Why Ask Huawei?

January 29th, 2019

The long-delayed hammer of justice finally descended on Chinese telecom manufacturer Huawei:

U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges against Huawei, China’s largest smartphone maker, alleging it stole trade secrets from an American rival and committed bank fraud by violating sanctions against doing business with Iran. In a 13-count indictment unsealed in Brooklyn on Monday afternoon, the government alleged Huawei, two affiliated companies and its chief financial officer engaged in fraud and conspiracy in connection with deals in Iran.

A separate 10-count indictment in Seattle accused the company of stealing trade secrets from T-Mobile USA Inc. and offering bonuses to employees who succeeded in getting technology from rivals.

Snip.

The DOJ formally announced it was seeking the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the company’s founder, who was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1 on allegations that she committed fraud to sidestep sanctions against Iran. She has since become a flash-point in trade tensions between the U.S. and China; her release by the US and Canada was expected by some commentators who were confident the US would send a signal of goodwill to the US; instead Trump appears to be escalating the crackdown against Chinese technological theft.

Meng remains free in Vancouver, staying at her $4.2 million mansion with GPS monitoring, after posting bail of C$10 million ($7.5 million) as she fights extradition to the U.S. to face criminal charges.

The U.S., which had requested Canadian authorities arrest Meng, had to submit a formal extradition request by Jan. 30, which it did today. Canada’s justice minister now has up to 30 days to assess it. If she issues an “authority to proceed,” that means Canada is officially moving to extradition hearings. If so, they would likely be scheduled months later, even as relations between the US and China implode.

The Meng arrest really rattled the cages of China’s ruling elite, and is causing all sorts of friction between China and Canada.

The fact that China’s government aides and abets intellectual property theft, including industrial espionage, is well documented, and the Trump Administration is right to go after it.

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for January 28, 2019

January 28th, 2019

This week in the clown car update: South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is In, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is All But In, and Bobby Francis O’Rourke is sounding a lot more Hamlet-like than heretofore. And a very, very familiar name is once again making noises about a run…

According to this Zogby poll, everything is coming up Milhouse Biden. Biden leads field with 27%, well ahead of Sanders (18%), Warren (9%), Bloomberg (8%), with Harris and O’Rourke at 6%. McAuliffe, Gabbard and Castro all poll at 0%, behind even John Delaney at 1%.

In an Emerson poll of announced candidates, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren leads the field with 43%, Sen. Kamala Harris is at 19%, and Julian Castro is at 12%, with no other candidate reaching double digits.”

538 has their weeekly update of candidate and potential candidate doings. I haven’t looked at it much because that would be cheating.

Oh, and former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says he’s considering an independent run for President. That would spice things up nicely, and Democrats are livid the he might split the anti-Trump vote. His net worth is estimated at just under $3 billion, so he could probably self-fund a serious run.

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Probably Out.
  • Creepy Porn lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: “I’m thinking about it.” Oh thanks, that’s just super-helpful…
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning toward running. Twitter feed. Here’s an Esquire piece that says Biden should run so he can lose badly for his perfidious gestures towards bipartisanship…
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Making noises like he’s getting in. No announcement, but this week he did some Trump bashing, so of course the media covered it. If he runs it will be on climate change and gun control, which may not be enough intersectional tofu for the SJW faction. He does well in a Quinnipiac poll of New Yorkers.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: Probably in. This week Vanity Fair critiques Booker’s style. To be fair, there’s a lot there to critique, but I also get the impression that the media want to knock a potential rival for Kamala Harris’ presumed voting block out early.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Probably running. He’s boasting about how he could beat Trump in Ohio and New York. Since Hillary beat Trump in New York, the latter is not much of a boast…
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Leaning toward In, but is reportedly going to wait until Montana’s legislative session finishes, which would be May 1.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Official website. Facebook page. Twitter feed. Announced this week. First openly gay Presidential candidate to garner any media attention. Served in the Naval Reserve in Afghanistan. Here’s 538 doing the how he could win thing, but even they sound dubious: “Among adults who identified as Democrats, 73 percent of respondents supported gay marriage, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey. Independents were close behind at 70 percent. But the same research found support for gay marriage at 51 percent among black adults, an important part of the Democratic coalition.”
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter feed. He hates the fact that you got a tax cut. Also, NBC does some Hispandering about the “historic” nature of his campaign, without ever mentioning the name “Ted Cruz.”
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Maybe? “Clinton is telling people that she’s not closing the doors to the idea of running in 2020,” Zeleny said on Inside Politics. “I’m told by three people that as recently as this week, she was telling people that, given all this news from the indictments, particularly the Roger Stone indictment, she talked to several people, saying ‘Look, I’m not closing the doors to this.'” Fire up the villager’s torches, boys, Baroness Frankenstein is trying to break out of her crypt! (Hat tip: Red State’s Twitter feed.) Upgrade from “Probably Out.”
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Out.
  • New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Maybe. “De Blasio Dead Last Among NYers’ Picks For President, Poll Shows.” To know him is to loath him…
  • Maryland Representative John K. Delaney: In. “Democratic 2020 presidential candidate John Delaney on Thursday earned the approval of the Nashua Telegraph’s editorial board in New Hampshire.” That and $5…
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. The left-wing hit pieces against Gabbard are coming fast and furious. “Is Tulsi Gabbard the Jill Stein of 2020? The Democratic candidate’s perplexing, Bannonesque foreign policy and passivity toward Assad may make her radioactive. And then there is the homophobia.” Man, she sure has somebody (probably the Harris campaign) worried…
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Leaning toward a run, and he managed to cave in enough to end the teacher’s strike.
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Official website. Official Twitter feed. “Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is a Bizarrely Wretched Public Speaker. Finally a Woman Who Makes Hillary Clinton Look Authentic by Comparison!”
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter feed. Had a kickoff rally in Oakland. She’s stacking her campaign with ex-Hillary Clinton staffers. Because there’s no way that could possibly backfire.

  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Probably in. In Iowa.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. He wants to run on climate change, but he’s having to deal with a measles outbreak in his state.
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Leaning toward In. “Twenty Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Amy Klobuchar.” “One of her most influential mentors is former vice president Walter Mondale.” And if that doesn’t say “Electoral Juggernaut”…
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Maybe.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run. “I will make a decision by March 31.”
  • Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley: Maybe. “Oregon senator postpones decision on presidential bid.”
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Considering a run. Headed back to New Hampshire February 2nd.
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama: Out.
  • Addition: Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Dropped Out. I wasn’t including this guy because I didn’t think he had any chance, and evidently he came to the same conclusion. Listing him here only because he was included in that Emerson poll.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Maybe? The machine is in place, but where’s the driver? He’s starting to sound a lot more Hamlet-like. “Beto O’Rourke said Friday that it could take him months to decide whether to run for president, adding that he does not want to ‘raise expectations” about a 2020 bid.” Sure doesn’t sound like someone with a fire in the belly to run. Downgrade from Probably In.
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan: Doubtful. I’m not seeing any signs of a run.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: All but In. Website. Twitter feed. Reports say he is “set to announce he will run for president in 2020.”
  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning toward In. “Can we win? There is a path. It’s not an easy path. It’s a steep mountain to climb and I’m up for it. Right now, I have to talk with my family.” Also says there’s a “chance” he could quarterback the Rams next year.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. She wants an unconstitutional wealth tax. In a sign that America’s opioid epidemic has gotten out of hand, George Will calls Warren “Democrat’s Thatcher, if they dare.” Trump Derangement Syndrome is a helluva drug…
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Running but no one cares. Yet here’s a Rolling Stone interview with him, because I run a full service blog. “In a year when the progressive Democratic platform is coalescing around variations of Medicare-for-All, free college and the Green New Deal, presidential candidate Andrew Yang stands apart — with a bold proposal to provide a ‘Freedom Dividend’ of $1,000 a month to every adult in America.” I look forward to the forthcoming Yang Free Pony Proposal…
  • Westboro Baptist Church For Thee, But Not For Me

    January 27th, 2019

    Remember the Westboro Baptist Church? They were a tiny band of idiots who traveled the country protesting gay rights at military funerals for some damn reason. The mainstream media reported constantly on their stupid antics as a means to smear, by implication, any Republican opposition to any liberal culture war issue. The national media is always looking for such a group to puff up in importance as a designated hate object to smear Republicans and promote cohesion among the Democratic Paarty’s fractious factions.

    That’s what the national media tried to do with the Covington Catholic kids: Conjure up a hate group of Otherness representing strains of thought (Catholic orthodoxy, Trump supporters) that threaten the goals of the Democratic Party, no matter that they were teenagers. ironically, there was a group at the Lincoln Monument that day whose beliefs and actions recall the Westboro Baptist Church, but it wasn’t the Covington kids.

    Andrew Sullivan, who watched all the videos of the incident so you don’t have to, has the scoop:

    What I saw was extraordinary bigotry, threats of violence, hideous misogyny, disgusting racism, foul homophobia, and anti-Catholicism — not by the demonized schoolboys, but by grown men with a bullhorn, a small group of self-styled Black Hebrew Israelites. They’re a fringe sect — but an extremely aggressive one — known for inflammatory bigotry in public. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group: “strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic.” They scream abuse at gays, women, white people, Jews, interracial couples, in the crudest of language. In their public display of bigotry, they’re at the same level as the Westboro Baptist sect: shockingly obscene. They were the instigators of the entire affair.

    And yet the elite media seemed eager to downplay their role, referring to them only in passing, noting briefly that they were known to be anti-Semitic and anti-gay. After several days, the New York Times ran a news analysis on the group by John Eligon that reads like a press release from the sect: “They shout, use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments aimed at drawing listeners near.” He notes that “they group people based on what they call nations, believing that there are 12 tribes among God’s chosen people. White people are not among those tribes, they believe, and will therefore be servants when Christ returns to Earth.” Nothing to see here, folks. Just a bunch of people preaching the enslavement of another race in public on speakers in the most inflammatory language imaginable.

    Eligon actually writes: “Whatever tensions are sparked by Hebrew Israelite teaching, some adherents chalk that up to people being unwilling to accept uncomfortable doctrine.” The Washington Post ran a Style section headline about “the calculated art of making people uncomfortable.” In a news story entirely about the Black Israelites, the Washington Post did not quote a single thing they had said on the tape, gave a respectful account of their theology, and only mentioned their status as a “hate group” in the 24th paragraph, and put the term in scare quotes. Vox managed to write an explainer that also did not include a single example of any of the actual insults hurled at the Covington kids. Countless near-treatises were written parsing the layers of bigotry inside a silent schoolboy’s smirk.

    Here’s what I saw on the full tape: a small group of aggressive, hateful men using a bullhorn to broadcast the crudest of racial slurs, backed up by recitations of Bible verses. I saw a young Native American woman make the mistake of engaging them. When she stood her ground, she was suddenly interrupted: “You’re out of order. Where’s your husband? Where’s your husband? Let me speak to him.” On the tape, you can hear the commentary from another member of the Black Israelites: “You see this? This is the problem, Israel. It’s always our women coming up with their loud mouth, thinking they can run and bogart things, thinking they can come and distract things with their loud-ass mouth, because they’re not used to dealing with real men. You think we’re supposed to bow down to your damn emotions when you come around here and run your mouth and distract what we’re doing instead of coming here with order … She’s coming around here being wicked.”

    Wait, there’s more. Hollering through a bullhorn at a group of Native Americans, the speaker boomed: “You ain’t no child of God. You are the Indian. You are a blue-eyed demon. That’s the last Mohican.” Then: “You’re still worshipping totem poles. You out of your mind! You have to repent. You worship the buffalo. You worship the eagle. You worship the phoenix. These are the idols you’ve been worshipping. A damn buffalo ain’t gonna save you. You worship the creations and not the creator … That’s why you’re drunkards in the casinos and the damn plantation.” Another: “Dumb-ass niggers. Bunch of demons. You’re a bunch of Uncle Tomahawks.” They snarled the word “savages” at Native Americans. The yelling was deafening, aggressive, vile, and threatening. But an inscrutable smile by a white teen was enough for some elite liberals to urge punching a schoolboy in the face.

    Here is how the Black Israelites verbally assaulted the schoolboys: “Bring your cracker ass up here. Dirty ass crackers, your day coming. We can give a hell about your police. No one’s playing with these dusty-ass crackers.” Another: “Don’t get too close or your ass gonna get punished … You crackers are some slithery ass bastards. You better keep your distance.” And this, surveying the scene: “I see you, a bunch of incest babies … Babies made out of incest. If you’re the great damn nation, get rid of the lice on your back. … You’re a bunch of hyenas. You outnumber us but you keep your distance. You couldn’t touch us if you wanted to. You worship blasphemy.”

    So not only are these “Black Hebrew Israelites” as poisonous as the Westboro Baptist Church, they’re demonstrably more so, adding racism, sexism and anti-American Indian animus ala mode on top of Westboro’s anti-gay pie. Yet where’s the endless coverage of Black Hebrew Israelite nastiness that the Westboro Baptist Church received for their professional irritant demonstrations? Nowhere. And we all know the reason why: As black people, their Democratic coalition and Victimhood Identity Politics standing puts them beyond criticism. They won’t be demonized for their lunatic beliefs because that demonization isn’t helpful in smearing the Republican Party, Catholics or Trump supporters. It’s the same reason Louis Farrakhan and Nation of Islam don’t get regular coverage of their lunatic beliefs. As Sullivan says in that essay: “This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it….Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism.”

    Though numbers are hard to come by, Black Hebrew Israelites probably outnumber the Westboro Baptist Church, who seemed to have a maximum membership of 40 people, by some 2-4 orders of magnitude. According to Wikiedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, there are multiple locations of multiple churches: Commandment Keepers, African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, Church of the Living God, Church of God and Saints of Christ (with supposedly 50 tabernacles), Orthodox Church of God and Saints of Christ, Church of God in Jesus Christ, Nation of Yahweh (which supposedly has “supporters in over 1,300 cities within the U.S. and 16 foreign countries,”) etc., though it’s unclear how accurate these numbers are, or how many adhere to the most poisonous black supremacist biblical interpretation.

    For a taste of their beliefs, you can check out Nation of Yahweh’s website, which looks like it was built by the leader’s cousin after a semester of website design from a community college in the Geocities era, complete with Flash plugins and long PDFs on theology that cite the dictionary. Here’s just a little taste:

    What does it mean to have an indifference to matters that are spiritual? Indifferent coming from the definition of worldly, the adjective form of indifference in the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, copyright 2004, on page 727 is tantamount to, “having or showing no interest, concern, or feeling.” Matter in the Synonym Finder by J.I Rodale, copyright 1978, on page 714, is synonymous to subject and topic; while on page 1145, spiritual is the same as godly, righteous, moral, and good.

    I know I want to get my theology from freshman Comp 301 essays filled with obvious padding to make the word count.

    But don’t expect any exposes of crazy Black Hebrew Israelite belief from the MSM anytime soon. That woudn’t be useful. It wouldn’t help advance the narrative

    The “Russia Hacked The DNC” Allegation Remains Unproven

    January 26th, 2019

    Someone at Slashdot seems to be pushing the “Russia supplied Wikileaks with the DNC hack info” theory as fact, even though it remains unproven. We’ve been hearing this supposition for over two years from Democrats and their media enablers who still can’t bring themselves to believe the obvious truth that Hillary Clinton was a horribly corrupt and demonstratively incompetent candidate.

    Anyone could have hacked the DNC, just like anyone could have hacked Hillary Clinton’s illegal homebrew email server. It could have been the Russians, who regularly undertake malicious activity. But it could also be China, or a leak from within the DNC, or the Awan spy ring, who had access to DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz’s computers and tablets, as well as those of some 40 other House Democrats.

    But the Russia theory is pushed above all because that’s the one that fuels Democratic activist outrage and the “Russian collusion” fantasy the mainstream media has spent two years pushing. Which is why we get a piece from the hard-left Daily Beast on the front page of Slashdot.

    But to quote another hard-left outlet, The Nation, about the DNC hack:

    This journalistic mission led The Nation to be troubled by the paucity of serious public scrutiny of the January 2017 intelligence-community assessment (ICA) on purported Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election, which reflects the judgment of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA. That report concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hacking of the DNC and the dissemination of e-mails from key staffers via WikiLeaks, in order to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. This official intelligence assessment has since led to what some call “Russiagate,” with charges and investigations of alleged collusion with the Kremlin, and, in turn, to what is now a major American domestic political crisis and an increasingly perilous state of US-Russia relations. To this day, however, the intelligence agencies that released this assessment have failed to provide the American people with any actual evidence substantiating their claims about how the DNC material was obtained or by whom. Astonishingly and often overlooked, the authors of the declassified ICA themselves admit that their “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

    But the Democratic Media Complex will still push the “Russia hacked the DNC!” talking point out out of political necessity. Anything to maintain the mass hysteria bubble.

    /Cue up the cries of “Russian bot” in 5…4…3…

    LinkSwarm for January 25, 2019

    January 25th, 2019

    How much of the vicious, fact-free attacks on the Covington kids were just baseline floating animus against Christians and Trump supporters on the part of the media, and how much are battlespace preparation over a possible nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg?

  • True tales from border enforcement. “I also had multiple cases where convicted child molesters were arrested illegally reentering the United States.” (Hat tip: Director Blue. )
  • Over at American Thinker, E.M. Cadwaladr is not a fan of recent immigration policy:

    The northeastern part of Columbus, Ohio used to be an unpretentious, unremarkable part of America. You could go there if you wanted to. It is now an unofficial colony of Somalia. The business signs, grimy and grey for decades, are now in Arabic. Somali women, grown fat on an American diet doled out by the public’s confiscated largesse, waddle along the street in their abysmal burkas. Somali men are something other than Americans with funny accents. Something has gone badly wrong.

    While I can still drive through this part of Columbus, I notice the Americans who used to live there, white and black, are fewer and farther between. I notice when I hear on the local news that a “refugee” has run his car into a group of students at Ohio State, then chased others down the street with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I notice when another “migrant,” a Muslim from Ghana, enters a restaurant owned by an Israeli and proceeds to hack at the customers with a machete. America’s earlier minorities didn’t do these things. This is something new. I may be in Ohio, my dear Toto, but something tells me I’m not in my own country anymore. I’m in the middle of a pre-industrial, semi-literate, dystopian Islamic theme park.

    Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I cannot simply tap my heels together and get back to the imperfect but largely harmless familiarity of home. One more part of America has been allocated to another alien population – squatters who have been brought here to feed on us and to drive us out. But where do we have left to go? This isn’t progress – though it is progressive.

    This situation did not occur by accident. It is the product of a premeditated and deliberate social policy. When immigration is talked about on what sneeringly masquerades as news, it is always painted in fatalistic phrases that make it sound like an unstoppable force of nature – as though the people surging into America were a swarm of Mexican butterflies or a herd of East African wildebeests that had somehow overwhelmed the TSA.

    Snip.

    They did not aspire to be Americans in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. We have seen them, and we are not that stupid. The African populations seeded in Columbus, Minneapolis, and many other places did not come here to learn our culture or our values. They were not blown here in some unavoidable freak storm, nor did they wander here in search of missing livestock. They were certainly not brought here centuries ago as hapless and unwilling slaves. People from Washington, Boston, San Francisco and New York have sponsored this invasion – people who staff committees and think tanks, people who show the residents of the heartland the same loving concern that the Jackson administration showed the Cherokee.

  • Human smugglers: extortion and death threats. (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abboyy’s Twitter feed.)
  • Are Democrats wavering on a border wall?
  • Luke Rosiak’s book on the Awan case, Obstruction of Justice: How the Deep State Risked National Security to Protect the Democrats, is out next week. I intend to pick up a copy.
  • How National Review stepped in it in the rush to denounce the Covington kids:

    It seemed way out of character for [Nick] Frankovich to author an angry post about the Covington Catholic High School incident just as the details were emerging. His article—”The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross”—went online in the middle of the night on National Review’s portal for short posts by contributors. Frankovich harshly condemned the students, referred to their actions as evil and sadistic, and questioned their Christianity.

    “They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. Bullying is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here,” the deputy online editor wrote. He included accusations that had not yet been confirmed.

    On Sunday afternoon, as the media’s narrative fell apart and the reality of the situation came into view, National Review quietly removed Frankovich’s article from its website. Rich Lowry, the outlet’s editor, explained in a very brief post that he and Frankovich had been duped by a “hoax” and that Frankovich’s “strongly worded post” had been taken down. Lowry also deleted a few of his own tweets that inaccurately portrayed the incident.

    That was it. Rather than acknowledge that the editor and deputy editor for a once reliable and thoughtful conservative magazine were complicit in mob-shaming teenage boys attending a pro-life rally, they quickly excused their behavior as nothing more than gullibility. There was no apology, save for this quasi mea culpa. There was no “calling out” other conservatives who also had participated in the viral assault on innocent young boys.

    Two NRO articles addressed the the media’s malfeasance in the matter. In particular, “Nathan Phillips Lied, The Media Bought It,” wrote Kyle Smith.

    But the fact that editors for National Review also bought into the various lies escaped mention. This also included senior editor Jay Nordlinger, who deleted a January 19 tweet that read, “the images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.” Jonah Goldberg hand-waved away Frankovich’s vicious post as just “different people reaching different conclusions or having different opinions.”

    Snip.

    When confronted with evidence, there is no real apology or soul-searching. The public and the maligned families are just supposed to accept their vague, “oops, my bad” tweets and move on.

    Further, the same crowd of call-out conservatives, the nags who constantly are telling us which Republican lawmaker or presidential aide or Fox News anchor must be reprimanded for one imagined offense or another, have been silent on calling out their own tribe for joining the Covington High School outrage mob. Where is David French “calling out” his pal, Bill Kristol, for his two (deleted) tweets about the kids, including calling them “MAGA brats”? Where are the Referees of the Right demanding that Ana Navarro or Ben Howe or Jennifer Rubin apologize for vilifying innocent kids? Where are the conspiracy trackers like Jim Swift condemning Jim Swift for peddling this fiction? And why isn’t one conservative demanding that S.E. Cupp be fired from CNN for slandering these kids on her program? (She unconvincingly apologized on Twitter on Monday.)

    To be fair, French did address the issue in this piece. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady via The Other McCain.)

  • It turns out that openly wishing for the deaths of children who hold different political views than you do is a career-limiting decision. Who knew?
  • MSM lies about Trump supporters again. Clip and save this sentence for reuse…
  • Let the lawsuits begin! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Press That Sicced Mob On Teenagers Based On 10-Second Video Clip Unsure Why Some People Call Them ‘Fake News.'”
  • Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and other media outlets announced layoffs. Maybe those outlets should consider, oh, I don’t know, not treating half their potential audience with naked contempt?
  • Ace of Spades had some pungent observations on journalists and Twitter:

    As Mollie Hemingway has said several times, Twitter did improve transparency, and that transparency in turn reduced trust in media.

    You showed yourselves for what you really are. We noticed. We adjusted our estimates of you according to the new information.

    The thing is, what twitter exposed was not that you were leftwing. We already knew that.

    What Twitter exposed was that you were also dumb, easily duped, eager to believe self-justifying conspiracy theories, thin-skinned, arrogant, incompetent, disgracefully lazy, psychologically (and almost certainly physically) inadequate, dunderheadedly unimaginative and unwilling to consider any idea not within the braindead leftwing Incela Corridor Conventional Wisdom Bubble, prone to the most cowardly go-along-to-get-along sort of groupthink, and weak.

    Before Twitter, you were removed from us. Anyone who’s removed seems exalted. We knew you were leftwing political operators, but, and I hate to admit this, your remoteness made you seem like you were… elite.

    Now we’ve seen what you really are. You’re C- minus students and fat-assed pencil pushers with a nose for sniffing out the right dicks to suck.

    Stop holding back and tell us what you really think!

  • The six axioms of Social Justice Warrioring. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott on Instapundit.)
  • “Ilhan Omar Endorsed Somalia’s New President. Four Days Later, Omar’s Brother-in-Law Had a Powerful Job in His Administration.” Naturally Nancy Pelosi has given her a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Thanks to Intersectionality, Democrats are exploring bold new frontiers in graft! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “What if the FBI Had Probed Obama for Collusion with Iran?”
  • The Supreme Court has agreed to review New York City’s draconian gun laws.
  • David Kopel has more on the case: “Since the Sullivan Act in 1911, New Yorkers must obtain a license to own a handgun. As will be detailed below, the New York Police Department’s enforcement of the Sullivan Act was abusive from the very start, and has generally remained so ever since.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • In China, it’s not enough for Communist Big Brother to know you’re in debt, he has to let everyone around you know you’re in debt as well.
  • Germany catches an Iranian spy.
  • This just in: Shelia Jackson Lee is still a scumbag. And no longer leader of the Congressional Black Caucus.
  • Cahnman is a big fan of Speaker Dennis Bonnen’s committee assignments.
  • Powerline has a nice meme roundup of last week’s news. I’ll swipe a couple:

  • Could Alzheimer’s be caused by…gum disease? (Hat tip: David Shirpley on Twitter.)
  • Facebook is building an orbital death ray. Because they just weren’t evil enough before…
  • The fraudster behind the Fyre Festival.
  • Feel good story: A Puppy Saved From A Fire Becomes A Firefighter. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Islamic State Remnants in Hajin Pocket Crumble

    January 24th, 2019

    It appears that the Syrian Democratic Forces have just about finished crushing the last holdouts in the former Hajin pocket:

    The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) on Wednesday claimed the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are getting close to defeating the Islamic State in the countryside of Deir al-Zor.

    “The SDF managed to achieve an important and strategic advancement in the area, through advancing into and taking the control of about the half of Al-Baghuz Foqani town, which is the last town left under the control of the “Islamic State” organization in Syria,” the SOHR said.

    Ranya Mohammed, a Syrian Kurdish journalist, also tweeted that SDF fighters have reached the town of Baghuz and that many Islamic State families had fled to SDF-held areas.

    Currently, the jihadist group holds only about 10 square kilometers in that region. According to some sources, morale among the remaining Islamic State fighters is at an all-time low with many surrendering to the Kurdish-led SDF.

    “The rest of ISIS members who are still in an enclave east of the Euphrates refuse to surrender,” as “hundreds” of their members have surrendered to the SDF “in the past 24 hours,” the monitor group asserted.

    Here’s what the remnants of the Hajin pocket look like today:

    And here’s what it looked like January 6:

    In other Islamic State news:

  • There was a firefight between Filipino government troops and Islamic State-linked Maute gunmen in Lanao Del Sur province on Mindanao.
  • Here’s photographs of Yazidis trying to rebuild their lives in Iraq following the Islamic State’s campaign of genocide against them.
  • Three Kenyans living in the United States have been arrested by the FBI for conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State.
  • “Nicolas Maduro must go.”

    January 23rd, 2019

    Well, this is a shame:

    Venezuela plunged deeper into turmoil Monday as security forces put down a pre-dawn uprising by national guardsmen that triggered violent street protests, and the Supreme Court moved to undercut the opposition-controlled congress’ defiant new leadership.

    Socialist party chief Diosdado Cabello said 27 guardsmen were arrested and more could be detained as the investigation unfolds.

    The mutiny struck at a time when opposition leaders have regained momentum in their efforts to oust President Nicolas Maduro. They have called for a nationwide demonstration Wednesday, urging Venezuelans — especially members of the armed forces — to abandon Maduro.

    The uprising triggered protests in a poor neighborhood just a few miles (kilometers) from Venezuela’s presidential palace. It was dispersed with tear gas as residents set fire to a barricade of trash and chanted demands that Maduro leave power.

    The military said in a statement said that it had recovered all the weapons and captured those involved in what it described as “treasonous” acts motivated by “obscure interests tied to the far right.”

    I guess “the far right” includes “people who want to be able to feed their children.” Plus those who want to avoid being tortured for alleged disloyalty to the regime.

    Meanwhile, the Venezuelan opposition is planning a mass protest.

    More context:

    Venezuela is officially a dictatorship. The Organization of American States does not recognize Nicolas Maduro as its president. Nor does nearly all of Latin America, with the exception of maybe three governments: Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua….Everyone except those three aforementioned countries now recognize National Assembly president Juan Guaidó as the democratically elected leader of the country. He has been leading rallies nationwide in an effort to galvanize public support to oust PSUV from power.

    Keep in mind that, thanks to The Magic Power of Socialism™, inflation in Venezuela hit 80,000% last year.

    What needs to happen is for the Venezuelan military to finally abandon Maduro’s illegitimate government en masse, but so far that’s not happening, even though “more than 4,000 low-ranking officers deserted last year.”

    Vice President Mike Pence penned an editorial in The Wall Street Journal nicely summing up the situation:

    The Venezuelan people will march Wednesday for freedom and democracy. They will do so at the urging of the National Assembly—Venezuela’s legitimate legislature—and its courageous president, Juan Guaidó. As I told Mr. Guaidó last week, President Trump and the U.S. stand resolutely with the Venezuelan people as they seek to regain their liberty from dictator Nicolás Maduro.

    The National Assembly has rightly called Mr. Maduro’s rule illegitimate, following a sham election last May. It has called for protests on Jan. 23 because on that date in 1958 the Venezuelan people toppled their country’s military dictatorship.

    As I have heard many times from Venezuelans over the past 2 years, Mr. Maduro has exacerbated the country’s corruption and socialist policies, accelerating its descent from one of the richest countries in the Western Hemisphere to one of the poorest and most despotic. He promised prosperity, but his actions have caused Venezuela’s economy to shrink by nearly 50%. He promised safety and security, but cities and streets are now overrun with murderous gangs, kidnappers and thieves. He promised to respect democracy, but instead followed the advice and example of his communist mentors in Cuba, imprisoning opponents, banning major parties, and undermining fair elections.

    Snip.

    Venezuela’s crisis will worsen until democracy is restored. That is why under President Trump, the U.S. strongly supports the National Assembly and Mr. Guaidó. Nicolás Maduro has no legitimate claim to power. Nicolás Maduro must go.

    How Texas Oilmen Made LBJ

    January 22nd, 2019

    There’s a fascinating piece by LBJ biographer Robert Caro about how he pieced together how powerful Texas oilmen, through the insistence of Brown & Root and speaker Sam Rayburn, made Lyndon Baines Johnson’s career by making him the conduit for Texas oil money in the 1940 election.

    For some time after Johnson’s arrival in Congress, in May, 1937, his letters to committee chairmen and other senior congressmen had been in a tone befitting a new congressman with no power—the tone of a junior beseeching a favor from a senior, or asking, perhaps, for a few minutes of his time. But there were also letters and memos in the same boxes from senior congressmen in which they were doing the beseeching, asking for a few minutes of his time. What was the reason for the change? Was there a particular time at which it had occurred?

    Going back over my notes, I put them in chronological order, and when I did it was easy to see that there had indeed been such a time: a single month, October, 1940. Before that month, Lyndon Johnson had been invariably, in his correspondence, the junior to the senior. After that month—and, it became clearer and clearer as I put more and more documents into order, after a single date, November 5, 1940, Election Day—the tone was frequently the opposite. And it wasn’t just with powerful congressmen. After that date, Johnson’s files also contained letters written to him by mid-level congressmen, and by other congressmen as junior as he, in a supplicating tone, whereas there had been no such letters—not a single one that I could find—before that date. Obviously, the change had had something to do with the election. But what?

    Snip.

    [Thomas G.] Corcoran had said that the answer to my question was money, and if money was involved the place to start looking was Brown & Root, the Texas road-and-dam-building firm, whose principals, Herman and George Brown (Root had died years before), had been the secret but major financiers of Johnson’s early career; by 1940, Brown & Root had already begun receiving federal contracts through Johnson’s efforts. When it came to money, there were no closer associates than Herman and George. I didn’t have much hope of finding anything in writing, but their files were files in which I should nonetheless have been turning every page.

    I started doing that now. I requested Box 13 in the LBJA “Selected Names” collection and pulled out the file folders for Herman. There was a lot of fascinating material in the files’ two hundred and thirty-seven pages, but nothing on the 1940 change. George’s correspondence was in Box 12. There were about two hundred and thirty pages in his file. I sat there turning the pages, every page, thinking that I was probably just wasting more days of my life. And then, suddenly, as I lifted yet another innocuous letter to put it aside, the next document was not a letter but a Western Union telegram form, turned brown during the decades since it had been sent—on October 19, 1940. It was addressed to Lyndon Johnson, and was signed “George Brown,” and it said, in the capital letters Western Union used for its messages: “YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE CHECKS BY FRIDAY . . . HOPE THEY ARRIVED IN DUE FORM AND ON TIME.”

    It also named the people who were supposed to have sent the checks—six of Brown & Root’s business associates. And Tommy Corcoran had been wrong: Lyndon Johnson had for once put something in writing. Attached to the telegram was a copy of his response to George. “ALL OF THE FOLKS YOU TALKED TO HAVE BEEN HEARD FROM,” it said. “I AM NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR LETTERS, SO BE SURE TO TELL ALL THESE FELLOWS THAT THEIR LETTERS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED . . . YOUR FRIEND, LYNDON B. JOHNSON.” Johnson had added by hand, “The thing is exceeding my expectations. The Boss is listening to my suggestions, thanks to your encouragements.”

    So there was the proof that Johnson had received money from Brown & Root in October, 1940 (and that it had brought him into some sort of contact with “the Boss,” Johnson’s name for President Franklin Roosevelt). But how much had the six donors sent? Why hadn’t Brown & Root sent the money itself? And, more important, what had happened to the money? How did Johnson use it? What was the mechanism by which it was distributed? There was no clue in the telegram, or in Johnson’s reply. But the money had come from Texas, and George and Herman had friends who, I knew, had contributed, at the Browns’ insistence, to Johnson’s first campaigns. Most of the contributors, I had been told, were oilmen—in Texas parlance, “big oilmen.”

    I started calling for the big oilmen’s folders. And, sure enough, there was a letter, dated in October, from one of the biggest of the oilmen, Clint Murchison. Murchison dealt with senators or with the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, the leader of the Texas delegation; he hardly knew the young congressman; in his letter to Johnson, he misspelled his name “Linden.” But he was evidently following Brown & Root’s lead. “We are enclosing herewith the check of the Aloco Oil Co. . . . for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Committee,” his letter said. Another big oilman was Charles F. Roeser, of Fort Worth: the amount mentioned in the letter I found from him was again five thousand, the payee the same.

    So the recipient was the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had previously been nothing more than a moribund subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. There were a lot of file folders in Boxes 6, 7, 8, and 9 of the Johnson House papers labelled “Democratic National Committee.” Those boxes contained thirty-two hundred pages. Some of the folders had less than inviting titles. “General—Unarranged,” for example, was a thick folder, bulging with papers that had been sloppily crammed into it. When I pulled it out, I remember asking myself if I really had to do “General—Unarranged.” But Alan [Hathway, Caro’s editor at Newsday] might possibly have been proud of me—and I wasn’t very deep into the folder when I was certainly grateful to him. One of the six people George Brown said had sent checks was named Corwin. In “General—Unarranged,” not in alphabetical order but just jammed in, was a note from J. O. Corwin, a Brown & Root subcontractor, saying, “I am enclosing herewith my check for $5,000, payable to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.” Five thousand dollars. Had each of the six men mentioned in Brown’s letter sent that amount?

    Snip.

    The “Unarranged” file contained letter after letter with details I knew I could use. And in other folders I came across letters in which that same amount was mentioned: for example, from E. S. Fentress, who was the partner of Johnson’s patron, Charles Marsh. I knew that one of the biggest and the most politically astute of the oilmen was Sid Richardson. I looked under the name “Richardson” in file folder after file folder in different collections, without any luck. What was the name of that nephew of his whom Richardson, unmarried and childless, allowed to transact some of his business affairs? I had heard it somewhere. What was it? Bass, Perry Bass. I found that name and the donation—“Perry R. Bass, $5,000”—in yet another box in the House papers.

    Letters from many big Texas oilmen of the nineteen-forties—who needed guarantees that Congress wouldn’t take away the oil-depletion allowance, and that other, more arcane tax breaks conferred by the federal government wouldn’t be touched—were scattered through those boxes. And all the contributions were for five thousand dollars. Of course, they must be. I suddenly remembered what I should have remembered earlier. Under federal law in 1940, the limit on an individual contribution was five thousand dollars. How could I have been so slow to get it? Well, I got it now. The Brown & Root contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, funnelled through the company’s business associates, had been thirty thousand dollars, a substantial amount in the politics of that era, and, in fact, more money than the committee had received from the D.N.C., its parent organization. And there were so many additional five-thousand-dollar contributions from Texas!

    But there was a next question: how had this money resulted in such a great change in Lyndon Johnson’s status in Congress? How had he transmuted those contributions into power for himself? He had had no title or formal position with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; he had tried to get one, I had learned from other files, but had been rebuffed.

    I found the answer in those LBJA files. He had had George Brown instruct each of the Brown & Root contributors, and had had the other Texas contributors instructed similarly, to enclose with their checks a letter stating, “I would like for this money to be expended in connection with the campaign of Democratic candidates for Congress as per the list attached.” Johnson had, of course, compiled the list, and, while the checks received by the lucky candidates might have been issued by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, each candidate received a telegram from Johnson, saying that the check had been sent “AS RESULT MY VISIT TO CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE FEW MINUTES AGO.”

    The secret to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s rise was powerful patrons, Texas oil money, and campaign finance bundling…in 1940.

    Read the whole thing. Including the part where Caro and his wife move to the Texas hill country for three years to get the real story about Johnson’s past.

    I began to hear the details they had not included in the anecdotes they had previously told me, and they told me anecdotes and stories that no one had even mentioned to me before—stories about a Lyndon Johnson very different from the young man who had previously been portrayed: about a very unusual young man, a very brilliant young man, a very ambitious, unscrupulous, and quite ruthless person, disliked and even despised, and, by people who knew him especially well, even beginning to be feared.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

    And if you’re interested in Caro’s LBJ books, here are the Amazon links:

  • The Path to Power
  • Means of Ascent
  • Master Of The Senate
  • The Passage of Power
  • Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for January 21, 2019

    January 21st, 2019

    This week in the clown car update: Lots climbing in, one getting out. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and California Senator Kamala Harris are both In and Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey. JR. is Out. Plus a few more no-hope longshots considering a run.

    Before we get to the individual candidates, here’s a table from that January 14 Marist poll on Democratic contenders:

    Usual poll caveats apply, but Biden has a huge advantage over the rest of the field in both favorability and name recognition. And for all the Betomania among the chattering classes, the majority of possible Democratic voters have never even heard of him. Highest unfavorables are Bernie Sanders (bitter Hillary cadres at work there) and Michael Bloomberg. In fact, Bloomberg is alone in having a net favorability rating of zero.

    538 offers up speculation on how longshot Democrats could potentially build a winning coalition, with pentagonal diagrams that look vaguely like cutaways of a Wankel rotary engine. They’re also doing a similar weeekly update of candidate and potential candidate doings that I only noticed when I was about 80% through this post.

    Oh, and National Review says all the Democratic candidates suck.

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Probably Out, considering a senate run instead.
  • Creepy Porn lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Addition: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Considering a run. Bennet told Colorado Public Radio he was seriously considering a run, and just changed his Twitter handle from “BennetForCO” to “MichaelBennet.”
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning toward running. His completely-devoid-of-interest Twitter feed. There was talk of Biden announcing on Tuesday, but he also has an event in Grand Prairie, Texas on Thursday. Chris Smith at Vanity Fair says Biden is the sell high candidate. Since this comes from Vanity Fair, my working assumption is that it must be wrong…
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Making noises like he’s getting in. Says he’s not too old to run (the same age as Bernie Sanders). That National Review piece says “He doesn’t mesh with the Democratic party we see every day in the national media, but he’s intelligent, shrewd, and willing to spend more money than Croesus on securing the nomination and defeating Trump. Only a fool would dismiss him.”
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: Probably in. New Jersey law lets him run for both the Presidency and for reelection to the senate simultaneously. He picked up the all-important Jimmy Carter endorsement. This is two Democratic Presidential Clown Car updates in a row I’ve mentioned Jimmy Carter. I’m not such which of the seven seals that opens.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Probably running. He’s visiting a bunch of early primary states, including Iowa.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Leaning toward In, but is reportedly going to wait until Montana’s legislative session finishes, which would be May 1.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: Probably in. Has a Facebook page. This week he got a fawning Washington Post profile.
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out. “After two months of considering it, I have concluded that the best way for me to fight for the America that so many of us believe in is to stay in the U.S. Senate and not run for the presidency in 2020.”
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Campaigning in New Hampshire, he says he would not pardon Trump. Also promises not to punch out Mike Tyson.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not. Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue. Beautiful plumage…
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Out.
  • New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Maybe. He’s sure acting like he’s running. “People who criticize de Blasio for being more interested in national politics than the local scene aren’t wrong.” Translation: As Mayor, he sucks!
  • Maryland Representative John K. Delaney: In. Has raised nearly $5 million. I misspelled his name “Delany” last week and nobody noticed. Want to know his views on Israel? I didn’t think so, but here they are anyway.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter feed. Howard Dean says she’s not qualified to be President. And if anyone knows about not being qualified to be President…
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Leaning toward a run, but it’s sort of hard to run for president when you have to deal with a teacher’s strike.
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Official website. Official Twitter feed. Ended 2018 with over $10 million in her campaign bank account.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter feed. She announced today, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, as befitting the MSM favorite they hope can re-knit the Obama coalition. The New York Times piece says the date was also meant to evoke Shirley Chisholm, the black Democratic congressman who ran for President in 1972, which suggests that Harris will come in 7th against a nominee who eventually loses 49 states to Trump. Evidently she’s leaning toward Crack Charm City as her headquarters. National Review has “Twenty Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Kamala Harris,” including her being Willie Brown’s mistress, and her anti-civil liberties stance on things like linking collected DNA evidence to family members and charging the parents of truant kids.
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Probably in. No real news, so enjoy the delusional fantasy of two USA Today writers calling for a Hickenlooper-Kaisch national unity ticket. I’m sure the notion was very well-received down at the coffee shop nearest the shuttered offices of The Weekly Standard.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter feed. Here he is yammering about climate change in the Washington Post.
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Probably Out.
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Leaning toward In, playing “the family wants me to run” card.
  • New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu: Maybe.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run. Because we just haven’t had enough of the Clintons…
  • Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley: Maybe. Right now he’s making “Fundraising is hard!” sounds. Most recently seen banging the impeachment drum over that Buzzfeed fake Russian collusion “bombshell.”
  • Addition: Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Considering a run. Because there just weren’t enough longshot congressmen on this list to update before.
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama: Out.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Probably In. Says he’s hitting the road because he’s “in a funk,” and I’m presuming it’s not the James Brown kind. Between this and the Instagram dentist visit, I’m wondering if O’Rouke is going to be the presidential candidate equivalent of The Woman Who Overshares Her Depression On Facebook Fishing For Sympathy, because that would be both really sad and weirdly hilarious. An Oprah interview looms next month.
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan: Doubtful. I’m not seeing any signs of a run.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: Probably running. He’s in South Carolina for MLK weekend. I think Bernie likes the attention of running for President too much to stop.
  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: Still considering.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter feed. She’s also visiting South Carolina.
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Running but no one cares.
  • Last week I linked to a prediction market website that had Democratic presidential odds. Last week O’Rourke was on top. This week he’s been eclipsed by Harris. Their current ranked odds on the Dem nominee are:

    1. Kamala Harris
    2. Beto O’Rourke
    3. Joe Biden
    4. Bernie Sanders
    5. Elizabeth Warren

    Dumbass Texan Arrested Fighting for the Islamic State

    January 20th, 2019

    The world is filled with dumbasses, and some of them even come from Texas. But it takes a special kind of dumbassery to join the Islamic State:

    An American English teacher who joined ISIS says that witnessing people being beheaded never bothered him because ‘they like to execute people in the US too.’

    Warren Christopher Clark, 34, who joined the group in spring 2015 before being captured by Kurds earlier this month, spoke out about life in the so-called Islamic State from a prison in northern Syria.

    Clark told NBC that during his time in Iraq and Syria ‘I saw some people being executed publicly, I saw some crucifixions… that’s just normal life there.’

    Watching your first judicial crucifixion, a man of even average intelligence and/or a functioning moral compass might have said to himself “Huh, maybe I’ve made a mistake.”

    Asked how he felt about it, he replied: ‘I’m from the United States, from Texas. They like to execute people, too. So I really don’t see any difference.

    ‘[Texas] might do it off camera, but it’s the same.’

    Clark also admits that he had seen the execution videos before leaving to join the group, and hadn’t been put off.

    ‘That’s just normal life there,’ he said. ‘This is an Islamic society, an Islamic country, things like this happen.

    ‘I guess [it didn’t bother me] because I knew what I was coming to see.’

    Yeah, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Or even the sharpest spoon.

    Asked why he decided to join the group, which was being bombed by the US at the time, he said: ‘I wanted to go see exactly what the group was about and what they were doing.’

    Clark made contact with the group by applying to be an English teacher at the University of Mosul, Iraq, having been a substitute teacher in Sugar Land, Texas.

    He even sent a resume with a cover letter to the course director, under the alias of Abu Mohammed al-Ameriki.

    Most people researching radical terrorist organizations don’t feel the need to join them.

    By the way, my parents lived in Sugar Land for many years. For those unfamiliar with Texas, it’s a suburban city southwest of Houston where I-69 and Highway 6 meet. A hotbed of Islamic radicalism it’s not.

    He was accepted, and in June 2015 Clark said he traveled to Turkey before crossing into Syria and making his way to Iraq.

    Two weeks ago he was captured in eastern Syria, near the Euphrates river, as Kurdish forces attempt to flush out the last remaining pocket of ISIS resistance.

    He was captured alongside two men from Pakistan, another from Ireland, and a fifth from Trinidad and Tobago.

    Only five other American ISIS fighter are known to have been captured alive.

    Clark claims he only ever worked as a teacher and refused to fight for ISIS, spending several terms in jail for refusing to pick up a weapon.

    When interviewed by NBC he was walking on two crutches, but insisted he was injured in a ‘personal fight’.

    Yeah, right.

    “US officials have yet to reveal what they will do with Clark and another US citizen purportedly arrested by Kurdish-led forces, Zaid Abed al-Hamid.”

    Here’s hoping Mr. Clark gets the precise degree of justice he deserves…