Job numbers boom! Ghislaine Maxwell captured! CHOP chopped! It’s your Friday before Independence Day LinkSwarm!
4.8 million jobs added in June, blowing away all estimates. This is what keeps Democratic strategists up at night: Between lockdowns and riots, they’ve done everything they can to kill the Trump economy, and the Trump economy refuses to die.
Hillary Clinton today after hearing of the news that Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, there is a reason Epsteined is trending right now. pic.twitter.com/SrGorHPigu
Speaking of the intelligence community, here’s why that Russian bounty story was crap. And all your liberal Facebook friends shared it because they don’t care whether a story is true or not, as long as it hurts Trump. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
It is not transcendentally stupid for the alleged anti-racism rioters to destroy a Lincoln statue, though, to normal people, it looks like the act of drooling morons. Now, a good number of these cesspeople are drooling morons, but that does not change the fact that trashing POTUS #16’s statuary is brilliant.
They have confused their targets â us â by casting off the constraints of coherence.
Oh wait, you thought that these folks were trying to make a point about racism being bad. And you thought, because that’s how those of us who weren’t raised on Instatwitbook, soy, and critical race theory, that if you point out that something is unreasonable then that will cause the person you were instructing to rethink it. After all, trashing some Honest Abe totem in order to illustrate how racism is double-plus-ungood is about a “12” on the 1-10 scale of unreasonability. And yet, you can point that out all day and they don’t care.
In fact, they laugh at you for doing so.
It’s not about making sense. It never was. It’s about making you kneel.
If you look at everything that is going on, the one common denominator is that every action the woke insurgents take is designed to strip you of your ability to defend your interests, or property, or rights, or life. The idea is to leave you utterly vulnerable, totally exposed, at which point they can do with you as they see fit. The nicer ones will merely reeducate you then demand humiliating submission and tribute. History (and their social media feed) teach that others will happily murder you. Doubt me? Just ask your local kulak.
Stripping you of defenses takes many forms. One form is defunding and abolishing the police. Oh, someone will be wielding force in society. It just won’t be people accountable to or inclined to protect you. Another form is literally stripping you of your defenses. Why is gun control such a fetish for these creeps? Because you with a gun have the ability to not just say “no” but to exact a price from those who wish to compel a “yes.” So, of course, they want to eliminate your ability to have weapons, but they also want to eliminate, as a practical matter, your ability to use them to protect yourself.
Look at what happened when the pink polo shirt gun guy quite reasonably grabbed his AR-15 as the savages descended on his property and the cops were AWOL. St. Louis’s Soros-bought DA â who last month released all the arrested rioters â threatened to prosecute him. The media is slandering him too. A pack of jackals threatened his property, his family, and even his dog, and he’s the bad guy for not showing his belly? You see the same fake furor every time some citizen has his car surrounded by a feeding frenzy of scumbags and plows through them to escape. Ignore that the slime are now shooting people they try to trap. The idea is to make you give up instead of fight back because if you fight back, the law comes down on you instead of the criminals.
Soros really is a shrewd investor.
The law â and the law generally says you can reasonably defend your life and property (please consult your local laws for specifics and get proper training) â means nothing if corrupt Democrats ignore the crimes of leftists and prosecute normals who dare resist the Blue Terror, which is kind of the point. You thought you could rely on the law and on the government to protect you. Nope. And now you can’t protect yourself either.
And then there’s reason. That’s a defense too. You can use reason, make arguments, present evidence, and convince people. Not if making sense is beside the point.
You cannot reason with these people. Forget trying to convince them. You are not going to talk them out of their quest for power over you by deploying bourgeois conceits like “facts” and “evidence.” Yet so many of us see what’s happening and still take to Twitter or (increasingly) Parler to point out the sheer ridiculousness of the enemy’s latest antics. But these actions are not ridiculous. They are tactically genius. Instead of confronting an impenetrable defense, they just scuttle around it and attack into our rear.
Let’s do a double-shot of Kurt: “Americaâs Problem Is Systemic Liberalism“:
Forget the bizarre and evil concept of national original sin that is the malignant idea that America is built upon âsystemic racism.” Americaâs true systemic flaw, arising at the time of those miserable progressives of yesteryear and continuing up through the miserable progressives of this rotten year, is what we now call âliberalism.â
Oh, itâs not classical liberalism, with its concern for expanding economic and personal rights â you know, individual liberty. The current inverted mutation of liberalism is all about constricting economic and personal rights and forcing individuals into collective boxes where their individuality is subsumed into an easily exploited and manipulated conformist whole. Want to test out this hypothesis? Look through the endless woke tweets of your favorite hack journalist, pinko pol, or Hollywood half-wit, or even go up to some self-described liberal in your own life, and see if you can find one iota of deviation from any of the approved liberal dogma. Good luck. You wonât find a smidgeon of nonconformity. You wonât detect a molecule of dissent. These people are the Borg, if the Borg worked in a giant space coffee house, had Bernie stickers on their spaceships, and could not do a push-up. You canât reason with them â appealing to reason is futile.
Systemic liberalism is the real poison in Americaâs veins, not the fanciful notion pushed by bigots, charlatans, and demagogues, that the American enterprise is dedicated to invidious discrimination on the basis of race.
Left-wing activist and former Bernie Sanders surrogate Shaun King is among the most visible faces of the Black Lives Matter movement. The former Daily Kos blogger is also one of its prominent fundraisers: In 2017, King founded a political action committeeâthe Real Justice PACâwith an eye toward driving criminal-justice reform across the country using the same mass mobilization techniques employed by the Sanders campaign.
But over the past 15 months, the Real Justice PAC, staffed by a number of left-wing activists, has funneled a quarter of the money it has brought in back to companies linked to PAC leaders.
Since January of 2019, the PAC has cut dozens of checks totaling more than $460,000 to three political consultancy firms linked to PAC employees. The PAC’s data strategist, Jin Ding, and its treasurer, Becky Bond, manage two of them: Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC. The thirdâMiddle Seat Consultingâwas cofounded by one of the PAC’s original leaders, Hector Sigala.
“There are legal and ethical ways to have people in leadership positions at an organization also serve as vendors to the same organization,” Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a money-in-politics watchdog, told the Washington Free Beacon. “But these relationships properly raise questions, especially for a group whose leaders include someone like Shaun King, who has repeatedly been accused of enriching himself improperly.”
“For 501(c)(3) charities, the IRS actually prohibits whatâs called âprivate inurement’ or excessive benefit to an individual from the organizationâs coffers,” Walter said. “Real Justice PAC isnât a nonprofit overseen by the IRS but a PAC overseen by the Federal Election Commission, which so far as I know doesnât have such a strict regulation. Still, groups like Real Justice that routinely criticize their opponents for things like âdark money’ influenceâshould be prepared to defend practices that let leaders write checks to their own for-profit consultancies.”
Ding, the PAC’s technology strategist, is registered as the manager for the California-based Social Practice LLC and Bernal Alto LLC in the firms’ state filings. Social Practice received nearly $250,000 from Real Justice PAC this cycle for campaign consulting and digital services. Bernal Alto, which dissolved earlier this year, was paid $20,000 for consulting and organizing services. Bond, a cofounder of the PAC and former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, is also listed as a manager for both companies. Progressive digital firm Middle Seat Consulting, which was cofounded by Sigala, received $193,000 from the PAC for advertising services.
Seattle’s lawless CHAZ/CHOP zone finally demolished not due to all the murders, but because the scumbag protestors approached the mayor’s house. We can’t have the rabble bothering the more equal pigs!
Slowly but surely, all the Social Justice rioters are being brought to actual justice: 44 scumbags arrested in Scottsdale.
The antifa ringleader of the attempt to pull over the Andrew jackson statue was also arrested. “Jason Charter was arrested at his home by the FBI and U.S. Park Police on Thursday morning and charged with destruction of federal property.”
Our ruling class: “Peter Newell was the former co-ordinator of the Association for the Protection of All Children charity. The 77-year-old from Wood Green, north London, was sentenced last month at Blackfriars Crown Court. He admitted five indecent and serious sexual assaults on a child under 16.”
Wary of closer Indo-American ties, the Chinese Communist Partyâs mouthpiece Global Times news outlet published editorials cautioning India from involving itself in U.S.-China tensions and serving as an American pawn against China. Picking up on this notion, Brookings scholar Tanvi Madan believes closer India-U.S. ties triggered the border standoff, with Beijing intending to show India its rightful place.
Instead, Chinaâs deadly actions might have achieved exactly the oppositeâcementing New Delhiâs strategic tilt towards Washington.
Hey @tiktok_us, why do you paste from my clipboard every time I type a LETTER in your comment box? Shout out to iOS 14 for shining a light on this HUGE invasion of privacy. inb4 they say it was a "bug" pic.twitter.com/MHv10PmzZS
And it’s not just Tik-Tok! “Other news apps caught red-handed: ABC News, Al Jazeera English, CBC News, CBS News, CNBC, Fox News, News Break, NPR, ntv Nachrichten, Reuters, Russia Today, Stern Nachrichten, The Economist, and Vice News.”
“Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows.” Absent other corroborative samples from that timeframe, I would guess it’s a case of sample contamination or a false positive. Still: a data point.
Apple today announced it will transition the Mac to its world-class custom silicon to deliver industry-leading performance and powerful new technologies. Developers can now get started updating their apps to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of Apple silicon in the Mac. This transition will also establish a common architecture across all Apple products, making it far easier for developers to write and optimize their apps for the entire ecosystem.
Apple today also introduced macOS Big Sur, the next major release of macOS, which delivers its biggest update in more than a decade and includes technologies that will ensure a smooth and seamless transition to Apple silicon. Developers can easily convert their existing apps to run on Apple silicon, taking advantage of its powerful technologies and performance. And for the first time, developers can make their iOS and iPadOS apps available on the Mac without any modifications.
To help developers get started with Apple silicon, Apple is also launching the Universal App Quick Start Program, which provides access to documentation, forums support, beta versions of macOS Big Sur and Xcode 12, and the limited use of a Developer Transition Kit (DTK), a Mac development system based on Appleâs A12Z Bionic System on a Chip (SoC).
Apple plans to ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the end of the year and complete the transition in about two years. Apple will continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come, and has exciting new Intel-based Macs in development. The transition to Apple silicon represents the biggest leap ever for the Mac.
Well, not really. The leaps from Motorola’s 68000 series to PowerPC chips, its move from legacy Mac OS to the FreeBSD/NeXTSTEP-based OS X, and the transition away from PowerPC to Intel, were all probably bigger leaps. But their transition away from Intel is still pretty big.
