Between that South Park episode and the NBA, awareness of China forcing corporate entities to silence its critics has exploded into the mainstream, so let’s do a roundup of Chinese news:
I watch with unease as the People’s Republic of China turns 70 amid great fanfare about its growing economic and political heft, the longest-running nation state to ever fly a flag emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, surpassing even the former Soviet Union. Ever since it embarked on its modernization program, China has been subtly cultivating and influencing the Chinese diaspora to its cause.
At an overseas Chinese conference just shortly before President Xi Jinping consolidated power and was reelected at the 19th Party Congress, Xi noted that the realization of the ‘great rejuvenation’ of the Chinese nation ‘requires the joint efforts of the Chinese people at home and abroad’, saying that he hoped that those who have Chinese descent outside of China — up to 60 million ethnic Chinese in more than 180 countries — can work hard for and share in the ‘Chinese dream’.
The word ‘Chinese’ can refer to the citizenry of a country, a race, a language, and even a culture, ambiguities that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploits in order to appeal to the diaspora via the sentimental heartstrings of heritage via ‘flesh and blood’. It exports and reinforces the concept that there is only one politically-correct way of being Chinese: loyalty to the party first and foremost, above all else. In effect, it’s like the ummah, an Arabic term that describes the supra-national global community that unites all Muslims as one. Only this one is based not on religion but on ethnicity, where Tibetans, Uigher Muslims, Chinese dissenters, Hong Kong protesters, are excluded and marginalized like infidels.
Almost nothing embodies the scope of China’s attempts at a global soft power offensive more as the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes, where there are 480 branches operating on six continents around the world (watch out, Antarctica!). These institutes ostensibly offer language classes and promote cultural education and diplomacy, but in reality they are de facto fronts for generating good Public Relations and patriotism to the CCP. In 2014, the American Association of University Professors issued a report urging colleges to close the institutes or renegotiate their mutual agreements to guarantee a certain degree of academic freedom and control.
The report asserted that ‘most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China. Specifically, North American universities permit Confucius Institutes (CIs) to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and control of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction of debate.’ As these centers draw scrutiny from the FBI, the Pentagon and even Congress, many CIs on US campuses have been closing.
The rhetoric between pro-Beijing factions and critics of the Chinese regime has been heating up, especially in light of the current conflict with Hong Kong protesters spilling over at pro-democracy rallies in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. There are roughly 1.5 million Chinese students studying overseas — roughly 300,000 in the United States alone — and increasingly, they are getting caught up in the crossfire of the escalating tensions and heightened scrutiny for ties to Beijing.
Making China part of the world trade system was supposed to lead to China liberalizing and adopting democracy. It was a beautiful theory with a lot of supporting evidence behind it. One tiny problem: It turned out not to be true:
Back in May, I went back to the arguments American policymakers had with themselves in the 1990s as they contemplated extending “most-favored-nation” status to China, and then “permanent normal trade relations.” Something weird happened when chief executives of American companies discussed China back then. They kept describing a market of a billion new customers, as if the average Chinese citizen was awash in disposable income. They pictured a China full of people eating American soybeans, drinking Coke, wearing blue jeans made with American cotton, celebrating with American bourbon and riding on Boeing airplanes.
America’s policymakers, by and large, agreed. Here’s Bill Clinton describing America’s future relationship with China in 2000, after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed Permanent Normal Trade Relations:
With more than a billion people, China is the largest new market in the world. Our administration has negotiated an agreement that will open China’s markets to American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals to computers.
Bringing China into the WTO and normalizing trade will strengthen those who fight for the environment, for labor standards, for human rights, for the rule of law . . . At this stage in China’s development, we will have a more positive influence with an outstretched hand than with a clenched fist.
Clinton hailed the deal as a step to “a China that is more open to our products and more respectful of the rule of law at home and abroad.” And from that year on, America’s trade relationship with China was “normal.”
Except . . . China wasn’t a “normal” country, and it never was one. Only a few decades earlier, the Chinese regime had perpetrated some of the greatest horrors of the century upon its people — the Great Chinese Famine — which killed tens of millions! — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. The Tiananmen Square massacre had just been a few years earlier. It still had political prisoners and a police state, it was slowly but steadily building up its military, it still harvested organs from prisoners in its jails. And yet most of America’s political and business leaders looked across the Pacific, averted their eyes from the draconian human rights abuses, focused relentlessly on that growing economy and potential billion customers and declared, “we can do business with these people.” And they told the rest of us to trust them. Oh, and Bill Clinton assured us that money donated by Chinese citizens in his reelection campaign had never influenced his thinking about China. Even though in 1992, he had campaigned as a tough critic of China and called George H. W. Bush as too soft on the regime.
Nothing could seem to dissuade America’s business leaders when it came to their vision of an endlessly mutually profitable relationship with the regime. We kept being told how absolutely ruthless and relentless the Chinese efforts at corporate espionage were, and how brazenly and defiantly they stole patents, blueprints, and intellectual property. I don’t know about you, but when somebody steals from me, I don’t want to keep doing business with them. Yet America’s business leaders never seemed to experience anything that made them conclude the regime is so bad that it’s not worth doing business with them. There was this consistently weird disconnect in the comments from American business leaders, as they kept saying their Chinese competitors were overtly or secretly state-subsided, or would complain about corruption . . . but no one wanted to stop putting more resources there.
Whereas the Soviet Union largely walled itself off from its greatest adversary, literally and figuratively, China’s leaders have sought to exploit America across the board for decades. China profits from U.S. financial markets; purchases cutting-edge U.S. firms; pilfers trade secrets and technology from U.S. companies, including defense contractors; and promotes a massive misinformation campaign on U.S. soil to sway policy and public opinion in its favor. Yet far from being a source of strength, Communist China’s dependence on America is one of its primary weakness.
Like the Soviet Union before it, China’s tyranny stifles the creativity of its people. While Beijing grants some few a small amount of economic autonomy, it refuses to let the average Chinese citizen fully pursue her dreams, apply her talents, or realize her potential, preventing untold advances across every field of endeavor. There’s a reason Chinese parents send their children to American universities and their cash to Western banks. China’s seemingly inexorable rise requires continued access to America and the fruits of our system of free enterprise and the rule of law.
This reality is coming into focus under President Trump. The administration has started to disentangle Communist China from America’s economy and institutions. China’s stock markets are suffering and its economy is growing at the slowest rate in nearly three decades. Additional unraveling of U.S.–China ties will likely further demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Communist economic model, and its need for external support.
Beijing knows this, hence its relentless focus on tamping down trade tensions, but not national security or human-rights issues. It also benefits from the widespread belief that Communist China is here to stay, so we might as well deal with it rather than hope for a better, more democratic regime. In our organization’s discussions with government leaders, prominent academics, and corporations, we have found an overwhelming belief that a change in China’s government would be catastrophic. They prefer to work with the devil they know, not hope for a devil they don’t.
Yet the lessons of history are worth remembering. The fall of the Soviet Union ushered in a new era of freedom, prosperity, and peace in its former lands, and far beyond. A collapse of red rule in China will surely be more complicated, given its greater interaction with the world, but it stands to reason that the Communist party’s loss will be the Chinese people’s gain. Many others, America included, will benefit, too.
Communist China is weaker than it appears. However, it’s unlikely to fall unless the United States, and the rest of the free world, continue to ratchet up the pressure. The Communist ideology is a parasite that cannot survive for long on its own.
