South Park’s Band In China Gets South Park Banned In China

October 9th, 2019

South Park made an episode about how American companies kowtow to China called “Band in China.”

Here’s the entire episode.

“You’ve got to lower your ideas of freedom if you want to suck on the warm teat of China.”

The result: South Park is now banned in China.

China has a message for “South Park”: You will respect their authoritah!

After Comedy Central aired an episode of the animated series that chided Hollywood for fearing Chinese censors, that country responded by stripping any mention of the show from internet providers and streaming services there.

Last week’s Season 23 episode, cheekily titled “Band in China,” depicts Randy in a Chinese work camp — alongside Winnie the Pooh, the Disney character often compared to China President Xi Jinping — for attempting to smuggle pot into the country to expand his weed-selling enterprise.

In a parallel storyline, a rock band made up of Stan, Jimmy, Kenny and Butters is on the verge of having a movie made about them, but Chinese censors keep wanting to water down the script. “Now I know how Hollywood writers feel,” Stan declares when he’s forced to endure changes. Disney is even part of the takedown, with Mickey Mouse depicted as supporting censors’ work.

Life imitating art imitating life…

Edited to add: The twitter “apology” is just the cherry on top:

The Kurdish Conundrum

October 8th, 2019

Before getting into the latest developments in Syria, let’s not forget that the entire reason we’re there is the Obama Administration’s foolish decision to try to overthrow Assad’s government on the cheap, actions that precipitated us showering pallets of money onto various jihadi groups and (along with the failure to achieve a status-of-forces agreement with a still wobbly Iraq) engendering the rise of the Islamic State, all with very little to show for our efforts except some eight years of Syrian bloodshed.

Unless you’ve been keeping up with every twist and turn of that very long war, it’s hard to understand how Syria has come to the current pass, since there were over a dozen different factions at various points in the civil war, including Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, and Russia. Basically, Syria ended up crushing just about all rebel forces in the south (thanks to a goodly amount of Russian help), while stalemating with jihadist groups and the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army in the north. Meanwhile, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces crushed the Islamic State with American/allied logistical backing and airpower, leaving them in control of Syria east of the Euphrates, all the way up to the Turkish border.

Given that Kurds are our allies, as well as the closest things to goods guys in the Middle East outside Israel (and maybe the Druze), many were disturbed to hear that the Trump Administration is withdrawing American troops from northern Syria in advance of a Turkish invasion.

Is this concerning? Yes it is. Recep Tayyip Ergodan’s jihadist regime deserves no support from America, and the safety of our Kurdish allies is a legitimate issue. But the news also brought about a number of wild overreactions from all points of the political spectrum.

The first overreaction is “Oh my God, Turkish ground troops will be entering Syrian territory! This is unprecedented!” No, Turkish ground troops have been fighting in Syria since 2016.

The second overreaction is “Oh my God, the Islamic State will spring back to life!” In truth, the Islamic State was already going to live on in some form as a transnational jihadist terrorist group, but is effectively finished as a territory-holding Caliphate, no more viable a state than Biafra or the Don Republic. And even if the SDF is forced to abandon some or all the Syrian territory they currently hold, I don’t see Turkey or Syria letting the Islamic State stage a serious comeback.

The third overreaction is thinking that this is a big shift of American forces. In fact, there were less than 25 U.S. troops relocated.

Fourth, while we are pulling back troops, and it sucks for the Kurds, I doubt this is the “betrayal” some are making it out to be. I sincerely doubt we ever said to the Kurds “Hey, take out the Islamic State, and we promise that we’ll use America’s military power to protect you until the end of time!” I also highly doubt we promised the Kurds we would support an independent Kurdish state no matter what the four states with significant Krudish ethnic minorities (Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran) might say in the matter. I suspect the Kurds came to us and said “Give us arms, training and support and we’ll destroy the Islamic State for you.” We did and they did. It’s been six months since the last of the Baghuz pocket was mopped up. Since there’s no plans or appetite for a permanent U.S. protection force in Syria, we were always going to pull our troops out sooner or later. Sooner or later turns out to be now.

Fifth, we are not consigning the Kurds to annihilation. If we are to believe Turkey (a dubious but not entirely impossible proposition) the goal of their incursion is to establish a 20 mile buffer zone, mainly aimed at preventing the PKK from launching attacks into Turkish territory. The PKK itself is indeed bad news, a communist-rooted terrorist organization that never really reformed. (The flip side is that the Turkish government loves to call any Kurdish Party in Turkey an arm of the PKK, which is mostly a lie.) When it comes to Turkish statements on the Kurds, there are half-truths, quarter-truths, eighth-truths, all the way down to quasi-semi-demi truths, where the remaining grain of truth is so tiny it’s a homeopathic tincture. I suspect there are PKK units among the SDF, but far fewer than Turkey claims.

