I think everything that needs to be said about the O.J. trial has been said, so I’m just using this as an opportunity to put up videos of Norm Macdonald on Saturday Night Live (which, I assure you, was actually funny at various points in its history) slamming O.J.:
I usually note library additions in the other blog, but all of these but two are political or military books. Two are also signed copies replacing or supplementing unsigned copies.
Bush, Barbara. A Memoir. Scribner’s, 1994. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine- dust jacket with slight bumping at heel and trace of wear at points, inscribed by Bush: “To Chris Hyatt/With best wishes/Barbara Bush/December 1998. Autobiography by First Lady Barbara Bush, wife of 41 and mother of 43, who died in 2018. Not my usual thing, but I stumbled across it checking for signatures in books by 41 and 43. Bought for $14.48 at Half Price Books.
Hemple, Stuart. Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip. Abrams Comic Arts, 2009. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Near Fine dust jacket with slight waviness, slight grubbiness to uncoated stock, and a thin scratch across bottom of spine. Received as a Christmas gift only because, many moons ago, I noted to Dwight my incredulity that this comic strip ever existed at all. Yes, Woody Allen’s neurotic nebbish character was so well known in the 1970s that a comic strip based on it (but written and drawn by someone else) appeared in numerous newspapers from 1976-1964. I am equally incredulous that someone found the strip worth of a prestige retrospective collection. Supplements my copy of Non-Being and Somethingness, which contains selections from the strip.
Hill, Doug and Jeff Weingrad. Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. Beech Tree Books, 1986. First edition hardback, a Fine- copy with bumping at head and heel in a Near Fine dust jacket with with one 1/16″ chip at heel, crease to bottom of front flap, slight bumping at head and heel and a bit of pull to top jacket edge. History of Saturday Night Live. Part of a very small collection of books on early SNL. Most people today don’t realize how amazingly funny, daring and groundbreaking the original cast SNL was. Bought for $4.99.
King, Florence. Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye. St. Martin’s Press, 1989. First edition hardback, a Near Fine copy with slight bumping at head and heel and thrift store stamp to insider rear cover, in a Fine- dust jacket with slight bumping at head, in a Mylar dust jacket protector. Collection of essays. Replaces an Ex-Library copy. Bought for $7.99.
McBride, H. W. A Rifleman Went to War. Small-Arms Tactical Publishing Company, 1935. First edition, second printing (according to Dwight’s bibliography of this press), a Near Fine copy with a slight bit of spine wear and previous owner’s bookplate, in a Very Good- dust jacket with 1 1/2″ wide x 1/2″ deep chip at head, small chip at heel, creasing along front flap fold, and general wear, but no loss of lettering anywhere, in a Mylar dust jacket protector. Memoirs of the experiences of an American rifleman who joined the Canadian expeditionary forces during World War I (my second favorite World War). A Christmas gift from Dwight, who collects this press.
Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980. Basic Books, 1984. Third printing, a Fine- copy in a Fine- dust jacket, with slighting bumping at head and heel, a trace of wear at points, and a touch of surface wear, inscribed by Murray: “To Dr. Harry Schmitt,/with best wishes/Charles Murray/18 July 1986.” (I wonder if this was inscribed to former astronaut and Republican senator Harrison Schmitt.) This is probably the most important book ever written about the American welfare state, in which Murray showed in meticulously researched detail why the welfare state expansions instituted by Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society inflicted lasting economic and social harm to black families in America. Without Losing Ground, the welfare reform act of 1996 never would have happened. It came out back when some Democrats will still willing to look at research and data rather that automatically calling critics of the welfare state racist. Highly recommended. Supplements an unsigned first printing. (I had a second printing inscribed to me that I foolish lent out and never had returned.) Bought for $5.99.
Thorburn, Wayne. Red State: An Insiders Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics. University of Texas Press, 2014. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine-dust jacket with just a touch of wear, signed by Thorburn. This is an interesting book that describes (among other things) how leftists deliberately drove conservatives and moderates out of their own party so they could control the Democratic Party. Of course, they expected voters would simply keep voting for Democrats, but that didn’t happen. Recommended. Bought for $7. Replaces an unsigned copy.
When it comes to longer videos I find interesting, I have a system for posting them here:
I see a longer video I think BattleSwarm readers will be interested in.
I go “Hey, I’ll go ahead and post that as soon as I have time to watch the whole video!”
I never have time to watch the full video.
I never post the video.
I think there are some drawbacks to the system.
This Babylon Bee (Seth Dillon, Kyle Mann, and Ethan Nicolle) interview with Elon Musk from back in December is one of those longer videos I meant to get to before now. Rather than continue to hold onto this forever, I’ve watched more of it and am posting it here.
Some topics of discussion:
How Saturday Night Live and The Onion used to be funny before they became so hard left they refused to make fun of Democrats.
The threat to western civilization by the “woke mind virus.”
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary and hateful. It basically gives mean people a reason, it gives them a shield, to be mean and cruel, armored with false virtue.”
Kyle Mann: “The left is almost this religion now,where they’re so serious, and they believe what they believe with such intensity, that for us to make fun of them you know for them, it’s like you’re making fun of God or salvation.”
Musk is much higher on “sustainable energy” than I am (which you would expect for a guy that owns solar power companies), but does say shutting down nuclear power plants is a big mistake.
The craziness of trying to shut down Dave Chappelle.
“Part of why I moved to Texas, it’s just fewer strings tying you down.”
Ted Cruz posted this classic Saturday Night Live skit to his Facebook page, and since I had been looking for an embeddable copy for a while, I’m passing the joy onto you:
For younger viewers: Yes, once upon a time, Saturday Night Live was willing to make fun of Democratic presidents…
If you work in the media and you made a big deal when Trump walked down a slippery ramp a little slower than usual so he would *not* fall and you are not making a big deal of Biden falling 3 times today trying to walk up some steps, you are the reason people don't trust the media
So when is Saturday Night Live going to rehire Chevy Chase to play Joe Biden the way he played Gerald Ford? Chase is one year younger than Biden. (Of course, we all know the answer to that: Never. Because SNL hates making fun of Democrats. And Lorne Michaels hates Chase. Plus, at age 77, I doubt Chase is doing many pratfalls these days…)
We are rapidly approaching the endgame on election fraud remedies. States must ratify their final electors by December 8 (the “safe harbor” date), and electors meet and vote on December 14. Either the Supreme Court will have stopped the steal by that date, or Joe Biden will officially receive enough electoral votes to be elected President.
President Donald Trump lays out the case for significant voter fraud having altered the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election:
The mysterious case of four suitcases of ballots pulled out from under a table after counting had supposedly stopped:
President Donald Trumpâs legal team on Dec. 3 presented surveillance footage at a Georgia state legislature hearing that appears to show ballot-counting workers telling poll observers late at night on Election Day to leave before continuing to count and pulling out what appears to be boxes filled with ballots.
In the hearing on Dec. 3, Jacki Pick, a lawyer who is volunteering with the campaignâs legal case, said the team received video footage from State Farm Arenaâs vote-tabulation center in Fulton County, Georgia. The team said that GOP poll watchers werenât allowed to watch the counting process in the poll center.
According to Pick, an unusual occurrence took place later in the evening at around 10 p.m. local time: A womanâdescribed as a blonde woman with braidsâtold workers to stop counting and notified everyone to go home.
Describing the video footage, Pick said, âEveryone clears out, including the Republican observers and the press, but four people stay behind and continue counting and tabulating well into the night.â The four counted unobserved until about 1 a.m., according to the video.
Pick said that video footage shows Fulton County election workers waiting at their scanning areas until GOP poll observers and reporters left the room before they started âscanning ballots,â ostensibly without any observation.
