Posts Tagged ‘Detroit’

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for November 4, 2019

Monday, November 4th, 2019

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.)

  • NBC/Wall Street Journal: Biden 27, Warren 23, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 6, Klobuchar 5, Harris4, Yang 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, O’Rourke 1, Castro 1, Bennet 1.
  • ABC/Washington Post: Biden 27, Warren 21, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 7, Booker 2, Castro 2, Gabbard 2, Harris 2, Yang 2, Bennet 1, Delaney 1, Klobuchar 1, O’Rourke 1, Steyer 1.
  • Fox News: Biden 31, Warren 21, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 7, Harris 3, Yang 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2, Steyer 1.
  • Harvard Harris (page 145, and be prepared to use the zoom button): Biden 33, Sanders 18, Warren 15, Harris 5, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, Klobuchar 3, Yang 2, O’Rourke 2, Steyer 1, Gillibrand 1, Williamson 1, Gabbard 1.
  • New York Times/Siena (Iowa): Warren 22, Sanders 19, Buttigieg 18, Biden 17, Klobuchar 4, Harris 3, Yang 3.
  • Franklin & Marshall (Pennsylvania): Biden 30, Warren 18, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 8, Gabbard 2, Bennet 2, Harris 1, Booker 1, Yang 1.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 186): Biden 27, Warren 23, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 8, Harris 4, O’Rourke 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Castro 1, Booker 1, Steyer 1, Bennet 1, Delaney 1.
  • 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.
  • Emerson (Arizona): Biden 28, Warren 21, Sanders 21, Buttigieg 12, Yang 5, Harris 4, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2, Sestak 1.
  • Politico/Morning Consult (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada): Biden 32, Sanders 20, Warren 20, Buttigieg 7, Harris 6, Yang 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Everyone thinks Biden is toast in New Hampshire:

    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.
  • More on how the 15% delegate threshold plays out:

    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?
  • It’s do or die time for second tier candidates.
  • Biden mentions down, Gabbard mentions up.
  • State of play roundup. Nothing new if you read the clown car update regularly.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bennet slams Warren yet again for her phony baloney socialized medicine numbers.

    “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.

    Our incestuous ruling class: Bennet’s brother James is a top editor at New York Times. Former Colorado Senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart endorses Bennet. Which makes you wonder just how much the endorsement of a candidate who couldn’t overcome the raw charisma of Walter Mondale is worth. Hart managed to be Howard Dean in 1984 and John Edwards in 1988.

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Joe Biden Repeatedly Asked Federal Agencies To Do What His Son’s Lobbying Clients Wanted“:

    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.

    “Joe Biden: The Frontrunner Dems Don’t Really Like.”

    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.

    The head of Joe Biden Super-PAC Unite the Country is a registered foreign agent for the government of Azerbaijan.

    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.

    Grandpa Simpson confuses Iowa with Ohio. By now, wouldn’t you think Biden’s advance team would have a little piece of paper for him that says something like “It’s MONDAY, November 4th, and you’re in IOWA”? How hard can that be? Speaking of Biden gaffes, he did a Edward James Olmos as Lt. Castillo in Miami Vice homage by staring at screen with his back to the camera. Here’s a roundup of his fumbles through the Carolinas. He was denied communion at mass in a South Carolina Catholic church. Which is another sign of his Catholic problem:

    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.

    Gets a PBS interview.

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Thinking of Running After All? No new news on that front, but His Billionarness did drop $600,000 on two Democrats running for the Virginia House of Delegates, and an additional $110,000 to the Virginia Democratic Party.
  • 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…)
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Buttigieg threatens to eclipse Biden in Iowa:

    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…
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But Dick Morris says she’s ready to jump in when Biden drops out.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an ABC News interview. Talks about rural issues, jobs, and criticizes Warren’s socialized medicine plan. Gets a piece by Art Cullen in the Storm Lake Times (Iowa) boosting his opportunity zone proposal.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an MSNBC interview. Denies she interviewed for a job at the White House, despite what Steve Bannon says. Ann Coulter said something really stupid about her. Is Gabbard considering a third party run? No idea. I don’t have a mental map if the terrain inside Gabbard’s head.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris closed all her New Hampshire field offices to go “all in” on Iowa. This move reeks of desperation and a failing campaign, and is unlikely to work. Of course, her star has plunged so far fast, I’m not sure anything would work for her. Harris says her failing campaign shows that “America’s not ready for a woman of color as president.” Since her falling poll numbers are only from Democrats, that must mean that Democrats are racist.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Klobuchar had the second biggest net favorability jump, of 13%. Says Warren’s health care plan won’t work. “In 2008, Democratic presidential hopeful and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar requested $500,000 of taxpayer money to be donated to Minnesota Teen Challenge, a fundamentalist organization associated with the Pentecostal the Assemblies of God, which describes Pokemon, Harry Potter and Halloween as gateways to drug addiction.”
  • Update: Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Dropped out November 1, 2019. 538 Postmortem:

    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:

    “Nation Surprised To Learn Beto O’Rourke Was Running For President.” He swears he’s not running for the senate. Let’s enjoy our last chance to snark on Bobby Francis:

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He held a rally with Ilhan Omar in Minneapolis, despite the fact that his poll numbers have actually slipped after being endorsed by The Squad. “Heart-wrenching video shows Bernie Sanders touring Detroit with Rep. Rashida Tlaib.” Hey, remind me again which party has ruled Detroit for the last half century…
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Appeared on Neil Cavuto’s show.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bashes Warren’s health care proposal, doesn’t want to scrap private insurance. Gets a Politico interview in which he natters on about climate change and…crony capitalism?
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren swears up and down that her $52 trillion socialized medicine scheme won’t require tax hikes on the middle class, evidently based on taxes obtained from magic space unicorns. Even Obama Administration alums think that her socialized medicine pitch will doom her campaign:

    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 Live mocks 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.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s running on reparations in South Carolina. Doubt that moves the needle, but at this stage of the game her needle’s stuck on zero anyway.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yang had the biggest favorability jump of all the candidates, of 15%. Says impeachment could backfire.

    “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.

    He’s staffing up:

    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.

    He’s also building out a ground game in South Carolina:

    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.

    How Yang went from a prep-school-to-Ivy League student to walking away from a law firm job.

    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:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In, but exiled to the also-rans after raising $5 in campaign contributions in Q3.
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for July 15, 2019

    Monday, July 15th, 2019

    Biden still leads, Steyer is In, Warren, Sanders and Harris are all bunched up for second, Castro wants nothing to do with your germ-bearing meatbag spawn, and Williamson channels Neon Genesis Evangelion and raises Gravel’s campaign from the dead.

    It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Polls
    Remember how Biden was doomed after a few bad polls? Yeah, no so much.

  • Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 35, Sanders 14. Harris 12, Warren 5, Booker 3, Buttigieg 2, Delany 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1.
  • NBC News/Wall Street Journal: Biden 26, Warren 19, Harris 13, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 7, O’Rourke 2, Yang 2. “Biden performs best among African Americans, older Democrats and those who are moderate or conservative in their political views, while Warren runs strongest with self-described liberals and those ages 18 to 49.”
  • Economist/YouGov (page 149): Biden 22, Warren 17, Harris 14, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 5, Gabbard 2, O’Rourke 2, Castro 2, Booker 1, Bullock 1, de Blasio 1, Hickenlooper 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1.
  • Emerson: Biden 30, Sanders 15, Harris 15, Warren 15, Buttigieg 5, O’Rourke 4, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Swallwell (out) 1, Klobuchar 1, Gravel 1, Bullock 1, Inslee 1.
  • Morning Consult (national): Biden 31, Sanders 18, Harris 14, Warren 13, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2. “The following candidates received 1% or less of the vote: Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Tim Ryan, John Hickenlooper, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Bennet, John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, Jay Inslee, Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton and Marianne Williamson. ‘Someone else’ received 2%.”
  • Morning Consult (early states): Biden 31, Sanders 20, Harris 14, Warren 11, Buttigieg 5, Booker 5, O’Rourke 3. “The following candidates received 2% or less of the vote share: Amy Klobuchar, Tim Ryan, Andrew Yang, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Steve Bullock, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Julian Castro, Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton, and Marianne Williamson. ‘Someone else’ received 2%.”
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Q2 Fundraising

    Q2 numbers continue to trickle out. The Warren, Inslee and Ryan numbers are new

    1. Pete Buttigieg: $24.8 million
    2. Joe Biden: $21.5 million
    3. Elizabeth Warren: $19.1 million
    4. Bernie Sanders: $18 million (plus $6 million transferred from “other accounts”)
    5. Kamala Harris: $12 million
    6. Jay Inslee: $3 million
    7. Michael Bennet: $2.8 million
    8. Steve Bullock: $2 million
    9. Tim Ryan: $895,000

    Warren did very well, edging Sanders, though below Buttigieg and Biden. Ryan’s numbers are, quite frankly, pathetic.

    For sake of comparison, President Donald Trump raised $105 million for his reelection campaign.

    Pundits, etc.

  • Democratic radicalism is going to reelect Trump:

    The president will be ­re-elected. Easily.

    “Easily?” I asked, making sure I heard them correctly. Yes, they insisted, with her nodding as he said Democrats had gone bonkers and voters would respond by giving Trump four more years.

    The recent Manhattan conversation would be insignificant except that it dovetails with national trends, namely a growing belief that Dems are not coming back to this world anytime soon. The election is still a long way off, but there is no sign that the radicalism surging through the party can be put back in the bottle before the election. What we see now is likely what voters will see in 2020.

    One of many defining moments among the presidential contenders and pretenders came with their unanimous support for giving illegal immigrants free health care. They raised their hands to signal yes, as if the question was a ­no-brainer.

    Implicit in their so-called compassion is an invitation for millions and millions more to cross the border and get free care. Free, of course, except to American taxpayers.

  • 538 says that it’s going to be hard to make the third debate:

    To qualify, candidates must have at least 2 percent support in four qualifying national or early-state polls released after the first debate on June 26-27 through two weeks before the third debate on Sept. 12-13 and 130,000 unique donors (including at least 400 individual donors in at least 20 states).1 And while those thresholds might not sound that difficult to meet, it’s definitely raising the ante from the first two debates, in which candidates needed to hit only 1 percent support in three qualifying polls or 65,000 unique donors (including at least 200 individual donors in at least 20 states).

    Right now only Biden, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders and Warren have met the criteria.

  • Black Entertainment television founder says that Democrats have moved too far left:

    “The party, in my opinion, has moved for me, personally, too far to the left, and for that reason I don’t have a candidate in the party at this time,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, if a Democrat is going to beat Trump that person, he or she, is going to have to move to the center and you can’t wait too long to do that because the message of some of the programs that the Democrats are pushing are not resonating with the majority of the American people.”

    “It’s really working for the party for the primaries, but if you’re going to win a general election against President Trump, who has a lockdown at his base and everybody’s going to contest for the middle and the independents, you can’t be too far left in that process,” he added.

  • “Sen. Elizabeth Warren stole the show at Netroots Nation’s presidential forum, if only for the fact that she was the lone top-tier presidential candidate who showed up.” Gillibrand, Inslee and Castro also showed up. That so many other candidates felt safe in skipping it (including Booker, who attended last year) is a sign of the conference’s continuing decline in importance.
  • There was a LULAC convention in Milwaukee. Sanders, Warren, Castro, O’Rourke all put in appearances, as did Jill Biden. Also see the bit on the Bennet/de Blasio being there below.
  • The NAACP’s 110th convention starts next Wednesday in Detroit, and declared candidates speaking there will be Biden, Booker, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, and Warren…plus Stacey Abrams. Klobuchar being there but not Buttigieg is…interesting.
  • I suppose I have a duty to link this 538 piece the topic of women running for president, but it starts with a lot of lefty culture war assumptions before inconclusive data scrying.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Local columnist from Rome, Georgia wants her to get in.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. George Will (I know) makes the case for Bennet, such as it is, which amounts to “he’s not as crazy as the rest.” Bennet said Democrats could lose Colorado if Sanders is the nominee. Since Clinton only beat Trump by 71,000 votes out of over 2 million cast in Colorado in 2016, any Democrat could conceivably lose Colorado. He got into an immigration pander-off with di Blasio at a LULAC convention in Milwaukee.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Is Biden still the frontrunner? 538 debates. The answer? Sorta. Plus a lot on the endorsement race, which I think is largely meaningless. He unveiled his health plan:

    Joe Biden unveiled a proposal Monday to expand the Affordable Care Act with an optional public health insurance program, escalating a fierce debate with his Democratic rivals who favor a more sweeping Medicare-for-all system.

