Another week of the impeachment farce, another week of an embarrassing nothingburger and bombing ratings for Democrats:
Week one impeachment farce summary: “None of those three witnesses were have met with the President, none of them were on the July 25th phone call, and none of them have firsthand information, and none of them are aware of any criminal activity or impeachable offense. In short, why are we here?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The half dozen seminal columns I published for The Hill on Ukraine were already supported by overwhelming documentation (all embedded in the story) and on-the-record interviews captured on video. They made three salient and simple points:
Hunter Biden’s hiring by the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma Holdings, while it was under a corruption investigation, posed the appearance of a conflict of interest for his father. That’s because Vice President Joe Biden oversaw US-Ukraine policy and forced the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor overseeing the case.
Ukraine officials had an uneasy relationship with our embassy in Kiev because State Department officials exerted pressure on Ukraine prosecutors to drop certain cases against activists, including one group partly funded by George Soros.
There were efforts around Ukraine in 2016 to influence the US election, that included a request from a DNC contractor for dirt on Manafort, an OpEd from Ukraine’s US ambassador slamming Trump and the release of law enforcement evidence by Ukrainian officials that a Ukraine court concluded was an improper interference in the US election.
All three of these points have since been validated by the sworn testimony of Schiff’s witnesses this month, starting with the Bidens.
Schiff and Pelosi are racing two clocks: The narrative clock for dropping the Horowitz IG report into FISA, etc. abuse, and the judicial clock against three different court cases that might derail the farce. And since they just went into their Thanksgiving break, the House only has eight voting days in December to do it and pass a budget before leaving for the Christmas brealk.
“[Democratic] Former Baltimore Mayor Pugh indicted on 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion in ‘Healthy Holly’ book scandal.” (You only have to get six paragraphs in to learn that Pugh is a Democrat. Progress!)
Federal prosecutors have charged former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh with 11 counts of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy in what they allege was a corrupt scheme involving her sales of a self-published children’s book series.
In a grand jury indictment made public Wednesday, prosecutors allege Pugh defrauded area businesses and nonprofit organizations with nearly $800,000 in sales of her “Healthy Holly” books to unlawfully enrich herself, promote her political career and illegally fund her campaign for mayor.
Though her customers ordered more than 100,000 copies of the books, the indictment says Pugh failed to print thousands of copies, double-sold others and took some to use for self-promotion. Pugh, 69, used the profits to buy a house, pay down debt, and make illegal straw donations to her campaign, prosecutors allege.
At the same time, prosecutors said, she was evading taxes. In 2016, for instance, when she was a state senator and ran for mayor, she told the Internal Revenue Service she had made just $31,000. In fact, her income was more than $322,000 that year ― meaning she shorted the federal government of about $100,000 in taxes, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
The charges Pugh faces carry potential sentences totaling 175 years in prison. Prosecutors are seeking to seize $769,688 of her profits, along with her current home in Ashburton, which they allege she bought and renovated with fraudulently obtained funds.
Uncle Sam is not omniscient, but if you’re a public official and you’re taking in ten times as much money as you declare, yeah, I bet they’re gonna figure that one out, Crooked Kathy.
Speaking of Democratic Party mayors being indicted, Mayors Against Illegal Guns member Dennis Tyler, mayor of Muncie, Indiana, was arrested by the FBI as part of a corruption probe. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Last January, former Muncie Building Commissioner Craig Nichols pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
Others charged in the federal corruption probe include Muncie Sanitary District Administrator Debra Nicole Grigsby, Muncie Sanitary District official Tracy Barton; and local businessmen Jeffrey Burke, Tony Franklin and Rodney A. Barber.
The Russian government has for the past four years been fighting to keep 29-year-old alleged cybercriminal Alexei Burkov from being extradited by Israel to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. That effort failed as well, and Burkov had his first appearance in a U.S. court last week. What follows are some clues that might explain why the Russians are so eager to reclaim this young man.
On the surface, the charges the U.S. government has leveled against Burkov may seem fairly unremarkable: Prosecutors say he ran a credit card fraud forum called CardPlanet that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards.
However, a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.
There seem to be very few elite Russian hacking organizations Burkov, AKA “K0pa,” didn’t have a key administrative role in.
Speaking of hacking: “Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai.” Somebody in Shanghai has been spoofing GPS signals to make ships (and anything else using GPS) appear they’re someplace else, and GPS experts don’t understand how they’re doing it. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Foreign-born researchers working at U.S. agencies secretly joined China’s payroll, sending sensitive U.S.-funded research to the country while U.S. government agencies took almost no defensive measures against a major recruitment operation, a Senate investigation found.
Researchers linked to the Chinese government formed a Chinese cell within the Department of Energy, attained access to American genomic data, and recruited other U.S. researchers to join, the bipartisan report stated.
China’s Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) aims to get foreign governments to finance the communist power’s military and economy by buying off researchers who are doing work abroad. The experts apply to the program, and if approved by the Communist Party, they join China’s payroll and sign secret side agreements that the experts will share their research with that country, according to the investigation.
The Clinton Foundation suffered a $16.8 million loss in 2018. It’s a great mystery how that could have happened…
The upcoming UK election is no longer an election about Brexit, it’s an election about how incredibly unpopular Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson enjoys a mere plus 4% favorability rating. Corbyn has a minus 43% favorability rating. “This election is no longer primarily about Brexit, it’s primarily about Corbyn and his extreme socialist policies! Corbyn is rightfully getting clobbered.”
The sudden move by the oil-rich regime to ration gasoline and hike fuel prices is a direct result of President Donald Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. While the regime thrived under the Obama administration, which handed billions of dollars to Tehran for signing the nuclear deal, the current administration has reinstated stiff sanctions against the ruling Mullahs.
After President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal, the sanctions have crippled Iran’s state-run oil, shipping, and banking sectors. The U.S. government implemented the sanctions against the regime’s top brass and the IRGC, which controls critical sectors of the Iranian economy.
“Reuters Deletes Story Meant to Make Trump Look Bad After Realizing it Made Obama Look Bad.” The Ministry of Truth confirms that this story has been rectified.
Beto goes bye bye, sticker shock sets in for Warren, Grandpa Simpson forgets which state he’s in (again), and a failing Harris goes all-in on Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
The story had been about how Biden was doomed and Warren’s rise was inexorable, but Biden tops every national poll this week, maintaining a modest lead over Warren, while Harris is in freefall. Also notice that there’s not a single poll outside Iowa or New Hampshire where Warren leads Biden. (For one thing, Quinnipiac, which has constantly shown a more pro-Warren tilt than any other poll, evidently didn’t do one last week.)
CNN/UNH (New Hampshire): Sanders 21, Warren 18, Biden 15, Buttigieg 10, Yang 5, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 5, Steyer 3, Harris 3, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Sestak 1. Good news for Yang, Gabbard and Klobuchar, though I’m not sure if this is a DNC qualifying poll or not.
The assumption that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren will win New Hampshire is all but baked, Democratic insiders told POLITICO; the neighbor-state senators could easily take the top two spots. The biggest prize, at this point, is the surge of momentum that would come from eclipsing Joe Biden, as the race turns to Nevada and then South Carolina.
I think the story coming out of this state may not be first place,” said former Democratic state Sen. Andrew Hosmer. “It may be who shows up as a strong second or third place that really propels them.”
Hosmer’s assessment was broadly shared by more than two dozen knowledgeable Democrats interviewed for this story, including the party chair, current and former state lawmakers, several underdog campaigns and one of the candidates. Officials with several Democratic candidates’ campaigns, meanwhile, described the race as fluid, with no real frontrunner despite the advantage enjoyed by Sanders, who won New Hampshire in 2016, and Warren, who has been building inroads for years.
The candidates and campaign aides said superior organization will trump all in the state — more so than a heavy TV ad presence or endorsements. And with more than four of five voters still undecided or only leaning toward a candidate, there’s an enormous opportunity for a lower-polling candidate to emerge.
With no clear frontrunner and at least four plausible candidates, superdelegates might make a comeback in a brokered convention.
Depending on how frontloaded a primary calendar is, late April tends to be around the point where enough delegates have been allocated that the presumptive nominee is, if not already clear, coming into sharper focus. So if three candidates are still cresting above the 15 percent threshold by the six-contest “Acela primary” in late April, when more than 75 percent of delegates will have been awarded, that could wreak havoc on the 2020 Democratic nomination process.
But of course, much of this depends on how wide the margin is by which the candidates clear that threshold. If, say, only one candidate is getting a supermajority while the others struggle to hit 15 percent, then the fact that three candidates are above the threshold matters very little — see Trump in 2016. But if three candidates are tightly bunched at 40, 30 and 20 percent, it potentially becomes much more problematic. This is especially true if that clustering happens early and often, especially on delegate-rich days like Super Tuesday, which is scheduled for March 3 this year and is the first series of contests after the four early states.
But:
Here’s why I think a logjam situation is unlikely: How the threshold is applied tends to already have a built-in winnowing effect on the candidates. Yes, there is a proportional allocation of delegates, but that only applies to candidates who win 15 percent of the vote. And that qualifying threshold is not applied just once, but three different times. A candidate must meet that threshold at the statewide level twice, once for at-large delegates and once for party leader and elected official (PLEO) delegates. A candidate must also win 15 percent of the vote in a given congressional district (or other subdivision) to lay claim to any district-level delegates. In other words, a candidate who surpasses 15 percent of the statewide vote by running up margins in a few concentrated areas will not earn as many delegates as a candidate who hits the 15 percent statewide threshold by earning at least 15 percent of the vote across districts. A candidate must build a coalition of support more uniformly across a state — and the country — in order to win delegates. It’s more than just peeling off a delegate or two here and there.
Hey Democrats, when even Nancy Pelosi says your ideas are too far left to win elections, don’t you think you should listen?
“Voters are sick and tired of politicians promising them things that they know they can’t deliver,” the Colorado senator said in a statement. “Warren’s new numbers are simply not believable and have been contradicted by experts. Regardless of whether it’s $21 trillion or $31 trillion, this isn’t going to happen, and the American people need health care.”