The A12Z chip that Apple is currently using in its latest LiDAR iPad Pro and its first generation Apple Silicon chip in the Mac mini developer transition kit does incorporate ARM CPU cores. But that ARM Architecture CPU is not the most significant reason Apple is moving away from Intel’s chips on Macs.
Apple alluded to this in referring to its own custom silicon as being an “SoC,” or System on a Chip. Over the past decade, Apple has developed a series of SoCs that incorporate essentially an entire logic board of chips that a typical PC would require into a single chip that can be mass produced and used across multiple devices from its iPhone, to iPad, to Apple TV and even HomePod.
The primary advantage of this integration was power consumption. ARM supplied licensed CPU reference design cores that provided leading compute performance per watt, leading Apple to make ARM the center core of its SoC designs. ARM cores are also the basis for Apple’s M-series components that monitor data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and barometer to efficiently track how a device is moving over time.
Snip.
In some respects, Apple’s use of ARM cores in its SoCs is similar to its use of Unix in the OS itself. Both are effectively specifications that standardize the operations of low level technology layers. In the same way that Macs are more than just Unix systems, Apple’s SoCs are more than just ARM processors.
As with Qualcomm’s modems, the customizations, optimizations, and additional layers of proprietary work that Apple adds to its A-series SoCs results in a package that’s significantly more valuable than its base components.
That reality is reflected in Apple’s custom silicon being a lot more than just an “ARM chip,” and helps to explain why Apple’s SoCs have increasingly outperformed other ARM-based SoCs developed by Qualcomm, Nvidia, Samsung, and others.
Could Apple build their own fab? With a market cap of over 1.5 trillion and $192.8 billion cash on hand, they’re one of the few companies that could without making it a “bet your company” proposition.
But I don’t think they will.
Keep in mind, TSMC just broke ground on a new 5nm, 300mm Taiwanese fab expected to cost NT$500 billion, which works out to some $16.9 billion. They also plan to build a another 5nm fab in Arizona for $12 billion. That’s a lot of capacity for Apple (one of TSMC’s biggest customers, if not the biggest) to take advantage of. (TSMC has dozens of existing fabs, but not all are equipped for the cutting edge process technology Apple needs.)
Actually, Apple already owns a fab, a former Maxim facility at 3725 N. First St. San Jose, California, which it bought in 2015. Weirdly enough, you can’t find any information about it after 2015. Could they retrofit it to make their new SoCs? The older a fab is, the less likely it is to get retrofitted for new technology, for a variety of reasons. If they weren’t already using it for CPU production, they probably wouldn’t start now. But since they only paid $18.2 million for 70,000 square feet of valuable Silicon Valley real estate, I doubt that concerns them much.
Fabbing their own CPUs has a long-rumored move on Apple’s part, which has been building up its chip design capabilities for over a decade with the acquisitions of fabless design companies like P.A. Semi, Intrinsity, Anobit, Passif Semiconductor and part of Dialog Semiconductor. With its own CPUs, Apple is finally getting the complete end-to-end control of its computing platform its long sought.
According to Apple, “With the translation technology of Rosetta 2, users will be able to run existing Mac apps that have not yet been updated, including those with plug-ins. Virtualization technology allows users to run Linux. Developers can also make their iOS and iPadOS apps available on the Mac without any modifications.” Apple’s previous emulation transitions worked pretty well, but were far from seamless. In theory, well-written Mac software should only require a recompile to work properly on Macs using Apple’s new chips. In practice, such transitions are always bumpy, and it will take a while to tune performance.
Craig Coopersmith was up early that morning as usual and typed his daily inquiry into his phone. âGood morning, Team Covid,â he wrote, asking for updates from the ICU team leaders working across 10 hospitals in the Emory University health system in Atlanta.
One doctor replied that one of his patients had a strange blood problem. Despite being put on anticoagulants, the patient was still developing clots. A second said sheâd seen something similar. And a third. Soon, every person on the text chat had reported the same thing.
âThatâs when we knew we had a huge problem,â said Coopersmith, a critical-care surgeon. As he checked with his counterparts at other medical centers, he became increasingly alarmed: âIt was in as many as 20, 30 or 40 percent of their patients.â
One month ago when the country went into lockdown to prepare for the first wave of coronavirus cases, many doctors felt confident they knew what they were dealing with. Based on early reports, covid-19 appeared to be a standard variety respiratory virus, albeit a contagious and lethal one with no vaccine and no treatment. Theyâve since seen how covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, but also the kidneys, heart, intestines, liver and brain.
Read the whole thing.
A coronavirus map based on self-reported symptoms. I note that Williamson County has only about 0.32%.
Over on Borepath, there’s a good discussion of all the known unknowns of the Wuhan Coronavirus, and all the data we don’t have.
Only 38 of the 58 SSEs that I recorded were documented in a way that permitted me to determine their date with any specificity. (And even in these cases, I sometimes had to make educated estimates because of the vague nature of the reporting.) In the case of multi-day SSEs, such as religious festivals, I picked a day corresponding to the middle of the event. Unfortunately, some of the largest SSEs, such as those at North American meat processing plants, canât be usefully pinpointed at all because the infections span multiple weeks (or even months), and the employers havenât released detailed date-tagged data.
Of the 38 SSEs for which dates could be usefully identified, about 75 percent (29/38) took place in the 26-day span between February 25th and March 21st, roughly corresponding to the period when thousands of infected COVID-19 individuals were already traveling around the world, but before social distancing and event-cancelation policies had been uniformly implemented in many of the affected countries. (A notable early outlier is Steve Walsh, who spread COVID-19 from a Singapore corporate meeting to a French ski resort to his native UK in late January and early February.) No doubt, a vast number of SSEs occurred in January and February without being reported as such, because public-health officials and journalists werenât alive to the nature or scale of the coming pandemic. But it is reassuring that, so far, April has been almost entirely bereft of publicly reported SSEs.
I was struck by how few of the SSEs originated in conditions stereotypically associated with the underclass (though a March outbreak at a Qatari migrant workers camp in the industrial area north of Doha offers one such example). Many of the early SSEs, in fact, centered on weddings, birthday parties, and other events that were described in local media as glamorous or populated by âsocialites.â Examples here include a March 7th engagement party at a Rio de Janeiro âmansionâ that attracted âhigh societyâ fly-ins from around the world, and a similarly described birthday party in Westport, CT.
It is theoretically possible that socioeconomically privileged individuals really do lack some immune-response mechanism that protects individuals who have been exposed to a wider array of infectious pathogens. (A recent report on COVID-19 surveillance testing at a Boston homeless shelter contained the stunning disclosure that 36 percent of 408 screened individuals tested positive for COVID-19. Yet the vast majority were asymptomatic, and even the few who were symptomatic did not diverge statistically from the 64 percent of tested individuals who were COVID-19-negative.) But absent more data, the more obvious explanation is that these early SSEs are linked to the intercontinental travel practices of the guests. (In the case of the Connecticut event, reports the New York Times, âa visitor from Johannesburgâa 43-year-old businessmanâfell ill on his flight home.â And the Rio party was attended by guests whoâd traveled recently from, or through New York, Belgium and Italy.) Moreover, COVID-19 outbreaks in poor communities are simply less likely to be reported, because the victims have less access to testing, high-end medical care, or media contacts.
In fact, the truly remarkable trend that jumped off my spreadsheet has nothing to do with the sort of people involved in these SSEs, but rather the extraordinarily narrow range of underlying activities. And I believe it is on this point that a close study of SSEs, even one based on such a biased and incomplete data set as the one Iâve assembled in my lay capacity, can help us:
Of the 54 SSEs on my list for which the underlying activities were identified, no fewer than nine were linked to religious services or missionary work. This includes massive gatherings such as Februaryâs weeklong Christian Open Door prayer meeting in Mulhouse, France, which has been linked to an astounding 2,500 cases; and a massive Tablighi Jamaat Islamic event in Lahore that attracted a quarter-million people. But it also includes much smaller-scale religious activities, such as proselytizing in rural Punjabi villages and a religious meeting in a Calgary home.
Nineteen of the SSEsâabout one-thirdâinvolved parties or liquor-fueled mass attendance festivals of one kind or another, including (as with the examples cited above) celebrations of weddings, engagements and birthdays.
Five of the SSEs involved funerals.
Six of the SSEs involved face-to-face business networking. This includes large-scale events such as Biogenâs notorious Boston leadership meeting in February, as well as one-on-one business meetingsâfrom the unidentified âtraveling salespersonâ who spread COVID-19 in Maine to Hisham Hamdan, a powerful sovereign-wealth fund official who spread the disease in Malaysia.
All told, 38 of the 54 SSEs for which activities were known involved one or more of these four activitiesâabout 70 percent. Indeed, the categories sometimes overlap, as with patient A1.1 in Chicago, who attended both a party and a funeral in the space of a few days; or the New Rochelle, NY man who covered the SSE trifecta of Bar Mitzvah party, synagogue services, and local funeral, all the while going to his day job as a lawyer in New York City.
But even that 70 percent figure underestimates the prevalence of these activities in COVID-19 SSEs, because my database also includes five SSEs involving two warships and three cruise shipsâthe USS Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Diamond Princess, Grand Princess and Ruby Princessâat least three of which (and probably all five) featured onboard parties.
These parties, funerals, religious meet-ups and business networking sessions all seem to have involved the same type of behaviour: extended, close-range, face-to-face conversationâtypically in crowded, socially animated spaces.
So you probably want to avoid such events for the near future. Snip.
In the case of religious SSEs, Sikhs, Christians, Jews and Muslims are all represented in the database. The virus makes no distinction according to creed, but does seem to prey on physically intimate congregations that feature some combination of mass participation, folk proselytizing and spontaneous, emotionally charged expressions of devotion. In the case of Islam, it is notable that the same movement, Tablighi Jamaat, has been responsible for massive outbreaks at completely separate events in Lahore (noted above), Delhi and Kuala Lampur. At Mulhouse, the weekâs schedule included Christian âchoir performances, collective prayer, singing, sermons from preachers, workshops, and testimony from people who said God had cured their illnesses⌠Many people came day after day, and spent hours there.â And in Punjab, dozens of Sikhs died thanks to the itinerant rural preaching of a single (now deceased) infamous septuagenarian named Baldev Singh.
