This long and mostly friendly Edward-Isaac Dovere piece on Kamala Harris is pretty revealing once you shear the piece of the requisite “first black woman VP” rah rah fluff bits:
Air Force Two is a smaller plane than Air Force One. The exterior is the same light-blue and white, but unlike the commander in chief’s plane, the vice president’s aircraft is open plan—from the back, you can see all the way to the front, where a small office doubles as a bedroom. Kamala Harris spends most of her Air Force Two flights in that office, with the door closed. She doesn’t work the plane, the way Joe Biden or even Mike Pence did.
Snip.
For a political world in palace-intrigue withdrawal post-Trump, the Biden-Harris dynamic drips with promise. Harris tried to propel her own presidential campaign by calling Biden a relic and pointedly not a racist in their first debate. But he rolled on to victory while her campaign fell apart, and now her political existence is in limbo while everyone waits to see how long he wants to remain in charge.
Snip.
The woman who launched her presidential campaign to 22,000 people packing the streets of Oakland—about three times more people than showed up for Biden’s launch—has had to adjust to a smaller role than the one she once campaigned for. A few weeks ago, in Chicago, she made awkward small talk with a window washer at a vaccination site. She asked what the tallest building he’d ever worked on was. “Trump Tower,” down by the river, he told her.
Zing!
The vice president and her team tend to dismiss reporters. Trying to get her to take a few questions after events is treated as an act of impish aggression. And Harris herself tracks political players and reporters whom she thinks don’t fully understand her or appreciate her life experience. (She often mentions an episode in which a Washington Post reporter mistook the cheer of the historic Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha for “screeches,” I was told.) She particularly doesn’t like the word cautious, and aides look out for synonyms too. Careful, guarded, and hesitant don’t go over well. But she continues to retreat behind talking points and platitudes in public, and declines many interview requests and opportunities to speak for herself (including for this article). At times, she comes off as so uninteresting that television producers have started to wonder whether spending thousands of dollars to send people on trips with her is worthwhile, given how little usable material they get out of it.
Snip.
Harris has been an elected official for 18 years straight, but she has only a few senior aides on staff who have worked for her for more than a few months. Turf battles have been a recurring feature of Harris offices over the years, but her newest circle believes it is finally getting her on track after years of past staffers not serving her well. Some have been surprised at how much work there is to be done, whether that’s briefing her on certain policy issues or helping her improve her sparring-with-journalists skills.
Wait, you mean the presidential candidate that didn’t even make it to the primaries is a bad manager and a slow learner who is poor at dealing with people? Color me shocked.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told me he was “dumbfounded” trying to come up with what Harris’s precise role or impact has been. Bob Casey, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania who’s been close with Biden for years and is now a Harris fan too, fondly recalled how much he enjoyed being in the Senate until 5:34 a.m. to watch Harris cast the tiebreaking vote to move the COVID-relief bill forward. As for her specific influence, he added, “It’s probably the case that there are a number of things where her imprint or her presence on that team is the reason why there’s a particular emphasis. I can’t say that I can identify one.” Other members of Congress who have sat in Oval Office conversations with the president and vice president struggled to answer this question too. Biden, who has shown a new confidence since he returned to the White House, has been making clear that he’s the one running the meetings, and Harris has been diligently deferential.
Welcome to John Nance Garner’s famous “warm bucket of spit.”
In March, Biden put Harris in charge of diplomatic efforts around migration from Latin America. Obama had given him the same assignment, so Biden imagined that he was showing Harris respect while also giving her a prime chance to build up her nearly nonexistent foreign-policy experience. To much of the political world, though, it looked like he’d stuck her with a worse setup than Nelson Rockefeller’s description of the vice presidency: “I go to funerals. I go to earthquakes.”
Harris’s staff initially told reporters that the border was part of her assignment. Republicans eager to create the news narrative of a “border crisis” demanded that Harris visit a detention facility or inspect some stretch of land where Donald Trump’s wall would supposedly have gone. House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana appeared at a press conference with a mock-up milk carton that declared Harris MISSING at the border.
A few weeks ago, I went to a White House press briefing to try to get a sense of what the vice president’s role is supposed to be. Harris had held a virtual meeting with the Northern Triangle leaders that morning, so I asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki how that call fit into the administration’s overall effort. Psaki started by saying that the conversation was part of a series of meetings the vice president had been having with other leaders and staff, not all of which had been public. Had the president given Harris any directives? I asked. “Well, the president and the vice president see each other quite regularly. She’s in many of the meetings, when she’s in town—almost all of them—that the president is in as well. So I would say it’s more of a discussion with others who are leading and running point on these issues.”
No one, including the vice president’s staff, has been able to tell me what any of this means. Migration and immigration are multinational, multilayer problems. Saying that Kamala Harris is going to fix them is like declaring that she’ll be the one to figure out how to land a crewed mission on Jupiter.
This is a pretty stupid metaphor on Dovere’s part. As a gas giant, Jupiter lacks an observable solid surface for a crewed mission to land on and at a gravity some 2.5 times Earth’s, it would be nearly impossible for the crew to do anything were they able to manage the feat. You would send a crewed mission to the Jovian system and leave exploring the surface (such as it is) to robots.
It appears to me like President Biden handed her a hand grenade and pulled the pin, and she was quick to get rid of it as fast as she could,” Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas told me, noting that despite the border legislation he’s working on and his obvious interest in the issue, he hasn’t heard from the vice president’s office.
Harris hasn’t spoken with Republican leaders about the border, her aides say now, because she was never supposed to be dealing with the border—she was supposed to be handling migration-related diplomacy with Latin American countries. She’s going to Guatemala and Mexico in June to meet with leaders there, because that’s the assignment. Pretty much everyone—reporters, members of Congress, advocates—gets confused about what the parameters of her role are. On a Friday afternoon last month, for example, the White House announced one policy on refugee caps, and then, a few hours later—after being bombarded for sticking to Trump policy by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois—announced another, higher cap. Theoretically, this change had something to do with the immigration crisis that Harris was supposedly managing, because refugees are fleeing dangerous conditions at home. But as far as most people could tell, Harris wasn’t a key player in the discussions leading up to the first cap, or the revised one. [Washington Democratic representative Pramila] Jayapal, who is a leader on the refugee issue, called the process “incomprehensible,” and said she hadn’t even thought to go to Harris to ask for an intervention.
Funny how the much-despised Donald Trump managed to handle the “multinational, multilayer” problem by enforcing border controls, stopping illegal aliens from coming here in the first place and building a border wall. That may have been imperfect solutions, but they were manifestly better at controlling the border than the Biden Administration’s abandonment of them. This is because Democrats don’t want to control the border because they view every illegal alien as an undocumented Democratic Party voter.
These days, when friends and allies try to reach out, they often can’t get through (she got a new cellphone after being elected, for national-security reasons). When she sees friends from her pre–Naval Observatory life who tell her they’d like to connect her to some cause or supporter who might be helpful down the road, she’ll tell them that they should talk to her sister and closest confidante, Maya Harris, who’s not on staff and who often tangled with aides during her presidential campaign.
So Maya Harris is the bagman and cutout, a convenient role to channel communication through. Presumably she’s much more discreet than hunter Biden in this role.
Being in a bubble leads Harris to talk in terms like “human infrastructure,” by which she means measures such as child care. Human infrastructure is one of those self-defeating phrases that some liberals like to popularize. Even most Democrats roll their eyes at it; Republicans think that it’s too “woke.”
Note the scare quotes around “woke,” as though it’s some inexplicable, imaginary thing.
Is her more stilted approach one reason the administration doesn’t put her on television or send her to talk to members of Congress as much as, say, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg? No, West Wing aides insist: She’s just busy actually building the administration’s policies.
Sure she is.
Read between the lines and you see the same Kamala Harris we saw in the 2020 Presidential campaign: A maladroit, out-of-touch, hard-left political novice championing divisive social justice causes and language who was in over her head and was singularly unable to connect voters despite reams of fawning political coverage of he from the Democratic Media Complex. She’s a slow learner who’s never run a successful competitive political race in her life, and her current performance (and the Biden Administration’s disasterous policies) suggests she never will.
Biden behaving badly, Palestinian backers beating Jews, Portland crime soars, and the latest pause to the latest Israel beatdown of Hamas. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Dispatches from the swamp: “Former FBI director Louis Freeh gave $100,000 to a private trust for Joe Biden’s grandchildren and spoke with the then vice president in 2016 ‘to explore lucrative future work options’ with Hunter as the middle man.” Who watches the watchmen?
There has been a lot of discussion recently comparing the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter with the failing presidency of Joe Biden, but I will clue you in on something. Biden’s presidency is worse, and Biden is worse as a man and human being.
We’re five months into Biden’s presidency, and already he seems determined to outdo all four years of Carter’s incompetence by Christmas. Inflation is rising, the southern border practically doesn’t exist, the Middle East is in turmoil, and we recently experienced a gas shortage thanks to hackers easily breaching our digital infrastructure.
Snip.
For Carter, this came in the form of skyrocketing inflation and fuel shortages, the hostage crisis in Iran, compounded by an inability to work with Congress and constantly butting heads with Tip O’Neill and the Left wing of the Democrats. Carter, simply put, did not get how to work with Congress when he arrived in Washington, having spent his entire career playing Georgia politics. Unfortunately, this contributed to his inability to pass legislation, even though at the time Democrats controlled the Senate.
Moreover, Carter’s inability to get his own messaging right added to his problems. The best episode of this is of course the notorious “Malaise” speech, where Carter essentially told Americans that their best days were behind them. This certainly didn’t inspire confidence when there was indeed a crisis of confidence on the home front, while abroad the Soviets and Iranians caused their fair share of mischief. It took the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan to fix things.
During the 1980 campaign, an observer took note of the difference between the two men saying, “If you ask Jimmy Carter what time it is, he’d tell you how to build a watch but if you asked Ronald Reagan what time it is, he’d say it time to get this country moving again.” Reagan always knew where he was going and where he wanted to lead the nation,
Today, Biden only seems capable of being led by the hand by his staffers and signing whatever Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer shove across his desk. When he does bother to make rare appearances, he seems to always pour gasoline on the proverbial fire.
Already, inflation is rising under Biden’s direction, and despite a jobs relief bill that spent trillions of dollars, less than 300,000 new jobs were created as a result. On top of that, Biden seems determined, come Hell or high water, to ignore the crisis on the southern border, so much so that he refuses to call the situation an actual crisis. Did I also mention he’s done little to nothing to help Israel while Hamas pounds it with rockets lately?
That’s all well and good (Biden is hardly the first president to bungle domestic and foreign policy) but Biden seems to genuinely care little for the country he was elected to govern.
Unlike Carter, who to his credit is a patriot, Biden has caved to the whims of the radical deconstructionists by ignoring the very real threats of Antifa and BLM. Biden has entertained the possibility of giving federal grants to schools that teach Critical Race Theory (CRT), which postulates that all White Americans are born evil and that all Black Americans are born victims. While on paper CRT is supposed to teach “diversity and inclusion,” in reality it’s undoing the sacrifices of the Civil Rights pioneers who wanted us to not see color or race.
Jimmy Carter was a bad president but he wasn’t a bad man. Biden is a bad president and a bad man. Carter never at his worst ever contemplated the things Biden does willy nilly, such as revoking Donald Trump’s protection of American statues from the evil of BLM and Antifa.
The predominant conclusion is that face masks have a very important role in places such as hospitals, but there exists very little evidence of widespread benefit for members of the public (adults or children) as well as evidence that masking is truly an ineffectual way to manage pandemic-related spread of viral disease. As Kolstoe stated, it has become less about the science and more about politics and a symbol of solidarity.
The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. In fact, Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, even said as much on Saturday. “I talked to someone who *used* to work out of that building periodically who said he believed there may have been Hamas offices there,” Vietor tweeted. In other words, anyone who worked in the building on a regular basis understood that they likely shared an address with the Islamic Resistance Movement. Vietor also acknowledged on Twitter that terror groups “purposefully co-locate operations with civilians. But that is not a new problem.” Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.
Here’s the thing: There’s nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes. It happens all the time in the Middle East. CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open. The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza. The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it’s never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance. That’s because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity. Through direct threats as well as fixers and minders appointed to steer journalists in the right direction, Hamas lets every press outfit and journalist in Gaza know that if they do not understand this fundamental angle, they are not welcome in Gaza.
The language of leftists and globalists can be rather confusing because they never mean exactly what they say. The word “diversity” generally means “more leftists/Marxists”, not more brown people. Leftists are incredibly racist towards any minority person that argues from a conservative or moderate position. The phrase “white supremacist” is usually a hatchet reference to all conservatives. So, to translate their woke gibberish, the goal of the Pentagon under Biden will be to divest the ranks of the military of conservatives and replace them with more regime friendly leftists.
The goal of propaganda is often to create false word associations in the minds of the masses. The mainstream media constantly mentions “white supremacists”, “neo-nazis” and “extremists” within the same articles they mention “conservatives”. Though there is no evidence whatsoever to link the majority of conservatives with race identity groups, the hope within the establishment is that the conservative base in the US can be dismantled through guilt by manufactured association.
Anyone who stands against the social justice mob is labeled “white supremacist”. Therefore, all conservatives are white supremacists, because the social justice cult controls who gets labeled. The social justice cult thus becomes the self anointed arbiters of who gets canceled and who does not. See how that works?
As far as the military is concerned, the obvious intent is to link all conservative views with “extremism and racism”, thereby creating an artificial rationale for removing conservatives from the ranks or denying them the ability to sign up in the first place. The Pentagon is already openly discussing plans to comb through the social media histories of troops in order to root out those with “extremist backgrounds” (conservatives and constitutionalists). In theory, this would only leave devout social justice warriors behind. It is a political and ideological cleansing of the armed forces.
The Cult of Woke is like a hive of parasitic termites that feeds its way through the various pillars of western society until they crumble; once a pillar is hollowed out, they move onto the next one, and the next one until the nation or civilization breaks apart completely. As the nation is destabilized, they then offer their own social model as a solution to the problem. Invariably, their model is one that eliminates all individual freedom and inherent rights in the name of collective “safety” and “equity”. It is totalitarianism posing as compassion.
