Posts Tagged ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’

Colin Powell, RIP

Monday, October 18th, 2021

Colin Powell, Secretary of State for George W. Bush, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for George H. W. Bush, has died at age 84.

Powell, a consummate Washington insider, was fairly effective in both roles. As Secretary of State, he was much better at managing relations with American allies and various international institutions than (in increasing order of general competence) John Kerry, Madeline Albright, Warren Christopher, Rex Tillerson, Hillary Clinton or Al Haig, but not among the very best of the modern era (George Schultz, James Baker and Mike Pompeo), and was notably better than successor Condoleezza Rice. He kept the Blair government onboard for Operation Iraq Freedom (at considerable political cost to Blair), effectively used the temporary post-9/11 period of international goodwill, maintained the sanctions regime on Iran, and effectively represented a President who was not loved by the “international community.”

As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, he effectively managed inter-service relations and empowered General Norman Schwarzkopf to produce the most overwhelmingly impressive military victory by American forces since World War II.

Powell does owe a small measure of blame in that American involvement in Iraq turned out to be a long-running, expensive distraction whose ultimate success was only cemented under the Trump Administration, but that was clearly a bipartisan quagmire, as was the long-running, expensive, disaster in Afghanistan, in which the State Department played a very baleful role.

That he was a squishy Republican who backed Obama in 2008 shouldn’t change the fact that he was fairly adept at at implementing the policies of the Presidential Administrations he worked for, no matter how mistaken some of those policies may appear in hindsight. Powell was almost universally praised for effective and dignified management in successfully filling two different demanding roles.

He once described himself in an interview with the New York Times in 2007 as a “problem-solver.” He offered this analysis of himself: “He was taught as a soldier to solve problems, So he has views, but he’s not an ideologue. He has passion but he’s not a fanatic. He’s first and foremost a problem-solver.”

The Chieftain Talks About His Time In An M1 Abrams

Sunday, May 17th, 2020

More tanks? More tanks!

This time Moran climbs around an M1A1 Abrams tank and talks about his time serving inside one during (I’m assuming) Desert Storm [evidently the Iraq War]. Highlights include how an Iraqi bullet missed his head by three inches, and how a tank designer including a pressure sensor on a loading door kept it from taking his arm off when they forgot to throw the proper safety switch.

Edited to add:

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for January 13, 2019

Monday, January 13th, 2020

Williamson drops Out, Steyer eclipses Warren in two early states, the billionaire boys keep shoveling wheelbarrows full of cash into the fire, and Biden can’t tell the difference between Iran and Iraq. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

Update: After I posted this, word broke that Booker was dropping out as well.

Q4 Fundraising

Either my Google-fu is weak or no campaigns have released Q4 fundraising totals this week. Or maybe the press just doesn’t care enough to report on any that have. I’m leaving this up because I suspect official numbers for the rest will start posting after the FEC January 15th deadline.

  1. Bernie Sanders: $34.5 million
  2. Pete Buttigieg: $24.7 million
  3. Joe Biden: $22.7 million
  4. Elizabeth Warren: $21.2 million
  5. Andrew Yang: $16.5 million
  6. Amy Klobuchar: $11.4
  7. Cory Booker: $6.6 million
  8. Tulsi Gabbard: $3.4 million

Polls

  • CNN/Des Moines Register (Iowa): Sanders 20, Warren 17, Buttigieg 16, Biden 15, Klobuchar 6, Yang 5, Booker 3, Gabbard 2, Steyer 2, Bloomberg 1.
  • Fox News (Nevada): Biden 23, Sanders 17, Steyer 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 6, Yang 4, Booker 3, Bloomberg 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Williamson 1. Steyer’s saturation money bombing campaign may finally be bearing fruit.
  • Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 36, Steyer 15, Sanders 14, Warren 10, Buttigieg 4, Bloomberg 2, Booker 2, Yang 2, Gabbard 1. Ditto.
  • Fox News (Wisconsin): Biden 23, Sanders 21, Warren 13, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 7, Klobuchar 4, Booker 3, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Steyer 2, Williamson 1. If Klobuchar’s “I’m the most Midwest of the Midwest” strategy won’t work in Wisconsin, where will it work?
  • Monmouth (New Hampshire): Buttigieg 20, Biden 19, Sanders 18, Warren 15, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 4, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Bennet 2, Booker 1.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 143): Biden 27, Warren 22, Sanders 20, Buttigieg 7, Bloomberg 3, Yang 3, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 2, Booker 1.
  • Morning Consult: Biden 31, Sanders 23, Warren 14, Buttigieg 8, Bloomberg 7, Steyer 4, Yang 4, Klobuchar 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Bennet 1, Delaney 1, Williamson 1.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. Bloomberg is now in third place behind Biden and Sanders and ahead of Warren.
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Tuesday’s Iowa debate lineup is set: Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer and Warren.
  • Welcome to the Bizarro World Primary:

    Democrats are now beginning to confront a very real scenario where the nomination — and the winnowing — will not be decided in states where campaigns have been plowing ground for more than a year, but in places and calendar dates so deep into primary season that until recently they’ve received almost no attention at all.

    The Iowa field is bunched together with little daylight between a handful of well-funded candidates. Each of the four early voting states continues to present the prospect of a different winner. And, at the end of that gauntlet on Super Tuesday, a free-spending billionaire — Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor — is waiting to challenge whichever candidate or candidates emerge.

    Snip.

    Coloring the thinking of many Democrats is Bloomberg’s apparent willingness to spend limitless sums, leaving him poised to overwhelm their early operations across the Super Tuesday map.

    For most candidates, said Scott Kozar, a Democratic ad-maker who is helping Sen. Michael Bennet with his campaign, “No one is playing in those states.”

    He predicted the candidates still standing after Super Tuesday will be forced to run a “fast play” as they scramble into March.

    In addition to flooding the airwaves with television ads, Bloomberg has already put more than 200 staffers on the ground in states that vote in March and April. He traveled recently to Ohio and Michigan, where he has hired senior state-level staff and plans to open 9 offices and 12 offices, respectively.

    His campaign told POLITICO he plans to open five offices in Missouri, 17 in Florida and 12 in Illinois.

    “Before Bloomberg got in, I said whoever wins South Carolina on February 29 will be the nominee because of the momentum factor” coming out of the first four primary states, said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California. “Bloomberg kind of puts a pause on that.”

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with one of the field’s most robust ground operations, has had post-Super Tuesday staffers flung out across the country for months, with a presence in Missouri , Michigan, Washington, Illinois, Ohio, Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania, according to an aide. And Sen. Bernie Sanders has an army of volunteers held over from his 2016 campaign.

    But for every other Democrat, the landscape following Super Tuesday’s gigantic delegate hauls on March 3 is relatively barren — and will likely remain so until after the initial primaries.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Speaking of free-spending:

  • Matt Tiabbi looks at the process in New Hampshire.

    How the New Hampshire primary traditionally works: the out-of-town press invades, occupying the Manchester Radisson like a siege army, and leans into a presumed frontrunner until he or she wins.

    If the voters are very rebellious, and decide to back a different conventional politician, the press re-calibrates behind the new hotness. If voters decide to think completely for themselves, and pick a candidate not approved by the party or major media – no one knows what happens then, since we’ve never seen it, at least not on the Democratic side.

    Two candidates I didn’t catch on a recent tour through the state each show how conventional campaign thinking has been upended in this cycle.

    In the days after the New Year, Biden announced he’d be willing to pick a Republican running mate and also said coal miners should “learn to program.” He will go on to say “no one understood Obamacare” in Iowa. Reporters almost universally think he’d be a shit candidate against Trump, but voters haven’t agreed: he’s still at or near the top of polls.

    Bernie Sanders meanwhile has spent the last four years serving as the subject of stories detailing his lack of general election viability, declining popularity, Putin-ness, physical unfitness, bad hair, and ideological unsuitability, among other things.

    Yet he entered 2020 crushing the field in fundraising, raising $34.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, and is now a co-frontrunner with Biden in some polls. The failure of years of blunt messaging to derail a candidate like Sanders is part of what’s been driving those stories about “anxiety” among the party elders.

    One candidate who has been affected by media, especially of late, is Elizabeth Warren. In Concord, I watched the news cycle take a bite out of her campaign.

    New Englanders (I’m one) think they invented everything from baseball to microbreweries to the Democratic Party, and they believe the rest of the country should pay an annual thank-you dividend for the Kennedys. In regional memory, Mike Dukakis won the presidency in a landslide.

    That’s why a sizable crowd in Concord responds with howls of approval when Elizabeth Warren asks, “Can we just admit that trickle-down economics is a failure?” In Phoenix, they’d ask, “What the fuck is trickle-down economics?” In parts of New England, Reagan is still president and they’re still mad about ketchup being declared a vegetable. Understanding the vagaries of Masshole chauvinism helps here.

  • State of the race:

    As of this moment, if I had to place a wager I believe Bernie Sanders is going to be the Democratic nominee. But I wouldn’t necessarily bet much—the race is just too volatile.