    Biden’s plan, which campaign officials estimate would cost $750 billion over 10 years, would also expand tax credits to pay for health premiums, and it would create a new coverage option to help people living in states that have resisted the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid.

    Funny how a plan that socializes American medicine than the plan Obama and Pelosi just barely managed to get passed when they controlled all three branches of government is now too timid for the party’s true believers. Just one day before his candidacy, Biden had his records archive at the University of Delaware sealed. How convenient. Speaking of murky university doings, just exactly what is it that the University of Pennsylvania got for the more than $900,000 paid Joe Biden? “The former vice president collected $371,159 in 2017 plus $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 for a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) This is interesting: “Presidential candidate Joe Biden refused to apologize for the nearly three million deportations carried out during his tenure as vice president in the Obama administration, after being confronted by protesters while campaigning in Dover, New Hampshire Friday.” Also this: “‘I will not halt deportations and detentions.’ Protestors continued to chant and demanded an apology but Biden remained intransigent.” Holy crap! Biden might win the nomination by simply not pandering to the Open Borders crowd. “The only thing making Biden look ‘electable’ is his rivals’ extremism.” Yeah, but that ain’t exactly nuthin’, hoss. Late breaking news: “Biden cancer nonprofit suspends operations indefinitely…Biden and his wife left the group’s board in April as an ethics precaution before he joined the presidential campaign. But the nonprofit had trouble maintaining momentum without their involvement.”

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Booker is unveiling new legislation that would give more federal prisoners the chance at early release, building on perviously [sic] passed criminal justice reform that some supporters say didn’t go far enough.” Typos in the very first sentence aside (“layers and layers of fact checkers”), it’s not necessarily a bad idea, but I suspect the number of prisoners it would actually affect are small. He brags about changing Newark’s image of “crime and corruption” as mayor. Don’t know about corruption, but the figures hardly show an unambiguous decline in crime between 2006 and 2013 (all numbers per 100,000). Murders: 105 in 2006, 112 in 2013. Rapes: 87 in 2006, 45 in 2013 (the biggest decline I can spot except for arson, though they’re way up to 116 in 2017); Robberies 1,288 in 2006, 2,433 in 2013, etc. Arson went from 166 in 2006 to 34 in 2013, so maybe there was a significant dent there. Or maybe the economy improved just enough that people weren’t torching their own places for the insurance money anymore. In fact, crime seems to have dropped more after he left.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Piece wondering why he, Hickenlooper and O’Rouke don’t drop out and run for the senate. He complains about “dark money” in politics.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Pete Buttigieg goes on hiring spree after top fundraising quarter. Buttigieg’s once tiny campaign now has more than 250 people on staff, an aide said Friday, making the South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s campaign more representative of a top fundraising candidate.” The New Republic, once the premier journal of what would come to be called neoliberalism, published a piece attacking Buttigieg for being a neoliberal, and does so in such explicit terms about his gay sex life that it might have been penned by a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. Speaking of tedious explorations of Buttigieg’s sex life, NYT offers up “Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet,” because evidently that’s a subject some fraction their readership deeply cares about. Speaking of tedious, here’s more on Mayor Pete and race relations, because Democrats never seem to tire of scrutinizing every single person on earth for suspected racism. (See also yesterday’s piece.) Someone tracks down at least some of where that huge fundraising haul came from:

    Notably, however, it came three days after Buttigieg held a fundraiser at the home of Hamilton James — a longtime Democratic donor, a political bundler for the likes of Hillary Clinton, and also the executive vice chairman of the Blackstone Group and an architect of a $20 billion deal to use Saudi dollars to fund U.S. infrastructure projects.

    Blackstone, the largest alternative investment firm in the world, has long counted Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Public Investment Fund as a major client, according to the New York Times. The infrastructure deal was in the works before the last presidential election and long before the death of Khashoggi, for which bin Salman is widely believed to be responsible.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He said decriminalizing illegal border crossings is not tantamount to open borders, because reasons. In a bold departure from centuries of tradition, Castro doesn’t want to hold your stinking baby. How Castro’s mother helped found radical Hispanic group Laza and supported communist Angela Davis. Castro also hates the Betsy Ross flag.
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Following a blackout, the New York Post calls for de Blasio’s removal as New York City mayor:

    The lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa. It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.

    Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City. He does not care about its people. He does not care about how it’s run. He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives. All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.

    And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.

    Snip.

    De Blasio gave his wife $850 million for her ThriveNYC mental health initiative, and when questioned by the City Council, she couldn’t come up with one thing it succeeded in doing.

    He spent a jaw-dropping $773 million on his Renewal program to turn around failing schools. It did absolutely nothing except keep kids trapped in institutions the city knew were terrible. Shamed? You don’t know Bill. He claims the biggest threat to education is charter schools, which actually deliver results, not his own mismanagement.

  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He appeared on Face the Nation:

    I think the central issue facing this country is how terribly divided we are and how our government doesn’t work anymore meaning we don’t get anything done. And I’m running for president to get America working again so that we can actually fix health care, build infrastructure, improve public education, make sure there’s jobs in every community in this country. Those are the reasons I’m running for president. And- but to do any of those things we actually have to start coming together. We have to find common ground. We can’t act like bipartisan solutions are dirty words that we can’t say in Washington anymore.

    Snip.

    Medicare-for-All” is a great slogan. They’ve hijacked the good name of Medicare and applied it to a law that will cause upheaval in our health care system and I- I was the first person to actually talk about this. Now we’re seeing the debate change on this issue as people start to realize. My plan which is called “Better Care” is a universal health care plan. Every single American gets health care as a basic right of citizenship for free. But I preserve options if people want to opt out and keep their private insurance. They can if they want to buy supplemental plans. They can. It’s a much better way to create a universal health care system.

    He dinged the other candidates for making impossible promises.

  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. At the Milwaukee LULAC convention, Gabbard criticized Trump’s immigration policies on much narrower grounds: non-Americans denied citizenship after serving in the U.S. military. This is a real issue, but it’s one that affected only 227 people in 2018. Gabbard appeared on an NPR podcast. “Asked if there are any wars in American history that she thinks were justifiable, she named only World War II.” She says the two party system sucks. A defensible position, but one not calculated to help win the nomination of the party Gabbard is running to represent. She also wants to eliminate superdelegates, which under the 2020 rules won’t vote unless the nomination goes beyond the first ballot.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. I assume there’s a level in Hell where the damned are forced to hear Kirsten Gillibrand lecture people on white privilege. She toured Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan by bus. Also: “Gillibrand’s campaign did not disclose her latest fundraising total ahead of the second-quarter filing deadline on Monday, a likely sign she did not raise as much money as many of her opponents.” I bet.
  • Update: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Still In? Twitter. Facebook. Evidently last week’s news that he was dropping out was premature, or else he only plans to drop out after the debates, which he’s met the donor threshold for qualifying for, very possibly thanks to rival candidate William’s appeal for money. He promised the 65,000th donor a signed rock.

    “Mike Gravel and His Online Teens Want Weed in the Constitution.” I prefer to see federal marijuana prohibition ended on Tenth Amendment grounds, as passing a constitutional amendment is both the stupidest and least-likely path to legalization, but I’m surprised that more serious candidates haven’t made a play for pro-pot voters. It’s a significant single-issue constituency, albeit it not as big a one as its supporters think.

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets a long New Yorker profile:

    As a black, female law-and-order Democrat, Harris creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Some liberals, while professing a strong desire to see a woman of color in the White House, fear that California’s former “top cop” won’t fulfill sweeping progressive goals. To them, she seems like a defender of the status quo posing as a reformer. Others are less bothered by her past as a prosecutor—after all, Democrats often struggle to cultivate “toughness”—but believe that the best person to stop Trump’s reëlection is another white man in his eighth decade. To this way of thinking, which contends that the prospect of a liberal black woman President may present too much of a challenge for mainstream America, Harris would make an advantageous Veep. But when, in May, matchmakers in the Congressional Black Caucus speculated about the possibility of a Biden-Harris ticket, she had a snappy retort. “Joe Biden would be a great running mate,” she said.

    Snip.

    Harris’s father does not participate in her public life (and didn’t answer a request for an interview). The exception to the rule is telling. In February, on “The Breakfast Club,” an urban-market radio show, Harris admitted to smoking a joint in college, and one of the hosts asked if she supported legalizing marijuana. “Half my family’s from Jamaica—are you kidding me?” she replied, laughing. The glib response elided a more complicated record: she opposed recreational pot when she was D.A. of San Francisco, then apparently adapted her view as the public consensus shifted. But that wasn’t the problem. After Harris’s radio appearance, her father gave a statement to the Jamaican-diaspora Web site, reprimanding his daughter. “My deceased parents must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” When I asked Harris how she felt about this belated, public parenting, she said, “He’s entitled to his opinion.” I asked if she found talking about Donald unpleasant. “I’m happy to talk about my father,” she said, glumly. “But, ya know.” She raised her eyebrows, and said nothing. This was not going to be “Dreams from My Father,” the sequel.

    Snip.

    Around the time that Owsley met her, Harris was a young prosecutor. She was dating Willie Brown, one of the most visible and powerful politicians in the state. He was sixty—four years older than her dad. Originally from segregated East Texas, he had come to San Francisco during the era of “James Crow” and, rather than join his uncle’s illegal gambling operation, became a defense attorney, representing pimps and prostitutes. Eventually, he won a seat in the State Assembly and, for fourteen years, served as speaker, earning the nickname the Ayatollah. A Democratic power broker with Republican allies, he apportioned the prime office space and knew where to find a legislator if his wife showed up looking for him. In the course of Brown’s career, he was investigated twice by the F.B.I. for corruption, but never charged with a crime. (He played a version of himself in “The Godfather: Part III,” glad-handing Michael Corleone.) Brown’s social life was “spicy,” as he puts it. Married since 1957, he lives amicably apart from his wife, seeing her on holidays. He has had a series of girlfriends—currently, he’s dating a Russian socialite—and maintains a large collection of friends all over the city, notably among wealthy white donors in Pacific Heights. “Willie knows no strangers,” Owsley told me.

    During Harris’s short-lived romance with Brown, he ran for mayor; they broke up sometime between his victory party and his swearing-in. The association has clung to her—“an albatross,” she told SF Weekly years ago. Some of the most abhorrent memes of the Presidential campaign riff on their relationship (“Just say no to Willie Brown’s ho”), as does the third comment down on just about any Harris news story. Roseanne Barr has weighed in, scurrilously. Stories that mention Brown have always infuriated Harris; when I asked her campaign about him, a spokesperson testily referred me to statements that she made sixteen years ago.

    Among political hopefuls, Brown is known as a mentor and a Pygmalion. Always nattily turned out—he favors Brioni suits and Borsalino hats—he believes that people in public life should present themselves well. “Women in politics need five or six well-fitted sets of pants,” he writes in his memoir. “They also need a complement of blouses or shirts that can be interchanged. And they need a whole series of blazers.” Pelosi is always on point, he writes; Feinstein can look as if she’s caught between seasons. Tactfully, he doesn’t mention Harris, but he may as well have been cataloguing her wardrobe.

    “Willie is a bit of a finishing school for some of the people in his orbit,” the local observer told me. “Most people don’t quite know one hundred per cent how to dress for the first Pacific Heights cocktail party they get invited to. The notion that he helped polish somebody like Kamala a little more—I don’t think that is sexist. To use a Colette metaphor, he might have been the Aunt Alicia. ‘Here’s how you dress for this, and when you talk to this person remember that her husband likes to talk about this subject—and you might get a big donation.’ ” Harris grew close to Wilkes Bashford, a friend of Brown’s and one of San Francisco’s most exclusive clothiers, and she became a frequent bold name in the society columns. Even now, she is often featured in the address-restricted magazine the Nob Hill Gazette. Brown also arranged appointments for Harris on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the state’s Medical Assistance Commission, which together reportedly paid her about four hundred thousand dollars over five years. He gave her a car.