If there’s a reason to believe Turkey’s aims actually are limited at this time, it’s because their existing incursion into northern Syria is already very unpopular with the Turkish people. An actual war against the entirety of the SDF is probably not in the cards for all sort of political, military and logistical reasons.

Also, in the event of such an all-out war, there’s very little reason to believe that Turkey could take out the entire SDF (and the Iraqi Kurdish Pershmerga, who would probably come to the SDF’s aid) before bogging down into quagmire of counterinsurgency warfare the way American forces in Iraq did following the 2003 invasion. The Kurds are no pushovers, and Turkey is already losing Leopard 2 tanks at an alarming pace in their existing Syrian deployment. (Turkey has a newer, locally produced (with South Korean help) main battle tank called the Altay, that hasn’t seen combat yet. Looks good on paper, but I bet it can’t stand toe-to-toe with an M1A2.) Finally, keep in mind that there’s still significant British and French military presence back-filling for withdrawn U.S. troops.

So why did President Trump accede to Turkish wishes? Is there any of that 4D chess going on here? Maybe. Trump seems to approach things through a persuasion/negotiation lens, using both carrots and sticks, and Turkey has already seen the stick in the F-35 order cancellation. Also, Trump may be leveraging Turkey to take a more active role against Iran, such as enforcing economic sanctions (and Iran is currently far more regionally disruptive). The majority Sunni Turkey has longstanding linguistic and ethnic differences with its Persian Shia neighbor, and (in the form of the Ottoman Empire) fought a series of wars with Persia between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth centuries, the last ending in 1823 (which is practically yesterday as far as Middle Eastern blood feuds are concerned). Finally, there’s the possibility that Trump is simply going to Yojimbo every Muslim nation in the Middle East against every other Muslim nation, keeping all of them too busy to make trouble for us…

Kurt Schlichter has a succinct summary:

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for October 7, 2019

October 7th, 2019

Ukraine revelations are pummeling the Biden campaign, furthering his slump, Q3 fundraising numbers drop, Yang rises, and rumors fly that Grandma Death is about to escape from her crypt yet again. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

Q3 Fundraising

It’s that time again! Fundraising totals came gushing out of the campaigns last week:

  1. Bernie Sanders: $25.3 million.
  2. Elizabeth Warren: $24.6 million.
  3. Pete Buttigieg: $19.1 million.
  4. Joe Biden: $15.2 million.
  5. Kamala Harris: $11.6 million.
  6. Andrew Yang: $10 million.
  7. Cory Booker: $6 million.
  8. Marianne Williamson: $3 million.
  9. Steve Bullock: $2.3 million.
  10. Michael Bennet: $2.1 million.

Those are good numbers for Yang, bad numbers for Harris, and terrible numbers for Biden. As the presumed front-runner and DNC insider candidate, Biden should be rolling in donor dough. He’s not. And he had two-and-a-half months to raise money before the whole Ukraine thing really broke open. This suggests serious organizational impairment by the Biden campaign, or that Biden himself is simply phoning it in.

Sanders topped the list, but everything hings on how well, and how quickly, he comes back from his heart attack. Warren is in line with expectation: The bump from beating Biden has to be tempered with the disappointment of losing to Sanders. More than half of the media seems ready to anoint Warren The Chosen One, but her performance isn’t yet justifying it yet.

As for Yang, between this and his rising poll numbers, there’s no reason to treat him as any less serious a candidate than Harris.

Polls

  • Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 41, Warren 12, Sanders 10, Harris 4, Steyer 4, Booker 3, Buttigieg 2, Ryan 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1. Has Steyer been making ad buys in South Carolina?
  • Fox News (Wisconsin): Biden 28, Warren 22, Sanders 17, Buttigieg 7, Harris 5. Booker 2, Klobuchar 2, Yang 2, Bullock 1, Gabbard 1, O’Rourke 1.
  • PPIC (California): Warren 23, Biden 22, Sanders 21, Harris 8, Buttigieg 6, Yang 3, Booker 2, Castro 2, Klobuchar 1, O’Rourke 1, Steyer 1.
  • Emerson (Ohio): Biden 29, Warren 27, Sanders 21, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, Yang 3, O’Rourke 2, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Bullock 1. Sample size of 353. Klobuchar, Sestak, Steyer, Castro and Messam all got zero votes.
  • Monmouth: Warren 28, Biden 25, Sanders 15, Buttigieg 5, Harris 5, Williamson 2, Yang 2, Booker 1, Castro 1, Klobuchar 1, O’Rourke 1, Steyer 1.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 167): Warren 25, Biden 22, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 7, Harris 5, Yang 3, O’Rourke 3, Bennet 2, Gabbard 2, Booker 2, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1, Steyer 1.
  • Saint Anselm College (New Hampshire): Warren 25, Biden 24, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 5, Gabbard 3, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 2, Yang 2, Booker 1. Sample size of 423. Castro received zero votes.
  • Morning Consult/Politico: Biden 32, Warren 21, Sanders 19, Harris 6, Buttigieg 5, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Yang 3, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • DNC tightens the debate requirements again.