    There are a batch of polls out showing the Three Bs—Bernie, Biden, and Buttigieg—virtually tied in Iowa and New Hampshire. Keep in mind two implications of this: first, a large portion of the Democratic primary electorate—maybe half or more—is undecided, and second, between undecided Democrats and the share of votes going to the rest of the field, Biden is an extremely weak front-runner. A few more senior moments in his campaign and the race might cascade rapidly to Bernie, who has the most money to go the distance, or Buttigieg, who has the kind of fresh face Democrats often fall for—maybe too fresh a face.

  • Democratic candidates are lying about a tranny murder epidemic.
  • Kurt Schlichter handicaps the Democratic losers:

    The deciding factor is going to be personality, and Trump has the advantage because he has one. The question is going to be, “Who does America trust not to screw up all the repairs that Trump has made to America post-Barack Obama?”

    The answer is going to be, “Not one of those quasi-commie Democrat dorks.”

    There are six real candidates – sorry Yangbangers and Tulsi-touters, but those two are not in the mix.

    There’s Biden. What a putz. From his bizarre behavior to his brazen demand that we just accept the manifest corruption of his boy Lil’ Crackpipe, Gropey Joe is not merely of the Swamp. He is the Swamp. And there’s no reason to believe Trump won’t drain him.

    Right now, he’s the leader in the polls and he’s the most likely to be nominated. There are two reasons. The first is that he has legacy black Democrat support. He’s the closest to a traditional Democrat, as opposed to one of the faculty lounge snobs that makes up most of the rest of the race. The second is that he has been designated The Democrat Most Likely To Succeed in beating The Donald. It’s unclear why. Sure, some polls say it (though they are shifting in Trump’s direction), but the problem for Joe is that so many liberal media types are wishcasting his victory that they never hit him hard. He’s soft and open to attack. Not-Mrs. Willie Brown gently tapped him in a debate (on busing, which is very, very popular among rich Democrats whose kids would never, ever be bused in a zillion years) and Not-Senile Joe went into a tailspin. He’s vulnerable because he’s been coddled – Trump will bash Hoover Biden’s dad all over the stage, as Trump feels no obligation not to talk about the subjects that the media has deemed off-limits, like the ex-senator’s (D-Credit Card Companies) Snortunate Son.

    And he’ll pick Amy Klobuchar as his running mate. She’s another one who the Democrats imagine can reach out and touch the working-class folks who went for Trump. Of course, she’ll reach out and touch them with a rock – she’s got a temper and she’ll get pilloried as a tyrant. Tyrannical women are a hard sell – just ask Stumbles McMyturn. Sure, the media has announced that she is “having her moment,” but moments stop. She’s neither interesting nor inspirational, and the very moderation she allegedly represents (she doesn’t – she’s on-board with every pinko policy her pals subscribe to) will keep her from breaking out as a candidate and depress the turn-out among the Dem left (but I repeat myself) when she’s on the ticket with Biden.

    Snip.

    Then there’s Chief Spewing Bull. Her own brother recently dissed her for inventing more fake family history. Trump would chew her up, spit her out, and wash the residue into the gutter. Where’s the enthusiasm for a serial fraud who compares poorly to every bitter spinster public elementary school teacher who either demanded you use your inside voice or tried to make her class celebrate Kwanza? Maybe at Harvard or The New York Times offices, and nowhere else. She sadly won’t get nominated, because she’s such a disaster Trump might get 45 states, and Biden won’t pick her as veep because he knows she’s going to be scheming and drape-measuring every time she visits the Oval Office, and the budget does not include a presidential food taster.

    Maybe Bernie Sanders will get it – which would be great because then all the nimrods who pushed the phony dossier would have to concede that they were going to vote for the one candidate we absolutely know has had sex in Russia – shiver. Yeah, he had his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union, and to people who aren’t college professors or college students or aspiring college students, that’s a disqualifier. He’s a loser, and what will be great is how the Dem bigwigs try to explain to the harder left contingent why their crusty curmudgeon is getting dissed again in the primaries.

    Pete Buttigieg…why? Why is he even part of this? He’s a sub-par mayor of a sub-par town in a state most Democrats have never even heard of. Really, if he’s the one the Dems are looking to for salvation – oh yeah, he says he’s a Christian too, incessantly – then they’re pretty hosed already. His candidacy will soon Pete-r out.

    Though maybe Biden will pick him for VP – if so, I’ve got $10 that says Smart Joe will get caught on tape at a rally explaining to disappointed feminists that, “Well, a gay guy counts as a woman, right?” You know that will totally happen.

    And tiny Michael Bloomberg’s zillion-dollar ad budget has captured him…fifth or sixth place. Fascist Frodo’s not going anywhere. He’s already lost.

  • Hmmm:

  • Pelosi’s impeachment farce is really going to screw Sanders, Warren, Klobuchar and Booker, as they might be stuck in the impeachment trial rather than campaiging in Iowa and new Hampshire.
  • Heh:

  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got a New Hampshire Public Radio interview.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Biden Is The Front-Runner, But There’s No Clear Favorite.”

    Joe Biden is the most likely person to win a majority of pledged Democratic delegates, according to the FiveThirtyEight primary model, which we launched on Thursday morning. This is our first-ever full-fledged model of the primaries and we’re pretty excited about it — to read more about how the model works, see here.

    But saying the former vice president is the front-runner doesn’t really tell the whole story. He may be the most likely nominee, but he’s still a slight underdog relative to the field, with a 40 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates1 by the time of the last scheduled Democratic contest — the Virgin Islands caucus on June 6. If one lowers the threshold to a plurality of delegates, rather than a majority, then Biden’s chances are almost 50-50, but not quite — he has a 45 percent chance of a delegate plurality, per our forecast.

    Second place is a set of steak knives Sanders, and third place is “No one,” so evidently “brokered convention” has a better chance than Warren or Buttigieg. Read the piece for more 538 model wonkery. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Elected Democrats in Texas and California previously backing Castro and Harris have flocked to Biden, but when Leticia Van de Putte is the highest profile name, you’ve got nothing that’s going to move the needle. I don’t see the anti-war Democrats being wild at this statement:

    But Biden just keeps lying about his record on the Iraq war. “Consider that not everyone pays all that much attention — and that the youngest batch of voters who will be heading to the polls in November were still in their mothers’ wombs (where news sources are limited) while Biden voted in favor of allowing military action.” It doesn’t help that he gets Iran and Iraq confused. “Hunter Biden linked to 2016 identity theft involving deceased brother.” He truly is a prince among men…

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s buying a Super Bowl ad. Democrats: How dare he not adhere to the sacred debate rules that all the other excluded candidates bitch about?

    At a campaign stop here, the former New York mayor said he has no intention of trying to qualify for upcoming debates — even though he almost certainly could participate if he wanted to. It was his most definitive statement to date on a stance that has rankled his opponents, who chafe at his limitless war chest and feel he should have to endure the rigors of campaigning they do.

    Bloomberg insisted he’d like to debate if the rules allowed. But the billionaire, a latecomer to the Democratic primary, reasoned it is inappropriate for someone of his wealth to ask supporters for cash.

    “It’s up to the Democratic Party. They have a rule that you cannot participate in the debates unless you have a few hundred thousand donors,” he told POLITICO after the campaign event Tuesday. “I don’t take any money from anybody else. I fund my campaign myself.”

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) If Bloomberg doesn’t win the nomination, his fallback position is simply controlling the Democratic Party:

    Bloomberg is running aggressively to win the Democratic nomination but he is simultaneously building out a general election machine to defeat President Trump, with a new structure — data, field organizing, advertising and policy — that aims to elect Democrats up and down the ballot even if the party’s voters reject the former New York mayor this spring.

    The party he is moving to transform, which he only rejoined in October, has become little more than a bystander to his ambition. With more than 800 employees, $200 million in ad spending so far and a fully catered Times Square office that houses hundreds of employees, “Mike Bloomberg 2020, Inc.” does not resemble a primary campaign in any traditional sense. It is an experiment in what happens to democracy when a single faction operates without economic constraints.
    AD

    While most presidential efforts start early and poor, the Bloomberg project exists in an inverted dimension, a fact that has caught the attention of Trump, who spent years tracking Bloomberg’s political career closely in New York. The president has been closely monitoring Bloomberg’s campaign, impressed by his extraordinary spending and fearful of his potential rise, according to Trump confidants with whom the president has discussed Bloomberg.

    Remember, this is the Washington Post, so anytime they “quote” anonymous “sources” like “Trump confidants,” our working assumption should always be that they’re “lying.”

    Bloomberg’s aides, in turn, have delighted in trying to find ways to get Trump’s attention and increase his anxiety, like the recent purchase of an $11 million Super Bowl ad that will run against a similar spot purchased by Trump’s campaign.

    The extravagance is part of the message, an attempt to demonstrate his competence and show that he can manage something big with good intentions.

    “We also want people to know that we are building a juggernaut pointed at Donald Trump and the Republican Party,” said Tim O’Brien, a senior adviser to the campaign who has been taking the message to state parties around the country. “One of Mike’s goals is to make a machine that lasts. This idea that he wants to do a vanity run or is just buying exposure is belied by that.”