    In his memoir, published the year Obama was elected President, Brown writes that it is critical for black candidates to “cross over into the white community.” He maintains that black women face a particular challenge being seen as leaders. “When whites look at black women, they see the women as servants, maids, and cooks (just as my mother was),” he writes. “No matter how astute these women are, they’ve never been viewed as worthy of much beyond domestic-service status.” His advice to black women seeking political office: get involved at a high level with cultural and charitable organizations, “like symphonies, museums, and hospitals.” In 1995, Harris joined the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she designed a mentorship program for public-school teens.

    Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, is another Brown protégé, though the connection is rarely held against him. Born into a political family from Pacific Heights, Newsom was a fixture in the social scene to which Brown introduced Harris. “I certainly remember Gavin delivering wine to our house,” Owsley said, remarking that her husband had invested in PlumpJack, Newsom’s hospitality company. When Newsom was twenty-eight, Brown appointed him to chair the Parking and Traffic Commission of San Francisco. Not long after, when a seat opened on the city’s powerful Board of Supervisors, Brown chose Newsom to fill it. “I can candidly tell you with conviction I would not be governor of California—I would not have been mayor of San Francisco—without his support and his mentorship,” Newsom told me. “Kamala was not directly appointed D.A. of San Francisco. I think it’s patently unfair to judge that harshly and not judge my relationship.”

    Since Brown fostered both of them, Harris and Newsom have been political siblings vying for primacy. The day Harris was sworn in as D.A., in 2004, Newsom became mayor; when he became lieutenant governor, she was sworn in as state attorney general. They share donors, networks, and consultants, and have backed each other publicly on issues that range from supporting gay marriage to opposing the death penalty. (Harris also endorsed Newsom’s decision to turn undocumented minors accused of felonies over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a decision both have since disavowed.) The two have even vacationed together, Newsom acknowledged to me. I asked Nathan Click, who once served as a spokesperson for Harris and now does the same for Newsom, who the elder was. “I don’t know—twins?” he said. A civic leader in San Francisco told me, “Kamala and Gavin are like two puppies rolling around having fun together, seeing who pops out first.”

    Several years ago, Harris and Newsom’s sibling rivalry was nearly put before the state’s voters. As Governor Jerry Brown was entering his final term, Newsom was the lieutenant governor and Harris was attorney general. Governor was clearly the next job for each of them. “It divided the social world,” Mimi Silbert, who co-founded the Delancey Street Foundation, a residency program for ex-convicts, and who is an old friend of both Harris and Newsom, says. “It was, ‘I’m more for Gavin,’ ‘Well, I’m more for Kamala.’ ” As the tension was becoming excruciating, Barbara Boxer unexpectedly announced that she was giving up her seat in the U.S. Senate. Within days, Harris had declared that she would run for the Senate, clearing the way for Newsom eventually to become governor. “It was very important when she decided, because running against her for any office was not something I had any desire to do,” Newsom, who is a co-chair of Harris’s California campaign, said. “If she decided to run for governor, that would have been perilous in terms of my own considerations.”

    There’s a lot more there on her various political campaigns and tenure as DA. Harris’ calculated straddles. “She wants to attack Biden on busing with paying the price of embracing a deeply unpopular policy of imposing busing today. She wants to say she’s on Bernie’s side on health care without acknowledging Medicare for All would abolish almost all private insurance.” A critique of her housing subsidy proposal:

    Harris says her well-intentioned goal is to close the wealth gap between black and while families. She would give 4 million homebuyers HUD grants of up to $25,000 each to help them make down payments and pay closing costs to buy homes.

    However, as we all know, the average cost of even a modest home far exceeds $25,000. That means that recipients of these generous government grants would need to borrow a lot more money to buy homes, even while facing big monthly mortgage payments that in many cases would be greater than they could afford.

    Does this sound familiar? If you’ve followed news about the housing market for years, it should. It reminds us of the feel-good government intervention that precipitated the horrendous real estate crash of 2008 and the greatest recession since the Great Depression.

    Husband Douglas Emhoff as Instagram spouse.

  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. “‘You are who?’ The lonely presidential campaign of John Hickenlooper:

    In 2016, the buzz around Hickenlooper was loud enough that Hillary Clinton vetted him to be her running mate. But three years later, Hickenlooper often finds himself talking to voters who have no idea who he is. A columnist for the New Hampshire Union-Leader recently likened the efforts of Hickenlooper — a former brewery owner — to “a fledgling IPA fighting for a tap in the neighborhood bar.”

    That was evident during a recent visit to the Foundry, a beer hall and distillery in West Des Moines, where patrons eyed him with mild curiosity. “You are who?” a man said as Hickenlooper wandered near the bar. Upon learning Hickenlooper was running for president, he replied, “There are so many of you.”

    In Cresco, Iowa, where Hickenlooper spoke at a local Democratic Party gathering, a woman mistook the former governor for Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), who is also running for president. “Two Coloradans,” the woman declared, as Hickenlooper walked away. “I can’t keep them straight.”

    During a recent visit to the Des Moines farmers market, the unassuming Hickenlooper walked through the buyers in almost complete anonymity. He made little effort to call attention to himself, and the shoppers and merchants appeared to have no idea a presidential candidate was in their midst.

    Hickenlooper’s road became even lonelier last week. Several top aides, including campaign manager Brad Komar, left the campaign or announced they would do so soon. Hickenlooper played down the departures, but a Democrat close to the campaign said the aides had urged him to drop his presidential bid and instead run for the Senate, which Hickenlooper refused to do.

    When the rodents depart the dinghy, maybe it’s time to take the hint.

    Hickenlooper also rejects some of the high-profile liberal initiatives embraced by other Democratic hopefuls. He is against Medicare-for-all, arguing there are “less disruptive ways” of achieving universal health care. And while citing a “sense of urgency” on climate change, Hickenlooper opposes the Green New Deal, saying it could never win Republican support.

    He’s sought a similar middle path on immigration. At a deli in Boone, Iowa, Dean Lyons, a utility company manager, asked Hickenlooper what he would do about the “mess” at the border. The former governor replied, “We need borders. And we need people to obey the law. You cannot continue to have laws that people don’t obey.”

    But he also said the nation can’t ignore the humanitarian issues at the border or its need for low-skilled workers, and he listed several policy ideas, such as a 10-year renewable visa program. Afterward, Lyons praised the nuanced answer but also stressed Hickenlooper’s long odds. “I was pretty impressed with him,” Lyons said. “But he’s got a long road to get up the ladder.”

    Hickenlooper has recently tried to stand out by being ever more aggressive about the party’s leftward turn, arguing that “socialism is not the answer” and that embracing it will only lead to a Democratic defeat. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up reelecting the worst president ever in American history,” he has argued.

    That line elicited boos from liberal attendees at last month’s California Democratic Convention in San Francisco, a reaction that lit up social media and attracted the first significant headlines of his campaign.

    But the same line attracted polite nods in Iowa, where Hickenlooper hopes his “extreme moderate” message, as he calls it, will catch fire with a Midwestern electorate that often prefers middle-of-the-road candidates.

    I wouldn’t hold your breath. “Hickenlooper refuses to condemn protesters who hoisted Mexican flag at ICE facility.” It must suck to be pandering as hard as you can and still be stuck at 1%.

  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. He raised $3 million in Q2, which is actually more than I expected, but he’s probably the candidate most screwed by Steyer’s entry into the race. “Inslee says he’ll ask soccer player Megan Rapinoe to be secretary of State.” Wow, and we though Eric Swalwell sucked at pandering. “Crowd roars for Elizabeth Warren, Jay Inslee follows to tepid applause.”
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She says she doesn’t support open borders. If she had taken this stance earlier in the campaign, she might be registering polling numbers higher than background radiation readings.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. I’m not seeing any news this week, and he’s not even on 538’s list of candidates.
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Piece wondering why Moulton, Ryan and the now-departed Swalwell are even running for President. “‘I think he’s got a better shot at being president than being a senator from Massachusetts,’ said [Democratic consultant Scott] Ferson, who worked for Moulton’s winning congressional race in 2014 but is not involved with his presidential run. ‘He burned a lot of bridges in Massachusetts in the Democratic Party, and for statewide office you need party support.'” Asked whether he knew Buttigieg at Harvard, Moulton said:

    “No. I think we hung out with different groups of friends. Not at all, I was not hanging out with the Harvard Democrats,” Moulton said.

    He was then asked to describe what his friend group was like.

    “Athletes. People who went out and, you know, had a good time,” Moulton said.

  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. When pandering goes wrong: “Beto O’Rourke: My wife and I are descendants of slave owners.” Heh: “Remorseful Beto O’Rourke Admits His Family Responsible For My Lai Massacre, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.” More prebituaries:

    The excitement that greeted Beto O’Rourke’s presidential candidacy is long gone. The former Texas congressman has been stuck in low single digits in most polls, and CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny reports he’s now running low on cash.

    “On the eve of the fundraising deadline for all the candidates to report their money, he’s yet to report,” Zeleny said. “I’m told by a couple of top supporters familiar with his financial situation that it’s bleak. A few staffers have begun leaving El Paso, moving on to other things. … He has a lot of high-powered, high-paid staff members so there are discussions going on, I’m told, as to what the next step is. He’s committed to staying in, but it’s not the summer he envisioned.”

    In Texas, allegiance to O’Rourke is vanishing“:

    Just nine months ago, attorney Katie Baron was so inspired by Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign in Texas that she commissioned a sprawling mural on the side of a building in east Austinfeaturing the candidate in a Superman-like pose.

    After O’Rourke lost race and began mulling a presidential campaign, the artist added a sweeping “2020” in blue paint – providing what seemed to be yet one more call for O’Rourke to get into the crowded race.

    Now, four months into O’Rourke’s campaign, Baron wishes he had stayed out.

    After the first Democratic presidential debate last month, Baron posted an altered picture of the mural on a Facebook page dedicated to the artwork. She had replaced O’Rourke’s face with Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s and wrote: “Don’t worry, still got PLENTY of love for Beto, but Kamala earned herself a little recognition too last night!” The comments filled with messages from angry O’Rourke supporters and a few excited Harris backers.

    While Baron says she will be forever grateful to O’Rourke for inspiring her and thousands of others to become politically active, she doesn’t think he’s the strongest candidate for president, nor has he shown he can nationalize the magic of his Senate campaign.

    “If the primary vote was tomorrow, he wouldn’t have my vote,” said Baron, 35, who likes Harris, D-Calif., for her sharp intellect and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for her methodical policy papers.

    “Being part of the Beto-mania that was fueling the fire, I can see why he kind of thought he had no choice but to enter,” she said. “Honestly, I did get a little caught up. We were still riding the wave of the midterms.”

    As O’Rourke slogs through a difficult primary season, he’s not only struggling to gain the support of voters who don’t know of him, but also to hold on to the support of those who know him best, Texans who powered his long-shot campaign against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year.

    On the one hand, yeah, there’s the widespread impression that he missed his mark. On the other hand, I still see a lot of Beto 2020 signs and stickers around Austin…

  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Most of the news this week is about his pathetic fundraising haul. “2020 Candidate Rep. Tim Ryan Sees Hot Yoga as Part of The Health Care Solution.” Yes, I checked, and Now This is evidently not a parody site.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Sanders campaign: Media ‘find Bernie annoying, discount his seriousness.'” Why should they be any different than the rest of the nation? Sanders has lot of crazy ideas, but his idea of rotating Supreme Court justices to other courts may be the craziest of all. Ross Douthat concern trolls Sanders: “Saving Bernie Sanders. The revolutionary needs to make a case that he can be a pragmatist.” Even by the standards of concern trolling, that’s extra-concern-troll-y.
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 does the how he could win thing. The prognosis sounds grim:

    Indeed, if you’re going to construct a path to the nomination for Sestak, it probably goes something like: If Biden stumbles, here’s another white man with gravitas who can speak credibly to middle America (and doesn’t call himself a socialist). But he has a problem that other candidates in this position (e.g., Sen. Michael Bennet or Gov. Steve Bullock) don’t — he’s made a lot of enemies in the Democratic establishment. In 2010, in defiance of party leadership, Sestak primaried Sen. Arlen Specter, who had recently switched parties from the GOP. Although Sestak impressively came from behind to topple Specter in the primary, he lost the general election by 2 points, and some Democrats blamed him for blowing a winnable race. So when he tried for a rematch in 2016, party elders recruited another Democrat, Katie McGinty, to block his path, and she handily defeated him in the primary. That was the last time Sestak ran for office — until now.

