In the wee hours of Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate finally passed the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill after a great deal of Democrat stalling and a futile effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put forward a separate bill jam-packed with liberal Christmas wish-list items. The bill provides crucial relief to businesses struggling with the social distancing strategy of stopping the spread of the coronavirus. It now heads to the House.
The stimulus bill is far from perfect, but its passage unmasked Pelosi’s tactics as a disgraceful waste of time during this crisis. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) slammed the speaker for her attempt to jam her liberal pipe dreams down Americans’ throats in the midst of a crisis.
“Democrats wanted to use the coronavirus response package to change election law & implement parts of their Green New Deal. The Senate just passed strong bipartisan legislation that scraps those items, & it’s clear. ⇨ Their delay achieved nothing but more pain for Americans,” McCarthy tweeted.
And far from perfect means it was stuffed with egregious special interest pork. Pelosi, of course, tried to block it because it just didn’t have nearly as much special interest pork as she would like.
Nevada’s governor has signed an emergency order barring the use of anti-malaria drugs for someone who has the coronavirus.
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak’s order Tuesday restricting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine comes after President Donald Trump touted the medication as a treatment for the virus.
December 6: According to a study in The Lancet, the symptom onset date of the first patient identified was “Dec 1, 2019 . . . 5 days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.” In other words, as early as the second week of December, Wuhan doctors were finding cases that indicated the virus was spreading from one human to another.
December 21: Wuhan doctors begin to notice a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause.”
Snip.
January 15: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission begins to change its statements, now declaring, “Existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.” Recall Wuhan hospitals concluded human-to-human transmission was occurring three weeks earlier. A statement the next day backtracks on the possibility of human transmission, saying only, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”
The Chinese Communist Party is using the pandemic to achieve its goal of supplanting the United States as the world’s leading economic, diplomatic, and military power.
Sounds unbelievable?
A new report from Horizon Advisory consultants details Beijing’s post-virus strategy—already operational—to leverage the pandemic to seize global market share in key industries, further global dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reverse efforts in the United States and elsewhere to decouple from the People’s Republic.
“Beijing intends to use the global dislocation and downturn to attract foreign investment, to seize strategic market share and resources—especially those that force dependence, and to proliferate global information systems; to as Chinese sources put it, ‘leap-frog’ industrially, ‘overtake around the corner’ strategically, capture the ‘commanding heights’ globally. Beijing intends to reverse recent U.S. efforts to counteract China’s subversive international presence; at the same time to chip away at U.S.-Europe relations. In other words, Beijing will use COVID-19 to accelerate its long-standing, strategic offensive,” the Horizon report states.
We’re witnessing Beijing’s attempt to scrub its culpability for the pandemic from the world’s memory. Chinese Communist propagandists declare, “China is owed a thank you for buying the world time” and the New York Times dutifully repeats it.
After covering up the novel infection and unleashing it on the world, Beijing’s rulers bought up the world’s supply of protective gear and respirators.
Then they sell these critical goods to Italy while portraying themselves as the heroic humanitarian savior of the world, not unlike a pyromaniac who takes credit for calling the fire department.
To the degree that we are suffering death and economic hurt from COVID-19, we can also attribute the toll to the Chinese Communist Party. Had it just called in the international medical community in late November, instituted early quarantines, and allowed its own citizens to use email and social media to apprise and warn others of the new disease, then the world and the U.S. would probably not have found themselves in the current panic. The reasons China did not act more responsibly may be inherent in communist governments, or they may involve more Byzantine causes left to be disclosed.
Add in the proximity of a Level 4 virology lab nearby Ground Zero of COVID-19, which fueled Internet conspiracy theories; the weird rumors about quite strange animals such as snakes and pangolins birthing the infection in primeval open meat markets stocked with live animals in filthy conditions in cages; and pirated videos of supposed patients dropping comatose in crowded hospital hallways. With all of that, we had the ingredients of a Hollywood zombie movie, adding to the frenzy.
Plus, 2020 is an election year — echoing how the 1976 swine flu was politicized. The Left and its media appendages saw COVID-19 as able to do what John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, the Mueller team, and impeachment could not: destroy the hated Trump presidency.
China will rue what it begat.
That is, it will come to appreciate fully that the supposed efficiency, ruthlessness, and autocracy of the Communist Party — what had so impressed foolish American journalists who once marveled at Beijing’s ability to enact by fiat liberal pet projects such as high-speed rail and solar industries — were China’s worst enemies, ensuring that the virus would spread and that China’s international reputation would be ruined.
It is only since the outbreak of the pandemic that Americans have come to learn that China is the major supplier for U.S. medicines. The first drug shortages, due to dependence on China, have already occurred. Eighty percent of America’s “active pharmaceutical ingredients” comes from abroad, primarily from China (and India); 45% of the penicillin used in the country is Chinese-made; as is nearly 100% of the ibuprofen. Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx,” testified last year to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission about this critical dependence, but nothing has changed in this most vital of supply chains.
The medicine story is repeated throughout the U.S. economy and the world. The unparalleled economic growth of China over the past generation has hollowed out domestic industries around the globe and also prevented other nations, such as Vietnam, from moving up the value-added chain. Many industries are quite frankly stuck with Chinese companies as their only or primary suppliers. Thus, the costs of finding producers other than China, what is known as “decoupling,” are exorbitant, and few countries currently can replicate China’s infrastructure and workforce.
The world never should have been put at risk by the coronavirus. Equally, it never should have let itself become so economically dependent on China. The uniqueness of the coronavirus epidemic is to bring the two seemingly separate issues together. That is why Beijing is desperate to evade blame, not merely for its initial incompetence, but because the costs of the system it has built since 1980 are now coming into long-delayed focus. Coronavirus is a diabolus ex machina that threatens the bases of China’s modern interaction with foreign nations, from tourism to trade, and from cultural exchange to scientific collaboration.
Xi can best avoid this fate by adopting the very transparency that he and the party have assiduously avoided. Yet openness is a mortal threat to the continued rule of the CCP. The virus thus exposes the CCP’s mortal paradox, one which shows the paralysis at the heart of modern China. For this reason alone, the world’s dependence on China should be responsibly reduced.
ere are some people who are useless, especially now: Performance artists, diversity consultants, magic crystal healers, sociology TAs, members of the mainstream media, and gender-unspecified entities who brew kale kombucha.
Here are some people who matter, especially now: Soldiers, nurses, truckers, cops, the guy who stocks the shelves at Ralphs, farmers, and that dude rebuilding your roof.
The Chinese Bat Soup Flu has certainly clarified some of the blurred lines between what is important and what is frivolous garbage. Yet, in a time when millions of Americans are at risk of dying as a direct result of ChiCom conspiracies and the bizarre need of its serfs to eat any weird thing that crawls or slithers within reach of their chopsticks, our useless elite is fixated on making sure we don’t hurt the feelz of the very people who stuck us in this predicament.
Our elite is full of self-important morons who contribute nothing but more dumb in a time when the only thing we have a surplus of is dumb. The real hero is the guy who trucks in a load of whole wheat bread, ribeyes, and low-priced cabernet to the Trader Joe’s, not the Prius-piloting sissy with a Maddow fetish who shops there. The people our elite laughed at, scoffed at, poked at, are the very people who are going to rescue us from the mess that same elite helped make.
Hmm: “Fun facts about Covid Act Now, the org that is mobilizing press, politicians, & citizens to rally behind mass quarantine/lockdown: 1) They were founded by Dem activists. 1 of them, Igor Kofman, works full time to defeat Trump in 2020. Another is a Dem legislator.”
Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve. The model predicted far fewer deaths if lockdown measures — measures such as those taken by the British and American governments — were undertaken.
After just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson is presenting drastically downgraded estimates, crediting lockdown measures, but also revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured.
“After the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”
That’s right, the shortage of N95 masks can be traced back to the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic of 2009… when Barack Obama was president.
A different story from the Los Angeles Times published last week goes into more detail about what happened after the swine flu pandemic depleted the supply. According to their story, “After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks […] be replenished by the stockpile.” The problem is that didn’t happen. According to Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Association, about 100 million N95 respirator masks were used up during the swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010, but, he said was unaware of any “major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown.”
A place that once gave Democratic native sons Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale 4-1 voting wins and considers the late Sen. Paul Wellstone a local hero has begun to embrace a president who bears little resemblance to them, except that he reversed the “injustice” of an Obama-era order that would have brought the nickel-copper project to a 20-year standstill. On top of that were the 25 percent tariffs Trump imposed on most foreign steel, which provided an initial boost to the 5,000 miners still employed in the region’s numerous iron-ore mines that have served as the backbone to the region’s economy.
All of that put Ely in the middle of a political transformation that makes Minnesota the president’s top target among states he lost in 2016 — and potentially a pivot point in the 2020 presidential race. Trump lost the state by 45,000 votes in 2016, a remarkable feat considering how entrenched Democrats have been in the state.
Remember Hershel “Woody” Williams, the Medal of Honor winner I highlighted last Veterans Day? The Navy just commissioned a ship named after him. “The Medal of Honor presented to Williams by President Harry S. Truman two months after the end of World War II is now enshrined in the galley of the ship named in his honor…The Williams, built at a cost of about $500 million, is the second of three Expeditionary Sea Base ships.” ESB ships are interesting multi-use ships built on oil tanker hulls:
The ESD and ESB ships were originally called the Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) and the MLP Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB), respectively. In September 2015, the Secretary of the Navy re-designated these hulls to conform to traditional three-letter ship designations.
The design of these ships is based on the Alaska class crude oil carrier, which was built by General Dynamics National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO). Leveraging commercial designs ensures design stability and lower development costs
The USNS Montford Point (T-ESD 1) and USNS John Glenn (T-ESD 2) are configured with the Core Capability Set (CCS), which consists of a vehicle staging area, vehicle transfer ramp, large mooring fenders and up to three Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) vessel lanes to support its core equipment transfer requirements. With a 9,500 nautical mile range at a sustained speed of 15 knots, these approximately 80,000 tons, 785-foot ships leverage float-on/float-off technology and a reconfigurable mission deck to maximize capability. Additionally, the ships’ size allows for 25,000 square feet of vehicle and equipment stowage space and 380,000 gallons of JP-5 fuel storage.
USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), the first ESB delivered, along with follow ships Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB 4) and Miguel Keith (ESB 5), are being optimized to support a variety of maritime based missions including Special Operations Force (SOF) and Airborne Mine Counter Measures (AMCM). The ESBs include a four spot flight deck, mission deck and hangar, are designed around four core capabilities: aviation facilities, berthing, equipment staging support, and command and control assets.
I would think this little tidbit would get more play, since the media repeatedly assured us that Wokescold Moppet was The Most Important Person In The World.
Still more efficient and straightforward than ObamaCare:
Thanks everybody for their entries and nominations…..but there’s one clear winner of the internet today…..round of applause please people…#WINternetpic.twitter.com/ToNA7bitpQ
Biden wins again, Gabbard drops out, Slow Joe makes himself scarce, and everybody hunkers down due to The Current Unpleasantness. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
By now the clown car has shrunk so far that all the occupants could fit in a Smart Car. (Note: That reflects the name brand of the car, not the mental acuity of the occupants.)