    To begin with, that means building a fully staffed general election campaign in January to win primary contests in March, with a suite of high-profile recruits on the payroll, like former top executives for Facebook, Foursquare and GroupM, the world’s largest advertising media company by billings. No one at headquarters knows what he will ultimately choose to spend, but they operate for the moment without budgets, putting the 12th richest person on the planet on a path to spend $1 billion or more.

    He wants Democrats to know he is happy to spread the money around. During a swing through Texas on Saturday, when his campaign staged over 150 events in 27 states in a show of organizing prowess, he cast himself as a potential benefactor and mentor for all state and local party organizations.

    “I think you look at each,” Bloomberg said, when asked if he would boost them. “You look to see how well they’re run, and if you tried to help, that you’d be able to help. That’s number one. And number two would be that your money would be used efficiently. And it’s not just money. We can bring some advice.”

    Whether he wins or loses the nomination, the ubiquitous television and digital ads he is running have been crafted as the opening exchange in a conversation about Trump’s failures that will continue through November.

    Also this line: “His policy, though sometimes nuanced on paper, is uncomplicated in presentation, leaning heavily on phrases known to move focus groups.” Left unasked how rank-and-file Democrats feel about their party being taken over by a billionaire. Bloomy is all in on importing cheaper foreign labor.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Booker says an impeachment trial would be a “big blow” to his campaign. Oh, cry me a river, Spartacus.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He snags the endorsement of seven term Iowa Democratic Congressman Dave Loebsack. A U.S. congressman is a good endorsement, but he’s also retiring, so it’s unclear he’ll influence anyone. (But it doesn’t hurt.) “Buttigieg has staked his presidential hopes on Iowa and New Hampshire, the two early-voting states where he is significantly overperforming compared to national surveys and polls of Democratic voters in other states.” Yep. It’s good to be Da Mayor: repaved streets for me but not for thee. (Hat tip: StephenGreen at Instapundit.) Black South Bend police offers are critical of the way he handled race relations. There’s that Achilles Heel again…
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? “Tulsi Gabbard: ‘Everybody knows and understands’ that Hillary Clinton is a ‘warmonger.'” I’m not necessarily disagreeing, but I wonder what Tulsi’s endgame is in this spat, other than reincarnation.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Delaney Looks To Build Momentum As Iowa Caucuses Draw Closer.” That would suggest he had any in the first place.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an ABC 4 interview (in, I think, South Carolina). Defends appearing on Fox News.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Can Amy Klobuchar pull off a surprise in Iowa’s presidential caucuses?” (Imagine another Magic 8-Ball gif here.)

    Iowa political experts say her day job representing a neighboring state, her Midwestern values and the work she has put into meeting voters in big cities and small towns in every corner of the state could result in a surprise payoff when Iowans caucus on Feb. 3.

    A win for Klobuchar here doesn’t mean coming in first in Iowa, said Dianne Bystrom, director emerita of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. It means beating expectations.

    “I think Klobuchar has a chance. People really like Amy Klobuchar,” said Bystrom, who is neutral in the race.

    “She is down home, and she’s funny, and she’s got this quirky charm about her,” Bystrom said.

    Klobuchar is not a soaring orator; she is plainspoken and earnest. Sporting a no-muss, no-fuss bob, she offers anecdotes about parenthood and being a woman in the workplace — complete with references to hiding her gray roots — that appeal to the suburban moms who can be key to elections.

    All this amounts to “We need to pump her up for the sake of drama, but, yeah, she’s toast.”

  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. SuperPac makes $2 million ad buy for Patrick in early states. Given Bloomberg and Steyer’s saturation money bombing and Patrick’s 0.0 standing in all polls, that’s probably a less effective campaign tactic than throwing a giant kegger in New Hampshire and inviting every state resident to attend. “Since his late entry to the race in November, Patrick has struggled to gain traction with early-state Democratic voters or a national audience.” Like a greased man on a Teflon floor wearing sticks of butter as shoes. He’s concentrating on New Hampshire and South Carolina.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Fear of a Bernie Planet:

    Increasingly alarmed that Bernie Sanders could become their party’s presidential nominee, establishment-minded Democrats are warning primary voters that the self-described democratic socialist would struggle to defeat President Donald Trump and hurt the party’s chances in premier House, Senate and governors’ races.

    The urgent warnings come as Sanders shows new signs of strength on the ground in the first two states on the presidential primary calendar, Iowa and New Hampshire, backed by a dominant fundraising operation. The Vermont senator has largely escaped close scrutiny over the last year as his rivals doubted the quirky 78-year-old’s ability to win the nomination. But less than a month before Iowa’s kickoff caucuses, the doubters are being forced to take Sanders seriously.

    Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, previously a senior aide to President Barack Obama, warned Democrats that Sanders’ status as a democratic socialist and his unwavering support for “Medicare for All” won’t play well among swing voters in the states that matter most in 2020.

    “You need a candidate with a message that can help us win swing voters in battleground states,” Emanuel said in an interview. “The degree of difficulty dramatically increases under a Bernie Sanders candidacy. It just gets a lot harder.”

    The increasingly vocal concerns are coming from a number of political veterans tied to the Obama administration and the 2020 field’s moderate wing, including those backing former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.

    (Hat tip: Powerline.) “Of course Bernie can win,” says man waving away idea that a socialist is too far left for the American electorate. I find his arguments (such as they are) unconvincing. Sanders says that the Qassem Suleimani strike is just like Putin assassinating political rivals.

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He qualified for the January debate by polling at 12% in in Nevada and 15% in South Carolina. I never imagined there would ever be a Steyer boomlet, yet here we are. The hilarious thing about this is that it’s going to inspire Bloomberg to dump a ton more money into the race.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren campaign scrambling for survival. (Hat tip: Director Blue.) “Warren, Sanders Hosting Call With Pro-Tehran Lobby Group.”

    Along with Reps. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) and Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Sanders and Warren are scheduled to speak Wednesday evening with members of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). The group played a central role in what former Obama national security adviser Ben Rhodes called the administration’s pro-Iran Deal “echo chamber,” spinning journalists, lawmakers, and citizens.

    The Democratic candidates’ willingness to engage with NIAC—a group that aggressively pushed the accord and has strongly advocated against U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic—reflects their desire to see America reenter the nuclear deal, which released up to $150 billion in cash to the regime. Much of that money has gone to fund Iran’s regional terror operations, including recent attacks on American personnel stationed in the region.

    NIAC has deep ties to Iran’s regime, including senior officials like Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Zarif worked closely with NIAC founder Trita Parsi, who, in turn, consulted with the Obama administration.

    Parsi lobbied Congress against sanctions on Iran in 2013 and met with Obama administration officials at the White House dozens of times leading up to the nuclear deal’s signing in 2015. Multiple U.S. officials and senior congressional sources informed the Washington Free Beacon that Parsi helped the White House craft its messaging as it tried to sell the nuclear deal to the public. The NIAC chief met with Rhodes, among other top officials, during multiple visits throughout the Obama era.

    That’s just part of the Warren weirdness on Iran, where in 24 hours she went from calling Suleimani a “murderer” to just “a government official, a high-ranking military official.” (There’s no end to appeasing the soft-on-Jihad loony left). Castro endorses her. Let’s check the reaction meter:

    Her face is crawling with bacteria. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Update: Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: Dropped Out. She dropped out January 10th:

    I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible effort to share our message. With caucuses and primaries now about to begin, however, we will not be able to garner enough votes in the election to elevate our conversation any more than it is now. The primaries might be tightly contested among the top contenders, and I don’t want to get in the way of a progressive candidate winning any of them.

    As of today, therefore, I’m suspending my campaign.

    Farewell, Marianne. We’ll always have the memes…

  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. That Taibbi piece on Yang:

    No candidate has leaned more into the fun part of running for president than Yang. He does some high fives, then reminds all: He’s the guy who wants to give everyone $1,000 a month. He notes the state of Alaska already does something like this, divvying up oil revenues. What’s the 21st century version of oil?

    Murmurs among the teenagers. Yang grins.

    “It’s technology,” he says. “Although, I thought someone was going to say marijuana. And that’s cool, because I want to legalize weed, too.”

    LOUD cheers. The Beavis and Butthead factor here is through the roof. Also: Yang wants to give 16-year-olds with cash and expanded relaxation options the right to vote. (Studies show this increases like likelihood of future engagement). You could cause brain bubbles in a Fox News host with a video of this Democrat recruitment scene.

    Through the eyes of a rival candidate, Yang’s slang-laden pitch to high schoolers might smack of Steve Buscemi’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” routine. His speech is peppered with phrases like “That’s okay, bro.” Describing the political “disaster” previous generations have left children, he says, “You could even call it a shit show.”

    But kids spot phonies quickly, and Yang isn’t failing. His campaign is meant as a warning that it’s traditional politicians who are being phony, when they don’t raise alarms about a jobs crisis brought on by automation and changes to the manufacturing economy.