WATCH: Video footage from Georgia shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled from under a table AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave room and 4 people stayed behind to keep counting votes pic.twitter.com/AcbTI1pxn4
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) December 3, 2020
The Amistad Project has gathered whistleblowers and sworn declarations revealing over one million potentially fraudulent swing-state ballots, including completed ballots getting shipped across state lines, postal service workers being told to prioritize Biden mail, and officials tampering with Dominion systems to prevent an audit.
In total, over 300,000 ballots are at issue in Arizona, 548,000 in Michigan, 204,000 in Georgia, and over 121,000 in Pennsylvania.
The declarations state that unlawful actions by state and local election officials in swing states, and possibly U.S. Postal Service officials,â the Amistad Project noted.
The evidence details âthe failure of election officials in blue jurisdictions to maintain ballot chain of custody,â and include âphotographs of individuals improperly accessing voting machines and a detailed eyewitness account of the breaking of sealed boxes of ballot jump drives and commingling of those jump drives with others.â
In addition to voting machine tampering, the Amistad Projectâs findings reveal efforts by Postal Service officials in at least three of six swing states. âDetails include potentially hundreds of thousands of completed absentee ballots being transported across three state lines, and a trailer filled with ballots disappearing in Pennsylvania,â the group notes.
The Amistad Project feels that one whistleblower, a USPS truck driver Jess Morgan, had âfraudulent ballots were mistakenly placedâ in his Pennsylvania-bound truck.
“Judge Orders Forensic Audit of Dominion Voting Machines in Michigan.” “‘Our team is going to be able to go in this morning at about 8:30 and will be there for about eight hours to conduct that forensic examination and weâll have the results in about 48 hours, and thatâll tell us a lot about these machines,’ Trump election attorney Jenna Ellis told Fox News.” Maybe this will finally provide the Dominion smoking gun. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Red Headed Libertarian summarizes the evidence:
500,000 Mailin Ballots never mailed but submitted for Joe Out of a Batch of 600,000 just 3200 for Trump. Military ballots faked, all for Biden Fake Birthdays entered as 1/1/2020 to no pass system. Servers missing No creases in mail in ballots Only Joe voted for- no one else
The third and final presidential debate is in the books, Trump breaks 50% approval, and the hard left plans another riot and arson spree if they lose. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
That appeared to be one lesson from a Zoom focus group conducted after the debate by messaging expert Frank Luntz. Speaking to 15 undecided voters — and yes, they appeared to be really undecided — Luntz asked for a one- or two-word description of the candidates’ debate demeanor. For Biden, the words were mostly bad: among them were “vague,” “very vague,” “non-specific,” “cognitively impaired,” “old,” “uncomfortable,” “elusive,” “grandfatherly,” and “defensive.”
For Trump, they were mostly much better: among them were “controlled,” “composed,” “constrained,” “reserved,” “poised,” “con artist,” “surprisingly presidential,” “calmer,” and “restrained.”
There will be more coverage of the debate, of Biden’s promise to end the oil industry and, indeed, more about Mr. Luntz, in Monday’s BidenWatch.
President Trump just hit the “Holy Grail” of breaking the 50% approval rating, hitting 52% approval in Rasmussen polling. All the usual poll caveats apply.
The left is currently planning on how to peacefully protest if President Donald Trump wins. Ha, just kidding! They’re going to burn everything down:
An activist group is planning large-scale and widespread âdisruptive activityâ starting on the night of the election, in an attempt to stop what it predicts will be an âattempted coupâ by President Trump in the form of a refusal to accept the election results.
âShut Down D.C.â is setting the stage for mass gatherings in D.C., noting that the âresistanceâ must begin during the âmuddiedâ legal and political debate over the election outcome.
“We need to show that weâre ungovernable under a continued Trump administrationâŚThat can mean blocking traffic at major intersections and bridges, shutting down government office buildings (why should ICE or the FBI be able to keep doing Trumpâs bidding when heâs leading with a coup?!?), or blockading the White House.â
The document bases its action plan upon the scenarios projected by the establishment leftist âTransition Integrity Projectâ for election night and sketches these activistsâ response to each, explicitly rejecting the possibility that Trump could legitimately win. It continues:
Weâll keep it going until Trump concedes. We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winterâ maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable.
As it becomes clear that Trumpâs coup is failing, institutions and the elites will start to abandon him â or we will approach them as part of the problem. Either Amazon will shut down AWS for the Trump loyalists in the government or weâll shut down their fulfillment centers. Either governors will tell their national guards to stand down or weâll shut down their state capitals as well. Over time, Trump will grow increasingly isolated and his empire will crumble down around him.
The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of Americaâa 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power.
Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.
The Left seeks to transform America into something never envisioned by the founders, a huge all-encompassing, panopticon state, one run by anointed Platonic guardians. Our elite watchmen will use their unlimited power to force upon us an equality of result societyâwith themselves properly exempted.
The hard Leftâs defense is that its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.
Large swaths of the downtowns of Americaâs large citiesâNew York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portlandâare becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable. Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless. Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism. The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse.
Back in 2018, I wrote about the phenomenon of Great Southern Democratic Hopes â candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-learning state who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.
Prime past specimens of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes include Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Michelle Nunn and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But 2018 brought the modern king of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes, Texas Senate candidate Beto OâRourke.
You notice none of those candidates actually won, although OâRourke deserves some credit for performing better than any other Democrat in decades. Still, next spring, Ted Cruz will be in the third year of his second term, and OâRourke, having completed a presidential bid that also didnât live up to the initial hype, will be teaching at Texas State University.
This cycle: Amy McGrath.
after McGrath won the primary, the Washington Postâs Jennifer Rubin declared, âDemocrats serious about winning chose Amy McGrath.â The Frankfort State Journal concluded, âMcGrath has the name recognition and financial backing to give McConnell, well, a run for his money.â Fueled by Democrats across the country who are itching to see McConnell defeated, McGrathâs fundraising has been off the charts â $37 million in the last quarter, more than $82 million overall.
And yet it is mid October, and McConnell does not appear to be running for his money. The newest Mason-Dixon poll puts the Republican ahead, 51 percent to 42 percent. Nate Silverâs FiveThirtyEight gives McConnell a 96 percent chance of winning. In a year when Democrats are finding themselves in surprisingly strong shape from Maine to Colorado and from Montana to Arizona, McGrath is an afterthought and on pace to turn out like the last Democrat who took on McConnell. In 2013, Politico wrote of Grimes, âThe fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.â Mitch McConnell won reelection in 2014, 56 percent to 40 percent, in what was not the fight of his political life.
China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for ÂFacebook to recruit social media censors?
There are at least half a dozen âChinese nationals who are working on censorship,â a former Facebook insider told me last week. âSo at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, âHey, weâre going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.ââ
The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. Itâs called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebookâs offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning â teaching âcomputers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,â as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.
When it comes to censorship on social media, that means âteachingâ the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firmâs software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content âshows up dead-last.â
Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynastyâs dealings with Chinese companies.
To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: âThey take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.â
Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome â and root out what bosses call âborderline content.â
It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. âWhat they donât do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,â says the ex-insider. Instead, âcontent that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You canât tell itâs censored.â
In a joint press release issued early this morning, SK Hynix and Intel have announced that Intel will be selling the entirety of its NAND memory business to SK Hynix. The deal, which values Intelâs NAND holdings at $9 billion, will see the company transfer over the NAND business in two parts, with SK Hynix eventually acquiring all IP, facilities, and personnel related to Intelâs NAND efforts. Notably, however, Intel is not selling their overarching Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group; instead the company will be holding on to their Optane memory technology as they continue to develop and sell that technology.