In theory, there’s nothing insurmountable about Biden’s 300+ delegate lead. In reality, it would take something extremely drastic (like Biden keeling over or wandering naked in front of a camera) to change the dynamics of the race. 538 gives Biden a 98% chance of winning the nomination. On the other hand, everyone thought they knew how the 2016 election would turn out as well…
The political world is practically giddy at the failed campaigns of Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. The Democratic primary’s billionaire candidates rediscovered an age-old truth: money can’t buy love.
It couldn’t buy love for Hillary Clinton, who nearly doubled Donald Trump’s spending in 2016 and had three times as many positive ads. Or for Jeb Bush’s wealthy backers in the Republican primary preceding that race. Or for self-funders from years past like Meg Whitman, Linda McMahon, and Steve Forbes. Money can help a campaign’s message get heard, but it doesn’t mean that listeners will like what they hear. Yet fears of campaign spending “buying” elections continue to drive our campaign-finance laws. The result is bad law and poor policy.
Last year, the House passed H.R. 1, a sweeping rewrite of campaign-finance and election laws. The bill would have imposed a variety of new restrictions on paid political speech. Its authors asserted that current law lets wealthy individuals and special interests “dominate election spending, corrupt our politics, and degrade our democracy through tidal waves of unlimited and anonymous spending.”
But as Bloomberg and Steyer found out, voters easily reject messages and campaigns with which they disagree. Congress shouldn’t assume that voters just buy whatever is advertised. They don’t.
How much money did Bloomberg waste on his presidential run? Would you believe…
As funny as it may be on the surface, there is something dark and sad about Biden’s rise. The Democratic Party establishment knows Biden is unfit for office. They don’t care. With Biden, the political machinery that usually operates in hiding, in the shadows, has come out into the light, in aviator sunglasses and a sunny grin. The powers-that-be are declaring, openly, that their right to rule will not be reined in by anything, least of all the perception that they are incompetent and out of touch.
Thanks to decades of failed and corrupt leadership, many Americans are developing a creeping and cynical feeling that they don’t have a voice, that voting is like choosing from a carefully crafted menu of options with the same mediocre results. President Biden would prove them right. He would eliminate the mystique that once allowed them to believe our political system is one worth respecting and complete the decline into decadence that characterizes American managerial democracy, which is now at such a late stage of decay it no longer matters if a presidential nominee can tell his wife and sister apart.
Biden’s comeback proves that many things which people thought mattered in the great American clown show of presidential politics actually don’t.
The standards are through the floor: Biden has no policies, no core philosophy, and no special qualities to recommend him other than a perception of “electability” that is driven almost entirely by a sycophantic news media.
A vote for Joe Biden is a vote to remove Trump from office, not to elect Joe Biden. He would be the first president who upon election everyone, most of all his supporters, knows would not be calling the actual shots.
Sanders supporters have now learned a harsh lesson: power, not ideology, is what matters most.
This just in: Grandpa Simpson ain’t popular with the youn’uns. Biden plans to start vetting his affirmative action veep pick in the next few weeks. Incumbent Michigan governor Grethen Whitmer says it’s not going to be her. (A previous Michicgan governor, Jennifer Granholm, is constitutionally ineligable, being born in Canada to Canadian parents.) “Hunter Biden Trips Cost Taxpayers Nearly $200,000.”
Gabbard entered the race in January 2019 with an intriguing profile: a woman of color, a military veteran, a millennial who advocated for new voices within the Democratic Party (despite a congressional voting record that skewed more moderate than the rest of the party, she resigned as vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders).
But it was hard for Gabbard to make inroads with Democratic voters — the more Democrats got to know her over the course of the campaign, the less they liked her. This was probably compounded by the fact that perhaps the most attention Gabbard received all cycle long was when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested Republicans were “grooming” her to be a third-party spoiler and when Gabbard was one of only three Democrats who did not vote in favor of impeaching President Trump.
There were many other long-shot candidates in 2020, but what set Gabbard apart was how long she stayed in the race despite not winning more than 4 percent of the vote in any contest except tiny American Samoa (where she was born). Other candidates stuck in the 1 to 2 percent range in national polls dropped out once voting began, if not before. She even gave up a safe House seat to stay in the presidential race, announcing in October that she would not run for reelection even though Hawaii is one of the few states that allows candidates to run for Congress and president at the same time. Even by March, after candidates like former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who were polling above 10 percent nationally, were dropping out of the race, Gabbard pushed on.
By then, Gabbard’s campaign looked more like a protest campaign than one with any intention of winning. She did not contest multiple key states on the primary calendar, including Iowa, where she did not hold a public event after Oct. 24, 2019. In early March, she told ABC News she was staying in the race in order to speak to Americans “about the sea change we need in our foreign policy” and promote her pet issue of ending military intervention abroad. It was beginning to look like Gabbard would take her campaign almost all the way to the convention, following in the footsteps of past presidential candidates who were misfits in their own party, like former Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. But money may have been an issue for Gabbard; in January, she raised only $1.1 million but spent $1.8 million, an obviously unsustainable rate.
Upon dropping out of the race, Gabbard also endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden, despite the fact that her 2016 pick, Sanders, is still in the race, albeit a heavy underdog. It was an interesting olive branch to the establishment wing of the party with which Gabbard has openly feuded so much in the past. It would also seem to foreclose the possibility that Gabbard will run as a third-party candidate in the general election.
Farewell to the last Democratic candidate in the race born after World War II…
Four years ago, Bernie Sanders put up a surprisingly strong fight against Hillary Clinton on the strength of his support among white working-class voters, who proceeded to desert Clinton in November. On the basis of those two elections, the left quickly formed a series of conclusions. The working class had become alienated by neoliberal economics and was searching for radical alternatives. Because the Democrats had failed to offer the kind of progressive radical alternative Sanders stood for, voters instead opted for Trump’s reactionary attack on globalism. In order to win them back and defeat Trump, Democrats needed to reorganize themselves as a radical populist party.
On the left, this explanation was accepted so widely it became foundational, a premise progressives would work forward from without questioning its veracity. The Sanders campaign argued that its connection to the white working class would enable Bernie to compete in areas that had abandoned Democrats years ago. “Some in the Sanders camp envision possibly making a play for Iowa, Ohio, and Indiana, as well as states such as Kansas, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Montana,” reported Politicoone year ago. Every left-wing indictment of the Democratic mainstream was made in explicit or implicit contrast to this imagined counterfactual of a Sanders-led party riding triumphant through the heartland of red America.
Snip.
The second Sanders campaign has shown conclusively how badly the left misunderstood the electorate. It is not just that Sanders has failed to inspire anything like the upsurge in youth turnout he promised, or that he has failed to make meaningful headway with black voters. White working-class and rural voters have swung heavily against him. In Missouri and Michigan, those voters turned states he closely contested four years ago into routs for his opponent. Some rural counties have swung 30 points from Sanders 2016 to Biden 2020. The candidate in the race who has forged a transracial working-class coalition is, in fact, Joe Biden.
The factor that actually explains 2016, as some of us chagrined liberals insisted at the time, was Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic personal unpopularity. It turned out large portions of the public, even of the Democratic electorate, simply detested her.
True, but not the entire truth. More and more of the electorate loathes Democratic policies as well, no matter how many carefully-worded, crosstab-slanted, cherry-picked polls say otherwise. And they hate the naked disdain the SJW-infected leftwing elites display when it comes to ordinary Americans. But this final quote rings true: “Sanders has inspired a sizable faction of one party. But his vision of mobilizing a hidden national majority is, and always was, a fantasy.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, a couple of whose commenters make some cognizant points: First: “The ‘chagrined liberals’ were unable to point out Hillary’s unpopularity because the woke feminists saw Hillary as their champion to ‘break the glass ceiling’ allegedly preventing a female President. Anyone like Jonathan Chait who might express misgivings about Hillary’s electability was promptly dismissed as ‘a cis white man’ who had no right to express his opinion on the issue.” Second: “There is another explanation, that Trump has basically dominated the populist lane by delivering on much of the agenda he had that overlapped with Bernie, you know, the popular and effective part of it. But that would require giving Trump some credit, so it won’t receive much consideration.”) The New York Times already has a prebituary piece on his campaign, the sort where insiders leak self-flattering “if only he had listened to my advice” tidbits while preparing to swim away from the wreckage:
In mid-January, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pollster offered a stark prognosis for the campaign: Mr. Sanders was on track to finish strong in the first three nominating states, but Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s powerful support from older African-Americans could make him a resilient foe in South Carolina and beyond.
The pollster, Ben Tulchin, in a meeting with campaign aides, recommended a new offensive to influence older black voters, according to three people briefed on his presentation. The data showed two clear vulnerabilities for Mr. Biden: his past support for overhauling Social Security, and his authorship of a punitive criminal justice law in the 1990s.
And there’s your primary leaker/spinner.
But the suggestion met with resistance. Some senior advisers argued that it wasn’t worth diverting resources from Iowa and New Hampshire, people familiar with the campaign’s deliberations said. Others pressed Mr. Tulchin on what kind of message, exactly, would make voters rethink their support for the most loyal ally of the first black president.
And there’s your “But good old Bernie was just too high-minded!” positive spin.
Crucially, both Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jane, consistently expressed reservations about going negative on Mr. Biden, preferring to stick with the left-wing policy message they have been pressing for 40 years.
The warnings about Mr. Biden proved prescient: Two months later, Mr. Sanders is now all but vanquished in the Democratic presidential race, after Mr. Biden resurrected his campaign in South Carolina and built an overwhelming coalition of black voters and white moderates on Super Tuesday.
While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination. His efforts to regain traction have faltered in recent weeks as the coronavirus pandemic has frozen the campaign, and perhaps heightened the appeal of Mr. Biden’s safe-and-steady image.
In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events — most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign.
Sanders Raised $2 million for “coronavirus relief”. But look closer: “The money raised will go to No Kid Hungry, One Fair Wage Emergency Fund, Meals on Wheels, Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.” With the possible exception of Meals on Wheel, it looks like all those are adjuncts to lefty organizing causes.
Bulwerker hyperventilates that Bernie continuing his campaign is a threat to the Republic. Because mere voters must of necessity bow to the DNC’s candidate preferences. As if playing footsie with Castro wasn’t enough, Sanders has now been endorsed by history’s greatest monster. You know that “focusing on the crisis” he talked about?
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America’s institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America’s institutions. So, let’s imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.
What happens then?
What happens then is that it’s back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.
The difference is that in the future they will be much more careful to ensure that no one who is not in on the scam will ever again come anywhere near the levers of power. You can already see it – the demands that we defer to the bureaucrats they own, the attacks on the idea of free expression, and the campaign to disarm us. Their objective is no more Trumps, just an endless line of progressive would-be Maduros with the march toward despair occasionally put on pause for a term by some Fredocon Republican who hates us Normals just as much as the Dems, but won’t admit it until after he’s out of office.