    He’s been evangelizing the Democratic Party to a new generation of voters, at events like these and online, where his #YangGang has been one of campaign 2020’s big marketing success stories. He raised $16.5 million in the fourth quarter, fifth among Democrats, hinting at new sources of support for the party.

    But the reaction to Yang among party leaders and press has hovered between indifferent and hostile. He’s had trouble getting air time, and thanks to an arbitrary set of criteria, may be shut out of the January 14th candidate debate in Des Moines, despite poll numbers that are competitive with some already-qualified participants.

    The standard requires four “qualifying” polls showing 5% support or higher, or two qualifying polls showing 7% or higher support in Iowa or New Hampshire. The problem is, there were no new state polls for over a month, making it nearly impossible for candidates on the edge to meet the increased standard.

    Andrew Yang, Ken Jeong, what’s the difference? (Also note the pic for “Tulsi Gabbard.”) The Boston Herald likes Yang. “He is real. He talks to people — all kinds of people — and is not hindered by the unwritten rules of political tribalism and Twitter wokeness that have become wholly unproductive, if not totally exasperating….We also know that Yang is the most genuine candidate in the Democratic field, he is a successful businessman who has lived in the real world his entire life, and unlike his political competitors, still does.”

  • 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, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for July 29, 2019

    Monday, July 29th, 2019

    The next debates loom, Gabbard sues Google, Moulton shoots people in a graveyard, billionaire Steyer begs for pennies, a lot of polls, and your periodic reminder that polls are useless.

    It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Also, consider this advanced notice that you’re not going to get nearly as lengthy a Clown Car Update next Monday, as Armadillocon and work-related duties are going to be soaking up an inordinate amount of my time late this week and early next.

    Polls

  • Morning Consult (Nevada): Biden 29, Sanders 23, Warren 11.5, Harris 12.5, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Yang 3, Castro 2, Bullock 1, Klobuchar 1, Steyer 1, de Blasio 1, Ryan 1.
  • Fox News: Biden 33, Sanders 15, Warren 12, Harris 10, Buttigieg 5, Klobuchar 3, Yang 3, Booker 2, Hickenlooper 2, O’Rourke 2.
  • Monmouth (South Carolina): Biden 39, Harris 12, Sanders 10, Warren 9, Buttigieg 5, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Bennet 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1. “Biden has widespread support among black voters (51%), a group that makes up more than 6-in-10 likely primary voters. His support among white voters (24%) is less than half that level. Among the top five candidates, two earn significantly higher support among white voters than black voters: Warren (21% white and 2% black) and Buttigieg (11% white and 1% black). The remaining candidates draw equal support from both groups: Harris (12% white and 12% black) and Sanders (10% white and 10% black).” Those are disasterous numbers for Harris and Booker, who were game-planning for a South Carolina boost.
  • Quinnipiac (Ohio): Biden 31, Sanders 14, Harris 14, Warren 13, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 1, Booker 1, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1, Gabbard 1, Yang 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • “Medicare For All Isn’t That Popular — Even Among Democrats.”
  • With the second round of debates looming this week, a whole lot of candidates seem to be angling for a “Kill Biden” strategy. Understandable, but not sufficient, and one wonders how many lines of attack will rehash the culture wars clashes of the last half century (crime, busing, etc.) that Democrats lost the first time around.
  • Your periodic useful reminder that polls this far out are useless:

    Exactly twelve years ago, on July 29, 2007, national opinion polls declared the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination to be one Rudolph Giuliani, the bombastic former New York City mayor. In second place, seven points back, was a retired Tennessee senator and actor, Fred Thompson. Languishing in third place, another five points behind, was the eventual G.O.P. nominee, John McCain. Over on the Democratic side, on the same date, Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama by nearly thirteen points. Everyone knows how that turned out.

    Twenty Democratic candidates are set to debate in Detroit this week, as countless Democratic voters wonder, with knotted stomachs, whether anyone will emerge to defeat Donald Trump, in November, 2020. So what do the early polls tell us? I asked around and found an array of specialists firm in their beliefs that the polls are iffy. “These numbers are fun, but I wouldn’t put money on anything,” Lydia Saad, a senior Gallup research director, told me. “Historically, among Democrats, if you had to bet at this point, you’d do a better job betting against, than for, the front-runner.” Which can’t be good news for Joe Biden, who is ahead but who slipped after his shaky debate performance, last month.

    Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager in 2012, didn’t mince words: “Right now, it’s just too bumpy. There are too many candidates. There’s too much back-and-forth. ‘Oh, the polling shows Joe Biden is the best candidate to win the election.’ And then, after the first debate, ‘Oh, Kamala Harris came up, and she can win.’ And all of it is just bullshit.” At this stage, he said, polls can offer indications of what might happen, but he wouldn’t take them to the bank. One problem is that so little is known about so many of the Democratic candidates. Another is that so few people are paying close attention. And then there is the fact that a Presidential campaign is a bruising, billion-dollar proving ground. No candidate sails to victory untested and unscathed.

  • “Inside the Democrats’ Podcast Presidential Primary, Where Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang Rule.” Biden comes in third, but evidently because he has his own podcast. Or maybe “had,” since the last one seems to be dated October 23, 2018. It seems to be just some guy (not Biden) reading political news stories. It’s super-boring.
  • CNN did a “power ranking” of the top 10 Democratic contenders where they ranked Harris second, because of course they did.
  • Washington Post‘s The Fix did one that’s even stupider, with Warren first, Harris second, and Biden sixth. Yang and Williamson aren’t on it, but Kirsten “dead in the water” Gillibrand is. It’s naked gamesmanship disguised as analysis.
  • Speaking of which, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog takes on the field. Most of it is pretty lame, but there was this: “Kristen is the candidate for everyone who would say, ‘I love Hillary Clinton but she’s just too likable.'”
  • Rolling Stone does the ranking thing as well, but it much more closely tracks polls, going Biden-Warren-Harris-Sanders-Buttigieg. Has Yang too low and Messam over Sestak down at the bottom of the list.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She told her usual voter suppression fairy tales to the NAACP, who I’m sure lapped it up. Eh. I’m going to give her two weeks to give any indication she’s running, and if not I’m going to move her to the “not running” list.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Washington post interview. Wants to bring back the “Gang of Eight” illegal alien amnesty proposals, which is one reason you got president Trump in the first place. “Andrew Yang and Michael Bennet engage in satirical pre-debate Twitter feud.”
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a New York Times profile.

    The political calculation driving Biden’s campaign — and the main reason he has been assumed by many to be the most electable Democrat — is the belief that the Scranton native can win back enough of those voters to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and deny Trump a second term. “The issues that are front and center now,” he told me, “are issues that have been in my wheelhouse for a long time,” citing what he said was his advocacy on behalf of the middle class. Some who voted for Trump, he went on, were starting to realize that Trump’s tax cuts were tailored for the wealthy and for corporations; to take note of his unceasing effort to dismantle Obamacare; to grasp that he was a false tribune of the forgotten man. “When the carnival comes through town the first time, and the guy with the shell and the pea game, and you lose — the second time they come around, you’re a little more ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, I saw what happened last time,’ ” he said. Trump voters might be unwilling to admit out loud to buyer’s remorse, he allowed. “They don’t want to turn to their buddy and say, ‘I’m taking off my Make America Great Again [hat].’ ” But Trump’s base, he argued, isn’t as solid as it appears: “Not all of them, but I think they’re persuadable, yes.”

    Biden and his advisers are convinced that the general election will mostly be a referendum on Trump and his fitness for office. “This is really about character and values as opposed to issues and ideology,” says Mike Donilon, Biden’s chief strategist. He acknowledges that Hillary Clinton tried and failed to make Trump’s suitability the pivotal question of the 2016 election. The difference this time, he says, is that Trump is now president and has demonstrated his inadequacy. Biden made a similar point. “Even when he was running,” Biden told me, “I don’t think anybody thought he would be as bad as he is.”

    Orange man bad! Note that he’s not trying to run on “this lousy economy.” Biden loves him some ObamaCare. Huh: “Harris’s close friendship with Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, is giving an unusually personal tone to the growing rivalry between Biden and Harris (D-Calif.), which will be on display again at Wednesday’s debate.”

    Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown says he doesn’t think Biden will be the nominee, and makes noises about getting in himself, because if there’s anything this field needs, it’s one more guy running. (Also see the entry on Steyer below.)

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Plans to go after Biden in the debates. Also says he’s near the 130,000 donor threshold for the next round of debates. The Chicago Tribune says he’s foolish to go after Biden for the 1994 crime bill. “Americans were keenly aware of the growing danger, and they wanted something done about it — whatever it took to make them safer.” And a lot of people calling for harsher penalties were black Democratic politicians.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Elastigirl’s daughter wants you to consider Steve Bullock.

    “My name is Steve, and I work for the state.” That is not the voice of a Democrat who wants to do away with the private health insurance of more than half the population. It is the voice of a Democrat who would go on to expand Medicaid coverage — twice — in a blood red state with a Republican majority legislature, a Democrat committed to keeping rural hospitals open, which probably only matters to people who don’t plan their heart attacks two hours ahead.