To be sure, the Department of Defense is fast-tracking the woke agenda.
Snip.
Straight white men are noticeably absent from the Pentagon’s new series of commercials, and the people represented are a perfect pie chart of diversity hiring, even though the US is around 70% white and around 96% straight (according to Gallup).
But who are these commercials really made for? The Army admits they had to search a worldwide roster of soldiers, obtaining only 100 submissions that fit their woke criteria, and then filtered those submissions down to just a handful that met the diversity requirements of the marketing campaign. Some of the commercials are subtle, and some of them are not. The US campaign seems to be mimicking the “Snowflake” ad campaign used by the UK military in 2019 in a bid to attract what they call “Me Me Me Millennials”.
Clearly, the percentage of soldiers that check most or all of the woke boxes is tiny. The commercials are also notably in cartoon form, because SJWs have a hard time absorbing information unless it is animated.
Snip.
Globalists are very mindful of statistical realities, and they know that the current military dynamic is against them; hence their growing thirst for the wokification of our branches of defense. I want to remind conservatives that this is a good thing. They are trying to force social justice politics into the military because the military is the exact opposite of what they want it to be.
For example, polling in 2016 showed that around 31% to 35% of the US military is Republican, while around 25% to 29% votes Democrat. But what about the remainder? The media often calls the remaining current serving voters “moderates” or “independents”. As it turns out, up to 40% of the military is actually libertarian or constitutionalist leaning according to polls.
The mainstream media tries to hide this fact by only talking about “Republican votes” and “Democrat votes”, but the reality is that the vast majority of the military is conservative oriented, with values based in personal freedom and constitutionalism. That 40% of libertarians and constitutionalists is what the elites are really worried about. This is who they are referring to when they talk about “extremists” in the military.
And what about the 25% to 29% of Democrats? That is the extent of the left’s hold within the general ranks of the military and it is improbable that most of these democrats are hard leftists. Further studies also show that the majority of veterans leaving the military identify overwhelmingly as Republican, conservative or “independent”, not as Democrat or leftist.
This is probably why the latest social justice recruitment commercials by the Army are getting ratioed into oblivion by soldiers and the public alike. In response the Army YouTube page has shut down comments. Last I checked, the new LGBTQ and feminist inspired “Emma: The Calling” Army video had only 700 up-votes and over 33,000 down-votes. This is an epic fail. Where are all the hardcore social justice warriors just itching to join the military and “get some”? They don’t exist. The establishment is trying to appeal to a phantom demographic.
The fact is, the only place you will find a preponderance of woke lunatics in the military is among the brass and sometimes in the officer corps; the leadership within the pentagon has been carefully groomed to create a leftist/globalist consolidation, and this has been going on for decades. Generals are for the most part politicians, not warriors (SPECIAL NOTE: Never trust retired generals or retired CIA agents, even if they claim to be on the side of liberty).
While military leadership might go woke, this does not mean the rest of the military will, nor does it mean that troops will follow unconstitutional orders from such people.
They’re also the only big city that doesn’t use body cameras for police. Probably because they’d exonerate police and help convict their precious pet antifa rioters, and the powers that be in Portland don’t want that…
In a world in which massive violations of human rights have, tragically, become the norm, why has the hard left focused on one of the least compelling of those causes — namely, the Palestinians? Where is the concern for the Kurds, the Chechens, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans? There are no campus demonstrations on their behalf, no expressions of concern by “the Squad” in Congress, no United Nations resolutions, no recurring op-eds in The New York Times, and no claims that the nations that oppress these groups have no right to exist.
On the merits and demerits of their claims, the Palestinians have the weakest case. They have been offered statehood and independence on numerous occasions: in 1938, 1948, 1967, 2000-2001 and 2008. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Yet, even now, Palestinian leaders refuse to sit down and negotiate a reasonable two-state solution. As the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once aptly put it, the Palestinian leadership never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Nor are history and morality on their side. The Palestinian leadership allied itself with Nazism and Hitler in the 1940s, with Egyptian tyranny and antisemitism in the 1950s, and with international terrorism from the 1960s forward.
The usual history snipped.
The Palestinian people have suffered more from the ill-advised decisions of their leaders than from the actions of Israel.
Back to the present: Hamas commits a double war crime every time it fires a lethal rocket at Israeli civilians from areas populated by its civilians, who they use as human shields. Israel responds proportionally in self-defense, as President Biden has emphasized. The Israel Defense Forces go to extraordinary lengths to try to minimize civilian casualties among Palestinians, despite Hamas’ policy of using civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and high-rise buildings — to store, fire and plan their unlawful rockets and incendiary devices. Yet the hard left blames Israel alone, and many on the center-left create a moral equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas.
Why? The answer is clear and can be summarized in one word: Jews.
The enemy of the Kurds, the Tibetans, the Uyghurs and the Chechens are not — unfortunately for them — the Jews. Hence, there is little concern for their plight. If the perceived enemy of the Palestinians were not the Jews, there would be little concern for their plight as well. This was proved by the relative silence that greeted the massacre of Palestinians by Jordan during “Black September” in 1970, or the killings of Palestinian Authority leaders in Gaza during the Hamas takeover in 2007. There has been relative silence, too, about the more than 4,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians— killed by Syria during that country’s current civil war. It is only when Jews or their nation are perceived to be oppressing Palestinians that the left seems to care about them.
Arizona’s Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema isn’t having any of it:
The Pew study highlights a more interesting recent development among Orthodox Jews. They increasingly consider themselves—and are considered by others—to be separate within the Jewish community. Only 9 percent of Orthodox Jews feel “a lot” in common with Reform Jews, and a similar percentage of Reform Jews say the same about the Orthodox. In fact, both groups report feeling more in common with Jews in Israel than with their fellow citizens of the same religion but different denominations.
Like their secular counterparts, Orthodox Jews are clustered in the Northeast, but they differ in having lower levels of educational attainment. About 60 percent of Jews overall are college graduates, almost double the rate of the American population as a whole, but only 37 percent of Orthodox Jews have college degrees. And even though these religious Jews are largely urban and suburban, they vote like rural religious voters. As Alper and Cooperman wrote, “among Orthodox Jews, three-quarters say they are Republican or lean that way. And that percentage has been trending up.”
This split raises questions about the size of the various communities. The non-religious part of the Jewish community has long been and remains larger than the Orthodox component. Only 9 percent of American Jewish adults identify as Orthodox. They are, like the rest of the Jewish community, grouped largely in blue states. Only eight states have more than 200,000 Jews: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. All of these but Florida voted Democratic in the last presidential election, and six of the eight—all but Florida and Pennsylvania—have voted Democratic in every presidential election this century. However, adding in the seven states with Jewish populations in the range of 100,000-200,000 yields a decidedly more purple cohort: Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. The Jewish vote may be small, but it matters.
The Pew study also makes it clear that the Jewish community is changing. Eleven percent of Jews under 30 were Orthodox in 2013—largely in line with their percentage among the older set. In the new study, that number rose to 17 percent—a remarkable shift in an eight-year period. At the same time, the older generation has a disproportionately low representation among the Orthodox. Only 3 percent of Jews aged 65 and older identify as Orthodox, and only 1 percent of Jews over 65 belong to the Haredi, or non-Modern Orthodox, community. Given Pew’s other findings on the Orthodox community, including much lower rates of intermarriage (2 percent vs. 47 percent in the non-religious community), and given the fact that Orthodox Jews continue to have more children, it is reasonable to assume that the Orthodox percentage of the Jewish community will grow even more in the future.
Kamala the unpopular. “Her favorability is just at 41%, and her unfavorability stands at 48%. Most problematic: One in 5 Democrats polled deemed her unfavorable, as did nearly 3 in 5 independents.”
“AT&T Strikes $43 Billion Deal With Discovery To Launch New Streaming Giant.” “AT&T’s vast WarnerMedia holdings, which include CNN and HBO, will combine with Discovery’s assets – including Discovery Channel and Animal Planet – to create what management hopes will be a formidable competitor to Netflix and Disney.” Yeah, no. CNN is probably a negative asset at this point. And the price tag sounds a whole lot less impressive. And the price tag sounds a lot less impressive when you realize AT&T paid $85 billion for those assets less than three years ago…
Follow-up: “The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.”
“19-Year Veteran Cop Suspended for Allegedly Running Meth Lab Out of NJ Home.” I think they frown on that even in New Jersey…
Because our garbage ruling class is absolutely shameless, Kamala Harris will be interviewing serial rapist Bill Clinton on “empowering women“:
Vice President Harris is being slammed over her decision to appear with former President Clinton for a Clinton Foundation event focused on empowering women amid the Covid-19 pandemic, given Clinton’s alleged history of sexual abuse.
The Clinton Global Initiative event will take place on Friday and will be hosted by Howard University, of which Harris is an alumni.
A press release promotes it as “a one-on-one conversation” between Harris and Clinton “on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women, and empowering women and girls in the U.S. and around the world.”
It’s amazing that not only is the Clinton Foundation/Global Initiative still out there grifting long after Hillary’s chance to influence public policy has evaporated, but still has the standing to include Harris as part of their grift.
Inviting Bill Clinton to speak on Empowering women…. is like asking Jeffrey Dahmer to host a cooking class.
Regular readers know that Austin has been climbing out of a once in a century winter storm that froze our roads and wrecked our power grid. Right now it’s still 19°F, but it’s supposed to warm up to a balmy 39°F this afternoon…
Could be worse: ERCOT says that their quick thinking to impose rotating blackouts prevented the physical destruction of the Texas Interconnect Grid. That may even be true, but it’s sort of like a teenager saying “Thanks to my quick thinking, I only managed to burn down the garage and not the entire house!”
Passage of this bill this year would lead to job losses and higher use of labor-reducing equipment and technology,” said Sean Kennedy, executive vice president for public affairs for the National Restaurant Association. “Nearly all restaurant operators say they will increase menu prices. But what is clear is that raising prices for consumers will not be enough for restaurants to absorb higher labor costs.”
But for the fact that he’s president — given his track record of having been wrong on every defense and foreign policy issue for almost five decades — it would be easy to ignore his assessment of China. This is a man who said in 2019, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.” He added, “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” Despite the difficulty of being wrong on both occasions Biden managed it.
Focus for a moment on what he said about the conversation with Xi. It is natural that China would be spending billions on transportation given the size of the country and the billions who inhabit it. Whether it is true that China is spending billions on climate change is another matter. It has, for decades, been spending billions on coal-fired electricity generation plants and has only recently made noises about reducing pollution.
But “climate change” is probably the last priority for China while it is spending far greater sums on its military and cyberwar capabilities. Xi was clearly trying to gull Biden into some sort of race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that we could strangle our economy while China doesn’t do the same to its own. China may well be trying to reduce pollution — Beijing is infamous for its barely breathable brown air — but how much it is really doing remains to be seen.
Biden apparently wants to be known as the “climate change president.” If Xi can increase Biden’s desire to make climate change his top priority for legislation and regulation (which seems altogether likely in any event) China will be greatly advantaged by Biden’s concomitant reductions in spending on the U.S. military and intelligence communities.
To say that Biden is soft on China only proves the speaker’s command of the obvious.
What Tenev did not say, or explain, is why his company – which is merely a client-facing front of Citadel, which buys the bulk of Robinhood’s orderflow to use it perfectly legally in any way it sees fit – was so massively undercapitalized that the DTCC required several billion more in collateral to protect Robinhood’s own investors against the company’s predatory ways of seeking to capitalize on the gamification of investing making it nothing more (or less) than a trivial pursuit to millions of GenZ and millennial investors, a point which Michael Burry made so vividly.
The #mainstreetrevolution is a myth. Zero commissions and gamified apps were designed to feed flows to the two most influential WS trading houses. A few HFs got hurt, but if retail is moving toward more trading and away from fundamentals, WS owns that game. #Stonks by design. https://t.co/Y4raF0jiM3
— Cassandra (@michaeljburry) February 9, 2021
Incidentally we know why Tenev did not mention it: it’s because Robinhood’s back office is a shambles of a shoestring operation, one which never anticipated either such a surge in trading not a multi-billion collateral requirement; had Robinhood been a true brokerage instead of pretending to be one, and run merely to open as many retail accounts as it could in the shortest amount of time, thus generating the most profit in the quickest amount of time to allow its sponsors a quick and profitable exit, it would actually have been on top of this.
SpaceX wants to bring fast satellite broadband internet to the world — and in particular, to internet users in far-flung, rural locations, where download speeds are low and prices are high.
One of the first places in America to get SpaceX Starlink service was Alaska, the state with the lowest population density in the country — just one person per square mile. The company next extended service into Canada (population density: three people per square mile), followed last month by service in the UK — a big jump in concentration, with 650 people per square mile. (Even in the UK, there are plenty of isolated locations where internet service is expensive, slow — or both).
SpaceX’s globe-spanning satellite constellation should be capable of providing 100 megabit-per-second internet service to anywhere by the end of this year. You can expect that a lot of countries, no matter how urbanized they are (or not), will be lining up to sign up for Starlink service. And the more countries Starlink signs up as customers, the better the prospects for the SpaceX subsidiary’s promised IPO.
One country that most definitely does not want Starlink, however, is Russia.
Snip.
As Ars points out, “Russia is planning its own satellite Internet constellation, known as ‘Sphere.'” And in contrast to SpaceX’s Starlink, which is a privately funded and privately built communications system, the 600-satellite Sphere constellation will be a project built and run by the Russian state under the aegis of its Roscosmos space agency. And that could be a problem.
Sphere, you see, is rumored to cost $20 billion to build, may not begin launching until 2024, and won’t be completed before 2030.
Those numbers alone tell you Sphere will never be built, Starlink or no Starlink. Russia is a profoundly broke and profoundly broken country. Sphere is just the sort of prestige project Putin loves to announce to much fanfare, national greatness vaporware that either never gets built or else creeps out into the real world years (or even decades) late and in much-reduced form, like only ordering 100 T-14 Armata tanks.
Iranian fuel tanker convoy to Afghanistan goes boom.
The media want you to know that it’s Trump’s fault they couldn’t investigate such trivial scandals as Lincoln Project pedophiles, because how would they have time when Orange Man Bad?
Speaking of the Lincoln Project, founder Rick Wilson managed to pay off his mortgage early just as the John Weaver pedophilia scandal was breaking. How fortuitous!
Back in The Before Time, The Long Long Ago, newspapers actually defended free speech.
Back in 1977, the New York Times maintained that as long as Nazis did not engage in any illegality, they were “entitled” to the protection of the law, and then put the onus of maintaining peace on the Skokie residents:
The argument that they will provoke violence simply by appearing on the streets of Skokie only emphasizes the obligation of the police to keep the peace—and gives an opportunity the people of Skokie to demonstrate their respect for the law.
These days, the Times board will chase you out of the building for allowing anyone to voice an opinion that chafes against the brittle sensitivities of its writers. The paper employs full-time speech monitors to vet wrongthink.
The cancel mob comes for Baen Books. Book editors and writers kindly tell them to get stuffed.
Special for Black History Month:
Here are the names of the 200+ slaves owned by Kamala Harris’ ancestor Hamilton Brown in Jamaica in 1817. One of the largest planters in Jamaica, Brown now has a town named after him, Brown’s Town pic.twitter.com/6QnBpEQyez
Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg told employees they need to “inflict pain” on Apple because Apple won’t let Facebook steal every single bit of personal data from Apple devices.
“Bill Gates Bankrolling Educational Organization That Says Math is Racist.” “A conglomerate of 25 educational organizations called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction asserts that asking students to find the correct answer is an ‘inherently racist practice.’ The organization’s website lists the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its only donor.” How many fingers, Winston?
A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical made from fossil fuels onto a wind turbine made with fossils fuels during an ice storm is awesome. pic.twitter.com/3HInc2qKb9
“Man Asks That You Respect His Preferred Adjectives.” “‘Here are the adjectives I identify with,’ Becker put on social media. ‘Cool, witty, handsome, innovative, fun.’ Please use one of these adjectives when describing me. It distresses me when people use adjectives I don’t identify as,’ Becker later explained. ‘Like “creepy,” “weird,” or “off-putting.” That’s basically denying my existence and trying to genocide me.'”
Federal investigators obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against one of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business associates, suggesting that the executive was suspected of acting as a covert agent of a foreign government.
Prosecutors revealed the existence of at least one FISA warrant against Chi Ping Patrick Ho, known as Patrick Ho, in a Feb. 8, 2018 court filing obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Ho was charged on Dec. 18, 2017 with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering related to CEFC China Energy contracts in Uganda and Chad. Ho had been an executive at the multi-billion dollar Chinese energy company prior to his arrest.
Hunter Biden was part of a business consortium that sought a partnership with CEFC in May 2017. A Senate report released last month said that an affiliate of CEFC wired $5 million to Biden’s law firm from August 2017 through August 2018.
In addition to his partnership with CEFC, Hunter Biden also represented Ho during his legal battle.
According to a report from The New Yorker last year, CEFC’s chairman, Ye Jianming, raised concerns with Biden in summer 2017 about a possible investigation into Ho.
“Hunter Biden’s business group shopped Joe Biden’s influence in Colombia in an investment pitch to Chinese energy firm.” Who had Colombia on their Hunter Biden Corruption Index Bingo card?
In 2017, Hunter Biden and a group of business partners seeking a $10 million investment deal with a Chinese energy firm touted Joe Biden’s friendly relations with Colombia’s president in their sales proposal, which suggested a series of oil investments in the South American country, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Hunter Biden and four other businessmen, including his uncle James Biden, highlighted the former vice president’s positive relationship with Juan Manuel Santos in a May 15, 2017 investment outline for CEFC China Energy, a Chinese energy conglomerate.
The Biden consortium, which would be called SinoHawk, sought a $10 million seed investment from CEFC China Energy, with a goal of eventually securing billions of dollars in investments in the U.S. and around the world.
The report is part of a trove of records held by Tony Bobulinski, a California-based businessman who was part of the consortium with Hunter Biden, James Biden, and two other partners.
Undisputed is the fact that Hunter and other members of the Biden family have been involved in numerous complex, and sometimes controversial, multi-national, multi-million dollar deals involving Ukraine, Russia, China, Luxembourg, and the UK. Numerous observers have stated they believe the Bidens’ main qualification to conduct such business is simply that they are connected to a powerful political figure who has influence over policies and practices that can impact the businesses: Joe Biden.
Summary of crooked dealings snipped.
Still, there’s one nagging point that I haven’t seen considered. It’s the nature of the Biden family business ventures juxtaposed against Joe Biden’s position on oil and fossil fuels.
Biden has repeatedly taken strong positions against fossil fuels— oil, coal and natural gas. He has made it clear he wants to “transition” away from them in the U.S. But as he’s advanced this position, his family members have been making money on deals that expand fossil fuel companies and ventures in foreign countries.
For example, While Hunter Biden was getting himself a job on the board of Ukraine’s largest energy company, Burisma; Vice President Joe Biden was coincidentally put in charge of Ukraine policy. The same day the White House announced the vice president would handle Ukraine policy and make a visit there the following week, Hunter allegedly wrote to a business partner, “This could be the break we have been waiting for.” They inked a highly-compensated gig with Burisma in Ukraine.
During Joe Biden’s first visit to the country in his new position just days later, he spoke of how Ukraine could make the right decisions and become “energy independent”— less reliant on other countries and more secure from a national security standpoint. Energy independence in this context implied good things for Ukrainian fossil fuel companies like Burisma to which Hunter was hitched. There was no bigger oil and gas company in Ukraine than Burisma.
The point is, while Joe Biden has been pushing to end US the oil industry, his family has been cutting billion dollars in deals, profiting off of the oil industry in competing countries such as Ukraine and China. In fact, eliminating fossil fuel in the US while supporting it in other nations could be seen as putting America at a competitive and national security disadvantage.
3. Biden, on the other hand, said a bunch of dumb things. He repeated a plagiarized phrase about there being no blue states or red states, only United States—and then went on to urinate on red states anyway. He admitted under his presidency, a long, dark winter was ahead. His best zinger of the night—linking Trump to the Proud Boys (which we already learned was Iranian disinformation from the start)—was utterly muffed when he called them the Poor Boys. This provoked laughter as many Americans googled to figure out what sandwiches had to do with Trump. We could go on an on, but there were a number of stumbles by Biden that showed why Obama never gave him much to do.
4. Biden said nothing good. Yeah, he had a pretty good riff on a bonehead question about Black Americans being pulled over, but Trump jujitsued that by twisting the question from sounding like “why are Blacks so often mistaken to be criminals” to “here’s what Black Americans have achieved over the last four years.” Everything else was either rehearsed or repeated talking points and a lot of bluster and blather that, at best, sounded like Trump’s vain boasting. And from what we’re reading today, many voters were put off by his blatant fear mongering about everyone dying from COVID.
So you might be mistaken into thinking that this was the end of it. And for Trump, it pretty much was. He was wrapping up, for the most part, when the moderator (who wasn’t bad, really—she asked a lot uncomfortable questions of both candidates) asked Trump why so many Black Americans were suffering living near oil fields. Instead of taking the bait, Trump said that these Americans were living there because they were working there, under his economy. A nice answer, and Trump knew it. He pretty much started putting his coat on and turning off the lights when Biden was asked to respond.
And did Biden respond. He announced that he would seek to end the oil industry. Trump wheeled around and asked him to repeat that. Biden did, and announced he would—as president—end America’s use of fossil fuels. Trump was handed gold, and he made sure Americans recognized this as big news, especially folks living in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Oklahoma.
Biden had a definite look of panic on his face as Trump named those states. Even he realized he just gave Trump 83 electoral votes, mumbling something about “on public lands” and “subsidies,” but Trump drowned out his babbling by reminding voters in those states what Biden just announced. There would be no walking that back, even with the media’s certain (and ultimately proven) covering for him on Friday. It was said, and at this point, if polls in other states stay where they are, those 83 votes will put Trump over.
Bear in mind, this doesn’t affect just four states. Shutting down oil and fossil fuels in this country will put nearly one million Americans out of their current jobs, in the form of drilling, mining, trucking, piping, distribution, distillation, manufacture, plasticization, and more. The Depression here will crush world markets that depend on us. Did Biden mean for all this? Probably not, but he reassured America that Biden, after 47 years in government, has literally no understanding of how the economy works.
Want to view Joe Biden’s entire Pennsylvania speech? Me neither, but here it is. Even includes time markers for the bloopers. But it’s weird to hear a guy both yelling and suffering from a case of mush-mouth at the same time.
Early voting shows Republicans are waiting in line to vote. The pollsters say a far higher percentage of Republicans support President Trump than in 2016. If this is true then how can he be behind by 17 points in Wisconsin as ABC claimed its poll said?
Republican registrations are up.
People didn’t register in 2020 to vote against President Trump.
Thomson was right when he wrote, “In 2020, we have the most stable race in decades.”
Everyone decided months ago whether they will vote for President Trump. This election is a referendum on him, plain and simple.
The election is about enthusiasm. The election is about getting your people to vote. President Trump has held huge rallies night after night for weeks.
Biden draws flies to his rare rallies. But they are socially distanced flies. His rallies are short made-for-TV events designed to let TV outlets pretend to be fair. They show the best of his short presentation, then show the worst moment in an hourlong speech by President Trump.
The Republican Party has an army of 2 million volunteers to get out the vote.
Democrats have a phone bank.
The pollsters should have adjusted to the new reality.
Whether a person wants President Trump or Biden is nice to know.
But what counts are the actual votes. A 10-point gap in enthusiasm trumps a 7-point lead in the polls. When the enthusiasm gap became obvious this summer, pollsters should have adjusted. They didn’t.
And really they learned nothing from 2016. They view it as an anomaly, and cling to the false notion that they got the national vote right.
Still more poll warning signs for Biden: 41% in Iowa:
I’ve been covering American politics for a long time and I can’t remember a number that so dramatically altered the political community’s perception of a presidential campaign as that number did, last night, at 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time.
The source of the number was The Iowa Poll, which has been the gold standard for statewide polling in the United States for decades. The number itself was the percentage of likely voters in Iowa supporting Joe Biden’s candidacy for president.
President Trump’s number was 48%, which put him ahead in the “horse race” by 7 percentage points. There was nothing really remarkable about that, in context. Mr. Trump won the state in 2016 by (roughly) nine percentage points.
What was remarkable was Biden’s 41%. What made it doubly disconcerting was the way The Des Moines Register (accurately) described the poll results:
“Republican President Donald Trump has taken over the lead in Iowa as Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden has faded…”
Faded! Could there be a more terrible word in the last week of a presidential campaign? Off the record, Democratic elected officials and campaign operatives and financial backers have been saying throughout the campaign that their biggest fear regarding the eventual outcome was Biden himself. They saw him as an especially weak candidate and worried that he wasn’t “a closer;” even if he was ahead going into the last week, victory could slip from his grasp.
Up until last night, Democratic elected officials and political operatives saw the presidential race standing at somewhere between a narrow Biden win and a “blue wave.” In their “blue wave” scenario, the Democrats would win both the presidency and a Senate majority and the Trump-McConnell nightmare would finally come to an end.
That was the other piece of bad news in last night’s Iowa Poll release. It showed that Republican Sen. Joni Ernst had pulled ahead of her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield. Her lead (46%-to-42%) was within the margin of error, but it wasn’t Ms. Ernst’s lead that Democrats were focused on. It was the “faded” support for Ms. Greenfield, which almost exactly tracked the “faded” support for Joe Biden.
For Democrats, last night’s Iowa Poll was the worst possible news at the worst possible moment. It foretold close results in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It undermined the Biden campaign’s momentum and morale. And it fracked Democrats’ self-confidence.
Senior officials on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign are increasingly worried about insufficient Black and Latino voter turnout in key states like Florida and Pennsylvania with only four days until the election, according to people familiar with the matter.
Despite record early-vote turnout around the country, there are warning signs for Biden. In Arizona, two-thirds of Latino registered voters have not yet cast a ballot. In Florida, half of Latino and Black registered voters have not yet voted but more than half of White voters have cast ballots, according to data from Catalist, a Democratic data firm. In Pennsylvania, nearly 75% of registered Black voters have not yet voted, the data shows.
The firm’s analysis of early vote numbers also show a surge of non-college educated White voters, who largely back President Donald Trump, compared to voters of color, who overwhelmingly support Biden.
The situation is particularly stark in Florida where Republicans currently have a 9.4% turnout advantage in Miami-Dade County, a place where analysts say Biden will need a significant margin of victory to carry the state.
Jim Geraghty on which states to watch and why. Pennsylvania (especially Bucks County), Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.
Heaven knows Biden has a long history of making gaffes. And maybe some of his bungling can be attributed to him just being a natural-born blooper machine. But all of it? Unlikely. The volume of slip-ups is too much.
Just as disturbing as the constant misstatements are his appearances in public and on video outside of the debates. He looks to be in a hard decline. His facial expressions are dull and empty. He seems to drift, get lost in his thoughts. Or simply has no thoughts and blanks out. He forgets where he is. Staffers feed him words when he can’t come up with them.
People who have raised at least $100,000 for the Biden campaign. Notable names (excluding Democratic senators, reps and governors) include Lisa Blue Baron, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, megalawyer Christopher Boies, Pete Buttigieg, Vanessa Getty, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and investment guru Andrew Tobias.
Trump was big on the national stage long before he was president. Why would he go away after the election is over? He’ll still have tens of millions of (probably angry) followers, deep pockets and a huge megaphone.
There has already been some talk of Trump starting his own television network to rival Fox News, and/or his own social media platform — the latter made more plausible by the heavy censorious hands of those running Twitter and Facebook — and I suspect that Trump would regard a 2020 loss as a setback, not a defeat. Grover Cleveland came back to win a second term after losing the White House, Trump might reason. Why not me? He’ll probably hold campaign-style rallies around the country starting right after the election.
And the deep toxicity of national politics, which grew worse after the 2016 election but which has been brewing at least since the turn of the millennium, is not going to go away. In fact, a lot of what we’re hearing from Biden supporters suggests that it will get worse under a Biden administration.
Democrats are already calling for a Biden administration to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices until Democrats have a majority, to pack the Senate by admitting Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states, and even to establish a “truth and reconciliation commission” in which Republicans will be dragged in front of the public and forced to confess the error of their ways. And, of course, abolishing the Electoral College. None of that is normal.
Man attends Trump rally, is shocked to find happy people:
It is only “baffling” if one first reduces conservatives to pro-life freedom-lovers and then decides human life and freedom are dispensable. Freedom and life, however, are not abstract, and they are not simply a means to accomplish earthly goals or gain temporal wealth. Freedom and life are part of our Imago Dei. They are gifts from God that we are to steward, and we use them in myriad ways to advance God’s kingdom.
So is it “baffling” that a Christian would think God-given sex distinctions are important? Is it baffling that a believer would want to protect his family against the racially charged attacks of a violent mob? Is it baffling that a Christian would desire that his children learn truth, rather than government-sanctioned doctrine — not walking in the counsel of the ungodly? It is baffling that a Christian would desire for men to keep the hard-earned fruits of their labor, giving charitably to the poor and needy? Is it baffling that a believer would value the biblical family structure over the state? Of course, it’s not.
Furthermore, if Piper believes this immoral gangrene that spreads throughout our country is a result of one unregenerate man instead of the result of the wickedness in the hearts of every sinful citizen, he is a fool.
Biden goes full tranny pander, demanding religions bow to to Democratic Party’s transgender mandates. “Religion should not be used as a license to discriminate.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Kamala Harris has a habit of launching into peals of laughter when she is asked questions, even serious ones. It’s likely a nervous tic, and it’s possible that she doesn’t even realize that she does it.
In the world of gambling, this is called a tell. An unconscious and often uncontrollable behavior that serves as a clue to others that a player is bluffing or lying.
Harris was interviewed on 60 Minutes this weekend, and when she was asked if her view on certain issues was progressive or socialist, she launched into a laugh.
In 2016, Trump lost Minnesota by about 45,000 votes. This year, he is clearly making an attempt to close the gap there and pull off a win that would sting Democrats for years to come.
The left didn’t do itself any favors by burning down Minneapolis this summer, and Trump was also helped by gaining the endorsements of multiple mayors in the state’s ‘Iron Range’ region
Snip.
Trump’s campaign has booked more than $1.2 million in TV advertising in Minnesota in the final week of the campaign—more than it spent there in the preceding three weeks combined, according to Advertising Analytics, which tracks campaigns’ ad spending. Vice President Mike Pence held a rally in northern Minnesota on Monday, the latest in a series of visits to the state by Trump and top surrogates. Overall, the Trump campaign has deployed 60 staffers in Minnesota, a level of Republican intensity surpassing that of any race in memory, both parties say.
“Like many in our region, we have voted for Democrats over many decades. We have watched as our constituents’ jobs left not only the Iron Range, but our country. By putting tariffs on our products and supporting bad trade deals, politicians like Joe Biden did nothing to help the working class. We lost thousands of jobs, and generations of young people have left the Iron Range in order to provide for their families with good-paying jobs elsewhere. Today, we don’t recognize the Democratic Party. It has been moved so far to the left it can no longer claim to be advocates of the working class. The hard-working Minnesotans that built their lives and supported their families here on the Range have been abandoned by radical Democrats. We didn’t choose to leave the Democratic Party, the party left us,” the letter, signed by Virginia Mayor Larry Cuffe, Chisholm Mayor John Champa, Ely Mayor Chuck Novak, Two Harbors Mayor Chris Swanson, Eveleth Mayor Robert Vlaisavljevich and Babbitt Mayor Andrea Zupancich, states.
"Joe Biden and I are about to work to get rid of that tax cut," Kamala Harris tells Hispanic Americans. pic.twitter.com/BT9sTqsDfK
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) October 30, 2020
“Ex-husband of Joe Biden’s wife claim two had an affair that split marriage.” He claims both worked on Joe Biden’s campaign in 1972. Really, would it shock anyone to find yet another chapter of Joe Biden’s autobiography was fiction?
Hunter Biden revelations continue to explode, Kazakhstan joins China and Ukraine in the Biden Payola Sweepstakes, inside Biden’s Malarkey Factory, and the revolving door between social media giants and Team Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Just two more BidenWatchs until election day!
If you haven’t been following last week’s Hunter Biden revelations, click here and here.
Hunter Biden is facing fresh questions over business dealing in yet another nation — Kazakhstan.
Between 2012 and 2014 — when his father Joe Biden served as Vice President — Hunter Biden worked as a go-between to Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakh oligarch with close ties to the country’s longtime kleptocratic leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, The Daily Mail reported.
The British tabloid said they obtained emails from “anti-corruption campaigners” in Kazakhstan showing Hunter making contact with Rakishev and attempting to facilitate investment for his cash in New York, Washington DC and a Nevada mining company.
Through his connections, emails show Hunter Biden successfully engineered a $1 million investment from Rakishev to filmmaker Alexandra Forbes Kerry — the daughter of ex-Sen. and former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, the report said.
Hunter Biden also traveled to the country’s capital of Astana for business talks.
Rakishev, however, repeatedly ran into problems finding western business partners due to the murky origins of his wealth. The respected International Finance Corp. pulled out a planned deal with him over “liabilities” stemming from his connections to the country’s rulers.
As in other nations like Ukraine and China where Hunter plied his trade, Joe Biden may not have been far behind. The Mail published a photo they obtained from the “Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery” showing Hunter Biden with his beaming father alongside Rakishev.
Has another Hunter Biden laptop been seized in Ukraine? “A Ukrainian lawmaker has claimed a second laptop belonging to Hunter Biden’s business contacts in the country has been seized by law enforcement there. Andrii Derkach posted to Facebook on Friday to say there is a ‘second laptop’ involving evidence of corruption and connected to the Bidens.” As with all foreign sources, some caution is probably in order.
“Has the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop material for ten months?”
A whistleblower says that many months ago, he provided the FBI contents of a laptop computer once used by Hunter Biden.
That’s according to a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray sent today by Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). The letter states that an unnamed whistleblower contacted Sen. Johnson’s committee on September 24, a day after the committee released its investigation into alleged Biden conflicts of interest.
The whistleblower reported he had turned over the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop December 9, 2019 in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by the FBI from the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. Delaware is the Bidens’ home state.
In the letter today, Sen. Johnson says that he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the FBI about facts alleged by the whistleblower but the FBI stonewalled. That despite the fact that Johnson says several of their questions were not related to confidential information regarding “the possible existence of an ongoing grand jury investigation.”
More from Rudy Giuliani on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Including the fact that Biden’s lawyer tried to get the laptop back after the story broke. Plus: “It’s got him [Hunter Biden] there with crack pipes, it’s got him there doing an imitation of Anthony Weiner about 50 times.” Also:
He went on to say that there would be more communications that would describe how Joe Biden was being compensated.
“In fact, he was getting a large portion of this money,” Giuliani said, adding that the information would explain how Joe Biden, who has never made that much money as a politician, “has two or three luxurious homes.”
“Because he didn’t pay for anything, Hunter did,” he explained.
“This is a long term bribery scheme that started low level in Delaware with his brother James—selling his office,” Giuliani told Crowder.
“When they got to the big time, they shook down Iraq for … I think about 500 million, Ukraine for about 20 [million], China—I don’t know—30, 40 million?” he said.
Giuliani added that he almost forgot Russia. “The 3.5 million from the mayor’s wife,” who he noted is a good friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “That woman is a close ally of Putin,” Giuliani said, pointing out the irony of the president being accused of colluding with Russia, when “Biden actually got paid by Russia!”
Here’s a New York Times piece that attempts to debunk the Hunter Biden story by taking every Team Biden pronouncement at face value, but which nonetheless provides an awful lot of damning context for his China dealings:
The $1.5 billion figure to which Mr. Trump referred on Thursday appears to be the amount of money that a Shanghai-based private-equity company, BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Co., aimed to raise in 2014. The company, which says its biggest shareholder is the state-controlled Bank of China, pools money and invests in companies, many of which are also state owned.
Hunter Biden has been a member of the board of BHR since it was formed in late 2013. In October 2017, after his father had left the vice presidency, he bought 10 percent of the firm, investing the equivalent of $420,000.
But his lawyer, George Mesires, said on Thursday that he has never been paid for his role on the board, and has not profited financially since he began as a part-owner.
“He has not been compensated for being on the board of directors, nor has he received any return on his investment to date,” Mr. Mesires said. Although BHR has been involved in a number of business deals, he said, “there have been no distributions to the shareholders since Hunter has been an equity owner.”
Translation: “Sure, he’s part owner of a company with several Communist Chinese officials, but you have top trust us when we say he hasn’t made any money off the deal!”
With his latest attacks on the Bidens, Mr. Trump is “desperately clutching for conspiracy theories that have been debunked and dismissed by independent, credible news organizations,” Kate Bedingfield, Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement.
Still, the fact that Chinese state-owned firms were interested in linking arms with Hunter Biden while his father was vice president fits a long pattern of companies owned by or closely tied to foreign governments courting the families of high-ranking American officials. In 2002, for example, when George W. Bush was president, his brother Neil won a $400,000 consulting contract to advise a Chinese semiconductor company co-founded by the son of the man who was then China’s president.
“Almost any senior name that I start researching, I run into practices like this. It is extraordinarily widespread,” Sarah Chayes, the author of the book “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,” said in an interview on National Public Radio on Thursday. “How did we all convince ourselves that this isn’t corrupt?”
Asked if there was any conflict of interest, Mr. Mesires, said: “Hunter has been repeatedly clear on this point. Hunter has not and does not discuss his business interests with his father.”
A spokesman for the Biden campaign also said that the former vice president never discussed the China venture with his son.
The only known connection between the elder Mr. Biden and BHR came in early December 2013 in Beijing. Mr. Biden, who had traveled to China on official business as vice president, met and shook hands with his son’s business associate, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the hotel where the American delegation was staying, according to an account in The New Yorker. The magazine said Hunter Biden had arranged the encounter with Mr. Li, who was headed for a post as BHR’s chief executive.
Hunter Biden went along to Beijing, too, because his young daughter had been invited and needed to be chaperoned, according to Mr. Mesires. He said that his client and Mr. Li met for coffee on the trip but that it was only a social chat. “He conducted no business there,” the lawyer said.
Several days after the trip, BHR won a business license from the Chinese government. Mr. Mesires said that the registration paperwork had already been submitted and that the timing of the approval was purely coincidental. Hunter Biden was not involved in the firm’s registration, and its approval “was not related in any way, shape or form to Hunter’s visit,” he said.
To raise funds, BHR teamed up with some of China’s leading state-owned financial companies, including its biggest indirect shareholder, Bank of China, as well as China Development Bank and the country’s social security fund, according BHR’s website. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014 that the firm was seeking to raise $1.5 billion.
That figure was then cited by Peter Schweizer, a conservative author, in a 2018 book detailing the China business ties of some prominent American political families. Mr. Schweizer was also the author of the 2015 book “Clinton Cash.”
Until October 2017, well after his father had stepped down from the vice presidency, Hunter Biden had no equity stake in BHR, Mr. Mesires said. He said Mr. Biden bought a stake in the firm in the name of a company named Skaneateles L.L.C. for the equivalent of about $420,000. That gave him about 10 percent of the company’s registered capital of 30 million renminbi, China’s currency. Skaneateles is the New York hometown of Hunter Biden’s mother, who died in 1972.
BHR has invested in a number of state-owned Chinese companies, including a subsidiary of the oil refiner Sinopec and China General Nuclear Power Group. The business focus of some of them is at odds with American policy.
For example, the company invested in Face++, a division of the Chinese company Megvii, which specializes in facial recognition technology that is promoted for use by China’s police, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. BHR also invested alongside AVIC, a major state-owned aerospace and defense company that builds fighter jets for the Chinese military.
“Nothing to see here, folks! But that Ukrainian phonecall was an impeachable offense!”
“In 2015, Hunter Biden’s Bohai Harvest joined forces with Chinese military contractor AVIC to buy American parts manufacturer Henniges,” Schweizer explains in the documentary. Henniges produces dual-use technology, which can be used for commercial and military purposes. The deal required Obama administration approval, and the Obama administration did approve it.
AVIC, a company notorious for stealing U.S. military technology, bought 51 percent of Henniges while Bohai Harvest bought the other 49 percent.
2. Military surveillance tech used on the Uyghurs
“Hunter’s firm, Bohai Harvest, also invested in military surveillance technology that the Chinese government would use to monitor and control the population in their own country,” Schweizer says.
The company, FACE++, developed technology the Chinese Communist Party used to identify potential terrorists, which helped result in the detention of over 1 million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
Interestingly, nothing comes up when using “Hunter Biden cocaine ass” as the Twitter image search terms, but do come up if you remove “ass.” So: The usual twitter incompetence extends to their censorship as well…
Testy:
I asked Joe Biden: What is your response to the NYPost story about your son, sir?
He called it a “smear campaign” and then went after me. “I know you’d ask it. I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.” pic.twitter.com/Eo6VD4TqxD
More of that all-in-the-family Biden corruption: “Biden’s son-in-law advises campaign on pandemic while investing in Covid-19 startups.” That’s Howard Krein for those of you playing along on the home game…
It’s no secret the totalitarian governments of China and Iran favor Joe Biden in the presidential election.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would like nothing more than to go back to the status quo ante, the pre-Trump world when American politicians convinced themselves (or pretended to) China would turn democratic if we gave them favorable trade terms and shut up about their monstrous repressive policies, including the hundreds of thousands—or is it millions—languishing in “reeducation” camps while the rest of their population becomes subject to the pervasive Orwellian surveillance of the “social credit“ system.