Per the terms of the unusual agreement, SK Hynix will be acquiring Intelâs NAND memory business in two parts, with the deal not expected to completely close until March of 2025. Under the first phase, which will take place in 2021 once all relevant regulatory bodies have approved the seal, SK Hynix will pay Intel the first $7 billion for their SSD business and Intelâs sole NAND fab in Dalian, China. This will see Intelâs consumer and enterprise SSD businesses transferred to SK Hynix, along with the relevant IP and employees for the SSD business, but not any NAND IP or employees. Similarly, while SK Hynix will get the Dalian fab, the first phase does not come with the employees that operate it.
Following the first phase, Intel will continue to develop and manufacture NAND out of the Dalian fab for roughly the next four years. This period is set to last until the rest of the deal fully closes in March of 2025. At that point, SK Hynix will pay Intel $2 billion for the rest of their NAND business. This will finally transfer all of Intelâs NAND IP and related employees over to SK Hynix, along with the Dalian fab employees.
NAND = Flash memory, and it’s a very profitable business to be in most times, but not part of Intel’s core microprocessor business. In Intel’s case, NAND is what you run once your fab is too old to crank out Microprocessors, and Fab 68 in Dalian was built in 2010 as a 65 nanometer fab. With Intel’s cutting edge currently at 7nm, you can see how it would be easy for them to part with, especially since the flash division was losing money despite record revenue in 2019. What Hynix gets out of the deal is harder to fathom. They’re buying a revenue stream in a sector that should be profitable, add another fab to their stable, and maintain parity with DRAM rivals Samsung and Micron. But that’s an awful lot to pay for a small revenue stream bump, a ten year old fab and no NAND IP until 2024.
“U.S. Sanctions Have Caused âSeriousâ Damage to Iran, Tehran Says.” Good. Maybe they could stop being jihadist scumbags who oppress your people with a brutal theocracy? Just a thought…
Armenia-Azerbaijan truce breaks down within hours.
Chairman of the Georgetown County (South Carolina) Board of Voter Registration and Elections resignes after stealing Trump signs. Note: Repeatedly stealing the signs of political opponents isn’t a “lapse of judgement.”
The Nate Paul scandal has, at its heart, allegations that federal and state law enforcement officials abused the rights of an American citizen. The facts from all sides seem to indicate an unwillingness by the OAG staff to investigate Paulâs complaint; their unwillingness to do so must be explored.
If the 2019 raid was properly conducted, why has that not been confirmed? Why delay an investigation into the raid? If the raids were legitimate, why, after more than 13 months, has Nate Paul not been charged with a crime?
On the other hand, Nate Paul mightâindeedâbe a notorious villain. But in the current environment, shouldnât state investigators be willing to double-check that the actions of law enforcement officials are conducted properly? Even accused criminals have constitutional rights.
Just as important, what if Mr. Paul is not a villain and merely a businessman targeted for less than honorable reasons? Is it merely a coincidence that U.S. Attorney Bash resigned from office three days after Mateer tendered his own resignation?
Likewise, it is possibleâas the seven OAG employees allegeâthat Paxton was acting âunder duressâ in pushing for this investigation into the complaint made by his friend Mr. Paul. Whether or not Nate Paulâs allegations have merit, Texans need to be certain their elected officials are not acting improperly or unethically in the course of their jobs. Was Mr. Paxton simply pursuing justice for a Texan, or was he acting under undue influence?
Bret Weinstein kicked off Facebook, presumably for daring to voice anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts.
I have been evicted from Facebook. No explanation. No appeal. I have downloaded "my information" and see nothing that explains it.
We are governed now in private, by entities that make their own rules and are answerable to no process. Disaster is inevitable. We are living it. pic.twitter.com/JBTFH2devl
I don't care who you are, but seeing your dog dressed as Chuckie, running towards you with his wig and little knife arm, is just funny….. pic.twitter.com/vwaX0as0qW
I hope you’re enjoying your splendid isolation on the first day of spring. As in previous weeks, the Wuhan coronavirus dominates the news with the reminder that the Gods of the Copybook Headings are never far away…
President Donald Trump invokes the Defense Production Act of 1950 to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus. “The legislation allows the president to require production and orders from certain industries to prioritize the response to a national emergency.”
Not just the flu. “On a scale of 1 to 10, he said, the pain was 15⌠Imagine your lungs turning solid. Itâs like suffocating.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Don’t let the MSM revisionism fool you; President Trump was relentlessly slammed by Our Media Betters for that decision:
Holy crapâflashback to @wapo quoting the Chinese FM slamming the Trump administration's 1/31 travel ban AND noting that WHO (still operating under Chinese disinformation about #COVID19) was against Trump's move to stop entry into the US from China. pic.twitter.com/kkHfgwrv4Y
From the Verge 1/31 – apoplectic that Trump was going against WHO recommendations (because he's such an anti-science xenophobe…) pic.twitter.com/G83YAaVhsT
All of this PALES in comparison to Laurie Garrett in @ForeignPolicy lavishing praise on the Chinese for their response while viciously admonishing the Trump administration for going against WHO recsâcalling the travel ban an âimprovisationâ
The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.
The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.
At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.
Snip.
During the Ebola crisis, the CDC had been spending a mere $2.6 million on gun violence studies. But the CDC has a history of wasting money on everything from a $106 million visitor’s center with Japanese gardens, a $200K gym, a transgender beauty pageant, not to mention promoting bike paths.
The occasional outbreak only calls the CDCâs general incompetence to everyoneâs attention. The rest of the time its incompetence, like that of other government agencies, just ticks along wasting money.
In 1999, the CDC announced a plan to end syphilis in 5 years. The Clinton era National Plan to Eliminate Syphilis was an unserious social welfare proposal that wanted to battle racism and was such a success that by 2018, syphilis rates had hit a new record high. But Democrat presidential candidates using the CDC for imaginary proposals to end a disease, not by utilizing science, but social welfare, had become a bad habit under Obama, diverting resources from what the CDC could realistically do for political scams.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton had promised an âAIDS-free generationâ by, in part, using the CDC. Like her presidency, the âAIDS-free generationâ never arrived and was never going to.
The CDC isn’t prepared to fight epidemics because it’s too concerned with pushing gun control, fighting obesity, and waging social justice. (Hat tip: Zerohedge.)
What Beijing cares about is clear from its sustained war on global public opinion. Chinese propaganda mouthpieces have launched a broad array of attacks against the facts, attempting to create a new narrative about Chinaâs historic victory over the Wuhan virus. Chinese state media is praising the governmentâs âeffective, responsible governance,” but the truth is that Beijing is culpable for the spread of the pathogen around China and the world. Chinese officials knew about the new virus back in December, and did nothing to warn their citizens or impose measures to curb it early on.
Instead of acting with necessary speed and transparency, the party-state looked to its own reputation and legitimacy. It threatened whistleblowers like the late Dr. Li Wenliang, and clamped down on social media to prevent both information about the virus and criticism of the Communist Party and government from spreading.
Unsurprisingly, China also has enablers abroad helping to whitewash Beijingâs culpability. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refused for months to declare a pandemic, and instead thanked China for âmaking us safer,â a comment straight out of an Orwell novel. This is the same WHO that has refused to allow Taiwan membership, due undoubtedly to Beijingâs influence over the WHOâs purse strings.
Most egregiously, some Chinese government officials have gone so far as to claim that the Wuhan virus was not indigenous to China at all, while others, like Mr. Tedros, suggest that Chinaâs response somehow bought the world âtimeâ to deal with the crisis. That such lines are being repeated by global officials and talking heads shows how effectively Chinaâs propaganda machine is shaping the global narrative. The world is quickly coming to praise the Communist Partyâs governance model, instead of condemn it.