It is outrageous that the Chinese Communist Party is using its economic power to suppress the speech of Americans inside the United States: https://t.co/9t04p1jxuP
Imagine living in a world in which not just entertainers & athletes but non-public figures can be fired by employer or kicked out of sporting event by a team, here in America, for condemning the actions of the govt of #China
Democrats want to ban cheeseburgers, Biden’s eye fills with blood, the third debates loom, and Williamson is shocked to find out that leftist activists are mean liars. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
CBS battleground states: Let’s shotgun all these in one line. New Hampshire: Warren 27, Biden 26, Sanders 25, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7. Iowa: Biden 29, Sanders 26, Warren 17, Buttigieg 7, Harris 6. South Carolina: Biden 43, Sanders 18, Warren 14, Harris 7, Buttigieg 4. Nevada: Sanders 29, Biden 27, Warren 18, Harris 6, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3.
Texas Lyceum (Texas): Biden 24, O’Rourke 18, Warren 15, Sanders 13, Harris 4, Castro 4, Buttigieg 3, Klobuchar 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1, McAuliffe (lolwut) 1, Moulton 1, Williamson 1. Keep in mind that the Lyceum poll always oversamples Democrats, but their intra-Democratic poll numbers aren’t necessarily inaccurate. And Biden beating Beto in his home state, and Castro garnering a puny 4%, are both hilarious…
The presidential ambitions of the leading Democrat candidates may not survive CNN’s 7-Hour ‘Climate Change’ Townhall.
It was a man-made disaster, created in the fevered swamps of CNN and fueled by pledges of allegiance to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
The candidates came across as not-serious-people. Worse, they came across as nanny-state monsters who really do want to take away your plastic straws and cheeseburgers to save the planet. It was a self-parody of what woke totalitarianism sounds like, with an abnormal focus on meat.
Republican attack-ad makers have hours of footage that can be sliced and diced to make any of the candidates who appeared at the Townhall look insane. And they wasted no time.
Ban all the things! “Here is a comprehensive list of everything the left wants to have banned for the sake of human survival:
One of Yang’s supporters, Scott Santens, has been keeping track of the apparent slights via Twitter: an MSNBC graphic with other candidates polling at 2 percent but not Yang, oddly unbalanced graphics that seem to include just enough candidates to get in the media favorites but exclude Yang. As Axios recently pointed out, Yang is sixth in the polling average yet 14th in terms of the number of articles written about his candidacy.
Clearly, something is going on here. But what I’ve noticed is that Yang is not alone in facing media contempt. Without fail, every candidate who has come from outside the Democratic establishment, or who has dared to question the Democratic establishment, has been smeared, dismissed or ignored by most media.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who resigned from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in protest of its treatment of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and dares to challenge the bipartisan pro-war foreign policy consensus, has been smeared as “unpatriotic.” This despite the fact that she is an Iraq War veteran who, to this day, serves in the Hawaii Army National Guard. The Daily Beast published an absurd article titled “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign is Being Boosted By Putin Apologists” about how three of her donors, among tens of thousands, had tangential connections to Russia. NBC News published a piece on how Russian bots were boosting Gabbard’s campaign. It cited one expert, a group that reportedly faked Russian bot activity in an Alabama election.
Gabbard had the distinction of being the most-Googled candidate in both of the first two debates. The media, however, have shown little interest in understanding why her pro-peace message might hold appeal.
I’ve talked quite a bit about media bias against Sanders. The latest, most egregious case involved a Washington Post “fact check” that found Sanders accurately cited academic research — but managed to give him three Pinocchios anyway.
Marianne Williamson, an author and activist, is definitely off the beaten path for a candidate, but she is an incredibly accomplished woman, with seven New York Times bestsellers to her name and decades of activism under her belt. Perhaps it would be interesting to hear more of her thoughts on national healing and reconciliation rather than just casting her as a weirdo and mocking her for a tweet about the power of prayer, something to which many, if not most, Americans subscribe.
These candidates occupy much different poll positions and have wildly different approaches, styles and philosophies. Yang, the cheerful prophet of doom; Williamson, the spiritual healer; Gabbard, the teller of hard truths about American imperialism; and Sanders, well, he’s just Bernie. But they have something important in common: They don’t fit the mold. They aren’t in the club. They defy the rules.
Asian techies are supposed to develop the latest AI, not lead the revolution to put humanity first. Democratic female veterans are supposed to burnish the party’s hawkish cred, not doggedly pursue diplomacy and engagement and call out the American war machine. Spirituality is not supposed to be mixed with politics on the left, even though religion is fully weaponized by the right. And septuagenarian democratic socialists who are not fashionable in any way are not supposed to be rock stars with youths or be top-polling presidential contenders.
Rather than deal with these contradictions — which, by the way, clearly fascinate the public, judging by Google and Twitter trends — it’s easier for many in the media to mock, smear or ignore.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida are four states likely to determine the 2020 presidential race, and Donald Trump won each by a percentage point or less. “Of course, we’re deprived of any painfully honest discussion of how much the Democrats need black voters in big cities to control the electoral votes of the swing states and why they’re having trouble getting these votes in the post-Obama era.”
Perhaps part of it is due to the pressure of being an old white man who’s posing as the standard-bearer of a political party whose sole agenda these days is the extermination and debasement of old white men. How taxing must it be to run on the premise of, “Well, sure, everything I represent sucks, but at least I acknowledge it, so vote for me, anyway”? I could see how that could take its toll on a fella.
But most of it is due to the fact that he has always been a liar who jumbled the facts, compounded by a septuagenarian brain that is rapidly fermenting.
Biden is often referred to as a “gaffe machine,” and although that’s accurate, it doesn’t tell the whole story. A gaffe, by definition, is an unintentional mistake. There was the time when, in front of a crowd, he told wheelchair-bound Missouri state senator Chuck Graham to stand up. There was the time he called Barack Obama the “first sorta mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Those are simply dumb, clumsy mistakes.
But throughout his career, he has also blatantly lied about himself:
He claimed he finished in the top half of his law-school class; he actually finished 76th out of 85.
He has repeatedly claimed that both he and members of his family were coal miners. He even plagiarized sections of a speech from British politician Neil Kinnock about how his ancestors would work in the coal mines for 12 hours and then come up to play football for four hours. He was ultimately forced to admit he was lying.
He plagiarized portions of a law-school essay so extensively he had to beg administrators not to expel him.
He implied that Osama bin Laden’s men “forced down” his helicopter in Afghanistan, when the truth is that the pilot landed safely as a precaution to avoid a snowstorm.
He claims he was “shot at” in Iraq, when the truth is that a mortar landed several football fields away from where he was safely ensconced in a Baghdad motel.
He claims he participated in sit-ins and boycotts during the Civil Rights era and then was later forced to acknowledge that, no, he didn’t do any of that, although he did briefly work at a predominantly black swimming pool.
Joe Biden did not bring his fastball tonight. Nor did he know what sport he was playing or when the game was supposed to start. I think he was accidentally wearing someone else’s clothes.
The returns, which Booker released in April as part of his presidential campaign, show that he donated more than $110,000 of stock in Yandex, a Russian search-engine firm, from April 5, 2013 to October 11, 2013. In the middle of that stretch, on May 16, 2013, Booker filed a financial disclosure report. Yet on the report, an accounting of Booker’s assets and liabilities, he did not list Yandex. How could Booker have given away stock in the company if he did not own it?
“I certainly would be interested in hearing the campaign’s explanation,” said Brendan Fischer, director of the federal reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog group. “It’s not uncommon for candidates to divest financial holdings that could be controversial or pose a conflict of interest, but if a candidate does hold assets at the time the financial disclosure report is filed, they have to be reported. And it’s not clear that that’s what happened here.”
Hey, remember all the way back to earlier this year when media companies told us that playing footsie with Russians was the worst thing in the world? Buzzfeed offers up a failure to launch piece.
