obverse principle, anything done to harm Trump or his supporters, including libel and violent assault, is considered legitimate, because Orange Man Bad. Living inside a media-generated echo chamber where everyone shares their simplistic worldview, the Trump-haters tune in nightly to their MSNBC/CNN religious revival and are catechized, so to speak, with the latest reiteration of the Orange Man Bad gospel.
What else can explain what happened Thursday, after Mueller finally delivered his 448-page “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.” The delivery of the special counsel’s report was preceded by a press conference at which Attorney General William Barr summarized the result of the investigation. Barr “made clear that, after two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and endless media speculation, the ‘Russian collusion’ story was, as some of us had noted all along, a story about nothing,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds observed. “No member of Trump’s campaign — and in fact, no American anywhere — colluded with the Russians to influence the campaign.” Contrary to what MSNBC and CNN viewers had been told night after night for month after month, Trump is not a Kremlin stooge and yet: “Orange Man Bad!”
Proven wrong on the matter of “Russian collusion,” the anti-Trump media sifted through the Mueller report in search of evidence of other wrongdoing by the president, who of course must be guilty of something. The Twitter feeds of media types filled up with excerpts of the report proving… what? Well, Trump was very angry about being falsely accused of “collusion,” and he didn’t enjoy watching his former associates being investigated and prosecuted as part of what he considered a partisan witch hunt, inspired in large measure by the phony Steele dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign. But we already knew that. Trump’s animus toward the Mueller investigation was certainly no secret, but being angry is not a crime and, however angry he was, nothing Trump did amounted to obstruction of justice. Because there was no “collusion,” and thus no crime to conceal, it would be hard to figure out how or why justice could be obstructed in such a case. The innocent don’t fear justice, and if Trump was innocent of “collusion” (as Mueller concluded) why should he engage in obstruction? Never mind basic logic, cried the Trump-haters, because Orange Man Bad!
“Their minds are made up, and mere facts cannot penetrate their ironclad certainty about Trump’s maliciousness.”
The American political and media elites that spent the first two years of the Trump administration promoting the Russian collusion hoax have some explaining to do. And not merely explaining: They owe the president an apology.
As Attorney General William Barr said on Thursday before releasing the Mueller report, “After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the special counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”
And yet nearly the entire complex of elite media was actively complicit in promoting the biggest political conspiracy theory in American history: that Hillary Clinton lost the election because Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to — well, that was always a moving target — but to somehow deprive Mrs. Clinton of victory. What we now know definitively is that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and a team of very accomplished, mostly Clinton-supporting, prosecutors were unable to find evidence of a conspiracy that had been taken as an article of faith by Trump haters.
Journalists don’t like being called “fake news,” but too many of them uncritically accepted the Trump-Russia narrative, probably because of their strong distaste for Mr. Trump himself. But that lack of objectivity represents a major professional failure, and it’s Exhibit A in why Mr. Trump’s taunt resonates with so many Americans. Gallup polling shows that for 69 percent of Americans, trust in the media has fallen over the last decade. Among Republicans, it’s 94 percent; for independents, it’s 75 percent and for moderates it’s 66. Only among self-identified liberals and progressives does a majority continue to trust the media. They like what they hear.
Leftists express respectful disagreement with Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw over his criticism of Ilhan Omar. Ha, just kidding! They mocked him as “captain shithead, “Nazi,” and “eyeless fuck.”
What happens when the government turns your apartment building into public housing. “The SWAT team, the overdose, the complaints of pot smoke in the air and feces in the stairwell — it would be hard to pinpoint a moment when things took a turn for the worse at Sedgwick Gardens, a stately apartment building in Northwest Washington.” Bonus: they’re handing out vouchers for up to $2,648 a month, which is more than my mortgage payment. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
“The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed new sanctions and other punitive measures on Cuba and Venezuela, seeking to ratchet up U.S. pressure on Havana to end its support for Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolas Maduro.” Good.
.WHY do people do people leave a poorly run, overtaxed state & then vote for liberals in Texas? Let Texas be Texas! Welcome to Texas. Don't vote for what you fled! Vote Republican this November. pic.twitter.com/O1lDuzOG5I
At long last, the FISA abuse/FBI spying on the Trump campaign scandal is finally being dragged into the light again. At the same time, Wikileaks head honcho Julian Assange has been extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy arrested, pending extradition to the U.S. Coincidence? I report, you decide. “The US department of justice confirmed he has been charged with computer crimes, and added in a statement that if convicted he will face up to five years in prison.” Dang dude, if he had turned himself in when indicted, he’d already be out by now and working the talk show circuit.
Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm, and remember that you have to finish doing your taxes this weekend.
The baffling thing was why they were baffled. Barr’s statement was accurate and supported by publicly known facts.
First, what Barr said. “I think spying did occur,” he told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “But the question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting it was not adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”
That is entirely accurate. It is a fact that in October 2016 the FBI wiretapped Carter Page, who had earlier been a short-term foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. The bureau’s application to a secret court for that wiretapping is public. It is heavily redacted but is clearly focused on Page and “the Russian government’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Page was wiretapped because of his connection with the Trump campaign.