    Candidates will need to clear 3 percent in four DNC-approved polls, up from the 2 percent required to qualify for the September and October debates. But the committee also created an additional early-state path to qualify: garnering 5 percent in two approved polls conducted in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina.

    Additionally, candidates now need to receive donations from 165,000 unique donors — up from 130,000 from the September and October debates — with 600 unique donors in 20 different states, territories or the District of Columbia.

  • Uncertainty leads the field:

    The top fundraiser in the Democratic presidential field was hospitalized for a heart attack, the longtime polling leader and his son sit at the center of an impeachment inquiry, and the one candidate with clear momentum faces persistent doubts among some party leaders that she is too liberal to win the general election.

    With breathtaking speed, the events of the past two weeks have created huge uncertainty for the candidates who have dominated the Democratic nomination race, shaking a party desperate to defeat President Trump next year and deeply fearful of any misstep that risks reelecting a president many Democrats see as dangerously unfit for office.

    Concerns have risen in recent days that the potential Democratic slate has been weakened by events largely out of the candidates’ control. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) promised a speedy return to the campaign trail after leaving the hospital Friday, but it was unclear whether the 78-year-old would be able to replicate his previously frenetic travel schedule. Former vice president Joe Biden, who has spent most of the race as the leader in the polls, has faced daily attacks from Trump over largely unfounded allegations about his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings, highlighting a potential vulnerability for the candidate many saw as the best hope for beating Trump.

    Snip.

    But they point to several worrying factors, including questions about whether Biden is equipped to mount an effective defense against Trump’s attacks and whether the surging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would alienate moderate voters and donors if she were the nominee. Some fear that Sanders’s health problems put a spotlight on the advanced age of the top contenders, all of whom are in their 70s. Others expressed skepticism that any Democrat would be able to compete against Trump’s unmatched ability to shift the public’s focus.

  • Warren overtakes Biden in poll of college students. Caveat: It’s an online polls with 586 respondents, so my working assumption is it’s garbage.
  • Speaking of online polls of college students, this one has it Sanders 30, Warren 26, Yang 10 and Biden 9.
  • Forbes writer argues that it’s a six man race: Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg and Yang.
  • “Dems Worried If Impeachment Fails They’ll Have To Nominate Electable Candidate.”
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Launches ads attacking “Medicare for All.” It’s open question to whether the majority of the Democratic Party’s total voting membership (as opposed to the hard left activist base) supports fully socialized medicine and destroying private health insurance. If Biden falters, Bennet and Bullock would be two candidates with a good shot to pick up his moderate voters. Well, that is, assuming they can get past Buttigieg’s giant spiked walls of money…
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Giuliani Hits Bidens With New $3 Million “Ukraine-Latvia-Cyprus” Money Laundering Accusation.” “Five Times Hunter Biden’s Business Dealings Presented a Conflict of Interest for Joe Biden. Including this, which we might not have covered heretofore: “Hunter Biden was on MBNA’s payroll while Joe Biden was writing bankruptcy reform legislation.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Andrew Stein: “Joe Biden’s corrupt dealings in Ukraine and those of his son must be investigated, and the time has come for him to drop out of the presidential race.” Get past the requisite New York Times “orange man bad” talking points and this piece shows a Biden campaign struggling to frame an effective response on the Ukraine attacks:

    For Mr. Biden’s campaign, no attack could have been more difficult to deal with than one involving the candidate’s son.

    Mr. Biden nearly did not run for president because of the effect it would have on his family — and particularly on Hunter Biden and his children, according to multiple advisers to the former vice president. Hunter Biden has struggled for years with substance addiction and had recently gone through a very public divorce from his first wife.

    In separate interviews, Mr. Coons and his fellow senator from Delaware, Tom Carper, both said they had warned Mr. Biden that the president would target his family.

    “He expected his family to be attacked,” Mr. Carper said, adding that Mr. Biden assured him he was braced for “the onslaught.’’

    Mr. Biden’s family, including his son, encouraged him to enter the race, knowing the attacks were inevitable. But as Anita Dunn, one of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers, put it: “When it happens, it still feels pretty lousy.”

    The Biden campaign has attempted to handle the candidate’s son with great sensitivity. Mr. Biden made clear at the outset that Hunter, a lawyer who had long advised his father on his campaigns, should not be made to feel excluded, people who spoke with him said. One adviser to Mr. Biden recently telephoned his son to solicit advice on the upcoming debate in Ohio.

    But to most of Mr. Biden’s aides, Hunter Biden has been a spectral presence. He is living in Los Angeles and stayed away from Mr. Biden’s campaign launch in Philadelphia. Hunter Biden quietly attended the last two debates and appeared with his new wife, Melissa Cohen, at a July fund-raiser in Pasadena, Calif.