Then there’s the little matter of the as yet still mysterious provenance of the novel coronavirus, appropriately called the CCP virus hereabouts, that has wreaked such havoc across the globe. When we will know the truth about what really happened in the Wuhan virology lab? Would a Biden administration even want to know?
And, yes, as most of us realize, there’s considerably more, but it was all okay in the view of Democrats like Biden and Sen. Dianne Feinstein—she of the Chinese chauffeur who, mirabile dictu, was suddenly exposed as a spy after twenty years of service to her—as long as there was money to be made.
And there was, a lot, as Hunter Biden, not to mention Feinstein’s husband and Michael Bloomberg, can attest.
Hunter’s father had to revise his initial praise of China, pooh-poohing the idea they might be an enemy, when things started to get a little obvious and handlers whispered in his ear this was not exactly the road to the White House.
So it’s hard to feel reassured about how Joe would behave toward the communist regime once in office. There’s a great deal more reason, actual evidence of deals, to believe the Chinese have “special leverage” with Biden than there ever was that the Russians had something on Trump.
And politicians like Biden and Feinstein are far from alone in their fealty to Beijing. They have plenty of support among American progressives. As is well known, many of our universities, from Harvard on down, have been bribed with huge sums by the CCP to regard them favorably, even have had spies on the faculty, with Confucius Institutes, essentially communist propaganda arms, installed on many campuses.
Would a President Biden fight this network of corruption that actually justifies and teaches totalitarianism to our youth? Does he even think or know about it?
We know Trump would because he already has. He does it.
You know that whole “Biden Landslide” narrative the media is trying to sell? You shouldn’t be buying.
Early voting data in battleground states shows Trump outpacing national polls giving Biden an edge
The Republican Party is keeping pace in mail-in and early voting in three key swing states despite polls showing early voting should clearly favor Joe Biden.
Data out of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio indicates that registered Republicans are returning ballots at about the same rate as registered Democrats in the battleground states.
In Michigan as of Wednesday, just over 1 million ballots have been returned, 40% from registered Democrats, with the same from registered Republicans. In Wisconsin, 40% of the 711,855 returned ballots have been from Democrats, while 38% have come from Republicans. The GOP actually leads in Ohio, with 45% of 475,259 early ballot returns coming from Republicans, compared to 43% from registered Democrats. The preliminary data matches up with the requests by party affiliation for mail-in ballots.
The data contradicts national polls showing Biden supporters overwhelmingly plan to vote by mail or early in person. According to a Pew Research poll released Friday, 55% of voters who plan to cast their ballot in person before Election Day support Biden, compared to 40% who support President Trump.
For a few weeks now, there has been a massive divide between what the polls say and what you can see happening on the ground. Every poll shows Biden leading, yet public support for Trump remains huge and enthusiastic.
One other thing that’s not showing up in the polls and that’s favoring Trump is voter registration.
Note that this is net new fraud, on top of whatever was done in 2016. And this is the best case scenario – there’s no margin of error at all for Team Biden here, and so it really needs to be 500,000.
Plus that many again to keep Trump from flipping Blue states.
To talk about a Biden-Harris administration let’s first talk about the Obama-Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch administration.
Back in 2015 and 2016, when Holder and Lynch were President Obama’s Attorney Generals, my frack company was beset with an IRS audit, an International Fuel Tax (“IFTA”) audit and a Department of Labor investigation. Not to be excluded, I was also personally audited by the IRS. Fortunately, me and my company cleared the IRS audits without penalty (other than paying our accountant). The Department of Labor audit got us for something less than $250, based on some arcane back of the book calculation on arbitrarily given bonuses. But the IFTA audit did some damage with a $40,000 paperwork related fine even though all our taxes were paid at the pump. All three agencies and all four audits were federal, and all came at roughly the same time. When I asked the Department of Labor attorney how she even found our little basement office, she kept mum.
There was no point in her answering – we both knew why she was there.
Her 18,000-employee strong department, like the IRS and IFTA, had been weaponized to undermine the oil and gas industry. AGs Holder and Lynch, likely with President Obama’s blessing, were picking and choosing and me and my industry got picked.
Snip.
Now, we have Vice President Biden saying he supports fracking when he swings through natural gas rich Pennsylvania, but we all know that is just politicking. His previous anti-fracking statements, all of them inconveniently caught on imperishable video tape, suggest some double speak here.
So where does Joe Biden truthfully stand on fracking?
That depends on who he’s talking to. In the old days they called it “waffling” and it was a disqualifier. Not so any longer. If there is any sort of pushback, the 2020 method is to simply just deny that you have multiple positions on the same subject. When no one pushes back, why not?
They call Joe a fair-minded moderate, a congenial and thoughtful friend to both sides of an argument. I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. A moderate doesn’t choose a San Francisco prosecutor with an anti-fossil fuel record as a running mate. A moderate also wouldn’t choose socialist New York Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to co-chair his climate task force.
During the recent Harris-Pence debate, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez Tweeted “Fracking is bad, actually”. So, I guess we at least know where she stands, a breath of fresh air given the chicanery of the Biden-Harris oil and gas platform. Now rumors of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as a Biden administration Attorney General are being reported. True or not, it knocks the wind out of the rest of that moderate argument. Remember, Governor Cuomo was the guy who ordered his own state regulators to study the health and safety of fracking. When their study qualified fracking as environmentally safe, Mr. Cuomo outlawed it anyways. So much for open minded moderation, Mr. Biden. These aren’t “across the aisle” sorts of people that Biden’s handlers would want you to believe are open minded to US Energy Policy. Moderates simply don’t choose vehemently anti oil and gas lightning rods as successors, advisors and top cops.
In a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, 59% of respondents didn’t think Joe Biden would serve-out a full four-year term due to health-related issues. That would leave us with Senator Harris as president. And where exactly would that leave us? I would argue, uncertain at best. When President Trump won the 2016 presidential election, the oil and gas industry immediately turned on after a punishing two-year downturn. Oil and gas prices didn’t rise as a result of his victory, but business confidence did. Operators teed up new drills and completions and service companies like mine were immediately called back to work. We finally had an administration that was supportive of extraction rather than vaguely duplicitous about it. Four years later, having a new Commander and Chief who is well known as anti-fracking isn’t going to do much for industry confidence. Investment will dwindle, jobs will be lost and the environment will suffer. Natural gas power plants are the reason for the considerable drop in CO2 emissions in US air over the last decade. Fueling these plants is the gas from fractured horizontal shale. Stop fracking and natural gas stops flowing—right away.
Should a Biden presidency prevail in the upcoming elections, my own experience tells me that our oil and gas industry will be facing regulatory headwinds that will far exceed the blow back I personally faced during President Obama’s time in office.
First, Biden did not merely “support” the 1994 law; he wrote the damned thing, which he has proudly called “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Second, as much as Biden might like to disavow the law’s penalty enhancements now that public opinion on criminal justice has shifted, he was proud of them at the time. Third, the 1994 crime bill is just one piece of legislation in Biden’s long history of supporting mindlessly punitive responses to drugs and crime.
Biden is trying to gloss over a major theme of his political career. “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress—every minor crime bill—has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden,” he bragged in 1993. Now he wants us to believe his agenda was limited to domestic violence, community policing, and gun control.
“Things have changed drastically” since 1994, Biden said last night, noting that “the Black Caucus voted” for the crime bill, and “every black mayor supported it.” In other words, now that black politicians and Democrats generally have rejected the idea that criminal penalties can never be too severe, Biden has shifted with the winds of opinion. But as Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) noted during a Democratic presidential debate last year, that does not mean we should forget Biden’s leading role in the disastrous war on drugs and the draconian criminal justice policies that put more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time.
“The crime bill itself did not have mandatory sentences except for two things,” Biden said. He mentioned the law’s “three strikes and you’re out” provision, which required a life sentence for anyone convicted of a violent crime after committing two other felonies, one of which can be a drug offense. He said he “voted against” that provision, which is not exactly true. While he did express concern that the provision was not focused narrowly enough on serious violent crimes, he voted for it as part of the broader bill.
In any case, Biden did not just go along with the crime bill’s punitive provisions; he crowed about them. Like a crass car salesman hawking a new model with more of everything, he touted “70 additional enhancements of penalties” and “60 new death penalties—brand new—60.” He denounced as “poppycock” the notion, which would later be defensively deployed by Bill Clinton and Biden himself, that “somehow the Republicans tried to make the crime bill tougher.” Biden bragged that he had conferred with “the cops” instead of some namby-pamby “liberal confab” while writing the bill.
As for “what the states did locally,” the law was designed to increase incarceration. It provided $10 billion in subsidies for state prison construction, contingent on passage of “truth in sentencing” laws that limited or abolished parole. “What I was against was giving states more money for prison systems,” Biden said last night. But that is simply not true. As FactCheck.org noted last year, “Biden did support $6 billion in funding for state prison construction, but not the $10 billion that was part of the final bill.”
For all that people bitch about, that crime bill, incarcerating repeat offenders, and the “broken window policing” embracing by many big cities did help bring crime rates down. But the drug war incarcerated millions of users without putting a dent in the drug trade.
Trump first lamented the horrific treatment of George Floyd, calling it “a terrible thing to watch.” He noted Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) proposal, the JUSTICE Act. “He came up with a bill that should have been approved. It was great,” the president noted. “And the Democrats just wouldn’t go for it.”
Indeed, Senate Democrats pre-emptively blasted the bill before Republicans had finished drafting it. Minutes after Scott, a black Republican senator, revealed the bill, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called it a “token” effort. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) went so far as accusing Republicans of “trying to get away with murder, the murder of George Floyd,” because the JUSTICE Act’s provisions against chokeholds did not go far enough, in her view.
Trump went on to repeat his rather grandiose claim, “I have done more for the African American community than any president. With the exception of Abraham Lincoln.”
Yet the president mentioned specific accomplishments. “Criminal justice reform, prison reform, historically Black colleges and universities — I got them funded. They were on a year-to-year basis. … I got them 10-year funding and financing, and more than they even asked for,” Trump explained.
The president also mentioned opportunity zones, his program to help black entrepreneurs. He claimed that President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Biden “never even tried” to do criminal justice reform. While Obama did suggest reform measures, he did not get them passed through Congress and signed into law, as Trump did.
Joe Biden’s campaign has quietly built a multimillion-dollar operation over the past two months that’s largely designed to combat misinformation online, aiming to rebut President Trump while bracing for any information warfare that could take place in the aftermath of the election.
The effort, internally called the “Malarkey Factory,” consists of dozens of people around the country monitoring what information is gaining traction digitally, whether it’s resonating with swing voters and, if so, how to fight back. The three most salient attacks the Malarkey Factory has confronted so far are claims that Biden is a socialist, that he is “creepy” and that he is “sleepy” or senile.
In preparation for misinformation spreading as voters head to the polls, especially a stretch around Election Day when Facebook will not let campaigns buy new ads, the campaign has partnered with dozens of Facebook pages associated with liberal individuals or groups that have large followings. The campaign has also enlisted 5,000 surrogates with big social media platforms who can pump out campaign messages.
The Malarkey Factory has already been at work. When Trump began attacking Biden as a socialist, for example, the Biden campaign saw that it was affecting Hispanic voters in Florida. So it developed counter-messaging that showed a different image of Biden, with him speaking of his love for America and being endorsed by former president Barack Obama, and the campaign blasted the messaging to Latinos in the state.
Hunter’s name appears once, China and Ukraine not at all. One wonders if Post writer Matt Viser is himself an employee, given how fervently the piece regurgitates Biden campaign talking points…
Here are some of the other areas of concern, especially when we consider the role she plays at Facebook should be filled by someone who is politically unbiased:
Senior Policy Advisor to Ambassador Samantha Power
Director for Russia at the National Security Council
Chief of Staff for the Office of European and NATO Policy
Professor at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University
Field organizer for Obama for America in Wisconsin
Worked for the President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Distinguished Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship recipient
Caveat: I’m not familiar with noqreport.com, but there seems to be some supporting information out there.
More social media honchos walking through the revolving door to team Biden: Twitter public policy director Carlos Monje is joining Biden’s “transition team.” 1. Why does Twitter even have a “public policy director? (Don’t answer that: Obviously to help Democrats.) 2. Seems like he’s counting his chickens before they’re hatched, doesn’t it?
Most households would face a tax increase under the Biden-Harris tax plan. In fact, as the chart shows, unless your household income is less than $45,600, there is more than a 90 percent chance that the Biden-Harris plan, if enacted, will raise your taxes. In the exact middle of the household income distribution, over 95 percent of households can expect a tax increase if the Biden-Harris plan becomes law. Overall, 82.6 percent of American households can expect a tax increase.
But you won’t just be taking home less money thanks to taxes, you’ll be taking home less money period. “A new study on Biden’s tax, health-care, energy and regulation proposals predicts $6,500 less in median household income by 2030.”
Evidently Joe Biden has seen his own shadow and will not be showing his face until Thursday:
CBS's Ed O'Keefe on Face The Nation: "[Joe Biden] will not be seen again after today until Thursday night."
REMINDER: Joe Biden and his campaign have not disputed the authenticity of the bombshell emails which detail the extensive corruption of the Biden family. pic.twitter.com/obMn3QRxKS
I think this very short flowchart is worth highlighting:
I'm amazed that the Media is so focused on Ukraine. There's plenty of story in China, but that one impacts both Joe Biden and John Kerry. Probably 100% legal, but let's not pretend that it's not happening. pic.twitter.com/cYJAU4PJtg
Supposedly Kamala Harris has tested positive for the Wuhan coronavirus, and so won’t be traveling anymore. Which is a lot more palatable to the press than saying she’s come down with the Dontwannatalkaboutmyrunningmatesobviouscorruptionproblemsvirus.
Biden refuses to reveal his position on court-packing, but he still wants to take your guns and hike your taxes until your eyeballs bleed, plus more on the enthusiasm gap, fracking flip-flops, and we’re all going to be millionaires (the Weimer Republic kind). It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
“Hey Joe, are you gonna pack the courts?” “Not telling!”
As the Senate moves forward on the president’s Supreme Court pick, both former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, continue to deflect when asked if they would try to add more justices to the nation’s highest court, a practice known as court packing.
Biden and his party face increasing pressure because of the frustration of many progressives at the Republican effort to rush through a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime liberal icon, with Amy Coney Barrett just before the Nov. 3 election. Because the addition of Barrett is expected to create a conservative majority on the high court some have called for adding more justices.
The question of adding seats to the Supreme Court also hinges on the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, where Republicans currently hold a slim 53 to 47 majority. If Democrats are able to wrest control of the GOP, maintain control of the U.S. House and Biden wins the presidency, the party would need to pass legislation expanding the court beyond its current limit of nine justices.
Lord knows progressive frustration is a just a swell reason to overthrow centuries of tradition.
“According to an analysis from Real Clear Politics, Biden holds a 4.4 percentage point lead over the president in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona,” she explains. “However, Democrat Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by 4.8 points in these swing states this time in 2016—a slightly greater advantage than the one Biden currently has.”
Biden’s leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan, two states Trump won, are also smaller than Clinton’s leads at this time four years ago. “The Real Clear Politics average shows that Biden is ahead with a 6.3 lead in Pennsylvania and a 6.2 advantage in Michigan. Comparably, Clinton was leading in these two states by 9.2 points and 9.6 points, respectively, this time in 2016.”
Similarly, polls for Wisconsin and North Carolina show Biden with a smaller lead than they did for Hillary Clinton back in 2016.
The only outliers to this trend are Florida and Arizona. Biden’s lead in Florida is at 3.5, compared to Hillary’s 3.2 point lead in 2016. Biden also leads in Arizona by 3.4 points, compared to Trump’s 0.7 point advantage in 2016.
NBC News featured several "undecided" voters at Monday's Biden Town Hall that had previously been featured as Biden supporters on MSNBC:pic.twitter.com/61ZRXmcktT
Asked about President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which most economists agree are largely responsible for the resurrection of the U.S. economy following the slow-growth Obama-Biden years, Harris said: “On Day 1, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill.”
Never mind that a President Biden will have no such power to “repeal” anything. That’s Congress’ job, and if Biden isn’t blessed with having both branches of Congress firmly in far-left Democratic hands, “repealing” the tax cuts won’t happen.
But then Harris went on to say Biden wouldn’t raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000. Say what? By “repealing” Trump’s tax cuts, he would be doing just that.
The truth is, Biden has played games with his tax plans all along. But the actual tax plans he has revealed would be nothing short of disastrous for working men and women, and the economy as a whole. Those plans plainly show that 77-year-old Biden, a lifelong politician, understands nothing about the private economy. That is, apart from it being a great source of graft for him and his family.
A report out just this week from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that taxes would rise about $4.3 trillion over the next decade under Biden’s plans, while taxes under Trump would actually decline by $1.7 trillion over that period.
At least, you say, that $4.3 trillion in added taxes under Biden would cut the deficit more than Trump’s plans, right? Wrong.
The CRFB notes that its projections show a 10-year rise in federal deficits of $8.3 trillion for Biden, versus $6.9 trillion for Trump.
Enthusiasm for Trump among his voters “is historically high,” said Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll. “We saw that very early in the cycle, in his primary vote totals,” when the president drew unusually large voter turnout in uncontested races.
“Meanwhile, Biden’s enthusiasm level is historically low — so low that the Democrats run the risk of replaying 2016,” Baris said.
Just 46 percent of Biden voters in a recent Pew poll said that they strongly support him, compared to 66 percent of Trump’s base.
Rank-and-file Dems are sounding the alarm.
“I look out over my Biden sign in my front yard and I see a sea of Trump flags and yard signs,” Pennsylvania voter Susan Connors told Biden worriedly at a CNN-sponsored town hall Sept. 17.
Experienced political hands have a saying: “Yard signs don’t vote.” And research appears to bear that out — a 2016 study found that political signage increases vote share by a mere 1.7 percentage points, on average.
Biden holds a 10-point lead in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, a commanding position with Election Day less than four weeks away. But the exuberant signs and displays of Trump passion may actually point to a yawning enthusiasm gap that could make a big difference on Election Day — just as they did in 2016.
Four years ago, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found a 13-point enthusiasm gap in Trump’s favor, a result echoed by other surveys, The Hill reported.
Many people . . . said that the sheer volume of Trump signs they saw in 2016 — and the scarcity of Hillary Clinton signs — was their first clue that the polling was wrong and that Trump would have more success than the pundits had predicted,” Daniel Allott writes in “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Nation” (Republic Books), out Oct. 20.
It’s deja vu all over again… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A federal appeals court has reinstated a fraud conviction of Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, Devon Archer, reversing a decision by an Obama-appointed judge (and wife of Mueller special counsel lawyer) to vacate Archer’s conviction and grant him a new trial.
Archer and several of his business partners were indicted on March 26, 2018 in a $60 million bond scheme which defrauded Native Americans. Hunter was not implicated in the fraud, however Archer and the other partners repeatedly name-dropped the former Vice President’s son.
Following a trial which lasted nearly one-month, Archer was found guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud. After requesting that the district court set aside the jury’s verdict, Judge Ronnie Abrams – the wife of Mueller special counsel attorney Greg Andres (who himself was a Deputy Assistant AG in the Obama DOJ, according to RedState) – granted Archer’s wish. What’s more, Abrams was Hunter Biden’s classmate at Yale Law school.
In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel said that Abrams made a mistake by prioritizing her own theory above that of the jury’s, and that her assessment undercut the significance of the proof in its totality.
Mike Pence dominated in that debate. He was calm and cool. Rock-solid. Kamala Harris’s body language and voice reflected her nervousness—a stark contrast to her previous debate performances during the Democratic primary when she was still in the race. But neither her body language, her failure to answer questions, nor her constant reliance on fake stories as lines of attack were the key tell that she lost.
The liberal media conceded Pence’s victory by describing Pence’s debate performance. And their go-to explanation was to attack the vice president by accusing him of “mansplaining.”
“China Censors Mike Pence’s Debate Comments On China But Freely Broadcasts Kamala Harris’s.” “‘China censored Pence’s comments on China,’ Canada’s Globe and Mail Beijing Correspondent Nathan VanderKlippe reported. ‘Signal returned when Harris began talking again.'”
Of all the people they know — including RINOs and squishes and NeverTrumpers who voted against Trump in 2016 — many of the NeverTrumpers are now reluctant Trump voters, and many of 2016’s reluctant Trump voters are now enthusiastic Trump voters.
On the other hand, they don’t know anyone who has moved from voting for Trump in 2016 to voting for Biden.
One friend tells me that the suburban well-to-do Wine Moms and Squish Sisters he knows are now fully on the MAGA train.
Everyone they know who’s moved on The Trump Question (and Trump seems to be the only issue in 2020) has moved in favor of Trump.
They also note that the “Shy Trumper” effect — where Trump supporters won’t admit to pollsters they still support Trump — is still strong, based on their own experience.
One relates that he did not tell his own children that he voted for Trump, due to social pressure and the idea that he didn’t want to “normalize” Trump’s bad behavior to his children.
If you can’t tell your own kids you voted for Trump, you’re not going to tell a pollster.
And this person works in conservative politics, too!
If even people in the conservative movement can’t admit they’re Trump supporters — well good luck getting Wendy Wine Mom to admit that on the phone.
A friend of mine was a hardcore NeverTrumper in 2016 but now is a crawl-over-broken-glass Trump Voter. No, he doesn’t really like Trump, but unlike Jonah Goldberg and Steve Schmidt, he recognizes the profound threat the left poses to what is left of America.
He has kept in touch with his NeverTrump pals. Media types. The types who annoy you on Twitter.
And while he won’t Name Names, he tells me that many of the NeverTrumpers I hate are now “red pilled” Trump voters.
They just won’t admit it publicly.
Snip.
If there were a lot of Trump defectors, the media would be profiling them and lionizing them and promoting them 24-7.
But I haven’t seen a single story about Trump 2016-Biden 2020 defectors.
The media hasn’t found any — despite the fact that by announcing that you’re now a full-on Democrat Liberal, you gain employment opportunities and social prestige.
So if the media can’t find any of these people… do they even exist?
YouTuber Liberal Hivemind says that Biden is losing voters every day:
“Those blacks, always working menial jobs before they hop back on a city bus and head home to their housing projects. Anyway, I’m Joe Biden. Vote for me cause Donald Trump is racist.” https://t.co/MHaxeYNcB7
chronicled many times over the last three years when Democratic senators questioned judicial nominees about their faith, suggesting in various forms that a candidate’s Catholic or Christian beliefs might render them unfit to serve on the bench.
Several of those questions were posed by Harris herself, focusing especially on Catholic candidates. In late 2018, for instance, Harris grilled Brian Buescher, nominated to be a federal district judge in Nebraska, about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization with more than 2 million members worldwide who conduct charitable work. Here’s one of Harris’s written questions to Buescher:
Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.” Mr. Anderson went on to say that “abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.” Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?
She went on to ask whether Buescher was “aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization” and whether he had “ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women’s reproductive rights.”
Harris posed these and other similar questions to Paul Matey and Peter Phipps, Catholic nominees who, like Buescher, are members of the Knights. Among the questions she posed to Matey based on his involvement in the Knights were:
* Do you agree with Mr. Anderson’s description of abortion as “the killing of the innocent on a massive scale”?
* Do you agree with Mr. Anderson that legal abortion in the United States has “resulted in more than 40 million deaths”?
* Do you believe that a fetus is entitled to any protection under the U.S. Constitution?
Race snapshot:
Campaign snapshot for Sunday:
– Trump is fully recovered (it seems)
– None of the 34 allegedly infected at White House seem to be in medical danger, including Chris Christie
Like antifa, Joe Biden is just an idea, CNN skews its poll even more than usual, more “inappropriate” touching, and Biden refuses to take a position on, well, just about everything. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Lost in the blinding gaslighting over Donald Trump’s remarks about white supremacists during the first presidential debate was the fact that Joe Biden proved again that he’s little more than a stand-in propped up by a compliant political press.
Biden was unable to answer even the most rudimentary queries about his beliefs, never mind specifics about policy. Apologies to the Twitter expert class, but opposing Donald Trump is neither a moral doctrine nor a policy agenda.
There is plenty to dislike about the president, but you rarely have to guess where he stands. Biden, on the other hand, says “I am the Democratic Party,” and yet, after a half century in American politics, we have virtually no idea what his presidency would look like.
Biden’s already put a lid on his past, and the press has obliged. The same reporters who will comb over 15 years of Trump’s tax returns have shown zero curiosity in nearly 40 years of Senate papers Biden has buried somewhere in a University of Delaware basement. Then again, there’s not a single significant piece of legislation Biden sponsored in his 36 years in Senate that he still supports, so maybe it doesn’t matter.
Thanks to the media, though, I know more about some flaky QAnon candidate in Georgia than I do about the presidential frontrunner’s foreign-policy positions. Or much else. If Republicans were threatening to destroy the constitutional order by packing the courts and throwing out the legislative filibuster — one that Biden’s mentor Barack Obama once argued was an indispensable tool of a representative democracy — there would be massive pressure on the head of the party to stake out a public position.
Biden’s basement has proved more of a tomb than a front porch. And his vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the avatar of the “Harris Admiration,” seemed almost as scarce as Biden. Until now, both thought it wiser to let Trump Agonistês flail at his existential enemies and to let the press do its now-accustomed work of churning out periodic hit jobs on Trump. When Biden gave a rare scripted interview, his obsequious interviewers grimaced as they sought to prop him up when he bizarrely claimed that he had served 180 years in the Senate or that 200 million Americans had died from the coronavirus.
Technology has allowed Biden to hobble along now and then with Zoom and Skype. Hidden teleprompters and a conspiracy of toady journalists have passed off fake press conferences as spontaneous rather than scripted events.
Biden was never up to 16- to 18-hour days, as we learned in the year-long primary fights. So staying home purportedly also gave him rest and the chance to run an occasional on-screen Wizard of Oz campaign — and again let the ram Trump beat his head against the media, the virus, and the chaos of the cities.
So without current technology, a slavish media, the weirdest year in American history, and strong polling, Biden could not have gotten away by disappearing from a presidential campaign for months on end.
Yet there were other reasons that the once loquacious motor-mouth Biden never really campaigned. He became a virtual candidate in quite another sense: He has acted as an emissary for a Bernie Sanders socialist agenda that otherwise would have stayed underground after expiring and being buried in the Democratic primary. A prisoner of ideology, Biden found it wiser not to rebel and comment on the issues — well aside from the pragmatic worries of his handlers that he might detour to yet another “You ain’t black” revelation.
If Biden were to openly oppose any of the hard-left ideologies that his handlers and masters embrace — if he endorsed fracking, issued a list of liberal rather than hard-left judges, or objected to dismantling the Electoral College — he would lose his new base and with them a close election.
And yet if Biden were to explicitly and publicly advocate the Sanders, AOC, or Warren neo-socialist agenda, he would also lose, turning off his supposed swing-voter and independent suburban constituents.
So Biden in the vortex stays nearly mute — a quietude certainly well suited to his age, the prior news cycles of 2020, his cognitive limitations, and his hope that he can win with a rope-a-dope, run-out-the-clock strategy.
And now? The polls tighten. This strange year is gradually normalizing. Biden should be rested, after his months-long hiatus. And so will he in the eleventh hour actually conduct a campaign? Yes and no.
His strategists still seem to suffer from the Hillary disease. As in 2016, Trump is frenetic in the swing states, the Democratic candidate is virtually nonexistent.
As in 2016, Biden and the Democrats talk of a 70 to 90 percent likelihood of victory and an Electoral College blowout. They speculate about who will be the nation’s next cabinet officers, oblivious that such arrogance only feeds their blindness.
As in 2016, a few polls — Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Emerson, Zogby — show Trump nearly even or ahead in some states and are thus dismissed. Mainstream polls, as in 2016, likely “prove” their absence of bias by under-sampling working-class Democratic constituencies and over-sampling suburbanites, many of them Republicans — as if they cannot be accused of party asymmetries even as they do not reflect accurate ideological affinities.
And the polling outfits that in 2016 assured a Clinton victory are now once against cited for their reassurance that the Democrat remains clearly ahead.
As in 2016, when millions would not reveal their preferences and were written off as mythical voters, so too now we are told that the proverbial stealthy Trump voter remains an exaggeration and a likely no-show.
As in 2016, when Hillary dismissed Trump’s road-runner-like feverish visits to swing states as an ossified strategy, at least compared with the tactics of her twentysomething technical wizards, so too Biden’s youngsters now laugh off Trump’s calcified ideas, such as knocking on millions of doors to talk to voters in person.
And as in 2106, when Hillary’s social-media masters and tech experts proved incompetent, so too Biden’s scripted tele-campaigning is often plagued by glitches, inadvertent glimpses of teleprompter reflections, and prompts left on the script that Biden dutifully speaks out loud, giving the game away.
Long ago, we knew that Biden was physically not up for a normal campaign. Yet the freakish year of 2020 gave him the chance to outsource his candidacy to the weird cycle of events that drove down Trump’s polls.
Biden sends mixed signals on whether he supports the socialist “Green New Deal,” but his own proposals look like the Green New Deal’s Little Brother:
For starters, the Biden Plan does include the following:
“Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
“On day one, Biden will make smart infrastructure investments to rebuild the nation and to ensure that our buildings, water, transportation, and energy infrastructure can withstand the impacts of climate change.”
“He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that.”
“The Biden plan will make a historic investment in our clean energy future and environmental justice, paid for by rolling back the Trump tax incentives that enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment.”
“Biden will set a target of reducing the carbon footprint of the U.S. building stock 50% by 2035, creating incentives for deep retrofits that combine appliance electrification, efficiency, and on-site clean power generation.”
“Make climate change a core national security priority.”
These are just a few examples of the radical progressive elements in Biden’s plan.
Plus Green New Deal Supporter Kamala Harris would be waiting in the wings.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s layer threatens to sue Biden for libel for falsely calling him a white supremacist. As well he should.
The Obama administration oversaw the lowest point in the US-Israel relations since Israel’s establishment in 1948. Biden was party to regular leaks of Israeli intelligence and political attacks targeting Israel on the global stage. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the US to mend relations. The prime minister was taken in and out of the White House through a side door with no official media related to the visit.
Biden also worked to pass the Iran nuclear deal, which Israel heavily opposed. There are reports that in a 2014 meeting, Obama threatened to shoot down Israeli fighter jets should they target facilities in Iran. Biden does not get to run on the Obama-Biden record and play coy to these events. It is no coincidence that a month before Netanyahu addressed the House of Representatives, the Obama administration decided to declassify a 386-page report on Israeli nuclear capabilities.
“The wife of a Massachusetts transit police officer who was injured in the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers accused Joe Biden of touching her inappropriately and making a suggestive comment in 2014.” Hey, remember when we were supposed to believe all women during #MeToo? It already seems a million years ago…
Not that our media will report any of them:
This is the most complete indictment of media bias ever.
Why does CBS think voters in…Australia need to know about these serious charges against Biden, but not voters in…America (where he’s actually on the ballot)?
“Biden Transition Team Member Worked With CCP Officials For Over a Decade.” “Suzy George, a new addition to the transition team of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, is a former principal of Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm that has extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party.”
The ghost:
I simply cannot believe that #JoeBiden is running for President of the United States and is a complete ghost. Where is this guy? What the hell is a “lid”? Why are you in your basement, Joe? Will somebody please lay out a trail of hundred dollar bills so this guy will get going?!
It's also interesting to note that the Left has switched focus from Trump himself to his wife and family. Looks like they're starting to run out of ammo.
Democrats panic (some more), Slow Joe slowjoes some more, Rand Paul asks DOJ to look into Hunter’s sleaze, and inside Biden’s vast haberdashery collection. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
The first Biden-Trump debate is scheduled for Tuesday. We’ll see if it actually happens.
First, there are indications that Trump’s base of support — whites without college degrees — is more energized and committed to voting this year than key Democratic constituencies. And there is also evidence that polling does not reflect this.
Second, Latinos, who are key to the outcome in several crucial states — Arizona and Florida, for example — have shown less support for Biden than for past Democratic nominees. Many Hispanic voters seem resistant to any campaign that defines them broadly as “people of color.”
Third, absentee voting is expected to be higher among Democrats than Republicans, subjecting their ballots to a greater risk of rejection, a fate more common to mailed-in votes than to in-person voting.
Fourth, the generic Democratic-Republican vote (“Would you be more willing to vote for a Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress?”) through early July favored Democrats by more than 10 points, but has since narrowed to 6 points.
Fifth, the debates will test Biden’s ability to withstand three 90-minute battles against an opponent known for brutal personal attacks.
Details further down:
A Democratic strategist — who requested anonymity because his employer does not want him publicly identified talking about the election — analyzed the implications of the most recent voter registration trends for me.
In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, he said, overall
registration is up by 6 points through August compared to the 2016 cycle, but net Democratic registrations are down by 38 percent. That’s about 150,000 fewer additional Democrats than were added in 2016.
In addition, he continued, registration among whites without college degrees
is up by 46 percent while registration by people of color is up by only 4 percent. That gap is made more stark when you realize that over the last four years, the WNC (white non-college) population has increased by only 1 percent in those states, while the number of people of color increased by 13 percent.
The pattern was more pronounced in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than it was in Michigan.
On its own, increased registration among non-college whites would have only a negligible effect on total state voting, my source pointed out, but
it becomes troubling if it reflects greater interest more generally for these voters in those states. And there are good reasons to believe that if that is the case, those additionally energized voters are very underrepresented in surveys now.
On weakness of Biden support Hispanic voters:
While Democrats have struggled for years with non-college whites, another set of problems for Biden and the party has begun to emerge this year in what many liberals had been counting on as a key constituency: the steadily growing Hispanic electorate.
As Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Tory Gavito, a human rights lawyer who is president of Way to Win and the founder of the Texas Future Project, wrote on these pages on Sept. 18:
According to recent polls from Quinnipiac and Monmouth, 38 percent of registered Hispanic voters in 10 battleground states may be ambivalent about even voting. At least so far, this large group of Latinos seemingly perceives little reason to choose Mr. Biden over President Trump.
Why? López and Gavito offer an explanation based on 15 focus groups and a national survey:
Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.
In fact, the authors continued, the majority of Hispanics
rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.
Another data point they found “even more sobering”: López and Gavito asked
eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”
As they expected, “almost three out of five white respondents judged that message convincing.”
More disconcerting to López and Gavito, both liberals, was that “exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.”
Poll after poll has shown that Hispanic Americans don’t want MS-13 and other criminal aliens in their community, but Democrats have pointedly ignored that in favor of pushing their “OMG, separated families!” and “racist dog whistle” talking points and pandering to hard left open borders activists.
You have to get much further down before any mention of the Antia/#BlackLivesMatter riots. Completely missing from this piece: The words “Hunter Biden,” “Burisma” and “China”…
In addition to the Russian collusion hoax and the phone-call impeachment farce, who can forget the marquee media toadies of JournoList and the release of John Podesta’s email trove?
Or the moderator Donna Brazile’s primary debate questions, leaked through CNN, or Candy Crowley’s hijacking of a debate as moderator-turned-real-time-hack “fact-checker”?
Nothing then is new to the media’s fusion and collusion with the “progressive party.”
Yet never in American history have mainstream journalists not merely promoted a candidate but actively fused with his political candidacy to the point of warping, fabricating, and Trotskyizing the news and indeed history itself.
The trope of a vast charade to create an illusionary powerful figure out of nothing is an old one in fiction, Hollywood and television. We remember “The Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz fakery, a formidable screen image created backstage by gears and levers operated by a tiny man “behind the curtain.” Similar is the famous scene in an episode of the old Star Trek series, depicting a near comatose on-air John Gill used as a televised prop by his puppeteers, in a utopian federation project gone haywire.
But reality has outdone art with the Biden campaign. The concoction is holistic, from the mundane construction of a fantasy, on-the-go candidate to the supposed middle-of-the road old Joe Biden from Scranton radiating an aura of kindness and moderation in times of plague, panic, and protest.
For six months, Biden has run a Zoom campaign on the pretext of mandatory quarantines—our current version of a 19th-century, stationary presidential candidate, who campaigned by spitting out wit and wisdom while immovable on his front porch.
Biden has conducted no free-wheeling, unscripted press conferences. He will not do extended one-on-one interviews with a disinterested journalist. He rarely will even try Trump-like cameo appearances on CNN or MSNBC to answer unscripted questions from supporters. His press events instead are Orwellian, requiring a media mass suspension of disbelief.
The questions are canned. They are submitted in advance by “journalists,” whether formally or via electronic chatter. The inquiries are obsequious—seldom a word about Hunter Biden, China, Biden’s troubling racist remarks, his handsy past, his scary cognitive lapses, or his “contract” with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Instead the softball, known-in-advance inquiries are in spirit carried over from the Obama years, phrased in the manner of “Were you outraged enough by Trump’s outrage?”
Biden’s Oz functionaries seemingly are always experimenting with all sorts of screen props. The trick is to discover how best their challenged candidate can square the circle of completing sentences and remaining semi-coherent, while not giving away the game that his illusionists are feeding him answers to synthetic questions.
When asked point-blank on Fox News by Brett Baier whether Biden used a stealth teleprompter, his national press flak, T.J. Ducklo would not answer with a simple yes or no. Instead, he went on the attack, with the fossilized accusation that right-wing Fox News asks too many partisan questions.
So we were left with a de facto “yes”: Biden does read off a stealthy teleprompter when answering canned press questions—and gives the impression he does not.
But Biden, like the mirage of the Wizard of Oz, nonetheless can’t always keep the curtain closed.
When he strains to see the teleprompter that sits just behind, and thus out of sight of, his camera lens, he slips and mutters “bring it closer”—reminding any who watch, except the media that helps collude in these orchestrations, that the question asked is not a serious one, but a prompt to facilitate the proper nonspontaneous response.
Snip.
Sometimes the effort is scary. When old photos reappear in a CNN puff piece about a younger Biden holding his young son at a long-ago Washington Redskins game, the team logo—the now-politically incorrect Redskins logo—is airbrushed from his son’s stocking cap. And then presto, legions of “disinterested” “fact-checkers” in the media emerge to confess that Biden, not CNN, supplied the doctored image.
But, in turn, the Biden campaign assures the press that the doctoring was only for “copyright” reasons, as if candidates routinely photoshop out all the cap logos they wear. The impression is that Biden is terrified that his new leftist friends in the Ministry of Truth are combing his past and ordering embarrassing moments to go down the memory hole.
As a general rule, the Soviet-style apologia for the media-Biden fusion—usually outsourced to a now utterly corrupt left-wing institution called “fact-checking”—only solidifies the fact that the media and the Biden campaign are indistinguishable.
In Soviet times, one easily just assumed the opposite from Moscow’s party-line efforts and, presto, stumbled onto the truth. In the case of Biden’s optics and press conferences and appearances, we easily deduce that the downside of scripting and programming a compliant candidate far outweighs the existential risk of turning Biden loose to answer questions like a normal human being.
True, even before his cognitive decline, Biden was known in Washington as someone whose incoherent and impromptu loquaciousness usually embarrassed his friends more than hurt his enemies—in addition to his long history of plagiarism and inflating his thin résumés with false data about his past.
But with the onset of his cognitive decline, Biden’s own once-feeble social antennae are now more or less unplugged most of the day.
The result is that he has a creepy propensity to blurt out patently racist tropes as if the old inner Biden who talked of Obama as “clean” and the first “articulate” black presidential candidate, and pandered to his working-class Democratic supporters with references to the inner-city “jungle,” is now free of his harnesses, bits, and halters.
For some time, Biden unchained has shouted about “you ain’t black,” and, earlier, his Corn Pop series of inflated tales as Biden, the white knight, equipped with a chain no less, protecting the inner city from itself.
Biden showed his tough-guy mettle with putdowns of a transitorily noncompliant black journalist and sneered that he is comparable to a “junkie” and drug addict. To a liberated Biden, blacks just don’t think independently like Latinos.
The first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is happening on Tuesday night. Democrats are playing it cool, but there is real concern about how Biden will perform.
In a format like this, Biden is on his own. There is no campaign handler who can suddenly step in and shut down the event by saying “OK, thanks so much everyone.”
Sean Sullivan and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post wrote this rather revealing story:
Trump readies a debate onslaught — and Biden allies worry
President Trump is gearing up to launch blistering personal attacks on Joe Biden and his family in the first presidential debate on Tuesday, while Biden is bracing for an onslaught and worried allies are warning the Democratic nominee not to lose his temper and lash out, according to people with knowledge of the strategies in both camps.
Trump has told associates he wants to talk specifically about his opponent’s son Hunter Biden and mused that the debates are when “people will finally realize Biden is just not there,” according to one adviser. The president is so eager to lay into his rival that he has called aides to test out various attacks, focusing on attacks that cast Biden as a longtime Washington insider with a limited record of accomplishment, said another adviser, who like many interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe private talks.
Biden and his advisers are anticipating a venomous barrage, according to a person with knowledge of their thinking, and they are preparing to counter with an affirmative case for a Biden presidency. The Democrat wants to stay focused on how he would address the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s economic problems, which he blames Trump for worsening.
The prospect of a cage match between a president for whom no subject is off-limits and a challenger who can be openly emotional is making some Biden advisers nervous. They see a fine line between Biden’s passion and empathy, which can appeal to voters, and the raw anger that sometimes gets him in trouble and could undercut his pitch as a calming alternative to a president who thrives on chaos.
Two quick reactions. First of all, Joe Biden is “a longtime Washington insider with a limited record of accomplishment.” Second, why shouldn’t Trump go after Biden’s family? Hasn’t Trump’s family been fair game for Democrats and the media over the last four years?
In another sign of the left’s utter panic, Nancy Pelosi is doubling down on her suggestion that Biden shouldn’t even bother debating Trump. Funny, she didn’t feel that way about Obama in 2008 or 2012. What changed?
I think we all know the answer to that: The number of synapses still firing in Biden’s head.
The Biden campaign has “called a lid” (i.e., said Biden is not campaigning any more that day and reporters can go home) before noon nine times in September. Biden must have more lids than Charles Nelson Reilly.
Biden is accomplishing the rare feat of making Hillary look like a workaholic in comparison…
Presumably, Biden is so exhausted from his rigorous morning routine of plug and denture maintenance that he only has energy enough to campaign fewer than two out of every three days.
To his credit, Biden did manage to campaign for six days in a row during the first week of September. But since then, he’s ditched his own presidential campaign eight out of the last 18 days.
That’s not a good look for a man who is supposed to have energy enough to hold the most demanding office in the world.
I had a conversation with Bill Whittle on this same topic earlier this week, and Bill reminded me of his newly minted Whittle’s Law: When they let the optics look this bad, it’s because the alternative optics would look even worse.
In other words, the former veep or his handlers have made the conscious decision that it’s safer for Tired Joe Biden to stay tucked away every other day or so than to have him campaign in the traditional, vigorous manner.
What could possibly look worse than a presidential candidate who isn’t up to the job of campaigning?
Well, this:
Watch as Biden struggles to find his words until he’s able to latch on to the teleprompter.
This is after he took off all of yesterday and half of today. He read for 15 minutes before exiting, taking no questions. pic.twitter.com/tecd25WSZv
The final stretch of a presidential campaign is typically a nonstop mix of travel, caffeine and adrenaline. But as the worst pandemic in a century bears down on the United States, Joe Biden is taking a lower key approach.
Since his Aug. 11 selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, Biden has had 22 days where he either didn’t make public appearances, held only virtual fundraisers or ventured from his Delaware home solely for church, according to an Associated Press analysis of his schedules. He made 12 visits outside of Delaware during that period, including Friday when he went to Washington and paid respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
During the same time, President Donald Trump had 24 trips that took him to 17 different states, not counting a personal visit to New York to see his ailing brother in the hospital or weekend golf outings. He was hitting Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the nation’s capital on Friday alone.
Biden’s aides insist his approach is intentional, showcasing his respect for public health guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus and presenting a responsible contrast with Trump, who has resumed large-scale campaign rallies — sometimes over the objections of local officials. Still, some Democrats say it’s critical that Biden infuse his campaign with more energy.
Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said not traveling because of the pandemic was a “pretty lame excuse.”
“I thought he had his own plane,” Hinojosa said. “He doesn’t have to sit with one space between another person on a commercial airline like I would.”
When the Texas Democratic Party says you’re “lame,” maybe you have a problem…
Liberals who think that Kamala Harris is going to walk over Mike Pence in a debate are warned to lower their expectations. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Slow Joe Reloaded:
With no teleprompter Joe Biden is definitely struggling. This is a progressive disease. If you vote for #JoeBiden, #KamalaHarris will be President of the United States by next summer. pic.twitter.com/e5dxGh9JiH
Greetings regular readers! I’m so glad you survived yesterday’s tragic mass die-off! Plus Biden campaign troubles, fundraising updates, the “Harris Administration,” and the Burisma report looms. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Biden says 200 million people will die from the Wuhan coronavirus by the time he finishes his speech.
One of the lessons of 2016 was that the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had all kinds of internal reports of problems, signs of insufficient support and enthusiasm in key states, and ominous indicators that they were nowhere nearly as strong and effective as most of the coverage suggested.
The problem was that only a few reporters knew about those, and the ones that did had pledged to keep what they were seeing and hearing secret until after the election for their campaign narrative books. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, “over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred subjects, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly.” Florida Democratic political consultants warned the campaign they were in danger of losing the Sunshine State. Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking. The Service Employees International Union wanted to send more volunteers to Michigan and the Clinton campaign told them to keep their people to Iowa instead.
If you had really good Democratic Party or liberal activist-group sources, you heard these portentous stories that look like really key indicators in hindsight. If you didn’t, you were dependent upon the polls and the dominant narrative in the media that the Clinton campaign was an experienced, well-oiled machine while the Trump campaign was a bunch of amateur stumblebums constantly beset by infighting.
Fast-forward to today, and it feels like these kinds of, “hey, the Democratic nominee’s campaign may not be as strong as it looks” stories are leaking out into the general news coverage much more frequently.
Earlier this week, the New York Times wondered aloud about Democratic strength in Nevada:
Nevada’s Democratic political machine was held up as a model for other states where neither party has consistently dominated. But it was a machine built for another era.
Its success relied on hundreds of people knocking on thousands of doors for face-to-face conversations with voters. Now, there are fewer than half as many people canvassing for Democratic voters as there were in September 2016. And some Democratic strategists warn that Nevada could be in 2020 what Wisconsin was in 2016 — a state that the Democrats assume is safely in their column but that slips away.
The Washington Post reported that Latino Democrats are worried about Biden having lackluster numbers among this demographic:
Top Latino Democrats are voicing growing concern about Joe Biden’s campaign, warning that lackluster efforts to win the support of their community could have devastating consequences in the November election.
Recent polls showing President Trump’s inroads with Latinos have set off a fresh round of frustration and finger-pointing among Democrats, confirming problems some say have simmered for months. Many Latino activists and officials said Biden is now playing catch-up, particularly in the pivotal state of Florida, where he will campaign Tuesday — the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month — for the first time as the presidential nominee. Reaching out to Latino voters will be a key focus on the visit, according to a person with knowledge of the trip. Biden’s campaign said he will be in Tampa and Kissimmee, two areas with large Puerto Rican populations.
Plus concerns about the campaigns in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“I can’t even find a sign,” [Don] Sabbe says outside a Kroger’s in Sterling Heights, where surrounding cars fly massive Donald Trump flags that say “No More Bullsh-t” and fellow shoppers wear Trump T-shirts for their weekend grocery runs. “I’m looking for one of those storefronts. I’m looking for a campaign office for Biden. And I’m not finding one.”
The reason Sabbe can’t find a dedicated Biden campaign field office is because there aren’t any around here. Not in Macomb County, the swing region where Sabbe lives. It’s not even clear Biden has opened any new dedicated field offices in the state; because of the pandemic, they’ve moved their field organizing effort online. The Biden campaign in Michigan refused to confirm the location of any physical field offices despite repeated requests; they say they have “supply centers” for handing out signs, but would not confirm those locations. The campaign also declined to say how many of their Michigan staff were physically located here. Biden’s field operation in this all-important state is being run through the Michigan Democratic Party’s One Campaign, which is also not doing physical canvassing or events at the moment. When I ask Biden campaign staffers and Democratic Party officials how many people they have on the ground in Michigan, one reply stuck out: “What do you mean by ‘on the ground?’”
Among all Wisconsin voters, 56 percent say Biden hasn’t done enough to denounce the rioting versus just 31 percent who say he has. (Even among Democrats, 28 percent think he hasn’t done enough.) The numbers are similar in Minnesota at 54/35. Biden has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want to defund the police and he’s made several on-camera statements condemning the violence over the past few weeks, but that message isn’t getting through. And it’s helping to keep Trump close.
Democrats are concerned that a groundswell of support for President Trump outside of Minnesota’s Twin Cities may be enough to win him the state over 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Biden, the former two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator, visited carpenter apprentices and other union workers near Duluth on Friday, his first trip to Minnesota in more than 1,000 days, according to the Trump campaign.
Yet, despite his team releasing scant details about his itinerary, even to the local press, Republicans outnumbered Democrats at Hermantown’s Jerry Alander Carpenter Training Center, worrying those who are opposed to Trump clinching a second term on Nov. 3.
The Republican National Committee and the Minnesota GOP organized roughly 300 people to line Miller Trunk Highway for Biden’s stop. Democrats had less than half that number and told the Washington Examiner they didn’t know one another. Some, though, had traveled more than two hours from Minneapolis to see their party’s standard-bearer.
Tommy Moe, a retired miner from Virginia, Minnesota, predicted that the presidential race in his state would be close again after 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by only 1.5 percentage points (or 45,000 ballots). Moe, 65, based his prediction on the number of union workers he knew who felt “an affinity” for Trump because of the China trade deal and his unorthodox approach to politics.
“We didn’t have a very good turnout,” he said. “If the Democrats don’t get their act together and start getting as fired up as the Republican side is … we need a turnout. Democrats win if they turn out.”
“I focus on early primaries and the way the candidates perform in those early contests,” Norpoth said in the press release. “It’s a very good predictor, and a leading indicator of what’s going to happen in November.”
The professor said he was unsurprised at the model’s prediction this year, citing Trump’s performance in the primaries earlier in the winter.
“When I looked at New Hampshire and I saw that Donald Trump got 85 percent of the votes … I was pretty sure what the model was going to predict,” he said in the release.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, pulled down only 8.4% in New Hampshire, Norpoth said, a number that is “unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of being president,” he stated.
Enjoy some “Oh God, how I hate Trump, but Democrats are insane” hand-wringing from American Enterprise Institute wonk Danielle Pletka:
[Three paragraphs of pro-forma #OrangeManBad snipped]
I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues. I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses — almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November — would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy. That could include the abolition of the filibuster, creating an executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power; an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority; passage of devastating economic measures such as the Green New Deal; nationalized health care; the dismantling of U.S. borders and the introduction of socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown.
I fear the grip of Manhattan-San Francisco progressive mores that increasingly permeate my daily newspapers, my children’s curriculums and my local government. I fear the virtue-signaling bullies who increasingly try to dominate or silence public discourse — and encourage my children to think that their being White is intrinsically evil, that America’s founding is akin to original sin. I fear the growing self-censorship that guides many people’s every utterance, and the leftist vigilantes who view every personal choice — from recipes to hairdos — through their twisted prisms of politics and culture. An entirely Democratic-run Washington, urged on by progressives’ media allies, would no doubt only accelerate these trends.
Nor do Biden’s national-security positions reassure me. While he promises a welcome change in style and a renewed respect for U.S. alliances, Biden would, like Trump, pull our troops from the Middle East and South Asia. Worse yet, he would slash defense spending and likely renew the Obama administration’s misbegotten love affair with Iran’s tyrants. Then there is the Democratic Party’s hostility to the state of Israel. Biden supporters will clamor that the candidate’s history is very pro-Israel, but as president would he be strong enough to stand up to the new Democratic Party’s less-than-ardent support for the Jewish state?
To which I can only reply: What the hell took you so long to figure this out? (And then, to prove the extent of her Beltway Blinders, she turns out a paragraph on “execrable gun-toting racists.”)
“The former vice president’s campaign reported on Sunday that it and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) began September with $466 million in the bank – roughly $141 million more than the cash on hand for the president and the Republican National Committee (RNC).” Snip. “The infusion of cash allowed the Biden campaign to vastly outspend Trump’s team to run TV ads in August and September.” Big ad spends and no ground game? Sounds like Team Biden is trying to rerun the Jeb! strategy…
Republicans are preparing to release a report in a matter of days on their investigation focused on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, a move they hope will put fresh scrutiny on the Democratic nominee just weeks from the election.
The controversial probe, spearheaded by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is focused broadly on Obama-era policy and Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.
The GOP report, which is set to be released this week, is expected to argue that Hunter Biden’s work impacted Obama-era Ukraine policy and created a conflict of interest given then-Vice President Joe Biden’s work in the area.
Trump, Biden claims, “could not rally a single one of America’s closest allies” to support the extension of the [arms] embargo. What he neglects to mention is that the expiration date on the embargo was set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration and described by Biden as “a policy that was working to keep America safe.” That policy was, per Biden, discarded by Trump in favor of one “that has worsened the threat.” So which is it: Did the Obama-Biden Iran policy keep America safe? Or is the best argument against the Trump administration that they have failed to successfully roll back Obama-era policies?
Snip.
He fails entirely, in his op-ed ostensibly addressing the Iranian threat, to come even close to describing the full extent of how its regime has targeted U.S. forces in the Middle East, committed grievous human-rights violations against its own people, and funded terrorist organizations and plots around the globe. His failure to reckon fully with the evil of Ayatollah Khamenei seems indicative of not only his less serious estimation of the Iranian threat, but also the fact that he has made his peace with the current regime staying in power over the long term. He makes this belief explicit when he calls “Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’” strategy “a boon to the regime in Iran.” He again avoids explaining how, probably because this claim is untrue by every available metric.
Maximum pressure has effectively choked the Iranian economy. The JCPOA had helped Iran achieve GDP growth rates of 12.5 percent in 2016 and 3.7 percent in 2017. In 2018 — the same year the U.S. exited the deal — Iran’s economy contracted by 5.4 percent. 2019 was even worse, at -7.6 percent. Notably, this economic disaster has led to Iranians flooding into the streets many times over the last two years to protest not only pocketbook issues, but the regime’s restriction of basic freedoms. While Biden may be content to leave the ayatollahs in power, the Iranian people appear to be far less willing. Furthermore, Iran’s regional position has been undermined by the Trump administration’s successful efforts to strengthen Israel’s relationships with Arab nations, including the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.
Instead of backing maximum pressure, Biden supports what he calls a “smart way to be tough on Iran.” Ignoring Iran’s flagrant violations of the JCPOA even before the U.S.’s withdrawal, the sunset provisions on the agreement, and Israel’s discovery of documents detailing Iran’s nuclear program, Biden falsely asserts that the JCPOA had “verifiably block[ed] Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.”
College professors give seven times as much to Biden as Trump. That’s quite shocking. I would have expected the ratio to be more like 20-1 or 50-1. Biden must have remarkably poor fundraisers. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
” Democrats’ new strategy for winning the White House: Threaten riots if they lose.” The public doesn’t seem so hoit on the idea…
“CNN Forum Throws Nothing But Softballs and Pathetic Biden Strikes Out Anyway.” “A real low point came when the declining Biden couldn’t remember what to call the place where the mail goes.”
Segregation, what a blast from the past! I remember when I was already a full-grown man in the year 1960 and me and the boys would gather outside the soda shop to make sure only the white folks got in. Maybe those jeans and that jacket I wore are back in style again too. Jill? Where’s that trunk with all my old clothes?”
