Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! Manchin stands firm, Psaki drips with contempt, #NeverTrump and #BlackLivesMatter share a sugar daddy, and “Let’s Go Brandon” pops up everywhere.
It’s suddenly beginning to dawn on Democrats that Manchin means it.
Joe Manchin means what he says. Democrats and the media may not grasp this as it happens so rarely in Washington, and neither group has included that in its calculations. However, that reality keeps getting clearer and clearer, and the Punchbowl crew warn Democrats to figure it out — fast:
Manchin has been remarkably consistent, and all the major media outlets have reported it time and time again. If you’re surprised by what Manchin is saying now, maybe you’ve been really busy, tied up on other endeavors and haven’t listened to or read what he’s said. That’s understandable. Life moves pretty fast.
But if you have listened to Manchin and you’re still surprised by or enraged at his positions, that may be because you’re irrationally hopeful he will change his beliefs, or you’re engaging in wishful and likely unrealistic thinking. Maybe you’re just listening to what you want to hear. But don’t worry, you aren’t alone. Half of official Washington has decided that they’re going to ignore what Manchin says and believe he has a secret set of beliefs he’s waiting to unveil.
Here’s what you have to understand about Manchin: He says what he means. When he gets heavy pressure from the left, it helps him back home.
Here’s the reality: Joe Manchin is a filibuster-supporting conservative Democrat who is also an ardent supporter of coal, skeptical of big government and massive spending packages. He never pretends otherwise. Let’s all stop acting surprised when he says the same thing for the umpteenth time.
No kidding. That’s always been the reality, right along with the reality of an evenly split Senate. One would think that Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer would have put those two realities together and realize that launching a massive progressive-agenda reconciliation bill would have been a no-sale from the very beginning. Up to now, Democrats seem to have talked themselves into a fantasy that Manchin was just looking for a deal, or that they could pressure him into folding.
Now that neither approach has worked — so far, anyway — The Hill reports that Democrats have begun to panic:
Democrats are facing growing headaches over their sweeping social spending bill as they struggle to show momentum ahead of an end-of-the-month deadline.
President Biden will meet with groups of moderates and progressives on Tuesday, and he’s facing pressure from some in his party to take a tighter rein on the talks.
Instead of narrowing their differences, Democrats are dealing with a near constant whack-a-mole of new problems in recent days ranging from climate provisions and child care to increasingly intense infighting between moderates and progressives.
The “whack-a-mole” is also a product of Democratic fantasy. They larded up the reconciliation bill with the entire progressive wish-list agenda, and as those items get attention, they also draw opposition. This omnibus approach to the hobby-horse list from the Bernie Sanders wing might have worked if Democrats had a clear and significant majority in each chamber of Congress, or if they had worked out the details with Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema beforehand. Biden doesn’t have the former and didn’t do any work on the latter, which is why Democrats are playing “whack-a-mole” now.
Now, as The Hill reports separately, Manchin’s entirely predictable opposition to Green New Deal-esque legislation threatens to torpedo Biden’s entire agenda:
The hard left is so used to the MSM pandering to their delusions of popularity that cold, hard reality always comes as something of a shock to them. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Unsurprisingly, some influential Senate Democrats are getting cold feet about the prospect of President Biden nominating Saule Omarova to lead the OCC. The Cornell law professor educated in the USSR who has proposed that the Fed take over most retail banking activities from the private sector (which a Fedcoin – or ZuckCoin – just might help it to do) while wholeheartedly supporting the progressives’ “Green New Deal” agenda.
This has, understandably, made many in both Congress, and the industry she is about to regulate, uncomfortable.
Various Omarova commie policy proposals we’ve previously covered snipped.
According to CNBC’s main source (who remains anonymous) is that these Senators have already shared their misgivings with President Biden.
Her selection, coupled with her views on how to overhaul the US banking system, prompted several Senate Democrats or their staff to complain to the White House and suggest that the president’s choice will be tough to support on Capitol Hill, according to a person familiar with the matter.
This person declined to be named in order to speak openly about private discussions between the White House and Senate offices.
Others surrounding the OCC nomination process said a handful of moderate Democrats harbor reservations about Omarova and her aspirations to “end banking as we know it,” as she suggested in a Vanderbilt Law Review article.
Those people cautioned that skeptical senators likely haven’t made a final decision yet but are leaning against her candidacy.
