Posts Tagged ‘Karen Bass’

Ex-LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva Discusses The Homeless Industrial Complex

Sunday, April 16th, 2023

Here’s a video where Ex-LA Sheriff Alex Villanueva discusses how the Homeless Industrial Complex racket works there.

  • Five people a day die on the streets of LA in the gutter like a dog. Five a day. Like, five on drugs from overdosing overdosing on drugs, from illnesses that are treatable. But if you’re not being treated, like, for example, you’re insulin dependent type one [diabetes]. Without insulin you die. That’s what happens, because these are people are not in a state of mind to actually accept and seek medical care for a problem, so it goes untreated they die, or they overdose and they die, or they do both and they die. I think in 2020-2021, they registered, I think, over 1,800 deaths of that type on the street, which is mind-boggling, but it’s consistent.

  • “If you don’t pay attention, people are going to die. So the people, the activists, they want to get in the way. ‘Don’t touch them, you’re criminalizing poverty!’ or this or that. Yet they have no answer. And their solution is just to let people die on the street. That’s not a solution.”
  • “The [homeless] count is getting bigger, not smaller.”
  • “There’s a perception in the entire nation that, if you’re homeless and you like to use drugs, go to LA. Until that train stops, it doesn’t matter what you do locally in LA. You can’t defeat 49 other states sending all their homeless their derelicts their drug addicts to LA.” I don’t know, a lot still seem to be going to San Francisco. And we need to do more to spread the word to Austin’s drug addicted transients in hopes they move there.
  • When he started trying to clean things up, he got immediate pushback from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. They had “no desire whatsoever” to work with him.
  • “They’re not doing anything about it because the homeless industrial complex is alive and well. Look at the career arc of Holly Mitchell, supervisor. Karen Bass, mayor. Community organizers. Now they’re running non-profits. Now they’re receiving contracts from the county, from the city. Now they’re in public office. Those two in particular prime example of it, and that’s the wave of the future.”
  • “You’ve got a whole community of people that are in the 501c3s, the non-profits, and uh Boards of Directors, CEOs. The amount of money is pouring into the nonprofits is just incredible. There’s no governance, there’s no oversigh, there’s no accountability on the results. They just keep shoveling money at them, and the problem keeps getting worse and worse.”
  • “This has become a system for people to to get in and get involved, and actually build a career and build a path to politics. The top 10 CEOs of non-profits eight hundred thousand dollar a year. They were making more than twice what I was making as sheriff, and the size of my operation dwarfed all of them probably combined. But that tells you the influence the money involved.”
  • “From 2011 to 2021, L.A. County spent 6.5 billion dollars on homeless initiatives. The homeless count went from 39,000 to over 80,000. it doubled in size.”
  • “It’s engulfing every corner of life in L.A County.”

    • Watch the whole thing.

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, video, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 8 Comments »

    BidenWatch for August 3, 2020

    Monday, August 3rd, 2020

    Biden promises to shovel trillions into Social Justice and green energy ratholes, how Democrats plan to steal the election, more Slow Joe verbal stumbles, and a potential VP pick has a commie past. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • “Joe Biden’s Costly, Radical Race and Gender Agenda.”

    Joe Biden says he wants equality. Who could be against that? But if just declaring yourself in favor of equality were enough, we would not still be arguing about equality in 2020. As always, when politicians talk about inequality, watch your wallet. And in this case, watch the Constitution, too.

    In the past week, the Biden campaign has announced plans of Castro-esque length aimed at racial equality and women’s equality. We suppose we should at least welcome Biden’s continued willingness to use that old-fashioned word “women.” But Biden is so stuck in the past that he would pronounce the Equal Rights Amendment already ratified based on state legislative approvals in the 1970s. The deadline for the expiration of those long-ago votes was so clear, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg considers them dead letters. Biden would go further, demanding Senate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a radical-feminist 1970s treaty under which even Scandinavian countries get hectored for allowing women to assume the primary role in child-rearing. Biden would also restore the Obama-era unilateral executive fiat under which domestic violence and sexual violence are made the basis for political asylum, a position with no basis in the immigration laws enacted by Congress, and no limiting principle.

    Human rights get rough treatment under the plans. Biden proposes to roll back due-process protections for the accused in campus sexual-assault cases. The secret ballot for union elections is to be replaced by reviving “card check” elections. Biden once posed as a pro-lifer reluctantly supporting legal abortion, while opposing — for four decades — taxpayer-funded abortion. So much for that. He pledges that “his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate Roe v. Wade,” and that he will “restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood,” restore U.S. funding to the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund, and “restore the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate” to ignore the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision and restart the government’s assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

    Many of the proposals boil down to the same old thing: more federal spending of taxpayer money, more power and goodies for unions, more workplace regulations, more dividing people up by race. The price tag of all these initiatives adds up to some $7 trillion in new spending, most of it permanent. Right off the bat, a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” is pledged in a “clean energy future,” with the restriction that “disadvantaged communities receive 40 percent of overall benefits of spending in the areas of clean energy and energy efficiency deployment” — a telltale sign that this is more about spreading money around to favored constituencies than about “science.”