    Still, Mr. Biden’s advisers are aware that Hunter Biden carries political vulnerabilities. His business career has intersected repeatedly with his father’s political power, through roles he had held in banking, lobbying and international finance. Working for a Ukrainian energy company beginning in 2014, he was paid as much as $50,000 a month while his father was vice president, and some of Mr. Biden’s admirers worry that, while Mr. Trump’s accusations are without merit, voters may view Hunter Biden’s actions as problematic.

    “Without merit.” “Problematic.” You can always count on the press to put lipstick on a Democrats’ pig. More on Hunter Biden:

    There’s an old saying about addiction. The man takes a drink (or a sniff), then the drink takes a drink, until the drink takes the man. It will take the bystanders, too, if they let it. Addiction is ravenous. But there was always someone in Joe Biden’s life to help him out with Hunter. It’s heartwarming when family and friends swoop in to care for the boys while Daddy serves the people of Delaware. But little boys have little needs, while big boys have bigger needs.

    Soon enough, directionless Hunter has a six-figure job at a bank run by Biden supporters. When Hunter grows bored, there’s another lucrative job under the tutelage of a former Biden staffer. When Hunter wants a house he can’t afford, he receives a loan for 110 percent of the purchase price. And when he goes bust, another friendly banker mops up the damage.

    Then his brother Beau contracts fatal brain cancer, and the last wobbly wheels come off Hunter Biden’s fragile self. At this point, the New Yorker piece becomes a gonzo nightmare — much of it narrated by Hunter himself — of hallucinations, a car abandoned in the desert, maxed-out credit cards, a crack pipe, a strip club and a brandished gun.

    If, as the magazine headline put it, Hunter Biden now jeopardizes his father’s campaign, the article makes clear Joe Biden feels a share of the blame. Yet, by the time the senator was vice president, the folks still willing to help Hunter were of a sketchier variety. There was a Chinese businessman who, Hunter said, left him a large diamond as a nice-to-meet-you gift. And a Ukrainian oligarch who hired Hunter at a princely sum to do nothing much. (Neither the firm nor Hunter Biden identified any specific contribution he made). Joe Biden’s response, according to his son, was: “I hope you know what you are doing.”

    Hope! What family of an addict hasn’t fallen back to that last trench? Denial, they say, is not just a river in Egypt.

    The story of that golf outing with Hunter’s Ukrainian paymasters Joe Biden lied about. And just in case you missed this from Friday’s LinkSwarm:

    And don’t look now, but there’s more Rudy going after Hunter coming down the pike: “We haven’t even talked about Romania yet.” Evidently 38% of Biden’s Q2 fundraising came from just 2,800 people.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. His $6 million is enough to keep him in the game, but not enough to make any headway in closing with the frontrunners, but both Biden and Harris flaming out (a definite possibility at this point) would open a couple of those hypothetical “lanes” for him. Booker calls on TV stations to not air Trump ad attacking Biden over Ukraine.” More grist for the idea he’s running for VP.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. $2.3 million is enough to keep the lights on, but very little more. Speaking of fundraising, he wants to ban fundraising during the first half of any elected official’s term. Given how this disadvantages incumbents, I don’t see the idea making any headway…
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Buttigieg conendrum continues: He’s raising money like a topline candidate, but his poll numbers still don’t reflect it. Gets a fawning profile in The New Republic:

    Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old gay mayor of a small Indiana city (South Bend) half the size of Des Moines, is acing the listening test. His words, even in a stump speech, tend to be more thoughtful and more surprising than the standard political applause lines of his rivals. Elizabeth Warren often elicits cheers, Joe Biden gets the occasional affectionate chuckle, but Buttigieg summons up a different reaction. I first noticed it while seeing him at a Des Moines house party on a sparkling Saturday morning in June. As with Obama in 2006, members of the audience leaned forward to listen to Buttigieg speak rather than sitting back to applaud politely. What struck me at the time was that Buttigieg was pulling off this listening trick even though he lacked the national political profile that Obama boasted back in 2006, from his electrifying speech to the 2004 Democratic convention.

    It’s all pretty unconvincing. “Mayor Pete Is Starting to Annoy Almost Everyone Else in the 2020 Race.” Caveat: The Daily Beast, so take with several grains of salt.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro Presidential Campaigns Continue to Flounder.”

    Right now, the pair are each below 2.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics averages, with O’Rourke at 2.2 and Castro at 1.4 percent respectively. Even businessman Andrew Yang has eclipsed the pair.

    In Texas, O’Rourke has held a slight hold on second place for months — 10 points behind Biden and slightly ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — until the recent Quinnipiac poll, which showed Warren had moved ahead of O’Rourke and put him in third place in his home state.

    Meanwhile, while Castro is outperforming his national poll numbers in Texas, he has failed to hit higher than 4 percent in any Texas polls taken thus far.

    Castro praises Cesar Chavez, calling him a hero and ignoring the fact he was passionately opposed to illegal immigration.