There’s a world you can imagine where a candidate like Booker would be running strong with younger voters, especially young black voters. Research, such as a recent report titled the Black Millennial Economic Perspectives Report, published just this month found 36% said criminal justice was their top domestic issue — a top Booker issue. (A similar study from two Democratic PACs found that “despite having every reason to be disenchanted with politics and the political process, unregistered black millennials remain aspirational and committed to protecting and empowering their families and communities.”)
But Booker didn’t have strong black support in the race the moment he jumped in, and he can’t bank on it coming later. There is another leading black candidate in the primary, and that’s to say nothing of the high levels of support right now for Joe Biden, or the affinity for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders among some younger black activists and voters.
You can get a good sense of the intellectual vacuity (and religious sterility, if you’re interested in that) of this mode of politics from, e.g., Kirsten Powers’s banal and illiterate conversation with Buttigieg, written up for general amusement in USA Today. (You will not be surprised to read that Mayor Pete has “started a crucial conversation,” and has proceeded from cliché to cliché.) Powers, when she is not half-chiding her fellow Christian for showing what she considers excessive grace to people who have naughty political ideas (one wonders what she would consider insufficient grace), hits the reader with a few insights that are not exactly blistering in their originality: Jesus, she says, never mentioned abortion (but then, neither does the Constitution), while He did speak a great deal about looking after the poor. Powers writes this as though Christianity had been planted in a cultural vacuum and as though “feed my sheep” were synonymous with “vote for the party of the welfare state no matter what other horrifying business may be on their agenda” — and as though these kinds of issues had not been the subject of centuries of Christian inquiry. The New Testament is silent on the questions of, among other things, child pornography and cannibalism, but Christians are not expected to maintain a morally indifferent attitude toward these. Still less would Christians be expected to maintain such indifference in the face of the Supreme Court’s happening upon a right to cannibalism lurking in some unexplored constitutional penumbra and the subsequent establishment of a franchised chain of coast-to-coast cannibalism outlets enjoying public subsidies.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He wants to tax robots. He may throw in the towel if he doesn’t make the October debates. “I’m going to go and try to get into the October debates, and if I can, I think that’s a good reason to keep going forward. And if I can’t, I think it’s really tough to conceive of continuing.” They add: “Should de Blasio make good on his promise and drop out of the campaign in October, he’ll be forced to head back to his day job in New York City—likely to both his and his constituents’ chagrin.” Along those same lines: “NYC Mayor De Blasio Logged Just 7 Hours At Work For Entire Month.” De Blasio is running for President because it gives him an excuse to stay away from the city that hates his guts.
We have an interest, obviously, in Hong Kong. There’s a lot of economic activity that flows through Hong Kong. Obviously, U.S. businesses have a lot of interest in Hong Kong. So we clearly have an interest in Hong Kong maintaining the autonomy that they were promised.
But there’s also a bigger issue, and that is the role the United States has in providing some moral leadership, and standing up for people who are fighting for their rights and for their ability to have some self-governance, particularly self-governance that’s been assured to them, or at least was assured to them. So I think we not only have a direct interest in actually how things unfold in Hong Kong, particularly around their—the rule of law and their legal system that they have that’s very unique, and we have a lot of interest, but more broadly I think we have a leadership role around the world to stand up not only for human rights—which is another, obviously, issue related to China—but also for individuals who are fighting for their right to self-governance. And I think they have it, and I think we should be making our voice clear on this issue.
Snip.
I think it’s right to be a lot tougher on China. In my opinion, China’s acted in many ways like pirates across the last several decades, right? They’ve stolen things. They’ve stolen intellectual property. They haven’t played by the rules, particularly rules that they gave assurances that they would play by. You know, and they are taking islands in the South China Sea.
I mean, so there is a response that’s necessary because China’s become our economic rival by doing, in my judgment, three things. They worked really hard. Good for them. They made very smart investments, in some ways smarter than we did. Good for them. But they didn’t play by the rules. And we can’t allow the next several decades for them to continue to not play by the rules because I think that’ll put us in a very, very significant kind of difficult economic position.
So I think it’s appropriate to draw a hard line with China on a lot of these practices. And I think the president was actually right in raising this issue, but I think his diagnosis of the problem is entirely wrong and the way he’s approaching it is wrong.
You could call it meaningless blather, and you’re not far from wrong, but it’s still more coherent than 99% of prominent Democrats have been on the challenge posed by China.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Opposes impeachment. It is “important for us to think about what is in the best interest of the country and the American people, and continuing to pursue impeachment is something that I think will only further tear our country apart.”
Kamala Harris entered the presidential race with impressive credentials – a popular black woman with an inspiring story who hailed from a large Democratic state and drew accolades for her fiery questioning of President Donald Trump’s nominees.
Yet despite a shot of adrenaline after confronting front-runner Joe Biden in the first debate, she has failed to catch fire with Democratic voters who are torn between a nostalgic fondness for Biden and a revolutionary desire for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Harris’ attempt to replicate her feat in the second debate backfired among Democrats who say she went too negative on Biden. The Californian also suffers from a perception that she lacks a deep ideological well to guide her policy ideas, in contrast to her three main rivals who are better-defined. And her past as a prosecutor has earned her supporters and detractors.
Harris and Senator Cory Booker “really went after vice president Biden – it redounded to their detriment that they went after Biden so much. Because it also looked like they were not just going after Biden, but they were going after the Obama legacy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is neutral in the primaries.
Weingarten said many Democrats left the June debate thinking, “Kamala seems really feisty and let’s look at her.” But in the July debate they were turned off by Harris and other aggressors because “it looked like they were burning the house down, as opposed to building on what Democrats believe in.”
Harris surged from about 7% to 15% in averages of Democratic polls immediately after the first debate in late June, putting her in second or third place in the crowded field. But it was a sugar high – she’s back to the 7% she had when summer began.
For Harris, the danger is that she’s another Marco Rubio. The Florida senator, too, had a potentially history-making candidacy during the Republican nomination battle in 2016 and was hailed by the party establishment as presidential timber, before he failed to translate that on the ground.
Ouch! And like Rubio, Harris has a senate career to fall back on. “Kamala Harris claimed she ‘sued Exxon Mobil’ as California AG. She didn’t.” Ha ha! “Harris Only Three Points Ahead of Gabbard After Ridiculing Her Poll Numbers a Month Ago.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s not wild about the process, which I can understand from someone stuck in very last place in a field this ridiculously large. But it’s not like he’s run even a minimally competent campaign:
The mayor of Miramar, Florida, has not found much of an audience or appeared in any debates. He has raised a mere $93,812 and assembled a small campaign staff. And now, according to internal campaign documents and interviews with eight former Messam campaign staffers and contractors, his campaign appears to be in near-total disarray.
The documents as well as staffers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect future employment prospects, depicted a no-hope campaign that nonetheless was embroiled in bitter disputes over money and control — a “D-list version of The Sopranos,” in one description. In particular, staff members claim that Wayne and his wife, Angela Messam, have refused to pay them for their work. All of the staffers and vendors that BuzzFeed News spoke with said they were never fully compensated for their work on the campaign and, in some cases, weren’t paid at all for expenses they’d fronted from their own bank accounts, including business cards for the campaign and flights, hotel rooms, and security costs for a trip to the Middle East. In some instances, staffers were told by the Messams that the couple believed them to be “volunteering” for the campaign, despite emails from senior staff to the Messams telling them about start dates for employees, and what staff members say were verbal agreements and offer letters from the campaign for their positions.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently the Odessa shooter was not, in fact, a Beto backer, which I rather suspected when this made the rounds; never beleive something that seems too pat without verifying it. (And yeah, Snopes, but the piece cites some actual, non-risible sources.)