Some critics have noted that the wiretap authorization came after Page left the campaign. But the surveillance order allowed authorities to intercept Page’s electronic communications both going forward from the day of the order and backward, as well. Investigators could see Page’s emails and texts going back to his time in the campaign.
So there is simply no doubt that the FBI wiretapped a Trump campaign figure. Is a wiretap “spying”? It is hard to imagine a practice, whether approved by a court or not, more associated with spying.
Anyone reading this blog (or any non-MSM news source) knew that Obama’s Justice Department was spying on Trump over two years ago. At this point it’s about as surprising as hearing that James Harden is good at basketball…
Democrats seem both angry and frightened, and their kneejerk and perhaps even somewhat panicked response right now is to try to destroy Barr.
You can feel the frisson of fear they emanate. They waited two years for the blow of the Mueller report to fall on Trump, and now other investigative blows may fall on them. The Mueller report combined with Barr’s appointment could end up being a sort of ironic boomerang (whether or not boomerangs can be ironic I leave to you to decide).
How could this have happened? they must be thinking. How could the worm have turned? But they are spinning in the usual manner, hoping that—as so often has happened in the past—their confederates in the press will work their magic to make all of it go away and boomerang back to Republicans instead.
But whatever comes of it all, if anything, Democrats cannot believe that at least right now their dreams have turned to dust and they taste, instead of the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.
That’s from Neo, formerly NeoNeocon. I can see why she’d want to change the name, given how many neocons became #NeverTrump lunatics. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Newly released email from Platte River Networks, the firm that serviced the Emailgate server used by Hillary Clinton: “Its all part of the Hillary coverup operation.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Deeply sourced? What a laugh. As we now know post-Mueller Report, these “respected” journalists were simply trafficking in collusion lies whispered to them by biased informants. In other words, they were a bunch of gullible, over-zealous propagandists. For that they received their Pulitzers, as yet unreturned, needless to say (just as the Pulitzer for Walter Duranty still hangs on the NY Times’ wall despite decades of pleas from Ukrainians whose countrymen’s mass murder by Stalin was bowdlerized by Duranty).
So, in other words, these mainstream media reporters have gotten off with nary a slap on the wrist (indeed received fame and fortune) for lying while Julian Assange may be headed for prison for telling the truth. There’s a bit of irony in that, no?
Avenatti stole millions of dollars from five clients and used a tangled web of shell companies and bank accounts to cover up the theft, the Santa Ana grand jury alleged in an indictment that prosecutors made public Thursday.
One of the clients, Geoffrey Ernest Johnson, was a mentally ill paraplegic on disability who won a $4-million settlement of a suit against Los Angeles County. The money was wired to Avenatti in January 2015, but he hid it from Johnson for years, according to the indictment.
In 2017, Avenatti received $2.75 million in proceeds from another client’s legal settlement, but concealed that too, the indictment says. The next day, he put $2.5 million of that money into the purchase of a private jet for Passport 420, LLC, a company he effectively owned, according to prosecutors.
You can read the indictment itself here. Hey, remember the MSM treating Creepy Porn Lawyer like a rock star? Pepperidge Farm remembers:
Last year the media came down with a fever and the only cure was Michael Avenatti.
Forgot all about it? Well, for a trip down memory lane, please enjoy this supercut recapping some of the highlights. pic.twitter.com/OlKDftM8YA
When California Democratic Representative Ted Lieu went after Candace Owens, he probably had no idea he’d just make her star shine brighter. “She was a liberal, but during the #GamerGate controversy, she was ‘doxxed’ by the Left, and had a road-to-Damascus awakening: ‘I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.'”
Wendy Davis is going to run for congress against Rep. Chip Roy. In one way this makes sense, as Roy narrowly won over Joseph Kopser by 2% in 2018. However, Kopser was (by Democratic standards) a well-heeled businessman moderate. I don’t actually see Abortion Barbie being nearly as competitive after the walloping she took in 2014. Also of interest is her running for an Austin-to-San Antonio district rather than somewhere near her previous base of Fort Worth. (I emailed the Kopser for Congress address to ask if he’s running again, but the contact address is no longer valid.)
Fritz Hollings, RIP. Hollings was one of the last conservative southern Democrats, and co-sponsor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act, which temporarily limited spending growth until congress gutted it in 1990.
“Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has warned China that his soldiers [are] occupying the island of Thitu in the South China Sea, which is currently surrounded by some 275 Chinese fishing militia and Coast Guard vessels.”
he core function of the Electoral College is to require presidential candidates to appeal to the voters of a sufficient number of large and smaller states, rather than just try to run up big margins in a handful of the biggest states, cities, or regions. Critics ignore the important value served by having a president whose base of support is spread over a broad, diverse array of regions of the country (even a president as polarizing as Donald Trump won seven of the ten largest states and places as diverse as Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, West Virginia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas).
In a nation as wide and varied as ours, it would be destabilizing to have a president elected over the objections of most of the states. Our American system as a whole — both by design and by experience — demands the patient building of broad, diverse political coalitions over time to effect significant change. The presidency works together with the Senate and House to make that a necessity. The Senate, of course, is also a target of the Electoral College’s critics, but eliminating the equal suffrage of states requires the support of every single state. A president elected without regard to state support is more likely to face a dysfunctional level of opposition in the Senate.