The reality is that China did not tell its own people about the risk for weeks and refused to let in major foreign epidemiological teams, including from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Thus, the world could not get accurate information and laboratory samples early on. By then, it was too late to stop the virus from spreading, and other world capitals were as lax in imposing meaningful travel bans and quarantines as was Beijing.
Because of Chinaâs initial failures, governments around the world, including democratic ones, now are being forced to take extraordinary actions that mimic to one degree or another Beijingâs authoritarian tendencies, thus remaking the world more in Chinaâs image. Not least of the changes will be in more intrusive digital surveillance of citizens, so as to be able to better track and stop the spread of future epidemics, a step that might not have been necessary if Beijing was more open about the virus back in December and if the WHO had fulfilled its responsibilities earlier.
Are Chlorequine or Hydroxychloroquine a cure for the Wuhan Coronavirus? They just got approved for that use so I suspect we’re going to find out. Props to reader Greg Timoney for pointing out this post a few days before the news broke more generally.
Pretty good thread on what is and isn’t available in various supermarkets in various parts of the country. This week week at my local HEB, chicken was low but ground beef was available, as well as bread and eggs. Lots of things were picked but usually alternates were available if you were willing to switch brands or sizes. Didn’t check toilet paper.
List of which Austin-area employeers are letting their employees work from home, and which aren’t. I can well understand semiconductor manufacturers like Samsung and AMD keep running their fabs; an idle fab line can lose up to $1 million an hour, and you’re not going to catch coronavirus in a bunny suit in a cleanroom anyway…
Last year, ProPublica published a list of ER wait times at New York hospitals. Keep these pre-Wuhan virus wait times in mind when media begin to claim, in order to foment fear and hysteria, that long waits at NYC ERs are a new phenomeneon (they're not). https://t.co/rMhfdnXXltpic.twitter.com/ET2nEMGvJc
The Austin City Council has decided that there’s no need to clean up homeless encampments in the present crisis. “In the current situation, however, homeless encampments ought to be the first place you look to shut down transmission of infectious diseases. Instead, those are the one place that will be left completely alone.”
After two years of hiding public voter data, the stateâs biggest county will finally disclose records of foreigners illegally voting in Texas elections, ending a court battle initiated by an election integrity group.
This week, Harris County settled a lawsuit brought against its top voter registration official and agreed to release all records of noncitizen voters requested by Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm that specializes in fighting to enforce federal voter roll maintenance laws.
Snip.
PILF sued Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Ann Bennett in 2018, after Bennettâs office refused access to records of registered voters identified as noncitizens, as well as actions taken by the county regarding those registrations.
“Baltimore Mayor Begs Residents To Stop Shooting Each Other So Hospital Beds Can Be Used For Coronavirus Patients.”
Production on Saturday Night Liveshut down. I’m so old I remember when it was funny…
Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was âenough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic âpreference,â to qualify as a revolutionary.â When Hitchens first heard the expression âthe personal is political,â he knew âas one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it wasâclichĂŠ is arguably forgivable hereâvery bad news.â As he put it in a 2008 article:
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of âraceâ or âgenderâ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.
In the summer of 1992, actress Mia Farrow found out that her adopted daughter Soon-Yi was still romantically involved with Miaâs ex-long-time-boyfriend and collaborator, Woody Allen. According to then-21-year-old Soon-Yi, Mia responded by telling a psychologist that Woody was âsatanic and evil,â and that she needed to âfind a way to stop him.â Three days later, seven-year-old Dylan Farrow, Miaâs daughter, accused Allen of molesting her in Miaâs Connecticut house. But when the childâs accusations, which were captured on videotape with reported coaching from Mia, were investigated by the Connecticut State Attorney, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital and the New York Department of Social Services, no credible evidence could be found to support the allegations. As Kyle Smith reported in a definitive National Review article, Miaâs own nanny âquit the family rather than support Miaâs version of events.â And Dylanâs brother Moses wrote in 2018 that the Mia-Dylan abuse narrative simply made no sense given the architecture of the Connecticut house where the abuse allegedly took place. Yet Woody Allen was nonetheless smeared as a rapist and pedophile. And last week, his publisher, Hachette Book Group, announced it would cancel its deal to publish Allenâs memoirs.
The accusation always struck me as bunk. You can believe that Allen marrying his girlfriend’s stepdaughter is a creeper move without believing he’s a pedophile.
Another debate down (like the ratings), Buttigieg brings all the swells to the crystal wine bar, Bloomberg carpet bombs the airwaves with money, and Tom Steyer is the Cats of candidates. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
I’m betting polling will be sparse Christmas week:
Iowa State University (Iowa): Buttigieg 24, Sanders 21, Warren 18, Biden 15, Klobuchar 4, Yang 3, Booker 3, Gabbard 3, Steyer 2, Castro 1. Sample size of 632.
Emerson: Biden 32, Sanders 25, Warren 12, Buttigieg 8, Yang 6, Gabbard 4, Bloomberg 3, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, Steyer 2, Delaney 1. “Warren appears to be losing to Sanders with younger voters, and losing to Biden with older voters, making it difficult for her to secure a base. With less than 50 days until the Iowa caucus, this strategy of waiting for Sanders or Biden to fall is looking shaky.” But sample size of only 525.
There’s something of a spotlight paradox happening in the Democratic primary this year. The candidates who have spent time under the bright lights have wilted, while those sitting in its shadow have risen.
Why is this? Democrats don’t suddenly dislike the candidates who have undergone the scrutiny that comes with front runner status. What they do dislike, however, is vulnerability. For many Democratic voters, President Trump is an existential threat. As with any existential threat, the most important question is who/what can beat it. In 2019, a candidate’s ideology isn’t as important as his or her ability to take a punch. And be able to punch back.
Biden started the race as the guy best suited to do just that. He started the race as the affable frontrunner, who had a long history with the party and a solid relationship with the country’s first African-American president. What he lacked in energy, he made up for in electability. Who better to win back those Rust Belt states than good old “Scranton Joe.”
But, once in the spotlight, or more specifically, under the debate stage lights, Biden looked anything but invincible. His performances in the first two debates were shaky and uneven. He spent most of the summer on his heels, defending (or changing) past policy positions and struggling to raise money.
From May to November, Biden’s share of the Democratic vote dropped 10 points in Monmouth polls. In Quinnipiac surveys, he dropped nine points from June to October.
As Biden slipped, Sen. Elizabeth Warren started to rise. She was attracting big crowds in Iowa, raising lots of money online and getting a second look from voters and pundits who had written her off earlier in the year as she struggled to explain her decision to take a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry. By early October, the RealClearPolitics average showed Warren narrowly overtaking Biden, 26.6 to 26.4 percent. But, as she struggled to adequately explain how her plan for a Medicare for All system would work, voters started to get worried. Could the woman with the “plan” for everything, really be this unprepared to answer questions about a central issue in the campaign? And, if so, wouldn’t Trump exploit this?
Since reaching that high on October 8, Warren has begun a steady downward trajectory. The most recent RCP average pegs her vote share at 12 percent â13 points behind Biden.
As Warren slipped, anxious Democrats began to cast about for a candidate who would be steadier and less flawed than Biden or Warren had proven to be. And, right on cue, comes South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. He has been aggressive in the debates, steady on the stump and has surged into a big lead in Iowa. Since mid-October, Buttigieg has risen eight points in the RealClearPolitics average. The big ole spotlight is now trained directly on him and on his biggest weaknesses, namely his inability to attract voters of color.
As Buttigieg undergoes his ‘stress test,’ there’s another candidate just outside of the spotlight who is well-positioned to take advantage of this moment: Sen. Bernie Sanders. While we were all focused on Warren’s crashing, and Buttigieg’s rise, Sanders has been slowing moving up in the polls. The RealClearPolitics average puts him in second place nationally, and just slightly behind Buttigieg in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s also holding a good position in Nevada. This, despite the fact that he spent much of the fall recuperating from a heart attack.