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) And just like with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, you can bet that all that population control is aimed firmly at “undesirable” black and brown kids.
A former ThinkProgress writer took to Twitter to condemn billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer after receiving a job notice for his campaign following news that the liberal news site is shutting down.
Rebekah Entralgo, a writer who covered immigration policy and detention at ThinkProgress, said she received a LinkedIn message that attempted to recruit her after the activist group the Center for American Progress (CAP) said it could not find a new publisher for the site.
“Sorry to learn about ThinkProgress,” the message said in a screenshot Entralgo posted. “Tom Steyer 2020 is hiring for digital and comms roles — we do pay a relocation fee…”
Steyer (a CAP board member whose 2020 run could have funded TP for a decade as @ryanlcooper pointed out) is now trying to capitalize off of the site’s demise. You truly cannot make this stuff up pic.twitter.com/r5dJAhJUVJ
There are plenty of jobs I’ve been solicited for that I didn’t apply for, but in none of the cases did I declare “Screw you, you should have funded my last job!”
Warren is not overwhelmingly popular among women right now, but she has had a small, consistent edge among women in recent polls. Our average of national polls1 taken between Aug. 1 and Sep. 1 do show Warren getting some extra support from women, though not to a huge degree. Women were 2.9 points more likely than men to support Warren on average, while both Biden’s and Harris’s backers were nearly identically split between men and women — with Biden getting the most backing from both groups. And according to Morning Consult’s weekly national primary poll, Biden’s support is particularly strong among black women, too.
Biden will once again be the piñata at Thursday’s debate because the best way for any of his nine rivals to gain ground is to beat up on him, as Sen. Kamala Harris proved in the first debate.
But Warren is the one to watch this time. Most national polls have her second, with two recent ones showing her trailing the former vice president by just four points.
She is drawing by far the largest crowds and is focused, energized and organized. Biden, on the other hand, had a terrible week, with a growing realization in the party that his flubs and memory lapses are not passing problems.
Both his blood-filled eye and his gibberish remarks about climate change added to doubts he can go the distance. His team wants to cut back on his schedule and lowered expectations for Iowa and New Hampshire, moves that smell like panic.
“I know this sounds naive. I didn’t think the left was so mean. I didn’t think the left lied like this,” Williamson told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in an interview. “I thought the right did that. I thought we were better.”
Williamson accused the left of lying about her use of crystals and “crystal gazing,” telling Remnick that there has “never been a crystal on stage” at any of her events and “there is no crystal” in her home.
She accused those on the left of also falsely accusing her of having told AIDS patients not to take their medicines or implying that “lovelessness” causes diseases and “love” is “enough to cure their diseases.”
“I’m Jewish, I go to the doctor,” Williamson said, ripping those on the left for labeling her as an anti-science candidate who does not believe in modern medicine.
Mr. Yang has attracted an ideologically eclectic coalition that includes progressives, libertarians, disaffected voters and Trump supporters who have swapped their red MAGA hats for blue ones that say MATH — “Make America Think Harder.” Those who have come into his camp say his presence on YouTube, on podcasts and in the nationally televised debates helped them begin to see the logic behind giving people free money.
His performance in Houston could be crucial to sustaining his campaign’s newfound momentum. In the days immediately after the July debates, Mr. Yang’s campaign raked in about $1 million — more than a third of what his team had raised during the entirety of the second quarter. About 90 percent of the people who gave were new donors.
The campaign is now on track to raise more than $5.5 million in the third quarter of the year, according to Yang advisers — more than the total amount Mr. Yang had raised during the previous 20 months that he spent as a candidate. While his operation does not rival the size or scale of his more established rivals’ campaigns, his team has ballooned to over 50 staff members from around 10 initially, as new offices have opened in Nashua and Portsmouth, N.H., and Des Moines and Davenport, Iowa. At the New York headquarters, the campaign has leased additional office space and is building an in-house digital team.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
….stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border. This is being done to greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States. Details of the agreement will be released shortly by the State Department. Thank you!
Mexico will deploy National Guard throughout the country with priority on its southern border under the joint declaration with the U.S. https://t.co/N7vSTcA9iD
The threat of tariffs got #Mexico to agree to take unprecedented steps to control illegal migration.
Will be very interesting to see how media covers this now. It is going to be very hard for some of them to give @POTUS credit for this. https://t.co/XmKMrSH5gU via @NYTimes
President Trump’s Mexico tariff threat worked! Mexico signed a immigration deal with the U.S. to stop the flow of migrants thru Mexico. Trump is the FIRST President in modern history to understand the most powerful weapon we have is our economy… well done, @realDonaldTrump.
Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump and his team for reaching an agreement with Mexico that will substantially reduce the number of illegal immigrants coming through Mexico.https://t.co/mY3rVuXjYh
The Mexican government has pledged to do more than Congressional Ds to address this crisis: Trump announces deal to avoid tariffs on Mexico – Los Angeles Times https://t.co/WTPrHmuP0U
— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) June 8, 2019
President Trump’s newly-signed agreement with Mexico is great news for both our economy and our country’s border security. Once again, @realDonaldTrump has proven those who doubted him wrong by getting Mexico to step up their efforts to help us secure our southern border.
Monmouth from April 23rd: Biden 27, Sanders 20, Buttigieg 8, Harris 8, Warren 6, O’Rourke 4. “California Sen. Kamala Harris has 8% support, off just slightly from 10% in March and 11% in January.” But she can’t be thrilled at that trendline…
UNH New Hampshire poll. Sanders 30, Biden 18, Buttigieg 15, Warren 5, Harris 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Klobucher 2, Yang 2, Ryan 2. That’s as high as I’ve seen Buttigieg.
Emerson Texas poll: Biden 23, O’Rourke 22, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 8, Warren 7, Castro 4, Yang 3, Harris 3, Klobucher 3. That’s an abysmal showing for Castro in his home state, and Harris should be doing better just off urban voters from Houston and the Metroplex. Indeed, Harris is down in every poll here.
Election betting markets. Yang is polling better at 4.9% for the Dem nomination than Warren at 4.7%. One wonders which Bulwerk-backer has Marco Rubio 2020 at 0.5%…
Old white guy? Joe Biden has hair plugs that are older than the median Democratic primary voter. Sanders and Biden are a year apart — and both of them are older than Trump. Creaky? Creepy stuff in his history? Dusty northeastern union-hall politics? Check all those boxes. Worst: Sanders and Biden, though they are miles apart in rhetoric, are in many ways a couple of outmoded Teddy Kennedy liberals in a party that wants nothing to do with dinosaurs of that particular species.
Snip.
The old-white-guy thing isn’t working out too well for Sanders. In Houston earlier this week for a cracked festival of progressive inanity called “She the People,” Sanders got read the old-white-guy riot act: Pressed about racial issues, Comrade Muppet started to launch into yet another retelling of the fact that he marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 — but the crowd shut him down, hooting and laughing at him. “We know!” someone shouted. They’d heard it all before. Sanders, visibly flummoxed, went on to talk up the fact that he’d supported Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, and the room responded with, approximately, “Jesse Who?”
The Reverend Jackson’s is a name to conjure with no more.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s entry into the 2020 presidential primary sets the stage for another knock-down, drag-out fight between the establishment wing of the party and the ascendant left, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Snip.
The 2016 primary contest left liberals fuming at what they viewed as establishment interference in the race, underscored by the hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails that showed favoritism toward Clinton.