Consider an illustrative example. Most of us, I think, would agree that 54 percent of the vote is a pretty good benchmark for a decisive election victory — not a landslide, but a no-questions-asked comfortable majority. That’s bigger than Donald Trump’s victory in Texas in 2016; Trump won 18 states with 54 percent or more of the vote in 2016, Hillary Clinton won 10 plus D.C., and the other 22 states were closer than that. Nationally, just 16 elections since 1824 have been won by a candidate who cleared 54 percent of the vote — the last was Ronald Reagan in 1984 — and all of them were regarded as decisive wins at the time.
Picture a two-candidate election with 2016’s turnout. The Republican wins 54 percent of the vote in 48 states, losing only California, New York, and D.C. That’s a landslide victory, right? But then imagine that the Republican nominee who managed this feat was so unpopular in California, New York, and D.C. that he or she loses all three by a 75 percent–to–25 percent margin. That 451–87 landslide in the Electoral College, built on eight-point wins in 48 states, would also be a popular-vote defeat, with 50.7 percent of the vote for the Democrat to 49.3 percent for the Republican. Out of a total of about 137 million votes, that’s a popular-vote margin of victory of 1.95 million votes for a candidate who was decisively rejected in 48 of the 50 states.
Who should win that election? This is not just a matter of coloring in a lot of empty red land on a map: each of these 48 states is an independent entity that has its own governor, legislature, laws, and courts, and sends two senators to Washington. The whole idea of a country called the United States is that those individual communities are supposed to matter.
Step 1: put on mask Step 2: pull out watergun loaded with something that LOOKS/SMELLS like bleach Step 3: spray said bleach-smelling liquid at face of Conservative speaker Step 4: suddenly have cops go all UFC on your asshttps://t.co/sEWwszmeOo
Is there any number of illegal border crossings into the United States that would strike Democrats as an emergency?
As they resisted President Trump’s efforts to stem the flow of illegal migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, many Democrats made the point that fewer migrants are coming today than years ago, during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies. The implication was that today’s situation cannot be an emergency, because it used to be worse.
That doesn’t make sense, of course. One could argue that crossings were an unaddressed emergency back then, and that today’s figures, although lower, also qualify as an emergency.
But now, the border numbers are surging back to the bad old days. It appears that Customs and Border Protection apprehended more than 100,000 people in March (the precise figure has not yet been released), a pace that could mean more than 1,000,000 apprehensions this year.
For some perspective: According to Border Patrol statistics, U.S. authorities caught 1,643,679 people trying to cross the border illegally from Mexico in fiscal 2000. In 2001 the number was 1,235,718. In 2002 it was 929,809. In 2003 it was 905,065. In 2004 it topped the million mark again, with 1,139,282. In 2005 it was 1,171,396. In 2006 it was 1,071,972.
The full text of the Mueller report is a booby-trap for the Democrats. And many of them not named Schiff must know or suspect it….The natural question will then be — what was all this for? Cui bono? A full airing of the report, what Nadler claims he wants, will instead “open the door,” as they say in court, more than ever for an investigation of why this probe was launched in the first place, by whom and for what reason. The results of that investigation will be quite scary, if not humiliating, for Democrats because they will lead close to, if not over, their highest doorstep — the portals of the Oval Office during the previous administration.
Snip.
Besides whatever Barr decides to do, several other vectors are pointing at the Democrats and their DOJ/FBI/media allies. One is obviously hearings from the Senate Judiciary Committee under chairman Lindsey Graham. The second is the investigation into the provenance of the Russia probe and the attendant FISA court decisions (Steele dossier, etc.) to spy on U.S. citizens by inspector general Michael Horowitz. He is supposed to be working in concert with John Huber, a U.S. attorney appointed by Jeff Sessions ages ago with the power to carry out in the courts the results of Horowitz’s discoveries and who has since been silent.
I noticed that the Russia narrative was increasingly being clung to as an explanation for the media’s failures to understand the country they purport to cover. I pushed back against the idea that the American people had been duped by “fake news” (which then meant something else entirely, we might remember) or “Russia” when they voted for Trump, even if such a vote was obviously unfathomable to most media figures.
The Russia strategy Clinton had deployed was being picked up by Obama’s intelligence agencies and spread far and wide by American media, and it annoyed Trump. When he’d dismiss the fevered theories that Russian meddling was the reason Hillary Clinton had failed to visit the upper Midwest, intelligence analysts responded by threatening him with leaks.
“Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?” The assumption seems to be that Hispanic votes are a birthright for the Democratic Party, and their media partisans are perplexed that they’re not. “While many Democrats expected Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, especially the family separation debacle, to produce a decisive shift to the left among Hispanics, that has not proved to be the case.” Why would Hispanic American citizens be any less worried about illegal alien crime or taking jobs than any other American group? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Hey, remember when all those top Virginia Democrats were called on to resign? “Two of the three officials, Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, wore blackface decades ago. The third, Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax, has been accused of two instances of sexual assault.” Well, they haven’t and they’re not. Evidently the press finally realized that each of them had (D)s after their name…
Chinese woman carrying malware arrested at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s frequent vacation home in Florida.