In order to qualify for the next debate, candidates will need to reach one of two polling thresholds as well as a fundraising requirement. The White House hopefuls will have to hit at least 5 percent in four DNC-approved national or early-voting state (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina) polls â or reach at least 7 percent in two early-voting state surveys.
The fundraising criteria for the upcoming debate â which will be hosted by CNN and the Des Moines Register â requires campaign contributions from at least 225,000 individual donors as well as a minimum of 1,000 unique donors in at least 20 states.
Candidates have until the end of Jan. 10 to reach the thresholds, and the window for qualifying polling started on Nov. 14.
Megan McArdle offers up some horserace analysis. It’s pretty much consensus opinion stuff, though Yang over Bloomberg for sixth is a result no one would have expected when the campaign began.
Newmark Knight Frank CEO Barry Gosin and GFP Real Estate chairman Jeffrey Gural â bucking the trend of real estate gurus staunchly backing President Trump â are throwing a $2,800-a-ticket soiree for Biden at 6:15âp.m. Jan. 6. Then top Skadden partner Mark N. Kaplan and a host of other luminaries, including art collector and financier Asher Edelman, are hosting a breakfast for Biden in Midtown the following morning.
Bloomberg has committed $160 million from his coffers to fund vaping prohibition efforts, despite e-cigarettes being 95 percent safer than combustible cigarettes according to prestigious international health bodies such as Public Health England. The billionaire also gives generously to left-leaning organizations that advocate for carbon taxation and greater âgreenâ regulation, including the League of Conservation Voters and Americaâs Pledge.
Yet, Bloomberg believes that with enough of an investment, a message of higher prices at the pump and less reduced-risk options for smokers will somehow translate to electoral success. He clearly hasnât learned from the losses of his affluent forerunners and will surely have a lot of explaining to do to millions of moderate Democratic voters not sold on radical, costly progressive ideas such as the Green New Deal or his âBeyond Carbonâ doppelganger.
The more interesting but barely reported aspect of the litigation is that it has been encouraged and even secretly funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg.
State attorneys general offices are busy places. They generally donât generally have time for frivolous litigation, so Bloomberg stepped up to fund law schools, like the one at New York University, to do the climate litigation staff work for the various state attorneys general involved in the litigation, according to emails obtained via public records requests by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Bloomberg has essentially discovered a way for a (wealthy) private citizen to buy a state attorney general and use the stateâs powers and resources to pursue his private political agenda. Although there is no specific provision in any law prohibiting such conduct, that is only the case because no one ever imagined that anyone would have the effrontery to do it.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He released a list of campaign bundlers. “Among the high-profile donors who have raised at least $50,000 for Bookerâs presidential bid are musician Jon Bon Jovi, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D).”
At a Palo Alto, California, fundraiser on Monday, cohosts included Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; the Google cofounder Sergey Brin’s wife, Nicole Shanahan; the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s wife, Wendy Schmidt; and Michelle Sandberg, the sister of Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, a campaign document obtained by Recode’s Teddy Schleifer indicates. These hosts’ families combined have an estimated net worth of $80 billion, according to Recode.
After that cozy, down-home little gathering, Buttigieg jetted off to lecture people on income inequality. His fellow candidates may have torn into him for it, but the Wine Cave soiree is perfectly emblematic of the Democratic Party’s massive institutional hypocrisy, and of the disconnect between what it demands ordinary people (the ones it keeps claiming to represent) must give up in order to fight the existential crisis that is “climate change,” and the good life enjoyed by the anointed party elite, who make clear they are absolutely unwilling to give up jack squat, refusing to even to forgo their ostentatious displays of wealth.
Ordinary people are supposed to give up cars, toilets that flush and lightbulbs that work. Ordinary people are told to give up meat, eat bugs and recycle, while the party elite who look down on their backward ways continue dining in crystal-bedecked wine caves. Sacrifices, like laws against insider trading and foreign influence, are for the little people. What rankles is the unmitigated gall of railing against “the 1%” while insisting on their own right to live the same lifestyle, and expecting ordinary people to ignore the rank hypocrisy.
Remember, peasants: It’s not your place to question the privileges of your betters. And if that just wasn’t enough hypocrisy all on its own, Buttigieg is the son of a Marxist academic who specialized in the work of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Makes you wonder how much of Buttigieg’s moderate persona is a sham from a red diaper baby…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? She thinks the election will be close.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “John Delaney Would Like You to Know Heâs Still Running for President.” Writer calls up to ask his campaign why and get offered an interview. Delaney says he’s all in on Iowa and wants to bring the country together. I think the country has already united behind not voting for John Delaney.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She voted “present” on impeachment. “My vote today is a vote for much needed reconciliation and hope that together we can heal our country.” I guess that desire for reconciliation is why Saturday Night Live keeps casting her as the villain in their debate sketches: If you’re not a hyper-left partisan, you’re the enemy. President Donald Trump, chaos magician that he is, said he respected Gabbard for voting present, which is sure to sure to drive the TDS crowd even further around the bend (it’s a very big bend).
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a PBS interview. The headline says “Old allies come out to help Deval Patrick in N.H.” but the only allies actually mentioned are the Massachusetts couple running his campaign. But he is topping the order list for candidates in Massachusetts itself for the March 3rd primary. Is he planning on picking up enough home state delegates to be a kingmaker and wrangle a VP slot? If so, it’s a pretty longshot strategy, but at least it is a strategy, which is more than his stillborn campaign has evidenced thus far.
Nobody forced Bernie Sandersâs campaign to endorse Jeremy Corbynâs Labour Party. By the time the Sanders campâs national organizing director, Clair Sandberg, announced that the Vermont senatorâs team stood in solidarity with the far-left British candidate, it was already apparent that Corbynâs party was likely to lose and lose badly. And thatâs precisely what happened.
On Thursday, British voters delivered Labour its worst defeat in 85 years. The thrashing it endured was less attributable to the lingering debate over the U.K.âs withdrawal from the European Union than to Labourâs uniquely repulsive leader. When 100,000 British respondents were asked what they feared most about the prospect of a Labour government, all but the staunchest Labourites and Remainers indicated that the prospect of Corbynâs ascension to 10 Downing Street was an unacceptable risk.
Corbyn rendered his party toxic. His penchant for standing in solidarity with terrorists and anti-Semites opened a seal out of which a cascade of anti-Jewish sentiments poured, engulfing his party in scandal. His brand of radical socialism was insufferably hidebound. His expressions of sympathy for historyâs greatest criminals were thoughtlessly dogmatic. The Labour Party under Corbyn drifted so far toward overt Jew-hatred that Britainâs chief rabbi denounced the institution. The Archbishop of Canterbury agreed with that assessment, as did 85 percent of the countryâs Jews. There was no ambiguity here.
So there were many obvious risks and few upsides associated with the Sanders endorsement. And yet, his campaign did it anyway. We can only conclude that this was not an act of political shrewdness but a genuine display of affection.
Bernie Sanders has thus far evaded scrutiny over the values he and his campaign share with the Labour Partyâs discredited leader, but that lack of curiosity is indefensible. As of this writing, Sanders is firmly in second place in the average of national Democratic primary polls. Heâs in second and gaining in Iowa, too, and is leading in New Hampshire. Sanders is a contender, and itâs time for the press to act like it. But taking that job seriously would entail an examination of the senatorâs conspicuously Corbyn-esque instincts, to say nothing of the bigots with whom he has surrounded himself.