Itâs worth scanning all the myriad forms of common human activity that arenât represented among these listed SSEs: watching movies in a theater, being on a train or bus, attending theater, opera, or symphony (these latter activities may seem like rarified examples, but they are important once you take stock of all those wealthy infectees who got sick in March, and consider that New York City is a major COVID-19 hot spot). These are activities where people often find themselves surrounded by strangers in densely packed roomsâas with all those above-described SSEsâbut, crucially, where attendees also are expected to sit still and talk in hushed tones.
Again, read the whole thing.
Speaking of things you’re not supposed to do: “Bangladesh: Over 100,000 gather for funeral of Islamic teacher, defying coronavirus lockdown.” What could possibly go wrong? (On the other hand, if this doesn’t turn into a superspreader event, then we have some valuable data about that seemingly invariant infection curve and/or the role of sunlight/warm climates in preventing infection.)
Speaking of superspreader events, want to guess who owned that South Dakota meat packing plant with the heavy infection rate? “In September 2013 Smithfield Foods was acquired by Chinaâs biggest meat processor, Shuanghui International Holdings, in the largest acquisition ever of a U.S. company by a Chinese one.”
Speaking of China’s perfidy, while they rest of the world was struggling with the Wuhan coronavirus, they thought it was the perfect time to arrest dissidents in Hong Kong:
Fifteen activists between 24 and 81 years old were rounded up on suspicion of organizing, publicizing or taking part in several unauthorized assemblies between August and October and will face prosecution, the police said on Saturday without disclosing their names, following protocol.
The arrested democratic heavyweights included the veteran lawyers Martin Lee and Margaret Ng, the media tycoon Jimmy Lai and the former opposition legislators Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan and Leung Kwok-hung, political parties and aides said.
Half the residents of a Boston homeless shelter had the Wuhan Coronavirus, but none showed any symptoms.
If the Malevolent Donkey Party was actively seeking to plunge the country into an economic tailspin, while still maintaining some level of deniability to the credulous suckers out there, exactly what would it be doing differently? It would be pretty much doing exactly what it is doing right now â shilling for the bat-gobbling ChiComs, delaying needed assistance to keep America working, and generally trying to keep us all locked in the dark in perpetuity.
Itâs fair to assume that you intend the expected consequences of the actions you take, and the consequence of the actions the Democrats are taking is economic ruin. The indisputable fact is that theyâre totally cool with that if that is what gets them back into power.
Democrats are never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, and this Wuhan Flu is a very good crisis indeed if your goal is leftist hegemony. The Trump economy was booming after the near-decade of the Obama doldrums, and people were getting a taste of prosperity. But a happy, prosperous America is something the Democrat dudes canât abide. All the Democrats had to sell were recycled cries of âRACISM!â and âRUSSIA!â and their standard-bearer was that sinewy weirdo Grandpa Badfinger, who was promising to drag us all back into the nightmare of globalist failure. The future looked grim, which means it actually looked bright for the rest of us.
So, the Chinese coronavirus was a dream come true, a deus ex pangolin that finally, after an endless series of leaks, impeachments, investigations, and media meltdowns, might be the magic bullet that actually takes Trump down.
Am I saying that the Democrats are exploiting the pandemic for their own cheesy advantage? Well, yeah. Everything they are doing is consistent with that. Everything. No, in the abstract, many of them would probably not prefer that tens of thousands of Americans die (I get enough Twitter death wishes to know, from their own filthy mouths, that some absolutely do want us to die), but their attitude seems to be that if life gives you tens of thousands of dead Americans, make political lemonade.
How can Nancy Pelosi worry about your piddling lives when there’s so much ice cream to eat?
“U.S. Intelligence Knew Russia Preferred Hillary to Trump, But John Brennan Hid the Truth, Ex-NSC Chief Says.” This story probably deserves more attention than I can give it right now…
Iran: Watch our tiny boats harass the Great Satan! President Trump: I hope you like your gunboats getting destroyed.
Won’t someone please spare a moment to think about how the coronavirus outbreak has derailed the Austin politicians’ plans to spend billions on their toy trains? (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)
Speaking of Austin, the coronavirus has closed landmark Austin restaurants Threadgill’s…
Is Apple moving to ARM for Mac? They’re planning to have their own Apple-designed chips fabbed at TSMC on the latter’s 5nm process. Intel, the current supplier for Mac CPUs, isn’t slatted to hit 5nm until 20203, and there’s long been talk that bringing up yield on their existing 10nm process has been in a world of hurt for a while.
Everything’s coming up Bernie (including a Joe Rogan endorsement), Biden tranny panders, Buttigieg does a Jeb!, Bloomberg ops get sick bennies, Yang rises, and WaPo worries about screaming ghosts. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Also: The Iowa caucuses are next week. Our long national nightmare is finally coming to a middle!
Polls
Suffolk/USA Today (Iowa): Biden 25, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 18, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6, Yang 3, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1. No link to crosstabs/sample size/etc.
Emerson: Biden 30, Sanders 27, Warren 13, Yang 8, Bloomberg 7, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1, Bennet 1, Steyer 1, Delaney 1, Patrick 0. Yang in fourth here!
WBUR (New Hampshire): Sanders 29, Buttigieg 17, Biden 14, Warren 13, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 5, Yang 5, Stehyer 2, Bloomberg 1, Patrick 1, Delaney 0. Samples size of 426. Sanders has doubled his support in a month.
CNN: Sanders 27, Biden 24, Warren 14, Buttigieg 11, Bloomberg 5, Klobuchar 4, Yang 4, Steyer 2. I think this is the first CNN poll that has Sanders over Biden.
Boston Globe/Suffolk (New Hampshire): Sanders 16.4, Biden 14.8, Buttigieg 12.2, Warren 9.8, Yang 5.6, Gabbard 5.4, Klobuchar 4.6, Steyer 2.6, Patrick .6, Delaney 0.0.
Focus on Rural America (Iowa): Biden 24, Warren 18, Buttigieg 16, Sanders 14, Klobuchar 11, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 1 Bennet 1, Bloomberg 1, Delaney 0, Patrick 0. Sample size of 500 and heavily biased questions, which you would expect from a hard left interest group.
Emerson (New Jersey): Biden 28, Sanders 25, Warren 15, Bloomberg 9, Buttigieg 6, Yang 6, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 3, Delaney 2, Bennet 0, Steyer 0, Patrick 0. Sample size of 388.
Up until this point, weâve been pretty hesitant to read too much into any one of the post-debate polls â largely because for each poll that showed Sen. Bernie Sanders on the upswing, there was another poll that showed him on the downturn. But now with four more national polls and six early-state surveys (three from Iowa and three from New Hampshire) since we last checked in, weâve got a much clearer picture of where things stand. And one thing thatâs immediately obvious is that Sanders really has gained in the polls.
Sandersâs chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates has increased by 4 percentage points since Friday, up from 22 percent to 26 percent in our forecast. But notably, his gain hasnât come at the expense of former Vice President Joe Biden. In fact, Bidenâs odds are unchanged â he still has a 42 percent shot at winning a majority of pledged delegates, which was also the case on Friday. Sen Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, slipped 5 points since Friday, and is now roughly tied with Buttigieg in our overall delegate forecast. (Buttigiegâs odds remain the same, and the chance that no candidate wins a majority of pledged delegates ticked up very slightly.)
The second thing thatâs immediately obvious from this latest batch of polls is that the race in Iowa is still incredibly close. Biden has slightly better odds than Sanders in our forecast, but itâs probably better to think of the two of them as roughly tied, with Buttigieg and Warren not too far behind. That said, this weekendâs polls did change the picture in New Hampshire with Sanders vaulting into the lead, which at least partially explains some of his overall gains in the forecast.
Sanders is looking good in New Hampshire, but Iowa is a toss-up.
In a country where anti-Semitic attacks have spiked and the president has sometimes hesitated to condemn neo-Nazis, two men who celebrated their bar mitzvahs in the 1950s suddenly want to talk about their Jewishness.
âI know Iâm not the only Jewish candidate running for president,â Mike Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, told a packed synagogue here today, referencing his Democratic-primary rival Senator Bernie Sanders. âBut I am the only one who doesnât want to turn America into a kibbutz.â For the first time in American history, this niche joke fit neatly into a campaign for the White House. And for the first time in American history, thereâs a good chance that a Jewish candidate for president will beat another Jewish candidate to become a major partyâs nominee.
Before this campaign, neither Bloomberg nor Sanders spent much time publicly discussing, let alone celebrating, their Jewishness. But a few weeks ago, Sanders was ice-skating during a Hanukkah party at a Des Moines rink, lighting a giant menorah with a blowtorch and mouthing the words to a few of the Hanukkah songs. And Bloomberg was here, making a direct appeal to Jewish voters complete with deli references and Catskills-style rim shots. He quoted Leviticus (a book he identified by its Hebrew name, Vaykira) in Hebrew and said, âLo ta-amode, do not stand by idly while your neighborâs blood is shed,â stumbling slightly over the pronunciation, much like how he misplaced the emphasis on the word kibbutz.
To those who know Bloomberg well and even spent years working for him, this is a surprising turn. As mayor, he was more of the stop-by-synagogue-on-Rosh-Hashanah kind of observer, not the guy whoâd make a not-so-subtle reference to Donald Trump as âa pharaoh who knows not Joseph,â and speak about âstanding together, rejecting demagogues who try to seduce us by playing us against each other, and uniting behind the only shield that can protect us: our common values as American citizens and our common humanity as Godâs children.â Bloomberg went all in, going directly from âWhen Moses descended from Mount Sinai, he smashed the golden calf and raised high a tablet of laws,â to noting that Monday is âthe 75th anniversary of Auschwitzâs liberation,â and recalling his own visit to the death camp a few years ago.
This wasnât a speech like any presidential candidate has delivered beforeâand that includes Sanders. Before launching his 2020 campaign, Sanders rarely discussed his Jewish roots, publicly or privately. Sanders superfans know he spent a few months after college in Israel working on a kibbutz, but heâs talked about that more through his socialism than through any connection to the Jewish state. For years, Sanders referred to his father as a âPolish immigrant,â which some saw as a pointed erasure of his identityâwhen Eli Sanders arrived in America, after all, his passport from the Polish government would have listed his nationality as âJew.â Jewish leaders have criticized him for decisions like speaking at the evangelical Liberty University in 2015 on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
Obscure prediction: If Sanders sweeps the first three, there will be insane pressure on Klobuchar and Warren to stay in until Super Tuesday to keep him from racking up delegates in MN and MA.