  • Update: Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Following Sanders’ heart attack, the Intertubes are rife with rumors that Grandma Death is going to jump into the race, so I moved her up here from the also-rans. Also, she just passed Buttigieg in election betting odds, and is in third place there behind Warren and Biden. Here’s a recent piece speculating on Clinton entering the race, but it’s from a Norwegian-owned site that used to focus on cryptocurrency, so caveat lictor.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. He’s not in the debates…again. Now it’s just a question of how much of John Delaney’s money does John Delaney want to spend to kept pretending that John Delaney is running for President.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She made the next debate. “The Hawaii congresswoman’s debate performances haven’t done much to break her out of the asterisk category, but boy, can she dissect an opponent’s record in a devastating fashion. You could argue that Gabbard more than anyone else triggered the slide of Kamala Harris since the second debate.” If Sanders drops out, could Gabbard pick up some of his supporters? I’ve noticed some overlap there, but I doubt she could pick up enough to be even remotely viable.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Kamala Harris Is Burning Down“:

    Out of all the Democratic candidates, there is perhaps none more inauthentic and grating as Kamala Harris. To be fair, she doesn’t have the shrillness of Hillary Clinton, but she has every other bad quality in spades. She can’t hold a consistent position, she’ll do anything for support, and everything she says sounds like it was focus grouped. None of those things are good descriptors to be attached to one’s campaign.

    After being fluffed as the presumptive front runner following the first debate (which I called a sucker’s bet at the time), Tulsi Gabbard kneecapped Harris in the second debate and she has never recovered. Since then, it’s been a steady stream of desperation from her campaign….Her campaign is hemorrhaging cash, the donors have dried up, and she’s old news to the media.

    But now things are getting even worse. Her campaign is literally breaking down. The upper levels of her campaign staff are being changed up and she’s bringing over people from the Senate side to try to rescue her.

    More on that:

    California Sen. Kamala Harris plans to restructure her struggling presidential campaign, sources with knowledge of the staffing plans tell CNN.

    The changes represent the clearest sign to date that Harris, who has seen her poll numbers consistently fall over the last three months, feels changes are needed to jumpstart her presidential bid and streamline an operation that one source said has been been bogged down by bureaucratic hurdles.

    Harris will elevate Rohini Kosoglu, her Senate chief of staff, and senior adviser Laphonza Butler into senior leadership positions within the campaign, the sources said, splitting responsibilities for the day to day management of the operation.

    Juan Rodriguez will remain Harris’ campaign manager, but the addition of Kosoglu and elevation of Butler shifts some of the longtime Harris aide’s responsibilities to different staffers.

    Adding more cooks to the slop kitchen won’t help. The problem with the Kalama Harris campaign is Kamala Harris. Heh: “Kamala Harris Undergoes Heart Surgery After Seeing Positive Reception For Sanders.” Heh 2:

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Dings Biden: “Klobuchar Would Not Be Comfortable With VP’s Child On Board of Foreign Company.” Dodges impeachment question.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets interviewed by WMUR (along with Tim Ryan), where he offers up some education/STEM/entrepreneurial platitudes. Also worried that self-driving cars will result in unemployment for Uber and Lyft drivers. Wouldn’t they theoretically make money off their self-driving cars?

  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets some audience pushback on guns and illegal aliens. Goes after Buttigieg on guns, because there’s nothing quite so exciting as the ninth place guy launching an attack on the fourth place guy. Had a rally in Phoenix, which is odd, since Arizona’s primary isn’t until March 17.
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says he’s in it until the end. And a silly food challenge story.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. I assume you noticed his heart attack last week. Pre-heart attack analysis: “Bernie Sanders Is in Trouble“:

    With just four months until the first-in-the-nation caucuses, Sanders is in trouble. As he delivered his populist gospel to large crowds of camouflage-clad high schoolers, liberal arts college students, and trade union members across Iowa last week, a problematic narrative was hardening around him: His campaign is in disarray and Elizabeth Warren has eclipsed him as the progressive standard-bearer of the primary. He’s sunk to third place nationally, behind Warren and Joe Biden, and some polls of early nomination states show him barely clinging to double digits. He’s shaken up his staffs in Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s lost the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a left-wing group that backed him in 2016, to Warren.

    Dismissed out of the gate in 2016 as a nonfactor against Hillary Clinton — only to single-handedly shift the Democratic Party’s ideological center of gravity — Sanders is quite familiar with being left for dead. His top brass’ official line is that pundits and political elites are writing him off because they have no clue what’s happening at kitchen tables and picket lines across America. Sanders and his team have argued some polls that are bad for him are out of whack and several polls that are good for him are ignored by the media.

    Meanwhile, his aides say, Sanders remains a fundraising and organizing juggernaut. In its classic big-big-big-numbers style, the campaign announced this month that it had both contacted 1 million voters in Iowa and received donations from 1 million people throughout the United States — a milestone he reached faster than any Democratic presidential candidate in history.