    O’Connell wouldn’t say which specific constituencies within the party Sestak would try to woo, but his campaign strategy so far has been focused on retail politics — shaking hands at parades and convincing one voter at a time — in Iowa. But Sestak also plans to tap his old donor base in Pennsylvania, which raised millions for him in his previous campaigns, although O’Connell acknowledged that presidential fundraising will be a challenge because of Sestak’s late entry into the race. Without question, Sestak is starting from behind: Since 1976, only one successful nominee, Bill Clinton, kicked off a campaign later than April of the year before the election. And with only 27 percent of Democrats having an opinion of Sestak, according to a recent YouGov poll, he can scarcely afford to get a late start. However, he didn’t do so by choice: O’Connell says Sestak would have jumped in the race much sooner, but he didn’t want to run as long as his daughter was undergoing treatment for brain cancer. (She was given the all-clear earlier in June.)

    Sestak was always going to have an uphill climb. He hasn’t won an election in nine years, and long layovers between campaigns can make for weaker candidates. It’s also hard to win a nomination without at least some support from the party establishment, which he seems unlikely to get. Finally, he has yet to reach 1 percent in any poll, which is a severe handicap to his chances of making the stage for future debates (not to mention getting enough votes to win the nomination). Unfortunately for “Admiral Joe,” on-the-ground campaigning simply may not reach enough voters to make up for that.

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Tom Steyer as Charles Foster Kane:

    Today, a century after the progressive movement that inspired Kane and real-world patricians, class and inequality are once again at the center of American politics. Two of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have pushed inequality to the center of the Party’s political discourse, levelling indictments at the millionaires and billionaires who have absorbed much of the gains that the economy has made over the past few decades and particularly post-recession. The chief villain of this narrative is now Donald Trump—the self-proclaimed populist billionaire President who got to the White House with the help of a press that both burnished and indulged his reputation as a savvy businessman worth hearing out and taking seriously. Much of the free publicity his campaign was granted can be tallied among the many complimentary perks that the wealthy are habitually offered in this country.

    This week, Tom Steyer—who is not only a billionaire but one of the largest political donors in the country, having spent an estimated hundred and twenty-three million dollars on last year’s midterms—joined Sanders and Warren in the progressive lane of the Democratic primaries. Both candidates greeted his entrance coldly. “I like Tom personally,” Sanders said in an MSNBC interview, “but I do have to say—as somebody who, in this campaign, has received two million campaign contributions, averaging, I believe, nineteen dollars a person—I am a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Warren tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that’s powered by a grassroots movement.”

    To his credit, Steyer has already built a movement of sorts. His campaign to impeach Trump, publicized in ubiquitous social-media and cable-news ads, claims to have collected 8.2 million e-mail addresses. His nonprofit and political-action committee, NextGen America, registered about a quarter million young voters for the midterms last year and helped rally activists behind environmental campaigns like the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the effort to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In his campaign-launch video, however, Steyer focusses on an all-encompassing fight against inequality. “We have a society that’s very unequal,” he says to the camera, “and it’s really important for people to understand that this society is connected. If this is a banana republic with a few very, very rich people and everybody else living in misery, that’s a failure.”

    Sanders and Warren rail against the upper class as a whole—both individual millionaires and billionaires and the corporate world for unbalancing politics and the economy. In Steyer’s narrative, the villains are not the wealthy as a class but a malevolent set of corporations that have bought a disproportionate share of influence within our political system. “If you give them the unlimited ability to participate in politics, it will skew everything, because they only care about profits,” he says in the launch video. “I think eighty-two thousand people died last year of drug overdoses. If you think about the drug companies, the banks screwing people on their mortgages—it’s thousands of people doing what they’re paid to do. Almost every single major intractable problem, at the back of it you see a big-money interest for whom stopping progress, stopping justice, is really important to their bottom line.”

    Steyer himself is a big-money interest, of course. But his campaign seems to hinge on the argument that his own wealth has bought him both political independence and courage. “I’m an outsider,” he said in a CBS interview, on Thursday. “I’ve been doing this—successfully beating the oil companies, the tobacco companies, closing tax loopholes—from the outside for ten years. I don’t believe that this failed government is going to be reformed from the inside.” This is part of the case Trump made for his own candidacy in 2016—that only he, an outsider with the privilege to jump into the political system—could drain Washington’s swamp. “Remember, I am self-funding my campaign, the only one in either party,” he tweeted in January of 2016. “I’m not controlled by lobbyists or special interests-only the U.S.A.!”

    Jim Geraghty:

    Tom Steyer, you beautiful madman. You’re about to turn the Democratic primary into an expensive demolition derby: “Billionaire Tom Steyer announced Tuesday that he will join the crowded field vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and promised to commit at least $100 million of his personal fortune to the campaign.

    Steyer will not be the 2020 Democratic nominee. But with $100 million, he can do a lot of damage to anyone he deems an obstacle, and it’s worth remembering that Michael Bloomberg just overwhelmed every opponent with a tsunami of ad money when running for mayor in New York City three times. Steyer has limited name recognition now, but a nearly unlimited television advertising budget will change that fast. He can promise anything and accuse anyone else of being a “Washington insider.”

    Steyer’s probably not quite a threat to overtake Biden or Harris or Sanders or Warren. But everybody below that might as well call it quits.

    Life just stinks if you’re Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bennet these days, doesn’t it? You’ve worked hard to try to get things done in the U.S. Senate and it means bupkus to most Democratic primary voters. You could call for Trump’s impeachment, but you can’t do anything until the House of Representatives actually passes articles of impeachment. You’re sharing the stage with no-name House members and some spiritual guru from California who’s talking about the power of love. You’re going to spend your summer eating corn dogs in small towns in Iowa singing the praises of ethanol while reporters ask why you’re not raising as much money as the mayor of South Bend, who nobody had heard of a year ago. And now some billionaire who you’d prefer to have as a benefactor rather than an enemy has decided he wants the same job you want.

    Lots of lefty activists are upset that Steyer’s money is going to Steyer’s campaign rather than into their pockets. Even environmentalists, frequent recipients of his largess, aren’t pleased with him. “Steyer’s campaign could blunt momentum generated by candidates, such as Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who have elevated climate change as a priority in the primary elections by proposing detailed policies to curb it.” Given that Inslee has zero momentum, I don’t see how it could.

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Nutroots want Warren:

    It’s still early. There will be 16 more months of speech making and glad-handing and glitzy ballroom fundraisers before Election Day. Not committing to a presidential candidate just yet would make sense. But here at Netroots Nation, the premier annual convention for progressive activists, many attendees already seem fairly certain about their choice: They want Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, to be their next president. And if they have to pick a second choice? It’s Senator Kamala Harris of California.

    “Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Turned To A Big Donor To Pay For The DNC Voter Database, Despite Her Fundraising Pledge”:

    Warren officials say she did not violate that pledge when her campaign turned to one of California’s top Democratic donors, a wealthy Silicon Valley physician named Karla Jurvetson, to help pay for access to a crucial voter database earlier this spring.

    The so-called national “voter file,” a pool of data about millions of people that presidential campaigns use as a foundation for their own private data as they identify and track support over time, is managed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and costs campaigns a total of $175,000, according to the DNC’s voter file contract.

    The DNC term sheet outlines two ways campaigns may pay for the voter file: by transferring funds directly to the DNC, or raising that money “to” the DNC through donors.

    Jurvetson, who contributed about $7 million to Democratic causes during the 2018 election, gave a total of $100,000 to the DNC in April 2019, Federal Election Commission filings show. The donations, according to two Democratic operatives with knowledge of the agreement, helped Warren pay for the voter file.

    To me the most interesting part of the story is: How does a physician have $7 million to give away in political donations? Doctors make good money, but not that good. Oh wait: “Jurvetson was married in 1990 to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, an early-stage investor in companies including SpaceX and Tesla.” Mystery solved! Hmmm: “Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. His backers are younger, make less money, have fewer degrees and are less engaged in politics…In poll after poll, Sanders appeals to lower-income and less-educated people; Warren beats Sanders among those with postgraduate degrees.” “Warren criticizes powerful businesses. She also worked for them.” In addition to Dow Chemical:

    At issue are two decades when Warren enhanced her income as a law professor by consulting on various legal issues and representing clients. Some seem to fit her present-day brand: She worked on behalf of asbestos victims and represented the environmental lawyer whose story became the basis of the 1998 film “A Civil Action.”

    But in about a dozen cases, Warren used her expertise to help major companies or their lawyers navigate corporate bankruptcies. In many cases she was brought in to argue motions, swooping in to offer her analysis and persuade a judge with her knowledge of bankruptcy law.

    These include her work on behalf of plane manufacturer Fairchild Aircraft after a crash killed four people, including NASCAR star Alan Kulwicki. Warren argued that Fairchild should be shielded from liability because the plane that went down was made by a company that had gone bankrupt. (She lost.)

    In another case, Warren represented Southwestern Electric Power Company, a firm that relied on Warren when its bid to buy power plants from a bankrupt energy co-op was jeopardized by allegations of vote buying. (She won.)

    The work supplemented her salary from Harvard, which was about $185,000 a year in the mid-1990s, employment records show. Warren has not released tax returns from the 1990s, when she did much of the corporate work. But court records show she was paid as much as $675 an hour, which was at or below market rate for her level of expertise.

    From 2008 to 2010, a period for which Warren has released tax returns, her outside work brought in an average of about $200,000 a year. That included royalties from books and enabled Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, to bring in nearly $1 million in each of those years.

    Consistency is for the little people…

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Reason looks at Williamson as part of a long American traditional of spiritualism:

    In her 2007 book A Republic of Mind and Spirit, Catherine Albanese argues that religiosity has taken three major forms in American history: evangelical Christianity, the mainline denominations, and what Albanese calls “metaphysical religion.” In that third strand, the material world is believed to be “organically linked to the spiritual one,” allowing people to tap into a “stream of energy” that “renders them divine and limitless.” The followers of this tradition believe that the “trained and controlled human imagination” can be honed “to bring desired and seemingly miraculous change.”

    This worldview has Old World roots, but it has taken on a variety of distinctly American forms. One of the central threads of this tradition is what William James called the “religion of healthy-mindedness.” You hear its echoes whenever someone uses phrases like the law of attraction or the power of positive thinking.

    Overview of the career of Phineas Quimby, who combined mesmerism and herbal teas, snipped.


    (Maybe a decedent…)

    If this reminds you of Christian Science, there’s a reason for that: Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy was one of Quimby’s patients, and she drew on Quimby’s ideas as she developed her own distinctive doctrines. (Just how much she drew on Quimby became a matter of considerable dispute between Eddy and Quimby’s disciples.) Enthusiasts outside Eddy’s orbit began to refer to their core concepts as New Thought, a term borrowed from the transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“To redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action,” Emerson said, “that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.”) Others adopted different names, such as “mind cure.” When Charles and Myrtle Fillmore of Kansas City founded a church based on New Thought principles in 1889, they called it Unity. (The Unity congregation that hosted Williamson’s D.C. rally was founded in 1920, though it didn’t move to its current space until much later.)

    Some of these new-thinkers were recognizably Christian. Others roped in a smorgasbord of other spiritual ideas, from Theosophy to bastardized versions of various Eastern traditions. Some of them argued that modern medical theories were entirely baseless; others acknowledged that doctors often knew what they were doing but suggested that New Thought techniques could either amplify medicine’s effects or work as an alternative when other remedies failed. As the movement evolved, its interests extended beyond physical health; in particular, the notion took hold that those streams of divine energy could be used to attract personal riches.

    As these ideas grew more popular, they inevitably intersected with politics. Wallace D. Wattles, author of 1910’s The Science of Getting Rich, was to the left of Marianne Williamson: He was a member (and mayoral and congressional candidate) of the Socialist Party. Indeed, Horowitz’s book lists several social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who mixed their politics with mind-cure concepts. That shouldn’t be surprising. From the left-libertarian mystic Stephen Pearl Andrews to the spiritualist suffragette Victoria Woodhull, it was common in that period for populists, anarchists, socialists, feminists, and other radicals to draw on Albanese’s tradition of metaphysical religion. Why wouldn’t some of them be interested in New Thought too?

    But New Thought also planted the seeds of the health-and-wealth school of Christianity, whose political sympathies often trended in a different direction. Consider the career of Norman Vincent Peale, born to a Midwestern Methodist minister in 1898. Peale followed in his father’s footsteps and helmed a mainline Protestant congregation in New York, but he also read New Thought literature and soon started mixing it with his denomination’s doctrines. He was particularly taken with the writings of Napoleon Hill, a serial entrepreneur who left a trail of shady business practices and dubious biographical claims. Hill’s articles and books—most famously, his 1937 bestseller Think and Grow Rich—repackaged New Thought techniques as business advice, often putting Hill’s ideas into the mouths of the successful executives he allegedly interviewed. (In an entertaining article published in Gizmodo in 2016, Matt Novak makes a compelling case that few if any of these conversations actually happened. Hill’s habit of inventing interviews reached its peak in the posthumously published Outwitting the Devil, in which he claimed to have had a Q&A session with Satan.) Hill eventually drifted into a Long Island sect called the Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians, which attracted a degree of infamy when it declared its plans to unlock the path to physical immortality through a mixture of New Thought practices and vegetarianism.

    All its missing is the Fox sisters and John Murray Spear. Skipping ahead to Williamson:

    In Williamson’s case, that background begins in Houston, where she was born to a Jewish family in 1952. (She still considers herself a Jew, even as she regularly invokes Jesus and Buddha. Entertainment Weekly once called her Christ’s “most eminently eccentric Jewish exponent.”) She drifted in her 20s: dropping out of college, working briefly as a cabaret singer, imbibing a lot of alcohol and other drugs. Her life turned around after she discovered A Course in Miracles, a lengthy text that the historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal has called “a synthesis of psychoanalysis and mystical philosophy.” The book was “scribed” by the psychologist Helen Schucman from 1965 to 1972. (I say “scribed” rather than “written” because Schucman insisted that it had been dictated by Jesus.) Course says that everyone is a child of God, that our separate egos are an illusion, that the physical world itself is an illusion, and that one day we will wake into a state of eternal love.

    Williamson embraced the book, calling it “my personal teacher, my path out of hell.” By 1983 she was giving talks about it at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.

    The Philosophical Research Society is a venerable New Age institution, having been founded in 1934 by a Theosophist named Manly P. Hall. Hall wrote frequently about secret societies and esoteric symbols, and he was a devotee of the idea that a benevolent conspiracy has been guiding America toward a higher destiny. Williamson remembers Hall fondly, though she wouldn’t describe him as an influence on her. “By the time I got to the Philosophical Research Society, my reading Manly Hall was more affirmation of the things I already believed in,” she tells me after the D.C. rally, in a little room adjacent to the senior minister’s office. “I was already on that basic course of knowing that there’s much more to life than what meets the physical eye.”

    That said, there is one rather Hallian passage in Williamson’s first political book, 1997’s The Healing of America. The Great Seal of the United States—that eye-in-the-pyramid logo on the back of the dollar bill—”illustrates our Founders’ sense of America’s destiny,” Williamson writes. “The seal shows the Great Pyramid at Giza, with its missing capstone returned and illuminated. The Eye of Horus, the ancient Egyptian symbol for the consciousness of higher mind, is displayed within the capstone. Beneath the picture are written the words ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’—new order of the ages. This Masonic symbolism reveals democracy’s function as a vehicle for the realization of humanity’s highest potential.”

    And now we’re back in Robert Anton Wilson territory. And speaking of hip pop culture references, Williamson is now memeing famed Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Given that show’s Kabbalistic underpinnings, that ties right back into the whole spiritualist enchilada above…

  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Andrew Yang Wants to Save Your Dying Mall. The Democratic presidential candidate wants to fight suburban blight by repurposing dying retail centers.”

    According to his campaign, some 300 malls will fold over the next 4 years, a number in line with an estimate by Credit Suisse that one-quarter of all malls will close by 2022. Many dozens or hundreds more will struggle as anchor stores collapse and retail outlets wither. Yang’s American Mall Act would devote $6 billion to finding new purposes for these dying retail complexes.

    So, in other words, make them yet another sinkhole to toss taxpayer money into to prop up failing business models. Pass. “Andrew Yang on Automation: “You Can’t Turn Truck Drivers into Coders.'” He’s largely right there, but Universal Basic Income isn’t a solution, unless the question is “How do we prop up pot sellers, liquor stores and video game makers.”

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Austin Cops and Detroit Crooks

    Wednesday, May 2nd, 2018

    Two interesting dispatches from the frontlines of urban crime.

    First, Dwight has a really interesting post on various Austin Police Department doings.

    The other thing I hear training officers say: they’re dealing with entire generations of people who have never been in a fistfight. They have no idea what it’s like to take a punch, or get into a physical confrontation. Not only have they never done it, they’ve been actively discouraged from doing it all of their life. And the academy has to teach them to get past and through that. You can’t quit if you hurt a rib or got punched in the face. You have to keep going, or else you will die. Or your partner will die. Or both of you will die.

    I’m not one of those people who blindly says “Oh, the cops have a dangerous job” as an excuse for bad behavior. Yes, it is dangerous (not so much so as commercial fishing, for example) but I still want my police to behave properly, and treat everyone with dignity and respect up until the point they forfeit that right. Then I want them to end the threat as efficiently and humanely as they possibly can. To steal an old CHL saying, “Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

    On the criminal side of the ledger, here’s the first part of an in-depth look at a Detroit drug gang known as the Seven Mile Bloods, who made rap videos and put death lists up on Instagram.

    Since 2003, prosecutors say gang members targeted for death dozens of rivals on Instagram hit lists, participated in more than 14 shootings, at least four homicides, 11 attempted murders and drug crimes that eroded the quality of life on the gang’s home turf, known by locals as The Red Zone.

    “The SMB made The Red Zone into a war zone,” U.S. Department of Justice Trial Attorney Julie Finocchiaro said.

    More than 1,000 pages of federal court records and trial testimony illustrate how prosecutors used Facebook and Instagram posts, YouTube videos and rap lyrics to try and topple a social-media savvy gang that had a death grip on both the opioid drug trade and violence on the east side of Detroit.

    Five defendants in the Seven Mile Bloods case face possible death sentences under federal law, even though Michigan has abolished the death penalty. The five face possible death sentences because prosecutors say they were involved in homicides and violence as part of an organized criminal enterprise that operated a pain-pill pipeline between Detroit and Charleston, West Virginia, the epicenter of the nation’s opioid crisis.

    The court records and testimony also provide a street-level look at life and death in the The Red Zone. The gang’s turf is in the northeast corner of the 48205 ZIP code between Seven Mile and Eight Mile roads, east of Gratiot and west of Kelly.

    The ZIP code is so dangerous some locals call it the 4820-Die.

    Plus a gang murder that occurred because members of rival gangs ran into each other seeing their parole officers…

    LinkSwarm for December 29, 2017

    Friday, December 29th, 2017

    Welcome to the last LinkSwarm of one wild year!

  • Five Great Ways Trump Shook Up Washington in 2017.” (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • “The RNC closed November 2017 with $39.9 million cash on hand, while the DNC closed November 2017 with $2.6 million in debt.”
  • Democratic Party voter registration is down in a number of states. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Panic at the Washington Post as even they start to realize that the Russia-Trump fantasy is bunk. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Trouble in Texas: “Public Schools Using Taxpayer Resources to Defeat Republicans, Elect Democrats.”
  • Islamic State bombing in Kabul kills 40.
  • Why #NeverTrump should get with the program.
  • This weeks example of liberals bigwigs acting like sexual creeps comes from: Vice. Gee, with a name like that, what are the odds?
  • “Stephen Henderson, the managing director of opinion and commentary at The Detroit Free Press and a Pulitzer Prize Winner, was fired for alleged sexual misconduct.”
  • The link between polygamy and war.
  • Australia ends airstrikes against the Islamic State. That happens when you run out of targets. Thanks for the help, Australia!
  • “Democrat run Baltimore had 343 homicides in 2017, sets record for killings per capita.” A singular achievement for a city that already gave us Homicide: A Year in the Killing Streets, The Corner, and The Wire… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Here’s a real sweetheart: An Egyptian lawyer who says its a duty for Muslim men to rape women who wear revealing clothing.
  • How the beloved Charlie Brown Christmas Special almost never happened. Network executives hated the jazzy score and all that Christ stuff in Linus’ speech…
  • John Nolte on how hard Hollywood sucked this year. Though #6 should probably be #1…
  • Happy 2018, everyone!

    Democratic Rep. John Conyers: Two Sexual Harassment Charges…And Counting

    Wednesday, November 22nd, 2017

    The first sexual harassment charge about Michigan Democrat John Conyers came out November 20:

    Michigan Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 with a former employee who alleged she was fired because she would not “succumb to [his] sexual advances.”

    Documents from the complaint obtained by BuzzFeed News include four signed affidavits, three of which are notarized, from former staff members who allege that Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Judiciary Committee, repeatedly made sexual advances to female staff that included requests for sex acts, contacting and transporting other women with whom they believed Conyers was having affairs, caressing their hands sexually, and rubbing their legs and backs in public. Four people involved with the case verified the documents are authentic.

    Conyers confirmed he made the settlement in a statement Tuesday afternoon, hours after this story was published, but said that he “vehemently denied” the claims of sexual harassment at the time and continues to do so.

    This is the rare Buzzfeed piece that’s actually worth reading, and includes a detailed explanation of the torturous process those accusing congressmen of sexual harassment have to undergo to have their allegations addressed. After going through a lengthy bureaucratic wringer, they have the choice of taking the taxpayer-funded settlement and shutting up due to a confidentiality agreement, or taking their chances in a federal court.

    One of Conyers’ former employees was offered a settlement, in exchange for her silence, that would be paid out of Conyers’ taxpayer-funded office budget. His office would “rehire” the woman as a “temporary employee” despite her being directed not to come into the office or do any actual work, according to the document. The complainant would receive a total payment of $27,111.75 over the three months, after which point she would be removed from the payroll, according to the document.

    And when Conyers wasn’t pressuring his staffers to satisfy his sexual desires, he was instructing them to procure women for him on the taxpayer’s dime:

    n her complaint, the former employee said Conyers repeatedly asked her for sexual favors and often asked her to join him in a hotel room. On one occasion, she alleges that Conyers asked her to work out of his room for the evening, but when she arrived the congressman started talking about his sexual desires. She alleged he then told her she needed to “touch it,” in reference to his penis, or find him a woman who would meet his sexual demands.

    She alleged Conyers made her work nights, evenings, and holidays to keep him company.

    In another incident, the former employee alleged the congressman insisted she stay in his room while they traveled together for a fundraising event. When she told him that she would not stay with him, she alleged he told her to “just cuddle up with me and caress me before you go.”

    “Rep. Conyers strongly postulated that the performing of personal service or favors would be looked upon favorably and lead to salary increases or promotions,” the former employee said in the documents.

    Three other staff members provided affidavits submitted to the Office Of Compliance that outlined a pattern of behavior from Conyers that included touching the woman in a sexual manner and growing angry when she brought her husband around.

    One affidavit from a former female employee states that she was tasked with flying in women for the congressman. “One of my duties while working for Rep. Conyers was to keep a list of women that I assumed he was having affairs with and call them at his request and, if necessary, have them flown in using Congressional resources,” said her affidavit. (A second staffer alleged in an interview that Conyers used taxpayer resources to fly women to him.)

    So not just sexual harassment, but fraudulent use of taxpayer money.

    Now a second accuser has come forward:

    Another former staff member to Michigan Rep. John Conyers alleged that she endured persistent sexual harassment by the congressman, according to court documents.

    A former scheduler in the Conyers’ office attempted to file a sealed lawsuit against him this February in the US District Court for the District of Columbia that alleges she suffered unwanted touching by the Democrat “repeatedly and daily.” She abandoned the lawsuit the next month, after the court denied her motion to seal the complaint.

    The woman was not involved in the 2015 sexual harassment and wrongful dismissal complaint that Conyers settled in 2015, which was revealed Monday by BuzzFeed News, and is now under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

    The lawsuit centered on behavior that took place later, from 2015 to 2016, but involves similar allegations. The woman said that shortly after she started to work for Conyers he began to make sexual advances in the form of inappropriate comments and touching.

    “These behaviors and actions were so common and pervasive that they created a hostile work environment,” she alleged.

    If true, either the sexual harassment or the fraud charges alone are enough that Conyers should be removed from office. And Democrats are already looking for a way to pressure Conyers out before the 2018 elections.

    LinkSwarm for January 20, 2017

    Friday, January 20th, 2017

    Welcome to Inauguration Day, when Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the Forty-Fifth President of the United States of America! Celebrate the momentous day with a Friday LinkSwarm.

  • Trump plans to hit the ground running with a number of executive actions his very first day on the job. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Trump started planning his presidential run right after Romney lost. In fact, Trump registered his “Make America Great Again” slogan six days after Romney’s defeat. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Clinton Family Friend: “Yes, I will be at the review stand at the inauguration and I am going to kill President-elect Trump… what are you gonna do about it Secret Service?” Secret Service: “Enjoy these complimentary handcuffs.”
  • Much of the hatred against Trump is pure class bigotry:

    I don’t think reasonable differences of opinion on the one hand, and the ordinary hypocrisy of partisan politics on the other, explain the extraordinarily stridency, the venom, and the hatred being flung at the incoming administration by its enemies. There may be many factors involved, to be sure, but I’d like to suggest that one factor in particular plays a massive role here.

    To be precise, I think a lot of what we’re seeing is the product of class bigotry.

    Snip.

    Until last year, if you wanted to experience the class bigotry that’s so common among the affluent classes in today’s America, you pretty much had to be a member of those affluent classes, or at least good enough at passing to be present at the social events where their bigotry saw free play. Since Donald Trump broke out of the Republican pack early last year, though, that hindrance has gone by the boards. Those who want to observe American class bigotry at its choicest need only listen to what a great many of the public voices of the well-to-do are saying about the people who votes and enthusiasm have sent Trump to the White House.

    You see, that’s a massive part of the reason a Trump presidency is so unacceptable to so many affluent Americans: his candidacy, unlike those of all his rivals, was primarily backed by “those people.”

    Snip.

    This isn’t just because so large a fraction of working class voters generally backed Trump; it’s also because Trump saw this from the beginning, and aimed his campaign squarely at the working class vote. His signature red ball cap was part of that—can you imagine Hillary Clinton wearing so proletarian a garment without absurdity?—but, as I pointed out a year ago, so was his deliberate strategy of saying (and tweeting) things that would get the liberal punditocracy to denounce him. The tones of sneering contempt and condescension they directed at him were all too familiar to his working class audiences, who have been treated to the same tones unceasingly by their soi-disant betters for decades now.

    Much of the pushback against Trump’s impending presidency, in turn, is heavily larded with that same sneering contempt and condescension—the unending claims, for example, that the only reason people could possibly have chosen to vote for Trump was because they were racist misogynistic morons, and the like. (These days, terms such as “racist” and “misogynistic,” in the mouths of the affluent, are as often as not class-based insults rather than objective descriptions of attitudes.) The question I’d like to raise at this point, though, is why the affluent don’t seem to be able to bring themselves to come right out and denounce Trump as the candidate of the filthy rabble. Why must they borrow the rhetoric of identity politics and twist it (and themselves) into pretzel shapes instead?

    Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • “In donated shoes and suit, a Trump supporter comes to Washington.”
  • Follow-up:

  • How ObamaCare helped destroy Medicare.

    Physicians across the country have been firing Medicare patients; and according to a late 2015 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 21% of physicians are not taking new Medicare patients.

    Much of this trend is based on stiff penalties and financial disincentives from the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and 2015’s Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization (MACRA) Act.

    MACRA in particular is completely mystifying.

    The law created a whopping 2,400 pages of regulations that Medicare physicians are expected to know and follow.

    Many of the rules are debilitating.

    For instance, MACRA changed how physicians can be reimbursed for their Medicare patients by establishing a bizarre set of standards to determine if a physician is providing “value”.

    As an example, if a patient ends up in the emergency room, his or her physician can incur a steep penalty.

    This explains why my step-dad was dropped by his doctor.

    The healthcare system has been broken to the point that physicians now have a greater incentive to fire their Medicare patients than to treat them.

  • City journal has an extensive profile of George Soros.

    Soros’s global reach and influence far outstrip those of the Koch brothers or other liberal bogeymen—and that underlying it all is a vision both dystopian and opportunistic. “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” Soros has declared, “is the United States.” Ergo, that constitutional republic must be weakened and its allies degraded. The Sorosian world order—one of open borders and global governance, antithetical to the ideals and experience of the West—could then assume command.

    Snip.

    n the United States, Soros bankrolls a broad range of political and cultural causes. One is to destabilize the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. In 2015, he dedicated $650,000 for the purpose of shaping Pope Francis’s U.S. visit, using left-leaning Catholic groups to promote gay marriage, abortion, and physician-assisted suicide. Leading the effort was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, a self-professed Catholic. Bill Donohue, outspoken president of the Catholic League, vainly called for Podesta’s dismissal. “He is fomenting revolution in the Catholic Church, creating mutiny and is totally unethical,” Donohue said. “He is the front man for George Soros to create a host of phony anti-Catholic groups. These are not just bad comments, as some have suggested. These words are orchestrated, calculated and designed to create fissures in the Catholic Church.”

    Another Soros favorite is Black Lives Matter, the radical protest group dedicated to the proposition that police are inherently racist. Working the streets with incendiary rhetoric, at odds with the truth about black-on-black crime, BLM has helped foster “depolicing,” as Heather Mac Donald describes it, in high-crime urban areas. In 2015, after days of rioting in Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, an Open Society Foundations memo excitedly commented that “recent events offer a unique opportunity to accelerate the dismantling of structural inequality generated and maintained by local law enforcement and to engage residents who have historically been disenfranchised in Baltimore City in shaping and monitoring reform.” Three straight acquittals of police officers involved in the matter left the prosecution’s case in shreds but made no difference to the Open Society Foundations. It has donated at least $650,000 to Black Lives Matter and pledged more assistance to antipolice factions across the country. These activities prompted the father of one of the Dallas police officers killed during a Black Lives Matter protest to sue Soros (along with other individuals and groups) for inspiring a “war on police.”

    (Hat tip: John Tierney at Instapundit.)

  • I always thought George Soros was running Black Lives Matter, and now here’s some proof: “BLM leader lives in home owned by Soros’ Open Society board member.”
  • Don’t look now, but the Clinton/Sanders rift is still roiling the Democratic Party. Sadly, neither side seems to be willing to give up on Social Justice Warrior victimhood identity politics. (Hat tip: Hot Air, which notes “Democrats have to come to grips with the fact that they stopped speaking for most Americans over the past eight years, and started lecturing at Americans instead. The party got wrapped up in the progressive-academic social-justice agenda to the point that the party made diversity into an obsession at the expense of the real economic issues facing voters outside of the coastal enclaves and college campuses.”)
  • One college Democrat has had enough:

    A National Councilman for the College Democrats of America is jumping ship and considering joining the Republican Party just before President-elect Trump takes the oath of office.

    Michael J. Hout, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told Campus Reform that he believes the contemporary Democratic Party is no longer the best place for an ideological moderate like himself, saying the Party is pivoting towards more extremist rhetoric and appealing more to those who often do not even consider themselves Democrats, such as socialists and independents.

    Snip.

    “This strategy of catering to the whims of those for whom identity politics matters more than anything else, and of allowing for even anti-white, anti-male rhetoric to find a home within the party, is a large part of its untenable strategy moving forward,” Hout explained, predicting that “it will continue to cause Democrats to lose, time and time again.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Former California Democratic Party chair argues that Democrats should move their headquarters to Detroit to reconnect with middle class voters. I agree, but for a different reason: So they can be forced to see the results of their handiwork firsthand every day.
  • A glimmering of a clue: “U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, breaking ranks with other Democrats who are trashing President-elect Donald Trump and boycotting his inaugural, is imploring his party’s rank and file to figure out why middle American voters went Republican in November….’Folks, we lost their trust and being mortified and mystified about their vote doesn’t bring it back.'” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Tolerant left gets another Milo speech cancelled.
  • Ignore the shame mob and they’ve got nothing else to throw at you:

    While [Steve] Harvey tries to use his celebrity for something selfless and useful and while the Talladega College marching band gets the world stage to show off the results of its hard work and school spirit, think of their detractors as the latter sit behind their cell phones and sling names like “coon” and “Uncle Tom”[i] in between posting their twerking and ghetto fight videos.

    Ouch! (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Joe Bob Briggs takes aim at the “angry white male” concept.

    Numero Three-o: Why is anger as a voting incentive limited to white males? Don’t black men get angry? When Louis Farrakhan holds a rally, why doesn’t Yahoo News say “Angry Black Men Gather in Chicago”? Why aren’t there any Angry Latino Men or Angry Chinese Men?

    Numero Four-o: More specifically, how do you explain the fact that the Angry White Men who voted for Trump in 2016 are the same white men who voted for Obama in 2008? When they vote for Obama they’re not angry, but when they vote for Trump it can only be because they’re enraged hicks? Gogebic County in Michigan is 92 percent white and hadn’t voted for a Republican since 1972—until this election. The counties in southwestern Wisconsin, all heavily Democratic, went for Trump after a strong Obama vote in 2008 and 2012. Eastern Iowa, Democratic since 1988, went for Trump. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is frequently used as the very definition of “working-class,” went for Republicans for the first time since 1988. Why are all these people classified as “angry” now, but in 2008, when they were angry at George Bush, they were just “voting for change”? Could it be, just perhaps, maybe, they feel betrayed by the Democratic Party? If we’re gonna call them angry, let’s define what they’re angry about.

  • Then again, fake outrage over non-issues is the stock in trade of the center-left.
  • Four reasons why nobody trusts the media. Including that nothingburger of a New York Times hit piece on Rick Perry that relied on no facts whatsoever.
  • For all that CNN flack global warming, they certainly don’t act like they believe it. In addition from moving CNN headquarters from Atlanta to New York City, “Time Warner, the company that owns CNN, just invested in SEVEN new buildings located in Hudson Yards, a part of Manhattan just a block or two away from the water. An area that, according to its own CNN, will soon be underwater, and therefore utterly and completely worthless.”
  • Speaking of CNN, they just hired Valerie Jarrett’s daughter to report on Trump’s Justice Department. “Valerie Jarrett’s daughter quietly joined CNN in September as a reporter in the network’s Washington bureau. She came to CNN with no experience in journalism.” Evidence suggests CNN has naked contempt for both objectivity and those not in the anointed liberal overclass. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an “official narrative” that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between “the truth” as defined by the ruling classes and any other “truth” that contradicts their narrative.”
  • Post-Brexit, an economic boom in the UK. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • UK PM Theresa May aims at a “hard Brexit.” Andrew Stuttaford (and I) wonder why she isn’t going for the ‘Norway option’ of leaving the EU but staying in the European Economic Area.
  • Marine Le Pen cues up Frexit. “The euro has not been used as a currency, but as a weapon—a knife stuck in the ribs of a country to force it to go where the people don’t want to go.” I disagree with Walter Russel Mead: The EU, as currently constituted, is incapable of being reformed. Reform is impossible without scraping the European Commission, which is impossible without scraping Maastricht, which would scrap the EU. Better to start again from scratch or go back to just the common market.
  • Jihadwatch’s Robert Spencer had a minor piece at The Hill on why Lindsay Lohan’s (rumored) conversion to Islam was a bad idea. I wasn’t even going to link it. The The Hill took it down due to political pressure. Now I have to.
  • As one of his last acts, Obama commutes the sentence of convicted Puerto Rican terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera.
  • And it’s not just terrorists: Obama commutes the sentences of four South Texas druglords:

    Four family members who ran one of the largest cartel smuggling operations in south Texas had their life in prison sentences commuted and will likely be returning to this border city from where they ran their criminal empire. One of the main destinations that the criminal organizations delivered drugs to was Chicago, Illinois.