“Pence Issues Turkey Ultimatum: ‘Choose Between Remaining NATO Member Or Buying Russian S-400.’ I don’t think Erdogan’s Turkey should be kicked out of NATO for buying Russian anti-aircraft missiles, they should be kicked out of NATO for running a repressive jihadist scumbag regime. And we shouldn’t be selling them F-35s in any case.
“Trump Is Turning NATO Into a Viable Military Force.” “The Trump administration has made great strides in recent months to transform the cash-strapped and perpetually ailing North Atlantic Treaty Organization into a viable global military force that has the capabilities to confront Russia and other rogue regimes allied with terror forces.”
Some interesting maps showing American land use. (Hat tip: Gregory Benford on Facebook.)
Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.” The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is “not spending enough to really solve the problem.” For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.
Reporters have in mind a specific quote they’d like to have from you, and have developed great skill in teasing it out of people. Think of it as just one aspect of fake news. I had quite a bit of first-hand experience with this during my years in Washington, and I got good at spotting the technique and having the discipline not to give in to the usual reporter’s tricks. Often I’d get a call from a reporter wanting my comment on something the Bush Administration was doing, and the question, in substance, was usually: “Don’t you think the Bush Administration is doing the wrong thing?” (Though always more artfully put than that.) And when I didn’t give the answer the “reporter” was looking for, they’d keep asking the same question over and over again in different forms, because what they needed for their story was a way to say something like, “But even a conservative at the American Enterprise Institute thinks Bush is making a mistake. ‘Bush is making a mistake,’ said Steven Hayward. . .” Sometimes a reporter would keep me on the phone for 30 minutes or more, hoping I’d give in. I learned the discipline of never giving in to this trick, and what do you know? I was never quoted in any of the stories that “reporters” like this filed. Nor did any of the information or analysis I had about the issue make it into the story, because background information and perspective was not what the reporter was looking for.
Any attempt to discharge the moral crimes of the 18th and 19th centuries with monetary payments in the 21st century is doomed to fail. The logistical and definitional obstacles alone would be a nightmare. The majority of white Americans have no ancestral link to antebellum slavery — they are descendants of the millions of immigrants who came to the United States after slavery had been abolished. Of the remainder, few had any slaveholding forbears: Slavery was abolished in most Northeastern states within 15 years of the American Revolution, while in most of the West it never existed at all. Even in the South at the peak of its “slaveocracy,” at least 75 percent of whites never owned slaves.
That’s just where the complications start. To whom would reparations be owed? Millions of black Americans are recent immigrants or the children of those immigrants, and have no family link to slavery. Are they entitled to compensation for what slaves endured? How about whites whose ancestors were slaves? Or blacks descended from slaveholders? What of the 1.8 million biracial people who identified themselves in the last Census as both black and white? Should they expect to collect reparations, or to pay them?
Almost did a post on all the Unplanned Twitter shenanigans. Basically: Twitter briefly suspends, and then farks with, the Twitter account for a pro-life movie. If you followed it, Twitter would automatically unfollow the account. The shenanigans stopped when enough people noticed, with the result that not only did Unplanned land in the top five for box office that week, but now their Twitter account has far more followers than Planned Parenthood’s official Twitter account. This suggests that a half-century worth of preference falsification by the abortion industry and their media allies is finally falling apart.
If you thought Joe Don Baker’s Mitchell was a bad cop, you haven’t met this one.
MS-13 member on Texas Ten Most Wanted list captured. Seven of the ten are listed as “White (Hispanic) Male” and an eighth is named “Jesus Alberto Villegas.” It doesn’t say (at least on that page) how many are illegal aliens. In other news, Texas has its own Top Ten Most Wanted List.
Gramsci argued that the Bolshevik Russian revolution of 1917 worked because the conditions were ripe for such a sudden upheaval. He described the Russian revolution as an example of a “war of movement” due to its sudden and complete overthrow of the existing governing structure of society. Gramsci reasoned that in Russia in 1917, “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.”
As such, a direct attack on the current rulers could be effective because there existed no other significant structure or institutions of political influence that needed to be overcome.
In Western societies, by contrast, Gramsci observed that the state is “only an outer ditch” behind which lies a robust and sturdy civil society.
Gramsci believed that the conditions in Russia in 1917 that made revolution possible would not materialize in more advanced capitalist countries in the West. The strategy must be different and must include a mass democratic movement, an ideological struggle.
His advocacy of a war of position instead of a war of movement was not a rebuke of revolution itself, just a differing tactic—a tactic that required the infiltration of influential organizations that make up civil society. Gramsci likened these organizations to the “trenches” in which the war of position would need to be fought.
The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as state organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the “trenches” and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely “partial” the element of maneuver which before used the “the whole” of war, etc.
Gramsci argued that a “frontal attack” on established institutions like governments in Western societies may face significant resistance and thus need greater preparation—with the main groundwork being the development of a collective will among the people and a takeover of leadership among civil society and key political positions.
Snip.
Gramsci, however, viewed civil society in Western societies to be a strong defensive system for the current State, which in turn existed to protect the interest of the capitalist class.