Donât take my word for it; take that of Sandersâs own surrogates. Rep. Ilhan Omar, one of Sandersâs most visible endorsers with whom the senator frequently shares the stage, has apologized for some of what sheâs admitted were anti-Semitic remarks. Or, if thatâs not good enough, take the Democratic Partyâs verdict. Those anti-Jewish slights for which Omar declined to show remorse had been targeted by her fellow caucus members for censure before a revolt of the partyâs progressives and Black Caucus Members scuttled the initiative.
For one thing, as Trotsky correctly indicated, socialism tends to corrode all other religious and cultural affiliations. Secular Jewish progressive groups posing as faith-based organizations, for example, have long worked to conflate their ideological positions with Judaism by reimagining the latter to make it indistinguishable from the former. Itâs one of the great tragedies of the American Jewish community that they are succeeding.
More bluntly, remember that Sanders honeymooned in Moscow, not Jerusalem, for a good reason. âLetâs take the strengths of both systems,â Sanders insisted even as the reprehensible Soviet system was on the verge of collapse. âLetâs learn from each other,â Sanders said even when over 100 Jewish refuseniks were still being denied permission to leave the Communist regime after enduring decades of anti-Semitic oppression under rhetoric of âanti-Zionism.â As far as I can tell, Sanders never said a word in their defense to his hosts.
Oppressed Russian Jews werenât his people. Jeremy Corbyn is Bernieâs people. As Rothman notes, no one forced Sanders to compare his movement to Corbynism. Britainâs chief rabbi may have found Corbyn an âexistentialâ threat to his flock, but Sanders never once thought it concerning enough to mention during any of his praise for the British leader.
Bernie’s 2016 press secretary Symone Sanders (who this piece suggests is totally known by insiders) is now backing Biden. Celebrities supporting Sanders: Tim Robbins, Danny DeVito, Willow Smith, Jeff Ross, and somebody by the name of “Anderson .Paak,” which is evidently a rapper rather than a new data compression protocol.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Atlanticinterviews Steyer in the Nixon Library, so it’s all tedious impeachment blather. (Of course, we are talking Steyer, and tedious is his default setting. Historians will look back and wonder how the other billionaire in the race lost a charisma contest to Michael Bloomberg, something scientists previously thought impossible. Steyer is the Cats of the Democratic primary: spending tons of money only to completely horrify people.) He’s campaigning on climate change. Because that worked so well for Jay Inslee.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Obama talks up Warren behind closed doors to wealthy donors.” But! “The former president has stopped short of an endorsement of Warren in these conversations and has emphasized that he is not endorsing in the Democratic primary race.” She attacks Buttigieg in a new ad, for that exciting third place vs. fourth place action. Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus blasts Warren for bashing the rich. Ooopsie!
Warren released a list of endorsements from Obama aides and on the list is Edward B.P. Buck, which is indeed the same Ed Buck who is responsible for the deaths of several black men via drug overdose.
Yang, a candidate who is known for challenging the party consensus, slammed Democrats for their “obsession” with the president and impeachment during Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate.
“The media networks didn’t do us any favors by missing the reason why Donald Trump became our president in the first place,” Yang told the PBS Newshour moderators. “The more we act like Donald Trump is a cause of our problems, the more Americans lose trust that we can actually see what’s going on it our communities and solve those problems.”
“What we have to do is we have to stop being obsessed over impeachment,” he stated.
During his 2016 race, Sanders amassed a grassroots following with ideas like Medicare for All and tuition-free public college, two policies that initially had little mainstream support. That was the first year a majority of Americans backed Medicare for All, and their support has remained steady ever since, according to figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Also since 2016, support for free public college has grown from 47 to 63 percent.
Sanders, of course, didnât win the Democratic nomination. But his campaign did inspire hundreds of down-ballot progressive candidates across the country to embrace his platform: In the 2018 midterm elections, more than half of all Democratic candidates for the House backed Medicare for All, including his former campaign organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, with Sanders on his second campaign, his trademark proposals have dominated the 2020 primary race: Seven of the remaining 15 Democratic candidates have embraced some version of Medicare for All, and multiple debates have featured a sustained discussion about the proposal. Similarly, almost every candidate has promised to eliminate tuition for two-year community colleges, with several, in addition to Sanders, vowing to make all public four-year colleges free.
Sanders, in other words, has served as a transformational figure on the leftâsomeone who was able to fundamentally shift the Democratic political conversation toward these ambitious policy goals. Whether or not Yang earns his partyâs nomination, he, too, could be an influential figure. His policy proposals have already moved the primaryâs Overton window, even as many American voters are only just starting to tune in to the race. Before his campaign, UBI wasnât an often-discussed proposal in the United States outside the lefty-think-tank world, though a few cities have run pilot programs to varying degrees of success. Public support for the proposal increased by 6 percent from February to September of this year, according to the latest Hill and HarrisX polling. Among Democrats in particular, support for UBI ticked up 12 percent in the same period.
As Yangâs campaign has captured more attention, his competitors have been forced to take a position on UBI. Severalâincluding Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; former Housing and Urban Development Secretary JuliĂĄn Castro; Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigiegâexpressed openness to the policy in the months after Yangâs candidacy began to gain traction. âI think that itâs worth taking seriously,â Buttigieg said in an interview this spring on the liberal podcast Pod Save America.
In debates, Yang has hammered home his warnings about automation, and during the October contest, the CNN moderator Erin Burnett asked a question seemingly inspired by that message. She wanted to know how candidates would prevent job losses due to automation, leading to an argument between Yang and the primary front-runners about whether implementing UBI would be more effective than raising the minimum wage or instituting a federal-jobs guarantee.
âItâs likely,â Dave Wasserman, the House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told me, âthat candidates will only be talking more about automation and its impact and its role in inequality in future yearsâwhether they want to address it with some kind of enhanced safety net and a guaranteed income or not.â Already, Wasserman added, Yangâs ideas are speaking to âanxieties that a number of younger voters have about the future of the economy.â
This once again raises the question of why Yang is so concerned about automation taking American jobs in the future, but not illegal aliens taking American jobs right now. He wants to decriminalize whores, but not johns.
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:
Biden and Warren tie in Iowa, another debate looms, Harris continues to plummet, LBGTCrazy, indestructible Bernie is back on his feet, Yang is the new Ron Paul, and Beto is coming after your church. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
The Steyer amount is how much he raised; we’ll have to wait until his FEC form is posted to see how much of his own money he tossed in.
Polls
CBS/YouGov (Iowa): Biden 22, Warren 22, Sanders 21, Buttigieg 14, Harris 5, Steyer 3, Klobuchar 2, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1, Ryan 1. I think that’s the first time Warren has tied Biden in Iowa, but it’s essentially a three-way tie for the top. That’s also a really good showing for Buttigieg: Maybe all that money is finally have an effect.
CBS/YouGov (New Hampshire): Warren 32, Biden 24, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 7, Yang 5, Harris 4, Steyer 4, Klobuchar 2, Gabbard 2, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Ryan 1.
CBS/YouGov (South Carolina): Biden 43, Warren 18, Sanders 16, Harris 7, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, Steyer 2, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1, Williamson 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1.
While the event was called the âEquality Town Hall,â representation was not exactly equal. The vast majority of the questions concerned, and were asked by, gay men and trans women. There was one token bisexual and one token nonbinary person permitted to ask a question, but Iâm not sure the word âlesbianâ was uttered once. They did, thank goddess, let butch comic Julie Goldman ask Kamala Harris about the most lesbian issue of all: homeless cats children. But it really should have been called the CNN Gay and Trans Women of Color Town Hall since a few letters of âLGBTQâ were basically ignored.