Biden has a big corruption problem and it makes him a weak candidate. I know it seems crazy, but a lot of the voters we need â independents and people who might stay home â will look at Biden and Trump and say: âTheyâre all dirty.â
It looks like âMiddle Classâ Joe has perfected the art of taking big contributions, then representing his corporate donors at the cost of middle- and working-class Americans. Converting campaign contributions into legislative favors and policy positions isnât being âmoderateâ. It is the kind of transactional politics Americans have come to loathe.
Joe Biden is locking down support from powerful New York donors who have spent the past year flirting with multiple candidates, setting him up for a major cash boost just as 2020 voting begins.
Bidenâs campaign â sometimes with help from the candidate himself â has spent the last few weeks reaching out to big donors who have collectively raised tens of millions for past presidential campaigns and are not yet attached to 2020 rivals. The Biden camp, which suffered serious money problems in the fall, came to them with a message: The time is now to join up and back Biden to beat President Donald Trump, after the former vice president lasted the whole year as the Democratic polling frontrunner, despite frequent predictions that his campaign was about to collapse.
The message landed. And Bidenâs campaign will cash in on those efforts in mid-February, when Biden will head to New York City for a pair of fundraisers hosted by a litany of Wall Street power players, many of whom previously helped Kamala Harrisâ campaign or split their support among several candidates in 2019. Originally scheduled as one event, organizers had to split the Feb. 13 fundraising blowout in two because so many donors new to the Biden fold signed up to help.
Hosts for a cocktail-hour fundraiser will include financiers and former Harris supporters Blair Effron and Marc Lasry, both of whom were major donors to Hillary Clinton, as well as Jon Henes, a lawyer and Harrisâ former finance chair, and Tom Nides, a Clinton donor and former State Department aide. Later that evening, another set of major donors will fete Biden, including former U.S. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley, Blackstone president Jonathan Gray and PR executive Michael Kempner â another who was once a bundler for Harris, who dropped out of the 2020 race in December.
Biden succumbs to tranny pandering:
Letâs be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.
Billionaire presidential long shot Michael Bloomberg is trying to poach staff from other campaigns with outsized salaries and fancy perks like three catered meals a day, an iPhone 11 and a MacBook Pro, according to sources.
Bloomberg is paying state press secretaries $10,000 a month, compared to the average going rate of $4,500 for other candidates and state political directors are making $12,000 a month, more than some senior campaign advisers earn, sources said.
National political director Carlos Sanchez pulls in $360,000 a year. Kellyanne Conway, Trumpâs political director, made $240,000 in 2016.
Every Bloomberg staffer gets a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 11 on day one. They also enjoy three catered meals daily.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Various pundit sorts debate the effectiveness of Bloomberg’s billions. “Is there even a way to effectively spend another billion or $2 billion in a money-drenched election year? “There’s only so much airtime you can buy.'”
Jim McLaughlin, a Republican strategist who worked as a consultant on Bloomberg’s mayoral campaigns, doubts Bloomberg will really spend nine figures this year, suspecting he is dangling the promise of the massive payout mainly to curry favor with Democrats.
“Do I think he can spend $2 billion? Of course. Do I think he will? No,” McLaughlin said.
And he questioned the impact of that money, either way.
After all, the most expensive presidential campaign in history was Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, and she wasn’t able to stop Trump, though she did win the popular vote. She spent almost twice what Trump did per electoral vote won.
“Donald Trump was significantly outspent,” McLaughlin said, “and at the end of the day, it didn’t matter.”
When Pete Buttigieg holds âbig rally type eventsâ in South Carolina, âitâs mostly white folks showing up,â he acknowledged ruefully Thursday night. And his struggle to fix that problem has become an existential threat to his presidential ambitions.
Buttigiegâs low standing with black voters has been a long-running theme, and as he and his campaign argued that he simply wasnât well-known enough, it is one he has worked to correct. Over the past month and a half, he has invested more money advertising in South Carolina, where a majority of Democrats are African American, than any of the non-billionaire Democrats running for president.
But the more than $2 million Buttigieg poured into TV and radio ads, some featuring black supporters touting the former South Bend (Ind.) mayor, hasnât budged his stubbornly low poll numbers in the state â 2 percent among African American Democrats in a recent Fox News poll.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She really hates Bernie.
âI just donât want him to get out there and say the revolution is working, [that] people âfelt the Bern,ââ she says, before quickly leaving the room to beat him to a speech. Clinton adds that she found his socialist proposals unrealistic and phony. âI had people in my campaign say, âJust say ââFree college.ââ Millennials love it,â â she says. âAnd I said âno.â â
Whenever Sanders is onscreen, his underscoring is brooding and villainous, like Darth Vader just took off his helmet for a breather. In a hallway before a debate in New Hampshire, Sanders asks a tense Clinton how she feels about his suit. âButtoned or unbuttoned?â he says. Irked, she tells him to undo the button as soon as he gets âworked up.â
Last week, it was revealed that Clinton said of her former rival in the doc: âNobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. Itâs all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.â
You would not believe how black that pot is! Here’s a Truthout commentator who thinks she’s running.
In the interview, Clinton is asked if she has considered jumping into the 2020 presidential race. âI have had so many people [urge me to],â she replied. âEvery day. And Iâm grateful for peopleâs confidence, but I did think it was right for me to step back. Iâll do anything I can to defeat the current incumbent, and to reverse a lot of his damaging policies. Thankfully, I still have a voice and a following.â
I canât simply dismiss this as another example of a politician who doesnât know when to recede. I donât believe this is just Clinton acting out because Iowa canât throw a party without inviting her. This interview, and that pointedly vicious quote about Sanders, will explode the rift between the progressive candidates and the establishment candidates on the doorstep of the seasonâs first caucus. It will exacerbate the tensions already in place to a clamorous degree.
I believe it is deliberate on two levels. First, this is the establishment standard-bearer jumping into the fray in a moment when the establishment is conspicuously worried about the campaigns of Sanders and Warren. I have been nursing a fear that the Democratic Party might prefer a Trump victory over losing control of the party, and this sudden broadside from Clinton has only exacerbated those concerns.
He may be right, but he omits the other probably-even-more-true side of that equation: The radical left may also view losing to Trump acceptable if it means gaining control of the party. This is precisely the scenario that played out in Texas as it went from a one-party Democratic state to a one-party Republican state.
Second, Hillary is slated for release in March, an enormously important month that will see 29 primaries and caucuses take place in both the states and the territories. Super Tuesday falls on March 3, and will include make-or-break primary votes in California, Texas, Virginia, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio….Hillary Clinton seems to be hoping for a brokered Democratic convention so she can offer herself up as the âreasonableâ compromise candidate.
WHAT CHEER, IowaâDonât let the name fool you: What Cheer is a dreary little town. Other than the gas station, the most notable place in the city is an old building that apparently used to house the What Cheer Telephone Company, whatever that was. Today, cheap white curtains are drawn across the windows. It looks like someone is living there.
John Delaney is here at dusk on a Friday night in January because heâs still running for president. Did you know he was running for president? Probably not. If you did once knowâDelaney was actually the first Democrat to declare his candidacy, way back in July 2017âyou probably forgot. And if you did know he was still running, the question youâre probably asking is the one I am here to explore: Why? Why is a candidate whoâs barely registering in any poll still traipsing across Iowa day after day when he has absolutely no chance of winning, or even of seeming like more than an outlying blip on the radar?
I’ve wondered that myself for months. But the Delaney campaign is like the This Is Spinal Tap of Presidential campaigns:
Today began with an event at a pizza place in the small central-Iowa city of Montezuma, which 12 people attended. This evening, the door-knocking starts at a house across the street from the old telephone-company building. No answer. At the second house, a light in the front hall illuminates a Christmas tree, but no one answers the door here either. Third house, also no answer. Finally, at the fourth house a man wearing pajama bottoms answers the door. After listening to Delaney make his pitch for six or seven minutes, he says that while heâs committed to voting for a Democrat in the general election, heâs not planning to caucusâand that if he was, heâd probably go with Andrew Yang, because he likes Yangâs proposed Freedom Dividend, his signature policy of providing a guaranteed basic income of $1,000 a month to all Americans.
âBut that canât happen!â Delaney says.
Itâs quickly evident that Delaney canât get this voter, but courtesy dictates that he now listen politely while the man talks about how he wants to fix up the shed across the road.
After that, Delaneyâs small caravan, a big blue-and-red bus trailed by a car, rolls on. No one is home at the next two houses. When a woman pulls into the driveway of the second house, Delaneyâs campaign manager tries to talk to her, but she walks in the back door and doesnât come out again. Up a hill and around a corner is another house that the campaign staff have identified as belonging to a Democratic voter. An old man opens the door. He says heâs recovering from eye surgery but that he doesnât like Donald Trump and is happy to talk. Finallyâa prospect! He says the main thing heâs looking for in a candidate is honesty. Delaney makes his pitch, but the man is soon trying to wrap up the conversation. âHope you do well,â the man says. Delaney invites him to a free dinner that the campaign is hosting the next town over. The man just smiles noncommittally.
At this late stage of a very long presidential campaign that has by any conventional measure been remarkably unsuccessful, this actually counts as a pretty good hour for Delaney. How, I asked him as he walked away from the old manâs house, does he keep his head up?
âIâm disappointed it hasnât gone better, but I think itâs a privilege to do this,â he said. âI meet people who are really struggling. And I realize, you know, I have really no problems. And the opportunity to make a difference in peopleâs lives isâwhat better way to spend my time?â
Has a Union-Leader op ed where he says that “Divisiveness is America’s biggest hurdle.” If only the political party whose nomination he’s running for could bring themselves to accept the results of the 2016 election…
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently it’s “Edward-Isaac Dovere interviews no-hopers week,” because he did the same for Patrick:
Pretty much everyone hates what the Democratic primary race has become. Itâs gone on too long, cost too much money, and tended to reward people whoâve been repeating the same lines for years. Pretty much everyone also hates the debates. (How many people watched last weekâs debate and saw a future president? How many people saw someone who theyâre confident can beat Donald Trump?) And pretty much everyone hates what the process has churned out: A Des Moines Register poll three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, and 14 months after the campaign started, showed that 60 percent of people still hadnât made up their minds. The New York Times endorsed two candidates. âPeople like the field, but I donât think they feel that great about the front-runners,â John Delaney, who is still winding down the final days of his own candidacy, told me a few weeks ago. New York magazineâs latest cover headline nailed the Democratic panic: âWell, Here We Are.â
And here I am, in the lobby restaurant of a Marriott, with a candidate whoâs telling me itâs not too late to do something about all this. Deval Patrick says voters have been telling him directly that they like him, that theyâre ready to go with him, or at least consider him. âI meet donors who say, âI am so there; I just want to see this in the polls, and then I want to bundle for you.â What are you waiting for? If you already think I contribute something that the rest of the field doesnât, why are you waiting for permission from pundits, pollsters, the party, somebody else?â Patrick said. Iâve heard the same thing from people whoâve been thinking about writing checks. More often, Iâve heard people tell me that they canât bring themselves to be a part of this.