    This week, outgoing President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 209 convicted criminals and pardoned 64 others. The majority of the convictions were from drug trafficking or production offenses.

    Four of those convicted criminals who had been sentenced to life in prison will be released by May 17. They ran a criminal organization made up of close to 80 men and women who worked with Mexico’s Gulf Cartel to move between 100,000 to almost 750,000 pounds of marijuana into the U.S. during a 10-year period. The drugs were moved into Houston and then distributed to Atlanta, Chicago, and other major metropolitan areas.

    According to court records obtained by Breitbart Texas, brothers Cesar Moreno Sr., Eduardo Moreno, Lazaro Moreno, and Luis Moreno along with other relatives and friends had been at the helm of a large-scale drug distribution operation based out of the border city of Roma, Texas.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • A tweet:

  • Brian Krebs deduces the author of the Mirai worm.
  • Seattle kills bikeshare program. If it can’t make it in Seattle…
  • 3D TV is dead again. Good. 3D always struck me as an annoying gimmick, even in IMAX.
  • “Woman stabbed man 9 times after he wouldn’t commit to relationship.” I’m pretty sure the guy made the right call there… (Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
  • Man gets head start on the epic douchebag Olympics. “28-year-old James Allen is facing a charge of driving while intoxicated. [He] drove a $385,000 Ferrari off a bridge in Westlake, went airborne for 40 feet and crashed into the woods while speeding on Friday night.” (Hat tip: Iowahawk’s Twitter feed.)
  • Oakland Raiders file papers to move to Las Vegas.
  • “It’s come to my attention that some of you Hollywood types are calling yourselves ‘the Resistance’. Stop. Now.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Graduate student sues after being kicked out of school for not supporting left-wing causes.
  • Scott Adams being unable to comment on his own blog due to a software bug has to be the most Dilbert thing ever…
  • LinkSwarm for December 16, 2016

    Friday, December 16th, 2016

    Next week come two joyous events: Christmas, and Donald Trump being confirmed President by the electoral college. The first is a time of family celebration, and the second means liberals can finally shut the hell up about their asinine cockamamie schemes to keep the duly-elect 45th President of the United States of America from taking office.

    Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Speaking of the electoral college, publicity whore faithless elector Chris Suprun turns out to be a serial liar rather than a 9/11 first responder.
  • Linux guru Eric S. Raymond (who I’ve been on panels with at the odd science fiction event and such) has a long piece on the hard truths Democrats need to face to exit the political wilderness:

    First, your ability to assemble a broad-based national coalition has collapsed. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise by your popular vote “win”; that majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex and disguises a large-scale collapse in popular support everywhere else in the U.S. Trump even achieved 30-40% support in blue states where he didn’t spend any money.

    County-by-county psephological maps show that your base is now confined to two major coastal enclaves and a handful of university towns. Only 4 of 50 states have both a Democratic-controlled legislature and a Democratic governor. In 2018 that regionalization is going to get worse, not better; you will be defending 25 seats in areas where Trump took the popular vote, while the Republicans have to defend only 8 where Clinton won.

    Your party leadership is geriatric, decades older than the average for their Republican counterparts. Years of steady losses at state level, masked by the personal popularity of Barack Obama, have left you without a bench to speak of – little young talent and basically no seasoned Presidential timber under retirement age. The fact that Joseph Biden, who will be 78 for the next Election Day, is being seriously mooted as the next Democratic candidate, speaks volumes – none of them good.

    Your ideological lock on the elite media and show business has flipped from a powerful asset to a liability. Trump campaigned against that lock and won; his tactics can be and will be replicated. Worse, a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night.

    Your donor advantage didn’t help either. Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost.

    Your “coalition of the ascendant” is sinking. Tell all the just-so stories you like, but the brute fact is that it failed to turn out to defeat the Republican candidate with the highest negatives in history. You thought all you had to do was wait for the old white men to die, but anybody who has studied the history of immigration in the U.S. could have told you that the political identities of immigrant ethnic groups do not remain stable as they assimilate. You weren’t going to own the Hispanics forever any more than you owned the Irish and the Italians forever. African-Americans, trained by decades of identity politics, simply failed to show up for a white candidate in the numbers you needed. The sexism card didn’t play either, as a bare majority of married women who actually went to the polls seem to have voted for Trump.

    But your worst problem is less tangible. Trump has popped the preference bubble. The conservative majority in most of the U.S. (coastal enclaves excepted) now knows it’s a conservative majority. Before the election every pundit in sight pooh-poohed the idea that discouraged conservative voters, believing themselves isolated and powerless, had been sitting out several election cycles. But it turned out to be true, not least where I live in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where mid-state voters nobody knew were there put Trump over the top. Pretty much the same thing happened all through the Rust Belt.

    That genie isn’t going to be stuffed back in the bottle. Those voters now know they can deliver the media and the coastal elites a gigantic fuck-you, and Republicans know the populist techniques to mobilize them to do that. Trump’s playbook was not exactly complicated.

    Some Democrats are beginning to talk, tentatively, about reconnecting to the white working class. But your real problem is larger; you need to make the long journey back to the political center. Not the center you imagine exists, either; that’s an artifact of your media bubble. I’m pointing at the actual center revealed by psephological analysis of voter preferences.

    First on his list of suggestions: Give up their suicidal gun control policies.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • The always pungent Jim Goad talks about how victimhood identity politics destroyed the Democratic Party:

    Still scratching their pointy heads over losing an election they were certain that history had preordained them to win, the Democrats are blaming everything except their own stupidity and arrogance.

    The intersectional house of cards has fallen. Every maladjusted minoritarian mini-tyrant in the country is freaking the frick out that their ragged, patchwork coalition of misfits is crumbing before their eyes. From coast to coast, every HIV-positive mulatto one-armed transgender lesbian midget is suddenly worried that Trump and his supporters in the heartland will become “normalized.”

    Huddled inside a rainbow-colored yet opaque bubble, it’s obvious that they have no idea what just hit them. Many overpaid and demonstrably clueless strategists seem to think that perchance they didn’t call people racists, sexists, homophobes, and Islamophobes enough. Maybe if they just verbally shat upon the stupid, uneducated, hateful, and soon-to-be-extinct white masses in flyover country who put Trump over the top, they could have shamed enough of these irredeemable rubes into voting for a party and an ideology that clearly hates their guts.

    Not for a moment does it seem to have occurred to them that maybe it’s not so wise to play aggressively hostile identity politics when your designated opponent is still the demographic majority.

    Listen up, dimwits: When you encourage racial pride in all groups except whites, you aren’t exactly making a case against “racism.” If you have even a semblance of a spine, sooner or later you’ll hear this nonstop sneering condescension about how you were born with a stain on your soul and say, “Hey, fuck you. I’ve done nothing wrong, but you’re really starting to bother me.”

    I suspect that for perhaps the majority of those who voted for Trump, it had nothing to do with the stupid, juvenile, leftist catchall excuse of “hatred.” If you really think extraordinarily complex social conflicts over power and resources can be explained by a dumb word such as “hatred,” I hate you.

    Instead, a large swath of voters grew so tired of being actively hated, they struck back and said “enough.” They didn’t “vote against their interests,” as is so often patronizingly alleged; they voted against the condescending, scolding, sheltered creampuffs who try to dictate their interests to them.

  • “NY Times Hires Reporter Who Sent Stories to Hillary Staffers for Approval.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • For all the lunatic leftist blather, Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch says that there’s no evidence Russians hacked voting machines. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Also, it wasn’t Russia that obtained Hillary’s emails, it was disgruntled Democratic insiders that gave them to Wikileaks.
  • And speaking of disgruntled Democratic insiders, some Clintonistas are only too happy to see the back of Huma Abedin. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Records: Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Lots of Democrats are pretty clear about the contempt they hold regular Americans in, but few are so stupid as to actually call America’s heartland “flyover country” in public.
  • “David Brock’s Media Matters Has Hidden $1,052,500 From The IRS Since 2010.”
  • In another entry in the “liberals keeping it classy” annals, a reporter tweets about Trump having sex with his own daughter.
  • Hillary Clinton didn’t win “America’s” vote, she won California’s:

    California voters are alone responsible for Clinton’s “win” in the popular vote. The latest tally shows Clinton up by about 2.8 or so million votes. She’s won California by nearly 4.3 million votes. So, take away California and the rest of the country starts to look like… well, it looks like the rest of the country. California is weird, but if that’s what the Democrats want to elect a president of, then the only thing you can really say to them is, “Congrats, you already have Jerry Brown.”

  • Scott Adams on dwindling liberal protests against Trump: “What are you doing that is more important than stopping Hitler?????????”
  • More on that Trump vs. Department of Energy dust-up. How long do you think that stonewall will last when Rick Perry is running the place? (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Along with the selection of Mad Dog Mattis for Secretary of Defense, the selection of Michael Flynn for National Security Advisor signals that Trump is tossing political correctness out of the Pentagon. Good.
  • How Trump can use the power of the purse to crack down on illegal alien sanctuary cities. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Get ready for more Scott Walkers as Republicans control 25 state capitals: tax cuts, pension reform, right to work, school choice.” (Usual WSJ hoops apply.)
  • Obama tries to create a new ethnic group for Democrats to pander to.
  • How an underachieving screwup from Plano named John Georgelas became Yahya Abu Hassan, a leader of the Islamic State.
  • Indian prime Minister Narendra Modi’s insane “demonitization” scheme continues to wreck India’s economy.

    The parched branches of big banks are still fortunate. For unexplained reasons the RBI has supplied almost no new cash at all to India’s hundreds of smaller rural co-operative banks or to its 93,000 agricultural credit unions, so keeping millions of farmers from deposits that total some $46bn. It has also banned these institutions from competing with “pukkah” banks in exchanging old bills for new. With no cash flowing, farmers cannot even seek help from informal networks that in normal times account for more credit in rural areas than formal institutions. And although India’s 641,000 villages house two-thirds of its people, they contain fewer than a fifth of its ATMs. These are being slowly modified to supply the new notes, which unhelpfully are smaller than old ones; for now most stand idle.

    Starved of cash, India’s rural economy is seizing up. A study by two economists at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research found that in the second week of the drought, deliveries of rice to rural wholesale markets were 61% below prior levels. Soyabeans were 77% down and maize 29%. Prices have also collapsed. In Bihar, Scroll’s reporters found desperate farmers selling cauliflower for 1 rupee ($0.01) a kilo, a twelfth of the prior price.

    It is not only farm incomes that are pinched. An investigation by Business Standard, a financial daily, found that virtually none of the estimated 8m piece workers who hand-roll bidis, a kind of cigarette, has been paid since the cash ban. Another Indian daily, the Hindu, reports that more than half of the 600-odd ceramics factories in the town of Morbi, a centre of the tile industry in the state of Gujarat, with a combined output worth some $3.5bn a year, have temporarily closed because they cannot pay workers. In Agra, the hub of Indian shoemaking, some firms are paying workers with supermarket coupons to keep them on the job.

    India’s wealthy few have servants to take their place in the still dismally long queues snaking outside banks, but the pain reaches even to the top. A dentist in a posh part of Delhi is shocked by a 70% fall in trade since the cash ban. “All my patients can pay with plastic so I assumed I was safe, but I guess people are just being careful about spending in general.” This does seem to be the case. A brokerage that surveys consumer-goods firms says November sales have fallen by 20-30% across the board. Property sales, which traditionally are made wholly or partly in cash, have plummeted even more.

    Small wonder that Fitch, a ratings agency, on November 29th cut its forecast for India’s GDP growth for the year to March 2017 from 7.4% to 6.9%. That is in line with most financial institutions’ trimmed estimates, although some economists think the damage could be even worse. “There will be no or negative growth for the next two quarters,” predicts one Delhi economist who prefers anonymity. “Consumer spending was the one thing really driving this economy, and now we are looking at a negative wealth-effect where people feel poorer and spend less.”

    Perhaps more embarrassingly for Mr Modi’s government, there are few signs that its harsh economic medicine is achieving the declared goal of flushing out vast hoards of undeclared wealth or “black” money. Officials had predicted that perhaps 20% of the pre-ban cash would not be deposited in banks, for fear of disclosure to the taxman. Yet within three weeks of the “demonetisation”—well before the deadline to dispose of old bills, December 30th—about two-thirds of the money had already found its way into “white” channels. Some of this is doubtless illicit: inspectors of Delhi’s bus system have found that the bulk of daily takings now mysteriously appears in the form of the banned bills, which public-sector firms can still deposit, rather than the usual small change. Reports from Maharashtra, in the centre of the country, suggest that brokers are offering to buy old notes with a face value of 10m rupees for 8.4m, suggesting that they have found ways of laundering them.

  • India’s Foxconn cell-phone factory has let 25% of its workforce go due to declining sales.
  • Speaking of phones, how long you have to work earn enough to buy an iPhone varies widely by country, from 24 hours in New York to 627 hours in Kiev, which is even more than Nairobi (468 hours).
  • Popping the liberal university bubble:

    When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans.

    We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological.

  • “In 2015: 4,454 men died on the job (92.4% of the total) compared to only 367 women (7.6% of the total). The ‘gender occupational fatality gap‘ in 2015 was again considerable — more than 12 men died on the job last year for every woman who died while working.”
  • Another day, another fake anti-Muslim “hate crime” exposed.
  • Llewellyn Rockwell of the Mises Institute explains Trump: “To get to where we want to go, the American political class has to be hit hard, and the media and the universities need to be exposed for the propaganda factories they are.”
  • Liberal women cutting off their long hair because of Trump. Says Instapundit: “Trump wins, and Democratic women respond by making themselves less attractive. Sorry, Democratic men!”
  • Formerly rich man forced to sublet his palatial digs to renters to make ends meet. Wait, did I say man? I meant The New York Times.
  • Pictures from an abandoned Russian military base above the arctic circle. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “City Of Chicago Working Around Clock To Clear 18 Inches Of Bullet Casings From Streets.”
  • Dripping Springs ISD stonewalls open records request over tranny bathrooms.
  • LinkSwarm for April 22, 2016

    Friday, April 22nd, 2016

    As today is a made-up celebration called “Earth Day,” be sure to have beef for dinner…

  • Reminder: “Officials at VA’s Phoenix hospital manipulated wait-time data to make it appear they were connecting doctors and veterans seeking appointments much faster than they actually were. This was done so VA managers at the Arizona facility could keep getting generous performance bonuses. They got their bonuses but dozens of waiting veterans died.” So how did the VA address the problem? They hired someone accused of doing the exact same thing at another hospital.
  • Huge ObamaCare premium hikes are coming down the pike in 2017. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “The largest health insurer in the U.S. has started pulling out of select Obamacare exchanges.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Eight more ObamaCare co-ops are about to bite the dust.
  • Meanwhile, ObamaCare is helping enourage opioid addiction.
  • Thanks to Obama’s supergenius management, the Taliban are now winning in Afghanistan.
  • “The National Labor Relations Board suspended a top-ranking Philadelphia official after receiving complaints that he helped raise money from unions for his pro-union charity.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Following a congressional subpoena over Benghazi, Hillary’s state department staff hid requested files in another department. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Is Rhode Island closing 66% of polling places for next week’s presidential primaries? Something smells.
  • How Ted Cruz could beat Hillary Clinton. “Clin­ton is en­ter­ing the gen­er­al elec­tion with glar­ing vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies of her own. Her im­age is tox­ic to Re­pub­lic­ans and in­de­pend­ents, and her pop­ular­ity among Demo­crats is now at an all-time low as a pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate, ac­cord­ing to Gal­lup’s polling. It won’t take a top-tier Re­pub­lic­an can­did­ate to win.” Also: “Cruz con­sist­ently runs far more com­pet­it­ively against Clin­ton than Trump does.”
  • “It’s not just Wall Street banks. Most companies and groups that paid Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to speak between 2013 and 2015 have lobbied federal agencies in recent years, and more than one-third are government contractors, an Associated Press review has found. Their interests are sprawling and would follow Clinton to the White House should she win election this fall.”
  • Donald Trump jumps on the social justice warrior tranny bathroom bandwagon.
  • Evidently accused pedophile Terry Bean is the one whose organizations are pushing tranny bathroom bills down America’s throats. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Trump convention manager Paul Manafort engages in the time-honored traditional rhetorical device know as “lying your ass off.”
  • Thomas Sowell on campaign lies and dodgy statistics.
  • “Although our panel’s original estimates had Trump finishing with 1,175 pledged delegates, my revised deterministic projections have him at 1,155, and the probabilistic version has him at 1,159.”
  • Ted Cruz has done heavy organizing in California.
  • Man indicted for selling school supplies to Detroit schools he didn’t actually deliver…with the connivance of several principles receiving kickbacks. Now, remind me: Which party has controlled Detroit for half a century?
  • Venezuela instituting four hours of blackouts a day, in addition to the previously mentioned three day weekends. That socialist paradise just keeps
  • Brazil impeaches their President.
  • Won’t someone please think of poor, penniless Boeing?
  • When low-fat dogma trumped science: hamburger study data showed exact opposite of study’s conclusions.
  • Navy chief starving Marine air corps.
  • What Women Really Want Is The Patriarchy.”
  • ‘White Privilege’ Is a Racial Slur.”
  • Walden is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.”
  • Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano erupts. Popocatepetl is less than 50 miles from Mexico City…
  • Goldman Sachs pays $5 billion fine to “settle claims that it misled mortgage bond investors during the financial crisis.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Pratt & Whitney pushing a B-52 engine upgrade.
  • The woman who can’t remember her own past. (Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
  • Lileks: “Who wouldn’t want to lounge around in a set from a 1970s failed Gene Roddenberry pilot?” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Son, that’s no way to treat steaks. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • LinkSwarm for May 15, 2015

    Friday, May 15th, 2015

    I knew if I was just lazy enough, I could get the Friday LinkSwarm back to Friday!

  • “If Baltimore wants to get its economic act together, it has to get something else right first: policing.”
  • What the left says is the same thing the 9/11 hijackers told the passengers: “Stay quiet and you’ll be OK.”
  • ObamaCare exchanges are melting down across America.
  • Coalition airstrikes against ISIS are increasingly targeting frontline fighting positions.
  • ISIS list of states to be attacked strangely doesn’t include Texas. Gee, I wonder why…
  • Is Hillary the new Bob Dole? Without, of course, the war service or dry wit…
  • Real editorial, or masterful New York Times trolling? “Let Syrians Settle Detroit”.
  • Mark Halperin asks Ted Cruz to play “Babalu.”
  • This is America: You can go to the bookstore and buy yourself copies of everything from The Basketball Diaries to The Motorcycle Diaries to The Turner Diaries.”
  • On the other hand, the DEA can just take your money without a trial.
  • Verizon buying AOL. Remember when AOL was important enough to merge with Time Warner as an equal?
  • I chuckled:

  • It’s not enough to believe in climate change, you must also abjure cost-benefit analysis of how to tackle it.
  • George Stephanopoulos: It’s conflict of interest all the way down. What, did you expect Renfeld to actually serve any other master? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “The vile dishonesty of the Democrat-Media Complex is exceeded only by the vile hypocrisy of the Democrat-Media Complex.”
  • Ben Carson gets to pandering early.
  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has said UT must turn over requested documents to its own regent Wallace Hall. So why haven’t they?
  • Bill to mandate E-verify for all Texas agencies moves forward.
  • Psychologist discusses porn and video game addition and a discussion of modern manhood’s discontents breaks out.
  • Seattle pizza shop closes due to minimum wage hike.
  • So former Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan is going to form a tranny wrestling league? The proposal seems as ill-conceived as his entire post-Melon Collie career…
  • Baltimore is the Natural Fruit of the Democratic Welfare State

    Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

    Despite the best effort of the far-left to spin it as such, the riots in Baltimore were not an “uprising” against “oppression.” (What oppression, the tyranny of CVS stores selling goods people want and the racism of fire hoses?) Instead, they were the standard, predictable outcome of the American welfare state.

    Liberals pounced on Rand Paul citing a lack of fathers for the Baltimore riots, but he is essentially correct. Walter Williams addresses the theme:

    In 1950, female-headed households were 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children lived with the biological mother and father. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. Herbert Gutman, author of “The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925,” reports, “Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.” Also, both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.

    A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia found that three-quarters of black families were nuclear families (composed of two parents and children). What is significant, given today’s arguments that slavery and discrimination decimated the black family structure, is the fact that years ago, there were only slight differences in family structure among racial groups.

    Coupled with the dramatic breakdown in the black family structure has been an astonishing growth in the rate of illegitimacy. The black illegitimacy rate in 1940 was about 14 percent; black illegitimacy today is over 70 percent, and in some cities, it is over 80 percent.

    The point of bringing up these historical facts is to ask this question, with a bit of sarcasm: Is the reason the black family was far healthier in the late 1800s and 1900s that back then there was far less racial discrimination and there were greater opportunities? Or did what experts call the “legacy of slavery” wait several generations to victimize today’s blacks?

    Charles Murray made an exceptionally strong and well-researched case in Losing Ground that this rise in illegitimacy is a direct result of the perverse incentives of the American welfare system, in that single women garner far more welfare benefits than married women. (Another factor blighting inner city prospects is the loss of entry levels jobs for those who never attended college, some from globalization, but even more from an unchecked flow of illegal aliens taking those same jobs for lower wages and no government-mandated job benefits, thus knocking them off the first rung of the economic opportunity ladder.)

    That welfare dependency was a big reason welfare was reformed in the 1990s to require more wlefare recipients to work. Naturally the Obama Administration gutted those reforms.

    As John Nolte puts it, Baltimore is the direct result of Democratic Party policies:

    Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem. Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor.

    In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have only been only been two Republican governors of the State of Maryland.

    Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years. As I write this, despite his objectively disastrous reign, the Democrat-infested mainstream media is treating the Democrat like a local folk hero, not the obvious and glaring failure he really is.

    Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat.

    Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city.

    Kevin D. Williamson expands upon the theme:

    American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too: Blacks make up barely 9 percent of the population in San Francisco, but they represent 40 percent of those arrested for murder, and they are arrested for drug offenses at ten times their share of the population. Criminals make their own choices, sure, but you want to take a look at the racial disparity in educational outcomes and tell me that those low-income nine-year-olds in Wisconsin just need to buck up and bootstrap it?

    Black urban communities face institutional failure across the board every day….

    Baltimore’s police department is, like Detroit’s economy and Atlanta’s schools, the product of the progressive wing of the Democratic party enabled in no small part by black identity politics. This is entirely a left-wing project, and a Democratic-party project…

    The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.

    And, as Allen West notes, it is more specifically a black democratic problem:

    The population of Baltimore is 622,000 and 63 percent of its population is black. The mayor, state’s attorney, police chief and city council president are black, as is 48 percent of the police force. But as 36-year-old Robert Stokes says, “You look around and see unemployment. Filling out job applications and being turned down because of where you live and your demographic. It’s so much bigger than the police department.”

    Everyone wants to have an honest conversation about race, so let’s us endeavor to do just that. Now, of course, when you speak the hard truth about race issues in America – and not just the liberal progressive talking points – and you’re white, you’ll be branded a racist. And if you’re black, well, y’all just watch the comments below and see the denigrating drivel.

    Snip.

    Every single major urban center in America is run by Democrats — more specifically, liberal progressives, black or white. The morass that became Detroit. The killing fields of Chicago. The depravity of Washington DC. The shame of South Dallas. And yes, even the place that was once my home, Atlanta — even with all the successful black entertainers…

    Just do the assessment yourselves, who are the elected officials heading up the urban centers? And where does one find the most dire socio-economic statistics?

    Yet we hear these rioters blame whites — well, they need to make sure they’re specifically blaming the correct whites — those on the left. Blacks have been herded into these inner city clusters, a new economic plantation and in this 50th year of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — well, the unintended, or maybe intended, consequences are deplorable.

    There was a time when America’s disasterous welfare policies could be chalked up to good intentions gone awry. That time has long since passed. It seems that both a large, welfare-dependent underclass, and a small cadre of thugs willing to riot over racial grievance-mongering at the drop of a hat, benefit the Democratic Party.

    At what point do we conclude that the destructive welfare policies the Democratic Party promotes and maintains exist not despite their exceptionally harmful effects on poor black Americans, but because of them?