As for the substance of the debate, the candidates were asked varying versions of five different questions: Will you make the Red Cross take blood from gay men? How will you make PrEP cheaper for gay men? What are you going to do about hate crimes and the âepidemic of violence against trans women of color”? What are you going to do about trans people in the military? And, are you going to pass the Equality Act? Everyone gave basically the same answers, which are as follows: Yes; force insurance to cover it; enforce hate crime laws through the Department of Justice; welcome them; and yes. If they wanted to distinguish themselves on matters of policy, asking questions everyone agrees on was not the way to do it.
The all distinguished themselves by proving how far they were willing to bend over to bow to tranny madness.
Ballotpedia offers a roundup. The 12(!) presidential candidates on a debate stage at one time beats the Republican record of 11.
All the Democrats want to do is cut up the pie; none of them are talking about how to expand it.
Shockingly, the party of Hillary Clinton sucks at cybersecurity. The irony here is that Williamson’s campaign gets higher cybersecurity ratings than Yang’sâŚ
In 1973, one year after Joe Biden was elected to the Senate at age 29, James Biden opened the nightclub Seasons Change with what Politico, referencing contemporaneous local reporting in Delaware, called âunusually generous bank loans.â When James ran into trouble, Joe, as a senator, later complained that the bank shouldnât have loaned James the money. âWhat Iâd like to know,â Biden told the News Journal in 1977, âis how the guy in charge of loans let it get this far.â The paper investigated, and sources at the bank said that the loan was made because James was Joeâs brother.
James, in the â90s, founded Lion Hall Group, which lobbied for Mississippi trial lawyers involved in tobacco litigation. According to Curtis Wilkieâs book âThe Fall of the House of Zeus,â the trial lawyers wanted James Bidenâs help pushing Joe Biden on tobacco legislation.
Also:
In November 2010, James Biden joined a construction firm. Seven months later, that firm that would go on to win a $1.5 billion contract building homes in Iraq.
The companyâs founder, Irvin Richter, told Fox Business Network that having James on board helped. âListen, his name helps him get in the door, but it doesnât help him get business,â he said. âPeople who have important names tend to get in the door easier but it doesnât mean success. If he had the name Obama, he would get in the door easier.â
He returned to Iowa this week for a four-day swing, his longest trip through the Hawkeye State since a May RV tour that was also four days.
But in between those May and October swings, Booker made just six trips to Iowa, where he spent nine days campaigning and attending events for members of the public or organizations or that were open to press, according to a CBS News analysis. During that same stretch, only former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, who entered the race in July, and Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam, who has been to Iowa once, spent fewer days publicly campaigning in Iowa.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Pushes back on O’Rourke’s plan to strip tax exempt status from churches. “That means going to war not only with churches, but I would think with mosques and a lot of organizations that may not have the same view of various religious principles that I do. But also because of the separation of church and state are acknowledged as nonprofits in this country.” He’s against socialized medicine. Gets a Hollywood Reporter profile. Why is Hollywood Reporter covering presidential candidates?
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Maybe? She’s on a book tour, but members of the Permanent Clinton Crony Circus say it’s only that. But: “‘A lot of people are talking to her, which isn’t helpful,’ another person close to Clinton told CNN. ‘They get into her head because she so dislikes Donald Trump that she can’t see straight.'” Well, someone so easily deranged sure sounds like who you would want in the White House…
Among her fellow Democrats, Representative Tulsi Gabbard has struggled to make headway as a presidential candidate, barely cracking the 2 percent mark in the polls needed to qualify for Tuesday nightâs debate. She is now injecting a bit of chaos into her own partyâs primary race, threatening to boycott that debate to protest what she sees as a âriggingâ of the 2020 election. Thatâs left some Democrats wondering what, exactly, she is up to in the race, while others worry about supportive signs from online bot activity and the Russian news media.
Perhaps strangest of all is the unusual array of Americans who cannot seem to get enough of her.
On podcasts and online videos, in interviews and Twitter feeds, alt-right internet stars, white nationalists, libertarian activists and some of the biggest boosters of Mr. Trump heap praise on Ms. Gabbard. They like the Hawaiian congresswomanâs isolationist foreign policy views. They like her support for drug decriminalization. They like what she sees as censorship by big technology platforms.
Then there is 4chan, the notoriously toxic online message board, where some right-wing trolls and anti-Semites fawn over Ms. Gabbard, calling her âMommyâ and praising her willingness to criticize Israel. In April, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, took credit for Ms. Gabbardâs qualification for the first two Democratic primary debates.
Brian Levin, the head of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, said Ms. Gabbard had âthe seal of approvalâ within white nationalist circles. âIf people have that isolationist worldview, there is one candidate that could best express them on each side: Gabbard on the Democratic side and Trump on the Republican side,â Mr. Levin said.
Ms. Gabbard has disavowed some of her most hateful supporters, castigating the news media for giving âany oxygen at allâ to the endorsement she won from the white nationalist leader David Duke. But her frequent appearances on Tucker Carlsonâs Fox News show have buoyed her support in right-wing circles.
Both Ms. Gabbard and her campaign refused requests for comment about her support in right-wing circles or threat to boycott the debate.
In the bold new world of the New York Times, even a Hindu of Samoan extraction gets to be a “white nationalist” for 15 minutes! Even by lazy smear job standards its a lazy smear job. Gabbard rightfully slammed it as bullshit. Gets a Reason interview with John Stossel. You might think she would approve of Trump’s withdrawal of troops from northern Syria. She doesn’t.
This theory takes the Harris surge in July more seriously â it was real and represented a real opportunity for the California senator. Her campaign simply squandered it.
Harrisâs campaign launch speech was widely praised, and she was strong in the first debate. But she has not had a strategy of keeping herself in the news, the way Warrenâs policy rollouts and liberal stances did earlier in the year. And Harris hasnât built a clear brand and rationale for her candidacy along the lines of Buttigiegâs (âIâm youngâ), Bidenâs (âI can beat Trumpâ), or Sanders and Warren (âI will take on the wealthyâ).
I think this lack of clarity about the rationale for her candidacy â beyond appealing to a broad coalition of Democrats â has led to some of Harrisâs stumbles. Her months-long waffling on Medicare for All likely stemmed from a desire to appease both the partyâs left-wing (which favors MFA) and the center-left wing (which opposes MFA). But this field may be too big for anyone to straddle the left and center-left â and perhaps health care is an issue where you canât equivocate. Similarly, while Harris attacked Bidenâs past opposition to aggressive school integration plans, she was hesitant to offer much of a proposal of her own on that issue. It seemed like Harris wanted to use that issue to nod at her racial liberalism but wasnât prepared to commit to a big school integration plan, which might be controversial.
538 can’t state the obvious, unspoken rationale for her campaign: black people would vote for her because of her skin color. Evidence suggests not.
Although the failed senatorial candidate hit the donor threshold long ago, he’s failed to secure the qualifying polls he needs. In fact, the qualifying and non-qualifying national polls alike have seen O’Rourke sink like a stone. His RealClearPolitics polling average stands at 2.3%, half a point behind Andrew Yang. Yang, by the way, needs just one more poll to become the eighth candidate to secure a spot on the November stage.
Theoretically, O’Rourke could go Steyer’s route and divert all of his efforts to early state polling, but it’s unlikely that a new field office or Instagram live is going to save him. O’Rourke claims he raised more money this past quarter than the $3.6 million he raked in from April through June, but with Yang posting $10 million and Bernie Sanders topping the fundraising with more than $25.3 million, the top six candidates in the race have absorbed the bulk of the cash. Steyer can self-fund his vanity project, but O’Rourke probably can’t without help from his billionaire father-in-law.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.) Bow to gay marriage or have your church’s tax exempt status revoked, comrade. “What Beto OâRourke said last night is a perfect example of why many orthodox Christians who despise Donald Trump will vote for him anyway. The survival of our institutions depends on keeping the Democrats out of the White House (and Congress) for as long as we can.”