  • But don’t forget that Biden’s climate change is also going to bankrupt us.

    The Biden plan requires we eliminate all greenhouse gases from the electricity grid that powers the country by 2035. As is usual, Biden is an underachieving. We’re all supposed to be dead in 10 years if you believe the climate alarmists. This deadline is just more proof that no one does.

    As Reason editor Nick Gillespie pointed out, the current plan is just another way to pander to organized labor. He also correctly pointed out that there is no way we should be spending $2 trillion after all the pandemic spending. However, you can be sure that it will not deter Biden.

    However, the Guardian is also pointing out what serious opposition the plan will face. The program requires building tens of thousands of new wind turbines and millions of new solar panels. These numbers are likely an underestimate. Renewable energy sources are very low-density and not well suited to powering urban areas. There are also some areas of the country where neither would be particularly efficient.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of money: “How Biden’s Foreign-Policy Team Got Rich“:

    Sergio Aguirre and Nitin Chadda had reached the most elite quarters of U.S. foreign policy. Aguirre had started out of school as a fellow in the White House and a decade later had become chief of staff to U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Chadda, who joined the Pentagon out of college as a speechwriter, had become a key adviser to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in even less time. Now, Chadda had a long-shot idea.

    They turned to an industry of power-brokering little known outside the capital: strategic consultancies. Retiring leaders often open firms bearing their names: Madeleine Albright has one, as do Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. Their strategic consultancies tend to blur corporate and governmental roles. This obscure corner of Washington is critical to understanding how a President Joe Biden would conduct foreign policy. He has been picking top advisers from this shadowy world.

    Snip.

    The problem for Aguirre and Chadda was that neither young man was a marquee name. Chadda realized that the latest crop of senior officials hadn’t yet started their own named consultancies. “The thought for us was to build a living and breathing platform, with those who are enthusiastic about serving again,” he said. Staying up late one night, they drafted a plan and came up with the first target they would pitch.

    Michèle Flournoy had served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012. Both Aguirre and Chadda had known her well in the Obama administration. Since leaving office, she’d spent several years in consulting and was hitting her stride. With Flournoy as senior adviser, Boston Consulting Group’s defense contracts grew from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. Before she joined, according to public records, BCG had not signed any contracts with the Defense Department.

    Flournoy, while consulting, joining corporate boards, and serving as a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, had also become CEO of the Center for a New American Security in 2014. The think tank had an annual budget of about $9 million, and defense contractors donated at least $3.8 million while she was CEO. By 2017, she was making $452,000 a year.

    If a Democrat were to win office, she would likely become the first woman defense secretary. She had considered an offer to serve as deputy to Trump’s first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, but ultimately withdrew from the vetting process and stuck to consulting. “That’s more of a labor of love,” she told me. “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important.”

    Intrigued by Aguirre and Chadda’s idea of starting her own shop, she had one condition: find another big name, so it wouldn’t just be Flournoy and Associates.

    They needed another co-founder. Establishing a new firm was an investment and a risk, and many Obama officials were already spoken for, some headhunted by corporations or consultancies, others returning to academic appointments or finding respite in research institutions—many wearing all those hats at once.

    Flournoy could carry her own private practice, but she didn’t want a firm with her name on it alone. The trio reached out to defense and intelligence honchos, but with no luck. Then a particular Washington fixture came to light.

    He had been Vice President Joe Biden’s right-hand man for almost two decades and finished out the Obama administration as deputy secretary of state. He was known for his unimpeachable ethics. Having written Biden’s speeches for years, he had started to enunciate with the vice president’s drawl when he appeared on CNN. He had never cashed in on his international connections, years of face time with Saudi, Israeli, and Chinese leaders.

    His name was Tony Blinken. With his commitment to join Flournoy as founding partner, a new strategic consultancy was born. They called it WestExec Advisors.

    Add Avril Haines, another Obama alumnus, to the list of names.

    If you believe that personnel is policy, it’s worth reading the whole thing. WestExec sucked up a lot of defense contractor consulting cash.

  • CNN interviews Obama-to-Trump swing voters. 66% still pick Trump over Biden. Ignore the mandatory CNN condescension.

    They think a businessman is best suited to turn the country around economically. They feel Covid-19 was not Trump’s fault, and he’s doing the best he can to contain it. They conflate the Black Lives Matter protesters with the rioters attacking federal buildings and retail shops. They don’t want historic monuments torn down. And they dismiss defunding the police as ridiculous.