    Pre-heart attack counterpoint:

    For a guy who’s supposed to be slowly fading into the second tier, Bernie Sanders had a good third quarter of fundraising, announcing this morning that his campaign raised $25 million in the past three months. (One wrinkle: Sanders’ campaign did not specify how much cash on hand he has left.)

    The upshot is that Bernie Sanders will probably have enough financial resources to stay in the presidential race as long has he likes, all the way to the Democratic convention in Milwaukee if he wants. As of this morning, he’s still a respectable third nationally in the RealClearPolitics average nationally (17.8 percent), third in Iowa (12 percent), third in New Hampshire (18.8 percent), second in Nevada (21.7 percent), and third in South Carolina (15 percent, and Elizabeth Warren is at 15.7 percent). And fairly or not, a lot of Democratic race-watchers see Joe Biden’s campaign as a ticking time-bomb with a gaffe-prone candidate and the Hunter Biden stuff now getting more play.

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. WBUR profile.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He qualified for the November debate. Lefty-site-that-pretends they’re not a lefty site Cal Matters offers up an extensive profile of Steyer’s political activities:

    From an early age, Tom Steyer has hopscotched from one rarified sphere of American prestige and privilege to the next. His resume starts at the Upper East Side of New York’s The Buckley School, a private K-9 that educated Franklin Roosevelt and a young Donald Trump. Next stop was Phillips Exeter, the patrician New Hampshire boarding academy. Then Yale, where Steyer studied economics, played soccer and graduated at the top of his class. A brief stint at Morgan Stanley, a business degree at Stanford and a job at Goldman Sachs rounded out Steyer’s gilded early resume.

    And that was before he became a billionaire.

    In San Francisco, Steyer teamed up with the banjo-playing financier Warren Hellman and started a hedge fund. It would eventually be named Farallon Capital and grow from $15 million to more than $20 billion investing diversely: corporate mergers, distressed Asian banks, pharmaceutical companies.

    Today Forbes estimates Steyer’s net worth at $1.6 billion. But Farallon’s past investments in coal mines, private prison companies and aquifer-pumping land deals may not jibe with Democratic voters. Neither might Steyer himself — a white guy from high finance.

    “The whole issue of income inequality has become a fairly major talking point with Democrats,” said Garry South, a California political strategist. “Why would you think that a billionaire is the best person to deal with income inequality? It’s sort of a contradiction in terms.”

    Steyer is a bit of a contradiction himself. In the mold of Warren Buffet, he is famously restrained in his spending habits (to a point). His sartorial style could be described as “Boomer dad”: He regularly wears the same tartan tie and a colorful beaded belt he bought on a trip to Kenya. He flies commercial, for environmental reasons. Speaking to CalMatters over the phone from Iowa, he recalls meeting a “slick-as-could-be” energy lobbyist a few years back who was wearing a “$5,000 suit.” As if Steyer couldn’t drop ten times that on a new outfit every morning for the rest of his life.

    Snip.

    In 2010, he co-chaired the committee to defeat a repeal of the state’s cap-and-trade emissions reduction program, putting $5 million into the effort. He struck Dan Logue, a former Republican Assemblyman who sponsored the measure and debated Steyer that year, as a true believer “committed to the cause.”

    In 2012, Steyer ratcheted up his financial involvement, spending $30 million on a ballot measure to close a tax loophole, effectively raising rates on businesses with out-of-state facilities. In 2016, he spent millions more on an unsuccessful bid to overturn the death penalty, and successful initiatives to raise cigarette taxes and reduce sentences for non-violent crimes.

    Steyer’s early focus on voter-initiated policy change runs through into his presidential campaign. He’s proposing to give voters the power to directly make federal law twice each year.

    Snip.

    Many California voters may not know who Steyer is, but California politicians do.

    He’s spent the past decade putting massive sums of cash toward supporting progressive candidates and boosting voter registration.

    Starting in 2013, Steyer began throwing his considerable financial weight behind individual candidates across the country through NextGen Climate Action Committee, a super PAC he started to help make climate change a winning issue for progressives.

    In the lead-up to both the 2014 and 2016 elections, Steyer’s family firm, Fahr LLC, was the biggest contributor of publicly disclosed political cash of any organization in the country. (Fahr, his middle name, was his mother’s maiden name.) In 2018, Fahr slipped to second place. So far in the 2020 cycle, the Steyers are back in the top spot.

    That largesse has endeared him to some Democrats.

    “I know the difference between talkers and doers and Steyer is a doer,” said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California.

    “Some candidates can come and be the main speaker at a dinner and that’s nice. But if you can write big checks…,” he said, trailing off.

    The piece notes he’s sometimes “not been a team player”…but only in the sense that he backs farther left challengers against Democratic incumbents. Picked up a state rep endorsement in South Carolina. “Steyer’s campaign says state Rep. Jerry Govan has signed on as a senior adviser. Govan is chairman of South Carolina’s Legislative Black Caucus.”