When the lights in the lobby keep swelling high and low, and the manager comes over to apologize, he doesnât recognize the former Massachusetts governor. Neither does the waiter.
Thatâs the problem for Patrick. He got in a year later than he was planning to, because his wife was diagnosed with cancer in late 2018. Then he spent this past fall stressing about how far off course the primary race seemed to be spinning, before deciding in November to go for it. Thatâs a whole year he didnât spend getting better known, or building any kind of organization. By the time he did jump in, he had to argue with campaign staff heâd never met before about whether to spend days chasing the media exposure they said he needed or follow his gut and campaign more deliberately, one on one, the way he had in his first race, when heâd pulled off his out-of-nowhere win for the governorship of Massachusetts. Heâs annoyed about old friends and supporters whoâve been smiling to his faceâand then telling reporters like me that theyâre heartbroken to see what a flop his campaign seems to be so far.
Not sure “flopping” is quite accurate, since flopping usually makes a sound. He announced support for slavery reparations, because of course he did. That worked out so well for Kamala Harris…
His rise clearly troubles establishment Democrats who are uneasy with his far-left agenda. Among Sandersâs most notable detractors are mainstream Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The former president, for instance, is reported to be so âanxiousâ about Sandersâs standing that heâs contemplating publicly repudiating him (although some Obama allies deny this account).
Obama and Clinton may have unwittingly contributed to Sandersâs rise, but they are right to be concerned. The man has no business being anywhere near the Oval Office â not even on a guided tour. The fact that the socialist senator is considered a national leader is a disgraceful blemish on the Democratic Party, a party once comprised by men such as John F. Kennedy, who fought communists, while Sanders defended them.
Weâve seen a rash of establishment-minded Democrats speak out against Sanders in recent weeks, but polls suggest itâs done little to stop his rise. The Vermont senator was at or near the top of several early state and national primary polls over the weekend. Weâve heard everyone from Pete Buttigieg to Rahm Emanuel raising concerns about Sandersâ ability to beat President Donald Trump and help vulnerable down-ballot Democrats this fall, even as passionate progressives rally behind him. For now, establishment Democrats are girding for a fight. And the ghosts of 2016 are screaming.
“The ghosts of 2016 are screaming” sounds like an impressive turn of phrase, until you realize that it’s either meaningless, or can mean any of a dozen contradictory things. Is Sanders going to wound Biden so badly he can’t win? Is Trump being underestimated again? Are the shades of Prince and David Bowie going to rise up to haunt the race? “Sanders Apologizes to Biden for Bringing Up Biden’s Corruption Problem.” Bernie takes on JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon for daring to dis socialism. He has Alexandria Ocasio Cortez out on the trail for him as a surrogate in Iowa. BoldMoveCotton.jpg.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s one of the few candidates still schlepping around Iowa a week before the caucuses, due to either the impeachment farce or other candidates having gone all-in on New Hampshire. Can you imagine the glorious screw-job Steyer would wreck on the race if he won or even placed in Iowa? Deeply unlikely, but stranger things have happened in politics. Can he win Nevada? Since Bloomberg didn’t make the ballot, possibly. And I love this photo of him:
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Border apprehensions are down almost 70% since May, meaning those border detention facilities Democrats love to yammer about are no longer overcrowded. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The first rule of Frozen 2 Machete Brawl Club is is you don’t talk about Frozen 2 Machete Brawl Club. Bonus: This takes place in Birmingham, UK, and the video displays an awful lot of that vibrant diversity the last Labour government imported…
A look at how details of Steve Job’s illness were withheld from the public…and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Speaking of futuristic vehicles, I don’t think that this is eligible for Iowahawk’s Car ID Service…
How much for financial fraud, how much for voter fraud?
In Louisville, a shipment was inspected at the Louisville Mail Facility. The parcel contained 238 counterfeit driver licenses and 536 blank card stocks. The documents were turned over to CBP Fraudulent Document Analysis Unit (FDAU) for additional research. pic.twitter.com/bzI1ojUTGe
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Lots of China and technology news this time around.
How much public, firsthand evidence is there of this so-called Ukrainian quid pro quo? Right now, zero: “The problem with this narrative is that all we have to rely on is Mr. [William] Taylor’s opening statement and leaks from Democrats. What we don’t know is how Mr. Taylor responded to questions, or what he knew first-hand versus what he concluded on his own, because like all impeachment witnesses he testified in secret. Chairman Adam Schiff, with the approval of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refuses to release any witness transcripts.”
Let ye who has never brushed a congressional aideâs hair in the nude, taken naked bong hits, gotten an Iron Cross tattoo, and posted wife-sharing pics to a wife-swapping site cast the first stone.
We all know that if she was a Republican, this would dominate news cycles for weeks on end…
Brett Kavanaugh: *has a beer*
Media: TAKE. HIM. DOWN.
Katie Hill: Does drugs, has multiple inappropriate sexual relationships with employees, posts exhibitionist pictures on Reddit, does "wifesharing," etc. etc.
Media: She's living her best life, give her some privacy.
>Parliament flooded with tractors >Doors rammed >Army deployed >Angry politicians
This has had little to no traction outside the Dutch sphere, so Ive decided to make an English thread detailing the events on the 3 major protests pic.twitter.com/u7W3RWWPdz
This is a bad look: “Apple CEO becomes chairman of China university board.” What’s a little widespread rape and torture next to the almighty buck? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Universe Is Made of Tiny Bubbles Containing Mini-Universes, Scientists Say.” An elegant, worm ouroboros structure which answers many questions, but since it’s from vice Motherboard, a salt shaker is probably in order.
Today, the vegetarian ideology is not a stand-alone philosophy. It is tied inexorably to other ideologies such as socialism, globalism and extremist forms of environmentalism. There are very few vegetarian promoters that are not politically motivated. This has caused a rash of propaganda, attempting to rewrite the history of the human diet to fit their bizarre narrative.
Even though human beings have been omnivores for millions of years, the anti-meat campaign claims that humans were actually long time vegetarians. They do this by comparing humans to our closest evolutionary relatives, like chimpanzees and gorillas, and arguing that these animals have a strict vegetable diet (which is not exactly true).
Of course, Native American tribes, living closest to how our prehistoric ancestors lived long ago, had meat heavy diets, but don’t expect the environmentalists to accept this reality. What they conveniently do not mention is that over 2 million years ago human ancestors broke from their vegetable diet and began eating meat. Not only this, but the diet changed our very physical makeup. We grew far stronger, and smarter.
Yes, that’s right, the rise of meat in the human diet tracks almost exactly with the rise of human intelligence and advances in tools and technology.
My theory is that “ethical humanism” among our chattering classes is a low-calorie substitute for traditional religion, and forgoing meat is our punishment for environmental sins. Either way, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it. Speaking of spinach…
Russian fighter with freakishly large biceps nicknamed Popeye gets clock cleaned by guy 20 years older. You’ve seen those “Skipped Leg Day” memes? This guy looks like he skipped everything but biceps day for five years.
I regard GNU Foundation head Richard Stallman as a fanatic who’s just a few steps shy of being a complete lunatic. But he’s right to defy Social Justice Warrior-types who want him removed for objecting to the lynch mob regarding the late Marvin Minsky’s minimal ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Biden’s going broke, Clinton accuses Gabbard of being a Russian agent, Angry Amy came to play, Tom Steyer’s the Make-A-Wish candidate, and Messam pulls in a whole $5 in Q3 campaign contributions. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Q3 Fundraising
Updated numbers from candidate filings. One name jumps from the bottom to the top of the list, thinks to a big check from himself:
Steyer only comes out on top because he donated $47,597,697 of his own money to his campaign, as against $2,047,433 from other contributors.
Delany did not kick any of his own money in this time around, which indicates that he’s either thinking of hanging it up or just coasting to Iowa before packing it in.
Messam: SIC. See below.
I should go back and link to early actual Q3 FEC documents for early reporters for the sake of formatting consistancy, but I don’t have time right now.
Emerson (Iowa): Biden 23, Warren 23, Buttigieg 16, Sanders 13, Yang 5, Bullock 4, Booker 3, Steyer 2, Gabbard 2, Harris 2, Klobuchar 1, Williamson 1, Bennet 1. It appears that Buttigieg’s huge fundraising haul is starting to bring results from pouring organizational money into Iowa. And this is the first poll I can recall Bullock registering support above background noise.
Joe Biden: Heâs old, but he looked energetic and spoke clearly. He made a few errors â whoâs âclipping couponsâ in âthe stock market?â But in general, he was forceful and seemed knowledgeable. In particular, he nailed Sen. Elizabeth Warren on how her health care plan would increase taxes on the middle class. And he was surprisingly sensible in dismissing âcourt-packingâ schemes. His final remarks were a bit over the top, but after three hours Iâd probably have been raving, too.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: When she challenged her colleagues who wanted to âend endless warsâ but who were also criticizing President Trump from withdrawing troops from Syria, she didnât back down, and blasted the New York Times and a CNN contributor for calling her a âRussian assetâ for criticizing what she called the âregime change warâ in Syria. She then challenged Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who says we shouldnât have troops in the Middle East at all, on the issue. On this and other issues, she was firm, clear, and was willing to buck the herd. And in her closing remarks, quoting Lincoln, she said âI donât see deplorables, I see fellow Americans.â
Mayor Pete Buttigieg: He made mincemeat of Beto OâRourke, who dodged a question from Anderson Cooper on how he would enforce a ban on assault weapons. Beto was left looking flustered and trying to claim that Mayor Pete was insensitive to victims of violence, which was a bad look for him.
Bernie Sanders: A guy who can have a heart attack and come back a few weeks later, yelling louder than anyone else for three hours, is winning. He was asked about his health, and he answered loudly, and then charmingly thanked his post-attack well-wishers. And he scored on Biden with his remarks about bipartisan support for the Iraq war.
Losers: O’Rourke, Warren, Castro (“Several times I forgot he was even on the stage for 30 minutes or more.”) and Steyer.