And some mainstream Democrats are unnerved by what they view as a group of left-wing interlopers, online brawlers and sore losers trying to take over the party.
The same fight played out in 2017, when party officials elected Tom Perez to be the next DNC chairman. Perez, who was backed by Biden, narrowly defeated Sanders’s preferred candidate, former Rep. Keith Ellison (Minn.). That race similarly cut along establishment and grass-roots lines.
Snip.
But many centrist Democrats are just as worried about how the left will approach the primary contest.
They’re frustrated by Sanders’s steadfast refusal to officially join the Democratic Party and worried by what they view as his team of political assassins. And they wonder whether Sanders’s supporters will accept the outcome of the primary and turn out to vote for the nominee in the general election if Sanders falls short again.
“There is a ‘Bernie-or-bust’ coalition, and they have no allegiance to the party,” said the Democratic strategist. “They don’t care about campaign infrastructure or winning up and down the ballot. They’re just concerned about bullshit litmus tests and defending their guy no matter what and pretending that everyone else is a member of the big bad establishment.”
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. Still no news since his three week old tweet.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning toward a run. He’s been very quiet since his cancer surgery. Hard to blame him…
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. See last week’s post for his announcement video. Naturally, there’s tons of Biden news to wade through:
He raised $6.3 million within 24 hours of announcing, the most of any of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls, but not a “blow you away” number. “Biden’s campaign announced Friday that 96,926 donors contributed, with an average online donation of $41. His campaign also noted that 97% of his online donations were under $200.”
Biden has long since been close to lobbyists. Biden’s presidential campaign is currently being coordinated by his former chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, who was himself a lobbyist. In the past, Ricchetti’s role with Biden’s vice presidential office sidestepped the Obama administration’s ban on employing lobbyists: Ricchetti received a special waiver to take his role with Biden.
Thursday’s fundraiser will be rife with lobbyists — but not those registered in the federal system.
The Biden for President host committee includes Kenneth Jarin, a lobbyist with Ballard Spahr who is registered to work on behalf of toll road operator Conduent and several health care interests. Jarin is a major donor to both parties and has given to political action committees controlled by former Republican House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner.
Another host of the Biden fundraiser is Alan Kessler, another lobbyist who works with the firm Duane Morris. Kessler is registered to lobby in Pennsylvania for American Airlines and the global information tech firm Unisys Corporation, among other clients.
Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, another host of the event, is a senior adviser to the local lobbying operation at Dentons, a law firm with a vast government affairs operation. Nutter is also on the board of Conduent.
In another election, at another time, the late entrance of a well-funded candidate leading in the polls might send convulsions through the primary field.
But Joe Biden’s arrival into the 2020 race has not had that effect. No Democratic rival appears doomed. No one’s fundraising seems in danger of drying up. Instead, in joining the race, the former vice president has laid bare how unsettled the entire 20-candidate contest remains — and how many in the party don’t believe the 76-year-old Biden is prepared for the rigors of a modern campaign, or the demands of a party transformed.
What, you mean the other candidates didn’t immediately start rending their garments and proclaiming “Woe is me! All is lost!”? Do tell…
Carpe Donktum nails Biden on the “very fine people” lie:
I’ve written previously on how the Democratic Party is more moderate and older than you probably think it is. About 50% of Democratic voters call themselves moderate or conservative, which is about the same percentage that are at least 50 years old. Most Democratic candidates running this year don’t seem to recognize that fact.
We’ve seen a Democratic field in which the candidates seem to be falling over each other to move further left, where the youngest Democrats are.
Biden, meanwhile, is sitting all alone in his base. In a Monmouth University poll released earlier this week, he had a 19-point advantage over his nearest competitor with Democrats who called themselves moderate or conservative. He was up by 18 points among those who were at least 50 years old. A Quinnipiac University poll released last month (that had Biden in a similar overall position) gave him even bigger advantages with more moderate and older voters.
Now, Biden does trail with the youngest and very liberal Democrats. But they make up a minority of the party, and Biden’s competitors are splitting that vote.
R. S. McCain thinks that Biden’s 29% is his peak. I’m not so sure. I think there are a substantial portion of people who vote in Democratic primaries that haven’t swallowed the SJW line, and will show up at the polls for Biden.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Get’s a New York profile. Actually talks about meeting with Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Jared Kushner, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, as both Mayor of Newark and a Senator. “I value comity, I value finding common ground.” He posted 10 years of tax returns. “When I said we should crash the Booker campaign event, I didn’t mean literally!”
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Maybe. The Montana legislative session has already ended, and he had a closed event in Butte. But: “You know, the Legislature just left town, they left 300 bills on my desk, so I have quite a bit of work to do to sort the rest of that out, and haven’t made any decisions what I’d do after I get to serve governor.” Slight downgrade.
But another part of Buttigieg’s appeal rests on the fact that during and after the McKinsey stint, he did two very un-meritocratty things: First, he joined the Navy Reserve and was briefly deployed to Afghanistan, and then he moved back to the small, de-industrialized Midwestern city of his youth, not to join his parents in its academic enclave, but to run for mayor of South Bend and attempt to save a piece of the heartland from stagnation and decline.
These unusual steps away from elite self-segregation inform the way he sometimes seems to want to run for president: As a bridge-builder between the heartland and the coasts, as the Ivy League guy who takes Trump voters seriously as something more than just “deplorables,” as the first gay president who, like Nixon going to China, might be able to call a truce in the post-Obergefell culture wars and convince cultural liberals that they don’t need to bring every evangelical florist or Catholic adoption agency to heel.
But this bridge-building possibility coexists with another theory of Buttigieg, in which his unusual trajectory back homeward, far from a rejection of the meritocratic mentality, is actually just a clever meritocrat’s “hack” of the system of ascent — an advertisement for his own seriousness that, having served its purpose, can now be abandoned while he tries to vault insanely high, to return not only to Washington but to the Oval Office (or at least the Naval Observatory or a cabinet office).
This is the reading offered by Buttigieg’s pungent left-wing critics: I especially recommend a long takedown of the young mayor’s memoir by Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs, and a shorter critique by a scion of the Studebaker family (Studebakers being the cars whose manufacture once built South Bend’s blue-collar prosperity).
These anti-Buttigiegians look at his mayoral record and see a politician who never really escaped the mentality of Harvard and McKinsey, whose big idea for the city involved bulldozing poor people’s houses and encouraging internet companies to move in — a “creative class” theory of urban renewal that didn’t supply the jobs that working-class South Benders need.
Here’s that Current Affirs takedown of Buttigieg’s memoir Douthat mentions. Current Affaris is both progressive and uber-smarmy, so read it only if you want a hard-lefty hit-piece. But I’ve got to admit that the author’s deep reading of Buttigieg’s own extremely lengthy index entry for himself in his own memoir (“CrossFit phase of, 133”) has some definite zing to it.
Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Presidential hopeful John Delaney wants you to unfollow Trump on Twitter.” See, I would think if you have some 19,800 Twitter followers, you wouldn’t want to draw attention to that fact by telling people to stop following the guy who has just under 60 million…
It’s clear that Gillibrand has made women and “women’s issues” a focus of her campaign, and it is clearly reflected in her fundraising. More than half of all the individual donations to her campaign during the first fundraising cycle of 2020 were from women. That’s more than any other 2020 contender can say. She is prioritizing issues like national paid family leave, access to abortion and birth control, improving public education, and stopping sexual harassment and abuse. But is that a winning strategy?
Maybe her hot pink campaign logo and website splashed with the word “BRAVE” all over are a little too on the nose. Maybe constantly describing herself as a “young mom” is a label that just isn’t doesn’t seem to fit. Maybe women voters don’t liked to be courted simply because of their sex. Or maybe, she’s just too much like Hillary Clinton.
Ouch!
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. But there is this: “Andrew Gillum Agrees To Pay $5,000 Fine In Ethics Case Settlement.”
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. He gets a New York Times profile. “In its 191-year history, the Democratic Party has never nominated a presidential candidate from west of the Central time zone.” I doubt that’s the tidbit I would have led with. Also “He got all these lefty programs through but supports fracking.” He had a brain freeze and forgot what GDP stands for.
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. “Klobuchar hails Anita Hill as an inspiration,” because of course she does. Genuflecting to St. Anita is a required ritual on the left again, mainly as a way for “woke” candidates to bash Biden for the Clarence Thomas confirmation. But one wonders how much a confirmation hearing that occurred more than a quarter-century ago will mean to an electorate that doesn’t remember Jesse Jackson…
Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Last week’s Clown Car Update noted reports that Messam had missed payroll for campaign staffers. This week: “The two-term mayor’s campaign staffers have scattered from the nest after Messam missed payroll, first reported by The Miami New Times. Reports from the road say rallies have been sparsely attended. Now, Messam is mum, referring people to his legal counsel.” Also this: “There was speculation that Messam has his eyes set on the seat of Congressman Alcee Hastings, 82, who is reportedly going through treatment for pancreatic cancer.”
Democratic congressman Seth Moulton (D-MA), an Iraq war veteran who announced his candidacy for president early this week, wants you to know that presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who are trying to push America towards more progressive policies are bad for our country, and he’s running to save us.
“We can’t go too far left or we will lose middle America.”
It seems like Moulton is competing with Biden, Buttigieg and Delaney for the “non-crazy” Democratic Party vote. Whether this is a viable strategy remains to be seen. I have my doubts. But I was mildly surprised to see that Moulton has 138,000 Twitter followers, which is more than any of the other representatives running save Gabbard. Of course, that says less about how well Moulton is running than how badly Swalwell, Delaney and Ryan are…
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got a KVUE interview: “I want to change the conversation. I’ve listened to some of these political shows and we’re not even talking about the real issues in the campaign. I think first and foremost, we need an industrial policy that actually lifts middle-class wages.”
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Inside Bernie’s army: “On Saturday, the campaign launched a nationwide organizing program with nearly 5,000 house parties in every state throughout the country, demonstrating a show of force for his volunteer network and an opportunity to mobilize supporters in a primary contest that could remain close through the early voting states and beyond.” He’s also building out Our Revolution as a “shadow campaign” in the Midwest. “Bernie Sanders Can Win, But He Isn’t Polling Like A Favorite,” which compares Sanders’ numbers to candidates with similar numbers in previous cycles from Jeb! in 2016 all the way back to Hubert Humphrey in 1972. “Three of these candidates [Romney 2012, Obama 2008, McCain 2008] won their nominations; the other 12 lost.”
Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Probably Out. But he did attract a sarcastic Trump tweet:
Weirdo Tom Steyer, who didn’t have the “guts” or money to run for President, is still trying to remain relevant by putting himself on ads begging for impeachment. He doesn’t mention the fact that mine is perhaps the most successful first 2 year presidency in history & NO C OR O!
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “A Guide to Elizabeth Warren’s (Many) 2020 Policy Proposals.” How Warren is threatening Bernie’s left flank. Op-Ed: “Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are bad for the Democrats.” “Both represent the purist liberal wing of their party, a faction that has failed to elect a single president since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. And with only one out of four Americans calling themselves liberals in the last election, the notion that a doctrinaire left-winger can win in 2020 is an exercise in self-delusion.” Warren was evidently well-received at an SEIU shindig that Sanders skipped.
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Report on a Yang rally in Los Angeles, complete with comparison to cult bad film The Room. “He is the hyper-enthusiastic high school teacher and his supporters are the jocks, goths, and potheads who never knew school could be so fun.” He also campaigned in Iowa.
Diversity erodes social trust, trust being that extremely valuable form of social capital that enables people to make handshake deals, leave their doors unlocked, and trust institutions to treat them fairly. Sociologist Robert Putnam was so shocked to discover this that he sat on his results for seven years before publishing. In diverse communities trust drops not only between ethnolinguistic groups but within them. It’s insidious and very harmful – low-trust societies are bad, bad places to live.
The U.S. has a proud tradition of assimilating legal immigrants into a high-trust society, but it succeeds in this by making them non-diverse – teaching them to assimilate folk values and blend in. Putnam’s work suggests strongly that without the ability to rate-limit immigration to be within some as yet undetermined maximum, the harm from erosion of trust would exceed the benefits of immigration.
We are probably above the optimal legal immigration rate – the highest compatible with avoiding net decrease in social trust over time – already (later in this post it should become obvious why I believe this). There is little doubt that we would greatly exceed it without immigration controls.
Anyway, even if ending border enforcement were a good idea (and I conclude that it is not, despite my libertarian reflexes) it’s a political nonstarter in the U.S. Trump got elected by appealing to sentiment against illegals, and beneath that is a phenomenon one might call Putnam backlash; everywhere outside a few blue-state enclaves, Americans sense the erosion of social trust and have connected it to illegal immigration.
If you run around saying “We should end border enforcement”, enough people to form a blocking coalition are going to hear that as “He wants the U.S. to sit on its hands as erosion of social trust degrades it into a shithole.” Of course most of them don’t have this intellectually analyzed – it’s a more a gut feeling. But no less powerful for that, especially since the problem is real.
Do you want more Trump? Because that is how you get more Trump – or possibly someone worse. I don’t think there is actually a large cohort of Americans willing to sign on to full-throated 19th-century-style nativism yet, and I’m glad of that. But that’s where the next turn of the screw takes us.
We can only save the positive benefits of immigration by controlling it. And by growing some freaking humility about our biases. It’s easy for elite whites like you and me to see only the upside of immigration (cool restaurants, interesting music, exotically pretty girls, lower price levels due to labor cost push on the things we buy, getting to feel virtuous about our inclusivity); immigration seldom has any obvious downside for us unless we roll snake-eyes and get killed by MS-13 or something.
We tend to miss the fact that if you’re a native-born unskilled laborer or minority or legal immigrant the cost-benefit ratio looks very different and not favorable at all. Loose labor markets are good to us, but sure as hell not to our poorer compatriots. A little more compassion and a little less class-blindness on our part would be an improvement.
Show of hands: Who thinks this stops, even slows down, once those mean old not-actually-assault weapons get banned? That liberals have taken a hard stand in favor of cowardice does not exactly fill one with confidence that once we give up our Second Amendment rights that we’ll be safer or freer.
I guess we both have blood on our hands for having this chat – the real heroes are Sheriff Israel and the Broward Cowards. Because of the children or something.
But at CPAC, the president was super clear – he is not wavering on the Second Amendment. Sure, gooey puff boys like Marco Rubio are eager to roll over and show belly, but a hard line on our rights is not going anywhere. Hey Little Marco, this is the Republican Party, not the Foam Party.
Rubio, displaying the political savvy that convinced him to don a studded leather collar and be led around on a leash by Chuck Schumer, talked Congressman Brian Mast into rolling too. Suckers. The New York Times was delighted that Mast agreed to commit career suicide by sticking his constituents in the back when he tried to leverage his being a vet into somehow qualifying him to tell everyone else what their rights are. Amazing, but those of us vets who don’t dance to the libs’ tune never seem to get a Golden Ticket to the NYT op-ed page.
These gullible outliers don’t change the fact that the rest of the GOP is solid. That’s why the left is changing the rules and trashing our norms to do what they can’t do politically through intimidation. They have cultural power and we don’t, and they now seek to use businesses to destroy our rights and silence our voices. Understand that they don’t want an argument or a conversation – they want to use their non-governmental cultural power to deny us access to a platform so that we are unable to make our views heard. We need to recognize this dangerous trend and counterattack ruthlessly with our political power.
Schlichter also reminds conservatives that liberals don’t hate the NRA, they hate you:
Just give them a listen. Those carefully selected moppet puppets are out there on TV telling Normals “We are going to outlive you.” When leftists tell you that you are going to die first, you should believe they mean it. They have a track record of making that happen.
And then there is the new meme, that the NRA is a “terrorist” organization. This means you are a “terrorist” simply by advocating for your political views. Think about that. Labeling your political opponents as “terrorists” – gee, that can’t end badly. Violence against and suppression of terrorists is okay, isn’t it? And when this ploy works with guns, it will happen with the next right the left wants to take from us.
How’s that blood on your hands? Sure, you were thousands of miles away, and your AR-15 – like the 14,999,999 other AR-15s out there – never shot up a school, but just believing in the Second Amendment makes you a non-human. Those of us who know something about history know that the people leftists regard as non-human always tend to end up non-living.
Q: Why are Senate Democrats torpedoing their own gun bill? A: Because it might pass:
When Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) first proposed the Fix-NICS act last November, he had four members of each party as sponsors, calling it “the most important piece of bipartisan guns legislation since Manchin-Toomey.” The bill would plug the gaps in reporting by federal agencies to the background-check system, failings that contributed to the fatal church shooting that month in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
Now, though, Democrats have spent their first days back from recess rejecting Fix-NICS, and even Murphy doesn’t want a stand-alone vote for his “most important” bill.
Because it fixes problems with the existing NICS system rather than disarming law-abiding Americans. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
In late November, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo flew to Buffalo for a fund-raising trip, a quick two-stop jaunt that brought in more than $200,000 in donations for his re-election campaign.
The events, one at an Embassy Suites hotel and the other a more intimate gathering at a private residence, were hosted by two men familiar to Mr. Cuomo — and to state government.
One host, Steven J. Weiss, had been appointed by Mr. Cuomo to the New York State Housing Finance Agency in 2011 and the state board of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in 2016. Government records show that Mr. Weiss has donated $53,000 to the governor’s campaign since being picked for the housing agency.
The other, Kenneth A. Manning, had been named by lawmakers to the same cancer research institute board, and had been appointed by Mr. Cuomo to a state judicial screening committee in 2011. Records show that Mr. Manning has donated $50,500 since his 2011 appointment.
That type of arrangement — appointments go out, campaign cash comes back in — has vexed government reformers in Albany for generations. Things were supposed to change in 2007, when Eliot L. Spitzer, then the newly elected governor, issued an executive order barring most appointees from donating to or soliciting donations for the governor who made the appointment. Mr. Cuomo renewed the order on his first day in office.
But a New York Times investigation found that the Cuomo administration has quietly reinterpreted the directive, enabling him to collect about $890,000 from two dozen of his appointees. Some gave within days of being appointed.
The governor also has accepted $1.3 million from the spouses, children and businesses of appointees, state records show.
Even the liberals talk like Ukip, while those on the Right talk of mass deportations. Every conversation involves the phrase: ‘I’m not racist but . . .’
Last weekend, thousands of Left-wing demonstrators descended on the town for an anti-fascist demonstration following the attack on the migrants. The locals, however, did not take part.
All tell me that the situation had been getting out of hand long before recent atrocities, with a marked rise in begging, petty theft and increased inter-racial tension.
Most suspect the authorities are not telling them the whole story about Pamela Mastropietro’s death.
So remember how Russian “mercenaries” got their ass kicked by American forces in Syria? Evidently there’s audio from the survivors talking about just how bad that ass-kicking was. Evidently (assuming the audio is legit, for which I make no claim one way or another), “our guys didn’t have anything besides the assault rifles…nothing at all, not even mentioning shoulder-fired SAMs or anything like that.” If true, this posits a tremendous failure of either leadership or situational awareness akin to attempting a bayonet charge uphill against an entrenched machine gun nest in World War I. You don’t attack a well-defended enemy’s position across a river using only small arms. But it also makes it harder to draw any conclusions about the relative quality of American and Russian troops; an American unit attempting such a monumentally stupid attack against similarly defended Russian forces would likely suffer the same devastating defeat.
Police arrest Daniel Frisiello, the guy who allegedly sent an envelope of white powder to Donald Trump, Jr. Judging from his targets, the things Frisiello allegedly hates are: A.) Trump, B.) Jews, and C.) People who hate pedophiles.
Also: Guess which party he belonged to?
BREAKING: Daniel Frisiello, just charged by DOJ w/sending hoax white powder letter to @DonaldJTrumpJr's family is a Massachusetts Democratic activist who donated to Act Blue in the same cycle they donated to MA's @SenWarren.
A 43-case dossier handed to the party leader in the document entitled LabourToo contains shocking complaints from women describing themselves as MPs, candidates, staff and activists.
MPs are due today to debate proposals for a new parliamentary complaints and grievance system drawn up by Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom, in the wake of a rash of complaints of inappropriate behaviour.
One woman told LabourToo she was raped at the annual conference, but “no-one cared” when she told her regional party and an MP.
Another said an individual facing rape accusations was allowed to resign quietly and others told of lewd comments and leg-stroking.
After Rotherham, is anyone really surprised?
A tweet:
This notion that women should vote for female candidates insulting and wrong. I call that "vote your vagina." I wouldn't vote for somebody because they have earlobes; why should I vote for somebody because they have a vagina?
They were a tiny band of idiots who traveled the country protesting gay rights at military funerals for some damn reason. The mainstream media reported constantly on their stupid antics as a means to smear, by implication, any Republican opposition to any liberal culture war issue.
White nationalist Richard B. Spencer and his tiny band of neo-Nazis are the new Westboro Baptist Church.
In case you were off in a sensory deprivation tank, “hundreds” of neo-Nazis/Klansmen/white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend, where they clashed with left-wing counter-protestors, leaving one person dead of apparent vehicular homicide. (Two state troopers died in a helicopter crash in the vicinity, but at this point there’s no evidence of foul play in the crash.)
Law enforcement in Charlottesville have received widespread criticism from counterprotesters, bystanders, and participants of the white nationalist “Unite The Right” rally. Many called the police’s handling of the event hands-off, often appearing outnumbered and waiting too long to break up skirmishes between protesters and counter-protesters.
Former police officials in New York and Philadelphia made similar criticisms that, despite a large mobilization of law enforcement personnel — Charlottesville’s mayor put the number at 1,000 — police failed to separate the clashing factions at the beginning of the event, allowing the violence to quickly grow out of hand.
There’s been some debate over what to call Spencer’s band of neo-Nazis/white supremacists/whatevers. But since they were literally marching down the street with cardboard shields chanting “Blood and soil!”…
(Really, chanting “Blood and soil”? Real nationalists tends to chant about specific historical grievances and causes, not just “blood and soil,” which is an abstraction of an abstraction…)
Some of the nomenclature confusion stems from vague use (intentional or otherwise) of the phrase “alt-Right”:
Actually, there are a lot more than two “alt-Rights”, depending on how you count. When the MSM uses the term, they’re frequently lumping in several of the following:
Actual neo-Nazis/Klansmen/white supremacists, as seen in Charlottesville, plus some garden variety anti-Semites.
People pretending to be neo-Nazis/Klansmen/white supremacists, just to piss other people off. (Seen much more online than In Real Life.)
People who take leftwing victimhood identity politics framing to its logical conclusion and see “whiteness” as a victimized group identity.
“Paleoconservatives” (Patrick Buchanan, some of the old Southern Agrarian conservatives, etc.)
4Chan /pol members and other online pro-Trump communities
Critics of Social Justice Warriors and feminism (Milo Yiannopoulos, Christina Hoff Sommers, etc.)
Libertarians
Anyone who reads Breitbart
Reagan Democrats
Free trade skeptics
Tea Party groups
Anyone who leans right but has been critical of Trump-hostile conservative media outlets (National Review, The Weekly Standard, etc.)
Anyone who leans right but has been critical of the national Republican Party establishment
Gun owners
Anyone who voted for Trump in the Republican primary
Anyone who ever posted a Pepe meme
Anyone who believes in limiting Muslim immigration
Anyone who believes in enforcing immigration laws
Anyone who believes in traditional male/female marriage
Republicans
Anyone who voted for Trump in the general election
Anyone from a state that voted for Trump in the general election
Christians
This lets the left perform their own dishonest mental shorthand: “If you support Trump you’re supporting Hitler!” Alt-Right is as meaningless a term as “fascist,” having come to mean “someone holding beliefs the speaker dislikes.”
And if you think I’m exaggerating about liberals doing that:
Though the LARP Nazis were the ones rallying, they weren’t the only ones committing violence, with antifa getting into the act assaulting people and hurling rocks and bottles.
People immediately called on President Trump to denounce the hate groups. Guess what?
We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!
Naturally President Trump’s denunciation wasn’t enough, Because Trump, and because it clashed with the liberal elites’ religious belief that Trump’s entire rise has been due to him sending “dog whistles” of “secret support” to white supremacists.
Also condemning the hate groups were Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (among many, many others), which lead to even more MSM stupidity:
Sorry to be cynical, but most of all Rubio and Ted Cruz to me seem mostly to be doing a tremendous job of posturing for 2020.
Gosh, you're right. Because Nazis & the Klan have such love for Cuban-Americans. If only we worked for a paper that shilled for Stalin…. https://t.co/PBsFqauXq2
Media: "Conservatives must denounce white supremacy!" Conservatives: "Down with white supremacy!" Media: "You don't really mean it." https://t.co/kgXkGf7IAY
So just who paid for the LARP Nazi cardboard shields? Logical or not, the first thought that occurred to me on seeing those was “George Soros.” I was not the only one.
If you don't understand that both sides in this were paid in Charlottesville by Soros Funding.. You really aren't getting what's going on..
(We have to be careful not to yell “Soros!” every time something bad happens. (Remember when the left yelled “Koch Brothers!” at every political setback? Good times, good times…) But mass-organizer agitators and agent-provocateurs have been his trademark for many years now, so we should probably at least explore the possibility he was funding both sides fighting in Charlottesville…)
Nationalism is a poor substitute for real patriotism, and white nationalism is a collectivist mockery of the American ethos of colorblind individualism and judging people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Don’t let the MSM’s hyping of a small crowd of idiots distract you from the fact that it’s a minuscule fringe movement with no power or influence in the Republican Party, the conservative movement, the Trump Administration, or America itself. And, like the Westboro Baptist Church, they’ll disappear from public’s consciousness when deprived of the oxygen of unwarranted media attention.
Ted Cruz’s and Marco Rubio’s supporters have teamed up in Arkansas to pack the state delegation with individuals who’ll turn against Donald Trump in a contested convention.
Since Rubio ended his presidential bid March 15, his network of party insiders has lined up behind Cruz to win delegates who’d vote for the Texas senator once they’re no longer bound to Trump in a floor fight. Trump won Arkansas’ GOP primary March 1 with 32.8 percent of the vote compared to Cruz’s 30.5 percent and Rubio’s 24.9 percent. But Cruz’s canny operatives, with Rubio riding shotgun, is likely to thwart Trump in the delegate election.
Trump’s organization is as sloppy in Arkansas as elsewhere, just as Cruz’s is an efficient machine in state after state. This could ding the Donald, costing him as many as 25 delegates after a first inconclusive ballot. Cruz, who finished with 15 out of the available 40 delegates in primary voting, stands to gain all 16 Trump delegates and the 9 won by Rubio.
Bart Hester, a top Rubio organizer in Arkansas, said he’s filling Rubio’s delegate slate with individuals committed to opposing Trump in Cleveland.
Add this to Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, South Carolina and Indiana where Cruz has outfoxed Trump on the delegate front. None of this matters of Trump manages to get to 1,237 delegates. But if he can’t get there, Cruz is the heads-on favorite to prevail on a second or third ballot.
Early on delegate selection rules worked in favor of Trump, awarding him about 22% more delegates than he received via a strict proportional vote. Now that Trump’s popularity has nosedived and his momentum stalled, the delegate selection process (and his his own disorganization and ignorance of the process) is working against him as Ted Cruz outflanks and outworks him at every turn.
It looks like someone in Donald Trump’s orbit fed the National Enquirer a Ted Cruz adultery story originally peddled by Marco Rubio allies.
The story is pretty much laughable, not only for the fact that it’s deeply out of character, but also that it strikes me as logistically impossible.
Has no one ever seen Ted Cruz work on the campaign trail? The man’s a campaigning machine with a grueling schedule that would kill lesser mortals. When the hell is Cruz supposed to find time to have an affair? When on earth is he supposed to find time for one mistress, let alone five?
It’s almost as ludicrous a theory as Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls never being shot dead and secretly collaborating on a comeback album with Joe Biden.
Edited to add: Texas Monthly editor Erica Grieder finds the story as ludicrous as I do.
“African-Americans living in poor neighborhoods cannot rely on Democratic leaders to take the decisive steps needed to ameliorate the problem as long as the Democratic Party can take the black vote for granted. The question, then, is how long can Democratic Party leaders and candidates continue to rely on African-American voters before African-American voters take matters into their own hands.”
“The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.”
Obama Administration finally comes out and admits that the Islamic State has committed genocide against Yazidis, Christians and Shiites. That’s like Harry Truman finally declaring the Holocaust genocide two years after the liberation of Auschwitz…
Contrary to his expectations of finding a pliable ally in Iran, he found the Iranians in control, glad to borrow his air force, arrogant and disdainful in Damascus (and Baghdad) and well on the path to dominating a vast stretch of strategically vital territory. And Iran has no interest in playing junior partner to anyone—least of all a traditional Christian enemy.
Suddenly, Putin had a vision of a nuclear-armed, radical-Shia empire on Russia’s southern flank. Those Iranian missiles that can reach Israel? They can reach major Russian cities, too.
Putin’s initial bet on Shia Iran also backfired by turning the Islamic world’s Sunni majority against him — not least Saudi Arabia, which can continue to hold down the price of oil and gas, punishing Russia’s economy far more than it wounds American fracking efforts. And Sunni terrorists have taken a renewed interest in Russia.
Gawker is poison AIDS cancer. In the same way that the Cross is the symbol for the redemptive power of Christ’s blood, Gawker is the symbol of a metastasized social media. Gawker is Nidhogg, the dragon which gnaws at the root of the World Tree. The causes they enunciate are tarnished, just for being in their mouths.”
I don’t wish ill on anyone who works there, obviously. I mean, I guess their every action technically does sustain a legitimately evil beast of legend, some Revelations type shit, and they ruin lives for profit whenever they aren’t simply wasting your time.
“It is still mathematically possible for Cruz to get beyond 1,237 delegates. He will perform well in Utah and Wisconsin and has a solid ground game…There is a way to stop Trump. But that way is rallying to Ted Cruz. That is the only option at this point.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