    His is also not the voice of free college or canceling student debt. It is the voice of a Democrat who has shepherded several tuition freezes for residents at the state universities, thereby minimizing the need for loans in the first place. He also beefed up the Montana Registered Apprenticeship Program, a public-private partnership among the state and tribal colleges and more than 500 businesses whose graduates earn $20,000 more than the state average. In Montana, that’s a year’s mortgage, about three years of a kid’s tuition at one of the aforementioned state schools, 1,700 movie tickets — that’s a life.

    Does Mr. Bullock, with his modest but concrete progress in a state hostile to Democrats on issues all Democrats hold dear, sound boring compared to charismatic candidates promising revolutionary change? I don’t know. Is winning boring?

    Like some leftist Dr. Dolittle, Mr. Bullock has a talent for knowing how to talk Republicans into doing Democratic things (including voting for him). It resulted in his re-election in 2016 in a state President Trump won by over 20 points. His crafty approach involves good manners, logic and a willingness to compromise when he can (and veto when he won’t). He sees the good in Republicans because there is good to be seen: Several of the conservative legislators who voted to support the public universities attended them.

    Sounds like the sort of incremental approach the loudest voices in the Democratic base assure us is passe compared to radical change. He gets a Politico profile. “He thinks Democrats are not doing enough to win over voters who backed Obama and Trump.” Also slammed Warren’s claims of PAC purity. “Everybody can be pure if you transfer over $8 or 10 million from their Senate accounts directly.” Bullock also opposes impeachment.

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Has a plan for homesteading vacant property. Not necessarily a bad idea in abstract, but his plan actual sounds like what it will be is the fed airdrops money, the connected scoop up desirable property cheap, and after a year you’ll find that we’ve spent $500 million and created a new federal bureaucracy to actual give 37 homeless people homes. (It doesn’t say that, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it will actually amount to.) “South Bend Cops Warn of ‘Mass Exodus’ as Morale Plummets Over Buttigieg’s Mishandling of Shooting.” Lil Nas X: “No ‘Old Town Road for you!”
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Julian Castro Is ‘Hypercritical’ Of Trump Immigration Policies He Once Praised Under Obama.” imagine my shock. Joaquin is evil Spock.
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He boldly proclaimed that Trump won’t be welcome back in New York after his presidency. Well, I guess Trump will just have to worry about that in 2025…
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He proposed a plan for mandatory national service. A bold plan. Stupid and unpopular, but bold.

    (Found the oldest version of this meme to represent the age of the idea.) Now if he wanted to limit it to everyone receiving federal welfare payments, that I could get behind…

  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gabbard sues Google for $50 million for suspending her campaign ads right after the Democratic debate she was in. That does sounds like a possibly illegal thing to do, especially if they were doing it to boost Harris. (Hat tip: Ryan Saavedra.) She broke with fellow Democratic candidates on decriminalizing illegal alien border crossings, saying it would lead to open borders. She also said Harris wasn’t qualified to be President.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She said that some unnamed rival Democrats don’t want women working outside the home. 🙄 (see also that “Kill Biden” bit, which spends a lot of time talking about Gillibrand as if she somehow still had a chance.) Polifact says she’s mostly lying about transaction taxes having no effect at all.
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Still In? Twitter. Facebook. Gets an interview with KAZU. The former Alaska senator now lives in Seaside, California.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris’ post-debate bounce is fading, which you could have learned here, what, three weeks ago? Flip, meet flop. “Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., backtracked on her support for decriminalizing illegal border crossing, then immediately reversed course and said she was in favor of it.” If you like your insurance plan, you can suck it up while government moves you to socialized medicine, but she promises to let insurance companies run parts of it. New York Times wonders what she actually believes:

    For the fights she has promised to wage, Ms. Harris prizes two weapons above all: presidential decrees and federal dollars. They are the instruments of an impatient politician — a career prosecutor sensitive to how slow the machinery of government can move, and how unforgiving voters can be.

    Ms. Harris’s economic agenda involves trillions of dollars in new spending — exact estimates vary, but well over $3 trillion and perhaps more than $4 trillion — with much of it aimed at distributing cash to people in economic distress. Most of the spending takes the form of a refundable tax credit for low- and middle-income taxpayers.

    But it also includes hundreds of billions of dollars earmarked for specific purposes: raises for public schoolteachers, tax benefits for people who rent their homes and grants for minority home buyers. On Friday, Ms. Harris’s campaign announced a $75 billion initiative to invest in minority-owned businesses and historically black colleges.

    Snip.

    Of nearly a dozen major plans Ms. Harris has announced, about a third have also included a kind of a threat: that if Congress did not resolve an issue with sufficient haste, she would take narrower steps with unilateral presidential authority.

    Those steps, according to Ms. Harris’s campaign, would bestow new protections on undocumented immigrants, impose new limits on firearm sales, enable the manufacture of cheaper pharmaceuticals and require federal contractors to meet pay-equity standards for women. Together, these plans convey a stark skepticism that Congress can be counted upon to pass important laws — skepticism that other Democratic self-styled pragmatists, like Mr. Biden, do not share.

    The decrees she has drafted are a statement, too, of Ms. Harris’s confidence in her own authority as an executor of the law.

    That role, Ms. Harris said in the interview, “is my comfortable place.”

    Her pitch seems to be “put me in charge so I can spend all the money and rule by decree.”

  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Extraordinary Humbling of John Hickenlooper:

    All happy campaigns are alike; each flailing campaign flails in its own way. And Mr. Hickenlooper’s disappointment runs deeper than most of his peers’. It is easy to imagine him succeeding in a past cycle, as a popular, moderate two-term executive of a purple state, known for brokering deals on environmental issues and gun regulation. He has arrived instead at a moment of celebri-fied elections and simmering progressive opposition to Mr. Trump.

    Nowhere is the disconnect more visceral for a long shot than in the rented reception halls in early-voting states across the country. Eyes migrate to the carpet patterns. Campaign stickers sit unstuck. Volunteer sign-up sheets remain wrenchingly white. It is the difference between polite applause and spontaneous affection, abiding a handshake and demanding a selfie. It is the difference between a former governor and a future president.

    “I somehow don’t feel he’s got the punch,” said Rachel Rosenblum, 82, of Danbury, N.H., leaving the Hanover event a few minutes early.

    A woman nearby noticed the small gathering through a window and approached Ms. Rosenblum, curious to know who had reserved the space. “Is that a private event?” she asked.

    “No,” Ms. Rosenblum replied. “He wants to win the election.”

    Other indignities have been more public. Before the first Democratic debate in Miami, a security guard mistook Mr. Hickenlooper for a reporter. In an appearance on “The View” last week, a host, Ana Navarro, confused him with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington. “All white people look alike, apparently,” a co-host, Joy Behar, said.

    It is a particularly humbling comedown for a man who, just a few years ago, garnered reasonably serious consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate — and who retains outsize status in Colorado as the spindly brewpub owner who made it big.

    I imagine that we’ll get lots more “failure to launch” pieces between now and Iowa. He has a plan for rural broadband and development, that may well appeal to all six of the rural Democrats still left in the party.

  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Politico on his health care plans:

    In May, Inslee signed into law the nation’s first public option, set to go live next fall. Under the plan, the Inslee administration will contract with a private insurer to sell coverage on the state’s Affordable Care Act exchange. The state projects that premiums in the public plan will be 5 to 10 percent cheaper that alternatives because of capped payments to doctors and hospitals. That might not translate into a major enrollment boost, and it remains to be seen whether enough providers will participate in the plan.

    Inslee also signed legislation making Washington the first state to add a guaranteed long-term care benefit, addressing a growing challenge for an aging population. The law, which in concept is similar to Social Security, creates a payroll tax to offer a $100-per-day allowance for nursing home care, in-home assistance or another community-based option. It’s not enough to fully fund nursing home care, which can top $100,000 per year, but it may ease some financial pressure on families.

    So he favors plans structured like ObamaCare that will no doubt fail like ObamaCare. (See also: “death spiral.”) He has a New York Times op-ed on climate change, just in case you’re out of melatonin.

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “The presidential campaign of Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar has been accused of delaying staff pay in order to boost the campaign’s cash-on-hand figures at reporting time.” That piece mentions a $55,000 a day burn rate. Since she brought in only $2.9 million in Q2, that burn rate is not sustainable, and that senate transfer money will only last so long. She has a “housing plan” described as “sweeping in scope but scant on details.” File it with Hickenlooper’s rural broadband plan…
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Not only is there no news for him, but I can’t even get his website to come up right now…
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Ambition Served Moulton Well In Combat, But Not Always In Politics.” It’s a weird title for what is actually an interesting profile:

    On his second combat tour in Iraq, 2nd Lt. Seth Moulton led his platoon in one of the most grueling battles of the war, at a cemetery in Najaf.

    “It was intense,” says Nick Henry, who served as a lance corporal under Moulton. “The thing we dealt with in the cemetery was a lot like Vietnam, almost. The insurgency would dig into the cemetery and they would pop out of little tunnels and holes. We would fight through them and then they would end up popping out of tunnels behind us, and we’d have to back up and re-clear, and basically it was 360 all the time.”

    Moulton served four tours of combat in Iraq. He’s called it the most influential experience of his life, one he refers to often in his presidential run.

    Interviews with those who served with Moulton in Iraq reveal that one quality that has sometimes gotten him in trouble in politics — his ambition — served him well in combat.

    Henry says half the men in their platoon saw combat for the first time in the battle of Najaf. He says Moulton was a “very intelligent” platoon commander, sometimes “a little too intelligent,” in the sense that he sometimes tried to implement tactics that were more advanced than entry-level Marines were capable of.

    Still, Henry says, everything was relatively well executed. He describes Moulton as always involved, with good command and control in a chaotic situation, someone who would lead from the front most of the time, and not overly controlling.

    Henry calls Moulton one of the better platoon commanders he had in five combat deployments.

    “He’s very sincere with his caring,” Henry says, and that came across most vitally when Moulton made sure his men were ready for combat. “He spent the time to come up with the plans and the training plan to make sure that we were prepared for anything that we came to, which is, in my personal belief, why our platoon was the most heavily relied on to execute missions during the battle of Najaf.”

    Snip.

    As measured by the Democratic National Committee, he’s not doing well. The DNC has barred him from two rounds of debates because he has yet to get the required number of financial donors or standing in the polls.

    “It’s the longest of long shots,” says Gergen, who believes Moulton has alienated some on the left, ironically because last year, he campaigned successfully to get young Democratic veterans elected to Congress, an effort Gergen says contributed to the Democrats taking back the House of Representatives.

    “The people who won were taking back districts that [President] Trump had won in many cases,” he says, “and so naturally, they have to be more mainstream than some of the progressives in the Democratic Party, and that makes Seth a target for some of the progressives, saying he’s too mainstream, he’s too close to the center.”

    The Iraq stuff is a whole lot more interesting than the political stuff. He’s for impeachment. He filed a digital privacy bill. “The Automatic Listening and Exploitation Act, or the ALEXA Act for short, would empower the Federal Trade Commission to seek immediate penalties if a smart device is found to have recorded user conversations without the device’s wake word being triggered… Moulton said that he would like to see his legislation spur a greater tech debate within the halls of Congress.” Uh…you’ve got a real issue there, Moulton, but the purpose of legislation is to make the laws of the land, not “spur debate.”

  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a failure to launch piece from Edward-Isaac Dovere, who seems to be making them a specialty:

    O’Rourke’s second-quarter fundraising total, announced two weeks ago, started to cement the sense of flop from polls that had him down to 1 or 2 percent, after being in third place when he announced in March he was running. He raised $3.6 million from April through June, meaning that after raising a blowout $6.1 million in his first 24 hours in the race, he picked up just $6.9 million in the three and a half months that followed. O’Rourke and his aides know how much is riding on the second debate next week, but they’re also struggling with what to do: He became a national name partly based on a viral video of him defending Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem. Re-creating that in a rapid-fire, multi-podium debate is pretty much impossible.

    Plus, he has to compete directly with South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whom he’ll share the stage with for the first time on Tuesday night. Both candidates are young white guys (O’Rourke is 46, Buttigieg 37), branding themselves as the bright, shiny future of the Democratic Party. Buttigieg’s explosion tracks with O’Rourke’s implosion. Any hopes O’Rourke has of rising again may depend on Buttigieg collapsing, which he shows no signs of doing; his polling has remained decent, and he raised $24.8 million for the second quarter, more than anyone else running.

    “What Beto O’Rourke’s Dad Taught Him About Losing.” Well, that’s knowledge that’s going to come in handy…

  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unveiled a manucaturing plan that also includes the $15 an hour minimum wage hike, which we already know is a job killer. “Two longtime Biden African American supporters in S. Carolina defect to Tim Ryan.” “Fletcher Smith and Brandon Brown, who played senior roles in Biden’s last presidential campaign in 2008” are the defectees. Given that the Biden 2008 Presidential campaign didn’t even survive long enough to get to South Carolina, it’s hard to see them as must-hire material…
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. President Trump wonders why he’s being called a racist for saying the same things about Baltimore in 2019 that Sanders aid in 2015. “No, Bernie! Scandinavia Is Not Socialist!”

    “Whatever you think about Sweden and what we did, you have to realize that we had a great society first,” Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, filmmaker, and Cato Institute senior fellow, said in a recent lecture titled “No, Bernie! Scandinavia Is Not Socialist!”

    “We were incredibly wealthy, we trusted each other socially, there was a decent life for everybody. That’s what made it possible to experiment with socialism; then it began to undermine many of those preconditions,” Norberg said during the June 20 event hosted by The Fund for American Studies and the office of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

    “That’s the one thing that it’s important for people to get, because if they just look at Sweden and think, ‘Oh look, they’re socialist and seem to be doing quite all right,’ then they’ve sort of missed the point,” Norberg added.

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. He met with the Des Moines Register editorial board. Which isn’t actually news, but it’s the only scrap of Sestak info I could scavenge up this week.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Many Democrats don’t seem to understand why Steyer is even running:

    Tom Steyer’s eleventh-hour presidential bid is confounding Democrats. And some party officials are ready for him to butt out.

    The billionaire environmental activist is antagonizing Democratic leaders, whacking Speaker Nancy Pelosi for going on August recess and criticizing House Democrats for not immediately impeaching the president.

    And as Steyer vows to spend as much as $100 million of his own money in the primary to boost his long-shot candidacy, Democrats are growing frustrated that he’ll only further clog the crowded campaign — particularly if he can buy his way onto the debate stage this fall.

    “It’s very difficult for me to see the path for Tom Steyer to be a credible candidate,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who has endorsed Pete Buttigieg. “So yes, I would rather that he spend his money taking back the Virginia House, the Virginia Senate and supporting people who can win.”

    “I wish he wouldn’t do it. Especially at this late date,” added Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who has endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. “Things are set except for those who are going to drop out.”

    Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio observed that Steyer is basically “another white guy in the race,” albeit a wealthy one who is “a major progressive player.” Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia was mostly perplexed by the wealthy Californian’s entry when asked about it: “I kind of wonder why?”

    Evidently Senator Brown doesn’t realize that he’s also the other white meat. But notice how he automatically lapses into the racist identity politics framing that infects the Democratic Party today. Whatever happened to judging people on the content of their character? There’s a whole lot of reasons not to vote for Tom Steyer without mentioning the color of his skin. “How Democratic debate rules are forcing a billionaire to plead for pennies.”

    About one-fifth of Steyer’s TV spending is on the national airwaves, but the vast majority is concentrated in the four early caucus and primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Positive poll results specifically in those states could help Steyer qualify for the debate, so getting his face on television is of special strategic value there.

    He’s also spending a ton on Facebook ads.

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Unveiled a plan to renegotiate trade deals. A small number of good transparency ideas attached to a giant boat anchor of liberal interest group ideas, including a “border carbon adjustment” tax. Her trade plans make Donald Trump sound like Adam Smith. Speaking of economics, she says we’re due for a recession, so she has that in common with Zero Hedge. But economists can’t agree, and the Fed is poised to drop rates, so who knows? Dem analyst for Warren says the race is between Warren and Harris. “Ignore that frontrunner behind the curtain!”
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She was on Face the Nation, where they asked her about, yes, Trump tweets. She understands that people make fun of her for love stuff. Says antidepressants may be overprescribed. She might be right there.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538: “How Weird Is Andrew Yang’s Tech Policy? Only About As Weird As America’s.”

    The Democratic Party has long considered itself the standard-bearer of scientific expertise, adopting an almost utopian vision of technological innovation since at least the Kennedy years, Vinsel said.

    Practically, this means that Democrats have made technology a bigger part of their image over the years. In the 1980s, for instance, “Atari Democrats” wore fancy watches and promoted Silicon Valley boosterism as an alternative to courting labor unions, said Marc Aidinoff, a history doctoral candidate at MIT who has also worked as a junior policy advisor to Joe Biden. That trend continued under Barack Obama, said Mary Ebeling, a professor of sociology at Drexel University. Obama’s technology advisors were heavily recruited from Silicon Valley and many returned there after serving in his administration. And now, it’s not just the Democratic Party pushing tech-based solutions, Vinsel said. At this point, the ideas of technological innovation and economic growth are so linked in the American mind that neither party can step away from tech as a common good without seeming like they are anti-growth.

    But Democrats’ tendency to seek solutions in technology for social problems has not always served them well. Ebeling is currently working on a project that explores how adopting electronic health records as part of the Affordable Care Act affected both patients and workers in the medical industry. The electronic records were pushed as a solution to deep-seated problems that weren’t really about technology — boosters promised they’d make healthcare cheaper and solve problems with patient access to consistent medical care. Instead, Ebeling is finding that we spent billions effectively favoring an industry that could never produce the returns it promised. “And lo and behold, by 2019, you have Kaiser Health News reporting on how much harm electronic health records have caused. Literally the death of patients because of medical errors,” she said.

    Says he’ll be running his campaign the entire way. Given slow but steady rise in the polls, I’d say certainly through Super Tuesday, and longer if it looks like Democrats are headed to a brokered convention, because why the hell not? “A recent Fox News poll had Yang ahead of Senators Cory Booker, D-N.J., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., former Colorado Gov. John Hickelnlooper, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas.”

  • 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, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown (but see above)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    LinkSwarm for June 14, 2019

    Friday, June 14th, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Border control, Social Justice Warriors, Iran and Geto Boys all feature in today’s roundup…

  • The idea that we can go back to a “Pre-Trump Normal” is an illusion.

    Washington sophisticates, and the DC press corps in particular, are deeply parochial. Trump didn’t create worldwide skepticism about globalism, resentment of sinecured elites, or frustration with an out-of-touch cultural vanguard. He merely rode them to power.

    Politicians and pundits can disagree with this populist trend, but it’s electorally suicidal to ignore it. As I note in USA Today, one look around the globe shows that, in many ways, Trump is the new normal.

  • Iran evidently limpet-mined two tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
  • One reason Iran is desperate: The Trump Administration’s sanctions are working:

    These actions on the part of Iran follow a series of sanctions from the US Treasury Department, which on Wednesday (June 12) imposed sanctions on a financial conduit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force, and last week (June 7) sanctioned Iran’s largest petrochemical holding group.

    US officials are also considering sanctions against the Iranian financial body that was established as a trade channel with Europe – a move that would underscore US intolerance to any international workarounds to the Iran sanctions campaign.

    You don’t need to read the tea leaves closely to know the administration’s plan for its “maximum pressure” campaign. But one thing the tea leaves don’t show are plans for war. And the reason is simple: the sanctions are working to help achieve President Donald Trump’s priority goal, which is to undermine Iran’s influence and support for terrorism in the Middle East.

    The Treasury’s latest steps follow a State Department press briefing, during which its spokesperson, Morgan Ortagus, listed the negative effects Iran sanctions were having on that country’s terrorist proxies and on its other actions in the region. She pointed to the Lebanese group Hezbollah’s “pleas for public donations via billboards, posters and collection cans” and stressed that “Iran is withdrawing Hezbollah fighters from Syria and cutting or canceling their salaries.” This is a big deal.

    She also pointed to Hamas’s austerity plan in Gaza and to the IRGC’s budget cuts for Iraq Shia militia groups. She highlighted fuel shortages in Syria due to the cut in Iranian oil supply and noted the IRGC cyber command “is short on cash.”

    Others have also picked up on this emerging trend: that Iran sanctions are starving Iran’s proxies of critical funds. The Washington Post reported that US sanctions against Iran have “curtailed” Iran’s finances to Hezbollah, which “has seen a sharp fall in its revenue and is being forced to make draconian cuts to its spending.” A fighter with an Iranian-backed militia in Syria told The New York Times that he lost a third of his salary and other benefits, lamenting, “Iran doesn’t have enough money to give us.”

    When he withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or what is often called the Iran nuclear deal, last year, President Trump made his top goal clear. Before even addressing Iran’s nuclear capabilities or speaking about working toward a new agreement, he emphasised Iran’s support for terrorism and plans for regional influence as among his key concerns and reasons for withdrawing from the deal. Working to undermine that behavior has been the administration’s top priority in its Iran policy.

    Sanctions are particularly taking a bite out of Hezbollah. One wonders, yet again, what the Obama Administration thought it was achieving with the insane and costly Iran deal…

  • Venezuelans reduced to barter.
  • This essay suggests that defeating Social Justice Warrior madness will be more difficult than we think, because it’s essentially a religious phenomena:

    The shock presidential election of 2016 might have prompted partisans on both sides to ask whether the vocabulary on which they relied had become a lifeless hindrance. On the Left, the Clinton political machine suffocated every dissenting voice within the Democratic Party, which denied its members the opportunity to rethink the identity politics death-grip that was strangling them. Then as now, Sanders, more smitten by Marx than the halfway-Nietzscheanism of identity politics, invited his fellow Democrats to step back from the brink. Alas, itself guilty of class privilege, the donor class of the Democratic Party living in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and in the wealthy enclaves surrounding New York City needed a fig leaf to cover its class sins—and, so did not, and will not, allow Sanders to win the Democratic nomination and thereby reveal their unrighteousness.

    The Democratic Party will again double down on the rhetoric of identity politics, lose the 2020 presidential election, and conclude—as it did with Russiagate—that some demonic force temporarily bent the arc of history in the wrong direction. The demonic force responsible this next time around? “Hate speech” from the lips of those in the center and on the Right who refuse to rehearse the Red Letter political liturgy identity politics tirelessly repeats—or bow before the false gods that identity politics worships.

    Partisans on the Right were given a gift: President Trump. He came into the Republican Party, and the Republican Party understood him not. Many did not want to receive this gift. Having read their Aristotle and Burke, and wishing to remain gentlemen, they withdrew from the political fray—preferring the decorous tyranny of candidate Clinton, the very paragon of identity politics, to the incivility of candidate Trump who, alone among Republican candidates, had the temerity to combat it. “Our tastes, not our ideas, define us”—that is what the 2016 election apparently taught the GOP.

    Now forming a Conservative Book Club of sorts, these gentlemen ponder great ideas, entice donors to fund their conferences and think tanks, and all the while enjoin us to believe the vocabulary of the pre-2016 Republican Party continues to be adequate to the troubles we face. It is not.

    Today, whether at conservative conferences or in conservative think tanks, the listener even moderately attentive to the conversation will hear of the perils of progressivism and of cultural Marxism, of the need to defend family values, of the importance of being pro-life, of the importance of free markets, and of the threat of multiculturalism. These terms—indeed the constellation these terms form—emerged during the Reagan Presidency, more than three decades ago. If the 2016 Presidential election tells us anything, it is that this verbiage has hardened into nearly lifeless political rhetoric, sustained on life support through institutional buy-in and the assurances of political philosophers sympathetic to conservatism who tirelessly promote the link between the veritable ideas they study and the political vocabulary that has been in place for decades is timeless.

    Times have changed, however. Philosophy must gently persuade; that is its privilege and its weakness. Philosophers are concerned with eternal truth. Partisans, by contrast, are concerned with timely rhetoric, opinion, and persuasion. They must engage in comparatively immediate combat. So long as conservatives inattentively conflate philosophizing and partisanship, they will continue to produce partisan vocabularies that masquerade as eternal truth—and partisans unable to respond in a timely manner to shifting times. To win, partisans must know when the weapons of their enemies have changed. Wars—and this is a crucial point to understand—are not won using weapons from earlier engagements. Only armchair soldiers and Conservative Book Club members have the luxury of replaying those battles.

    Neither liberals nor conservatives understand the weapon of identity politics, and the immense destruction it can cause. Identity politics does not simply parse different kinds of people. Identity politics is concerned with the relationship of transgression and innocence between different, purportedly monovalent, kinds of people. Identity politics is not just about who we are, it is about a moral stain or purity that defines who we are.

    The language of stain and purity, of transgression and innocence, is Christian language. Other religions are concerned with these categories as well, but our long familiarity with Christianity in America means that the invocation of these categories by the practitioners of identity politics derives from Christianity, and from Protestantism in particular. Surveys may indicate that America has lost or is losing its religion; the fever of identity politics that now sweeps the nation suggests these surveys are looking in the wrong place and asking the wrong questions. America has not lost its religion. America has relocated its religion to the realm of politics.

    Identity politics transforms politics. It turns politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering. Ponder for a moment, Christianity. Without the sacrifice of the innocent Lamb of God, there would be no Christianity. Christ, the scapegoat, renders the impure pure—by taking upon Himself “the sins of the world.” By the purging of the scapegoat, those for whom He is the sacrificial offering purify themselves. Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing for groups rather than for individuals. The scapegoat in the case of identity politics is the white heterosexual male who, if purged, supposedly will restore and confirm the cleanliness of all other groups of communities. He is the transgressor; all others—women, blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQs—have their sins covered over by the scapegoat, just as the scapegoated Christ covered over the sins of all the descendants of Adam.

    The theological perversity of replacing the Divine Scapegoat of Christianity with the all-too-mortal white heterosexual male scapegoat does not imply that he is innocent. Rather, in identity politics, the white heterosexual male becomes more than who he really is—a member of a scapegoated group who takes away the sins of the world, rather than a mortal, like everyone else, involved in transgression, and searching for redemption. The mystery of transgression and innocence, however, cannot be resolved at the level of groups, because in reality not one of them is univocally pure or stained. But identity politics stands or falls on the claim that groups are such unities of transgressors or innocents. Therein lies its weakness, at which all the armament allied against it must be aimed.

  • Charles Murray changes his mind. “I want to shut down low-skill immigration for a while.”
  • “Open borders advocates are panicking after the arrest of Irieno Mujihca, the leader of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a pro-open borders group funded by globalist financier George Soros that has worked to undermine United States immigration policy and sponsor Central American caravans.”
  • Hispanics stick with Trump despite tough border stance.” Despite, or because? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Tech reporter Peter Bright has been arrested for soliciting sex with children online. He was employed by Ars Technica until recently. A federal complaint alleges that Bright sought to molest a 7- and 9-year-old and met with an undercover agent for this purpose, at which point he was arrested. It also states that Bright claimed to be in a sexual relationship with an 11-year-old.” Was he a “male feminist” and “anti-#GamerGater”? Of course he was.
  • Twitter suspends Project Veritas for revealing Pintrest block pro-life website Live Action as porn.
  • University of Alabama returns donor’s $21.5 million and takes name off law building, partially over Alabama’s abortion law, but partially just because he was kind of a dick.
  • “Agriculture Dept. Employees Are Really Upset They Might Have to Live Among the Rubes in Flyover Country.”
  • “The folks running The Bulwark must decide which they value more, being conservative or being anti-Trump. They have, I’d argue, already picked the latter.”
  • Texas Senator Ted Cruz and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez team up again on a bill to make birth control available over the counter.
  • “Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Everyone’s Pay Should Be Equal, But My Pay Should Be More Equal Than Others.‘”
  • New York Times leftist: “Hey Rep. Dan Crenshaw! If you really cared about 9/11 victims, you would have co-sponsored the 9/11 Victims Compensation fund!” Rep. Dan Crenshaw: “I did.” New York Times leftist: “Uhhhhh….” DELETE DELETE DELETE. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina indicted on 12 felony counts of voter fraud.
  • “President Donald Trump will award the Medal of Honor to former Army Staff Sgt. David Bellavia later this month, the White House announced Monday, making him the first living Iraq War veteran to receive the nation’s highest military decoration.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • We could be heroes, just for one day… (Hat tip: @evangie.)
  • Woman kills boyfriend over alien reptile cult. “Shriner told NJ.com she believed Rogers was a ‘Vampire Witch Reptilian Super Soldier.'” Plus: liquor and firearms! Going to use the “David Icke” tag even though he’s nowhere mentioned, as that’s how I keep track of all the reptoid news…
  • Bad Idea Theater: Netflix Roast of Anne Frank. You’re probably thinking to yourself “Must be The Onion or The Babylon Bee.” No, this is an actual thing that people actually did. (Indeed, Jewish comics seemed to be the driving force behind it.) I suspect it’s only the second unfunniest spoof on the Holocaust, behind Heil Honey, I’m Home, which was also a real thing.
  • I’ve managed not to have any news about Houston rap group Geto Boys in a LinkSwarm ever, and now two pieces drop this week. First, dwarf frontman Bushwack Bill (legal name Richard Shaw) has died at age 52 from pancreatic cancer. Now Scarface, AKA Brad Jordan, is running for Houston City Council. (Hat tip for both: Dwight.)
  • High School Valedictorian’s speech slams teachers and administrators for their utter incompetence and failure. Oh, did I mention it was in California?
  • How to assemble a P-47 on the ground with hand tools.
  • ThinkGeek, RIP.
  • “House Democrats Draft Legislation That Would Make It A Hate Crime To Eat At Chick-Fil-A.”
  • “Did Leonard Nimoy Fake His Own Death So He Could Seize Control of the Illuminati?” I’m gonna go with “No” here…
  • UNMAKE.
  • “England Forced To Crown Donald Trump As King After Strange Woman Lying In Pond Lobs A Sword At Him.”
  • A funny, heartwarming story that doesn’t start out that way at all.
  • I was sad because I had no shoes, but then I met a puppy who had no feet:

  • Moammar Gadhafi’s Family Flees Libya for Algeria

    Monday, August 29th, 2011

    I think this is a pretty big indication that Moammar won’t be sending out Muharram postcards from Tripoli this year. Gadhafi himself still seems to be playing the title role in Where’s Waldo, but him sending his family out of the country would tend to indicates that his prospects for regaining power are (thankfully) bleak.

    Unless a hard-core Jihadi government takes over in Libya (possible, but it seems unlikely), the fall of Gadhafi must rank as good news for America, for the Libyan people, and, yes, President Obama. Putting aside questions of whether Gadhafi could have been toppled earlier (quite likely), whether Libya was the worst remaining Arab dictatorship (it wasn’t; Iran and Syria (clearly), as well as Saudi Arabia (arguably) are worse troublemakers and oppressors of their own people), and whether toppling Middle East dictatorships is a proper use of American power (there were many justifications of America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 that weren’t applicable to Libya, but I can think of none that would apply to Libya that would not equally apply to Iraq), having Gadhafi gone is good news for everyone involved except the dictators own corrupt cronies (and the businessmen who profited from dealing with them), and there’s a significant chance that he wouldn’t have been toppled without the judicious application of American air power that Obama approved. It would be nice to see Gadhafi hung from a pole, or put on trial for crimes against his own people, but even having him merely deposed is a significant victory. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

    Memorial Day LinkSwarm for May 30, 2011

    Monday, May 30th, 2011

    Here are a few links for Memorial Day, some specific to the occasion:

  • Let’s not forget this Memorial Day that Iraq was an important victory:

    America’s victory in Iraq broke the back of Al-Qaeda and left Osama bin Laden’s dream in ruins. He died a defeated fanatic in his Abbotabad hideaway; his dream was crushed in the Mesopotamian flatlands where he swore it would win…The tragedies of Iraq are real and well known. The victory is equally real—but the politically fastidious don’t want to look. The minimum we owe our lost and wounded warriors is to tell the story of what they so gloriously achieved.

  • I walk my dog in the local park, and last year on Veteran’s Day I came across this memorial bench for Cpl. Chad Eric Oligschlaeger, which I had seen before, but which this time was festooned for the occasion:


    Here’s a closeup of the plaque on the bench:


    I thought doing a post on the late Cpl. Oligschlaeger might provide a somber but uplifting story for Memorial Day, but in researching him, I found his story was a lot sadder than most. He didn’t die in combat (despite doing two tours in Iraq), but died due to “accidental death due to multiple drug toxicity,” the drugs in question being various prescription drugs he was taking to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder while waiting (over half a year) for a spot to open up in a PTSD treatment center.

  • A list of Texas casualties from Operation Iraqi Freedom can be found here.
  • A list of Texas soldiers killed in Afghanistan can be found here.
  • A list of Texas Medal of Honor winners.
  • One Texas Medal of Honor recipient who died recently was David H. McNerney, who died October 10, 2010. His citation reads:

    Rank and organization: First Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company A, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. place and date: polei Doc, Republic of Vietnam, 22 March 1967. Entered service at: Fort Bliss, Tex. Born: 2 June 1931, Lowell, Mass. Citation: 1st Sgt. McNerney distinguished himself when his unit was attacked by a North Vietnamese battalion near polei Doc. Running through the hail of enemy fire to the area of heaviest contact, he was assisting in the development of a defensive perimeter when he encountered several enemy at close range. He killed the enemy but was painfully injured when blown from his feet by a grenade. In spite of this injury, he assaulted and destroyed an enemy machinegun position that had pinned down 5 of his comrades beyond the defensive line. Upon learning his commander and artillery forward observer had been killed, he assumed command of the company. He adjusted artillery fire to within 20 meters of the position in a daring measure to repulse ??enemy assaults. When the smoke grenades used to mark the position were gone, he moved into a nearby clearing to designate the location to friendly aircraft. In spite of enemy fire he remained exposed until he was certain the position was spotted and then climbed into a tree and tied the identification panel to its highest branches. Then he moved among his men readjusting their position, encouraging the defenders and checking the wounded. As the hostile assaults slackened, he began clearing a helicopter landing site to evacuate the wounded. When explosives were needed to remove large trees, he crawled outside the relative safety of his perimeter to collect demolition material from abandoned rucksacks. Moving through a fusillade of fire he returned with the explosives that were vital to the clearing of the landing zone. Disregarding the pain of his injury and refusing medical evacuation 1st Sgt. McNerney remained with his unit until the next day when the new commander arrived. First Sgt. McNerney’s outstanding heroism and leadership were inspirational to his comrades. His actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Army and reflect great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of his country.

  • Via Ace of Spades comes this moving Ernie Pyle piece on the death of Capt. Henry T. Waskow, of Belton, Texas, killed in Italy in December, 1943.
  • Long, interesting story about an operation on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
  • Texas house and Senate pass a biannual budget with significant cuts.
  • Not news: Students cheating. News: New York City principals instructing their teachers to help students cheat. “Our mandated passing rate is 60 percent.”
  • WMD Found in Iraq

    Sunday, October 24th, 2010

    According to the latest batch of Wikileak documents. In particular, coalition troops kept coming across numerous artillery shells filled with mustard gas.

    Remember the terms of Section 8 of UN resolution 687 that ended the first Gulf War:

    Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:

    (a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities

    Thus the instance of a single chemical weapon in Iraq violates the terms that ended the Gulf War, and thus the decision by George W. Bush to carry out the liberation of Iraq in 2003 was both legal and justifiable. (This is in addition to the other numerous instances of jus ad bellum cited by Bush in his speech on that reasons behind that decision.)

    Liberals, look at yourself in the nearest mirror and repeat after me: “George W. Bush was right and I was wrong. George W. Bush was right and I was wrong.”