Warren on Friday released the cost estimate of her plan, which increases federal spending by $21 trillion over the next ten years, a significant increase that is nevertheless cheaper than the $31 trillion increase attributed to Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.
While serving as senator of Delaware, Joe Biden reached out discreetly to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to discuss matters his son Hunter Biden’s firm was then lobbying for, according to government records Goodman gathered.
The latest revelations further buttress accusations that Joe Biden’s work as senator and vice president frequently converged with and assisted Hunter Biden’s business interests. Whether it be getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son’s company fired or meeting one of his son’s business partners while on a diplomatic trip to China in 2013, Joe Biden’s political activities in relation to his son Hunter have continued to garner scrutiny.
In 2002, while his father was a senator, Hunter founded the lobbying firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which lobbied on the Hill. When his father announced his candidacy for president in 2008, Hunter opted to leave the firm, claiming it was to reduce concerns about conflicts of interest.
While Hunter was still at the firm, in late February 2007, then-Sen. Joe Biden reached out to DHS, expressing concern over the department’s proposed chemical security regulations. The regulations were in accordance with Section 550 of the DHS Appropriations Act of 2007, which called for chemical facilities to submit detailed “site security plans” for DHS approval. Part of these plans were expected to include specifics related to training and credentialing employees.
Biden’s call seems like an eerie coincidence. Two months prior to that phone call, the Industrial Safety Training Council had enlisted Hunter Biden’s firm to lobby DHS precisely on Section 550. The Industrial Safety Training Council is a 501(c)3 that offers safety training services to employees of chemical plants. In the midst of debates over regulations stemming from Section 550, ISTC launched significant lobbying efforts to encourage the expansion of background checks under the new regulation regime.
Hunter was not registered as an individual lobbyist on behalf of ISTC, but he did serve as a senior partner at his namesake firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which only boasted three partners at the time. According to Goodman, from early 2007 to the end of 2008, his firm earned a total of $200,000 from ISTC in return for its lobbying efforts.
While we don’t know the source of Joe Biden’s concern over Section 550 and whether his “concern” was the one ISTC shared, it is worth noting this repeated crossover between Hunter Biden’s business and his father’s political stratagems. At some point, coincidences stop being merely a product of a chance. In the case of Hunter and Joe Biden, the coincidences continue to pile up.
Joe Biden’s use of his political power for his son’s business dealings didn’t stop there. At one point, Hunter’s firm was lobbying on behalf of SEARCH, a national nonprofit devoted to information-sharing between states in the criminal justice and public safety realm. SEARCH was interested in expanding the federal government’s fingerprint screening system and hired Hunter’s firm to lobby on behalf of this issue.
During that very time, Joe Biden sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales expressing a desire to unpack this very topic. In his letter, then-Sen. Joe Biden asked to meet with DOJ to explore the benefits of the expanding the federal government’s fingerprint system.
From the Yogi Berra Institute for Advanced Whackery — er, Business Insider, actually — comes a new poll showing that while Joe Biden is the most-loved Democratic presidential contender, he’s also the least-liked. According to figures releasedon Sunday, “27% of likely Democratic voters would be unsatisfied with a Biden nomination, 21% would be dissatisfied with a Sanders win, and 15% would be dissatisfied with Warren.”
What that means is, should Biden win the nomination next summer, more than a quarter of Dems would face a serious “Meh” moment when deciding whether to even bother showing up at the polls in November.
Snip.
Registered voters (it’s too soon to narrow down to likely voters) who approved of Trump’s job performance are either “extremely” or “very” enthused about voting next year — by a whopping 79%. If you’re a registered voter and you disapprove of Trump, you’re only 66% likely to be extremely or very enthused. 13 points is a major enthusiasm gap. And as Kilgore also notes, “White folks are more enthusiastic about voting than nonwhite folks; old folks are more psyched than young folks; Republicans are more whipped up than Democrats.” Those demos suggest that Democratic primary voters had better think long and hard about nominating someone who generates serious enthusiasm, but their frontrunner doesn’t seem to be the guy to do that.
Records filed with the Department of Justice show that Rasky is also a registered foreign agent lobbying on behalf of the government of Azerbaijan. The records, which were filed pursuant to the Foreign Agent Registration Act, show that Rasky was hired by the Azerbaijani government on April 23, 2019. Federal documents signed by Rasky show that he reports directly to Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States.
“[The government of Azerbaijan] will pay RASKY a minimum monthly non-refundable fee (the ‘Monthly Fee’) for the Services provided of $15,000 per month, plus a 5% administrative fee as described below,” Rasky’s contract with the foreign government states. “The Monthly Fees totaling $94,500 shall be paid in two equal installments. The initial payment of $47,250 is due upon the signing of this agreement. The second payment of $47,250 is due on July 15, 2019.”
Rasky changed the name of the PAC from “For The People” to “Unite the Country” on Monday, according to FEC filings. The filings do not state which country Rasky intends to unite on Biden’s behalf.
The vainglorious, name-dropping Biden also couldn’t help himself from invoking Pope Francis and noting that he “gives me Communion.”
Such brief asides won’t solve his Catholic problem. For one thing, invoking Pope Francis plays poorly in American politics, as the opponents of Donald Trump found out in 2016. Trump’s poll numbers didn’t fall but rose after the pope slammed his immigration position. Hiding behind an obnoxious left-wing pope won’t help Biden any more than it helped Hillary and Kaine, who tried to drive that wedge between Trump and Catholic voters. Kaine’s faux-Catholic schtick — he would go on and on about his “Jesuit volunteer corps” work in Latin America with commies — went over like a lead balloon.
The Catholics who bother to go to Mass regularly anymore are loath to vote for a candidate who supports abortion in all its grisly stages and presides over gay weddings (which Biden has done since pushing Barack Obama to support gay marriage in 2012). That poses an insuperable impediment to picking up Catholic votes. Notice that Biden’s I-grew-up-Catholic-in-Scranton lines are recited less and less. His strategists have probably concluded that that routine hurts him in the primaries and can only remind people of his checkered Catholicism in the general election. His “private” Catholic stances grow fainter and fainter and can’t even be found in a penumbra.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Could Booker gain from O’Rourke’s exit? I rather doubt it. Booker’s no longer getting fawning profiles, but his director for state communications, Julie McClain Downey, is. The article opens stating she was “on the 12-week gender-blind paid leave available to all of the campaign’s full-time staffers.” Presidential campaigns are intense pressure cooker endeavors that require staffers to work killing hours over the course of (for a competitive campaign) 12-18 months. If key staffers are taking 12 months of leave during the white heat before the primary season, no wonder Booker is languishing around 1%.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Steve Bullock gets Anthony Scaramucci to unknowingly tape endorsement for $100.” That’s his big, exciting news this week. Maybe next week he can pay for Snooki’s endorsement. (And I know what you’re thinking, but no, she’ll only be 33 next year, making her constitutionally ineligible to be elected President…)
Joe Biden dropped to fourth place in Iowa, according to a new poll released Friday, his worst showing to date in the pivotal early state.
A few hours later, at the largest gathering to date for any 2020 event, it was clear why.
While Biden delivered a solid performance on stage before a crowd of 13,500 Democrats at the state party’s Liberty & Justice dinner, he was overshadowed and outshined by the candidate who just passed him in the polls — Pete Buttigieg.
At the massive state party event known for its catalytic effect on campaigns — it’s widely remembered as a turning point for Barack Obama’s Iowa fortunes in 2007 — Buttigieg captured the audience’s imagination, articulating a case for generational change.
“I didn’t just come here to end the era of Donald Trump,” Buttigieg said to a roaring crowd of supporters. “I’m here to launch the era that must come next.”
Snip.
Matt Sinovic, executive director of Progress Iowa, one of the largest left-leaning advocacy groups in the state, said Buttigieg generated considerable buzz with a recent statewide bus tour. He starts another on Saturday. But the Indiana mayor is also swamping his opponents in digital advertising, something that’s been hard to miss in Iowa.
“I cannot overstate how many Buttigieg ads I see,” said Sinovic, pointing to data showing Buttigieg’s national digital spending numbers surpassing Biden almost five-to-one. “It’s just a massive outspending right now.”
Almost always in politics, an early money lead counts for a hell of a lot more than an early poll lead.
Biden’s campaign announced on Friday a new round of digital ad spending in Iowa. And he’s opening a new office in the state, giving him 23 overall as well as 100 staffers. The campaign also notes an October fundraising bump as a sign they’re not losing momentum — the campaign said it had its best month to date online, raising $5.3 million from 182,000 donations, with an average donation of $28.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still not getting out. “Julián Castro plans to refocus his 2020 presidential campaign on Iowa, Nevada and Texas in the coming days and is supporting his staffers looking for jobs with other campaigns.” That pretty much says he’s broke, though Nevada and Texas make sense as last-ditch Hail Mary plays. In that CNN/UNH poll, Castro hard the largest net favorability decline of all the candidates listed, a whopping -25%. I’m sort of surprised voters actually noticed him enough to dislike him. Maybe it was the “abortion services for trannies” line that did it…
Coming off a close loss in Texas’s 2018 Senate race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, O’Rourke entered the presidential race with great fanfare in March, though some wondered if he had waited too long to fully capitalize on the national notoriety he gained from his 2018 performance. Still, O’Rourke’s initial polling numbers suggested he might really be in the mix to compete for the nomination — he was polling at 10 percent or more in some national polls not long after he announced. However, his survey numbers quickly deteriorated as the race moved along, and he spent the past four months mostly polling below 5 percent even after he tried to revive his campaign in August by tacking left on some issues and focusing more on President Trump.
’Rourke’s tumble in the polls was also accompanied by fundraising difficulties. Having been a prodigious fundraiser in 2018, he seemed capable of attracting the resources to run a top-level presidential campaign, and he showed early promise by raising $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign, the second best opening day after only former Vice President Joe Biden. But fundraising dollars started drying up shortly thereafter. He had raised only $13 million by the end of the second quarter, and added just another $4.5 million in the third quarter.
His debate performances didn’t help him recover either; in fact, his most recent performance seemed to have hurt him. After the October debate, O’Rourke’s net favorability among Democratic primary voters fell by about 6 points in our post-debate poll with Ipsos, the biggest decline for any of the 12 candidates on stage. His place at future debates was in serious jeopardy, too. O’Rourke was two qualifying polls shy of making the November debate and had yet to register a single qualifying survey for the December debate.
But O’Rourke might always have struggled to attract a large enough base of support in the primary given the makeup of the Democratic electorate. As a moderate three-term congressman, he won over many suburban white voters in his Texas Senate bid, but as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote back in July, a base of white moderates, particularly younger ones, wasn’t enough…only about 12 percent of 2016 Democratic primary voters fit all three descriptors — young, white, moderate.
O’Rourke may have been billed as a moderate, but he quickly joined the Twitter Woke Circus, threatened to take our guns, and watched his polls crash even harder as a result. A fact that makes the NRA celebrate his exit:
What do Beto, Gillibrand, and Swalwell have in common? They based their presidential campaigns around demonizing the @NRA, 100M gun owners and trying to destroy our right to self-defense and to even own guns. They messed with the bull and they got the horns. pic.twitter.com/oozFjUgJkr
Across the Democratic Party, ordinary voters, senior strategists, and health care wonks are increasingly nervous that the candidate many believe to be the most likely nominee to face Donald Trump has burdened herself with a policy that in the best case is extraordinarily difficult to explain and in the worst case could make her unelectable.
On Tuesday night, in Concord, one of the more bougie New Hampshire towns that should be a Warren stronghold, Warren stepped inside Dos Amigos, a local Mexican restaurant. She made the rounds talking to voters as locals ate tacos and watched a football game playing above the bar. It didn’t take long before the first Medicare for All question came up.
Martin Murray, who lives in neighboring Bow, came down for a taco and a beer and ended up having a conversation with Elizabeth Warren about single payer and slavery. (That’s what it’s like in New Hampshire.)
“I paid pretty close attention to the last debate when Buttigieg was talking to her,” he told me, “and what I got from him was simply that going for the golden coin, if you will, might be a little too much all at once and maybe we have to take that step by step. And that’s what worries me too: that going for Medicare for All might be unattainable.”
Murray, who is leaning toward supporting Warren, asked her about the Buttigieg critique. “You don’t get what you don’t fight for,” she told him. “In fact, can I just make a pitch on that? People said to the abolitionists: ‘You’ll never get it done.’ They said it to the suffragettes: ‘You’ll never get that passed.’ Right? They said it to the foot soldiers in the civil rights movement. They said it to the union organizers. They said it to the LGBT community.”
She added, “We’re on the right side of history on this one.”
Some Democrats I talked to found the comparisons that Warren used to be jarring. “I have the highest respect for Sen. Warren but she’s wrong about this,” said former Sen. Carol Mosley Braun, the first female African American in the Senate. “Abolition and suffrage did not occasion a tax increase. People weren’t giving something up — except maybe some of their privilege.”
She added, “To compare the health care debate to the liberation of black people or giving women the right to vote is just wrong.”
“Medicare for All does not equate in any shape, form or fashion to the Civil Rights Act, or Voting Rights Act, or the 13th Amendment, or 14th Amendment,” said Bakari Sellers, a Kamala Harris supporter whose father was a well-known civil rights activist who was shot and imprisoned in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968. “It doesn’t.”
Plus a history of Warren’s position, since she’s been on both sides of the issue whenever it suited her. Warren is a great candidate…if you want to see the stock market collapse. New York Times reporter had documents that proved Warren was lying about her “I was fired because I was pregnant” story, and sat on them. We all know why: They want Warren to win and they want Trump to lose. Saturday Night Livemocks Warren’s health care plan. The fact I’m linking here rather than embedding it should tell you how funny it is. Also, as with Hillary Clinton, SNL helps Warren’s campaign by having her played by an actress roughly half her age. “Elizabeth Warren Pledges To Crack Down On School Choice, Despite Sending Her Own Son To Elite Private School.”
The 2020 presidential candidate’s public education plan would ban for-profit charter schools — a proposal first backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — and eliminate government incentives for opening new non-profit charter schools, even though Warren has praised charter schools in the past.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) This does not appear to be an official Warren campaign account, but it does offer up an infinite well of cringe.
“The downsides of that, the entire country gets engrossed in this impeachment process,” Yang said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And then, we’re gonna look up and be facing Donald Trump in the general election and we will not have made a real case to the American people.”
Yang said that while he does support the impeachment, he feels Democrats waste too much time talking about it and not enough about the future of the US.
“That’s the only way we’re going to win in 2020 and that’s the only way we’re actually going to start actually solving the problems that got him elected,” he told CNN.
In the second quarter — from April to June — the campaign had under 20 staff members on its payroll, according to Yang’s Federal Election Commission filings. But a quarter later, it nearly quadrupled to include 73 staff members, POLITICO’s analysis shows, as well as several experienced and well-respected strategists in Democratic politics.
The expansion, fueled by a nearly $10 million third-quarter fundraising haul, ensures that the 44-year-old entrepreneur can stick around through the beginning of early-state voting next year — and gives Yang a platform to build on if he should have a big moment in a later debate or show unexpectedly well in the Iowa caucuses. The hires also add critical experience to Yang’s campaign as it starts to spend on advertising, like a recent six-figure digital ad buy in the early states.
Snip.
Most notably, Yang’s campaign recently brought on Devine, Mulvey and Longabaugh as its media consulting firm. The firm — run by Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh — worked for Sanders’ insurgent 2016 primary campaign and produced the famous “America” ad before splitting early on with Sanders’ 2020 bid due to “differences in a creative vision.”
Longabaugh says they were drawn to Yang because he’s “is offering the most progressive ideas” of the primary but that they see a long runway for the Yang campaign.
“We wouldn’t have signed on with somebody we didn’t think was a serious candidate,” Longabaugh said, “Yang has a good deal of momentum and there’s a great deal of grassroots enthusiasm for his candidacy and that’s what’s driven it this far.”
Other hires include senior adviser Steve Marchand, a former mayor of Portsmouth, N.H. and two-time gubernatorial candidate, who is a paid adviser to the Yang campaign since April and national organizing director Zach Fang, who jumped ship from Rep. Tim Ryan’s campaign in late August.
The campaign has also paid Spiros Consulting — a widely used Democratic research firm helmed by Edward Chapman — for research throughout the quarter.
The campaign’s field office game has ballooned recently. Currently all 15 of their field offices are in the first four states; 10 have opened since the start of October, according to the campaign.
That effort has evolved into more than 30 Yang Gangs across the state— 17 that South Carolina campaign chair Jermaine Johnson says are “100% structured.” The Columbia and Charleston group, made up of about 250 members, is the largest of these South Carolina Yang Gangs. The campaign maintains that while not all of these members are showing up to in-person events, the majority are active online.
It was fall of 1999, and Yang, 24, was in the job he had steered toward his whole life. Phillips Exeter Academy, Brown University, Columbia Law — the perfect elite track to land at Davis Polk & Wardwell, one of the country’s premier law firms. His Taiwanese immigrant parents were thrilled. Counting salary and bonus, he was making about $150,000 a year.
He quit because he didn’t like it. “Working at a law firm was like a pie-eating contest, and if you won, your prize was more pie.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Lots of China and technology news this time around.
How much public, firsthand evidence is there of this so-called Ukrainian quid pro quo? Right now, zero: “The problem with this narrative is that all we have to rely on is Mr. [William] Taylor’s opening statement and leaks from Democrats. What we don’t know is how Mr. Taylor responded to questions, or what he knew first-hand versus what he concluded on his own, because like all impeachment witnesses he testified in secret. Chairman Adam Schiff, with the approval of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refuses to release any witness transcripts.”
Let ye who has never brushed a congressional aide’s hair in the nude, taken naked bong hits, gotten an Iron Cross tattoo, and posted wife-sharing pics to a wife-swapping site cast the first stone.
We all know that if she was a Republican, this would dominate news cycles for weeks on end…
Brett Kavanaugh: *has a beer*
Media: TAKE. HIM. DOWN.
Katie Hill: Does drugs, has multiple inappropriate sexual relationships with employees, posts exhibitionist pictures on Reddit, does "wifesharing," etc. etc.
Media: She's living her best life, give her some privacy.
>Parliament flooded with tractors >Doors rammed >Army deployed >Angry politicians
This has had little to no traction outside the Dutch sphere, so Ive decided to make an English thread detailing the events on the 3 major protests pic.twitter.com/u7W3RWWPdz
This is a bad look: “Apple CEO becomes chairman of China university board.” What’s a little widespread rape and torture next to the almighty buck? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Universe Is Made of Tiny Bubbles Containing Mini-Universes, Scientists Say.” An elegant, worm ouroboros structure which answers many questions, but since it’s from vice Motherboard, a salt shaker is probably in order.
Today, the vegetarian ideology is not a stand-alone philosophy. It is tied inexorably to other ideologies such as socialism, globalism and extremist forms of environmentalism. There are very few vegetarian promoters that are not politically motivated. This has caused a rash of propaganda, attempting to rewrite the history of the human diet to fit their bizarre narrative.
Even though human beings have been omnivores for millions of years, the anti-meat campaign claims that humans were actually long time vegetarians. They do this by comparing humans to our closest evolutionary relatives, like chimpanzees and gorillas, and arguing that these animals have a strict vegetable diet (which is not exactly true).
Of course, Native American tribes, living closest to how our prehistoric ancestors lived long ago, had meat heavy diets, but don’t expect the environmentalists to accept this reality. What they conveniently do not mention is that over 2 million years ago human ancestors broke from their vegetable diet and began eating meat. Not only this, but the diet changed our very physical makeup. We grew far stronger, and smarter.
Yes, that’s right, the rise of meat in the human diet tracks almost exactly with the rise of human intelligence and advances in tools and technology.
My theory is that “ethical humanism” among our chattering classes is a low-calorie substitute for traditional religion, and forgoing meat is our punishment for environmental sins. Either way, I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it. Speaking of spinach…
Russian fighter with freakishly large biceps nicknamed Popeye gets clock cleaned by guy 20 years older. You’ve seen those “Skipped Leg Day” memes? This guy looks like he skipped everything but biceps day for five years.
I regard GNU Foundation head Richard Stallman as a fanatic who’s just a few steps shy of being a complete lunatic. But he’s right to defy Social Justice Warrior-types who want him removed for objecting to the lynch mob regarding the late Marvin Minsky’s minimal ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Why green-light the Full Monty impeachment farce three days later, when it was clear as day that this “bombshell” was already fizzling, just like all the other “bombshells”?
The answer is simple: the absence of impeachable offenses makes no difference whatsoever, because the outcome is pre-determined, and Pelosi’s options are stark: start the impeachment now, and retain control of the narrative, or start a month or two from now, and lose control completely, with the impeachment hearings dragging on into the primary season.
Pelosi understands perfectly that an election where the Democratic Party is framed as a single-issue party, whose sole concern is an impeaching a president over two casual sentences in a phone call, will be catastrophic. But she has run out of rope.
Impeachment proceedings are a given, because her caucus now almost unanimously demands it, and her caucus demands it because the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the Resistance crazies and the hard left. Pelosi has also run out of cute euphemisms for impeachment—the usual Pelosi mumbo-jumbo, like “inquiry,” “investigation,” and “official inquiry,” no longer work without giving the crazies the real deal.
Pelosi had to get ahead of the tidal wave before it drowned her. As Spartan women used to say to their men, “Return with the shield, or on it.” Pelosi, who generally does not lack in political courage, would rather return with the shield this time, and live to fight another day. So she chose the better of two bad options.
Snip.
With the House vote done by December, Pelosi can congratulate the troops, and move on, regardless of the result (not that it’s in any doubt). She can then proudly proclaim that the House Democrats have been diligent in saving the republic, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and those nasty obstructionist unpatriotic Republicans in the Senate refuse to see the light.
With a straight face, she can tell the lunatics and the impeachment fanatics that she has given them exactly what they asked for, and that it is up to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer now. Then she can privately breathe a sigh of relief.
Pelosi can then spend 2020 working to retain her House majority, while hoping Republican voters lose their energy by next November. Democratic candidates can spend the next year talking about something else, anything else, and at least have a chance of defeating Trump.
Pelosi knows that if impeachment is on the voters’ minds next year, Trump will be reelected in a tsunami. Her majority and speakership will go the way of the Dodo bird. The only way to change that narrative is to do the impeachment show now, and forget all about it next year.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) However, his idea that the Senate can have a quick up-and-down vote on impeachment simply won’t happen. Article I, Section 3, Paragraph 6 of the United States Constitution states:
The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
That means a real trial, presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts. That also means that President Trump’s defense team will probably be able to compel witnesses to testify, and given the Constitutional nature of the proceedings, it is entirely possible that witnesses will not be able to plead Fifth Amendment rights and refuse such testimony. Let the Senate call James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Rep. Adam Schiff, Hunter Biden, Andrew McCabe, Bruce and Nellie Ohr and every Fusion GPS and CrowStrike employee involved in both the Russian collusion hoax and Hunter Biden’s crooked dealings in the Ukraine.
The Clinton impeachment lasted a month, had thirteen House members stating the case for the prosecution, and dealt with a much narrower case and criteria. There’s no reason a Trump impeachment wouldn’t take three to six times as long for a much more complex and sprawling case.
If Democrats want an impeachment, let’s give them an impeachment, good and hard.
Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.
What’s really going on here? Why have the Democrats, to put it bluntly, gone berserk? Why are they risking a backlash of cosmic proportions (other than appeasing their psychotically-inflamed base, of course)?
One, distraction. They live in absolute fear of the coming revelations about the Russia probe, from Inspector General Horowitz but even more from the DOJ’s John Durham, who can actually put people in jail. The Dems know — if they have a brain (and a few do) — these revelations are likely to point up the line at the leaders of the Democratic Party all the way to President Obama. They were all involved to one degree or another with illegally spying on or undermining Trump and his administration and supporters before and after the election. The extent of this we are only beginning to understand.
To put it mildly, not good. Whether you call this treason is up to you, but you can be sure Middle America (i. e. those elusive independent voters) will not appreciate it.
But there’s something worse — and Pelosi’s knows it. The only hope for Democrats to defeat Trump is, remote and quixotic as it may be, impeachment. In the midst of the current brouhaha, Joe Biden — their great (alas white male) hope — is being exposed as not just a senile plagiarist, but a senile, corrupt plagiarist with a freaky family out of a Southern gothic novel with tentacles reaching into China and Ukraine. Again, not good.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Dems have tacked so far to the left that they wouldn’t be able to win an election in Shenyang. Sanders, speaking of senility, is almost risible. He wants to restrict population for reasons of “climate change” when every one of the myriad social programs he so vehemently urges depends on strong continued population growth for economic survival, irrespective of taxes. (Is he that stupid? I don’t think so. He’s just a liar.)
As for his somewhat subtle clone, Ms. Warren, her proposals are if anything more extreme because she fails to acknowledge (though Colbert did his best to encourage her) that they are going to cost a ton of taxpayer money that approaches national bankruptcy. Even taxing the rich at one hundred percent won’t come near supporting her ideas. Wait until Trump gets ahold of that.
What’s the magic word that made Democrats go extra apeshit over the Ukraine meeting? Crowdstrike:
To understand how important this is, we must remember the foundation for the entire Russian election interference narrative, ‘Muh Russia – writ large, is built on the claim Russians hacked the servers of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and subsequently released damaging emails that showed the DNC worked to help Hillary Clinton and eliminate Bernie Sanders.
Despite the Russian ‘hacking’ claim the DOJ and FBI previously admitted the DNC would not let FBI investigators review the DNC server or cloud-based network. Instead the original claim was that the DNC provided the FBI with analysis of a technical review done through a cyber-security contract with Crowdstrike.
According to the original FBI statements made by James Comey: Crowdstrike did the captured imaging of the DNC network (servers/cloud), then conducted analysis, then provided a report to the DNC with their findings; and that report was given to the FBI. At least that was the original 2017 claim. However, during court filings in the case against Roger Stone, the DOJ/FBI later admitted they never even saw the Crowstrike final report.
Lawyers representing Roger Stone requested the full Crowdstrike report on the DNC hack. When the DOJ responded to the Stone motion they made a rather significant admission. Not only did the FBI not review the DNC server or cloud data, the FBI/DOJ never even saw the final Crowdstrike report.
The narrative around the DNC hack claim was always sketchy; many people believe the DNC email data was downloaded onto a flash drive and leaked. Crowdstrike was a private contractor holding a strong conflict of interest over Clinton and DNC interests. With this FBI court admission the scale of sketchy increased exponentially.
There was, and still is, absolutely no evidence the DNC was “hacked” (WikiLeaks claims the information was an inside job of “leaking”), and even John Podesta admitted himself he was a victim of an ordinary “phishing” password change scam.
This admission meant the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party….. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor.
If politics were regulated the way that consumer goods are, Nancy Pelosi might be charged by the FTC with deceptive packaging for her ridiculous announcement yesterday that an “official” impeachment inquiry is underway. It is pure theater, designed to appease the radicals like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who two days ago denounced the failure to impeach as worse than Trump’s “crimes.” With radical primary challengers and a San Francisco constituency given to backing lunatic schemes and politicians, she fears for her political career.
The only way that impeachment begins is with a floor vote of the House, after which time subpoenas can be issued and the facts assembled for Articles of Impeachment to be presented to the House, and, if voted by a majority, submitted to the Senate for trial, which requires a two-thirds majority for conviction. What Pelosi offered was deceptively packaged oversight hearings by six committees. All she is doing is adding five more committees to the hearings already underway by Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s Judiciary Committee.
The obvious is that they are fishing for votes. Warren has a putative weakness with African American voters. Tom Steyer is unknown to them (as he is to a lot of people). Harris is sinking fast and needs to shore up her rep and Julián Castro’s campaign has barely been registering enough to keep him on the debate stage.
But beneath this are more disturbing beliefs, one of which is on the edge of disgusting and actually racist: that African Americans prefer to be lied to than told the truth. The corollary to this is that they are easily lied to if you stir them up. The level of disrespect in this is off the charts.
Also at play here, as it is everywhere in Democratic precincts, is Fear of Trump. African Americans are doing better under Trump than they ever have been in this country with unemployment at record lows and salaries up.
Further, Trump really did something never done before — spearheaded and signed criminal justice reform legislation. Better not remind black people of that. Distract them or lie to them instead. Call Trump a racist, though why would a racist do such a thing?
Man starts a program to help other men get off heroin. The Southern Poverty Law Center called him a white supremacist. Now he’s suing their ass for $4.8 million, and a district judge just gave the green light to start discovery.
“What’s Wrong With Chinese GDP Data?” “Since 2013, GDP figures look suspiciously smooth.”
If proven, this deserves serious prison time: “California Sheriff Under Investigation For ‘Pay To Play’ Concealed Carry Permits.” Namely to campaign donors. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
“Some 600,000 vacationers were stranded when Thomas Cook, a travel company that has been in business for 178 years, collapsed on Sunday.”
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) admitted her plans to put a resolution on the House floor Wednesday to investigate President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal, a process that will likely grow into an impeachment inquiry as Democrat demands for impeachment grow ever more insistent.
“Confirmed: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planning to put a resolution on the House floor tomorrow to address the Ukraine issue as there are increasing calls by Democrats to start the impeachment process for President Trump,” PBS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor tweeted.
In an interview with CNN Monday night, Pelosi declined to say whether or not she would fully endorse an impeachment inquiry, but she suggested a move toward impeachment proceedings was certain. “We will have no choice,” she said.
The renewed push for impeachment gained steam following reports that President Trump pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son Hunter in cooperation with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. On Tuesday, Trump announced he would release the full transcript of the call, during which he reportedly pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden no fewer than eight times.
Hunter Biden was a board member of Ukrainian firm Burisma Group when Joe Biden served as secretary of State. During his tenure, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
Yes, a scandal where a sitting Democratic Vice President withheld aid from a foreign country unless they stopped investigating his crooked son’s crooked deals is somehow Trump’s fault. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Democrat party is covering up a pattern of corruption involving high level members of the Obama cabinet. The multi-million and billion dollar pay-for-play is mind boggling. Biden Family sale of office to Ukraine was not the only one or the most egregious. Slimy Joe is not alone.
Let this sink in , The democrats want to impeach our President for exposing the crimes that they have committed . SMH Joe Biden needs to be impeached .#Trump2020LandslideVictory
Democrats want to impeach a president with a 53% approval rating based on a whistleblower with ZERO firsthand knowledge of the Trump-Ukraine phone call
It’s ironic that this so-called whistleblower scandal is going to be the thing that kicks off an actual impeachment inquiry, since it looks like just another nothingburger in a long line of nothingburgers:
The democrats in the House of Representatives are at it again. Is this their third or fourth call for impeachment of the president? Each week it seems media bring us a new sensational story of theft and intrigue, that then very quietly falls by the wayside once the facts emerge.
This time the controversy centers around business dealings that former Vice President Biden’s son had in the Ukraine. Allegedly, Biden’s son was on the board of a company that bribed Ukrainian officials to end a corruption investigation into it. Democrats now allege that the President threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine should it not reopen the investigation into Biden’s son. The President denies this claim, and intends to release the transcript of the phone call in question. Currently Speaker Pelosi and her cohorts are planning impeachment, before any real evidence of misconduct has come to light.
The way the House is going about sounds less like an impeachment proceeding than a clown show:
BREAKING: Speaker Pelosi was shot down by her caucus in her bid to form one impeachment committee, similar to the Hyde Committee or the Rodino Committee, and capitulated to no fewer than 6 committee chairs to jointly "lead" the investigation, including volatile Rep. Maxine Waters
Perhaps because it’s obvious that the entire thing is politically motivated by Democrats’ irrational hatred of President Trump:
Nancy Pelosi suggests that Democrats have to impeach Trump because they desperately want to prevent him from getting re-elected: "He can't win, that is very serious" pic.twitter.com/JTS2mYIm1u
Democrats seem not to have noticed that Trump thrives in environments of opposition and chaos. There are a lot of people (not just among Republicans) who believe that actual impeachment is several bridges too far, that Br’er Trump is going to thrive in the impeachment brier patch, and that instead of derailing President Trump’s reelection, it’s going to ensure it.
So, you guys are just going to feed another roll of quarters into the dick punching machine on this impeachment thing, eh?
Lefties are tweeting about impeachment but have no idea what impeachment means. If they think that the 2/3 of the Senate would vote out Trump, they’re crazy. & if they do sincerely believe that, I hope they’re ready for President Pence, because we all know how much they love him
But it’s also possible that this is just a mime show for the hard left rubes, that Pelosi has no intention of allowing an actual a vote on impeachment:
Pelosi did not and has not promised a floor vote on impeachment. This is just the launch of an "inquiry." I'm told she deflected on the question of a floor vote in caucus today.
This month, Netroots Nation met in Philadelphia. The choice was no accident. Pennsylvania will probably be the key swing state in 2020. Donald Trump won it by only 44,000 votes or seven-tenths of a percentage point. He lost the prosperous Philadelphia suburbs by more than Mitt Romney did in 2012 but more than made up for it with new support in “left behind” blue-collar areas such as Erie and Wilkes-Barre.
You’d think that this history would inform activists at Netroots Nation about the best strategy to follow in 2020. Not really. Instead, Netroots events seemed to alternate between pandering presentations by presidential candidates and a bewildering array of “intersectionality” and identity-politics seminars.
Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged that, if elected, she would immediately investigate crimes committed by border-control agents. Julian Castro, a former Obama-administration cabinet member, called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But everyone was topped by Washington governor Jay Inslee. “My first act will be to ask Megan Rapinoe to be my secretary of State,” he promised. Naming the woke, purple-haired star of the championship U.S. Women’s Soccer team, he said, would return “love rather than hate” to the center of America’s foreign policy.
Snip.
Many leftists acknowledge that Democrats are less interested than they used to be in trimming their sails to appeal to moderates. Such trimming is no longer necessary, as they see it, because the changing demographics of the country give them a built-in advantage. Almost everyone I encountered at Netroots Nation was convinced that President Trump would lose in 2020. Earlier today, Roland Martin, an African-American journalist, told ABC’s This Week, “America is changing. By 2043, we’ll be a nation [that’s] majority people of color, and that’s — that is the game here — that’s what folks don’t want to understand what’s happening in this country.”
It’s a common mistake on both the right and the left to assume that minority voters will a) always vote in large numbers and b) will vote automatically for Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in part because black turnout fell below what Barack Obama was able to generate. There is no assurance that black turnout can be restored in 2020.
As for other ethnic groups, a new poll by Politico/Morning Consult this month found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics is at 42 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll showed Trump at 32 percent among Hispanics; another poll from The Hill newspaper and HarrisX has it at 35 percent. In 2016, Trump won only 29 to 32 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Netroots Nation convinced me that progressive activists are self-confident, optimistic about the chances for a progressive triumph, and assured that a Trump victory was a freakish “black swan” event. But they are also deaf to any suggestion that their PC excesses had anything to do with Trump’s being in the White House. That is apt to be the progressive blind spot going into the 2020 election.
Democrats’ strategy against President Trump has been a miserable failure. Even CNN agrees!
President Trump won the Mueller showdown and now is going on offense:
Trump is just beginning to advance his arguments about what has blanketed the country since the summer of 2016. The president is going to argue that the real scandal was the attempt to keep him from winning election and, once having won, from governing. And his opponents did so by shocking means far outside the norms of law and U.S. politics. In this offensive against his tormentors of the past 36 months, the president may be aided by the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and by John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to whom Attorney General William P. Barr has entrusted the investigation into what may well become “CoIntelPro 2.0.”
Even if not, Trump will make this argument simply by force of repetition of the facts we already know: The Steele Dossier was a con job from the start — opposition research passed off as intelligence and, at best, stupidly accepted as legitimate by a naive FBI. It could turn out much worse than this. Wise advice during the Mueller investigation was to wait for the endgame and not guess. The same holds for the inspector general and for Durham.
That the attack on Trump has decisively failed is not open to debate — except by people unfamiliar with sunk costs. Many political figures and folks in the commentariat heavily invested in the idea that Mueller would bring forth impeachment, and possibly even conviction and removal of the president. He did not. Impeachment proceedings, much less a successful vote on articles of impeachment, seem unlikely.
Trump has his economic boom, his deregulatory record, his military buildup and his remaking of the judiciary. He has criminal-justice reform to his credit and an overhaul of Veterans Affairs is underway. He now has a spending deal that would guarantee continuing fiscal stimulus via larger deficits, and he has four vacancies (to which he astonishingly has not nominated anyone) on the U.S. courts of appeals for the 2nd and 9th circuits, as well as scores of district court openings to remind his base of the stakes.
Look at the last impeachment, that of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr delivered his report on the Lewinsky affair to Congress on Sept. 9. The House voted to start impeachment proceedings on Oct. 8. The formal impeachment vote was Dec. 19. The matter then went to the Senate, which voted to acquit Clinton on Feb. 12, 1999. The process took a few days more than five months.
Imagine a similar timeline today. The House stays out on recess until the second week in September. Say they vote to begin proceedings in October. The impeachment vote comes in mid-to-late December, and the Senate verdict in February — probably somewhere between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.
That is a crazy scenario, and that is what would happen if impeachment work got under way immediately after the House returns from recess. If it were delayed further, the whole thing would move weeks or months farther down the road. Why not a Senate trial during Super Tuesday, or the summer political conventions? The possibilities are mind-boggling.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi fears impeachment will backfire on Democrats, in large part because the Republican-controlled Senate will never remove Donald Trump from office. Her strategy appears to be to delay and delay until at some point it becomes obvious to all that it is far too late to make impeachment happen. Pelosi will then look at her watch and say, “Oh, my goodness, look at the time!” And that will be that.
The fact is, it is nearly too late for impeachment right now. Yet the possibility of impeachment is still being discussed seriously.
While everyone was watching Robert Mueller ask when Matlock was on, the House, in coordination with the Trump Administration, passed a budget agreement that continues profligate spending as far as the eye can see (or at least two years), and which takes a government shutdown off the table until after the 2020 election. Not what I or any conservative activist would have done, but obviously President Trump feels he can continue to hold off the next cyclical recession long enough to get reelected. Kicking the can down the road has become a global pastime for almost all the nations of the world, and sooner or later there will come a reckoning. In America, this fight may have been lost when Bush41 let Gramm-Rudman-Hollings get whacked in 1990…
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this story of Washington, D.C. therapists whose patients’ Trump Derangement Syndromes are making their equally liberal TDS-suffering therapists depressed as well. (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
Dr. Drew told Adams that he had predicted the recent typhus outbreak in Los Angeles, which was carried by rats, transferred by fleas to pets, and from pets to humans.
Bubonic plague, Dr. Drew said, like typhus, is endemic to the region, and can spread to humans from rodents in a similar fashion.
Though commonly recognized as the medieval disease responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which killed one-third of the population of Europe, the last outbreak of bubonic plague in the U.S. was nearly a century ago, from 1924 to 1925 — also in Los Angeles. Only a “heroic effort” by doctors stopped it, Dr. Drew recalled, warning that conditions were perfect for another outbreak of the plague in the near future.
Los Angeles is one of the only cities in the country, Dr. Drew said, that has no rodent control plan. “And if you look at the pictures of Los Angeles, you will see that the homeless encampments are surrounded by dumps. People defecate there, they throw their trash there, and the rats just proliferate there.”
Representative Jerrold Nadler has served in Congress for 27 years, rising to become the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. He has become a boldface name in the age of President Trump, the linchpin of many Democrats’ hopes of impeachment.
Eliot Engel leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, after first being elected to the House in 1988. Carolyn Maloney was the first woman to represent her district when she was elected in 1992. Yvette Clarke, serving since 2007, has delivered some of the most consistently progressive votes in her party.
All four New York House members are facing primary challenges from multiple insurgent candidates.
Almost a year in advance of the June 2020 primary, more than a dozen Democrats in New York have declared their plans to run, forming one of the most contentious congressional fields in the country at this stage. They are targeting some of the country’s longest-serving or most powerful politicians — most as first-time or outsider candidates, and some in the same district.
The phenomenon is not unique: Progressives across the country are plotting primary battles, spurred on by the victories last year of figures such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as growing disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s old-guard wing. Early challengers have emerged in blue states including New Jersey and California.
Texas Democrats have their eyes on taking over Texas, and a newly released plan lays out how they aim to finally turn Texas blue.
In a presentation given to political donors and Austin lobbyists this week, Texas Democrats made their case for heavy political investment in the Lone Star State.
First, they compare Texas to Ohio, a traditional swing state that often receives a heavy influx of cash from national Democrat donors. Both states, the presentation states, voted 43 percent Democrat in the 2016 presidential election. But while Ohio’s trajectory is “successively worse in the last two presidential elections,” Texas Democrats point out that they had their best showing in 20 years. They also highlight demographic differences between Ohio and Texas that they believe make the task easier, such as the Texas’ overall younger and larger minority population.
Snip.
Democrats need not worry, they say, about retaining [12 Texas House seats they flipped], as they claim there is “too much GOP defense to go on offense” in order to take those seats back. Recently released campaign finance reports, however, show that many of the newly elected “Democrat Dozen” have an astoundingly small amount in their campaign accounts, depicting what could be an uphill battle for many of them should Republicans wage serious campaigns to take those seats back.
In addition to John Cornyn’s senate seat, Democrats are targeting six U.S. congressional seats.
On the same theme, this piece says those six districts are:
TX-10 — Mike McCaul
TX-21 — Chip Roy
TX-22 — Pete Olson
TX-23 — Will Hurd
TX-24 — Kenny Marchant
TX-31 — John Carter
Minnesota, the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984, is trending Republican.
For example, last month, Trump moved to expand a major copper and nickel mining operation, one of the largest remaining reserves in the world, that Barack Obama had refused to renew in his final weeks in office. Obama’s backpedaling on approving new mining leases was widely unpopular. While liberal environmental groups are still vocally protesting Trump’s decision, polls show that Minnesotans, especially in the five counties surrounding the project, strongly approve.
Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has also found increasing favor. Minnesota is a major resettlement state for Muslim refugees, many of them from terror-prone Syria and Somalia. Some Somalis have also left Minnesota to join the Islamic State in east Africa. A November 2016 attack by a Somali American, who stabbed eight people in a shopping mall, has fueled support for Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Minnesota’s up for grabs for another reason: Massive fallout from the resignation of Sen. Al Franken, a prominent liberal Democrat, over sexual assault allegations that have damaged the party’s standing with voters across the board. Add to this the growing controversy over newly elected in-state Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is widely viewed as anti-Semitic and extremist, and the Democrats are confronting a major crisis of credibility with Minnesota’s electorate.
Related: “According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on Thursday, people with inside, compromising knowledge of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial and political dealings are 843% more likely to commit suicide.”
The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger, wants to desilo the Corps and reintegrate it into the Navy’s overall structure. CDR Salamander thinks this is a good idea. Maybe. I haven’t followed recent strategic seapower debates much as of late. But it’s a devil-in-the-details move that could badly backfire if improperly implemented. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time. I knew who he was since my uncle Christopher was an ex-boyfriend of his mother’s and he had told me to keep an eye out for him, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight (and sound) of him at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. This was the world famous debating society where ambitious undergraduates honed their public-speaking skills before embarking on careers in politics or journalism, and Boris was proposing the motion.
With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.
He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics—theatrical, dramatic, self-serious—when—a few seconds in—he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled—Where am I?—and asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. “What’s the motion, anyway?” Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared above his head and he was off, this time in an even more orotund, florid manner. Yet within a few seconds he’d wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who’d been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plonked down at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.
I’d been to enough Union debates at this point to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. That was particularly true of freshmen, who were expected to have mastered all the arcane procedural rules, some of them dating back to the Union’s founding in 1823. But Boris’s chaotic, scatter-brained approach had the opposite effect. The motion was deadly serious—“This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment”—yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a Music Hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.
A long list of Johnson scandals that didn’t even remotely come close to derailing his ascent skipped.
Another quote that’s often dragged up by Boris’s enemies to discredit him is from a Conservative campaign speech in 2005: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” In their minds, this is appallingly sexist, as well as environmentally suspect. But if Orwell is right about the enduring appeal of the “overwhelming vulgarity,” the “smuttiness,” the “ever-present obscenity,” of Britain’s seaside postcards you can see why constantly reminding people of Boris’s politically incorrect remarks won’t necessarily hurt his electoral chances. It just serves to embed him in the public imagination as a stock British character whom many people still feel an instinctive affection for: the lovable rogue, the man with the holiday in his eye. He’s the guy that tries to persuade the barman to serve one more round of drinks after time has been called, the 14-year-old who borrows his father’s Mercedes at two o’clock in the morning and takes it up to a 100mph on the motorway with his friends shrieking in the back. He’s Falstaff in Henry IV, Sid James in the Carry On films. He’s a Donald McGill postcard.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the reference, here’s an example:
Israel has reportedly flown a modified version of the F-35 to Iran and back, circling major cities and military bases and taking surveillance photographs without being detected by Iranian radar or intercepted by Russian missiles.
That is the story that has been circulating throughout the Middle East for the past year. No one is certain whether it is true, but it has begun to appear in Western sources, especially since Iran recently fired the head of its air force.
The Israeli version of the F-35, known as the “Adir,” is reportedly the first version of the American-made Joint Strike Fighter that has ever been deployed in combat. But it may have already had a bigger impact in a non-combat role.
That so many believe the story is a sign Iran is already regarded as the “weak horse” in the middle east. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)
Social justice warriors defy any and all pushback, calling it “transphobia.” They argue that gender is a social construct. It’s a theory in feminist sociology that states society and culture, not genetics, define whether one is male, female, or “other”.
While the argument about what constitutes “gender identity” and “gender expression” – other confusing facets of gender in contemporary society – remain up for debate, what isn’t up for debate is the fact that those born with male body parts and hormone levels have physical superiority over most biological females. It is settled science.
Speaking of tranny madness, this piece is about a woke and naive Harvard professor who let himself be taken to the cleaners by a “lesbian” divorced from a tranny who had a one-night stand with him and then proceeded to rob him blind because he was too stupid/woke to resist her.
Here’s a horrifying story about how San Luis Obispo police chief Deanna Cantrell losing her gun in a toilet stall led police to conduct a warrantless search of an innocent man’s house and seized his children for “neglect” because the house was dirty.
A rule published Monday bars migrants from seeking asylum in the United States if they’ve traveled through another country first.
Tens of thousands of migrant families from Central America travel through Mexico to the U.S. each month, many claiming asylum. The Trump administration claims families are taking advantage of legal loopholes it says allow migrants a free pass to the country while they wait out phony asylum requests.
The DOJ’s statement documents one particularly horrifying murder that some of the gang members are charged with where a rival gang member “was abducted, choked, and driven to a remote location in the Angeles National Forest” where he was “dismembered, and his body parts were thrown into a canyon after one of the defendants allegedly cut the heart out of the victim’s body.”
I didn’t initially buy into this business about how Trump’s often-unorthodox tweets and actions are part of a political 3D chess game he’s playing while the rest of the country is playing checkers.
But I do now.
I could go through a lengthy punchlist of examples of Trump statements and moves that prove the 3D chess theory, but that would dramatically overtake the space this column has to offer. Instead, let’s just talk about this weekend’s flare-up over the president’s Twitter outburst aimed at The Squad — the four idiot freshman Democrat congresswomen, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who have spent their time as elected officials offering one inappropriate and stupid anti-American outburst after another.
Trump didn’t initially name any of the four. He didn’t talk about Omar or Ocasio-Cortez, and he didn’t talk about Ayana Pressley or Rashida Tlaib.
Instead he referred to “Progressive” Democratic congresswomen, and then noted that they “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
This was decried by all the Usual Suspects as an abjectly racist statement, a response that Trump certainly anticipated and couldn’t care less about. Even some weak-kneed Republicans thrashed about in paroxysms of self-righteousness about how Trump could possibly be so bigoted and insensitive in calling out The Squad. After all, three of the four were born in this country!
But Omar wasn’t.
Omar is from Somalia. Omar is quite possibly here in this country after having committed immigration fraud. There has been a quite credible, perhaps even convincing, case made that Ilhan Omar married her biological brother in furtherance of that immigration fraud. And Ilhan Omar has not stopped making incendiary anti-American and pro-Muslim Brotherhood statements since she entered public life.
Absolutely everything Trump said in his tweets applies perfectly and without stipulation to Ilhan Omar.
The fact that he didn’t use her name meant that our political betters immediately assumed he was also talking about Pressley, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez.
Which bothered Trump not one bit.
Paragraphs on the unpopularity of Omar and Ocasio Cortez with actual voters (which I covered here) snipped.
So what do you do if you want to ensure Omar and AOC poison those so-called moderate Democrats who won those swing House districts last year?
You force Pelosi into bed with them.
Which is precisely what Trump has done.
The Democrat leadership immediately, reflexively, lined up behind The Squad after an entire week of slapping them down. Al Green, a Democratic congressman from the slums of Houston, is now attempting to use Trump’s tweets as a fresh justification for impeachment, which is all Al Green does in Congress. There will be a House resolution condemning the president’s comments as racist, on which Pelosi has put her stamp of approval, and another seeking to formally censure Trump.
All of this is precisely what Trump wanted. And he proved it by doubling and then tripling down on his statements Monday, first unleashing a new set of tweets mostly quoting Lindsey Graham, who had partially rebuked the president for getting too personal about The Squad in his complaints, and then popping off in a Rose Garden press avail with comments directly eviscerating Omar in a way I can’t remember ever having seen a president do to a member of Congress. Which was glorious, by the way, and if you haven’t seen the video you owe it to yourself to watch it.
Don’t think for one second that Trump doesn’t absolutely love this fight. He is a pig in slop at this point. Trump will continue forcing Pelosi and her leadership team into bed with The Squad from here all the way to Election Day, and when he’s through he won’t just win reelection in a landslide but he’ll also take away every single one of those swing districts.
The four — AOC, Tlaib, Pressley, Omar — have no clout in the Democratic caucus. But because of the confrontations they have caused and the controversy they have created, they have a massive media following.
Paradoxically, their interests in winning cheers as the fighting arm of the Democratic Party coincide with the interests of Donald Trump. He entertains and energizes his base by answering in kind their attacks on him and by adopting incendiary rhetoric of his own. He is now assuming the old “America! Love it or Leave it!” stance in going after the four women as anti-American ingrates.
They, by calling Trump a criminal, racist and fascist for whom impeachment proceedings should have begun months ago, elate and energize the outraged left of their party.
Among the presidential candidates, some have begun to side with the four, with Bernie Sanders saying Pelosi has been “a little” too tough on them.
On “Meet the Press,” Bernie added: “You cannot ignore the young people of this country who are passionate about economic and racial and social and environmental justice. You’ve got to bring them in, not alienate them.”
Trump’s Sunday attack forced Pelosi to stand with her severest critics, and she re-elevated the race issue with this tweet: “When Trump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.”
Do Democrats believe that refighting the racial battles of the 1960s that were thought to have been resolved is a winning hand in 2020?
Does Pelosi think that demeaning white America is going to rally white or minority Americans to Democratic banners?
(Caveat: Patrick Buchanan.)
Democrats tell Jake Tapper off the record that Trump snookered them into embracing The Squad. “And they have to pretend that their party is unified because of their fear of being challenged in primaries by radicals with the support of Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s Svengali chief of staff and the brains behind the Justice Democrats.”
Chakrabarti’s previous HQ was a Knoxville address out of which the Justice Democrats and another PAC operated side by side with a dozen congressional campaign committees. This arrangement flouted a variety of campaign finance laws and prompted several Federal Election Commission complaints, including one alleging that Chakrabarti set up a $1 million slush fund. But this sort of skullduggery is standard practice among Democrats. What exacerbated the already tense atmosphere in their House caucus was Chakrabarti’s response to the $4.6 billion border aid package passed by Congress last month. On June 27, he took to Twitter and berated the Democratic leadership for its shortcomings:
As usual, Dem leadership tried to create a pre-watered down border bill because of a mistaken idea that it’s more “viable.” And they lost to McConnell anyway. This is the entire theory of change that never works. Why not start from your strongest negotiating stance?
Predictably, this presumptuous tweet drew a number of angry responses from various Democrats who had voted for the measure, whereupon Chakrabarti once again betook himself to Twitter and proceeded to accuse his critics of racism:
Instead of “fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” let’s call the New Democrats and Blue Dog Caucus the “New Southern Democrats.” They certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.
Chakrabarti later deleted that tweet, but not before it had clearly signaled who actually calls the shots in AOC’s office.
Snip.
Chakrabarti’s Justice Democrats PAC is also taking fire from the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The Hill reports, “Congressional Black Caucus members are furious at Justice Democrats, accusing the outside progressive group … of trying to oust lawmakers of color, specifically African American lawmakers.” The PAC evidently plans to primary at least six CBC members who occupy safe Democratic seats simply because they don’t lean far enough to the left. Chakrabarti is clearly using his position as AOC’s chief of staff to engineer a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. He said as much during an extensive profile for The Washington Post Magazine:
To me, there wasn’t a difference between working for her and working for the movement … The whole theory of change for the current Democratic Party is that to win this country we need to tack to the hypothetical middle … you don’t take unnecessary risks, which translates to: You don’t really do anything.
Chakrabarti doesn’t see himself as a mere staffer in some congresswoman’s office. He sees AOC as someone who provides him with a headquarters from which he can “fundamentally change” the Democratic Party.
Speaking of The Squad, The Minneapolis Star Tribuneactually reports on allegations against Omar: “New investigative documents released by a state agency have given fresh life to lingering questions about the marital history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and whether she once married a man — possibly her own brother — to skirt immigration laws.”
Powerline, which has been following the story the media wouldn’t, has still more:
In 1995, Ilhan entered the United States as a fraudulent member of the “Omar” family.
That is not her family. The Omar family is a second, unrelated family which was being granted asylum by the United States. The Omars allowed Ilhan, her genetic sister Sahra, and her genetic father Nur Said to use false names to apply for asylum as members of the Omar family.
Ilhan’s genetic family split up at this time. The above three received asylum in the United States, while Ilhan’s three other siblings — using their real names — managed to get asylum in the United Kingdom.
Ilhan Abdullahi Omar’s name, before applying for asylum, was Ilhan Nur Said Elmi.
Her father’s name before applying for asylum was Nur Said Elmi Mohamed. Her sister Sahra Noor’s name before applying for asylum was Sahra Nur Said Elmi. Her three siblings who were granted asylum by the United Kingdom are Leila Nur Said Elmi, Mohamed Nur Said Elmi, and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
Ilhan and Ahmed married in 2009, presumably to benefit in some way from a fraudulent marriage. They did not divorce until 2017.
Democrats have defined racism down yet again. “Thirty-two percent (32%) of Democrats, however, say it’s racist for any white politician to criticize the political views of a politician of color. So being a ‘politician of color’ means that your views are immune to disagreement. Unless–once again–you are a Republican.”
The point is, apparently, Democrats are sick of thinking about that guy, the “guy in a diner in rural” whatever. Once they were safely stowed in a basket — a basket of deplorables — and that worked out so disastrously that the reaction could be to obsess over these imaginary people. Are Democratic Party candidates expected to actually venture into the hinterlands? No, they’ll just worry about those people, and then they come to Madison (where I live) or Milwaukee to try to score enough votes to outnumber those diner people. That’s what Democrats do to win Wisconsin.
Planned Parenthood head ousted over refusal to back transsexual abortions. Tranny madness is going to take out the entire leftwing establishment by insisting that every member must forthrightly declare that 2+2=5.
The Amazon pullout of Seattle continues. The corporate giant announced on Tuesday that it is going to build a 43-story tower in Bellevue.
It will be Amazon’s tallest building anywhere in the world, and it will be the tallest building in Bellevue, which has more than a few skyscrapers. Several thousand employees will be able to work there. So it looks like this is another part in the saga of Amazon leaving Seattle. All of this is because we have a city council and a mayor who have gone fanatic about socialism. They keep pushing anti-business policies.
What this means for the downtown Seattle real estate market is that when the economy inevitably starts to turn, it will be cataclysmic. When you have one company that takes up so many thousands of square feet of downtown real estate, and that company moves out, real estate prices will fall.
I don’t know when this is going to happen, but I am very confident in my analysis; Seattle will fall harder than any other city in the country. This is because Seattle has been the craziest in its Leftist run-up during this boom economy that we’re enjoying right now.
We already have so many businesses on the brink of survival because of the minimum wage because of all of the controlling policies the city government keeps imposing. When the businesses start toppling, you’re going to see all the support industry in downtown Seattle — the food service, etc. — fall hard, too.
The Amazon pullout of Seattle is another dramatic sign that when the people who drive our economy, our tax revenue, our job creation are out because of our politics, it’s time to change our politics.
In addition to his sexual predation with “tweens and teens,” Epstein pursued ambitious, beautiful New York City women in their 20s in the early 2000s, some of them ex-models seeking a professional afterlife. To this woman, and others, Epstein introduced himself as the owner of a hedge fund with clients investing $1 billion or more. He kept his child molestation secret, and came off as a gentle, erudite recluse. He was often at movie premieres, sometimes with a blonde on each arm—a blonde of legal age, but still, as noted this week by David Boies, usually under 25 years old. His predation had not been reported to the police yet, but there were indications that he was somewhat different than most mature men his age. Eleanora Kennedy, the elegant wife of powerhouse lawyer Michael Kennedy, recalls asking Epstein to underwrite a premiere party at the Metropolitan Club for The White Countess, a Merchant Ivory film released in 2005. “I got him on the phone and explained that the event was also a benefit for a women’s medical center conducting a study about menopause,” says Kennedy. “As soon as I said ‘menopause,’ he said, ‘Ms. Kennedy, if you don’t say that word again, I’ll send you a check for $10,000.’”
Like most of the older men who date young women, Epstein seemed to take great pride in his behavior. He seemed to desperately want other important men to perceive him as a great lothario, Genghis Khan in a monogrammed sweatshirt. A former model who was on Epstein’s 727 shortly after she graduated college recalls him taking her and some older men on a tour to show off his custom-designed, padded floors. “When I saw that I thought, Wow, rich people are weird,” she says. “I was so stupid and naïve—Why are padded floors cool? I was too young to get it.” The men simply laughed and winked, joking with each other that Epstein padded his floors so that he could have sex on the floor at 10,000 feet.
Also: He liked to keep his bedroom at 54°F when slept.
Media unveils bombshell report of Trump hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein…in 1992.
Yes, that’d be 27 years ago, before Epstein was even known to have done anything illicit. So apparently, Trump is guilty by association because he couldn’t see into the future and know that Epstein would abuse women some years later. In fact, Epstein did not even own his “pedophile island” in 1992, nor are there currently any victims dating back to that time.
The sexual assault charges against Kevin Spacey have been dismissed. The case, which involved Spacey allegedly groping an 18-year old man, evidently had multiple problems and fell apart when the accuser refused to testify. This is the only one of some fifteen accusers (one as young as 14) who alleged Spacey did something sleazy with them.
Related: CNN reporter asks a panel of women to comment on President Trump’s “racist” tweets. Their reply: “It’s not racist.” Including a legal immigrant.
None of these women, including a legal immigrant, think the president's comments were racist.
“Billionaire investor Peter Thiel says one reason for Google aiding in the transfer of AI technology to the Chinese military in favor of America is that “woke” Google employees are anti-American and prefer China to the U.S.”
In addition to being a corrupt scumbag, the Governor of Puerto Rico is also a bit of an asshole. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Today’s stupid ecoscam headline: “Streaming Online Pornography Produces as Much CO2 as Belgium.” From the comments: “If we had a global referendum on whether we’d rather have porn or Belgium, I wouldn’t bet on Belgium.”
#TeamCocaineMitch is already throwing down on Democratic opponent Amy McGrath:
Wes Pruden, editor of the Washington Times, RIP. I like the cut of his jib:
He was the last of the old-time newspapermen, and the word “journalist” was prohibited from appearing in the pages of the Times during his tenure as editor-in-chief.
That rule was one of several variations from the AP Stylebook known as “Prudenisms,” reflecting Mr. Pruden’s preference for plain English and his hostility to euphemism, jargon and lazy writing. For example, “controversial” was prohibited, as were “alleged,” “allegation” and “allegedly.” If someone was accused of wrongdoing, then you had to cite a source making that charge, rather than just saying the person allegedly did whatever it was. Also, under Mr. Pruden’s rules, “gay” was not an acceptable synonym for homosexual, which meant that, as an assistant editor on the national desk, I had to change this in AP wire stories.
The Times used courtesy titles, so the President would be “Mr. Trump” and the Speaker of the House “Mrs. Pelosi” on second reference, and we were not allowed to use “Ms.,” so that on second reference a certain New York Democrat would be Miss Ocasio-Cortez. Also, we did not use “Dr.” as the honorific for a Ph.D., but only for an M.D. This was because doctorate degrees were a dime a dozen in D.C., and even many high-school principals could demand a “Dr.” if we ever let that get started. This particular Prudenism really ruffled the feathers of James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who had a Ph.D. in psychology and always insisted on being called Doctor Dobson, but the editor’s rule was unbending and on second reference he was always “Mr. Dobson.” I seem to recall Ralph Z. Hallow on the phone with Dobson’s people, getting an earful of complaints about this, as the “Doctor” thing was part of Dobson’s brand, as it were, but it was Mr. Pruden’s paper, and complaints were useless.
Some of my colleagues at the paper grumbled about Mr. Pruden’s curmudgeonly ways, but having an old-fashioned editor was in many ways a great blessing, because he was utterly invulnerable to any kind of political correctness or manufactured “controversy.” Of course, every liberal on the planet hated the Washington Times, so there was never any shortage of “activist” types indignant about our coverage, but there was no pressure they could bring to bear on Mr. Pruden that would make him flinch. A reporter whose story touched off a firestorm of outrage knew that, as long as he had the facts right, Mr. Pruden had his back. As long as the Old Man was happy with your work, it didn’t matter who else might be angry about it. He had courage, and a sense of honor.
Bird, an electric scooter sharing startup, lost $100 million over three months. On behalf of every Austinite who’s driven downtown recently, I’d just like to say:
A reminder from 50 years ago: Don’t drink and drive. And if you do, don’t leave the scene of the crash to flee. Especially if there was another passenger in the car. Especially if it’s underwater…
"We are doing a film of the musical 'cats'" "Why" "Shut up" "Are they going to look like cats or humans?" "Fuck you" "Are you ok?" "Cats with avatar human faces" "Why" "Fuck you" pic.twitter.com/dm3ooobmMt
Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) filed articles of impeachment against President Trump on Tuesday under a process that will force a House floor vote by the end of this week.
Green introduced his articles of impeachment after the House passed a resolution largely along party lines condemning Trump for suggesting that four progressive freshman congresswomen of color — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — should “go back” to their countries.
Green said that the House should go beyond condemning Trump and move to remove him from office.
It will be the third impeachment floor vote forced by Green in the last two years, but the first since Democrats took control of the House.
Green previously forced procedural votes on articles of impeachment against Trump in December 2017 and January 2018. Both efforts drew the support of about 60 House Democrats.
A total of 84 House Democrats currently support launching an impeachment inquiry, as well as Independent Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), according to The Hill’s whip list. But Democratic leaders — and the majority of the caucus — are not yet on board as they seek to continue ongoing investigations of the Trump administration.
A floor vote will force all House Democrats to go on the record about an issue on which they have yet to reach consensus.
If Nancy Pelosi thought she had a decent chance of successfully impeaching and removing President Trump from office, she’d call a vote in a hearbeat. But not only is there no way the Senate will convict, but after the Mueller vindication and with the strong economy, she probably doesn’t even have the Democratic votes to pass articles of impeachment. A lot of moderate House Democrats (such as they are these days) resent being yoked to the likes of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and pressured by Tom Steyer to vote for impeachment, as they see the issue as a political loser.
Despite clear evidence Bill Clinton lied under oath, impeachment was a political loser for Republicans in 1998, and there’s no evidence it will be any more popular for Democrats in 2020. President Trump is forcing Pelosi hold a vote that pro-impeachment Democrats are probably going to lose, and one that forces moderates to pick between the perpetually outraged nutroots (and big money donors like Steyer) and their own constituents. Moreover, it makes Pelosi looks weak in the face of demands from “the Squad” (as people are calling the radical House members Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley). And, as mentioned previously, Trump knows that AOC’s Squad is extremely unpopular with independent voters.
Pelosi told me, after the A.O.C. Squad voted against the House’s version of the border bill and trashed the moderates — the very people who provided the Democrats the majority — that the Squad was four people with four votes. She was talking about a legislative reality. If it was a knock, it was for abandoning the party.
That did not merit A.O.C.’s outrageous accusation that Pelosi was targeting “newly elected women of color.” She slimed the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden and who was instrumental in getting the first African-American president elected and passing his agenda against all odds, as a sexist and a racist.
A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.
Why on earth would she do that? For years, if not decades, accusing random people of racism has been the social justice warrior finishing move for every occasion, the magic incantation that makes people back down and give in. Every person and problem in the world is a nail, and accusations of racism (or sexism, or gay bashing, or Islamophobia, or whateverphobia) is the hammer to be used on everything. You expect her to stop now, just because her far left lunacy is endangering the key hold on power absolutely vital to keeping the insane and corrupt wings of the Democratic Party together?
And then there’s the real instigator, Saikat Chakrabarti, A.O.C.’s 33-year-old chief of staff, who co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, both of which recruited progressives — including A.O.C. — to run against moderates in Democratic primaries. The former Silicon Valley Bernie Bro assumed he could apply Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast and break things,” to one of the oldest institutions in the country.
But Congress is not a place where you achieve radical progress — certainly not in divided government. It’s a place where you work at it and work at it and don’t get everything you want.
The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.
You mean they consider their opponents deplorable? Or irredeemable?
Wow, are you just now noticing this trend, Ms. Dowd? Just now? Social justice warriors have been dragging opponents for decades with false accusations of racism for daring to depart from the victimhood identity politics line, but it’s just now, just now that it’s aimed at the sacred Democratic Party institution of Nancy Pelosi that you finally deign to notice? That’s like living in the penthouse of a 20 story building, watching a raging fire consume the first 18 floors, and then, only when it’s reached the 19th floor, do you finally perceive that the building is on fire. Not in the 1980s, when people first started to use the phrase “political correctness,” not the thousands of false accusations of racism hurled against decent, non-racist people who happened to be Republicans over the decades, no it’s just now that you finally recognize the viper Democrats have clasped to their bosom all these years.
And it’s only just now that you recognize the horrific threat it holds to Democrats clinging to any sort of nationwide political power.
She goes on to quote Rahm Emanuel:
We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”
I think Emanuel’s wrong, I think they have decided. To the hard left, gaining control of the party levers of power is far more important than winning elections. It is moderate Democrats who must be defeated, as they’re the ones preventing the SJW ranks of the righteous from immanentizing the eschaton. We saw this in Texas, where the hard left pushed moderates out of the state Democratic Party as means of seizing control, with the result that they haven’t elected a statewide office-holder since 1994.
The SJW left didn’t undertake their long march through the Democratic Party merely to bow to moderates from unfashionable hinterlands like Georgia and Kentucky, no matter how necessary they might be to forge an actual House majority. Without those moderates, 2006 doesn’t happen and 2018 doesn’t happen, and Pelosi is never Speaker. AOC’s cadres don’t care. Pelosi is just another obstacle that stands between them and control of the party. And if you disagree with them, if you stand in their way, you are a racist, QED.
Top Democrats are circulating a poll showing that one of the House’s most progressive members — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — has become a definitional face for the party with a crucial group of swing voters.
Why it matters: These Democrats are sounding the alarm that swing voters know and dislike socialism, warning it could cost them the House and the presidency. The poll is making the rounds of some of the most influential Democrats in America.
“If all voters hear about is AOC, it could put the [House] majority at risk,” said a top Democrat who is involved in 2020 congressional races. “[S]he’s getting all the news and defining everyone else’s races.”
The poll — taken in May, before Speaker Pelosi’s latest run-in with AOC and the three other liberal House freshmen known as “The Squad” — included 1,003 likely general-election voters who are white and have two years or less of college education.
These are the “white, non-college voters” who embraced Donald Trump in 2016 but are needed by Democrats in swing House districts.
The group that took the poll shared the results with Axios on the condition that it not be named, because the group has to work with all parts of the party.
The findings:
Ocasio-Cortez was recognized by 74% of voters in the poll; 22% had a favorable view.
Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — another member of The Squad — was recognized by 53% of the voters; 9% (not a typo) had a favorable view.
Socialism was viewed favorably by 18% of the voters and unfavorably by 69%.
Capitalism was 56% favorable; 32% unfavorable.
“Socialism is toxic to these voters,” said the top Democrat.
The genius of Trump is that his unorthodox, street-brawler style has goaded Democratic activists into letting their masks of moderation slip. They seem to believe that a majority of Americans share their absolute instinctual aesthetic loathing of Trump, and this delusion has lead them into foolishly telling Americans what they actually want: completely socialize medicine, open borders for a new flood of illegal aliens, transsexuals as the latest unchallenged victim class, etc. Trapped in their self-enforced media bubble, they don’t see how ordinary Americans recoil in horror at their vision, and AOC’s hardcore activists don’t care.
Who worries about the petty concerns of the racist petite bourgeoisie when there’s a revolution to conduct?