    These voters tell me they want America finally to be put first; they oppose immigration and trade policies they say give benefits to foreigners at their expense. And they want a non-politician who relentlessly fights back, after witnessing too many office holders fold in the face of special interests.

    These voters may sound like typical Fox News watchers, but, significantly, the overwhelming majority are not. Many are, instead, people who get their news disproportionately from local television, regional websites and Facebook. Compared to the kinds of people who seek out news from national cable channels, many swing voters reside in a national politics desert.

    Reading between the lines: “These people are beyond the reach of, or see through, the national MSM preference falsification system.”

  • Both President Trump and Biden are building out legal armies:

    The Republican National Committee (RNC) has pledged $20 million this cycle to oppose Democratic-backed efforts to ease voting restrictions while Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said his campaign has assembled 600 attorneys as a bulwark against election subterfuge.

    With a little more than three months until Election Day, the voting rules in key battleground states are the focus of bitterly partisan court fights that could influence the outcome of the presidential race. These include lawsuits to expand mail-in voting in Texas, extend vote-by-mail deadlines in key Rust Belt swing states and restore the voting rights of up to one million indigent Floridians with felony records.

  • “The Democrats Plan on Stealing the Election.”

    At present, the Democrats are attempting to unseat an incumbent president by devising a plan where their candidate doesn’t have to be seen in public for most of the general election campaign. They’re desperate to keep Joe Biden hidden until as many early and mail-in votes as possible are cast for him because they know that the first time he’s on his own in public he’s going to pull down his mask and start sniffing strangers, all the while barking, “Barack likes me!”

    On the rare occasions when the idiot in the basement is let off-leash by his wife and handlers, he’s babbling about President Trump trying to “steal” the election. He keeps saying it, too, most recently at a virtual fundraiser hosted by one of the celebrities Hillary Clinton thought would wish her to victory.

    Snip.

    In each one of these “steal the election” rants, Biden immediately rambles on about mail-in ballots. Again, that’s all they’ve got and they know it. That’s where the real election-stealing can happen and it’s not going to be done by the Republicans.

    The Democrats have shown — especially in the Trump era — that most of what they throw at the Republicans is just a bunch of twisted political psychological projection.

    For example, take the absurd notion that Dems have recycled from 2016. They are again insisting that President Trump won’t accept the election results, giving it a minor update, saying that he won’t leave the White House now that he’s the incumbent.

    This from the party whose vanquished alcoholic grandmother from 2016 is still going on television and saying that the election was stolen from her. Throw in Stacey Abrams and her ongoing psychotic break about being the real governor of Georgia and I think we can see which side has a difficult time accepting the results of an election.

    In fact, the violence we’re seeing now has more to do with hating Trump than it does with the death of George Floyd. The Democrats began their “peaceful protests” almost the moment Trump was elected and have been ranging back and forth between simple public incivility and violence ever since. It’s been one long tantrum about not accepting the 2016 election results.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • In fact, Democrats are actually wargaming Biden refusing to concede:

  • What President Trump got right and Biden got wrong about banning travel from China due to the Wuhan coronavirus:

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • “Bernie Sanders co-chair: Voting for Joe Biden like eating ‘half a bowl of s–t.'”.

    “It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of s–t in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still s–t’, ” Sanders co-chair Nina Turner told The Atlantic.

    Turner, a former Ohio state senator, was quoted in an article analyzing Trump’s paths to re-election, including by exploiting disaffected supporters of Sanders’ socialist campaign, which lost to Biden despite winning the first three state Democratic contests this year.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • UK’s Sunday Express has a poll up showing President Trump leading Biden by a couple of points:

    The third in a series of monthly Democracy Institute/ Sunday Express polls has given President Trump a surprise lead over his Democrat rival of 48 percent to 46 percent, his clearest lead yet.

    Crucially, President Trump has a lead of 48 percent to 43 percent in the swing states Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin which would put him back in the White House with an electoral college tally of 309 to Biden’s 229.

    Specifically, in Florida Trump has a 47 to 45 point lead, Minnesota (where the black lives matters protests began) a 46/45 lead, and New Hampshire a 46/43 lead.

    The polling suggests Mr Trump is emerging as the race leader because of a belief he is best in handling the economy.

    With a third of voters putting the economy as the top election issue and 66 percent thinking that the economy is bouncing back after coronavirus, voters believe that Trump is better for the economy by 57 percent to 43 percent.

    Snip.

    According to the poll 71 percent of Trump voters are “shy” to admit it compared to 66 percent a month ago.

    However, 79 percent of Trump voters are enthusiastic about their candidate compared to just 41 percent of Biden voters, two points lower than a month ago.