Steyer has spent an estimated $19 million on TV ads. The next-closest Democrat was Kirsten Gillibrand, who spent $1.1 million, according to an analysis by the FiveThirtyEight website. More than 70% of all ads from Democrats running for president on TV right now were purchased by his campaign. His digital buys are also high â at least $10 million since he entered the race in July.
Steyerâs ascent to his first debate has drawn criticism from some competitors who say it proves the Democratic National Committeeâs qualifying requirements are too easily bought.
âHis ability to spend millions of his personal wealth has helped him gain in the polls like no one else,â New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said in an email seeking donations.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who didnât make the debate, said the rules “have allowed a billionaire to bankroll his way onto the debate stage, while governors and senators with decades of public service experience have been forced out of the race.â
Elizabeth Warren has a moving story about being fired from a teaching job because she was pregnant, a story that perfectly complements her political narrative that she is the tribune and champion of those who have been treated unfairly by the powerful. Joe Biden has a moving â and horrifying â story about his wife and daughter being killed by a drunk driver, a story that similarly could not have been designed more perfectly to bolster his political image as a man who can be counted on to soldier on in the face of adversity.
Of course, neither story is true.
Are we still caring about that sort of thing?
Elizabeth Warren has long pretended to be a person of color â a âwoman of color,â the Harvard law faculty called her. (That color is Pantone 11-0602.) What Senator Warren has in common with Jussie Smollett turns out to have nothing to do with skin tone. Smollett, youâll recall, regaled the nation with the story of a couple of violent, Trump-loving, MAGA-hat-wearing white supremacists who just happened to be cruising a gay neighborhood in Chicago on the coldest night of the year, who also just happened to be fans of Empire, who also just happened to have some rope at hand. Who happened, as it turns out, to be a couple of Nigerian brothers and colleagues of Smollettâs.
Fiction, yes. Deployed, as we are always told when these lies are exposed as lies, in the service of a larger truth, a truth of which such habitual and irredeemable liars as Warren, Biden, Smollett â and Lena Dunham, and the so-called journalists of Rolling Stone, and the perpetrators of a thousand phony campus hate-crime hoaxes â are the appointed apostles.
âDoes anybody seriously believe it was not as everyday as sunrise that employers made pregnant women leave their jobs 50 years ago?â CNBCâs John Harwood demanded in defense of Warren. Perhaps it has not occurred to Harwood, who purports to be a journalist of a kind, that the relevant question is not whether this sort of thing happened in the past to a great many women but whether this particular thing actually happened to this woman, which does not seem to be the case: The minutes of the local school-board meeting quite clearly document that Warren was offered a contract for further employment, which she declined. She was forthright in her account of the episode at earlier points in her life. She seems to have suddenly remembered the discrimination sometime between when she began advertising herself to the Ivy League as a Cherokee and the day when the Cherokee finally shamed her into knocking it off.
Was her “viral moment” a setup? Speaking of tranny madness, Elizabeth Warren wants men in women’s prisons, as long as they’re claiming to be women. What could possibly go wrong?
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. I was going to make the point that Yang was the Democratic Ron Paul after his impressive haul, only to find that others have already beaten me to the punch:
Long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang isnât afraid to take a position on, well, anything. Browse through his campaign website, and youâll see not just that he believes in universal basic income â the policy proposal for which heâs best known â but also that he wants to mandate the payment of NCAA athletes, to crack down on spam phone calls, and to secure $6 billion to revitalize dying shopping malls.
Many of his policy positions are tied to causes with little prominence in the mainstream but a devoted following on the internet, like his recent stance against childhood circumcision, the domain of an online community that refer to themselves as âintactivists.â
Anti-circumcision? Let the interminable flamewar begin!
Yangâs has a digital savviness â a longtime tech entrepreneur, he most recently founded and helmed a nonprofit called Venture For America â and a willingness to traverse the turf of Reddit and 4chan (as well as Joe Roganâs podcast, which he appeared on roughly before his online following started to really take off). He has duly earned himself a following that refers to themselves as the #YangGang. And it would be an understatement to call them enthusiastic. They propelled Yangâs improbable candidacy to a threshold of 65,000 individual donations, which the Democratic party designated as the requirement to be included in the partyâs first televised debate.
Many Yang fans say heâs the first candidate theyâve been excited about in a while, if ever. The Yang for President subreddit is lively, energized, and packed with âdank memes.â Some have pointed to Yangâs popularity in corners of the internet that are best known for their early and fervent support of Donald Trump in 2016, or to followers of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders in the same year.
But comparing the #YangGang phenomenon to Trump or Sanders supporters isnât quite accurate. Donald Trump was an international celebrity before he ran for office. Sanders is a somewhat closer parallel, but at the same time he was a sitting senator, and was additionally able to tap into an obvious demographic of disgruntled leftist voters who didnât want to put another person whose last name was Clinton into office.
The most obvious parallel in recent American presidential politics is more likely Ron Paulâs candidacy for the Republican nomination in 2008, when he was an oddball Texas congressman whose anti-tax stance and opposition to the war in Iraq managed to build him a following of âtechies, hippies, tax haters, and war protestersâ that largely congregated on the internet. âIn recent months,â Mother Jones magazine related in late 2007, âhe was sought out on the blog search engine Technorati more often than anyone except a Puerto Rican singer with a sex tape on the loose.â (Side note: Remember Technorati?) Paulâs candidacy arguably didnât succeed because he was too unorthodox, but if Donald Trumpâs win has taught us anything, itâs that American political media now has the infrastructure in place for unorthodoxy to succeed. No longer do people need to stand on a highway overpass with a handmade sign that says âGOOGLE RON PAULâ to get the word out. The fringe can now pull the mainstream along for the ride.
The only truly interesting data point from the latest batch of fundraising figures was Andrew Yangâs haul of more than $10 million. Yang has always been a long shot for the nomination, and this influx of cash doesnât change that fact. But, as others have noted, it makes him look more like the Ron Paul of this cycle: someone with a signature idea (universal basic income for Yang, the gold standard for Paul), an uncommon political outlook (libertarianism for Paul, postliberalism for Yang), a devoted base of oddball followers, and the ability to rake in surprising amounts of cash.
Paul obviously never won the Republican nomination and the GOP never had a libertarian moment. But Paulâs dovishness and penchant for conspiracy theories became part of the GOP mainstream as Trump ascended to the nomination and the White House. Yangâs fundraising numbers suggest that some part of his approach and platform resonated deeply within a segment of the Democratic Party. So even if Yang loses, which he almost assuredly will, Yang-ism may survive to exert an unexpected influence in the future.
âYou all heard at some point thereâs an Asian man running for president who wants to give everyone $1,000 a month,â the 44-year-old New York Democrat said to laughter and cheers inside a packed union hall this month in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Then he turned serious: âWeâre in an era of economic change, and we need to think differently.â
That way of thinking has propelled Yang, the Ivy League-educated son of Taiwanese immigrants who would be the countryâs first Asian-American president, from what many considered to be an entertaining diversion to a mainstream contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
Now Yangâs campaign, which began in 2017 but has seen its fortunes rise sharply in recent months, is rushing to catch up with rivals.
He stands near 3% in the latest public opinion polls, putting him in sixth place in the 19-candidate field ahead of numerous sitting lawmakers. His $10 million fundraising haul in the third quarter was the sixth-most among Democrats and more than triple his total for the second quarter.
Most importantly, he continues to inspire a fervent following known as the Yang Gang, supporters who wear blue âMATHâ hats – a tribute to Yangâs devotion to data that has since become an acronym for âMake America Think Harderâ – and revel in his ânerdyâ campaign.
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:
