The Apple Weather app is finally catching up with the National Weather Service and, holy crap, things are not looking good:
Austin Weather forecast 1/23/26
Yeah, it’s going to get above freezing, so the city will run again, but I’ve got to keep my plants inside for a week or more. Any any potential power loss is really gonna suck. Here’s that Austin energy outage map again.
My own 401K travails and money woes continue. I did receive the money I tried to transfer to my checking account in December. But I had only split it up to get half of it into 2025 for tax purposes. I was also going to have to transfer more more into my bank account this month to cover my property taxes. They assured me would only take a day to transfer funds after my IRA got set up. Surprise! It might be a day for most people, but because my phone doesn’t receive text messages, I had to request they send me a check, which is going to take 15 days. (Funny how they seem to be able to transfer money in instantaneously, but you have to jump through hoops to get your own money in 2+ weeks.) Yesterday, I had to sell some silver rounds to cover the last bit of property taxes and living expenses for two weeks (including a vet appointment for my two dogs). Fortunately, silver is at at an all-time high. I sold mine when it was just under $100 an ounce, and now it’s over $103.
Oh, yeah, some other stuff happened this week: More Minnesota fraud, more California fraud, Don Lemon joins the KKK (as a subject of federal scrutiny), more commie ties for left wing agitators, more of Russia’s shadow fleet comes a cropper, and William Shatner eats cereal.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Just like we already knew: “California: Newsom’s ‘National Model’ for Homeless Wracked by Fraud.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom has made reducing the homelessness crisis in California a top priority, saying the scale of the state’s efforts is “unprecedented” and calling for the continued expansion of his signature effort – Project Homekey – that has already cost $3.75 billion.
But in a state with more than 181,000 homeless individuals, or about one-third of the U.S. total, Homekey has been marred by failures and scandals, including a lack of government oversight and accountability as well as a federal investigation into allegations of fraud in Los Angeles.
Lack of government oversight isn’t a bug for Governor Hairgel, it’s a feature.
Newsom, who appears to be preparing for a presidential bid in 2028, could make Homekey, which he calls a “national model,” a talking point in his campaign. The state claims the program has created almost 16,000 permanent housing units that will serve over 175,000 people. But since the state doesn’t track outcomes – whether people placed in housing saw their lives improve or if they returned to the streets – the program’s effectiveness is unclear, according to a critical 2024 state auditor’s report.
“[Our budget] is bloated with homeless spending, a bottomless pit and taxpayer boondoggle that doubles down on failure year after year,” the Republican-turned-Democrat Los Angeles Councilwoman Traci Park said at a meeting in May. “Hundreds of millions of dollars on bridge homes and Homekeys and interim housing sites, and no one can even tell us which ones are operational.”
What is clear is that homelessness in California has skyrocketed in the five years Homekey has been in place, growing by more than 20%, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That’s an increase of some 36,000 people between 2019 and 2024.
Homekey has been touted by officials as a more cost-effective way to house the homeless. By hiring developers to convert excess motel and hotel rooms and other existing structures into permanent housing, the costs are two to three times lower than building new units, according to the auditor’s report.
But with huge contracts available to developers and very little oversight of their activities, some of that cost savings was lost to fraud, according to federal prosecutors. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California launched a fraud and corruption task force to find out where the money went, and in October filed criminal charges involving two developers who allegedly defrauded the system.
My guess is that not a single leftwing activist in California will be indicted by the state government for their own role in the fraud…
The videos coming out of Minneapolis, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers apprehending illegal immigrants in the streets while having to fight off aggressive and sometimes violent anti-ICE activists, are the predictable result of a Democrat strategy that amounts to nullification.
I mean nullification in the historical sense, like the Nullification Crisis of 1832 when South Carolina declared federal tariffs to be null and void within the boundaries of the state, and President Andrew Jackson threatened to send in the U.S. Army to enforce federal law.
What the Democrats of South Carolina did back then is essentially what the Democrats of Minneapolis are doing today, fomenting a 21st century nullification crisis by making it nearly impossible to enforce federal immigration law in the territory under their jurisdiction. Trump, who has ordered 1,500 active duty troops stationed in Alaska to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, is well within his rights (and within historical precedent) to respond in the same vein as Jackson did to what amounts to a nullification crisis.
Indeed, the whole point of so-called sanctuary laws is to make it difficult or impossible to enforce federal immigration laws — to nullify them. Sanctuary policies like the ones operative in Minneapolis (and many other Democrat-controlled cities) prohibit state and local law enforcement from working with federal immigration authorities.
Under normal circumstances, when an illegal immigrant commits a crime the local authorities notify federal immigration officials before the offender is released, so that ICE can take custody and begin the process of deportation. The handover occurs between law enforcement agencies in a controlled, orderly, safe manner.
But in places where Democrat lawmakers have created sanctuary jurisdictions, local law enforcement is barred from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement in this way. Instead of handing over illegal immigrants to ICE, the police simply release them. That means ICE agents have to go out into the community, into neighborhoods and businesses, to track down and arrest illegal immigrant criminals wherever they might be.
This is obviously a much more volatile and dangerous way to enforce federal immigration law. And in Minneapolis, it’s even more volatile and dangerous thanks to anti-ICE activists and vigilante mobs attempting to disrupt, impede, and in some cases attack ICE agents. Indeed, it’s a recipe for violent clashes between ICE and anti-ICE mobs. A cynic might say that’s the entire point, to make federal immigration enforcement as chaotic and tense as possible in hopes of exactly the kind of confrontations that led to the death of Renee Good, the woman who was fatally shot earlier this month when she tried to ram an ICE agent with her vehicle.
The goal of fomenting such mayhem is straightforward: to thwart the enforcement of federal immigration law. Keep in mind, ICE is not doing anything beyond the scope of federal law in Minneapolis. It is not exercising any new or novel powers not authorized under federal statute. As Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander in charge in Minneapolis said at a press conference this week, the operations and tactics of Border Patrol and ICE agents in the city are “born out of necessity” but are nevertheless “legal, ethical, and moral.”
“Our operations are lawful. They’re targeted. They’re focused on individuals who pose a serious threat to this community. They are not random and they are not political,” he said. The “necessity” Bovino refers to is that which has arisen as a direct result of Democrat sanctuary policies. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t see the very public, visible ICE operations now underway in Minneapolis and other sanctuary cities simply because criminal illegal aliens would be transferred to federal custody by local law enforcement.
But that’s not happening because Democrats don’t like federal immigration laws. Since they don’t have the political power to change them, they have decided, like Democrats in South Carolina in the 1830s, simply to declare them null and void in their territory.
I would suggest Minnesota Democrats should reconsider before Trump decides to do to Minneapolis what Sherman did to Savannah in 1864, but knowing Minneapolis, all he probably needs to do is hand out gasoline and matches to the #BlackLivesMatter/Somali set and let them burn it down themselves…
A collection of far-left activist groups — including the Democratic Socialists of America, major labor unions, explicitly Communist groups, and a CCP-linked protest network — have all organized a strike scheduled for Friday which aims to “shut down” schools and businesses statewide in Minnesota in an effort to push ICE out.
The planned shutdown was announced early last week — “ICE Out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom” — include plans for a large-scale march in Minneapolis and a day of “no work, no school, no shopping.”
The radical Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the left-wing BreakThrough News media outlet, and the Manhattan-based Marxist revolutionary People’s Forum are all involved in either promoting or organizing the Minnesota shutdown effort. Just the News previously reported on how these and other radical activist groups have leadership links or financial ties to a funding network backed by wealthy businessman and self-avowed communist Neville Singham.
The GOP-led House Oversight Committee voted this month to subpoena Singham for information about this sprawling activist network. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the Revolutionary Communists of America, and the Twin Cities chapter of the Communist Party USA — all avowedly Marxist groups — are also listed as co-sponsors of the Friday protest.
The DSA — which helped propel Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion in NYC — including the national organization and the local Minnesota chapter — are listed as backing the anti-ICE effort scheduled for Friday.
Major labor unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are listed as co-hosts of the shutdown effort, while the United Auto Workers (UAW) also endorsed the strike.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that former CNN host Don Lemon has been put “on notice” by the Justice Department and could face charges under federal civil-rights laws, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, for his role in storming a church service in Minnesota. Lemon allegedly joined a far-left mob that was on the hunt for a pro-ICE pastor at a St. Paul church.
“The Klan Act is one of the most important federal civil rights statutes. Its a law that makes it illegal to terrorize and violate the civil rights of citizens. Whenever people conspire to do this, the Klan Act can be used,” Dhillon told Johnson.
Dhillon continued, “Everyone in the protest community needs to know that the fullest force of the federal government is going to come down and prevent this from happening and put people away for a long time.”
“There is zero tolerance for this kind of illegal behavior and we will not stand for it,” she emphasized.
Johnson wrote on X, “DOJ confirms Don Lemon has zero ‘journalism’ protections against FACE Act violations. Lemon was fully aware of the violations and may face KKK Act conspiracy charges.”
But others got indicted. “FBI Arrests Left-Wing Activist Who Led Mob of Protesters into Minnesota Church.”
Federal authorities have arrested the woman who led an anti-ICE mob into a Minnesota church last week.
Nekima Levy Armstrong is facing charges related to violating the FACE Act, which prohibits interfering with the exercise of religion at a place of worship.
Minutes ago at my direction, HSI and FBI agents executed an arrest in Minnesota. So far, we have arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, who allegedly played a key role in organizing the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a post on X.
“We will share more updates as they become available. Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” she added.
Armstrong led a group into the Cities Church in St. Paul on Sunday, believing that one of the church’s pastors works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Dozens of demonstrators interrupted the service shouting, “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.”
Armstrong is a civil rights lawyer and “scholar-activist,” according to her website. She previously played a key role in organizing boycotts against Target over its decision to walk back its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, according to Fox News.
Homeland Security Secretary Krisit Noem announced on Monday that immigration officers have arrested more than 10,000 illegal immigrants in Minnesota.
“PEACE AND PUBLIC SAFETY IN MINNEAPOLIS!” Noem exclaimed in a post to X. “We have arrested over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens who were killing Americans, hurting children and reigning terror in Minneapolis because Tim Walz and Jacob Frey refuse to protect their own people and instead protect criminals.”
The figure includes about 3,000 “criminal illegal aliens” arrested by federal authorities in just the last six weeks, the secretary said.
Snip.
“There is MASSIVE Fraud in Minneapolis, at least $19 billion and that’s just the tip of iceberg,” Noem asserted in the same post. “Our Homeland Security Investigators are on the ground in Minneapolis conducting wide scale investigations to get justice for the American people who have been robbed blind.”
Indeed.
“Abbott Offers State Assistance to HUD for Fraud Identification Program. HUD Secretary Turner identified $5 billion in potentially erroneous payments.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has volunteered Texas assistance to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in identifying fraud in federal housing programs after the agency identified at least $5 billion in potentially erroneous payments last year.
According to a letter sent to HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Monday, Abbott offered state participation in a pilot fraud identification program through the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA).
“We will gladly work with you to develop fraud-prevention measures that ensure federal taxpayer funds, like those in the rental-based assistance programs, are not taken advantage of by bad actors,” wrote Abbott.
Turner, a former Texas state representative who was appointed by President Donald Trump to head HUD last year, published a financial analysis of the agency that warned of fraud and a lack of internal controls.
Using AI, HUD reported finding more than 30,000 deceased persons either actively enrolled in a rental assistance program or who had received assistance after they died.
Turner’s financial report also warned that his staff had identified examples of non-compliance with standards of internal controls under the Biden administration.
“The reviews determined that under the prior Administration, HUD experienced a deterioration in financial controls and governance and identified a material weakness affecting internal controls and financial governance across multiple program offices.”
Multiple federal agencies launched or extended investigations in Minnesota after new revelations of widespread fraud in the state last month. Last week, Abbott directed the Texas Workforce Commission and the Health and Human Services Commission to investigate potential childcare fraud in Texas.
A member of the violent Latin Kings gang was arrested after allegedly stealing government property from an FBI vehicle vandalized during unrest in Minneapolis Wednesday night, federal authorities said.
Fox News confirmed that Raul Gutierrez, 33, was arrested Thursday in a joint operation involving the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
The FBI said multiple government vehicles were vandalized and broken into Wednesday night in Minneapolis while agents were responding to a reported assault on a federal officer, adding that federal property was stolen from inside the vehicles.
“One individual who allegedly stole federal government property out of an FBI vehicle in Minneapolis last night has been arrested,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on X, adding that the suspect was a member of the Latin Kings gang with a violent criminal history. “FBI personnel are continuing to pursue other subjects involved. There will be more arrests.”
Is their any doubt the left will treat this gang banger scumbag as a hero?
A few weeks ago, I noted that California was losing over $160 million due to improper management of its commercial driver’s license program.
And well, Governor Gavin Newsom asserted his current budget would only have a $2 billion deficit, the state’s shortfall is actually estimated to be over $17 billion according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
The budget reports a $2.9 billion deficit, described as a “modest shortfall” by Department of Finance staff. This estimate differs markedly from the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) projection of a $17.6 billion deficit—a gap of $14.7 billion. According to department staff, the governor’s proposal incorporates $31.5 billion in additional revenues not included in the LAO forecast and excludes the risk of a stock market downturn that the LAO elected to factor into its analysis. Overall, the state budget totals $348.9 billion, including $248.3 billion in General Fund expenditures and $23 billion in total reserves.
Now, the gap may even widen.
California is facing federal demands to repay more than $1 billion in Medicaid funds that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), says were improperly used for health care for illegal aliens.
The Trump administration is planning to claw back over $1 billion in federal Medicaid dollars it says are being spent by blue states on healthcare for illegal immigrants, including some with violent criminal records for murder and rape.
A preliminary audit by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that, over the last few years, mostly during 2024 and 2025, California; Washington, D.C.; Illinois; Washington; Colorado; and Oregon improperly spent a combined $1,351,204,127 in federal Medicaid funds to help pay for healthcare for illegal immigrants.
While federal Medicaid dollars are supposed to be prohibited broadly from being used to cover healthcare for illegal immigrants, they can be used by states for emergency treatment regardless of a patient’s citizenship or immigration status.
While 5 other states were also investigated for illegal alien-oriented Medicaid abuses, California was by far the most egregious.
Virginians asked for it, and if the flurry of bills introduced in the 72 hours since Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s inauguration pass — and with a Democratic supermajority, they likely will — residents of the Old Dominion are going to get it “good and hard.” If enacted, these proposals would raise taxes substantially, shorten sentences for violent criminals, and erode election integrity statewide.
Virginia voters delivered Spanberger a landslide victory in November over her Republican opponent, then–Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. Despite presenting herself as a moderate during the campaign, Spanberger’s congressional voting record — nearly 100% aligned with the Democrats’ progressive agenda — suggested her governance would be anything but.
Let’s start with the tax increases: HB979 would create two new tax brackets. Currently, Virginians are taxed at 5.75% for all income over $17,000. If this bill passes, residents earning between $600,000 and $1 million will be taxed at 8%, and those earning over $1 million will pay 10%.
Before anyone argues that these taxpayers can well afford it, remember that this group includes farmers, small businesses, and sole proprietors — many of whom are about to be “crushed” by the impact.
The advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform sounded the alarm on the proposed new taxes in a piece titled Democrats Pounce On Virginia Taxpayers. ATF noted, “Under unified Democrat control, Virginia is poised to become a tax-hiking outlier in a region full of states that are phasing out their income taxes.”
The article highlights some of the most shocking tax proposals now being advanced by state Democrats.
HB 378 – Imposes a 3.8% net investment income tax on individuals, trusts, and estates beginning in taxable year 2027. If enacted, HB 378 would raise VA’s top marginal income tax rate on portfolio and passive income to 9.55%.
HB 900 – Authorizes sales tax hikes in various transportation districts, imposes a new tax on each and every retail delivery in Northern Virginia (Amazon, Uber Eats, FedEx, UPS, etc.), similar to the one imposed in Minnesota by Gov. Tim Walz (D).
HB 919 – Imposes a firearm and ammunition tax equal to 11% percent of the gross receipts from the retail sale of any firearm or ammunition by a dealer in firearms, firearms manufacturer, or ammunition vendor, as such terms are defined in the bill.
HB 978 – Extends the retail sales and use tax to dry cleaning, landscaping, and other previously exempt services.
Democrats now control the legislature and Governor’s office in Virginia.
Here are just a few of the bills they’ve introduced
– New 4.3% sales tax on Uber Eats, Amazon, etc deliveries.
– New sales tax on admissions to a wide variety of businesses.
– Create two new higher tax…
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 19, 2026
NEW retail and sales taxes coming to Virginia introduced by Virginia Democrats in a single bill:
“Levies the retail sales and use tax on the following services: admissions; charges for recreation, fitness, or sports facilities; nonmedical personal services or counseling; dry… pic.twitter.com/ki96Ngpj6T
— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) January 19, 2026
This legislative blitz has something for everyone — including convicted criminals in the state.
HB863 would “eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing for rape, manslaughter, assaulting a law enforcement officer, possession and distribution of child pornography, and all repeat violent felonies.”
Funny how Democrats are now objectively and reflexively pro-rape…
Here at Davos, I’ve heard numerous versions of this sentiment: “We Europeans/Canadians stood up to Trump and forced him to retreat. This is a major victory for the rules-based international order.”
This is a very wrong take. The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.
Snip.
Davos Man—I should say Davos Person—worries a lot more about such things than he—they—used to. The latest edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, which is based on surveys of business executives and academics, ranks “geoeconomic confrontation” and “state-based armed conflict” as the No. 1 and No. 2 risks most “likely to present a material crisis on a global scale in 2026.” On a two-year time horizon, geoeconomic confrontation remains top of the list. Asked to characterize “the global political environment for cooperation on risks in the next decade,” 68 percent of respondents picked a “multipolar or fragmented order in which middle and great powers contest, set, and enforce regional rules and norms.”
All of this is just a series of Davosy euphemisms for the one big risk that Davos Person fears above all others: Donald Trump. This is funny when you consider last year’s mood, which—in the wake of Trump’s reelection—was very bullish about the United States under Trump 2.0. “Almost everyone at Davos is long U.S., short EU,” I wrote in these pages this time last year. “The new Davos consensus is that Europe cannot get its economic act together and never will, whereas America is rocking and rolling, and if you don’t own the big U.S. tech stocks, then the FOMO may kill you.”
My long-standing contrarian rule is that the Davos consensus is always wrong. In last year’s case, I added, Davos Person should be very careful what they wished for. Sure enough, in 2025 European stocks outperformed U.S. stocks. And, of course, Trump 2.0 has turned out to be every good European’s worst nightmare.
In the run-up to Davos 2026, Trump did his utmost to wind up Europe’s elite, not to mention Canada’s. On social media and in interviews, he insisted that he was determined to get Greenland for the United States. “Greenland has to be acquired,” he wrote on the eve of his arrival in Switzerland. “Denmark and its European allies have to DO THE RIGHT THING.” He did not rule out military action. He threatened to impose new 10 percent tariffs on all countries that resisted. And he posted memes of maps of Denmark (and Canada) cloaked in the Stars and Stripes and an AI-generated image of himself planting an American flag on “Greenland—U.S. Territory Est. 2026.”
To stoke up the crowd ahead of the president’s arrival, Trump’s cabinet members chimed in. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s anti-European trash-talking so enraged the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, that she stormed out of a Davos dinner. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent drolly wondered if European leaders might unleash their “most forceful weapon,” the “dreaded European working group.”
Snip.
This was vintage Trump, part real-estate pitch, part reality TV. “All we’re asking for is to get Greenland,” he riffed, “including right, title, and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease. Legally, it’s not defensible that way, totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease[?]”
As for the haters, “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump declared. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” And: “Here’s the story, Emmanuel. The answer is you’re going to do it. You’re going to do it fast. And if you don’t, I’m putting a 25 percent tariff on everything that you sell into the United States. And a 100 percent tariff on your wines and champagnes.”
Except that, almost as an aside, Trump then called the whole Greenland thing off. “We never ask for anything [from NATO],” he rambled, “and we never got anything. We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay? Now everyone’s saying, ‘Oh good.’ That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”
Later that evening, following a “very productive meeting” with NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, Trump announced on Truth Social that he would not impose the additional tariffs on European countries he had threatened. He and Rutte had “formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region.”
Snip.
The problem with all of this is the premise that Trump ever seriously meant to annex Greenland or to impose new tariffs on the Europeans. Why would he when a) the United States already enjoys (under a 1951 treaty with Denmark and a 2004 agreement with Greenland) all the military access to the frigid island it could every possibly need, while the Danes pay for the heavily subsidized inhabitants of the island; and b) Trump means what he says on Truth Social only about half the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s recent analysis of 2,700 substantive Truth posts. I’ll say it again: Half the time he’s bluffing. And it was the same when he was on Twitter in series one.
Snip.
Ten years ago, Europeans made the mistake of taking Trump neither seriously nor literally. Now they make the opposite mistake of treating him both seriously and literally. But, as Saleno Zito explained nearly 10 years ago, the correct approach is to take him seriously but not literally. The fact that Trump carries out only around half the threats he makes on social media is a feature, not a bug—and it’s certainly not a sign of weakness. It is a deliberate tactic designed to leave counterparties uncertain. On this occasion, Trump was bluffing, and the administration never had the remotest intention of imposing new tariffs on Europe, much less taking military action to annex Greenland.
So Trump asked for the moon, threatened to disastrous sanctions on his negotiating counterparts, and then settled for what he actually wanted all along.
Cue the tiny violins: “Eric Swalwell Could Be Ineligible for Governor or Face Jail Time.”
Eric Swalwell’s political ambitions just hit a major snag. Swalwell, most famous for public flatulence and bedding a Chinese spy, wants to be the next governor of California, but he is now the target of a court challenge that could blow his entire gubernatorial campaign out of the water before it even gets started.
The accusation? He doesn’t actually live in the state he wants to govern.
Conservative activist and filmmaker Joel Gilbert dropped a legal bomb on January 8, filing a petition in Sacramento Superior Court arguing that Swalwell is constitutionally barred from seeking the governor’s office.
Gilbert has a strong case.
California’s constitution requires gubernatorial candidates to live in the state for five years before the election. Gilbert says Swalwell has been living in Washington, D.C., not California, which makes him legally ineligible to run for office.
“Swalwell is ineligible to run for governor of California because the California constitution requires that a candidate live in the state for five years before an election,” Gilbert told PJ Media. “Swalwall has no home address in California; that’s why he committed perjury on his candidate statement form 501 by providing his attorney’s office for his home address. Swalwell has a sworn Deed of Trust on his Washington, D.C. home where he declared that location as his primary residence.”
The complaint gets more interesting from there.
Public records searches allegedly show that Swalwell has no ownership or lease of any California property — his congressional financial disclosures from 2011 through 2024 back this up, listing zero California real estate holdings. When Swalwell filed his campaign paperwork on December 4, he listed an address on Capitol Mall in Sacramento. The problem is that the address isn’t a residence; it’s the office of his Sacramento lawyer, Greenberg Traurig, located in a high-rise.
Swalwell owns a $1.2 million, six-bedroom home in northeast Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife, Brittany Watts, and their three kids. Mortgage documents from April 2022 list that D.C. property as his “principal residence.”
There are really only two possibilities here, according to Gilbert: Swalwell either committed mortgage fraud — a serious crime that could result in prison time — or he’s ineligible to run for governor.
New Labor Department filings reveal the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has been channeling millions in taxpayer dollars to far-left political outfits, including Soros-backed networks and shadowy activist groups.
Instead of bolstering education, these funds are propping up anti-American causes, from anti-Israel protests to rigging electoral maps.
The bombshell underscores the deep rot in union leadership, where public money meant for schools is weaponized against conservative values and national security.
The filings, obtained by Fox News Digital, paint a damning picture of misdirected priorities. “The NEA’s last fiscal year report showed it sent $300,000 to the 1630 Fund, the liberal dark money group Fox News has been reporting on extensively, and in most cases exclusively — Tens of thousands of dollars to the (George Soros’) Tides Foundation Network,” according to the report.
These aren’t voluntary donations from union members’ pockets—these are taxpayer dollars funneled through the system. The Tides Foundation has ties to anti-Israel activism, while the Sixteen Thirty Fund operates as a hub for progressive dark money, influencing elections without transparency.
The NEA didn’t stop there, the report notes, adding it “was also involved in several state issues. It backed a campaign to end standardized testing in Massachusetts and fight gerrymandering in Ohio, to the tune of half a million dollars for each of those and it sent hundreds of thousands of additional money to groups committed to racial and education justice movements.”
One of the biggest payouts was a whopping $3.5 million to Education International, a global teachers’ federation where NEA President Becky Pringle serves as vice president. Critics call it a cozy self-dealing arrangement, with American tax dollars flowing offshore to international agendas.
The subpoenas went to the offices of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, according the outlets, including Reuters, the New York Times and Fox News, which cited anonymous sources.
The subpoenas come days after the Department of Justice announced it was launching an investigation into Walz and Frey in connection with a suspected conspiracy to impede federal immigration enforcement in the state.
I am hoping there are also subpoenas in the works for several years of their bank records, to see how much they participated in the Somali fraud…
Over the past several days, it appears that Minneapolis police officers have quietly kind of quit in another way.
From Alpha News:
Around 100 Minneapolis police officers could soon be off duty for weeks to months from an already critically understaffed police department, and just as the city faces a serious public safety crisis with protesters inciting confrontations with the surge of federal agents working in the city.
Multiple sources confided to both Alpha News senior reporter Liz Collin and to Crime Watch Minneapolis that 60 to 100 officers from the Minneapolis Police Department have applied or plan to apply for the state’s new paid leave program. The Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) program was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz during the 2023 DFL trifecta and went into effect on the first of this year.
This won’t end well: “Japanese Yields Soar To All Time High After PM Takaichi Calls Snap Election Seeking More Spending, Less Taxes.” Doubling down, yet again, on Abenomics, won’t solve Japan’s continuing problems.
New York has finally ended its nearly decade-long campaign to force Catholic nuns and other religious ministries to fund abortions.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty announced on Tuesday that New York agreed to enter into a settlement with their clients after a lengthy court battle over a state abortion mandate that went to the Supreme Court twice. Plaintiffs in the case, Roman Catholic Diocese v. Harris, included a group of Catholic and Anglican nuns, Catholic dioceses, Christian churches, and faith-based social ministries.
“For nearly a decade, New York bureaucrats tried to strong-arm nuns into paying for abortions because they serve all those in need,” said Lori Windham, senior counsel at Becket and an attorney for the religious groups. “At long last, the state has given up its disgraceful campaign. This victory confirms that the government cannot punish religious ministries for living out their faith by serving everyone.”
In a press release, AG James, who had previously worked to shut down the NRA because she disagreed with its politics, announced that she had closed down Betar, a pro-Israel group , for appearing at synagogues to defend them from Muslim mobs, for claiming that “that all devout Muslims ‘hate America’, and for making derogatory remarks about Islam and Gaza.
Did Howard University not cover the unconstitutionality of viewpoint discrimination back when James was obtaining her law degree there? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Nick Shirley sat down with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, and caught Callaghan deceptively editing the interview just like the MSM does.
Microslop 365. “Microsoft has invested tens to hundreds of billions of dollars into AI, okay? And so AI is not allowed to be the problem. And so it has to be you.”
My Hunter Biden corruption evidence, a Democratic Senator catches federal corruption charges, more blue cities suffering from Biden’s open border policies, California goes looking for cops in Texas, and a new Bill Burr movie looms. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The person who paid as much as six figures for “artwork” by an untrained painter also received a prestigious government appointment from the artist’s father, President Joe Biden.
Now congressional investigators want to know if Biden’s decision to name Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad was in any way related to her purchase of artwork by Hunter Biden, a middle-aged man who paints as a hobby.
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) is now asking Naftali and White House Counsel Stuart Delery to answer questions as to whether the Biden family is using Hunter’s “art” as a means of selling White House access.
The White House has previously claimed the identity of Hunter Biden art purchasers would be concealed to prevent any undue influence, but nothing prevents the purchaser from identifying themselves to Joe Biden when seeking an appointment, and now at least one purchaser has been identified as someone who sought White House access.
Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was indicted on corruption charges by federal prosecutors on Friday morning in a Manhattan court in an influence-peddling scheme involving Egypt.
The unsealed indictment revealed that Menendez’s wife, Nadine, New Jersey real estate mogul Fred Daibes, and two other business associates are being charged along side the lawmaker.
Led by Southern District of New York attorney Damian Williams, in June 2022, investigators conducted a search of Menendez’s residence in New Jersey and found $100,000 worth of gold bars, nearly half a million dollars in cash, “much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe,” and a brand new Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible.
“Menedez and Nadine Menedez agreed to and did accept hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using Menedez’s power and influence as a Senator to seek to protect and enrich” his allies “and to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt,” the indictment reads. “Among other actions, Menendez provided sensitive U.S. government information and took other steps that secretly aided the Government of Egypt,” the filing notes.
New York City will cut overtime pay for its police officers and three other agencies to help reduce costs driven by the city’s unprecedented migrant crisis, City Hall announced Monday.
Jacques Jiha, the budget director for Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, told the city’s police, fire, corrections, and sanitations departments in a Saturday memo to each submit an overtime pay reduction plan “to reduce year-to-year OT spending.”
He also wrote the four departments must submit monthly reports “to track overtime spending and their progress in meeting the reduction target” once Adams issues the order.
Jiha also noted the current assistance provided by President Joe Biden and New York governor Kathy Hochul is not enough, prompting City Hall’s decision to cut overtime pay among other financial measures.
“The amount of aid we have received from the federal government and the state has been grossly inadequate and there has been no progress on a statewide or national decompression strategy,” Jhia wrote in the memo, first reported by Politico. “The city can no longer continue to shoulder these skyrocketing costs and balance the budget without making very difficult choices.”
Crime has risen in New York in recent months as more than 100,000 illegal immigrants have poured into the city.
The leader of a police union said the overtime pay cuts will lead to fewer cops patrolling the streets, resulting in more staffing shortages.
“It is going to be impossible for the NYPD to significantly reduce overtime unless it fixes its staffing crisis,” Patrick Hendry, head of the Police Benevolent Association, told the New York Post. “We are still thousands of cops short, and we’re struggling to drive crime back to pre-2020 levels without adequate personnel.”
“If City Hall wants to save money without jeopardizing public safety, it needs to invest in keeping experienced cops on the job,” he said.
The Homeless Illegal Alien Industrial Complex pays very, very well in Chicago:
BREAKING: NBC 5 reports that private shelter employees that house illegal immigrants make from $135 per hour up to $200 per hour.
A manager of a migrant facility made $14,000 in one week and a nurse earned $20,000 in a week. pic.twitter.com/6P0a7Ae67F
“The Biden admin cut the razor wire Gov. Greg Abbott put along the Rio Grande, so Abbott immediately sent the Texas National Guard to put up even more.”
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson switches to the Republican Party. “While Dallas has thrived, elsewhere Democratic policies have exacerbated crime and homelessness.”
“I have been mayor of Dallas for more than four years. During that time, my priority has been to make the city safer, stronger and more vibrant,” Johnson wrote in his article.
“That meant saying no to those who wanted to defund the police. It meant fighting for lower taxes and a friendlier business climate. And it meant investing in family friendly infrastructure such as better parks and trails.”
Johnson said he does not plan to alter his “approach” to being mayor but is switching his party affiliation.
“When my career in elected office ends in 2027 on the inauguration of my successor as mayor, I will leave office as a Republican,” Johnson said.
The mayor was a leading opponent of calls to decrease funding for the Dallas Police Department after the 2020 demonstrations against police violence. Johnson proposed cutting salaries at city hall instead.
In his announcement, he also touted Dallas’ decreasing crime rate and the Dallas City Council’s reduction of the property tax rate.
While city mayors are nonpartisan officeholders in Texas, Johnson was a Democrat during his nearly five terms in the Texas House of Representatives.
This is both unexpected and big news. Lots of Hispanic politicians in Texas have switched to the GOP, but this is the first case I can remember of a high profile black Texas Democratic politician switching to the GOP.
A 35-year-old Renton man was sentenced on Sept. 13 in U.S. District Court to 40 months in prison for his role in a plot to burn the Seattle Police Officers Guild building in downtown Seattle during the September 2020 protests.
The defendant, Justin Christopher Moore, pleaded guilty in September 2022.
At the sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Lauren King said, “What you did showed a complete disregard for human life. Our ability to peacefully assemble is a fundamental right to our society. Your acts of violence can deter people from exercising that fundamental right.”
According to records filed in the case, Moore made and carried a box of 12 Molotov cocktails in a protest march to the Seattle Police Officers Guild building on Sept. 7, 2020. Ultimately the marchers were moved away from the building in downtown Seattle. Police smelled gasoline and grew concerned about the intentions of protesters. The box containing the 12 gasoline devices was found in the parking lot next to the Seattle Police Officers Guild building.
Using video from that day and from other protests, as well as information from the electronic devices of other co-conspirators, Moore was confirmed as the person seen carrying the box of destructive devices.
In June 2021, law enforcement executed a search warrant at Moore’s residence. They seized clothing that is consistent with the images of what Moore was wearing when he carried the Molotov cocktails. From the basement storage area, they also recovered numerous items that are consistent with manufacturing explosive devices. Law enforcement recovered a notebook in which Moore had made entries related to the manufacturing of destructive devices and the ingredients necessary.
University of North Texas tries to cancel musicology professor. Professor wins in court. Again.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down another defeat to the University of North Texas and a victory to Allen Harris in a lawsuit defending the First Amendment rights of Professor Timothy Jackson, after UNT shut down his journal, The Journal of Schenkerian Studies. The decision can be located here.
In January of last year, Allen Harris had already prevailed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The District Court Judge Amos Mazzant rejected UNT’s motion to dismiss the complaint of Professor Timothy Jackson in a strong decision available here.
Ordinarily, the case would then proceed to discovery and eventually to trial. But UNT invoked its right to a special appeal (called an interlocutory appeal) that is allowed only to the state under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. At first, Texas was expected to make an argument defending UNT’s right to do whatever it wanted with Timothy Jackson’s journal.
The Journal of Schenkerian Studies is dedicated to a late 19th/early 20th-century Austrian-Jewish music theorist, Heinrich Schenker, and his systematic, graphic methods of music analysis. In July 2020, Timothy Jackson defended Schenker in the pages of the Journal from an attack by Hunter College Professor Philip Ewell. Professor Ewell labeled Schenker a “racist” and, indeed, the entire tradition of Western classical music as “systemically racist.” This dispute would have remained a typical academic tempest in a teapot, but the University of North Texas swiftly condemned Jackson’s defense of Schenker and classical music. At UNT, defending classical music and its theory against charges of “racism” is a “thought crime.”
Graduate students quickly condemned Professor Jackson for “racist actions” and various other derelictions that they claimed hurt their feelings. Calls for Professor Jackson to be fired quickly escalated, and the vast majority of Jackson’s fellow faculty members jumped on the bandwagon. Sixteen of them signed a graduate student petition calling for his ouster and for censorship of the Journal. Discovery revealed that at least one did so without even reading or understanding what the petition said.
The most important thing at the University of North Texas was to demonstrate pious commitment to “anti-Racism,” no matter how irrational or lacking in substance–or contrary to evidence. As the Dean of the College of Music admitted in open court, the Journal was “put on ice.”
In July 2020, Professor Jackson stood alone against this tide. Had the case been allowed to proceed after Mazzant’s strong decision on the motion to dismiss, the Journal would likely be back in publication by now. Yet censorship is so important at the University of North Texas that the state exercised its right to a special appeal in order to halt discovery in its tracks.
Some technical legal analysis omitted.
The ruling is a clear warning to do-nothing boards of trustees and boards of regents that they have an affirmative duty to ensure that public universities uphold constitutional rights in education. From now on, they will also enjoy a no qualified immunity from personal suit, at least in the Fifth Circuit. UNT’s Board of Regents had direct governing authority over all UNT officials. They too can therefore be held accountable under the Ex Parte Young for sitting idly by while career university bureaucrats trampled Professor Jackson’s free speech.
Unfortunately, the federal government continues its misguided attempts to control an industry regulators know little to nothing about. But today’s attempts tend to focus more on something they understand even less than trucking: technology.
The electronic logging device (ELD) has been around since the late 1980s. The devices were first adopted by large nationwide fleets to simplify managing their plethora of drivers, and eventually became a way to lower insurance costs. Manufacturers and employers claimed the devices prevented drivers from driving longer than legally allowed, therefore reducing the number of tractor-trailer-related crashes. It was under the latter premise that the DOT mandated that all trucks be equipped with ELDs no later than the end of 2017. Unfortunately, fatal accidents involving tractor-trailers have seen a recent increase following a sharp decline. This correlation suggests that mandating ELDs has not had the promised or intended safety improvements.
More recently, environmental regulations requiring manufacturers to reduce emissions gave us the diesel particulate filter (DPF), an exhaust treatment system that replaces a standard muffler. While there is no current federal mandate requiring a DPF, the filters are required by the 2008 California Statewide Truck and Bus Rule, which has incentivized many nationwide fleets to adopt them. The problem with DPFs is the filter system clogs. A lot.
When DPFs go down, trucks roll to a stop. Truckers report having to have a DPF serviced as often as every 5,000 miles, which means lots of lost productivity and stranded cargo. I’ve had four breakdowns over the past two years, and three were due to my DPF. A tow truck driver I spoke to on one of those occasions told me half of his business comes from malfunctioning DPFs. Repairs are a specialized affair, and replacements can cost up to $2,000. When my truck isn’t moving, I’m not earning. And these regulators have required that my truck stand still far too often.
Next up on the government’s list of ways to make truckers’ lives miserable are proposed speed limiters. Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, wants to limit all tractor-trailers to the same speed. Imagine being stuck behind a pair of tractor trailers side by side, who can’t speed up to pass each other. It’s relatively rare right now, but it will become the norm. Every single interstate nationwide will be populated by moving roadblocks, inspiring road rage and blocking critical services. What happens when the fire truck or ambulance is stuck behind these unbreakable pairs?
Also in the California “Hall of Ls,” after ruing its own police department through defunding, San Francisco is trying to hire cops in Texas.
San Francisco slashed its police department’s budget by $120 million in 2020. Almost immediately, crime rose in the city. Crime has gotten so bad in San Francisco, that residents are reportedly leaving their car doors unlocked, so crooks won’t smash their windows.
Mayor London Breed promised to reverse her “defund” policy by restoring and increasing the police budget. However, the city is struggling to recruit qualified officers. Recently, the San Francisco Deputy Sheriff’s Association accused the mayor of continuing to make cuts to the sheriff’s department.
Despite this, the city went to four universities in Texas to recruit police officers. This appears to be the first time San Francisco looked for candidates outside of California.
Those four universities are Texas Southern University, Sam Houston State University, Prairie View A&M University, and Texas A&M University.
Murder suspect who broke into a Georgia home find out that gun beats knife. “Once he is released from the hospital, he will be confronted with charges including burglary, home invasion, and theft by receiving in Georgia, as well as murder charges in Ohio.”
Bill Burr has a new film called Old Dads coming to Netflix next month. Looks promising. “Just go on Twitter and share the story where you’re the hero.” Knowing Burr, there will be something here to offend everyone…
The Biden economy continues to batter ordinary Americans, CIA’s bribing experts to protect China and the deep state, Ukraine makes Russian ships and air defense systems in Crimea go boom, UAW goes on strike, and sanctuary city chickens come home to roost. Plus a personal update at the end. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Joe Biden continues to work his special brand of magic on the economy: “Real household income suffers biggest drop since Great Recession.”
Nominally, households earned more money in 2022 than they did in 2021. But thanks to inflation caused by Bidenomics, real household income (that is, income adjusted for inflation) not only fell, but fell by an amount not seen since the Great Recession.
According to Census Bureau numbers released Tuesday, median household income fell from $76,330 in 2021 to $74,580 in 2022, a decline of 2.3%. This is the biggest drop in real household income since 2010, when it fell 2.6%. Even at the height of the pandemic, when millions of people couldn’t work, real income only fell 2.2%.
The decline in real income was driven entirely by near-record-high inflation. According to the Census Bureau, inflation rose 7.8% between 2021 and 2022, which was the largest inflation increase since 1981.
Isn’t not being able to feed your family a small price to pay for our elites not having to deal with mean tweets? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A ‘senior-level’ CIA whistleblower has come forward to allege that the agency bribed analysts to change their opinion that Covid-19 most likely originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, according to the NY Post.
The whistleblower told House committee leaders that his agency ‘ tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans,’ according to a Tuesday letter from the chairmen of two House subcommittees investigating the pandemic response and US intelligence, Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH).
The pair have requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA’s Covid-19 Discovery Team by Sept. 26.
“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” reads the letter from the House panel chairmen.
“The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis.
“The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” the letters continue, adding that the analysts were “experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”
Hunter Biden indicted on federal gun charges. A whole lot of observers think this is just an excuse to avoid indicting him (and his father) on bribery and corruption charges.
Washington refused to fully fund construction of a wall along the Mexican border as Congress obeyed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — whom Republicans bow to — and the galaxy of gangs, drug cartels, pedos, Chinese spies, terrorists and Methodists who back Democrats. There are some overlaps. My point is, Democrats cannot destroy the nation without help.
There seemed to be no stopping the onslaught. What to do? What to do? What to do?
Well, they were messing with Texas and as Texans say, don’t mess with Texas.
Its governor’s press office said in June, “In April 2022, Governor Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to charter buses to transport migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C. The Governor added New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia as additional drop-off locations last year and most recently added Denver as a busing destination last month. Since beginning the migrant busing strategy last spring, more than 21,600 migrants have been transported to these self-declared sanctuary cities while providing much-needed relief to Texas’ overwhelmed border communities.”
Battles are usually fought with horses, tanks or aeroplanes. Greg Abbott used buses. As of June, he shipped 500 busloads of illegal aliens to sanctuary cities. The shipments continue.
Virginia Democratic statehouse candidate Susanna Gibson is complaining that there are videos of her having sex with her husband online. Gee, how did they get online? “Gibson had an account on Chaturbate, a legal website where viewers can watch live webcam performances that feature nudity and sexual activity…The videos show Gibson and her husband, John David Gibson, having sex and at times looking into the camera and asking viewers for donations in the form of ‘tokens’ or ‘tips’ to watch a private show.” It did not take Columbo to crack this case. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The Democrat Party has a latent disaster on its hand vis a vis one RFK Jr.
On the one hand, they are fully dedicated to sabotaging his campaign. Under no circumstances whatsoever will he be permitted to win the nomination.
Even if he had 80%+ support from the electorate, the sick truth is that party leadership (influenced by the consultant and donor classes) would rather lose with Brandon than win with RFK Jr. because of what he’s liable to do to the Deep State and D.C. largesse were he ever to assume office. It would be a proverbial bloodbath for the administrative state and all of the grifters who feed on it.
On the other hand, they need to keep RFK Jr. within the Democrat Party fold because if he were to go rogue and run third party — which he, frankly, should have been doing all along — it would be a veritable death knell for the Brandon entity’s prospects in 2024, which are wafer-thin as it is.
Whatever perceived threat Cornel West poses to Brandon’s re-election with his Green Party run, magnify that threat by 10x, 100x and you’re in the ballpark of what RFK Jr. would do to the party. It’s not outlandish to speculate that a strong third-party run by RFK Jr. might literally break the Democrat Party for years or possibly forever. That’s how sick of the party’s BS its own members, not to mention independents and non-voters (the largest, unserviced voting bloc in the country), are.
RFK Jr. has already proven himself nearly bulletproof from relentless Democrat Party and corporate state media attacks — arguably on the same level in this regard as “Teflon” Don.
There’s a petition to have the Hays County district attorney removed from office.
The person who filed it? The Hays County district clerk.
The petition was filed by Hays County District Clerk Avrey Anderson on Tuesday, Sept. 12. I
It alleged that Hays County DA Kelly Higgins implemented and executed a policy or policies that refused to prosecute a class or type of criminal offense under state law.
The petition said DA Higgins has made public declarations that he would not prosecute the following:
simple drug possession offenses
simple cannabis possession offenses
procedures committed by a licensed physician in the case that they are treating transgenders
procedures committed by a licensed physician in the case they are performing abortions
According to the court documents filed, there’s been an excessive amount of felony possession of cannabis, methamphetamine and cocaine cases being declined for “random and nonspecific reasons.”
I know one of the first questions in your mind: Is Higgins a Soros-backed DA? Answer cloudy. She got $2,000 from Chip Shields in Portland, OR. Shields founded Better People, a pro ex-con thing, but I can’t find a direct Soros link to Higgins. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Things that make you go Hmmmm: “A representative of the Harris County attorney’s office told a district court judge that the county would use all legal means to prevent the deposition of the deputy director of election technology Jason Bruce.”
National Review looks back at Simon and Garfunkel. Don’t agree with everything here, but they did make some great music Back In The Day…
“14-year-old son died after attempting the ‘One Chip Challenge.’ You don’t want to jump into that sort of thing without building up your resistance first. Me, I’m pretty sure I could do it, especially if I could find a way to make money off it. Maybe I could get 100,00 people to pledge a buck for every one I eat, and then then see how many I can eat on a live-stream…
Ever wanted to hear The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz do an album of REM covers? Yeah, me neither, but here’s “Shiny Happy People.”
Also, my most recent job just ended. So here’s the tip jar, if you’re so inclined:
I don’t usual rattle the jar, because I make good money when employed, and I’m hardly destitute, but every bit helps. If you know of any remote Senior Technical Writer positions, let me know.
From the outset of Donald Trump’s entry into the world of politics he espoused a series of key tenets around what he called his “America-First” objectives:
The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States. A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States. A return to economic independence.
The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products. China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.
Donald Trump was alone on these issues. No-one else was raising them; no-one else was so urgently pushing that discussion. In 2015, 2016 and even 2017, no-one other than Trump was talking about how close we were to the dependence point of no return.
Given the status of very consequential issues stemming from the Chinese Coronavirus threat; and the myriad of serious issues with critical supply chain dependencies; wasn’t President Trump correct in his warnings and proposals?
The idea driving this is not to stop all transmission of coronavirus (nice though that would be), but to flatten the curve so that American health care resources are not overwhelmed.
In Italy, you can say goodbye to Grandma. “Doctors are being told that they’ll likely need to deny care to senior citizens and those with other health conditions as the virus explodes across the nation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Chinese Communist Party has gone into overdrive pushing the lie that the #Wuhanvirus started in the US. It started in #China, and it was spread around the world thanks to Chinese government negligence and lies. They are 100% responsible for every death. #Coronavirus#CCPvirus
Before the coronavirus epidemic, U.S. companies were heading for record-low profitability in China as business conditions deteriorated and China’s economy slowed to its lowest rate in decades, according to a new survey of U.S. companies with operations in China…
American companies surveyed by AmCham reported their lowest levels of profitability since the Chamber first began asking the question 18 years ago: 61% of members described their 2019 financial performance as profitable or very profitable, an eight-percentage point drop from the year before.
He is charged with embezzling more than $1 million in union funds and properties to buy “luxury condos” in California, “lavish” dinners with “premium liquor,” five sets of custom-made golf clubs, horseback riding on a beach, and other non-union expenses that prosecutors allege the UAW covered up by mislabeling them as payments to vendors or meals for UAW officials, according to Matthew Schneider, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Sadly, Troy Hurtubise is no longer around to design a monkey-proof suit…
Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof:
The World Health Organization has announced that dogs cannot contract Covid-19. Dogs previously held in quarantine can now be released. To be clear, WHO let the dogs out.
De Blasio quits, Warren rises, Sanders falls, Harris freefalls, Booker’s going broke, Klobuchar shows signs of life, Messam registers, and everyone is all-in on Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Monmouth (New Jersey): Biden 26, Warren 20, Sanders 18, Booker 9, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Gabbard 2, de Blasio 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1. Booker’s best showing, but it’s for his home state, and if he got that percentage in the actual primary, it would be below the 15% threshold he needs to pick up delegates.
Iowa State University: Warren 24, Biden 16, Sanders 16, Buttigieg 13, Harris 5, Gabbard 4, Klobuchar 3, Yang 3, Steyer 2, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Williamson 1, Ryan 1. High as I’ve seen Buttigieg anywhere, much less Iowa. Sample size of 572.
Florida Atlantic University (Florida): Biden 24, Warren 24, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 5, Harris 4, Messam 3, Yang 2, O’Rourke 3, Bennet 1, Ryan 1, Bullock 1, Gabbard 1, de Blasio 1, Booker 1. Messam’s 3% in his home state is not only his highest anywhere, it may be the first time he’s actually registered as a choice.
Focus on Rural America (Iowa): Biden 25, Warren 23, Buttigieg 12, Sanders 9, Klobuchar 8, Harris 5, Steyer 3, Booker 2, yang 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1. Gabbard 1, O’Rourke 1, Messam <1. Sample size of 500. Highest I've seen Klobuchar since she announced. Of all the longer-shot candidates, I'd give her the best chance of an "all in on Iowa" strategy getting results.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign said it would have 110 staff members in the state by the end of this month. Senator Kamala Harris has promised to visit every week in October. Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Sunday kicked off a John McCain-like, everything-on-the-record bus tour and is advertising on local television and radio. Senator Amy Klobuchar is 49 counties into her tour of all 99 in the state. And on Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders will begin a “Bernie Beats Trump’’ tour of eastern Iowa to highlight what he says is his strength as a general election candidate.
As a new poll suggested a significant shift in the primary race’s top tier — with Senator Elizabeth Warren overtaking Mr. Biden for first place — candidates at the annual Polk County Steak Fry in Des Moines on Saturday tried to cut through the furor surrounding President Trump, Ukraine and Mr. Biden to deliver their message to voters still sifting through their preferences from one of the largest fields in history.
The candidates’ renewed sense of urgency has set the stage for a four-month sprint to a night of caucuses that remains the single biggest prize in American politics.
“We know that Iowa is where we can turn heads,’’ Mr. Buttigieg, of South Bend, Ind., said aboard his campaign bus on Sunday. “Even the other early states will be looking at what Iowa did.”
The increasing focus on Iowa, where voters must attend an hourslong midwinter evening gathering to participate in choosing their party’s nominee, has come at the expense of New Hampshire, where the nation’s first primary election comes eight days later.
None of the Democratic presidential candidates are betting their entire campaigns on a strong performance in New Hampshire, meaning it may be the first time since 1984 that there is not a candidate focused solely on the Granite State in a contested presidential race.
Naturally, this turn of events has supposedly given New Hampshire Democrats a case of the sads:
Overall, an analysis by The Hill shows that this cycle’s presidential candidates are actually visiting New Hampshire more frequently than 2016’s field of candidates.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), who is from the neighboring state of Massachusetts, held 34 campaign stops between January and July of 2019, according to the NBC Boston candidate tracker.
Former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) held 79 campaign events in the same time frame, the most of any 2016 or 2020 candidate.
Former presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) also held more campaign stops than any 2016 presidential candidate, with 53 campaign stops before the end of July. She dropped out of the race at the end of August.
Fat lot of good it did her.
“Even though there are dozens and dozens of candidate visits, they’re not as visible as they used to be,” said Andrew Cline, the president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy.
In an interview with The Hill, Cline, who follows New Hampshire politics closely, said the sense the state is being overlooked by candidates is widely shared.
“It definitely feels like there isn’t much going on in New Hampshire week to week,” he said.
New Hampshire people can sound a bit miffed about the whole thing.
“Yes, it’s annoying,” Cline said about the feeling of an overshadowed first-in-the-nation primary.
The sentiment has been felt in the state throughout the summer.
For example, the famed Amherst, N.H., Fourth of July parade usually serves as a hotbed for presidential hopefuls, but none of the top-tier candidates showed up this year.
Most of the top-tier no-shows had supporters marching in their absence but were met with lukewarm enthusiasm compared to the low-polling candidates, such as Delaney and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who marched in the hot sun and shook hands with dozens of locals.
After most called for reducing meat consumption, and some for banning cheeseburgers, Democrats descended on Iowa to grill 10,000 steaks.
Are Harris, Buttigieg and Booker playing for second place? If so Harris is failing at that. Booker may well be running for veep. I get the impression that Buttigieg is the insider big money backup choice if Biden’s brain goes completely kablooey.
Lots of candidates aren’t even winning their home states. “The fact that so many Democratic candidates aren’t winning in their home states is not a good sign. These are the voters who know you best and should be the most behind you.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. All that Hunter Biden/Ukraine dirt is finally getting dragged into the open. “Joe Biden, now the Democratic presidential frontrunner for 2020, faced scrutiny for months over accusations that he pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who at that time was leading a corruption investigation into a natural gas company that had ties to Biden’s son.” Let’s go to the tape:
Here is Joe Biden bragging about using extortion to have a Ukrainian state prosecutor fired for investigating the shady business dealings of Biden’s son.
Those so-called experts on TV keep saying that Biden is old. Well, you’re not as young as you used to be, either, but you’re not ready to be shuffled off into the retirement home or the grave just yet. When they say Biden’s past his prime and no good anymore, those smug young punks are saying you’re past your prime and no good anymore. You hope to live long enough to see those guys deal with a bad back and arthritis and diabetes.
Then there are the kids are complaining about what Biden said and did in the ’70s. C’mon now, it was the ’70s. Everybody was listening to disco and wearing bell bottoms and taking drugs and growing their sideburns longer than your middle finger. Nobody’s the same now as they were in the ’70s. That nice-looking kid mayor who’s running was, what, in preschool then? You want to judge him based on what he was doing back then?
He gets dissed by Ilhan Omar, which will probably only help him with his base of mostly non-insane Democrats.
The next 10 days will be critical for Sen. Cory Booker, who warned his presidential run may come to an end if he isn’t able to raise nearly $2 million by the end of the month. “We have reached a critical moment, and time is running out,” campaign manager Addisu Demissie warned in a memo to staff and supporters. “It’s now or never: The next 10 days will determine whether Cory Booker can stay in this race and compete to win the nomination.”
Booker confirmed that was the case in a series of tweets, acknowledging it was unusual “for a campaign like ours to be this transparent” but he insisted that “there can be no courage without vulnerability.” Booker specified that his campaign doesn’t “see a legitimate long-term path forward” unless the campaign can raise $1.7 million by the end of September. The New Jersey senator insisted that “this isn’t an end-of-quarter stunt” but rather “a real, unvarnished look under the hood of our campaign.”
Possibly true, possibly just another version of the direct mail “Dear DONOR, we need $X amount of money for CANDIDATE campaign in Y days or we can’t go on! Could you give $Z to keep us going?” solicitation that everyone who’s ever donated to a political campaign gets. Were Booker and Harris in on the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax? The Senator from Innsmouth.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Why Steve Bullock Refuses to Drop Out. Members of the Clinton diaspora are pleading with the Montana governor to stay in the race, even if the rest of the country doesn’t know who he is.” Because if there’s anyone who has their pulse on the finger of America it’s Clinton cronies.
The Democratic Party, and America as a whole, have changed so much over the past 30 years that comparing candidates from different eras can seem moot. But there’s a distinctly Bill Clinton–esque sensibility to many Democratic Party veterans urging Bullock to stick with his presidential campaign, despite his failing to make the September debate stage and remaining, at best, in the margin of error of most polls. They see another popular, moderate governor of a small, conservative-leaning state who started his campaign late and is being written off, and they don’t just feel nostalgic—they feel a little déjà vu. They insist they are not being delusional.
Paul Begala, the former Clinton strategist and current CNN pundit, earlier this week went on Twitter to encourage people to donate to Bullock’s campaign. Minyon Moore, one of the top political aides in the Clinton White House and now one of the most respected African American female operatives in the party, told me she didn’t know Bullock before they recently had dinner, but she was impressed by both his understanding of public policy and his campaign’s outreach, and encouraged him to stay with it. “They’ve been doing a lot of quiet meetings,” Moore said. “Unfortunately, time is not waiting for anybody, but I think he has an important voice that probably hasn’t been heard as much as it should be heard.” Mickey Kantor, the former Clinton Commerce secretary, told me this week that Bullock is “a terrific talent,” with “a résumé we would have prayed for in a Democratic candidate for president.”
Just 10 candidates met the polling and donor thresholds to participate in last week’s Democratic debate in Houston. And de Blasio was not among them, nor did it seem possible for him to qualify for the next debate, in Ohio in October. As of July, only 6,700 people had donated to his campaign (debaters need 130,000), and he has only hit 2 percent support in a handful of polls all year long (none of which are counted by the Democratic National Committee for debate qualification). In short, it’s no mystery why de Blasio called it quits.
De Blasio was always an extreme long shot. He entered the race quite late, on May 16 — after more than 20 other major candidates had declared and the field was already drawing headlines for being historically saturated. In fact, only one successful presidential nominee since 1976 (Bill Clinton) kicked off his campaign later than de Blasio did. And although de Blasio was arguably one of the most progressive candidates in the field — having brought universal pre-K and other liberal reforms to the five boroughs — he was crowded out of the primary’s left lane by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who combined for 56 percent support among “very liberal” voters in the most recent Quinnipiac poll (de Blasio had less than 1 percent).
But probably de Blasio’s biggest problem was simply that Democratic voters did not like him,2 which is quite an unusual place to be among voters of one’s own party. In an average of national polls of 2020 candidates’ favorability from May, de Blasio was the only candidate at the time whom more voters viewed unfavorably than favorably (his net favorability rating — favorable rating minus unfavorable rating — was -1). That’s especially bad because de Blasio wasn’t some little-known candidate; 46 percent of Democrats were able to form an opinion of him. All other candidates who were at least as well-known had net favorability ratings of +21 or better!
That’s one way to put it. “Almost universally loathed” is another.
NY Post de Blasio presidential campaign obituary – “it died doing what it loved best – being as far away from nyc as possible” 😂 pic.twitter.com/il0X9vs4aW
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. His daughter is getting married. Congrats! So now Delaney has at least one good thing that happened in his life this year…
Kamala Harris is putting her stumbling campaign on the line with a new Iowa-or-bust strategy: She’s shifting away from the closed-door fundraisers that dominated her summer calendar to focus on retail politicking in the crucial kickoff state.
Harris huddled with top campaign officials Tuesday in Baltimore to discuss the next steps as a series of polls show her plummeting into the mid-single digits. She’s not expected to significantly alter her message. Instead, Harris is planning to make weekly visits to the state and nearly double the size of her 65-person ground operation, sources familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.
The re-engagement in Iowa — where the California senator held a 17-stop bus tour in August but hasn’t returned since — is part of a broader acknowledgment inside the campaign that she hasn’t been in the early states enough. It’s designed to refocus her campaign and clarify her narrowing path to the nomination.
Harris has been backsliding since her summer confrontation with Joe Biden, dropping so far in recent surveys that her once-promising campaign appears in danger of becoming an afterthought.
An Iowa poll out Wednesday, conducted by her own pollster for another client, showed Harris well out of range of the frontrunners, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, and behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
By confiding (a little too loudly) to Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii that she’s “fucking moving to Iowa,” Harris inadvertently disclosed that her strategy now depends on getting a good result there. Another option would be to suggest to the nation that it’s not an optimal state for her, and thereby lower expectations. She could tell everyone that she’s putting her chips on New Hampshire. In truth, though, neither state is ideal for her.
Iowa and New Hampshire are among the least racially diverse states in the nation. At least in Iowa, Harris does not have to contend with two of the three frontrunners (Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts) representing bordering states.
Harris’s decision looks logical even if it’s a bit forced. The third contest is the Nevada caucuses, but they have historically not had influence in the perceptions game. Harris’s best early state is likely South Carolina, where there is a huge African-American population that has tremendous influence in the Democratic primary. But Joe Biden is dominating in the polls there and that’s unlikely to change (or benefit Harris if it does) if she does poorly in the first three contests.
She needs a win before South Carolina, or at least a much-better-than-expected result that gives people a reason to see her as a real option. Iowa is probably her best bet for accomplishing that.
According to an Iowa poll by Harris’ chief pollster, David Binder, released by Focus on Rural America, Klobuchar has jumped ahead of Harris in the Hawkeye State, in fifth place behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders after the third presidential debate in Houston.
Since the end of 2018, Klobuchar and Harris have jumped back and forth with one another in this particular poll. Harris had 10% support in September, while Klobuchar did not chart. By December, Klobuchar had 10% support and Harris dropped to 7%.
Harris jumped ahead of Klobuchar again in March by 3 points and following the California Democrat’s strong debate performance in Miami, after excoriating former Vice President Joe Biden, she received 18% support from Iowans in the poll, leap frogging into third place.
Klobuchar, on the other hand, spiraled downward at the time to the low single digits before rebounding to her current 8%.
Harris is an unlikable phony. Klobuchar, on the other hand, is just genuinely unlikable.
We’re swiftly marching into 2020, and as of right now, the Democrat party is in crisis with its 2020 candidates doing everything they can to appease the radical trend that has taken it over as Democrat leadership attempts to keep the party as centered as it possibly can.
It’s a war that is going to keep the left busy as the right continues to sail right through the election period with little to no difficulty. The great thing about O’Rourke’s comments is that, as Coons suggested, it will haunt Democrats going forward, specifically into 2020. O’Rourke essentially gave Democrats another problem to deal with, and so long as he’s is in the race, he’ll continue to make more problems for Democrats to deal with when it comes to gun control.
What’s more, it’s putting Democrat leadership in the position to tell demonstrable lies, and lies that will get other Democrats who do support that measure of gun control to turn on Democrat leadership.
So long as O’Rourke is around, the Democrats will continue to be forced to fight one another, and continue to give Republicans more momentum. It’s a house divided that will fall in 2020.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say O’Rourke is a Republican plant.
Warren has begun to eclipse Sanders’s once-dominant standing among the Democratic Party’s most liberal voters and surpass him in some polls in the first two states in the nominating process: Iowa and New Hampshire.
They both support what would be a massive economic restructuring with ideas such as Medicare-for-all, but Sanders, 78, has carved out his brand as a democratic socialist while Warren, 70, has described herself as a capitalist who has operated more as part of the Democratic mainstream. While Sanders drew notice in 2016 for his avid fans and big crowds, it is Warren this time who is gaining traction that way.
These challenges have been compounded by volatility inside Sanders’s operations in Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign quietly fired its Iowa political director in the late summer and has yet to name a replacement — a key vacancy as the race enters a crucial phase, with less than five months to go before the February caucuses.
Sanders’s difficulties in Iowa have come into sharper focus over the weekend. The most respected pollster in the state released a survey late Saturday showing Warren surging to 22 percent, two points ahead of former vice president Joe Biden, with Sanders at 11 percent. That places him third in the state where he fought Hillary Clinton to a near draw in 2016, launching an electrifying national movement.
Other Democratic presidentialcandidates have visited mosques on the campaign trail this year or spoken to Muslim groups. But Sanders has done it first and done it bigger, building on relationships with Muslim communities that took off during his previous presidential campaign, said Youssef Chouhoud, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University who studies the role of Muslims in politics.
“Historically, engaging with Muslims when you’re seeking federal office has been seen as politically dangerous,” Chouhoud said. “Bernie Sanders seems to be doing something different.”
Since February, Sanders has named a Muslim to be his campaign manager, tapped a prominent Muslim Palestinian American activist as a surrogate and visited a Los Angeles mosque to commemorate the victims of a New Zealand terrorist massacre at two Islamic houses of worship.
Last month, he headlined the Islamic Society of North America convention in Houston, where he got a standing ovation for his promise to overturn President Trump’s travel ban blocking most visitors from five predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. It was the first time a presidential candidate addressed the largest and most prominent Muslim gathering in the country, and more than 7,000 people packed in to hear him.
Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, the only other presidential candidate to speak at the event, followed Sanders, but many in the crowd left after hearing the senator.
Sanders’ campaign representatives said they hope Muslims will help him repeat his 2016 Michigan primary win and capture other states. The campaign credited outreach to Michigan’s large Arab American and Muslim communities — including Arabic campaign ads — as a factor in his win there.
Muslims and Islamic organizations, meanwhile, have sought out Sanders, inviting him to talk to their communities, praising his policy positions and offering endorsements. Many have taken to social media to show their support, using the hashtags #Muslims4Bernie and #InshallahBernie.
Over the summer, Latif, the Bay Area supporter, launched the website “Iftars with Bernie.” The name refers to the meals at sundown that end the daily fast during Ramadan, when extended families and friends take turns eating and praying together in each others’ homes. The website encourages Muslims to share literature about the senator at the dinners.
“Muslims appreciate how he is giving them opportunities to be part of his movement,” said Cynthia Ubaldo, a physical therapist in Columbus, Ohio, who hosted a similar event for Eid, a holiday at the end of Ramadan. She passed out homemade “Muslims for Bernie 2020” pins decorated with stars and crescent moons to her 30 guests.
Snip.
Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist, is flying to Islamic conferences and mosques around the country to speak on Sanders’ behalf as a campaign surrogate. The co-founder of the Women’s March was among the leaders who left the group recently after infighting and accusations of anti-Semitism, which she has denied.
Sarsour says Sanders has attracted followers because of his response to Trump’s statements on Muslims and the conflict in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Part of the challenge for Steyer, at this stage, is that his ideology does not especially distinguish him from many of his competitors. Were he a moderate, his late entry in the race might seem clearer—to rope the Party back toward centrist pragmatism. Instead, Steyer has cast himself as an outsider capable of realizing even the most progressive campaign promises. “My basic thesis is that we have a broken government,” he told me, adding that the top three candidates in the polls have served in Congress or the Senate for about seventy years. “We have to stop the corporations’ stranglehold on this government. So, if that is the issue, the question is who’s going to be credible in terms of making that happen.”
In his early visits to Iowa, though, his bid has felt somewhat abstract. When, at the diner, he roved from table to table, asking Iowans to name their top policy concerns, the impression was of a cheery executive crowdsourcing his own priorities. During another stump speech on his swing, Steyer outlined the five priorities central to his political identity—voting-rights protections, a clean environment, a complete education, a living wage, and good health—and pointed out that none of the candidates at the previous night’s debate had brought up the climate crisis. He later told me that the first debates, which he found uninspiring, had contributed to his decision to run. “I felt they weren’t really getting down to the nub of what’s going on in the United States,” he said, of the other candidates. “I am categorically, qualitatively different, and, in my opinion, what I am saying is much more realistic and much more significant than anything they’re saying. As far as I’m concerned, I have a very simple task—not an easy task, but simple—to try and see if I have something important to say to the American people.”
On Friday, a few dozen people, mostly seniors, convened in Maquoketa for a town hall hosted by Bob Osterhaus, a pharmacist who served in the Iowa state legislature until 2004. Osterhaus has seen a number of politicians pass through his home, including Bill Bradley, Chris Dodd, and John Dean, who told Osterhaus’s wife that her cinnamon rolls were the best he’d ever had. “It’s always interesting when a rich man decides to get in and try to act like a commoner,” Osterhaus said of Steyer before the event.
In her first Senate race in Massachusetts, in 2012, Warren won by just 7.4 percent, while Barack Obama was carrying the top of the ticket by more than 23 percent. (Warren might have been facing the unique obstacle of being seen as a carpetbagger, but it’s worth noting that Obama was running against a former Massachusetts governor.) Six years later, Warren won reelection against a barely known opponent in a Democratic wave election. She won by a more commanding 24.1 percent, but still fell short of the 27.2 percent margin Hillary Clinton had amassed in that state in the much-less-favorable 2016 election year.
Election results are indicative, but not dispositive. No two races are alike, and it’s possible Warren’s traits translate better to a presidential election than to the Senate (or to a campaign against Donald Trump in 2020 than to the Republicans she faced in 2012 and 2018). A somewhat more subjective measure of her political appeal is the degree to which Warren’s platform tracks with popular opinion.
When she began positioning her candidacy last year, Warren seemed to consciously aim for the broad mainstream of her own party. While she formally had endorsed the Bernie Sanders health-care plan, she was promising more limited measures, which seemed to insulate her from its unpopular aspects like higher middle-class taxes and forcing everybody off employer-based insurance. She was also distancing herself from Sanders by labeling herself “capitalist to my bones,” and even pitching her most radical proposal, the “Accountable Capitalism Act,” as good for business in the long run in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
And Warren seemed also to understand the political appeal of policies that imposed their costs on corporations — both through taxes and through regulation — than on the public through general taxation. Her focus on corruption and corporate governance was substantively ambitious, but also presented a narrow target for attack — most voters are happy to stick costs on corporate America if they don’t worry about paying for new programs themselves. A year ago, I thought Warren had found the perfect sweet spot.
It didn’t work out that way. Despite an exhaustive Boston Globe report that her self-identification as Native American had never benefited her career, early media coverage fixated on the issue, and she drew scorn from left and right alike. To Democratic voters, she looked like another victim of Donald Trump’s bullying.
Months of dismal polling forced Warren to attract more attention from progressive activists and compete with Sanders for the energized left. She has thrust herself back into the conversation by releasing a blizzard of policy proposals, including a full-on embrace of Berniecare. Many of them poll quite well, though the totality of the programs — free college and debt forgiveness ($1.25 trillion over a decade), green energy investment ($2 trillion), universal child care ($700 billion), new housing subsidies ($500 billion), and Medicare for All (roughly $30 trillion) — would be impossible to fund entirely from the rich. Circa 2018, Warren had a strong case to make that she could avoid higher taxes on the middle class, but 2019 Warren couldn’t credibly make a promise like that without giving up most of her plans.
On top of all that, Warren has joined most of the field in embracing broadly unpopular stances that play well with progressive activists, like decriminalizing immigration enforcement, abolishing the death penalty, and providing health coverage to undocumented immigrants. Trump’s campaign clearly grasps that his only chance of success is to present the opposition as unacceptably radical, and the Democratic primary is giving him plenty of ammunition to make this case. (Trump has also stopped, for the moment, injecting his “Pocahontas” slur into the political news cycle, but that will return if she clinches the nomination.)
Ann Althouse has spotted the most embarrassing example of WaPo Warren sycophancy yet: “Frederick Douglass photos smashed stereotypes. Could Elizabeth Warren selfies do the same?” Sweet bleeding Jesus, do you have any idea how cringingly pathetic that makes you look? “Martin Luther King helped lift black Americans up to freedom. Could Wheaties do the same?” Matt drudge thinks it’s Warren’s nomination to lose. She and Biden joined UAW picket lines.
The more voters learned more about her, the less they seemed to like her. According to an analysis by my colleague Nathaniel Rakich, Williamson’s name recognition is up, but her net favorability ratings are down. She now actually has negative net favorability, a dubious honor she shares only with mayor of New York Bill de Blasio and former Rep. Joe Sestak. And her failure to resonate with an audience that might have been receptive to her message — “spiritual but not religious” Americans — also reflects the difficulty of reaching a group that’s defined largely by what it’s not.
According to the Pew Research Center, about one-third of Democrats identify as “spiritual but not religious” — an amorphous identity that has a lot in common with Williamson’s nondenominational spiritual practice. She identifies as Jewish and still attends High Holiday services, but she also practices transcendental meditation. She rose to prominence as a commentator and teacher of “A Course In Miracles,” a mystical book published in 1976 whose author claimed to be dictating revelations from Jesus.
“She’s really the definition of spiritual but not religious,” said Laura Olson, a political science professor at Clemson University, about Williamson. “In that sense, she represents — and you’d think might be able to reach — a very sizeable group of Americans.”
Depending on how you measure it, between one-fifth and one-third of Americans identify as “spiritual but not religious.” It’s a group whose numbers have grown in recent years, as more and more people draw away from institutional religion. And like Williamson, most of the “spiritual but not religious” maintain some kind of link to an organized faith tradition. In fact, according to Pew, they’re about as likely to identify as Protestant as they are to say they’re religiously unaffiliated. But perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority are not churchgoers, nor do they necessarily have a strong sense of communal identity or group cohesion. And here we run into the hurdle that makes outreach to the less-religious and the non-religious perennially tricky for Democrats: It’s hard to marshal a group that doesn’t think of itself as a group.
Williamson’s followers seem to be people who want meaning in their lives, and who reject the materialist vision of finite human life as a briefly flickering candle in a howling void of meaningless existential nothingness, but also don’t want to believe in something as unfashionable as Christianity. She wants mandatory national service to combat climate changes. Way to draw in that youth vote! Evidently she “didn’t challenge” a 9/11 truther in a 2012 interview. Meh, that’s a pretty limp gotcha.
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:
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead) Things that make you go “Hmmm“: “John Hickenlooper’s exit from the presidential race came on the same day he would have had to file his financial disclosure forms with the Office of Government Ethics.”
The State Department revealed in a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that it had identified “multiple security incidents” committed by current or former employees who handled Hillary Clinton’s emails, according to Fox News.
So far 23 “violations” and seven “infractions” have been issued as a part of the department’s ongoing investigation – a number that will likely rise according to State Department Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, Mary Elizabeth Taylor.
“To this point, the Department has assessed culpability to 15 individuals, some of whom were culpable in multiple security incidents,” said Taylor in the letter to Grassley, adding “DS has issued 23 violations and 7 infractions incidents. … This number will likely change as the review progresses.”
The Democratic National Committee has a money problem. And that could hurt its nominee’s chances of beating President Donald Trump in 2020.
In the first four months of 2019, the party spent more than it raised and added $3 million in new debt. In the same period, its Republican counterpart was stockpiling cash.
Snip.
Whoever wins the party’s nomination will rely heavily on the DNC in the general election for organizing, identifying voters and getting them to the polls. That will ultimately cost hundreds of millions of dollars by Election Day, but the party needs to spend early to prepare, which is why it’s been borrowing money. It’s also sending out fundraising appeals under the presidential candidates’ names, something it’s never done before.
“It’s trouble, it’s going to affect us,” said Allan Berliant, a Cincinnati-based Democratic bundler, who says the party needs to open offices and get boots on the ground around the country. “All of that starts with fundraising,” he said.
Party officials and fundraisers blamed the deficiency on several factors, and chief among them is competition from the 23 Democrats who are running for president and vacuuming up contributors’ cash. Giving to the party isn’t as compelling as supporting the presidential hopefuls, said John Morgan, an Orlando-based trial attorney and Democratic fundraiser.
“Do you want to fix up the barn or do you want to bet on the horses?” he said.
But major donors also pointed to the perception of some contributors that the national party is disorganized – a hangover from the 2016 election. The growing schism between the old-guard establishment and the younger, activist wing could be discouraging donors, too, they said.
By the end of April, the DNC had collected contributions of more than $24.4 million, but had spent $28.4 million, according to the latest disclosures. It had $7.6 million cash on hand, $1 million less than in January. It posted $6.2 million in debt, including bank loans and unpaid invoices to vendors, Federal Election Commission records show.
It seems like I link some variation of this story every year.
The Democratic ex-staffer who doxxed several Republican senators after disapproving of their handling of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation will be going to jail for four years.
Jackson Cosko, a 27-year-old former staffer for Sen. Maggie Hassan (D., N.H.), was arrested last October for leaking the phone numbers and home addresses of Republican senators Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), and Mike Lee (Utah). The information was briefly posted on the senators’ Wikipedia pages before being taken down.
Cosko was working for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas) at the time of his arrest, and was immediately fired.
Jackson Cosko was sentenced Wednesday to four years in prison. Prosecutors called his offense an “extraordinary” and “vicious” crime where the ex-Democratic aide stole a senator’s data, mined it for blackmail material and then published the home addresses and phone numbers of Republican senators during the 2018 hearings for now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Even after the computer administrator was caught in the act and arrested for spying on a senator’s office using his advanced technical skills, Capitol Police didn’t check the USB ports of nearby computers. Six different computers within steps of where he was arrested in the Senate had keylogger devices in them that continued to capture and beam private information over WiFi. They were only exposed through a confession.
Police then got a search warrant on his home, but missed critical evidence because they didn’t check the oven.
I worry that our desire to fix the past compromises our ability to fix the present. Think about what we’re doing today. We’re spending our time debating a bill that mentions slavery 25 times but incarceration only once, in an era with zero black slaves but nearly a million black prisoners—a bill that doesn’t mention homicide once, at a time when the Center for Disease Control reports homicide as the number one cause of death for young black men. I’m not saying that acknowledging history doesn’t matter. It does. I’m saying there’s a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today.
In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.
“This is his worst treason since his last worst treason!” they thundered. “This is even more treasonous than when The Bad Orange Man called us ‘traitors’ for our treachery after we called him ‘traitor’ for two years!”
They got really, really upset. Fake upset, of course, but they committed to the bit and kept straight faces. And you know that Trump pulled the pin on that hand grenade of truth on purpose in order to make the dummies explode just like they did.
You have to wonder if the garbage elite really thinks their brand of blatant hypocrisy disguised as moral outrage works, or if this is just a reflexive response to a president who not only sees them for the useless slugs they are, but says so.
My apologies to slugs. I am not slugist.
Still, do any of them truly think that we Normals will listen to them sounding off about the perfidy of perhaps considering the possibility of maybe accepting dirt on their freak show candidates from outsiders and not recall that Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit famously did just that with the pee-pee dossier, or that Adam Schiff got punked by a couple of Russian Howard Stern wannabeskis offering him pics of the POTUS au natural?
When Staggers O’Cankles does it, it’s cool? When Congressman Leaky does it, it’s fine? Yet when Trump says he might do exactly what they did, it’s the greatest betrayal of our Values, our Constitution and our Democracy since his last greatest betrayal of our Values, our Constitution and our Democracy, which happened last week?
Snip.
To the extent our modern elite had retained any residual credibility from back in the distant past when our elite wasn’t totally corrupt and incompetent, that goodwill has been squandered in the wake of its war to crush Trump, which is actually a war to crush us and restore the elite’s unchallenged power.
We watch them do X as they tell us to do Y, and they expect us to accept it. Maybe that’s not a completely unreasonable expectation. A lot of goofy, submissive alleged conservatives from Conservative, Inc., have accepted that 2 + 2 =5. The whole cruise-shilling set loves Big Gender-Neutral Sibling and eagerly joins in the phony festivals of fake fury. Last week, social media was packed with these bitter pills fulminating about TRUMP TRAITOR TREASON. And, probably, the geebos at The Bulwark ran with it too, not that anyone would know except the donors Bill Kristol somehow suckered into funding that cesspool floater of a blog.
Everything they tell us reeks of hypocrisy, like the ever-changing rules about our Glorious Public Servants. When some bureaucrat parrots the party line, we’re supposed to defer. When one fails to parrot correctly, we’re supposed to scream that he’s in contempt of Congress.
How Republicans can retake the House in 2020. “The Republicans need to flip only 18 seats in 2020 to regain control of that body — and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has already identified nearly twice that number of vulnerable Democrats in districts won by President Trump during the last presidential election.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Will Oberlin Learn Its Lesson? Short answer: No, they won’t.”
David French brings the requisite amount of wood in stating how the Oberlin College judgment provides a blueprint to fight back. Maybe because Trump isn’t involved. But one wonders why neither the phrase “Social Justice Warriors” nor the word “woke” appears in the piece.
….proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!
Both Iran and Trump are playing the long game.” “Iran’s recent attacks signal weakness and desperation, not strength and assurance…Most of the oil passing through Hormuz (about 11/17ths) is bound for the Straits of Malacca en route to China, Japan and Korea. If Tehran actually closed the Straits, by mining it for example, they would essentially be blockading China.”
The United States then ramped up sanctions on the Iranian theocracy to try to ensure that it stopped nuclear enrichment. The Trump administration also hoped a strapped Iran would become less capable of funding terrorist operations in the Middle East and beyond, proxy wars in the Persian Gulf, and the opportune harassment of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The sanctions are clearly destroying an already weak Iranian economy. Iran is now suffering from negative economic growth, massive unemployment and record inflation.
A desperate Iranian government is using surrogates to send missiles into Saudi Arabia while its forces attack ships in the Gulf of Oman.
Snip.
Time, then, is on the Americans’ side. But it is certainly not on the side of a bankrupt and impoverished Iran that either must escalate or face ruin.
If Iran starts sinking ships or attacking U.S. assets, Trump can simply replay the ISIS strategy of selective off-and-on bombing. The United States did not lose a single pilot to enemy action.
Translated, that would mean disproportionately replying to each Iranian attack on a U.S. asset with a far more punishing air response against an Iranian base or port. The key would be to avoid the use of ground troops and yet not unleash a full-fledged air war. Rather, the United States would demonstrate to the world that Iranian aggression determines the degree to which Iran suffers blows from us.
It’s unfortunate that social media not only makes informed debate more difficult on their platforms, but also, it seems, rewires people’s brains in such a fashion as to make such debate more difficult everywhere else. This is made worse by the fact that Twitter in particular seems to be most heavily used by the very people – pundits, political journalists, the intelligentsia – most vital to the sort of debate that Emerson saw as essential.
In fact, the corruption of the political/intellectual class by social media is particularly serious, since their descent into thoughtless polarization can then spread to the rest of the population, even that large part that doesn’t use social media itself, through traditional channels. Writing on why Twitter is worse than it seems, David French observes that even though its user base is smaller than most other social media, those users are particularly influential:
But in public influence Twitter punches far above its weight. Why? Because it’s where cultural kingmakers congregate, and thus where conventional wisdom is formed and shaped — often instantly and thoughtlessly.
In other words, Twitter is where the people who care the most spend their time. The disproportionate influence of microbursts of instant public comments from a curated set of people these influencers follow shapes their writing and thinking and conduct way beyond the platform.
Hong Kong stages huge demonstration against new communist Chinese extradition laws:
This time lapse gives an idea of the size of the Hong-Kong demonstration on Sunday. 2 million demonstrated (for a population of 7 million). pic.twitter.com/4thz4QBsX7
Texas Governor Greg Abbott didn’t use a single line-item veto on any item in the Texas budget. There’s been a lot of grumbling that the recently completed legislative session didn’t hold the line on spending and failed to enact several conservative priorities.
Banning plastic bags won’t save the planet. “Research from 2015 shows that less than 5 per cent of land-based plastic waste going into the ocean comes from OECD countries, with half coming from just four countries: China, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam.” Also: “You must reuse an organic cotton shopping bag 20,000 times before it will have less environmental damage than a plastic bag.” (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“Down here, voter fraud is not all that unusual,” says Monte, a city planning consultant in a brown suit jacket, sitting with other activists at a table in Coffee Zone on McColl Road. “It’s unusual when they get prosecuted.”
Now, for this south Texas town, that unusual moment has arrived. A November 2017 mayoral election has been under scrutiny from local and state officials, and 19 arrests have been made over alleged voter fraud. The mayor—and winner of the 2017 election—was indicted earlier this month, along with his wife.
Only 8,400 votes were cast in the mayoral election, and Mayor Richard Molina’s final vote count was more than 1,200 votes ahead of the No. 2 candidate, 14-year incumbent Richard Garcia. From what’s known now, the election result couldn’t have been changed by the number of suspicious votes identified.
But Molina reportedly is the first elected official in Texas to face a felony charge under a 2017 statute against vote harvesting, casting the midsize city into the national debate over election integrity.
In case you were worried that Democrats had a monopoly on all the bad ideas, the Tampa Bay Rays are considering spending half their time in Montreal. Because nothing says “well thought-out idea” like 1,500 miles between home games…
“Florida man says he had sex with stolen pool toys instead of raping women.” Uh…you can buy pool toys, dude…
The Edge wanted to live where the streets have no name, but thanks to the California Supreme Court’s ruling, he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.
“Say anything you want about this president – I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights.”
Remember the multi-million dollar corruption scandal involving UAW officials? Apparently, it was even more corrupt than previously reported. While the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center is suing both Fiat Chrysler and the union members involved, recent developments point to the money scheme being greenlit by former UAW President Dennis Williams.
As part of a plea agreement filed this week, ex-labor official Nancy Adams Johnson told investigators that Williams specifically directed union members to use funds from Detroit’s automakers, funneled through training centers, to pay for union travel, meals, entertainment, and more. If true, the accusation not only implicates the UAW of corruption at the highest level but also the potential involvement of staff from both Ford and General Motors — something the FBI is already looking into.
I believe the official industry term for something like this is a “shit show.”
Alt-right protestors call black police officers “f**king n****r” in Portland protest. Oh, wait, did I say “alt-right”? I meant “anti-ICE.” (Hat tip: Derek Hunter on Twitter.)
Retired Sgt. Maj. John Canley received a phone call from President Donald Trump telling him he was receiving the Medal of Honor for his heroism in the Battle of Hue in 1968.
Masculine fathers raise strong daughters. Plus this: “A glance at the public figures felled in the #MeToo purges—not to mention Bill Clinton —should cure us of the idea that progressive politics incline men to better treatment of women.”
“Sexual inequality makes marriage work.” Marriages work better when the husband earns more. Also: “The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.”
UK father who raped and fathered three children with his own daughter sentenced to only four years in jail. Guess the ethnicity of the rapist. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
American semiconductor company Qualcomm’s merger with Dutch company NXP collapses after regulatory approval withheld…by China. Earlier this year, Qualcomm’s attempted merger with Broadcomm was blocked by the Trump Administration.
Facebook just lost $120 billion in market cap. How about they stop worrying about censoring the news and stop switching the view from “Most Recent” to “Top Stories”?
Allegations of vote fraud in Mission mayoral runoff in Hidalgo County.
President Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Trans Pacific Trade Partnership agreement, as both he and Hillary Clinton promised to do on the campaign trail. (We can speculate that Clinton was just lying, and that she would happily flip-flop and sign TPP once safely ensconced in office, but the glorious thing is that now we’ll never know.)
Free trade is a good idea, and multinational free trade agreements do generally help grow the economy. My suspicion is that TPP probably would have provided a net benefit, albeit it one that might be hard to measure if you weren’t employed in an industry (like apparel) called out by TPP. Vietnam and Malaysia were included, so maybe my sneakers would have gotten slightly cheaper.
But the question of whether this particular free trade treaty was actually a good or bad thing requires actually analyzing and reading the thing, and I have to give that a pass. For the historical record, here’s the cached text of the Trans Pacific Trade Partnership agreement. I didn’t have time to read that gargantuan tome of trade minutia back when it was a going concern, and I’m certainly not going to now. It’s less a platonic ideal of free trade ripped from the quill of Adam Smith and more a vast dog’s breakfast of competing special interest requests that, on the whole, probably nudges trade in a slightly freer direction while scratching numerous well-heeled backs.
Trump is not necessarily opposed to trade agreements in principle, but seeks more bilateral trade agreements than multinational ones. There were real concerns about TPP (especially in the areas of copyright agreements, labor laws, environmental regulations, and enshrinement of certain dodgy foreign part content requirements into law) that could be addressed in smaller bilateral agreements. The Washington Examiner suggests that a bilateral trade agreement with the UK should be at the top of Trump’s list.
Trump invited a lot of union leaders to the White House to help dance on TPP’s grave, and he garnered lavish praise from the likes of the UAW and the Teamsters (the still-breathing Jimmy Hoffa the Younger) for the move.
Setting aside the fact that the UAW probably did far more than Japanese competition to cripple the U.S. auto industry, imagine if Trump were able to get private sector unions to not even flip their support to Republicans, but just significantly cut back their campaign donations to Democrats. That would cripple their fundraising at a time when they’re already hurting for being completely out of power and for alienating Jewish Americans (traditionally a key Democratic Party funding constituency) over Israel. That could be a big domestic political positive even if ditching TPP is theoretically a small net economic negative.
Another roundup of tab-clearing news, much of which got pushed aside by Ukraine updates:
Obama Administration admits that ObamaCare will screw small businesses. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) Why are any Republicans futzing around with any fix but full repeal?
Bobby Jindal: “Obamacare is giving low-income Americans fewer reasons to work.”
How ObamaCare is turning into the Democrats’ own forever war.
Michael Totten points out that Che Guevara is a murderous communist scumbag. Bonus: “Cuba’s maximum wage is less than one percent of America’s minimum wage”
Portugal decriminalized all drugs 11 years ago. Result? Addiction cut in half, and “Portugal’s drug usage rates are now among the lowest of EU member states.”
Sarah Hoyt further dissects Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America idiocy. She touches on many of the reasons I didn’t renew my membership, the main ones being that SFWA is no longer important enough to be worth fighting for, and was certainly not worth $90 a year in dues.
This wasn’t merely one more failed union organizing attempt. The UAW and its chief Bob King spent years working toward this vote as part of its strategy to organize plants in the American South, and all the stars were aligned in its favor.
Mr. King colluded with IG Metall, Volkswagen’s German union, to neutralize Volkswagen management. It pitched the collaborative vision of a labor-management “works council” at the plant that makes the VW Passat, and it claimed to have learned its lesson from the confrontation and strikes that hurt Detroit’s auto makers. Volkswagen management gave the union the run of the plant to lobby workers while denying similar privileges to union opponents.
So it’s nothing short of remarkable that the union couldn’t make the sale. The failure reflects how well the plant’s workers are doing without a union, to the tune of $27 an hour including benefits. The defeat also speaks to the harm the UAW has done to itself by driving GM and Chrysler to bankruptcy and pushing companies like Caterpillar to move new production from union plants.
Reports make it appear that unionized workers would actually end up taking $3 an hour less home after union dues were deducted. Gee, who could possibly turn down such a bounty?
Said one worker: “‘Look at every company that’s went bankrupt or shut down or had an issue,’ he said. ‘What is the one common denominator with all those companies? UAW. We don’t need it.'”
More from the Wall Street journal editorial:
But the fact that unions must rely on brute government force shows how out of touch they are with modern economic reality. American manufacturing is making a modest comeback with the help of rising labor costs in China and the American energy revolution. But it could stage an even bigger revival without the threat that unions could once again make American production uncompetitive. The last thing the U.S. economy needs is to import European labor practices. In Chattanooga, and not for the first time, the workers are smarter than management.
For all the talk of “Republican interference” (local Tennessee elected officials like Senator Bob Corker opposed the unionization), little mention has been made of President Obama’s sticky fingers.
We are already among the highest paid in the region and, when compared to UAW-represented employees at the Detroit Three with the same length of service, VW Team Members make more.
The UAW is increasing union dues by 25% to fund a strike against Detroit automakers. The UAW will use our money to fund their strike after years of irresponsible spending (e.g., the UAW golf course and Las Vegas conventions). Remember, about half of the money you pay to the UAW will be sent directly to the union in Detroit.
The UAW wanted to unionize us without an election. When that failed, behind closed doors, they got VW to agree to a 9-day “ambush” election, giving UAW organizers dispatched from Detroit access to our plant.
Unions are the single biggest source of funds for Democratic causes and candidates.
According to Opensecrets.org, of the top ten political donors in the last 25 years, six are unions. And they all overwhelmingly donated to Democratic causes and candidates. The UAW, for instance, has donated $41.7 million over the last 25 years. That’s well over twice what the infamous Koch brothers have donated, mostly to Republican causes. (The Koch brothers actually gave 8 percent of their money to Democratic causes and candidates.)
Of the UAW’s donations, 71 percent went to Democrats and zero percent went to Republicans. The other 29 percent went to organizations not formally affiliated with either party but it’s a safe bet they are left-leaning. Unions can also mobilize large numbers of “volunteers” for phone banks and get-out-the-vote efforts.
Thus, unions have such a disproportionate influence over the Democratic Party for the simplest of reasons: they buy it. How much longer that will continue is a good question. There is no reason to think that the long-term decline in the private sector will not continue. And in places where union dues are no longer collected by governments (such as in Wisconsin), public sector union members have been leaving in droves. Obviously, they don’t think they have been getting value for their money. That is also a trend that is likely to spread.