Why UK coronavirus death statistics can’t be trusted:
'Member when it came out that the PCR test at +40 cycles gave over 90% false positives? Yeah, about those numbers… pic.twitter.com/5SeD77TWsP
It’s not just the vexation you get when a lot of people are crammed into one place, though. It’s imposed, by dint of not doing anything about the disorderly elements. We will not police the streets so you will step over needles. We will not clear out the encampment so you will have an inert RV fill the neighborhood with smoke when it burns. We will not do something about petty theft, so you will have to wait for the clerk to get a key. We will not confine the mentally ill, so you will be trailed for a block by someone scrabbling a hand in his pants.
When you complain, you will be told you’re lucky not to be in the situation of the people who are causing the problems.You should be grateful you don’t have to steal Tide. You should be grateful you can afford to replace your broken stove, even though the replacement won’t come for 8 months. (It’ll be 9 next month.) I suppose that’s true, but it’s setting the bar rather low, and making the disorderly uncivil elements the baseline. Anything above that, it’s gravy.
Revanchist running-dog lackey of the plutocratic hegemony that I am, I am suspicious when the state determintes your needs and justifies their construction. You don’t need the treadmill is you don’t need 14 varities of ice cream is you don’t need that car is you don’t need that hamburger when there’s bug protein is you don’t need fast access to unprotected detergent is you don’t need to go to that wedding is you don’t need . . . this. That. The other thing. And it is churlish of you to think you need this when (insert aching never-solved non-analogous problem that still exists despite decades of expenditures here).
Ever seen the old Soviet ads? They’re lovely. They didn’t have 15 different brands. They just had a nice ad for marmalade, in general. No confusion. Yes, but did they actually produce any marmalade? Of course! But if there wasn’t any marmalade, because the wreckers and kulaks had prevented the fufillment of the Five-Year Fruit Spread Goals, everyone shared the experience. There was Marmalade Equity. And Comrade Brezhnev had his toast dry? He may have had some at diplomatic occasions, where it was expected.
What you might take away from the exchange above is this: the press secretary has access to a treadmill, and it works, and if it doesn’t, there are ten others in a row just like it. And membership in the fitness club comes with the job.
And never forget that she, and the mandarins she represents, hate you.
This is what Trump’s critics meant when they said we needed to restore “civility” to the White House: they meant we need the right kind of disdain for the right kinds of people, expressed in the right kinds of ways. Gone are the mean tweets, the off-color jokes, the rough pugilism. Now instead we have Jen Psaki, sneering avatar of an aristocracy that regards working Americans as less than dirt. People are straining to put food on the table and gas in their cars; they increasingly fail to see the point in going to work at all. Psaki’s response is that of the anointed class she represents: shut up and take it.
We are ruled over by a cabal of solipsists who feel outraged that the regressive pigs in flyover country express any opinions at all—about the fruits of their labor, about the security of their nation, about the health of their bodies. Their response is that we should “lower expectations” for affordable food, “welcome competition” from a rapidly arming China, and “follow the advice of health experts” on pain of unemployment.
Who can forget the treacly grin with which Psaki invited us to “stay tuned” for Biden’s forthcoming vaccine decree? She delights in her role, which is to act out the revenge fantasies of all who felt wounded in 2016 by the mere suggestion that their virtue is less than immaculate. We have to reckon with the fact that Psaki, loathsome though she may be, is doing her job exactly as intended. Her affronts are outrageous only to the people who already hate her: from her target audience they elicit shouts of “YAS Kween” and “drag him!” She is not slipping up when she insults your intelligence and riles up your countrymen against you, when she lies unblinkingly out in the open and defies you to do anything about it. That is her job, and she is good at it. She is doing exactly what she was put there to do.
No one with a spine should take instruction on “civility” from such a feckless cretin or anyone who enjoys her act. If we are to re-learn civic excellence, it will not be from a movement whose moral framework consists of slander and self-satisfaction. Remember that in 2022 and 2024 when they call you a fascist or a bigot or a domestic terrorist or whatever: these are people who think Jen Psaki is a good person. Their opinion about your morals literally doesn’t matter at all.
The press releases went out on schedule and the media rewrote them into news stories. A group of “principled” Republicans was going to fundraise to support Democrat congressmen.
The stories rolled out on schedule from different media outlets while appearing nearly identical. And the real story, as usual, was not what was on the page, but what had been deliberately left out. Reuters described the Renew America Movement as a group of Never Trump Republicans “whose leadership includes former Republican Governors Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Bill Weld of Massachusetts.” Hardly a single story mentioned the actual leaders.
The Renew America Movement was co-founded by Evan McMullin (pictured above) and his running mate Mindy Finn. Its national political director, Joel Searby, who is quoted in the media’s writeups, was the chief strategist for the McMullin campaign. Donations to RAM go through Stand Up Republic, which is the anti-Trump group that McMullin and Finn originally set up. The press release for the new pro-Democrat campaign even came from Stand Up Republic. The media actually had to work not to mention McMullin or Stand Up Republic in its stories about the RAM campaign.
And the media did a fine job of lying by omission to the public in order to elect Democrats.
Snip.
Stand Up Republic had scored $800,000 from Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Voice and $750,000 from the Hewlett Foundation. Omidyar, a Franco-Persian billionaire, is the richest man in Hawaii and the digital version of George Soros. His projects include the pro-terror site, The Intercept, and a plan to “Reimagine Capitalism”. Hewlett is a more conventional leftist setup.
The “principled” Never Trumper network championing “moderates” to “heal our country” is actually backed by the same money as Black Lives Matter radicals and racists.
The Hewlett Foundation is one of the backers of the Democracy Frontlines Fund which poured tens of millions into a variety of black nationalist groups including the Movement for Black Lives.
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a BLM umbrella group which is backed by billion-dollar leftist foundations like the Ford Foundation. Considering its wealthy anti-Israel backers, it’s unsurprising that M4BL has embraced the antisemitic BDS movement, falsely accused Israel of genocide, and tried to oust any Jewish groups that wouldn’t join them in destroying Israel.
The Omidyar Network promised last year that it was committing $500,000 to “racial justice” and focusing on 5 groups including the Movement for Black Lives. It also couldn’t let the anniversary of September 11 pass without announcing a joint initiative with Soros, the Ford Foundation, and other leftists to pour money into Islamic groups fighting against America’s counterterrorism.
Omidyar is also the sugar daddy of the Never Trumpers, funding The Bulwark together with the Hewlett Foundation. Omidyar’s Democracy Fund has provided $1.6 million to Bill Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together. It’s all just Democrats funding Democrats… together.
I honestly feel sorry for the livers of Biden's handlers tonight.
The townhall was an incredible disaster that saw Joe forget names, pose like a discount Cornholio, wander aimlessly about the stage, drift of topic, and just generally showcase his incompetence.#LetsGoBrandonpic.twitter.com/g3jUhmyT6I
Yeah. Okay, the commies got a plan. That is sort of their one and only given strength. They plan, they organize, they work towards the world’s stupidest things, but they do it TOGETHER. (Eh, mostly.)
But to believe it’s working you’d have to forget everything from the collapse of the Soviet Union (THEY surely try to forget it) to the repeated smacks on the nose they have got in America, to the fact many of you don’t seem to know that the only reason that the Soviet Union survived that long was because we FED THEM. (Seriously. We should give all those who lost relatives to the Soviet Union and its depredations, including the poor bastards in Africa destroyed by Russia’s Cuban mercenaries a chance to disinter FDR’s corpse and kick it around. It’s no more than a very mild form of justice.)
Communism is in fact an idea so stupid that only intellectuals can believe it and try to apply it. Fortunately for them they do attract most intellectuals with the siren song of “because you’re smarter than other people, you see this.”
Snip.
Orwell was a believer, even if a heretic. As an adult, read the damn thing and tell me it’s in the least likely.
Not only would it fall apart within years — if not weeks — because no one can manage a large economy well enough for it to survive that long (yeah, China. Sure buddy. If you think China is working out that well, you haven’t looked closely), but it could never extend to the whole world, or everyone would starve and die out.
The other thing is that it’s 1940s tech extended indefinitely. This might work — eh, sort of — under really tightly controlled regimes, but sooner or letter a clever monkey (ape, d*amn it. We’re apes) throws a wrench in. The internet is a big wrench, and their attempts to put the genie back in the bottle have been markedly unsuccessful. But it doesn’t take the internet. The Soviet Union was brought down by typewriters and copiers.
Alec Baldwin kills a cast member of the movie he’s shooting. It may not have been his fault.
The Washington Postwants us to invade Haiti. Remember when it was Republicans that were accused of being the warmongers?
Fauci flops, but the industry tries to hide it. ” IMDB just got caught with its pants down. Social media is noticing that they changed the Fauci film 1.6 audience score to 5.8, but they neglected to change the demographic data or the raw distribution, so it looks like they just faked the top-line number.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“DC assistant chief: I was told “have an abortion or be fired.” “D.C. Assistant Police Chief Chanel Dickerson…said when she became pregnant as a young police cadet, she was told she had to have an abortion to keep her job.”
New evidence suggests the Norse were in Newfoundland in 1021.
Remember all the fawning coverage that former Democratic congresswoman Katie “Naked Bong Hits” Hill received despite banging a staffer? Yeah, it turns out that one of the journalists giving her that fawning coverage, Alex Thomas, was banging her too. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Here’s a chance to buy the very earliest Apple Macintosh prototype ever offered at auction, this one with the unreliable, abandoned 5 1/4″ “Twiggy” drive, only a few prototypes of which exist.
The attack on April 13th went up against a 21st-century Russian superweapon–the S-400 Triumf air-defense system, a mobile state-of-the-art anti-aircraft and missile network featuring four distinct missile types targeting aircraft in any performance envelope from treetop level to high altitude – including stealth aircraft (at a range of 150 miles, yet). For a decade we have been assured by military analysts that the S-400 is a game-changer – a system that could rend the heavens in twain and call into question the very concept of air power under battlefield conditions.
And yet, last Friday, the epoch-making Triumf failed to let out so much as a peep as 105 cruise missiles trashed Bashar Assad’s chemical warfare plants. Not a single SAM left the rack while the attack was proceeding. (The Syrians did fire over 40 missiles at nothing, but only after the attack was completed. This is standard behavior among Arab armed forces – the Libyans and Iraqis did the same thing.) The Russians claim to have shot down over 70 of the attacking cruise missiles. How do we know this isn’t true? First, because the targets were utterly destroyed, and second, because the French were involved. If the Russians had shot down any U.S. missiles at all we would be hearing from Paris that American “missiles de croisière” are useless, and that’s why we had to turn to the French, who invented the cruise missile in 1689. (This is scarcely an exaggeration – Emmanuel Macron has gone on record to state that it was he, le président de la France, who persuaded Donald Trump to carry out the strike.)
Some might argue that the new AGM-158 JASSM stealth missile foxed the S-400, but half the missiles launched were actually thirty-year-old BGM-109 Tomahawks, the equivalent of Colt Peacemakers as far as the world of missile development is concerned. If the mighty S-400 can’t shoot down a thirty-year-old missile, what can it do?
Also this: “Russia today is what it always was – a Potemkin village hiding a nation in a state of suspended collapse.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
President Donald Trump’s approval ratings hit 51%.
Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network’s platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady activities, including spamming, wire fraud, account takeovers, phony tax refunds, 419 scams, denial-of-service attack-for-hire services and botnet creation tools. The average age of these groups on Facebook’s platform was two years.
Former presidential candidate Evan McMullin owes his former campaign staff members tens of thousands of dollars and most believe he has no intention of ever paying them, a former campaign worker tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Right before McMullin’s failed bid for president in 2016 as the conservative alternative to President Donald Trump, the campaign was inundated with debt. The disastrous fiscal situation was a combination of frivolous spending by McMullin and his campaign manager Joel Searby, according to the former staffer.
McMullin received news weeks before Election Day 2016 about how dire the campaign’s finances were, and he had “no remorse” and said “I have qualms about this thing ending badly in debt,” the former staffer claimed. McMullin’s cavalier attitude towards the campaign’s spending struck many as a surprise, particularly because he billed himself as a fiscal conservative, he added.
The staffer also claims the campaign never paid him somewhere between 12-15 thousand dollars on top of a few thousand dollars in reimbursements. While he has since recovered, he expressed concern about former staffers with “families and children.”
I’ll never forget the first time I went to a steakhouse here. I thought I’d eaten steak before. I was expecting this small, flat circle of meat, maybe a couple of fries on the side. Fine. C’est bon.
So in Texas, steak is a different thing. I’m at this restaurant and they put this plate in front of me, and, well, there was barely any plate visible — all I saw was this was this big, big piece of meat. I look around, maybe I had been mistaken in what I ordered. Maybe this waiter was playing a prank on me. It looked like a whole farm animal in front of me. But everyone with me laughed and nodded and told me that in Texas, this is a steak.
Then I was introduced to these other foods I’d never seen before but were totally amazing. Mac and cheese, man. Guys, you are blessed for having mac and cheese here. It’s a work of art. Bravo, guys.
And that was the first time I thought, O.K. O.K., I think I can get used to this place.
But if he really wants to be “King of Books,” he should know that road runs through me…
Time, finally, for something vaguely resembling a comprehensive post-election roundup.
As this keeps threatening to turn into a very long and unwieldy post, I’m going to break it up into chunks, with this installment centered on vote totals, race outcomes, and statistical facts about the election. We’ll save analysis, implications, and the saltiest examples of liberal tears for another time.
Assuming the current results hold, Trump flipped six states Romney lost (Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan), plus Maine’s second congressional district, which gives Trump 306 electoral votes.
That’s the highest electoral vote totals for a Republican since Bush41 blew out Dukakis in 1988 (426).
Hillary might still edge Trump in the popular vote (right now she’s up by 3/10ths of 1%).
Clinton lost over 5 million votes from Obama’s 2012 totals. Trump was down less than a million from Romney’s totals.
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson pulled in over 4 million votes, triple his 2012 showing. Green Party candidate Jill Stein pulled in over 1.2 million votes, which was almost triple her 2012 showing as well.
Evan McMullin (or, as Ace of Spades refers to him, “Egg McMuffin”) pulled in less than half a million votes, about a third of which came from his native Utah, where he beat Johnson and Stein. He did not win any counties in Utah, though he did beat Clinton in a few.
1996 was the last time West Virginia (formerly a reliable Democratic state) went for the Democratic presidential candidate. This year they went for Trump by nearly 69%, including every county in the state. Despite that, WV Democratic Senator Joe Manchin says he’s not switching to the Republican Party. Machin, 69, is up for reelection in 2018.
Republicans lost two seats (in Illinois and New Hampshire) but maintain control of the Senate. Louisiana will have it’s top two runoff December 9, where Republican John Kennedy will be heavily favored, likely giving Republicans a 53-47 edge.
Republicans only lost six House seats, easily maintaining control. Three Dem pickups were in Florida (where Republicans flipped two sets themselves), two in Nevada, one in New Hampshire, one in Virginia, and one in New Jersey. Republicans also picked up one House seat in Nebraska. Republicans are guaranteed to retain control of Louisiana’s third congressional district (two Republicans in the runoff) and likely to retain control of the 4th as well.
Not a single U.S. House seat in Texas flipped parties, which means that incumbent Republican Will Hurd retained the 23rd Congressional District over Democrat Pete Gallego. CD23 is the only true swing U.S. House district in Texas these days, and Gallego had been the incumbent when Hurd ousted him in 2014.
Senator Tim Scott was reelected to a full term. Scott still remains the first black Senator from the South since reconstruction.
Republicans also picked up three governorships, in Missouri, Vermont and New Hampshire, giving them 33 to the Democrats 15.
The North Carolina Governor’s race may not be decided until November 18. If Democrat Roy Cooper’s razor thin lead over Republican incumbent Pat McCrory holds, that will be the Democrats’ only gubernatorial pickup this year.
“Eastern Kentucky voters rejected [Democrat] House Speaker Greg Stumbo on Tuesday as Republicans appeared poised to take control of the Kentucky House of Representatives for the first time since 1921.”
Texas county-by-county Presidential race results. Clinton taking Fort Bend county is a surprise to me; Romney won that by six points in 2012, and Clinton beat Trump by about that much this year.
Libertarians maintained automatic ballot access in Texas because their railroad commission candidate pulled in 5.3% of the vote, over the 5% threshold. The Green Party, however, did not, and will have to submit 50,000 petition signatures to make the ballot in 2018.
National Review (ad blocker blocker warning) notes that the “Trump won because of racism” talking point is demonstrably wrong:
Mitt Romney won a greater percentage of the white vote than Donald Trump. Mitt took 59 percent while Trump won 58 percent. Would you believe that Trump improved the GOP’s position with black and Hispanic voters? Obama won 93 percent of the black vote. Hillary won 88 percent. Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. Hillary won 65 percent. Critically, millions of minority voters apparently stayed home. Trump’s total vote is likely to land somewhere between John McCain’s and Romney’s (and well short of George W. Bush’s 2004 total), while the Democrats have lost almost 10 million voters since 2008.
And all this happened even as Democrats doubled-down on their own identity politics.
But all this is based on exit polls. How do we know they’re any more accurate at capturing the electorate than those other faulty polls?
More exit poll analysis from Oren Cass. The thrust is that Trump did better among nonwhites than Romney. But when he gets down to differences of less than 2%, he’s counting angels on the heads of pins.
Remember all that MSM talk about Trump turning Texas into a swing state? Instead he turned Michigan and Wisconsin into swing states.
Here’s a Tweet that encapsulates a New York Times interactive map indicating which areas of the country voted notably more Republican or more Democratic in the Presidential race than in 2012. Note the strong surge of Trump voters in the rust belt.