So #NeverTrumpers are upset because Trump called them scum? Well boo freaking hoo:
If you were involved in the 2016 election and, at any point, decided that Hillary Clinton was very bad for the nation and that Evan McMullin was a f***ing bug-eating tool and that Donald Trump was not Beelzebub incarnate, then you became the target of abuse. In my personal experience, there are people who I’d considered friends for several years who I would no longer pee on if they were on fire today because of the abuse and scorn the heaped upon people who disagreed with them and the cheap bullying that they engaged in. Trumpkin. Trumptard. Trumpaloo. Trumphumper. And all manner of other cute names.
Snip.
For three years these people have degraded, demeaned, and libeled anyone who simply decided that, for all his flaws, Trump was better than any Democrat. No grace was offered to people who had considered them friends and colleagues. No common cause was allowed to be made. They stopped being conservatives and Republicans who simply disliked the candidate and then the president and became active Democrat partisans who simply called themselves something else. Every hoax and bad faith allegation made against the President and his administration, from the Russia bullsh** to defending illegal FISA warrants to the “Muslim ban” to “kids in cages,” was spearheaded by NeverTrumpers flagellating themselves with their principles and yodeling “we’re better than that.”
In 2020, these people have a choice to make. They can either earn their way back in–Prodigal Son, and all that–or they can stay gone. I don’t care who they vote for because Trump won last time without them and he’s in a much stronger position today than he was in November 2016. But, no matter what path they choose, there should be no forgetting of how these people have acted and what they’ve done. No one should allow them to forget why no one–right or left–wishes to have anything to do with them. No one should ever forget that they are dangerous, timorous and unfaithful allies and should not be allowed to do any more than hold the coats for the rest of us.
President Donald Trump begins process to formally withdraw from the Paris climate accord. I’m not sure this is strictly necessary, as it was never binding on the U.S. because it was never submitted to the senate for ratification. As opposed to being nonbinding on the rest of the world because they’re just lying about following it anyway.
Sanctions against Iran really biting into its oil revenues, especially as the U.S. becomes more sophisticated about counter attempts to evade it.
As recently as mid-2019, Iranian leaders openly boasted of selling its oil to foreign customers despite the 2017 sanctions. At the time of that boast, Iran was getting a million BPD (barrels per day) out to export customers. In contrast, before the sanctions, Iran exported two million BPD. But by July 2019 exports had been reduced to 365,000 BPD and in August it was a record low 160,000 BPD and that did not change much in September. What the Iranians don’t issue press releases about is how well sanction enforcement efforts have been at reducing those illegal exports to record lows.
The UK is finally having a general election after essentially a year of deadlock. If history is any guide, parties promising to deliver Brexit will win, then not deliver Brexit…
Related: Sanctuary city proposition goes down in flames in Tucson. Funny how not enforcing laws against illegal aliens enjoys crushing defeat when actual voters get a chance to chime in.
Meanwhile, the illegal alien debate in the Democratic Party is between the hard left and the loony left. “While the rest of America frets about illegal alien criminals escaping authorities with the eager help of liberal politicians, liberals are more concerned about proving to each other how wonderful and tolerant they are by opening the border and allowing anyone and everyone with a sob story to be welcomed and cared for.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A recent string of high-profile comments brought “Cancel Culture” to the fore. Stand-up routines by Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Sebastian Maniscalo forced the subject back into the limelight.
“No Safe Spaces,” a documentary about the Left’s serial attacks on free expression, debuts this weekend at the near-perfect time. Comedian Adam Carolla and syndicated radio star Dennis Prager unite to explore how universities are clamping down on healthy debate, and why that woke sentiment is leaking into society at large.
“Joker” director Todd Phillips, who previously helmed the “Hangover” series, amplified the cause. He told Vanity Fair he created “Joker” because making comedies is no longer fun.
“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he says. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’
Science Fiction tries to erase its past over crimes against Social Justice Warrior orthodoxy. To be fair, the people who handed out the (now being renamed) James Tiptree Award were always far-left radical feminist lunatics. The question is why have the theoretically more sober people behind the John W. Campbell and World Fantasy Awards also given in to this Orwellian, history-erasing lunacy?
Is anyone really surprised when a progressive treats institutional charity money as a personal slush fund?
The former head of the L.A.-based anti-poverty nonprofit Youth Policy Institute improperly used the organization’s funds to pay the property taxes on his house, buy furniture for his home office and make national political donations, the group alleged in court documents filed this week.
Dixon Slingerland, who was fired as the group’s chief executive in September, spent the nonprofit’s money on an array of unauthorized and personal expenses, including private tutoring for his children, contributions to his wife’s pension, and “lavish” dining, travel and entertainment, according to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing lodged by the nonprofit in federal court.
Texas candidate Jessica Cisneros has been one of the most high profile candidates backed by Justice Democrats, the liberal group seeking to defeat incumbents they perceive as insufficiently progressive. While Cisneros has received praise from freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), local residents appear more skeptical. She has received just $3,585 of her $190,000 (1.8 percent) in itemized contributions from inside the San Antonio district she hopes to represent.
Cisneros is primarying Democratic incumbent Henry Cueller for the Texas 28th Congressional District. She does not appear to be former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros’ daughter.
“Democrat Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz and Republican Gary Gates are headed to a runoff to decide who will fill the unexpired term of State Rep. John Zerwas (R–Richmond)” for Texas House District 28. Gates is a seven time loser, the founding money behind the “Texas Citizens Coalition” (whose mailers I have not seen recently), and was last seen running a dishonest campaign against Wayne Christian for the Railroad Commission. Still, I can only imagine that he’ll be preferable to a Democrat, and even though Markowitz garnered more votes in the election, all the other candidates were Republicans for a Republican-leaning seat, giving Gates a good chance to retain it.
“Plastikov 3D printed AK. 900 rounds on the front receiver, 550 on the rear – with no signs of damage. 7.62×39 goodness in a 7 dollar PLA receiver.” Not quite a revolution, since he used metal parts for the ejector and rails, and spent a total of $393 for all the parts, but definitely interesting, since the receiver is what the federal government counts as the “gun.” Caveat: 7.62x39mm evidently generates lower firing pressure than 5.56 NATO. But I’m hardly an expert here. Still: interesting. (Hat tip: Sal the Agorist.)
Beto goes bye bye, sticker shock sets in for Warren, Grandpa Simpson forgets which state he’s in (again), and a failing Harris goes all-in on Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
The story had been about how Biden was doomed and Warren’s rise was inexorable, but Biden tops every national poll this week, maintaining a modest lead over Warren, while Harris is in freefall. Also notice that there’s not a single poll outside Iowa or New Hampshire where Warren leads Biden. (For one thing, Quinnipiac, which has constantly shown a more pro-Warren tilt than any other poll, evidently didn’t do one last week.)
CNN/UNH (New Hampshire): Sanders 21, Warren 18, Biden 15, Buttigieg 10, Yang 5, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 5, Steyer 3, Harris 3, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Sestak 1. Good news for Yang, Gabbard and Klobuchar, though I’m not sure if this is a DNC qualifying poll or not.
The assumption that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren will win New Hampshire is all but baked, Democratic insiders told POLITICO; the neighbor-state senators could easily take the top two spots. The biggest prize, at this point, is the surge of momentum that would come from eclipsing Joe Biden, as the race turns to Nevada and then South Carolina.
I think the story coming out of this state may not be first place,” said former Democratic state Sen. Andrew Hosmer. “It may be who shows up as a strong second or third place that really propels them.”
Hosmer’s assessment was broadly shared by more than two dozen knowledgeable Democrats interviewed for this story, including the party chair, current and former state lawmakers, several underdog campaigns and one of the candidates. Officials with several Democratic candidates’ campaigns, meanwhile, described the race as fluid, with no real frontrunner despite the advantage enjoyed by Sanders, who won New Hampshire in 2016, and Warren, who has been building inroads for years.
The candidates and campaign aides said superior organization will trump all in the state — more so than a heavy TV ad presence or endorsements. And with more than four of five voters still undecided or only leaning toward a candidate, there’s an enormous opportunity for a lower-polling candidate to emerge.
With no clear frontrunner and at least four plausible candidates, superdelegates might make a comeback in a brokered convention.
Depending on how frontloaded a primary calendar is, late April tends to be around the point where enough delegates have been allocated that the presumptive nominee is, if not already clear, coming into sharper focus. So if three candidates are still cresting above the 15 percent threshold by the six-contest “Acela primary” in late April, when more than 75 percent of delegates will have been awarded, that could wreak havoc on the 2020 Democratic nomination process.
But of course, much of this depends on how wide the margin is by which the candidates clear that threshold. If, say, only one candidate is getting a supermajority while the others struggle to hit 15 percent, then the fact that three candidates are above the threshold matters very little — see Trump in 2016. But if three candidates are tightly bunched at 40, 30 and 20 percent, it potentially becomes much more problematic. This is especially true if that clustering happens early and often, especially on delegate-rich days like Super Tuesday, which is scheduled for March 3 this year and is the first series of contests after the four early states.
But:
Here’s why I think a logjam situation is unlikely: How the threshold is applied tends to already have a built-in winnowing effect on the candidates. Yes, there is a proportional allocation of delegates, but that only applies to candidates who win 15 percent of the vote. And that qualifying threshold is not applied just once, but three different times. A candidate must meet that threshold at the statewide level twice, once for at-large delegates and once for party leader and elected official (PLEO) delegates. A candidate must also win 15 percent of the vote in a given congressional district (or other subdivision) to lay claim to any district-level delegates. In other words, a candidate who surpasses 15 percent of the statewide vote by running up margins in a few concentrated areas will not earn as many delegates as a candidate who hits the 15 percent statewide threshold by earning at least 15 percent of the vote across districts. A candidate must build a coalition of support more uniformly across a state — and the country — in order to win delegates. It’s more than just peeling off a delegate or two here and there.
Hey Democrats, when even Nancy Pelosi says your ideas are too far left to win elections, don’t you think you should listen?
“Voters are sick and tired of politicians promising them things that they know they can’t deliver,” the Colorado senator said in a statement. “Warren’s new numbers are simply not believable and have been contradicted by experts. Regardless of whether it’s $21 trillion or $31 trillion, this isn’t going to happen, and the American people need health care.”
Warren on Friday released the cost estimate of her plan, which increases federal spending by $21 trillion over the next ten years, a significant increase that is nevertheless cheaper than the $31 trillion increase attributed to Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.
While serving as senator of Delaware, Joe Biden reached out discreetly to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to discuss matters his son Hunter Biden’s firm was then lobbying for, according to government records Goodman gathered.
The latest revelations further buttress accusations that Joe Biden’s work as senator and vice president frequently converged with and assisted Hunter Biden’s business interests. Whether it be getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son’s company fired or meeting one of his son’s business partners while on a diplomatic trip to China in 2013, Joe Biden’s political activities in relation to his son Hunter have continued to garner scrutiny.
In 2002, while his father was a senator, Hunter founded the lobbying firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which lobbied on the Hill. When his father announced his candidacy for president in 2008, Hunter opted to leave the firm, claiming it was to reduce concerns about conflicts of interest.