    Meanwhile, only 4 percent of Trump voters believe they could change their mind while 10 percent of Biden voters could switch.

    Usual poll caveats apply.

  • “Why Won’t Biden Accept an Interview With Fox’s Chris Wallace?” Well, the headline pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it?

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • And you may ask yourself: “What city am I in?”

    And here’s a Twitter thread on just that question:

  • California Democratic Representative Karen Bass has to explain remarks about how awesome Fidel Castro and the Church of Scientology were. (Presumably separately, as opposed to fused together as a Voltron of Suck.) (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Indeed, Bass went to Communist Cuba in 1973 with the far-left Venceremos Brigade.
  • Four from Scott Adams:


    

  • Losing the middle:

  • Evidently a staffer is now always ready to call time on a Biden interview when Slow Joe starts wandering off into Crazyland:

  • Heh:

  • Bill Clinton’s ex-pres secretary (not him, not her, yeah, him) wants you to know that Biden can still lose. But you have to wade through Democratic Party talking points to get to that, so I’ve saved you some time…
  • ‘Squad’ Member Tlaib Won’t Endorse Biden. She supported Sanders in the primaries.
  • “Biden Campaign Says He Is So Close To A VP Pick He Can Smell Her.”

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    BidenWatch for July 13, 2020

    Monday, July 13th, 2020

    Biden drifts left, embraces the Green New Deal, and lifts his platform from Bernie Sanders. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Joe Biden signs up for the Green New Deal. You know, if primary voters wanted a socialist takeover of the economy, they could have just voted for Bernie Sanders…
  • Speaking of which: “Joe Biden’s Unity Task Force recommendations copy and paste word-for-word from Bernie Sanders quite a bit.”
  • Even the Washington Post has noticed how far left Biden has drifted:

    Joe Biden is looking at building 500 million solar panels, slashing U.S. carbon emissions within 15 years, and rapidly expanding a government-sponsored health care plan. He wants to overhaul the way policing is conducted on American streets and the way success is measured in primary schools.

    Over the past week, the presumptive Democratic nominee has offered the biggest burst of policy proposals since he effectively won the nomination, including a plan to spend $700 billion on American products and research. It marks a significant move to the left from where Biden and his party were only recently — on everything from climate and guns to health care and policing — and reflects a fundamental shift in the political landscape.

    The new plans, which have come in speeches, interviews, and a 110-page policy document crafted with allies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), provide a window into how Biden would govern, and they kick off a new phase in a campaign that until now has focused mostly on President Trump’s performance. As Biden releases more plans — including one on climate and clean energy investments this week — he appears to be drafting a blueprint for the biggest surge of government action in generations.

    “I think the compromise that they came up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most progressive president since FDR,” Sanders, a democratic socialist who does not offer such assessments lightly, told MSNBC.

  • Biden wants to make Little Sisters of the Poor bend the knee:

    Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden issued a statement Wednesday evening in which he said he is “disappointed in today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision” in the case Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania.

    “I will restore the Obama-Biden policy that existed before the [2014 Supreme Court] Hobby Lobby ruling,” Biden said.

  • Biden wants to transform America:

    Barack Obama famously (infamously?) said that he wanted to “fundamentally transform” America. Thankfully, he was unable to completely do that. Now Obama’s senile Mini-Me, Joe Biden, is parroting his former boss and going on about “rebuilding” and “transforming” our beloved country.

    Snip.

    America is just fine, thank you. Warts and all, this 244-year-old experiment in freedom is — put mildly — freakin’ glorious. Every leftist who says America needs to be rebuilt or transformed is lying.

    What’s really disturbing is that Joe Biden is the most moderate of the Dems to emerge from that large primary field. If he’s going on about transformation then the center of American politics has moved too far to ever get it back to anything resembling “normal.”

    We’re fine here, Joe. We won’t be needing your help.

  • More on the same subject:

    Putting aside the fact that Biden almost certainly doesn’t have the capacity to consistently write his own tweets, one is left wondering exactly what he plans to transform “this nation” into. Given how much the nation has already been transformed over the last several months, with the continued tolerance of the destruction of cities and America’s history, the promise of some higher level of radicalism coming should worry everyone.

    Biden is not a moderate and never has been. The fact that he likely didn’t write the above tweet is perhaps worse than if he had. He’s surrounded by radicals, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his actual campaign staff, some of whom are alumni of the Sanders and Obama campaigns.

    I’d go further and say that it’s not playing into Trump’s messaging but that it’s reality. Biden is telling us who he is and he has continuously done so. The idea that he’s a moderate is a myth perpetuated by people who want it to be true, i.e. voters who are not comfortable with the current cultural revolution but still want to vote for Biden. They are deluding themselves, believing that he’ll flip a switch when he’s president. He won’t and there’s absolutely no reason to believe he won’t govern exactly as he’s campaigning.

  • Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones: “I Am Black And I Am A Democrat. But ‘I Ain’t’ Voting For Joe Biden This November.”

    Since that day in May when I announced I would support Donald Trump for president, my motives have been questioned, my integrity assailed, even my intelligence challenged. That’s okay.

    I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I am also a black man, the son of a World War II veteran and a proud American.

    In recent weeks, there have been absurd calls to defund and disband police departments across the country by Democrats in response to the unjust murder of George Floyd. These are extreme calls that will only lead to more pain and suffering in our most vulnerable communities.

    As the former Chief Executive Officer of DeKalb County, Georgia, I’ve had to manage one of the largest police departments in the state. I’ve had the experience of dealing with police shootings and comforting the families of victims. But at the same time, I’ve also had the experience of losing two black police officers. I’ve had to comfort their families in the middle of the night and console their young children. I know firsthand when others are running away from chaos, police officers are running into the fight to protect and serve.

    President Trump was sickened by the death of George Floyd and fully committed to ensuring that he will not have died in vain. The president has taken a commonsense approach to heal our nation. President Trump made clear that he will protect all Americans, serve as an ally to peaceful protesters and always uphold law and order.

    But the protesters were determined to sow chaos and destruction, all in the name of racial equality. Listen, during my first legislative session in the Georgia House of Representatives in 1993, I filed the first bill in my career to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag. But I also understand the preservation of our history — the good and the bad. And still I bow to no one in my advocacy for the black community.

    But unlike other Washington politicians, this president actually backed up his words with actions. He signed an Executive Order on police reform — taking steps to build a better bridge between law enforcement men and women and their communities.

    The landmark Executive Order encourages police to implement best practices to protect the people they serve. It sets the highest professional standards for law enforcement officers, while promoting peace and equality for all Americans.

    Under the order, the Trump administration will now prioritize federal grants from the Department of Justice to police departments that meet these high standards. Additionally, the order pushes forward the creation of a national database of police misconduct. This database will root out bad cops and help create accountability between police agencies.

    Where were Joe Biden and the previous administration for 8 years in the White House on this issue? I’ll tell you. They were absent in unifying this country.

  • How the chaos Democrats have sown will end up biting them in November:

    The forces of anti-Trump hatred comprise not just Democratic aspirants to high office but also, and more significantly, the media (social and otherwise), the spoiled, pajama-boy Left, and—above all, perhaps—the entrenched administrative apparatus of government, the self-engorging bureaucracy of the state whose fundamental allegiance is to the principle of self-perpetuation.

    It is all of that which Donald Trump came to office to sweep clean, like Hercules confronting the Augean stables. The first time around the reaction was a compact of contempt and ridicule, but that was only because Trump could not win. The smartest people in the world—Bill Kristol, Nancy Pelosi, Rachel Maddow—they all knew he couldn’t win. So they didn’t come together in a single caterwauling primal scream to stop him.

    This time they have. And since they control almost all the major megaphones, it can sometimes seem that everyone is against Donald Trump and no one is for him.

    It can seem that way, but of course it is not. And that is chiefly for two reasons. First, there are those 63 million voters—perhaps it will be 66 or 68 million this time. Voters whose voices you don’t hear in the pages of the New York Times and whose rigged Google searches and Facebook hot spots somehow leave out of account. They’re sitting at home watching their cities burn, watching monuments to Columbus, to Washington and Thomas Jefferson be defaced or toppled. They see that, and they hear a nonstop litany telling them how racist they are and how evil America is.

    And just about now, a great chasm is opening up. The choice, they see, is not so much between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It is between the America they love—that Donald Trump celebrates—and the out-of-control forces of anti-American hatred that, though he does not understand them, Joe Biden manages to blink and nod and gibber around.

    Everything that is happening between now and November 3 is about November 3. But the fundamental choice is not really Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It is civilization and America on one side, anarchy and woke tyranny on the other. The Democrats thought they could ride the tiger to victory. Instead, they will be consumed by the monster they created but could not control.

  • Mike Huckabee on how those policies would hurt the economy:

    Employing the same pro-growth policies that turned the stagnant Obama-Biden economy into a record-setting dynamo in recent years, President Trump is orchestrating an unprecedented “V-shaped” recovery as our country emerges from pandemic-related lockdowns. The past two months have both seen blowout new records for job creation — 2.7 million new jobs in May, followed by an even more incredible 4.8 million new jobs in June.

    The recovery has been rapid, but our progress remains fragile, and America’s beleaguered workers and business owners could not withstand the strain of Biden’s new taxes and regulations.

    Biden’s proposal to halt all fracking would be particularly disastrous, both economically and geopolitically. Over the course of just four years, Biden’s fracking ban would destroy an estimated 19 million jobs and shave over $7 trillion from our national GDP.

    But Biden’s radical environmentalism gets even worse.

    For the first time in over half a century, America has become a net exporter of fossil fuels under President Trump, whose common-sense deregulatory agenda has allowed our country to become the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. This means our country is now less reliant on Middle Eastern dictators for its oil, and American consumers are paying less at the pump and on their energy bills.

    Joe Biden, however, wants to restore the sort of punitive regulations that were the centerpiece of the “war on coal” waged during the Obama-Biden administration.

    Economic growth and innovation would also be severely undercut in other ways by a Biden presidency. In 2018, the Commerce Department calculated that total regulatory costs were equivalent to approximately 10 percent of the entire national economy — an alarming statistic that President Trump has made it a priority to correct.

    As the most far-left of any Democratic presidential nominee in history, Biden’s platform is replete with proposals to increase the burden of bureaucracy even more.

  • “Joe Biden must release the results of his cognitive tests — voters need to know.” Good luck with that…
  • Does Jill Biden want to run things?

    I truly believe Jill Biden wants to be Edith Wilson 2.0. Woodrow Wilson’s wife basically ran the White House after his stroke in 1919. She only had to do that for two years. I’m pretty sure that Jill Biden would like at least an eight-year run at the gig.

    When Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep’s handlers first began letting him do videos from his quarantine basement, Jill was often sitting at his side, grinning like a proud mother whose idiot underachieving kid had just successfully recited the alphabet for the first time. It was, quite frankly, very creepy to watch.

    I’m still convinced that the overarching Democratic National Committee plan is to get Biden elected, whisk him back to the basement until Inauguration Day, then tell everyone that he’s had a medical situation of some sort shortly after that. Then his progressive VP can take over the job of running the country off a progressive cliff.

    I am also firmly convinced that Jill Biden has other plans.

    For reasons beyond my comprehension, Team Biden keeps releasing videos of this drooling moron. They are all painful to watch, and it seems at times to be a little cruel to mock him. He is, however, making a bid for becoming the most powerful man in the world. As long as he is running, Biden is fair game.

    Jill Biden knows that and she doesn’t care.

    The longer the Joe Biden Obvious Decline Circus is allowed to go on, the more I’m convinced that Jill Biden is a power-hungry madwoman who so desperately wants to be in the White House that she is willing to subject her husband to what has now become bipartisan ridicule.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Joe Biden presidency will bring disaster for the Supreme Court.”

    Progressive activists see Biden as an opportunity to secure the Supreme Court for the left over the next several decades. Some have even floated the idea of expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to “pack” it with liberals the next time a Democrat wins the White House. Biden has rejected that idea, but the enthusiasm it has from progressive activists says plenty about what the left wing of the party wants from him.

    Liberal organizations have seized upon the promise of Biden to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court, urging him to consider someone like Leslie Abrams, the sister of Stacey Abrams, or liberal academic Michelle Alexander, who compared the nation of Israel to apartheid South Africa. Though Biden himself has not yet released his own shortlist of potential nominees, progressive activists who would wield immense power in his potential administration are already narrowing down the names.

    Progressive activists see Biden as an opportunity to secure the Supreme Court for the left over the next several decades. Some have even floated the idea of expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to “pack” it with liberals the next time a Democrat wins the White House. Biden has rejected that idea, but the enthusiasm it has from progressive activists says plenty about what the left wing of the party wants from him.

    We cannot afford to give Biden the opportunity to appoint new Supreme Court justices. With so many important cases decided along such narrow political lines, and with the “conservative majority” becoming increasingly fragile as Chief Justice John Roberts continues to drift leftward, the way to prevent a liberal takeover of the highest court in the land is to ensure that the next few vacancies are filled by reliably conservative judges.

  • Don Surber thinks Trump will win 37 states.

    Biden finished fifth in Iowa to Hillary and Obama in 2008. And Biden has not aged well in the intervening 12 years.

    In the past month, Democrats have made the same mistake they have made in every election they have lost since 1968. They turned their backs on patriotism.

    The liberal scorn of patriotism will once again backfire. Democrats are burning down their cities. Conrad Black sees this destruction as re-electing the president.

    He wrote, “This is some new form of farce noire, a nightmare of outright idiocy, part slapstick and part horror, playing on a gigantic stage. Fortunately, we know it has to end on November 3, but the audience will likely tire of it and bring down the curtain well before then. No society can tolerate this for long. The arsonists will not burn down society; the society will awaken and banish the arsonists.”

    There is an element of extortion in all this. Democrats are saying everything will return to normal only if we elect Biden.

    Otherwise…

    The attacks on the flag and the nation’s Founding Fathers (as well as Lincoln and Frederick Douglass) show an arrogance and tone-deafness. Americans still love their country. Be they the sons and daughters of slaves or slave owners or people who were neither, Americans are proud of their country and proud of their heritage.

    I said 37 states in January. I say 37 states in July because Democrats have done not one thing to win over Trump voters, who were enough in number to win 30 states and the presidency in 2016. Seven more Hillary states will flip. I mean, does anyone seriously believe Minnesotans will not switch to President Trump after the George Floyd riots?

  • Here’s a long, flattering portrait of Michigan Democratic representative Elissa Slotkin, who came in the semi-blue-wave of 2018. Ignore the fawning and the credence given the now-debunked “Russian bounty” scandal and read the part where she thinks Democrats are deluding themselves if they think 2020 is in the bag:

    “I don’t believe it,” Slotkin says matter of factly. “Listen, if anyone tells me they can accurately predict what major events are coming in the remainder of 2020, I’ll give them a thousand dollars. I mean, this has been the year of black swans. … I don’t for one minute think this [presidential] race is safe in anyone’s column. I’ve been literally begging people to ignore those polls. They are a snapshot in time. And if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming next.”

    I stop Slotkin there. Is her gripe that these snapshots—the polling, both public and private, that shows Republicans bleeding support across the board—are accurate in the present, yet subject to so much volatility in the future as to be worthless? Or does she believe the snapshots themselves are inaccurate here and now?

    “I think they’re inaccurate,” she replies without hesitation. “Here’s the thing. When I started to run and I had to hire a pollster, I interviewed a bunch of different folks and I decided to do what we do sometimes at the Pentagon, which is to take a ‘bad cop’ approach to the interview. … It was five or six folks that I interviewed, and I said, ‘You got something wrong. You screwed up in 2016. What did you get wrong? And how are you going to fix it?”

    Only one pollster, Slotkin says, admitted that he got it wrong. That was the person—Al Quinlan of GQR, a large Washington-based firm—she hired.

    “He told me that they fundamentally undercounted the Trump vote; that the Trump voter is not a voter in every single election, that they come out for Trump, so they’re hard to count,” she explains. “On a survey, if someone says, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to vote,’ you don’t usually continue the conversation. And some of them didn’t have any desire to be on those poll calls; they didn’t have the 20 minutes to talk to somebody. They didn’t want to do it. And so, they were fundamentally undercounted.”

    Slotkin, ever the intel analyst—identifying trends, compiling a report, presenting a conclusion—tells me, with a high degree of confidence, “I believe that same thing is happening right now.”

  • “Biden wins Puerto Rico primary.”
  • Veepstakes: “The Biden VP Pick Who Would Satisfy Both Ilhan Omar and George Will. California Representative Karen Bass’s low-key manner and progressive credentials could strengthen Biden’s campaign when he needs it most.”
  • Veepstakes: Profile of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Because being less strident while letting the city you lead burn less than Minneapolis is evidently a qualification.
  • “Culture…culture…culture…”

  • Wrong again, Joe:

  • Joe Biden: Steady and Pathetic:

  • Pandering to the hard left again:

  • Reminder:

  • “To Save Time, The Babylon Bee Will Now Just Republish Everything Biden Says Verbatim.”

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    BidenWatch for June 29, 2020

    Monday, June 29th, 2020

    Black voters have about the same enthusiasm for Biden as they do for leftover tuna casserole, his non-profit did more to line staffer’s pockets than fight cancer, and Biden agrees to three debates with Trump. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Politico has a long, revealing profile of a group of black voters in Detroit. All think the Democratic Party has done nothing for them. All support Biden. None are enthusiastic about him. All think Trump is going to win.

    If what I heard Sunday in southeast Michigan is at all representative of the Black community across America, Democrats should be disturbed and afraid. Not because they risk losing an election, but because they risk losing the loyalty of an entire class of voters.

    “Here’s the thing about Black people,” TONYA GRIFFITH said between sips of rose-colored liquid from a clear plastic cup. “We are real passive politically—until they give us a reason not to be. And trust me, we’re not feeling real passive right now.”

    Three weeks ago, Griffith said, that wasn’t the case. Black voters she knows were coasting on autopilot during this election year. There was no feeling of intensity. And then came the killing of George Floyd. “That lit a fire under our ass like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Griffith said.

    But how long will that fire burn? Griffith is skeptical. A 55-year-old clinical therapist, she was born and raised in Detroit. She had to work hard to make it—but she knows plenty of folks who didn’t make it. She was drilled by her parents on basic civic obligations—but she knows plenty of folks who weren’t. Griffith will vote this November. But she isn’t excited about it. And truth be told, she doesn’t know anyone who is.

    “I bet our numbers come up, because nobody liked Hillary Clinton, but I don’t think they come up much. And I know they don’t get back to those record numbers from Obama,” Griffith said of Black voter turnout. “We look at Joe Biden and see more of the same. It’s about the era he came up. It’s about his identity—he’s a rich, old white man. What are his credentials to us, other than Obama picking him? It’s nice that he worked with Obama. But let’s keep it real: That was a political calculation. Obama thought he needed a white man to get elected, just like Biden thinks he needs a Black woman to get elected. We can see through that.”

    These sentiments resurfaced in almost every conversation I had. First, that Biden choosing a woman of color might actually irritate, not appease, Black voters. Second, that the inferno of June would flicker by summer’s end and fade entirely by November. And third, that Biden does little to inspire a wary Black electorate that views him as the status quo personified. It was thoroughly convincing. Here were high-information voters, giving their personal opinions while also analyzing the feeling of their community, all making the same points in separate conversations.

    We’re all Democrats, but we’re all Black Democrats. So, we can see things for what they are,” explained URSURA MOORE, a 53-year-old real estate agent. “Some people thought just because we had a Black president, he was going to make things better for Black people—he was going to free Black prisoners, wipe out Black debt. That was just ignorance. But the disappointment some of us felt with Obama—more so with the Democratic Party—that was real. And it hasn’t gone away. So, people start to wonder whether the outcome even matters. They wonder whether they should bother voting at all.”

    She stopped herself. “I’m going to vote. But Trump’s getting back in office either way.”

    This was another recurring theme of my conversations: a fatalism about defeating Trump this fall. Not a single person I spoke with at the cookout told me they believed Biden would win.

    “There’s no excitement for Biden,” Moore said. “Trump can get his people riled up. Biden can’t. That’s why there’s all this talk of putting a Black woman on the ticket. But that’s not going to help him win.”

    Read the whole thing.

  • How lacking is enthusiasm for Biden? Even after clinching the nomination, Biden lost three out of ten New York and Kentucky primary-voting Democrats. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Biden agrees to three debates with President Donald Trump. What could possibly go wrong? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Biden says that 120 million people have died from the Wuhan coronavirus.
  • Biden wants the federal government to force everyone to wear masks.
  • He can’t even read off a Teleprompter.
  • Basement Joe gets to avoid uncomfortable questions.
  • “Nearly 65 percent of the Biden Cancer Initiative’s money went into the pockets of staffers.”

    Nearly two-thirds of the money the Biden Cancer Initiative spent since its founding in 2017 went toward staff compensation and six-figure salaries for top executives. The group spent far less on efforts to eradicate cancer.

    One of several nonprofits Joe Biden created following his tenure in the White House, the Biden Cancer Initiative paid top executives lavishly, with salaries comprising nearly 65 percent of its total expenditures. That is well above the 25 percent charity watchdogs recommend nonprofits spend on administrative overhead and fundraising costs combined.

    The nonprofit raised and spent $4.8 million over its two years in operation, its 2017 and 2018 tax forms show. Slightly more than $3 million of that amount went to salaries, compensation, and benefits. At the same time, the group spent just $1.7 million on all of its other expenses. A bulk of this cash—$740,000—was poured into conferences, conventions, and meetings. It did not cut a single grant to any other group or foundation during its two-year run.

    An analysis of nonprofits by Charity Navigator, which rates charities for effectiveness, found that mid-to-large-sized nonprofits paid their chief executives an average salary of $126,000 per year—far less than what the Biden Cancer Initiative paid its president, Greg Simon, who pocketed $224,539 in 2017 and $429,850 in 2018. Charity Navigator’s primary criterion for rating charities is whether they “spend at least 75% of their expenses directly on their programs.”

  • “Presumably things will continue with maximizing the hatred of Trump and Biden just waiting there, being not-Trump. Why doesn’t he DO something?!”
  • NYT writer pushes Tammy Duckworth as Veep pick. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • While one on CNBC boosts Val Demings.
  • Another veep possibility floated is California Democratic representative Karen Bass, a “a non-descript, non-entity in the House, not known for pushing any important legislation,” who just happens to be on record praising Fidel Castro. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • And speaking of black female California representatives who haven’t covered themselves in glory, here’s a WaPo writer pushing Rep. Barbara Lee.
  • If Biden becomes president, get ready for stocks to tank. “The stock market typically performs better when an incumbent is reelected, while it usually underperforms when the White House flips from Republican to Democrat, according to data from Bank of America. According to a recent RBC Capital Markets survey, the majority of the firm’s clients still believe that Trump’s reelection is a positive for the market, with 60% saying that a Biden presidency would negatively impact stocks.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Oopsie!

  • Heh:

  • Meet Joe Biden’s cabinet. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

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