“In the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks,” he wrote. In short, in times when the state itself may have shown weakness to overthrow from opposing ideological forces, the institutions of civil society provided political reinforcement for the existing order.
In his view, a new collective will is required to advance this war of position for the revolution. To him, it is vital to evaluate what can stand in the way of this will, i.e. certain influential social groups with the prevailing capitalist ideologies that could impede this progress.
Gramsci spoke of organizations including churches, charities, the media, schools, universities and “economic corporate” power as organizations that needed to be invaded by socialist thinkers.
The new dictatorship of the proletariat in the West, according to Gramsci, could only arise out of an active consensus of the working masses—led by those critical civil society organizations generating an ideological hegemony.
As Gramsci described it, hegemony means “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership over allied and subordinate groups. The intellectuals, once ensconced, should attain leadership roles over these groups’ members by consent. They would achieve direction over the movement by persuasion rather than domination or coercion.
The goal of the war of position is to shape a new collective will of the masses in order to weaken the defenses that civil society provides to the current capitalist state.
Now I have an excuse to embed this:
“CNN Blames Ratings Slump On Lack Of News They Want To Report.” “It’s perfectly natural to see a little bit of a dip in ratings when your entire narrative is being destroyed and you’d rather just not talk about it,” Stelter added. “All part of the business.”
You know that whole “We’ve got to drop rote memorization and teach critical thinking!” thing? It’s not just bunk, it’s really old bunk. “Memorization and practice are still essential elements of learning and prepare students for the kind of higher level thinking we all claim to value.”
Have I ever shared The Worst Web Page In History with you before? If not, behold the abomination in all its glory! (Or rather, a snapshot of the page as it existed in 2005.) Bonus: it’s from a radical leftist! (Warning: Everything!)
All remaining criminal cases will be dismissed from the 2015 Twin Peaks biker shootout that left nine dead and 20 injured, prosecutors said Tuesday, ending a four-year prosecutorial fiasco that resulted in zero convictions.
McLennan County District Attorney Barry Johnson said he will dismiss the remaining 24 criminal cases to “end this nightmare that we have been dealing with in this county since May 17, 2015.”
Johnson’s decision means no one will be held accountable for killing and injuring bikers or for engaging in a chaotic battle in a shopping center parking lot in front of a Sunday lunchtime crowd.
“There were nine people who were killed on that fateful day in Waco, Texas, and 20 injured, all of whom were members of rival motorcycle clubs/gangs, and the loss of life is a difficult thing,” Johnson said. “But after looking over the 24 cases we were left with, it is my opinion as your district attorney that we are not able to prosecute any of those cases and reach our burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Johnson inherited the Twin Peaks cases when he took office in January, and said he has spent 75 percent of his time since then with a team of prosecutors and investigators trying to determine how to resolve the remaining cases.
About 200 bikers were arrested after the shootout on identical charges of engaging in organized criminal activity and held on $1 million bonds each. Former McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna sought indictments against 155 bikers on those identical charges and chose to try Jacob Carrizal, the Bandidos Dallas county chapter president, first.
Carrizal’s case, tried in Waco’s 54th State District Court, ended in mistrial in November 2017, with most of the jurors in his case favoring acquittal. No other defendant has been tried since.
Johnson’s campaign hammered Reyna for his handling of the Twin Peaks cases, and he won the March 2018 Republican primary by 20 percentage points. After the primary, Reyna dismissed all but 24 of the remaining Twin Peaks cases.
Johnson probably made the right call here, as Reyna cocked things up so badly by refusing to charge individual bikers with individual crimes, choosing instead to charge almost every biker arrested with “conspiracy,” evidently operating on an unconstitutional theory of collective guilt. At least some of the dead appear to have been killed by police rifles, and there are reports of law enforcement officials failing to render aid to the wounded.
Thanks to Abel Reyna, multiple people got away with murder, while over a hundred people got arrested, and had their lives destroyed, not for actually committing any crimes, but simply for wearing the wrong colors and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What use is April Fools Day when there are so many fools to choose from? That aside, Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam is In, while Biden continues his Hamlet routine. (Given what last week’s Mueller-Avenatti-Smollett smashup was like, I don’t really blame him anyone for not launching their campaign last week.) Eric Swalwell was do disappointed by the Mueller report that he’s going to run for President to ease the pain, sort of like sawing off your own leg to make you forget a toothache. There’s a little Buttigieg boomlet going on. And with the quarter just ended, fundraising totals are starting to trickle out.
Polls
A Quinnipiac national poll has it Biden 29, Sanders 19, O’Rourke 12, Harris 8, and Warren and Buttigieg in a distant fifth tied at 4% each. Most interesting tidbit? O’Roruke has double Harris’ support among black people, and ties it among women.
An Emerson Iowa poll had it Biden 25, Sanders 24, Buttigieg 11, Harris at 10, with Warren, Booker and O’Rourke trailing in single digits.
America’s youngest voters prefer the oldest 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls over those closer to them in age, and millennial women are showing little problem with former Vice President Joe Biden’s personally touchy style that has drawn the scorn of some #MeToo champions, according to a new survey.
The Harvard Youth Poll found that Sen. Bernie Sanders, 77, and Biden, 76, top the choices of voters aged 18-29.
Sanders leads Biden 31 percent to 20 percent, said the survey from the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy’s School.
Notably, one of the youngest Democratic candidates, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, registered just 10 percent. But that makes him the third top choice of the younger voters.
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? “Stacey Abrams builds massive political network ahead of 2020 decision.” “Stacey Abrams is set to reveal soon whether she’ll run for president or senator or something else. But in recent months, the Democrat has mounted a nationwide, largely below-the-radar effort to expand her donor and political network that will make her an instant force whatever she decides.” She also ruled out preemptively agreeing to be Biden’s VP.
Joe Biden is a creepy old goat. Everyone knows this. There is much photographic evidence of him crossing the line with women. He’s also a liar and a buffoon. But the Democratic party’s public-relations arm, aka the mainstream media, has never before had any incentive to hold Biden up to scrutiny. Why bother? When he became veep, any attack on Biden risked looking like casting aspersions on the man who made him his number two, and the media could not countenance any naysaying about the judgment of the Precious.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He was in Ft. Dodge, Iowa. Back in January, Jim Geraghty noted: “Julián Castro was the candidate of tomorrow, and always will be.” It also included this tidbit:
In 2012, Rosie Castro caused her son a bit of a headache when she told The New York Times Magazine that the Texans at the Alamo were “a bunch of drunks and crooks and slaveholding imperialists who conquered land that didn’t belong to them…I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for.” It’s not often you see a mayor’s mother trashing the city’s most famous historical site.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Tulsi Gabbard Says It’s Time to ‘Move Forward’ After Trump-Russia Investigation.” “Now that Mueller has reported that his investigation revealed no such collusion, we all need to put aside our partisan interests and recognize that finding that the president of the United States did not conspire with Russia to interfere with our elections is a good thing for our country.” Yeah, I bet that stance is going to make her super popular among Democratic primary voters…
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. “Unless somebody I know who inspires me on a regular basis decides to do something else, he’d be focusing all his energy on getting Florida voters registered and turning the state blue in 2020.” Downgrade from Maybe.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris is popular with her California constituents…but not super-popular, and the state doles out delegates proportionally. Interestingly, left-leaning PolitiFact said that her assertion that President Trump was raiding money from soldier pensions was false. And speaking of Jussie Smollett:
I’m so excited that @KamalaHarris has decided to run for president. I would not be where I am today without her guidance during my first run for political office, and she has continued to mentor me as I work to reform the criminal justice system in Cook County. —KF pic.twitter.com/O241FGKKMs
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. She visited Iowa to check out flooding damage. “There are half a dozen Democrats running for president who fill VFW halls or city squares or public parks. Klobuchar is not one of those Democrats. Her audiences are rapt and curious but small. Her Friday night visit to Council Bluffs, which took place in the same venue and time of day as Warren’s first visit to the city, attracted 75 people.” She also unveiled an very expensive infrastructure plan. How expensive?
In the first speech of his presidential campaign, Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam on Saturday said he’s aiming to “give Americans a second chance at the American Dream.”
The 44-year-old son of Jamaican immigrants said his top priorities are greatly reducing gun violence and preventing mass shootings, eliminating college loan debt, reversing harmful climate change, and rebuilding ties with America’s allies across the planet.
“We will meet this challenge,” Messam told the crowd at the Lou Rawls Center for the Performing Arts at Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens. He used the “Black Panther” movie song “Pray for Me” as his theme music.
With all of five thousand twitter followers, Messam takes the longest of longshots crown from John Delaney. However, as a black mayor with a compelling personal story, the media will be unable to ignore him as they’ve largely ignored Delany, no matter how much Harris and Booker campaigns might wish they would. And the inevitable Obama comparisons won’t hurt, though I don’t see him having anything near that magnetism. Florida’s primary is March 17, fairly early but after Super Tuesday, and it’s possible that Messam’s favorite son bid could make some noise there, especially if Gillum doesn’t jump into the race.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Maybe? Yet another guy who says he’ll decide in the next few weeks.
California Representative Eric Swalwell: All But In. He told an audience he was announcing in two weeks. Maybe he can spend his Presidential campaign looking for the real Russian colluders. (Upgrade from Maybe.)
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. She just lost her financing manager. “Her staff is sensitive enough about the “but can she win” concerns that last week it issued a lengthy campaign memo, in the guise of a fund-raising email, detailing her platform and resume while offering a reminder that she is the only candidate who in recent years has defeated a statewide Republican incumbent.” Yeah, in Massachusetts, which for a Democrat is like Kramer beating up 9-year olds in his karate class.
Say hello to Marianne Williamson, a best-selling author who has often been called Oprah Winfrey’s “spiritual guru.” Although she isn’t even a single-digit blip in the national polls, Ms. Williamson’s campaign has already been featured on ABC’s Nightline, and her campaign appearances in Iowa and New Hampshire have received respectful coverage in such local media as the Des Moines Register and the Concord Monitor. Her only previous foray into electoral politics was a fourth-place finish in a 16-candidate California congressional race in 2014, but Ms. Williamson seems to have learned a lot in the past five years. Her campaign website is state-of-the-art, her calendar of public appearances is carefully targeted toward the early primary and caucus states, and she has already hired state campaign directors in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. “We’re getting traction,” Williamson campaign spokeswoman Patricia Ewing told me in a brief telephone interview Thursday. “We’re very happy with it.”
Ms. Ewing said the campaign is “confident” Ms. Williamson will surpass the crucial metric of 65,000 unique donors that the Democratic National Committee has established as the threshold to participate in the first televised debates. She already has more than 25,000 donors, Ms. Ewings said. “It’s not a stress point for us at all. We know we’re going to hit the numbers by the time the DNC wants us to.” Ms. Williamson has spent more than 30 years making public appearances to promote her popular books and, before launching her current campaign, went on a 75-city national tour with an average of 500 people attending each event, Ms. Ewing said. Do the math, and that adds up to nearly 40,000 dedicated supporters. Given how easily an “outsider” candidate like Trump vanquished a field of Republican politicians in the 2016 primaries, it’s not impossible that Ms. Williamson could pull off a similar feat among Democrats in 2020. “We believe that a presidential candidate can come from someone who is not a career politician,” Ms. Ewing said. “Someone who has an understanding of the breadth and width of the country.”
For all the talk about the Religious Right’s role in Republican politics, little attention is paid to the influence among Democrats of the Religious Left, of which Ms. Williamson is a recognized leader. And if the odds against her winning her party’s 2020 presidential nomination are a million-to-one, there are nonetheless serious Democrats who believe she can achieve such a miracle. One of them is Dr. Gloria Bromell Tinubu, state director of the Williamson campaign. An experienced politician who served in the Georgia legislature before returning to her native South Carolina, Dr. Tinubu was twice the Democratic nominee for Congress in the 7th District, getting more than 100,000 votes against Republican Rep. Tom Rice in this deep “red” district. Dr. Tinubu introduced Ms. Williamson at Bethel A.M.E. by saying, “I consider her a sister,” which is about as strong an endorsement as any Democrat needs here.
Snip.
If the “Three B’s” (Biden, Bernie, and Beto) are Trump’s “dream” of a 2020 opponent, Ms. Williamson might just be his worst nightmare. Like him, she’s an outsider, a non-politician without the kind of political baggage that sank Hillary Clinton. And she brings to the campaign a spiritual vibe that could connect with swing voters. “Politics should not be a pursuit disconnected from the heart,” her campaign literature proclaims. “Where fear has been harnessed for political purposes, let’s now harness the power of love.” Sure, conservative readers will roll their eyes at that kind of emotional appeal, but what about suburban “soccer moms”? What about the millions of women who’ve bought Ms. Williamson’s books or seen her many TV appearances with Oprah? What about the congregation at Bethel A.M.E. that applauded Ms. Williamson’s call for reparations for slavery?
All the same pundits who confidently predicted Trump’s defeat would say it is impossible Ms. Williamson could win the Democrats’ 2020 nomination, and that’s the really spooky thing. We are living in a world where impossible things seem to be happening with remarkable frequency, and it’s foolish to say miracles never happen. How odd was it, after all, that Ms. Williamson was speaking Sunday from the pulpit of a black church in South Carolina? Not only is she white, she’s Jewish. (To quote New York Jewish Week: “Should she win the presidency, Williamson, 66, not only would be the first woman president but the first Jewish one.”) She mentioned the Jewish celebration of Purim, which commemorates Esther’s role in saving the Jews of Persia. She didn’t mention the famous question Mordecai asked of Esther: “Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Indeed, who knows? In such a time as this, perhaps Ms. Williamson could be the miracle that saves Democrats from themselves.
This week in the clown car update: Two more additions, one possibly serious, the other definitely not. Also, don’t miss yesterday’s post on the Twitter primary.
Polls and Pundits
Fox poll has Biden at 31, Sanders at 24, and both beating Trump, with everyone else in single digits and losing to Trump.
James Pindell of the Boston Globe ranks the Democratic presidential field in New Hampshire. TLDR: Sanders, Biden, Warren, Harris, Booker, O’Rourke, Williamson, Gabbard, Buttigieg, Yang. Yes, he has Williamson and Yang ahead of numerous “serious” candidates.
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe?Still considering a run. Also see Biden comma Joe.
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out. But he did pen an op-ed stating that Beto O’Rourke can’t win. “It’s not Beto’s fault he’s not a fighter. After all, he’s led a very charmed, privileged life as a white male. He’s faced very little adversity.” Seems like the Creepy Porn Lawyer is calling the kettle white…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning Toward In. “U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet is taking the final steps toward becoming the second Colorado Democrat in the 2020 race for president, with a possible announcement coming soon, sources familiar with his plan have told The Denver Post.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning Towards Running. Trial balloon floated the idea of him announcing for the campaign and naming Stacey Abrams as his running mate right out of the gate. Not sure that would help clinch the nomination with two (or, see below, three) actual black candidates in the race. Lots of pundits are pronouncing this to be a bad idea, but how many are in the tank for Kamala Harris? Jim Geraghty: “Nominating Biden atop the Democratic ticket is like giving the wacky neighbor supporting character on a beloved show his own spinoff.” Could Biden be the Jeb Bush of 2020?
Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an ABC profile that notes “Delaney has made Iowa his primary focus. He’s traveled to 99 counties and was planning to open six offices in the first state that will have a say in the election. His time in Iowa reportedly earned him early endorsements from three Iowan Democratic Party county chairs.” Probably the only candidate in the field emphasizing bipartisanship.
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Maybe? This week Gillum announced…a voter registration drive.
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Maybe, but it’s a joke run. He lost to everyone in 2008, coming in eight out of eight and receiving no delegates, then switched to the Libertarian Party, where he came in four out of eight. According to his Twitter account: “I’m not planning to contest any primaries and, if offered the nomination, would decline it.” The 88-year old did make an FEC filing, but I’m only listing him here to mention that I’m not listing him here…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. She swung through Texas and compared herself to LBJ, which suggests she’s a mean, corrupt political operator who used voting fraud to steal an election. “Black women could help boost Kamala Harris’ presidential aspirations.” Wow, there’s an original thought. But the whispers I hear suggests that Homewrecker Harris is far less popular among black women than you might expect…
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Appeared on The Daily Show. Inslee’s extra security for his presidential run will cost Washington state $4 million. Wait, don’t you actually have to know who someone is before you target him for assassination?
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign. But he did get 4% in that CNN poll.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. US News and World Report (who are evidently still around) cover the “humor” of Klobuchar. Judging from the samples provided, I don’t see her headlining at The Laugh Factory anytime soon…
Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run? He gets a Washington Post profile. “When he left office in January 2018, McAuliffe appeared to be well positioned for a White House run as a socially liberal, business-friendly Democrat from an important swing state. But 14 months later, it’s unclear if there is room for McAuliffe, 62, in a party that seems to be pulling leftward.”
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
Addition Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: Leaning Toward In. Twitter. Stumbled across him on Wikipedia. He’s filed paperwork with the SEC and is expected to make an announcement March 30. He was also a wide receiver at Florida State and a member of their 1993 National Championship team. Do I consider the 44-year old a serious contender? Right now, no. But as of 2010, Miramar had a population of 122,041, compared to South Bend, Indiana’s 101,168. By what objective criteria is Sound Bend’s white gay mayor Pete Buttigieg a legitimate Presidential contender and Miramar’s black, straight (presumably, since he’s married with three children) mayor isn’t? (Even 538 is keeping track of him, and made the same point about Buttigieg.)
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Maybe? Says he’ll decide by next month.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Two Jim Geraghty pieces: Beto finds that that everything seems a lot harder when you’re not running against Ted Cruz. “All of a sudden Beto O’Rourke, the candidate who was most beloved by the national press in 2018, is getting brutal coverage in 2019.” But then he warns Republicans not to underestimate him and compares his career path to George W. Bush. There are some parallels there, but it’s a big leap from the congressional son of a city councilman to the gubernatorial son of a President. He campaigned in South Carolina. Wait, he’s now saying he’s a gun owner? Did he mention that when he was bragging about his F rating from the NRA last year? Whoa ho here he comes, he’s a dirt eater.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
As it stands in the New Hampshire primary, there’s Sanders and then everyone else. No one even comes close to the level of support, energy, and commitment that Sanders has enjoyed since he won the New Hampshire primary with 60 percent of the vote in 2016.
Now here’s the downside of expectations: mathematically, his numbers can go only go down in a field this large. But even with polls putting him at 25 percent to 30 percent support in the state’s primary, that’s enough to win in such a large field.
Journalist David Sirota spent the last few months attacking all the non-Sanders Democrats in the race. Surprise! Bernie just hired him. Sanders also spoke to large crowds in San Francisco (of course) and San Diego.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. In Politico, Jeff Greenfield ponders her slow start. “She is languishing in fifth place in a spate of polls of Democratic primary voters; Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke are dominating the money race.” Oh, and she wants to eliminate the Electoral College because of course she does.
Yes, a person most readers will have to Google is already well ahead of sitting senators, Cabinet officials, and former governors in the New Hampshire rankings. Don’t believe me? Just look at the overflow crowds of people who adore her and probably won’t even consider voting for anyone else. It’s clear by these counts that Williamson, Oprah Winfrey’s spiritual adviser, enters the race with her own base of support. Also, it turned a lot of heads when former congressman Paul Hodes agreed to run her campaign in the state.
She gets an intermittantly interesting Buzzfeed profile that talks about all her celebrity spiritualist boosters (Steve Tyler, Gwyneth Paltro, Cher, Kim Kardashian West) and officiating at one of Elizabeth Taylor’s weddings, while showing her speaking before an audience of six. Robert Stacy McCain needs your donations so he can travel to South Carolina to give the Williamson campaign the coverage it deserves in person. Help make it happen! (And here’s an update.)
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Running but no one cares. Twitter. Facebook. He’s in the debates! Yang has lots of ideas, most of them bad. He wants to reformulate GDP: “Robot trucks are going to be great for GDP, but they’re going to be terrible for the 3 1/2 billion [sic] truck drivers in the country.” He’s also come out against the most pressing issue of our day: circumcision. Though I suspect there’s no truth to the rumor he’ll make his official campaign song Pink Floyd’s “The Final Cut”…