While Hunter was still at the firm, in late February 2007, then-Sen. Joe Biden reached out to DHS, expressing concern over the department’s proposed chemical security regulations. The regulations were in accordance with Section 550 of the DHS Appropriations Act of 2007, which called for chemical facilities to submit detailed “site security plans” for DHS approval. Part of these plans were expected to include specifics related to training and credentialing employees.
Biden’s call seems like an eerie coincidence. Two months prior to that phone call, the Industrial Safety Training Council had enlisted Hunter Biden’s firm to lobby DHS precisely on Section 550. The Industrial Safety Training Council is a 501(c)3 that offers safety training services to employees of chemical plants. In the midst of debates over regulations stemming from Section 550, ISTC launched significant lobbying efforts to encourage the expansion of background checks under the new regulation regime.
Hunter was not registered as an individual lobbyist on behalf of ISTC, but he did serve as a senior partner at his namesake firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which only boasted three partners at the time. According to Goodman, from early 2007 to the end of 2008, his firm earned a total of $200,000 from ISTC in return for its lobbying efforts.
While we don’t know the source of Joe Biden’s concern over Section 550 and whether his “concern” was the one ISTC shared, it is worth noting this repeated crossover between Hunter Biden’s business and his father’s political stratagems. At some point, coincidences stop being merely a product of a chance. In the case of Hunter and Joe Biden, the coincidences continue to pile up.
Joe Biden’s use of his political power for his son’s business dealings didn’t stop there. At one point, Hunter’s firm was lobbying on behalf of SEARCH, a national nonprofit devoted to information-sharing between states in the criminal justice and public safety realm. SEARCH was interested in expanding the federal government’s fingerprint screening system and hired Hunter’s firm to lobby on behalf of this issue.
During that very time, Joe Biden sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales expressing a desire to unpack this very topic. In his letter, then-Sen. Joe Biden asked to meet with DOJ to explore the benefits of the expanding the federal government’s fingerprint system.
From the Yogi Berra Institute for Advanced Whackery — er, Business Insider, actually — comes a new poll showing that while Joe Biden is the most-loved Democratic presidential contender, he’s also the least-liked. According to figures releasedon Sunday, “27% of likely Democratic voters would be unsatisfied with a Biden nomination, 21% would be dissatisfied with a Sanders win, and 15% would be dissatisfied with Warren.”
What that means is, should Biden win the nomination next summer, more than a quarter of Dems would face a serious “Meh” moment when deciding whether to even bother showing up at the polls in November.
Snip.
Registered voters (it’s too soon to narrow down to likely voters) who approved of Trump’s job performance are either “extremely” or “very” enthused about voting next year — by a whopping 79%. If you’re a registered voter and you disapprove of Trump, you’re only 66% likely to be extremely or very enthused. 13 points is a major enthusiasm gap. And as Kilgore also notes, “White folks are more enthusiastic about voting than nonwhite folks; old folks are more psyched than young folks; Republicans are more whipped up than Democrats.” Those demos suggest that Democratic primary voters had better think long and hard about nominating someone who generates serious enthusiasm, but their frontrunner doesn’t seem to be the guy to do that.
Records filed with the Department of Justice show that Rasky is also a registered foreign agent lobbying on behalf of the government of Azerbaijan. The records, which were filed pursuant to the Foreign Agent Registration Act, show that Rasky was hired by the Azerbaijani government on April 23, 2019. Federal documents signed by Rasky show that he reports directly to Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States.
“[The government of Azerbaijan] will pay RASKY a minimum monthly non-refundable fee (the ‘Monthly Fee’) for the Services provided of $15,000 per month, plus a 5% administrative fee as described below,” Rasky’s contract with the foreign government states. “The Monthly Fees totaling $94,500 shall be paid in two equal installments. The initial payment of $47,250 is due upon the signing of this agreement. The second payment of $47,250 is due on July 15, 2019.”
Rasky changed the name of the PAC from “For The People” to “Unite the Country” on Monday, according to FEC filings. The filings do not state which country Rasky intends to unite on Biden’s behalf.
The vainglorious, name-dropping Biden also couldn’t help himself from invoking Pope Francis and noting that he “gives me Communion.”
Such brief asides won’t solve his Catholic problem. For one thing, invoking Pope Francis plays poorly in American politics, as the opponents of Donald Trump found out in 2016. Trump’s poll numbers didn’t fall but rose after the pope slammed his immigration position. Hiding behind an obnoxious left-wing pope won’t help Biden any more than it helped Hillary and Kaine, who tried to drive that wedge between Trump and Catholic voters. Kaine’s faux-Catholic schtick — he would go on and on about his “Jesuit volunteer corps” work in Latin America with commies — went over like a lead balloon.
The Catholics who bother to go to Mass regularly anymore are loath to vote for a candidate who supports abortion in all its grisly stages and presides over gay weddings (which Biden has done since pushing Barack Obama to support gay marriage in 2012). That poses an insuperable impediment to picking up Catholic votes. Notice that Biden’s I-grew-up-Catholic-in-Scranton lines are recited less and less. His strategists have probably concluded that that routine hurts him in the primaries and can only remind people of his checkered Catholicism in the general election. His “private” Catholic stances grow fainter and fainter and can’t even be found in a penumbra.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Could Booker gain from O’Rourke’s exit? I rather doubt it. Booker’s no longer getting fawning profiles, but his director for state communications, Julie McClain Downey, is. The article opens stating she was “on the 12-week gender-blind paid leave available to all of the campaign’s full-time staffers.” Presidential campaigns are intense pressure cooker endeavors that require staffers to work killing hours over the course of (for a competitive campaign) 12-18 months. If key staffers are taking 12 months of leave during the white heat before the primary season, no wonder Booker is languishing around 1%.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Steve Bullock gets Anthony Scaramucci to unknowingly tape endorsement for $100.” That’s his big, exciting news this week. Maybe next week he can pay for Snooki’s endorsement. (And I know what you’re thinking, but no, she’ll only be 33 next year, making her constitutionally ineligible to be elected President…)
Joe Biden dropped to fourth place in Iowa, according to a new poll released Friday, his worst showing to date in the pivotal early state.
A few hours later, at the largest gathering to date for any 2020 event, it was clear why.
While Biden delivered a solid performance on stage before a crowd of 13,500 Democrats at the state party’s Liberty & Justice dinner, he was overshadowed and outshined by the candidate who just passed him in the polls — Pete Buttigieg.
At the massive state party event known for its catalytic effect on campaigns — it’s widely remembered as a turning point for Barack Obama’s Iowa fortunes in 2007 — Buttigieg captured the audience’s imagination, articulating a case for generational change.
“I didn’t just come here to end the era of Donald Trump,” Buttigieg said to a roaring crowd of supporters. “I’m here to launch the era that must come next.”
Snip.
Matt Sinovic, executive director of Progress Iowa, one of the largest left-leaning advocacy groups in the state, said Buttigieg generated considerable buzz with a recent statewide bus tour. He starts another on Saturday. But the Indiana mayor is also swamping his opponents in digital advertising, something that’s been hard to miss in Iowa.
“I cannot overstate how many Buttigieg ads I see,” said Sinovic, pointing to data showing Buttigieg’s national digital spending numbers surpassing Biden almost five-to-one. “It’s just a massive outspending right now.”
Almost always in politics, an early money lead counts for a hell of a lot more than an early poll lead.
Biden’s campaign announced on Friday a new round of digital ad spending in Iowa. And he’s opening a new office in the state, giving him 23 overall as well as 100 staffers. The campaign also notes an October fundraising bump as a sign they’re not losing momentum — the campaign said it had its best month to date online, raising $5.3 million from 182,000 donations, with an average donation of $28.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still not getting out. “Julián Castro plans to refocus his 2020 presidential campaign on Iowa, Nevada and Texas in the coming days and is supporting his staffers looking for jobs with other campaigns.” That pretty much says he’s broke, though Nevada and Texas make sense as last-ditch Hail Mary plays. In that CNN/UNH poll, Castro hard the largest net favorability decline of all the candidates listed, a whopping -25%. I’m sort of surprised voters actually noticed him enough to dislike him. Maybe it was the “abortion services for trannies” line that did it…
Coming off a close loss in Texas’s 2018 Senate race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, O’Rourke entered the presidential race with great fanfare in March, though some wondered if he had waited too long to fully capitalize on the national notoriety he gained from his 2018 performance. Still, O’Rourke’s initial polling numbers suggested he might really be in the mix to compete for the nomination — he was polling at 10 percent or more in some national polls not long after he announced. However, his survey numbers quickly deteriorated as the race moved along, and he spent the past four months mostly polling below 5 percent even after he tried to revive his campaign in August by tacking left on some issues and focusing more on President Trump.
’Rourke’s tumble in the polls was also accompanied by fundraising difficulties. Having been a prodigious fundraiser in 2018, he seemed capable of attracting the resources to run a top-level presidential campaign, and he showed early promise by raising $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign, the second best opening day after only former Vice President Joe Biden. But fundraising dollars started drying up shortly thereafter. He had raised only $13 million by the end of the second quarter, and added just another $4.5 million in the third quarter.
His debate performances didn’t help him recover either; in fact, his most recent performance seemed to have hurt him. After the October debate, O’Rourke’s net favorability among Democratic primary voters fell by about 6 points in our post-debate poll with Ipsos, the biggest decline for any of the 12 candidates on stage. His place at future debates was in serious jeopardy, too. O’Rourke was two qualifying polls shy of making the November debate and had yet to register a single qualifying survey for the December debate.
But O’Rourke might always have struggled to attract a large enough base of support in the primary given the makeup of the Democratic electorate. As a moderate three-term congressman, he won over many suburban white voters in his Texas Senate bid, but as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote back in July, a base of white moderates, particularly younger ones, wasn’t enough…only about 12 percent of 2016 Democratic primary voters fit all three descriptors — young, white, moderate.
O’Rourke may have been billed as a moderate, but he quickly joined the Twitter Woke Circus, threatened to take our guns, and watched his polls crash even harder as a result. A fact that makes the NRA celebrate his exit:
What do Beto, Gillibrand, and Swalwell have in common? They based their presidential campaigns around demonizing the @NRA, 100M gun owners and trying to destroy our right to self-defense and to even own guns. They messed with the bull and they got the horns. pic.twitter.com/oozFjUgJkr
Across the Democratic Party, ordinary voters, senior strategists, and health care wonks are increasingly nervous that the candidate many believe to be the most likely nominee to face Donald Trump has burdened herself with a policy that in the best case is extraordinarily difficult to explain and in the worst case could make her unelectable.
On Tuesday night, in Concord, one of the more bougie New Hampshire towns that should be a Warren stronghold, Warren stepped inside Dos Amigos, a local Mexican restaurant. She made the rounds talking to voters as locals ate tacos and watched a football game playing above the bar. It didn’t take long before the first Medicare for All question came up.
Martin Murray, who lives in neighboring Bow, came down for a taco and a beer and ended up having a conversation with Elizabeth Warren about single payer and slavery. (That’s what it’s like in New Hampshire.)
“I paid pretty close attention to the last debate when Buttigieg was talking to her,” he told me, “and what I got from him was simply that going for the golden coin, if you will, might be a little too much all at once and maybe we have to take that step by step. And that’s what worries me too: that going for Medicare for All might be unattainable.”
Murray, who is leaning toward supporting Warren, asked her about the Buttigieg critique. “You don’t get what you don’t fight for,” she told him. “In fact, can I just make a pitch on that? People said to the abolitionists: ‘You’ll never get it done.’ They said it to the suffragettes: ‘You’ll never get that passed.’ Right? They said it to the foot soldiers in the civil rights movement. They said it to the union organizers. They said it to the LGBT community.”
She added, “We’re on the right side of history on this one.”
Some Democrats I talked to found the comparisons that Warren used to be jarring. “I have the highest respect for Sen. Warren but she’s wrong about this,” said former Sen. Carol Mosley Braun, the first female African American in the Senate. “Abolition and suffrage did not occasion a tax increase. People weren’t giving something up — except maybe some of their privilege.”
She added, “To compare the health care debate to the liberation of black people or giving women the right to vote is just wrong.”
“Medicare for All does not equate in any shape, form or fashion to the Civil Rights Act, or Voting Rights Act, or the 13th Amendment, or 14th Amendment,” said Bakari Sellers, a Kamala Harris supporter whose father was a well-known civil rights activist who was shot and imprisoned in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968. “It doesn’t.”
Plus a history of Warren’s position, since she’s been on both sides of the issue whenever it suited her. Warren is a great candidate…if you want to see the stock market collapse. New York Times reporter had documents that proved Warren was lying about her “I was fired because I was pregnant” story, and sat on them. We all know why: They want Warren to win and they want Trump to lose. Saturday Night Livemocks Warren’s health care plan. The fact I’m linking here rather than embedding it should tell you how funny it is. Also, as with Hillary Clinton, SNL helps Warren’s campaign by having her played by an actress roughly half her age. “Elizabeth Warren Pledges To Crack Down On School Choice, Despite Sending Her Own Son To Elite Private School.”
The 2020 presidential candidate’s public education plan would ban for-profit charter schools — a proposal first backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — and eliminate government incentives for opening new non-profit charter schools, even though Warren has praised charter schools in the past.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) This does not appear to be an official Warren campaign account, but it does offer up an infinite well of cringe.
“The downsides of that, the entire country gets engrossed in this impeachment process,” Yang said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And then, we’re gonna look up and be facing Donald Trump in the general election and we will not have made a real case to the American people.”
Yang said that while he does support the impeachment, he feels Democrats waste too much time talking about it and not enough about the future of the US.
“That’s the only way we’re going to win in 2020 and that’s the only way we’re actually going to start actually solving the problems that got him elected,” he told CNN.
In the second quarter — from April to June — the campaign had under 20 staff members on its payroll, according to Yang’s Federal Election Commission filings. But a quarter later, it nearly quadrupled to include 73 staff members, POLITICO’s analysis shows, as well as several experienced and well-respected strategists in Democratic politics.
The expansion, fueled by a nearly $10 million third-quarter fundraising haul, ensures that the 44-year-old entrepreneur can stick around through the beginning of early-state voting next year — and gives Yang a platform to build on if he should have a big moment in a later debate or show unexpectedly well in the Iowa caucuses. The hires also add critical experience to Yang’s campaign as it starts to spend on advertising, like a recent six-figure digital ad buy in the early states.
Snip.
Most notably, Yang’s campaign recently brought on Devine, Mulvey and Longabaugh as its media consulting firm. The firm — run by Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh — worked for Sanders’ insurgent 2016 primary campaign and produced the famous “America” ad before splitting early on with Sanders’ 2020 bid due to “differences in a creative vision.”
Longabaugh says they were drawn to Yang because he’s “is offering the most progressive ideas” of the primary but that they see a long runway for the Yang campaign.
“We wouldn’t have signed on with somebody we didn’t think was a serious candidate,” Longabaugh said, “Yang has a good deal of momentum and there’s a great deal of grassroots enthusiasm for his candidacy and that’s what’s driven it this far.”
Other hires include senior adviser Steve Marchand, a former mayor of Portsmouth, N.H. and two-time gubernatorial candidate, who is a paid adviser to the Yang campaign since April and national organizing director Zach Fang, who jumped ship from Rep. Tim Ryan’s campaign in late August.
The campaign has also paid Spiros Consulting — a widely used Democratic research firm helmed by Edward Chapman — for research throughout the quarter.
The campaign’s field office game has ballooned recently. Currently all 15 of their field offices are in the first four states; 10 have opened since the start of October, according to the campaign.
That effort has evolved into more than 30 Yang Gangs across the state— 17 that South Carolina campaign chair Jermaine Johnson says are “100% structured.” The Columbia and Charleston group, made up of about 250 members, is the largest of these South Carolina Yang Gangs. The campaign maintains that while not all of these members are showing up to in-person events, the majority are active online.
It was fall of 1999, and Yang, 24, was in the job he had steered toward his whole life. Phillips Exeter Academy, Brown University, Columbia Law — the perfect elite track to land at Davis Polk & Wardwell, one of the country’s premier law firms. His Taiwanese immigrant parents were thrilled. Counting salary and bonus, he was making about $150,000 a year.
He quit because he didn’t like it. “Working at a law firm was like a pie-eating contest, and if you won, your prize was more pie.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
Ukraine revelations are pummeling the Biden campaign, furthering his slump, Q3 fundraising numbers drop, Yang rises, and rumors fly that Grandma Death is about to escape from her crypt yet again. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Q3 Fundraising
It’s that time again! Fundraising totals came gushing out of the campaigns last week:
Those are good numbers for Yang, bad numbers for Harris, and terrible numbers for Biden. As the presumed front-runner and DNC insider candidate, Biden should be rolling in donor dough. He’s not. And he had two-and-a-half months to raise money before the whole Ukraine thing really broke open. This suggests serious organizational impairment by the Biden campaign, or that Biden himself is simply phoning it in.
Sanders topped the list, but everything hings on how well, and how quickly, he comes back from his heart attack. Warren is in line with expectation: The bump from beating Biden has to be tempered with the disappointment of losing to Sanders. More than half of the media seems ready to anoint Warren The Chosen One, but her performance isn’t yet justifying it yet.
As for Yang, between this and his rising poll numbers, there’s no reason to treat him as any less serious a candidate than Harris.
Polls
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 41, Warren 12, Sanders 10, Harris 4, Steyer 4, Booker 3, Buttigieg 2, Ryan 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1. Has Steyer been making ad buys in South Carolina?
Saint Anselm College (New Hampshire): Warren 25, Biden 24, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 5, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 2, Yang 2, Booker 1. Sample size of 423. Castro received zero votes.
Candidates will need to clear 3 percent in four DNC-approved polls, up from the 2 percent required to qualify for the September and October debates. But the committee also created an additional early-state path to qualify: garnering 5 percent in two approved polls conducted in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina.
Additionally, candidates now need to receive donations from 165,000 unique donors — up from 130,000 from the September and October debates — with 600 unique donors in 20 different states, territories or the District of Columbia.
The top fundraiser in the Democratic presidential field was hospitalized for a heart attack, the longtime polling leader and his son sit at the center of an impeachment inquiry, and the one candidate with clear momentum faces persistent doubts among some party leaders that she is too liberal to win the general election.
With breathtaking speed, the events of the past two weeks have created huge uncertainty for the candidates who have dominated the Democratic nomination race, shaking a party desperate to defeat President Trump next year and deeply fearful of any misstep that risks reelecting a president many Democrats see as dangerously unfit for office.
Concerns have risen in recent days that the potential Democratic slate has been weakened by events largely out of the candidates’ control. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) promised a speedy return to the campaign trail after leaving the hospital Friday, but it was unclear whether the 78-year-old would be able to replicate his previously frenetic travel schedule. Former vice president Joe Biden, who has spent most of the race as the leader in the polls, has faced daily attacks from Trump over largely unfounded allegations about his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings, highlighting a potential vulnerability for the candidate many saw as the best hope for beating Trump.
Snip.
But they point to several worrying factors, including questions about whether Biden is equipped to mount an effective defense against Trump’s attacks and whether the surging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would alienate moderate voters and donors if she were the nominee. Some fear that Sanders’s health problems put a spotlight on the advanced age of the top contenders, all of whom are in their 70s. Others expressed skepticism that any Democrat would be able to compete against Trump’s unmatched ability to shift the public’s focus.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Launches ads attacking “Medicare for All.” It’s open question to whether the majority of the Democratic Party’s total voting membership (as opposed to the hard left activist base) supports fully socialized medicine and destroying private health insurance. If Biden falters, Bennet and Bullock would be two candidates with a good shot to pick up his moderate voters. Well, that is, assuming they can get past Buttigieg’s giant spiked walls of money…
For Mr. Biden’s campaign, no attack could have been more difficult to deal with than one involving the candidate’s son.
Mr. Biden nearly did not run for president because of the effect it would have on his family — and particularly on Hunter Biden and his children, according to multiple advisers to the former vice president. Hunter Biden has struggled for years with substance addiction and had recently gone through a very public divorce from his first wife.
In separate interviews, Mr. Coons and his fellow senator from Delaware, Tom Carper, both said they had warned Mr. Biden that the president would target his family.
“He expected his family to be attacked,” Mr. Carper said, adding that Mr. Biden assured him he was braced for “the onslaught.’’
Mr. Biden’s family, including his son, encouraged him to enter the race, knowing the attacks were inevitable. But as Anita Dunn, one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, put it: “When it happens, it still feels pretty lousy.”
The Biden campaign has attempted to handle the candidate’s son with great sensitivity. Mr. Biden made clear at the outset that Hunter, a lawyer who had long advised his father on his campaigns, should not be made to feel excluded, people who spoke with him said. One adviser to Mr. Biden recently telephoned his son to solicit advice on the upcoming debate in Ohio.
But to most of Mr. Biden’s aides, Hunter Biden has been a spectral presence. He is living in Los Angeles and stayed away from Mr. Biden’s campaign launch in Philadelphia. Hunter Biden quietly attended the last two debates and appeared with his new wife, Melissa Cohen, at a July fund-raiser in Pasadena, Calif.
Still, Mr. Biden’s advisers are aware that Hunter Biden carries political vulnerabilities. His business career has intersected repeatedly with his father’s political power, through roles he had held in banking, lobbying and international finance. Working for a Ukrainian energy company beginning in 2014, he was paid as much as $50,000 a month while his father was vice president, and some of Mr. Biden’s admirers worry that, while Mr. Trump’s accusations are without merit, voters may view Hunter Biden’s actions as problematic.
“Without merit.” “Problematic.” You can always count on the press to put lipstick on a Democrats’ pig. More on Hunter Biden:
There’s an old saying about addiction. The man takes a drink (or a sniff), then the drink takes a drink, until the drink takes the man. It will take the bystanders, too, if they let it. Addiction is ravenous. But there was always someone in Joe Biden’s life to help him out with Hunter. It’s heartwarming when family and friends swoop in to care for the boys while Daddy serves the people of Delaware. But little boys have little needs, while big boys have bigger needs.
Soon enough, directionless Hunter has a six-figure job at a bank run by Biden supporters. When Hunter grows bored, there’s another lucrative job under the tutelage of a former Biden staffer. When Hunter wants a house he can’t afford, he receives a loan for 110 percent of the purchase price. And when he goes bust, another friendly banker mops up the damage.
Then his brother Beau contracts fatal brain cancer, and the last wobbly wheels come off Hunter Biden’s fragile self. At this point, the New Yorker piece becomes a gonzo nightmare — much of it narrated by Hunter himself — of hallucinations, a car abandoned in the desert, maxed-out credit cards, a crack pipe, a strip club and a brandished gun.
If, as the magazine headline put it, Hunter Biden now jeopardizes his father’s campaign, the article makes clear Joe Biden feels a share of the blame. Yet, by the time the senator was vice president, the folks still willing to help Hunter were of a sketchier variety. There was a Chinese businessman who, Hunter said, left him a large diamond as a nice-to-meet-you gift. And a Ukrainian oligarch who hired Hunter at a princely sum to do nothing much. (Neither the firm nor Hunter Biden identified any specific contribution he made). Joe Biden’s response, according to his son, was: “I hope you know what you are doing.”
Hope! What family of an addict hasn’t fallen back to that last trench? Denial, they say, is not just a river in Egypt.
And don’t look now, but there’s more Rudy going after Hunter coming down the pike: “We haven’t even talked about Romania yet.” Evidently 38% of Biden’s Q2 fundraising came from just 2,800 people.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. His $6 million is enough to keep him in the game, but not enough to make any headway in closing with the frontrunners, but both Biden and Harris flaming out (a definite possibility at this point) would open a couple of those hypothetical “lanes” for him. Booker calls on TV stations to not air Trump ad attacking Biden over Ukraine.” More grist for the idea he’s running for VP.
Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old gay mayor of a small Indiana city (South Bend) half the size of Des Moines, is acing the listening test. His words, even in a stump speech, tend to be more thoughtful and more surprising than the standard political applause lines of his rivals. Elizabeth Warren often elicits cheers, Joe Biden gets the occasional affectionate chuckle, but Buttigieg summons up a different reaction. I first noticed it while seeing him at a Des Moines house party on a sparkling Saturday morning in June. As with Obama in 2006, members of the audience leaned forward to listen to Buttigieg speak rather than sitting back to applaud politely. What struck me at the time was that Buttigieg was pulling off this listening trick even though he lacked the national political profile that Obama boasted back in 2006, from his electrifying speech to the 2004 Democratic convention.
Right now, the pair are each below 2.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics averages, with O’Rourke at 2.2 and Castro at 1.4 percent respectively. Even businessman Andrew Yang has eclipsed the pair.
In Texas, O’Rourke has held a slight hold on second place for months — 10 points behind Biden and slightly ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — until the recent Quinnipiac poll, which showed Warren had moved ahead of O’Rourke and put him in third place in his home state.
Meanwhile, while Castro is outperforming his national poll numbers in Texas, he has failed to hit higher than 4 percent in any Texas polls taken thus far.
Castro praises Cesar Chavez, calling him a hero and ignoring the fact he was passionately opposed to illegal immigration.
Update: Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Following Sanders’ heart attack, the Intertubes are rife with rumors that Grandma Death is going to jump into the race, so I moved her up here from the also-rans. Also, she just passed Buttigieg in election betting odds, and is in third place there behind Warren and Biden. Here’s a recent piece speculating on Clinton entering the race, but it’s from a Norwegian-owned site that used to focus on cryptocurrency, so caveat lictor.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. He’s not in the debates…again. Now it’s just a question of how much of John Delaney’s money does John Delaney want to spend to kept pretending that John Delaney is running for President.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She made the next debate. “The Hawaii congresswoman’s debate performances haven’t done much to break her out of the asterisk category, but boy, can she dissect an opponent’s record in a devastating fashion. You could argue that Gabbard more than anyone else triggered the slide of Kamala Harris since the second debate.” If Sanders drops out, could Gabbard pick up some of his supporters? I’ve noticed some overlap there, but I doubt she could pick up enough to be even remotely viable.
Out of all the Democratic candidates, there is perhaps none more inauthentic and grating as Kamala Harris. To be fair, she doesn’t have the shrillness of Hillary Clinton, but she has every other bad quality in spades. She can’t hold a consistent position, she’ll do anything for support, and everything she says sounds like it was focus grouped. None of those things are good descriptors to be attached to one’s campaign.
After being fluffed as the presumptive front runner following the first debate (which I called a sucker’s bet at the time), Tulsi Gabbard kneecapped Harris in the second debate and she has never recovered. Since then, it’s been a steady stream of desperation from her campaign….Her campaign is hemorrhaging cash, the donors have dried up, and she’s old news to the media.
But now things are getting even worse. Her campaign is literally breaking down. The upper levels of her campaign staff are being changed up and she’s bringing over people from the Senate side to try to rescue her.
California Sen. Kamala Harris plans to restructure her struggling presidential campaign, sources with knowledge of the staffing plans tell CNN.
The changes represent the clearest sign to date that Harris, who has seen her poll numbers consistently fall over the last three months, feels changes are needed to jumpstart her presidential bid and streamline an operation that one source said has been been bogged down by bureaucratic hurdles.
Harris will elevate Rohini Kosoglu, her Senate chief of staff, and senior adviser Laphonza Butler into senior leadership positions within the campaign, the sources said, splitting responsibilities for the day to day management of the operation.
Juan Rodriguez will remain Harris’ campaign manager, but the addition of Kosoglu and elevation of Butler shifts some of the longtime Harris aide’s responsibilities to different staffers.
Adding more cooks to the slop kitchen won’t help. The problem with the Kalama Harris campaign is Kamala Harris. Heh: “Kamala Harris Undergoes Heart Surgery After Seeing Positive Reception For Sanders.” Heh 2:
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets interviewed by WMUR (along with Tim Ryan), where he offers up some education/STEM/entrepreneurial platitudes. Also worried that self-driving cars will result in unemployment for Uber and Lyft drivers. Wouldn’t they theoretically make money off their self-driving cars?
With just four months until the first-in-the-nation caucuses, Sanders is in trouble. As he delivered his populist gospel to large crowds of camouflage-clad high schoolers, liberal arts college students, and trade union members across Iowa last week, a problematic narrative was hardening around him: His campaign is in disarray and Elizabeth Warren has eclipsed him as the progressive standard-bearer of the primary. He’s sunk to third place nationally, behind Warren and Joe Biden, and some polls of early nomination states show him barely clinging to double digits. He’s shaken up his staffs in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s lost the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a left-wing group that backed him in 2016, to Warren.
Dismissed out of the gate in 2016 as a nonfactor against Hillary Clinton — only to single-handedly shift the Democratic Party’s ideological center of gravity — Sanders is quite familiar with being left for dead. His top brass’ official line is that pundits and political elites are writing him off because they have no clue what’s happening at kitchen tables and picket lines across America. Sanders and his team have argued some polls that are bad for him are out of whack and several polls that are good for him are ignored by the media.
Meanwhile, his aides say, Sanders remains a fundraising and organizing juggernaut. In its classic big-big-big-numbers style, the campaign announced this month that it had both contacted 1 million voters in Iowa and received donations from 1 million people throughout the United States — a milestone he reached faster than any Democratic presidential candidate in history.
For a guy who’s supposed to be slowly fading into the second tier, Bernie Sanders had a good third quarter of fundraising, announcing this morning that his campaign raised $25 million in the past three months. (One wrinkle: Sanders’ campaign did not specify how much cash on hand he has left.)
The upshot is that Bernie Sanders will probably have enough financial resources to stay in the presidential race as long has he likes, all the way to the Democratic convention in Milwaukee if he wants. As of this morning, he’s still a respectable third nationally in the RealClearPolitics average nationally (17.8 percent), third in Iowa (12 percent), third in New Hampshire (18.8 percent), second in Nevada (21.7 percent), and third in South Carolina (15 percent, and Elizabeth Warren is at 15.7 percent). And fairly or not, a lot of Democratic race-watchers see Joe Biden’s campaign as a ticking time-bomb with a gaffe-prone candidate and the Hunter Biden stuff now getting more play.
From an early age, Tom Steyer has hopscotched from one rarified sphere of American prestige and privilege to the next. His resume starts at the Upper East Side of New York’s The Buckley School, a private K-9 that educated Franklin Roosevelt and a young Donald Trump. Next stop was Phillips Exeter, the patrician New Hampshire boarding academy. Then Yale, where Steyer studied economics, played soccer and graduated at the top of his class. A brief stint at Morgan Stanley, a business degree at Stanford and a job at Goldman Sachs rounded out Steyer’s gilded early resume.
And that was before he became a billionaire.
In San Francisco, Steyer teamed up with the banjo-playing financier Warren Hellman and started a hedge fund. It would eventually be named Farallon Capital and grow from $15 million to more than $20 billion investing diversely: corporate mergers, distressed Asian banks, pharmaceutical companies.
Today Forbes estimates Steyer’s net worth at $1.6 billion. But Farallon’s past investments in coal mines, private prison companies and aquifer-pumping land deals may not jibe with Democratic voters. Neither might Steyer himself — a white guy from high finance.
“The whole issue of income inequality has become a fairly major talking point with Democrats,” said Garry South, a California political strategist. “Why would you think that a billionaire is the best person to deal with income inequality? It’s sort of a contradiction in terms.”
Steyer is a bit of a contradiction himself. In the mold of Warren Buffet, he is famously restrained in his spending habits (to a point). His sartorial style could be described as “Boomer dad”: He regularly wears the same tartan tie and a colorful beaded belt he bought on a trip to Kenya. He flies commercial, for environmental reasons. Speaking to CalMatters over the phone from Iowa, he recalls meeting a “slick-as-could-be” energy lobbyist a few years back who was wearing a “$5,000 suit.” As if Steyer couldn’t drop ten times that on a new outfit every morning for the rest of his life.
Snip.
In 2010, he co-chaired the committee to defeat a repeal of the state’s cap-and-trade emissions reduction program, putting $5 million into the effort. He struck Dan Logue, a former Republican Assemblyman who sponsored the measure and debated Steyer that year, as a true believer “committed to the cause.”
In 2012, Steyer ratcheted up his financial involvement, spending $30 million on a ballot measure to close a tax loophole, effectively raising rates on businesses with out-of-state facilities. In 2016, he spent millions more on an unsuccessful bid to overturn the death penalty, and successful initiatives to raise cigarette taxes and reduce sentences for non-violent crimes.
Steyer’s early focus on voter-initiated policy change runs through into his presidential campaign. He’s proposing to give voters the power to directly make federal law twice each year.
Snip.
Many California voters may not know who Steyer is, but California politicians do.
He’s spent the past decade putting massive sums of cash toward supporting progressive candidates and boosting voter registration.
Starting in 2013, Steyer began throwing his considerable financial weight behind individual candidates across the country through NextGen Climate Action Committee, a super PAC he started to help make climate change a winning issue for progressives.
In the lead-up to both the 2014 and 2016 elections, Steyer’s family firm, Fahr LLC, was the biggest contributor of publicly disclosed political cash of any organization in the country. (Fahr, his middle name, was his mother’s maiden name.) In 2018, Fahr slipped to second place. So far in the 2020 cycle, the Steyers are back in the top spot.
That largesse has endeared him to some Democrats.
“I know the difference between talkers and doers and Steyer is a doer,” said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California.
“Some candidates can come and be the main speaker at a dinner and that’s nice. But if you can write big checks…,” he said, trailing off.
The piece notes he’s sometimes “not been a team player”…but only in the sense that he backs farther left challengers against Democratic incumbents. Picked up a state rep endorsement in South Carolina. “Steyer’s campaign says state Rep. Jerry Govan has signed on as a senior adviser. Govan is chairman of South Carolina’s Legislative Black Caucus.”
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Let no one say she’s not pandering to left-wing interest groups hard enough, as she came out for eliminating right-to-work laws. Democrats couldn’t even implement card check when they had the White House, House and Senate, what makes her think she can pass a big labor pander a hundred times more radical? Or that a nation full of non-unionized employees would ever elect her? Union membership has been declining for decades, down to some 6.5% of private sector jobs. Most states are right-to-work states. Does Warren really think “vote for me and I’ll force you to join a union” is a winning campaign slogan? Once again, Warren maneuvers to win the primary at the cost of winning the election. Well well well: “Elizabeth Warren Fires National Organizing Director Over ‘Inappropriate Behavior.'” “Over the past two weeks, senior campaign leadership received multiple complaints regarding inappropriate behavior by Rich McDaniel.” He “was also Hillary Clinton’s primary states regional director.” Should we assume McDaniel: A.) Tried to get jiggy with new recruits, B.) Forced all new hires to eat a bug, or C.) Proclaimed his love of Nickleback*? She keeps ducking admitting that she’s going to hike your taxes until your eyes bleed. She also got caught lying about being fired for getting pregnant. Indeed, “lying” seems to be the theme of Warren’s entire career. Dissecting all of her pie-in-the-sky promises:
From stem to stern, the senator from Massachusetts has marketed herself as the candidate with everything thought out. For every problem facing our nation, her slogan says she “has a plan for that.” Warren is running on a myriad of big government programs including Medicare for all, student loan debt cancellation, and free college tuition. Her plan to pay for these promises includes a wealth tax of 2 percent on fortunes above $50 million and 3 percent on fortunes above $1 billion.
To many voters, her plans sound attractive, and her years in academia lend to her pitch. She is articulate and crafty enough to crib off Sanders, while arguing that she just wants capitalism with a human face. In reality, however, the former Harvard professor is hoping you will not do the math yourself when it comes to her grandiose pitch. Almost every element of her plans would drive discourse to the left, while weakening our political and economic systems to make it susceptible to crony capitalism.
Even the centerpiece of the Warren campaign platform is obviously unworkable. A wealth tax on fortunes above $50 million is touted as the key funding mechanism for a plethora of new programs. But European nations have attempted numerous such wealth taxes, and none have been successful. Since 1990, the number of European states with such a levy has fallen from a dozen to three, including otherwise low tax Switzerland. Between 2000 and 2012, the burdensome wealth tax in France caused 42,000 millionaires to flee the country. The nation ultimately scrapped the impost in 2018.
While a wealth tax in the United States is likely unconstitutional to begin with, it is certainly unenforceable in the way that Warren desires.
Snip.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the Warren wealth tax plan is that it is estimated to bring in an average of less than $3 trillion over the following decade, which would provide less than 10 percent of the total cost of her Medicare for all plan. Warren will not state the obvious that in order to pay for any of her policy proposals, it would require a massive tax increase on the middle class.
Even worse, Warren proposes a frightening Office of United States Corporations through her Accountable Capitalism Act. Under the plan, workers must represent 40 percent of corporate boards of companies worth more than $1 billion. It also institutes strict controls on political spending and requires a corporate charter approved by the federal government. This idea is Orwellian. After all, the idea of government control of private industry is among the textbook definitions of fascism and its concept of corporatism. That means charters to do business could be revoked by Washington.
As Peter Beinart has trenchantly observed in The Atlantic, formerly moderate Generation X Democratic candidates Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have chosen to turn their backs on policies they once championed. Booker no longer talks up his successful expansion of charter schools as mayor of Newark, while Harris has run away from her common-sense decision, as San Francisco district attorney, to enforce truancy laws as a means to get the attention of parents of disadvantaged students. But there’s another Gen X candidate, unmentioned by Beinart, who’s run away from past successes: Andrew Yang.
While he promotes government-led efforts to redistribute income, Yang has been silent about his own groundbreaking efforts to help declining cities — not through government, but through civil society. In 2011, after a successful career as corporate lawyer and business-school test-prep entrepreneur, Yang founded Venture for America (VFA). Modeled on Teach for America, VFA aimed to attract applicants from elite colleges to work as paid interns at start-up companies in poor cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Birmingham, and Baltimore. Its funding came entirely from philanthropists, most importantly Detroit’s Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans. Like Dan Markowits, the author of the new The Meritocracy Trap, Yang saw the best and brightest as having “too limited a vision of what career success looks like,” and got to work fixing the problem.
Today, VFA is still in operation, with fellowships in 14 different cities around the country. The organization has supported more than 1,000 fellows, working in business incubators and often going on to found start-ups of their own. It says that 51 percent of them continue to live in the cities where their fellowship was based, and they’ve been involved in starting 129 new companies.
Bringing graduates of some 300 colleges to cities that ambitious young people have long been fleeing is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a record of success that gives Yang, if he’d only use it, a ready-made, positive message on the stump: Talented people can start new businesses, help power established ones, and in the process, make cities thrive. This message is all the more powerful when juxtaposed with generations of failed local, state, and federal policies based on the idea that subsidies to attract business are the best way of rejuvenating cities in decline.
Indeed, what is striking about Yang’s Venture for America is its fundamental separation from those failed government policies and from government itself.
I suspect that’s the very reason he doesn’t talk about it to Democrats. He blasted China for blasting the Houston Rockets for Daryl Morey posting a pro-Hong Kong tweet, which has engendered big controversy, because the Rockets have a lot of business deals in China thanks to the Yao Ming era. But Morey (and Yang) was right the first time. Funny how CNN and MSNBC just keeps leaving Yang out of infographics:
Yang raised $10 million, but MSNBC shows Booker in fourth at $6 million. https://t.co/N1tf7NBI9q
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:
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
*I was only vaguely aware of Nickleback in their heyday, and only became aware of them after all the memes talking about how much they sucked. Now that I’ve been forced to listen to “Photograph” to keep up with current events, eh, I don’t hate it. Solid piece of nostalgic pop rock. Honestly, what strikes me most is how the chorus of a song from 2005 sounds exactly like every “hot country” song circa 2014…
Their futile rage at Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh unslaked, Democratic activists have evidently decided that the 53-47 gap between Republicans and Democrats in the senate just isn’t wide enough, and have been attacking two of their sanest senators for not hewing to the glorious far-left party line.
The Arizona Democratic Party is planning to hold a vote this week to determine whether Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) should be censured.
The Arizona Republic reports the censure vote is due to the fact that progressives in the state Democratic Party see her as too accommodating to President Trump and his policies.
Those seeking to censure Sinema point to her vote to confirm David Bernhardt, Trump’s nominee to serve as secretary of the Interior, as well as her vote to confirm William Barr as Attorney General, the news outlet notes.
You voted for the wrong Secretary of the Interior??? Die, vile heretic, die!
Democratic activists, realizing what a deep red state West Virginia is, ignored Sen. Manchin’s remarks as a necessary compromise to keep the seat in Democratic hands.
— #TrumpIsNotAboveTheLaw grandmother-sweets (@sweetsgrandma) September 19, 2019
Sen. Joe Manchin was the only Democrat who voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. It was Manchin who gave Jeff Sessions the thumbs up when he was confirmed as Attorney General. Nothing would make me happier than for someone to primary that motherfucker.
Yes, I’m sure that running someone like Elizabeth Warren for the senate in a state that went for Trump by 42 points in 2016 couldn’t possibly have any negative repercussions.
The extent to which the hard left gets high on their own supply is the extent to which Democrats lose elections.
Chinese hackers are breaching Navy contractors to steal everything from ship-maintenance data to missile plans, officials and experts said, triggering a top-to-bottom review of cyber vulnerabilities.
A series of incidents in the past 18 months has pointed out the service’s weaknesses, highlighting what some officials have described as some of the most debilitating cyber campaigns linked to Beijing.
Cyberattacks affect all branches of the armed forces but contractors for the Navy and the Air Force are viewed as choice targets for hackers seeking advanced military technology, officials said.
Navy contractors have suffered especially troubling breaches over the past year, one U.S. official said.
The data allegedly stolen from Navy contractors and subcontractors often is highly sensitive, classified information about advanced military technology, according to U.S. officials and security researchers. The victims have included large contractors as well as small ones, some of which are seen as lacking the resources to invest in securing their networks.
One major breach of a Navy contractor, reported in June, involved the theft of secret plans to build a supersonic anti-ship missile planned for use by American submarines, according to officials. The hackers targeted an unidentified company under contract with the Navy’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I.
The hackers have also targeted universities with military research labs that develop advanced technology for use by the Navy or other service branches, according to analysis conducted by cyber firms as well as people familiar with the matter.
While Brooklyn is known for liberal silos such as Park Slope and Williamsburg, the Brooklyn I’d known as a child was politically diverse. A number of my former classmates and colleagues remain Republicans. And some of them have come to my aid at the darkest, most tragic times in my life. Many are still my friends. They are police officers, nurses and combat veterans; they are Jews, immigrants, Asians, Latinos and African-Americans. Some would vote for Donald Trump: Conservative Jews who liked his pro-Israel stance; Wall Street workers who liked his business background; rank-and-file police who wanted to stick it to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; visible minorities who liked his “America First” rhetoric, and imagined that he’d bring back secure manufacturing jobs. These promises may have been empty and dishonest. But they resonated with a lot of people, not all of them “troglodytes.”
I also witnessed something else that alarmed me. The charges of Russian collusion against Trump’s campaign—while being a completely legitimate (and ongoing) political concern—were curdling into Russophobic hysteria among some members of the New York literary caste.
“I think Russians have been at the root of our discord for years,” Daniel announced at one point. “I think they own the government and the NRA.…They are the true enemy…Seriously, #russia, fuck you.” Caught up in these negative reveries, he would lapse into Swiftian absurdism, declaring at one point, “I hope we deport every single one of you motherfuckers back to Russia where you’ll live in gulags.” Eventually, Twitter deleted Daniel’s account after he allegedly posted threatening tweets against other users.
On another occasion, after I refused to discuss my Soviet immigration experience via Facebook and suggested we talk in person instead, the daughter of a renowned American novelist told me to “honestly fuck off. Go translate media monitoring kits for Trump… How did you all get into our country? Jesus Christ…You are a great reason why we need immigration reform now.”