Notice that Buttigieg is at 12 percent in Iowa in the RealClearPolitics average, and 8.7 percent in New Hampshire. That may not sound like much, but nobody else outside of the big three is anywhere near double digits anywhere. The South Bend mayorâs rise is Exhibit A of counterevidence when other candidates whine that the process is rigged in favor of well-known candidates who have been in politics forever.
Yeah, but I’m convinced Buttigieg had big money recruiting and backing him before he ever got into the race.
Klobuchar had, until last night, been a strong contender for the biggest âwhy is she running?â status. She wasnât the biggest centrist or the most progressive, sheâs from a state that might, theoretically, be competitive this cycle but isnât most cycles and up until last night, âMinnesota Niceâ appeared to be a synonym for boring. What does Klobuchar do well? It turns out she can politely but firmly poke holes in Warrenâs arguments, making the Massachusetts senatorâs high-dudgeon âyouâre attacking me because Iâm the only one standing up for the peopleâ schtick sound overwrought and ridiculous.
âAt least Bernieâs being honest here and saying how heâs going to pay for this and that taxes are going to go up. And Iâm sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that, and I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where weâre going to send the invoice.â
âI appreciate Elizabethâs work. But, again, the difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.â
âI want to give a reality check here to Elizabeth, because no one on this stage wants to protect billionaires. Not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires.â
What we saw last night â particularly in the one-on-one concern-off held by Buttigieg and Beto OâRourke on gun violence â is that progressive Democrats get really used to being able to play the âI care about people, and you donâtâ card against their opponents, and theyâre really shocked and indignant when their own style of criticism is turned against them. You get the feeling that Buttigieg really sees OâRourke as a political dilettante, play-acting at leadership having never had that much executive responsibility in office.
Winners: Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, was seemingly everyoneâs target. Biden targeted her. Kamala Harris targeted her. Tulsi Gabbard and others seemed to think that she was the candidate to beat during the debate, and so they tried. However, none of the blows really stuck. She also had some help from the producers of the debate, covering for Warren against an attack from Gabbard in particular. Her ability to withstand the attacks helped her image a bit, and she is definitely going to come out at least breaking even here.
Pete Buttigieg stood out more than I think people expected. His shot at Beto OâRourke knocked the Texas Democrat out. He scrapped with Warren and didnât come across as foolish as others did. He appears now to be vying for the very base that Joe Biden has, and he looked very good doing it. If Biden falters, right now itâs not difficult to see those voters moving to Buttigieg.
Bernie Sanders was very Bernie Sanders, and that did not hurt him. In fact, a little added sympathy from his heart issues late last week helped him perhaps dodge some attacks from the others on the stage. Nothing really stood out, but like Warren and Biden, ânot losingâ a debate with their level of support and backing them is as good as a win IF no one else stands out. And⌠no one did.
The Losers: Joe Biden, Beto OâRourke, Kamala Harris
Joe Biden was, once again, seemingly left alone for the most part. Up until the end of the debate, he wasnât really hit too hard, and even after the divisions over Medicare For All, Bidenâs record in the Senate and as Vice President, and a rather chauvinist attempt to take credit for Elizabeth Warrenâs time as head of the consumer finance agency she touted as a major accomplishment, Biden still stood tall. The problem is that all of this happened to Biden as an afterthought. Everyone was focused on Warren. Everyone was worried about Sandersâ health. Everyone was looking for Buttigieg and others to step up. And no one really cared how well Biden did. That is a bad thing for him.
Beto OâRourke has a glass jaw, and everyone knows it now. When Pete Buttigieg landed a full-on blow, saying âI donât need a lesson in courage from you,â it was pretty much over for the furriest Democratic candidate. Beto came off as weak and, when not talking about guns, he frankly appeared to lack the backbone necessary to advocate as equally for his other unconstitutional pursuits. If he doesnât fold this week, then heâs even more foolish than we knew.
Plus this: “What on Godâs green earth is Tom Steyer even doing here? He exists on this debate stage solely to make people wish he didnât. There is no reason for him here. Heâs not even a good distraction from the other candidates. Heâs just⌠there.”
They debated breaking up big tech. And the hill Kamala Harris died on was…Trump’s Twitter account.
There are seven other active candidates legitimate enough to make major media lists who will not be on the stage â and are very unlikely to meet the tougher criteria for the November and subsequent debates â who are nonetheless still in the field….Messam hasnât even made some lists and has been on others because, well, heâs an elected official, not some random schmo claiming to run for president to advertise his dry-cleaning business or whatever. The city of which he is mayor, Miramar, Florida, is actually larger that Pete Buttigiegâs South Bend. But he hasnât come within a mile of a debate stage. Nor has former congressman and retired admiral Joe Sestak, who has been in the race since June but hasnât made much of an impression.
There are five others, though, who did make the June and July debates, but none since then, and havenât dropped out. Of these, author and self-help guru Marianne Williamson has shown some grassroots fundraising chops (she met the donor threshold for tonightâs debate, but only had one qualifying poll); she raised a non-negligible $3.1 million in the third quarter, double her second-quarter haul. There are two barely surviving candidates with fine rĂŠsumĂŠs and theoretical paths to the nomination if Joe Biden ever crashed and burned: the self-styled moderates Colorado senator Michael Bennet and Montana governor Steve Bullock. Congressman John Delaney is kind of sui generis: His personal wealth makes fundraising for anything other than debate qualification largely unnecessary, but heâs been in the race longer than anyone and had one debate (in July) in which he got lots of exposure â yet still is in nowheresville in terms of measurable support. Heâs said heâll stay in until Iowa no matter what.
When Ohio congressman Tim Ryan suspended his campaign in the wake of the Dayton shootings in August, a lot of people figured heâd be formally out of the race before long. But he hasnât dropped out, technically, though heâs simultaneously running a House reelection campaign.
The Democratic Partyâs most powerful donors are running out of options in the presidential race. Their warhorse Joe Biden is stumbling, while the other corporate-minded candidates lag far behind. For party elites, with less than four months to go before voting starts in caucuses and primaries, 2020 looks like Biden or bust.
A key problem for the Democratic establishment is that the âelectabilityâ argument is vaporizing in the political heat. Bidenâs shaky performances on the campaign trail during the last few months have undermined the notion that heâs the best bet to defeat Donald Trump. The latest polling matchups say that Biden and his two strong rivals for the nomination, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, would each hypothetically beat Trump by around 10 points.
As such realities sink in, the focus is turning to where the partyâs entrenched power brokers donât want it to go â the actual merits of the candidates in terms of political history, independence from big-money special interests, and longtime commitment to positions now favored by most Democrats.
With the electability claim diminished, Biden faces a steep climb on the merits of his record and current policy stances. The looming crisis for the Biden forces is reflected in the fact that his top campaign operatives have already publicly conceded he could lose the first two nomination contests, the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.
And in an era when small donations from the grassroots are adding up to big financial hauls, Biden is so uninspiring that heâs losing the money race by a wide margin. Despite his relentless harvesting of big checks from hedge-fund managers, rich CEOs and the like, Bidenâs campaign raised a total of only about $15 million in the last quarter, compared to around $25 million that Sanders and Warren each received. The New York Times noted that the duoâs fundraising totals are markers for âthe collective enthusiasm in the party for progressive candidates pushing messages of sweeping change.â
But Biden continues to greatly benefit from the orientations of corporate media outlets that loudly echo the concerns of corporate Democrats (often called âmoderatesâ or âcentristsâ) and their kindred spirits in realms like Wall Street. Rarely inclined to dispel the longstanding myth of âLunch Bucket Joe,â reporting has been sparse on his legislative legacy in service to such industries as credit-card companies, banks and the healthcare business.
Media affection for Biden is matched by the biases of corporate media that â for many years â have routinely spun coverage of Sanders in negative ways, amplifying the messages from people at the helm of huge corporations. Recent months have seen no letup of anti-Bernie salvos, with Sanders as a kind of âheat shieldâ for Warren, catching the vast majority of the left-baiting attacks that would otherwise be aimed at her. Yet, as Warrenâs campaign gains momentum, she is becoming more of a prime target for wealthy sectors and their media echo chambers.
I haven’t seen much criticism of Warren from the MSM; mainly it’s been non-stop tongue bathes, at least since Harris faded. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Biden’s campaign blew $924,000 on private jets. That’s one out of every 16 bucks his campaign raised. Also, his warchest is down to $8.9 million. More on those implications:
Biden raised $15.7 million last quarter, spent $17.7 million and has about $9 million in the bank, according to the reports. In other words, for every $1 the campaign raised, it spent $1.12. If he continues to spend his third-quarter average of roughly $196,120 a day and continues to raise $174,904 each day, he can grind out until Election Day. But his future finances get ugly if he wants to build beyond the current footprint.
That rate of spending leaves Biden with a campaign nest egg smaller than Bernie Sanders ($33.7 million), Warren ($25.7 million), Pete Buttigieg ($23.4 million) and Kamala Harris ($10.6 million).
Biden also has a stupid gun control plan, including a restoration of the cosmetic “assault weapon” ban of 1994 and a “voluntary” gun buyback. (Hat tip: John Richardson.)
Mike Bloomberg is still considering a 2020 run â if Joe Bidenâs campaign implodes, according to a new report.
The CNBC report comes just days after The Post revealed that TVâs âJudge Judyâ said the billionaire would be a âperfect presidential candidate.â
The former mayor in March announced he would not run for president because he believed it would be difficult for him to prevail in a Democratic primary. He also saw former Vice President Biden as a viable moderate voice.
But a CNBC report Monday claims Bloomberg is reconsidering after seeing Biden stumble and lose ground to Elizabeth Warren.
Color me confused. In one breath, Booker has promised to repeal the [2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] for the highest-earning individuals, a move that would return the top rate to 39.6%. There is, of course, the 3.8% net investment tax, meaning the top rate on interest or passive business income would reach 43.4%.
But in another breath, Booker promises to tax capital gains and dividends at ordinary rates, and states that the top rate on capital gains would become 40.8%, which would seem to indicate that the top rate on ordinary income will not increase from 37% to 39.6%.
In any event, a top rate of 41 – 44% — should that be where Booker lands — will pale in comparison to the top rate of 70%(!) proposed by both Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris.
Pete was praised for launching the same dumb Medicare for All attack that we’ve heard from someone or another at every debate and for obliging the CNN moderators by continuing the grudge match with Beto O’Rourke that no one wanted or asked for.
But maybe my favorite take was from Van Jones, who described the desire for everyone to have health care the way every other developed country does as “wokenomics,” and then went on to outright predict the field would narrow to Warren and Pete!
Pistol Pete versus Warren the selfie queen. There is no doubt that this would be the dream matchup of every post-grad holding, Harvard envying, McKinsey-adjacent pundit in the land. Just imagine the plans and the civility and the erudition. No word on what would have happened to Bernie and his 1.4 million donors and 33 million dollars in the bank to say nothing of his working-class supporters. Or for that matter where the older black voters who have solidly supported Biden would have magically vanished to.
Guys, I think we have enough evidence to officially declare that the media has decided to pull mayor Pete off the gurney and resuscitate his failing presidential run.
The Harvard-bashing is tasty, but this is a stupid take. Buttigieg has been raising money hand-over-fist and rising in the polls before the debate, so in no way is his campaign “failing.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile in The Stanford Daily, the school newspaper for the college he and his twin brother attended. It’s a fawning profile for a campaign where such things are now few and far between.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But see the entry for Tulsi Gabbard below. And I get an excuse to embed this:
Fifteen minutes until Hillary and Chelsea take the stage for their much-awaited Portland, Ore. tour stop. Audience is filled with middle-age white women, their husbands, and gay men. Some are wearing their âIâm with Herâ shirts. Kelly Clarkson music in background. pic.twitter.com/3CyJsP2qKF
Appearing on Obama campaign manager David Plouffeâs podcast, Clinton made a number of claims regarding Russian meddling in U.S. elections, including that Gabbardâs substantial social-media support relies on Russian bots. Gabbard was the most-searched candidate after the first and second Democratic debates.
âI think theyâve got their eye on someone whoâs currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,â Clinton said on the podcast. âSheâs the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.â
Although Clinton did not explicitly mention Gabbardâs name, when asked if the accusation was leveled at the Hawaii Congresswoman, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said âIf the nesting doll fits.â
Result:
Tulsi Gabbard told me after this event sheâs taking her campaign to the Dem convention, even if she doesnât have enough delegates to win https://t.co/vrTyLf0xNy
Notice how quickly CNN cut off Gabbard when she challenged Elizabeth Warren. “Even among the other frontrunners, Warren got almost a full 10 minutes extra vs. Biden and Sanders. Thatâs pretty remarkable given how absolutely boring and uncharismatic she is. But thereâs a simple reason she got so much extra time. The moderators were favoring her big time.”
Tulsi Gabbard: "When I look out at our country, I don't see deplorables, I see fellow Americans. People who I treat with respect even when we disagree, and when we disagree strongly" #DemDebatepic.twitter.com/566inLxCBy
A confessed bird murderer who presided over a Senate office that former staffers described as “controlled by fear, anger, and shame,” Klobuchar (D., Minn.) traded her inside voice for her shouty voice, and lit into her Democratic opponents, accusing them of trying to deceive the American people with lies.
De facto frontrunner Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) bore the brunt of Amy’s rage, especially when it came to the issue of health care and Warren’s refusal to admit that middle class taxes will go up under her proposed “Medicare for All” plan.
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth ⌠I think we owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice,” Klobuchar seethed. “I believe the best and boldest idea here is to not trash Obamacare, but to do exactly what Barack Obama wanted to do from the beginning, and that’s have a public option.”
Klobuchar was just getting started, accusing Warren of wanting to kick 150 million people off of their preferred health insurance plans by forcing them to enroll in Medicare.
“And I’m tired of hearing whenever I say these things, âOh, it’s Republican talking points,'” Klobuchar fumed. “You are making Republican talking points right now in this room ⌠I think there is a better way that is bold, that will cover more people, and it’s the one we should get behind.”
Klobuchar, who struggled for attention in the Democratic primary, says this week’s debate helped her catch on at exactly the right time. Her town halls are crowded, with staffers running to get more chairs to pack breweries or event centers. She leads the field in local endorsements, especially state legislators, âwith more to come,â she says. She kicked off her bus tour with the support of Andy McKean, a Republican state legislator who bolted his party six months ago and who pronounced Klobuchar the kind of Democrat who could unite America again.
âIf you want to peak in this race,â she said after a stop in Waterloo, âyou want to peak now, instead of six months before [the caucuses].â
A few other candidates still draw larger crowds, but Klobuchar is going for a particular kind of caucus-goer: the loyal Democrat who wants to win back those mysterious Trump voters. In interviews around the events, Klobuchar-curious voters tended to list her alongside South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.); and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) as the candidates who could have the longest reach, because they were not seen as too left-wing. Craig Hinderaker, a 71-year-old farmer who saw Klobuchar in Panora (population 1,069), said he’d committed to her months earlier after becoming convinced that she had centrist appeal and real campaign skills.
âBiden was my top choice, but he’s been dropping,â Hinderaker said. âJust too many errors.â
Klobuchar, who began running TV and digital ads in Iowa only this month, had methodically introduced herself to the state as the electable, relatable neighbor who Republicans had already learned to love. On the campaign’s official bingo cards, there are squares for âbio diesel plantâ and âbreakfast pizza,â as well as the more evasive âbridge that crosses over the river of our divide.â Her stump speeches and town hall answers are peppered with references to Republican colleagues â âLindsey Graham, who took up my bill with John McCain,â or âJames Lankford, a very conservative senator from Oklahomaâ â who have helped her pass bills. Without mentioning Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), she describes the sort of Democrats she says wouldn’t win in 2020.
âPeople don’t really want the loudest voice in the room,â Klobuchar said in Mason City. âThey want a tough voice in the room, which I think I showed I could do in the debate. They want someone that’s going to tell them the truth â look them in the eye and tell them the truth â and not make promises that they can’t keep. They want someone who understands that there’s a difference between a plan and a pipe dream, and that not everything can be free.â
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Wayne Messam brought in $5 in campaign contributions in Q3. Not $5 million. Not $500,000. Not $5,000. $5. Plus a timeline of his failing campaign. He says the $5 was a mistake, but I’m going to use this opportunity to move him down to the also-rans for the next clown car update.
Bernie Sanders, just weeks after a heart attack took him off the presidential campaign trail, renewing questions about his age and health, roared back last week with a strong debate performance and the disclosure of a quarterly fundraising haul that vanquished all of his Democratic competitors.
But the 78-year old Vermont senator, whose powerful oratory and progressive message on income inequality lifted him to serious contention in the 2016 Democratic contest against Hillary Clinton, is less formidable this time, with polls in early states and beyond showing his status as a top-tier candidate at risk.
From the challenge posed by fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren to staff clashes and poor strategic communication, Sanders has struggled to compete in a larger field and a new political environment. His health scare added another major challenge.
Other than Tuesday’s televised debate in Ohio, Sanders has been largely off the trail since his heart attack Oct. 1. He held his first major campaign event since his hospitalization on Saturday, when New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined Sanders at a New York City rally to endorse his candidacy.
For months, Sandersâs campaign was largely listless. Sanders still had a devoted following, though most polls suggested what was obvious on the ground: Fans were drifting to other candidates, most obviously Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. At events in Iowa, New Hampshire, and beyond, I heard the same comments from longtime Sanders supporters: They still loved him and were grateful for how heâd jolted Democratic politics to the left, but he was too old to be president, and it was time for someone else to step up. The heart attack seemed like a macabre metaphor for the state of Sandersâs campaign.
But contrarianism runs deep in the senator from Vermontâa 2016 campaign aide once described one of Sandersâs main animating principles to me as: âFuck me? No, fuck you!â With his comeback, Sanders seems to be saying just thatânot only to any detractors ready to write him off, but to the organ pumping inside his own chest.
And his supporters have responded.
âI kind of thought [his heart attack] was the end of the campaign, but the boost has been significant, and Iâm encouraged by it,â said Quinn Miller, a 33-year-old city-government worker wearing a blue Unidos con Bernie T-shirt.
âIt got everyone rallied,â said Erik Pye, a 45-year-old Army veteran and store owner from Brooklyn. âIt gave everyone a sense of urgency.â
The incident seems to have made serious again all the Sanders supporters whoâd recently wandered off, I observed to 28-year-old Elizabeth Johnson, whoâd traveled from Rhode Island with her boyfriend. âSerious,â she joked, âas a heart attack.â
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Fox News profile on his walk across New Hampshire. “Itâs a non-traditional journey. Sestak will often stop down and jump into the support vehicle to attend an event or make a campaign stop or two before heading back to the spot where he stopped his trip, so he can resume his journey. And each evening he returns to a home in southern New Hampshire, where he stays with friends.” He actually seems to be walking alone for significant portions of the trip. A candidate’s time is a campaign’s most precious resource. The fact that he’s spending it plodding alone and mostly ignored is the perfect metaphor for the Sestak 2020 campaign.
When billionaire Tom Steyer is up on the debate stage tonight and several serious-minded senators and governors are not, viewers can fairly ask what the heck is going on. Other Democratic candidates have explicitly accused Steyer of buying his way onto the debate stage. Per the Sacramento Bee: âIn an email to supporters, former Texas Congressman Beto OâRourke said Steyer has âsucceeded in buying his way up there.â New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker wrote to supporters in a fundraising email that Steyerâs âability to spend millions of his personal wealth has helped him gain in the polls like no one else in this race.ââ
Steyer has spent $20 million on television ads â boosting his name ID and poll support above that oh-so-high 2 percent threshold â and heâs collected donations from more than 165,000 individuals.
Tonight, many Americans will get their first look at Tom Steyer, and while thereâs always the chance he surprises us, the odds are good that by the end of the night, viewers at home will wonder if he won his spot on the debate stage in some sort of auction or perhaps through the Make-a-Wish Foundation. If Tom Steyer did not exist, cynical conservatives would have to invent him as the embodiment of hilariously self-absorbed, hypocritical elitists who believe in wildly impractical happy-talk theories and who have only the vaguest notion of what the U.S. Constitution says.
Steyer is a billionaire hedge-fund manager who told the New York Times that he doesnât think of himself as rich. At his hedge fund, Steyer helped âwealthy investors move their money through an offshore company to help shield their gains from U.S. taxes.â Back in 2005, he invested $34 million in Corrections Corporation of America, âwhich runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.â Steyer says he regrets that past investment.
Heâs an ardent environmentalist and climate-change activist who made part of his fortune in coal development projects. He has spent tens of millions of dollars on political ads because he wants to âget corporate money out of politics.â Itâs unclear if he has other controversial investments, because he âdeclined to go into detail about significant segments of his investment portfolio, citing confidentiality agreements that bar him from publicly disclosing the underlying assets in which he is invested.â (Steyer believes President Trump has violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution because âhas directly profited from dealing with foreign governments through his businesses in the U.S. and around the globe.â)
In January, he declared that he would be âdedicating 100 percent of my time, money and effort to one cause: working for Mister Trumpâs impeachment and removal from office. I am not running for president at this time. Instead I am strengthening my commitment to Need to Impeach in 2019.â But by July â well before House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of impeachment proceedings â he changed his mind and decided to run.
Heh. âThe Make-A-Wish Foundation Candidate.â
âLetâs all give brave little Tommy Steyer a round of applause! And a big thank you for the DNC making a dream come true for this special little boy in recognition of his fight against Stage 4 Unearned Superiority Complex.â
âBut she would never get elected,â says Lowry. âThere is no chance.â
âWhy do you say that?â says White, a former navy officer with a PhD in health policy.
âAll the people who voted for Trump are scared to death of socialism,â she says. Warrenâs policies are far too left-leaning to appeal to most Americans, Lowry says. Living in this area, she adds, she understands the importance of selecting a moderate.
When pundits question Trumpâs support among women, he will often allude to the âhiddenâ suburban women voting block that backed him in 2016.
Warren was taken to task during the debate for evading basic questions about how she would pay for her signature Medicare-for-all health-care plan, and how she would implement her controversialâand constitutionally dubiousâwealth tax. For a candidate who brags about having a policy plan for everything, it didnât look good.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar called Warrenâs health-care plan a âpipe dreamâ and offered her a âreality checkâ on her wealth tax, attacks that were echoed and reinforced by the other candidates throughout the night. When Mayor Pete Buttigieg asked Warren, âyes or no,â whether her Medicare-for-all plan would raise taxes on the middle class, Warren hemmed and hawed, talked about her âprinciples,â and evaded giving a yes or no answer.
Buttigieg and others seized on this, calling into question Warrenâs trustworthiness. When Sen. Bernie Sanders jumped in to explain that his universal health-care plan would increase taxes, Klobuchar and Buttigieg noted that at least Sanders was being honest and straightforward about his plan. Through it all, Warren seemed defensive and taken aback that her fellow candidates were coming after her like this.
The reason all this should concern Democrats is that if Warren canât handle pointed questions about basic aspects of her major policy proposals in a primary debate, how is she going to weather the storms of the general election? If she canât bring herself to admit that Medicare-for-all will mean higher taxes for everyone, which it certainly will, how will general election voters already skeptical of Washington be persuaded to trust her?
Trump won a crowed GOP primary in 2016 in part by saying things no other candidate was willing to say and putting himself forward as an honest outsider who tells it like it is. If Democrats want to put someone up against Trump who can beat him at this game, their candidate had better have a credible answer for how he or she will pay for a $32 trillion program thatâs steadily losing support. The most recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found just 51 percent now support Medicare-for-all, a two-point drop from last month and a five-point drop since April, even as the share of those who oppose it is growing.
Questions about how Democrats plan to pay for these things are only going to intensify as we approach the general election, and as more Americans realize that theyâll certainly have to pay higher taxes for socialized health care and college, such policies will likely continue to lose support.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s been too long since Williamson got one of those weirdly glowing profiles, so here’s one from her old ministry stomping grounds: “Soul on Fire: Marianne Williamson brings explosion of love to Encinitas town hall event.” (I saw Explosion of Love open for The String Cheese Incident at SXSW.) Williamson hits Clinton over the Gabbard smear: “The Democratic establishment has got to stop smearing women it finds inconvenient! The character assassination of women who donât toe the party line will backfire. Stay strong @TulsiGabbard . You deserve respect and you have mine.” Also objecting to Clinton’s comments was…
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He says Gabbard “deserves much more respect” than Clinton gave her. “She literally just got back from serving our country abroad.” The Yang campaign is now treated seriously enough that we’re actually starting to see some hit pieces. First up: Slate: “Andrew Yang Is Full of It.” There follows a somewhat tedious and misguided discussion of automation vs. trade deals are responsible for the decline in manufacturing jobs. (Both are more wrong than right; union contracts and policies and the structure of tax laws probably had bigger effects than either.) “Andrew Yang, Snake Oil Salesman:
Not only has he exceeded expectations for his polling and fundraising, not only has he developed a cult following, not only has he got people talking about his signature idea, the universal basic income, he actually has other candidates expressing openness to it.
Itâs too bad that Yangâs idea is a foolish response to a non-problem. Worse, Yang is trying to persuade people to fear and oppose something that we need more of and that is a key to economic progress and higher wages â namely, automation.
It is through technological innovation that workers become more productive â i.e., can create more with less â and society becomes richer.
To hear Yang tell it, robots are on the verge of ripping an irreparable hole in the American job market. Heâs particularly alarmed by the potential advent of autonomous vehicles. According to Yang, âAll you need is self-driving cars to destabilize society.â He predicts that in a few years, âweâre going to have a million truck drivers out of work,â and âall hell breaks loose.â
Not to put too fine a point on it, Yangâs fear of automation in general and self-driving cars in particular is completely insane.
It canât be that the only thing holding our society together is the fact that cars and trucks must be operated by people. If innovations in transportation were really the enemy, we would have been done in long ago by the advent of canals, then railroads, then automobiles and highways.
At a practical level, Yangâs assumption that autonomous vehicles are going to wipe out all trucking jobs, and relatively soon, is unsupported. If progress has been made toward self-driving cars, weâve learned that the jump to full autonomy is a vast one that will take many years to achieve. There will be time for the sector and people employed in it to adjust.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot has died at age 89. Perot is probably most famous for unsuccessfully running for President in 1992 and 1996, siphoning off enough votes to ensure Bill Clinton’s election over George H. W Bush, and then his reelection over Bob Dole. Perot won 19 million votes (though no electors) in 1992. His run would briefly give birth to the Reform Party, which quickly declined to both ideological incoherence (nominating Pat Buchanan in 2000 and Ralph Nader in 2004) and complete irrelevance in less than a decade. Of the issues Perot championed, doubts about foreign trade agreements would play an important role in Donald Trump’s election in 2016, but concern over budget deficits is a sadly neglected issue.
As a private businessman, Perot was much more successful, twice establishing powerhouse IT service companies (Electronic Data Systems and Perot Systems) before selling each off to larger companies (General Motors and Dell, respectively). Perot was also an early investor in Steve Jobs NeXT, which would later be acquired by Apple Computer, resulting in Jobs eventual return as Apple CEO and whose NeXTStep operating system would form the basis of MacOS X. Perot also famously organized the rescue of two imprisoned EDS employees during the Iranian revolution in 1979. Perot and his son, Ross Perot, Jr., have also long been big (and frequently controversial) players in Metroplex real estate and development, through a variety of companies (The Perot Group, Perot Investments, etc.).
For decades Perot Sr. was the public’s idea of “ornery Texas billionaire.” Ironically, he’s probably best known today not as a successful businessman, but as a failed politician whose most enduring legacy is the persistence of the Clintons as national political figures.
Man, it’s been a week. The clown car and NRA pieces have been blowing up my stats, and I’ve got a bunch of other things happening. I tried to watch the Group of Death debate last night, but the stream kept cutting out, so I’ll probably save the reactions for Monday’s Clown Car Update. This LinkSwarm features Dan Crenshaw, Google, and Dan Crenshaw grilling Google.
Pelosi caves, gets the House to pass the Republican Senate bill to address the crisis on the Southern border 305-102. The Senate bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a vast improvement on the House’s laughable effort. But the fact that 90% of the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders are demonstrably to the left of Nancy Pelosi on the issue might give a more reflective party pause…
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw says Democrats live in another world when it comes to the crisis on the border.
“In Emergency Bill, House Dems Vote To Send More Fake Tears To Address Border Crisis.”
Professor Posner is correct in pointing to the rivalrous nature of political power and market power. What is less well understood is that markets won that fight in a knockout a decade or more ago. The new reality is that markets â not corporations, but markets â are more powerful than states, and much of the angry, angsty, mob-inciting politics of the Left and the Right in the past decade is simply the emotional noise and churn generated as societies and governments readjust their affairs to accommodate themselves to that new reality. Bill Clinton spent much of his presidency bitching about the bond market, which was his shorthand for the ways in which global markets (especially financial markets) limited politiciansâ effective scope of action. He was, uncharacteristically for a man of such modest imagination, ahead of his time.
The power of capital flows is a reality that has made itself known bit by bit to states both liberal and autocratic, from the members of the European Union to the caudillos in Beijing. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy with no regard for life or property, brutal and vicious â and constantly getting slapped around by volatility in the energy market. Mohammed bin Salman can command almost anything â except the commodity markets that rule his world.
Much of the hysteria on display in the Democratic presidential primary is American progressivismâs shrieking protest of the new facts of life. Progressives such as Elizabeth Warren are intelligent enough to understand whatâs happened: That just at the moment they were primed to take power, power was taken away from them.
Speaking of Big Tech censorship of conservatives, Reddit has “quarantined” The_Donald subreddit for Trump fans, one of the largest and most heavily trafficked groups on Reddit. You can still reach The_Donald by following that link, but you get a warning and you can’t search for the content anymore.
“Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne Used To Hate Donald Trump. Now, He’s Kind of a Fan.” Also worries (if you listen to the podcast) about China’s rise as a techno-authoritarian hegemon.
Stop laughing. This isn’t funny. Louis CK is now an unperson. You can no longer applaud him or enjoy his comedy hate speech. If you insist on supporting an enemy of the people, there will be consequences. You will be punished. Your life will be upended. If you care about your future, you will keep your excitement and happiness to yourself when presented with the verboten.
“Well, if you don’t like Louis CK, don’t listen to him. You can’t tell other people what they should and shouldn’t laugh at.” We hear that a lot from fascists, don’t we? They think hate speech is free speech, and they don’t think they need to do what they’re told. But they’ll learn. They will be corrected.
Today you’re cheering for an unapproved comedian. Tomorrow you’re marching with tiki torches and tweeting dank memes. The day after that, you’re annexing the Sudetenland. These people must be controlled before the fascism spreads.
Here’s an interesting interview with Gen. Robert Spalding, chief China analyst for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who analyzes the pressures the trade war puts on China, and how they respond to Trump’s challenge.
“When you look at the full scope of everything China does, it mixes in its own brand of expansive influence into its economics.”
Also a bit on Huawei and 5G, and how China intends to use technological leadership to extend its own censorship regime.