As a New York writer, I’m supposed to be reflexively hostile to Trump voters—a political breed that often is caricatured as a bunch of racist Appalachian hillbillies. But because of what I do for a living, and who my friends are, I’ve learned that Trump’s enemies can be every bit as Manichean and hysterical as Trump’s supporters.
Americans are largely against the country becoming more politically correct.
Fifty-two percent of Americans, including a majority of independents, said they are against the country becoming more politically correct and are upset that there are too many things people can’t say anymore. About a third said they are in favor of the country becoming more politically correct and like when people are being more sensitive in their comments about others.
That’s a big warning sign for Democrats heading into the 2020 primaries when cultural sensitivity has become such a defining issue with the progressive base.
Drones shutdown Gatwick airport. When they find the asshole responsible, instead of trying him, they should just turn him over to the people whose flights he’s delayed…
“A prominent ‘Republican’ women’s political action committee that regularly receives national media attention for its criticisms of President Donald Trump and the GOP is bankrolled by three liberal billionaire donors and activists, Federal Election Commission filings show.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Republicans are on-track to pickup five senate seats, including Arizona and Montana, but Republican Dean Heller lost in Nevada. (Update: Democrat Jon Tester back in the Montana Senate race lead narrowly.)
Democrats pick up 27 House seats (with some races still outstanding), enough to take control of the chamber and put Nancy Pelosi back in the speaker’s chair.
Democrats picked up seven Governor’s mansions, including booting Scott Walker in Wisconsin.
No blue wave. A bit of a blue ripple, but Democrats underperformed midterm averages, as the party in the White House usually loses senate seats.
Republicans both taking a senate seat and holding the governor’s mansion in Florida without recounts in such a mixed midterm is a big of a surprise.
So every Dem Senator in a competitive race who voted against Kavanaugh lost (Donnelly, Heitkamp, McCaskill, and almost certainly Nelson), and the one who voted for Kavanaugh survived (Manchin). Coincidence?
They show North Dakota Democrat incumbent Heidi Heitkamp as gone, which already brings Republicans up to 50 seats with victories in Tennessee (likely) and Texas (even more likely).
The races they have as tossups are:
Arizona: The late John McCain’s seat. I expect former fighter pilot and Republican Martha McSally to beat Kyrsten “Meth Lab of Democracy” Sinema based on the latter’s baggage and blunders, and the importance of border control to Arizona residents.
Florida: Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson is in a very tough fight with Republican Governor Rick Scott, but Republican turnout seems to be surging. Keep in mind that in 2014, Scott beat the odious Charlie Crist by only 64,000 votes. It being Florida, it may not be decided until the recount.
Indiana: Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly (D), the last of the Stupak Block Flipper still in office, has been in a virtual tie with Republican challenger Mike Braun. Trump walloped Hillary by 19 points in 2016, while Donnelly managed to eek out 50.04% of the vote in the very Democrat-friendly year of 2012. I think he’s toast and Braun wins.
Missouri: Republican challenger Josh Hawley has lead polls against incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ever since the Kavanaugh vote in a state Trump won by 18 points in 2016. Stick a fork in her.
Montana: Incumbent Democrat Jon Tester should be in deep trouble in a state Trump won by 21 points, but polls show him with a small but sustained lead over challenger Matt Rosendale. Chalk this up as the toss-up Senate race Republicans are most likely to see slip away.
Nevada: Polls show Republican incumbent Dean Heller slightly behind challenger Jacky Rosen. See the mention of big crowds at Trump rallies further down in a state Hillary won by just over two points. Heller eked out a two point win in face of Obama’s big 2012, and I think he survives by the skin of his teeth this year as well.
West Virginia: You would think that Democratic incumbent Joe Manchin would be in deep trouble in a state where Trump walloped Hillary by 42 points, but he’s maintained a small but persistent lead over challenger Patrick Morrisey. The Last Blue Dog may survive 2018, but I suspect this one will go down to the wire.
Any “Likely Democrat” races Republicans can pull an upset off in? Maybe New Jersey where, despite substantial leads, Democrats have been pouring last minute funds in to save indicted sleazebag Robert Menendez. But that’s a pretty high mountain for Republican challenger Bob Hugin to climb.
Vegas oddsmaker Wayne Allyn Root, who correctly predicted Trump’s upset win two years ago, similarly sees another GOP win in the offing:
Don’t look now, but it’s all happening again. Nate Silver says Democrats have a 80%+ chance of winning the House. Cook Report says Democrats will win the House by 40 seats. All the experts say it’s over- Democrats will win. I’ll go out on a limb and disagree again.
I see Florida Democrat Governor candidate Andrew Gillum holding a rally with Bernie Sanders and the whole place is empty.
Barack Obama could not fill a high school gym in Milwaukee.
I witnessed firsthand Joe Biden and Obama at separate events here in Las Vegas playing to small crowds.
Meanwhile I was opening speaker for President Trump’s event in Las Vegas last month- with 10,000 waiting in line for hours in a place where no one cares much about politics. This is a phenomenon.
Does that sound like the GOP is losing 40 seats? Dream on delusional Democrats.
One of the seats he see’s flipping is the Texas 32nd Congressional District, currently held by Republican Pete Sessions. The district went very narrowly (1.9%) for Hillary Clinton in 2016, but went for Romney by over 15 points in 2012. I tend to think Sessions barely wins reelection, based on a strong economy, the long-time Republican nature of the district, and incumbency.
My prediction: Republicans keep the Senate, and we won’t actually know if they keep the House until most of the recounts are done.
Everyone’s talking about the the Inspector General Report on the Hillary Clinton email probe, which I’ve not only not been able to read, I haven’t even properly skimmed the summaries yet. But I was already planning to do a Clinton Corruption Update next week, so I’ll try to grapple with it then.
50 Media Mistakes in the Trump Era. Just 50? Here’s a taste: “June 4, 2017: NBC News reported in a Tweet that Russian President Vladimir Putin told TV host Megan Kelly that he had compromising information about Trump. Actually, Putin said the opposite: that he did not have compromising information on Trump.”
Samantha Bee has never to my knowledge said anything that is funny. Her business is the sort of thing that would be of keen interest to those monkeys in the Duke study: the ritual raising and lowering of status — which, as Tyler Cowen and Arnold Kling and others have argued, is what politics is mostly about. The same holds true for media criticism, which is of course only another form of politics. Professor Cowen: “I have a simple hypothesis. No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status. . . . The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. . . . Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered.”
Samantha Bee does not sell humor or satire: She sells status adjustment. She got her start on The Daily Show, which of course is nothing more than an extended, tedious, witless exercise in concentrated status-lowering: hence all that chest-pounding excitement every time Jon Stewart destroyed! somebody or another, which is precisely the sort of thing that gets the ol’ chimp juices flowing.
Calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless c***” on television is a win-win for Bee et al.: One possibility is that Ivanka Trump offers no response, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to endure outrageous insults by a relative nobody on TBS; the second possibility is that she responds, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to condescend to respond to the outrageous insults of a relative nobody on TBS. The proverb holds that the problem with wrestling a pig is that you both get dirty but only the pig enjoys it. Samantha Bee is that pig.
Since Trump’s election victory in 2016, the left has lost their goddamn minds. The left has become a national freakout movement and they think that his election legitimizes their complete childish and vulgar meltdown on the national stage. On their side, there is no one telling them that they’ve gone too far- they will simply ramp up the violence all the way to the fall. There’s no one to stop their post-election temper tantrum.
Let’s be honest, though. This didn’t happen overnight. The left has absolved itself from any cultural responsibility the moment they gave Bill Clinton a pass for raping people. And then used cultural outlets like The Daily Show to mock everyone who isn’t on their side and delegitimize civil discourse.
Come the mid-term elections, the more crass and racist stunts that they pull (and get away with), the more people are going to drift into the right-of-center Trump camp. The Democrats were already demographically in trouble with 2018, but the further they push the cultural envelope with mean and childish antics (let alone actual political violence) they are going to get a cultural backlash that makes 1968 look like child’s play.
And what really is bad news for the left is that they’re already at peak jerk levels. What the heck will they do for an encore leading up to November?
If you had been making predictions based on these different movies, Movie 1, predicted that President Trump would not be popular with Israel, and he wouldn’t take the bold step of moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. But both of those outcomes are compatible with Movie 2.
Movie 1 would have predicted there is no way President Trump would grant a posthumous pardon of African-American boxer Jack Johnson because it wouldn’t fit the racist dog whistle script. But Movie 2 is compatible with the pardon. Same with the pardon of Alice Johnson.
Movie 1 would have predicted that President Trump would underplay the fact that black unemployment reached its best level in the history of America. That’s the sort of accomplishment that would make his racist supporters stop hearing the secret racist dog whistle. It doesn’t fit. But President Trump’s frequent highlighting of gains for African-American citizens fits Movie 2 perfectly.
I realize no one reading this post will change movies because of it. My only point today is that mainstream Trump supporters are not knowingly supporting someone they believe to be a racist. It only looks that way to the folks trapped in Movie 1.
Rozanna and Kate Lilley, the daughters of playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett, say they were forced into sex aged 15 by men including the late Bob Ellis and Martin Sharp, The Australian reports.
Sharp, Australia’s foremost pop artist, designed record covers and posters for Bob Dylan, Donovan and Eric Clapton and wrote songs for Clapton’s band, Cream.
Ellis was a political commentator, write and film maker who penned 22 television and screenplays.
And speaking of statutory rape, here’s the inside story of the night Roman Polanski raped a child. Includes details of just how he set about deliberately seducing a girl he knew went to middle school.
Mueller’s indictments not only don’t indicate Russian collusion on part of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, they actually indicate the opposite, says notorious right-wing shills at…The Nation?
AT&T/Time Warner merger approved. Can’t think that this is a good thing, given how much of the local broadband market are government-enforced monopolies…
The director of the American Civil Liberties Union has now acknowledged what should have been obvious to everybody over the past several years: The ACLU is no longer a neutral defender of everyone’s civil liberties. It has morphed into a hyper-partisan, hard-left political advocacy group. The final nail in its coffin was the announcement that, for the first time in its history, the ACLU would become involved in partisan electoral politics, supporting candidates, referenda and other agenda-driven political goals.
Important safety tip: If you’re a popular band, never play Indonesia. Among the worst incidents: multiple cases of death, and Deep Purple’s manager being dropped down an elevator shaft. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
In Austin news, Interim Police Chief Manly is no longer interim. Dwight thinks it’s a good move.
Speaking of basketball games no one will be willing to pay $99 a ticket for, Ted Cruz will play Jimmy Kimmel a one-on-one basketball game in Houston Saturday, with the loser coughing up $5,000 to the winner’s non-political charity of choice.
Somebody had a really shitty day:
Punchy punches Dem chances:
My 5 year old daughter heard Robert DeNiro say “Fuck Trump” and asked me what does “Fuck Trump mean daddy”? I told her it means the Republicans just won the 2018 mid terms and Trump will be President until 2024.