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Let no one say she’s not pandering to left-wing interest groups hard enough, as she came out for eliminating right-to-work laws. Democrats couldn’t even implement card check when they had the White House, House and Senate, what makes her think she can pass a big labor pander a hundred times more radical? Or that a nation full of non-unionized employees would ever elect her? Union membership has been declining for decades, down to some 6.5% of private sector jobs. Most states are right-to-work states. Does Warren really think “vote for me and I’ll force you to join a union” is a winning campaign slogan? Once again, Warren maneuvers to win the primary at the cost of winning the election. Well well well: “Elizabeth Warren Fires National Organizing Director Over ‘Inappropriate Behavior.'” “Over the past two weeks, senior campaign leadership received multiple complaints regarding inappropriate behavior by Rich McDaniel.” He “was also Hillary Clinton’s primary states regional director.” Should we assume McDaniel: A.) Tried to get jiggy with new recruits, B.) Forced all new hires to eat a bug, or C.) Proclaimed his love of Nickleback*? She keeps ducking admitting that she’s going to hike your taxes until your eyes bleed. She also got caught lying about being fired for getting pregnant. Indeed, “lying” seems to be the theme of Warren’s entire career. Dissecting all of her pie-in-the-sky promises:

    From stem to stern, the senator from Massachusetts has marketed herself as the candidate with everything thought out. For every problem facing our nation, her slogan says she “has a plan for that.” Warren is running on a myriad of big government programs including Medicare for all, student loan debt cancellation, and free college tuition. Her plan to pay for these promises includes a wealth tax of 2 percent on fortunes above $50 million and 3 percent on fortunes above $1 billion.

    To many voters, her plans sound attractive, and her years in academia lend to her pitch. She is articulate and crafty enough to crib off Sanders, while arguing that she just wants capitalism with a human face. In reality, however, the former Harvard professor is hoping you will not do the math yourself when it comes to her grandiose pitch. Almost every element of her plans would drive discourse to the left, while weakening our political and economic systems to make it susceptible to crony capitalism.

    Even the centerpiece of the Warren campaign platform is obviously unworkable. A wealth tax on fortunes above $50 million is touted as the key funding mechanism for a plethora of new programs. But European nations have attempted numerous such wealth taxes, and none have been successful. Since 1990, the number of European states with such a levy has fallen from a dozen to three, including otherwise low tax Switzerland. Between 2000 and 2012, the burdensome wealth tax in France caused 42,000 millionaires to flee the country. The nation ultimately scrapped the impost in 2018.

    While a wealth tax in the United States is likely unconstitutional to begin with, it is certainly unenforceable in the way that Warren desires.

    Snip.

    But perhaps the biggest problem with the Warren wealth tax plan is that it is estimated to bring in an average of less than $3 trillion over the following decade, which would provide less than 10 percent of the total cost of her Medicare for all plan. Warren will not state the obvious that in order to pay for any of her policy proposals, it would require a massive tax increase on the middle class.

    Even worse, Warren proposes a frightening Office of United States Corporations through her Accountable Capitalism Act. Under the plan, workers must represent 40 percent of corporate boards of companies worth more than $1 billion. It also institutes strict controls on political spending and requires a corporate charter approved by the federal government. This idea is Orwellian. After all, the idea of government control of private industry is among the textbook definitions of fascism and its concept of corporatism. That means charters to do business could be revoked by Washington.

    A short list of all the taxes Warren has proposed. “Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren endorsed a Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) policy proposal that includes taxpayer-funded welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.” Wargaming what happens if Warren beats Biden in Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s all church-of-what’s-happening-now speculation, but they do note Howard Dean’s flameout.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Williamson doesn’t want to be your crystal space witch: “I’ve never had a crystal, I’ve never written about crystals. I’ve never talked about crystals. I’ve never had a crystal onstage with me.” How much is Williamson worth? Evidently $1.5 million.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Andrew Yang Shouldn’t Retreat from His Past Success in Revitalizing Depressed Cities“:

    As Peter Beinart has trenchantly observed in The Atlantic, formerly moderate Generation X Democratic candidates Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have chosen to turn their backs on policies they once championed. Booker no longer talks up his successful expansion of charter schools as mayor of Newark, while Harris has run away from her common-sense decision, as San Francisco district attorney, to enforce truancy laws as a means to get the attention of parents of disadvantaged students. But there’s another Gen X candidate, unmentioned by Beinart, who’s run away from past successes: Andrew Yang.

    While he promotes government-led efforts to redistribute income, Yang has been silent about his own groundbreaking efforts to help declining cities — not through government, but through civil society. In 2011, after a successful career as corporate lawyer and business-school test-prep entrepreneur, Yang founded Venture for America (VFA). Modeled on Teach for America, VFA aimed to attract applicants from elite colleges to work as paid interns at start-up companies in poor cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Birmingham, and Baltimore. Its funding came entirely from philanthropists, most importantly Detroit’s Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans. Like Dan Markowits, the author of the new The Meritocracy Trap, Yang saw the best and brightest as having “too limited a vision of what career success looks like,” and got to work fixing the problem.

    Today, VFA is still in operation, with fellowships in 14 different cities around the country. The organization has supported more than 1,000 fellows, working in business incubators and often going on to found start-ups of their own. It says that 51 percent of them continue to live in the cities where their fellowship was based, and they’ve been involved in starting 129 new companies.

    Bringing graduates of some 300 colleges to cities that ambitious young people have long been fleeing is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a record of success that gives Yang, if he’d only use it, a ready-made, positive message on the stump: Talented people can start new businesses, help power established ones, and in the process, make cities thrive. This message is all the more powerful when juxtaposed with generations of failed local, state, and federal policies based on the idea that subsidies to attract business are the best way of rejuvenating cities in decline.

    Indeed, what is striking about Yang’s Venture for America is its fundamental separation from those failed government policies and from government itself.

    I suspect that’s the very reason he doesn’t talk about it to Democrats. He blasted China for blasting the Houston Rockets for Daryl Morey posting a pro-Hong Kong tweet, which has engendered big controversy, because the Rockets have a lot of business deals in China thanks to the Yao Ming era. But Morey (and Yang) was right the first time. Funny how CNN and MSNBC just keeps leaving Yang out of infographics:

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida 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)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    *I was only vaguely aware of Nickleback in their heyday, and only became aware of them after all the memes talking about how much they sucked. Now that I’ve been forced to listen to “Photograph” to keep up with current events, eh, I don’t hate it. Solid piece of nostalgic pop rock. Honestly, what strikes me most is how the chorus of a song from 2005 sounds exactly like every “hot country” song circa 2014

    Lee Stranahan On The Clinton State Department Crony Origin Of The Russian Collusion Hoax

    October 6th, 2019

    Here’s an interesting thread by Lee Stranahan on how Clinton cronies at the State Department were building the Russian Collusion hoax story back in early 2016, before Fusion GPS hired Steele to assemble the fake dossier.

    So that’s TWO State Department employees being briefed by Steele; Jonathan Winer & Victoria Nuland.

    They both have 🇺🇦 Ukraine connections, as does Steele.

    And there’s one more State Department who is VERY relevant to the whole story…Clinton’s Oxford roommate Strobe Talbott.

    Strobe Talbott is one of the Clinton’s oldest and closest friends.

    He headed the Brookings Instituion for years.

    And is the THIRD State Department official briefed by Steele.
    This is already looking very much like a State Department operation.

    The 🇺🇦 Ukraine connections are everywhere.

    Strobe link to a VERY important connection.

    Back in the 1970s, Strobe married the twin sister of a man who would become a shadowy Clinton operative: Cody Shearer.

    Read that Jonathan Winer op-Ed from earlier in the thread and you’ll that he was shown the little discussed “second dossier” that Cody Shearer assembled.

    Steele gave it to the FBI.

    But it’s totally misnamed. Why?

    Because it came first, as you’ll see soon.

    Snip.

    Cody Shearer was assembling HIS dossier BEFORE STEELE WAS HIRED.

    He was discussing Trump / Russia in MARCH OR APRIL of 2016.

    Other names that play a role in the timeline: DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa, notorious Clinton crony Sidney Blumenthal, George Soros, John McCain and even convicted felony Brett Kimberlin, though those last three names appear to be involved in the Steele story only tangentially. Also, I don’t buy Stranahan’s “Ukraine bad/Russia good” positioning near the end of the thread. But the information about State Department/Clinton crony involvement in assembling the Steele hoax dossier information much earlier than most people know is worth pointing out.

    Joe Rogan: “TransWomen” Beat The Shit Out Of Real Women

    October 5th, 2019

    Joe Rogan makes an obvious point here. Super obvious. Blindingly obviously. But in a world gone mad, the obvious needs to be restated again and again: “TransWomen” are men, and merely good male athletes regularly beat the very best women athletes in fair competitions. And when it comes to martial arts, male athletes of the same weight simply beat the snot out of female athletes.

    There are two biological sexes, male and female, genetically determined before birth. Either you have XX chromosomes and are a women, or XY chromosomes and are a man, or you’re and end-of the bell curve genetic anomaly. Everything else is sophistry.

    LinkSwarm for October 4, 2019

    October 4th, 2019

    Welcome to the October Country!

  • Why not ask foreign governments if they have information on criminal activity by America’s criminal elites?

    The events of this week reveal the new standard. Like sharks to a whale carcass, our elites routinely feast upon precarious situations in other nations: The Podesta Group, Hunter Biden, and others were content to make a buck off the tensions in Ukraine along with Paul Manafort, just as the Clintons and others were happy to take tens of millions of dollars from Russian oligarchs. We all know that Manafort would be sitting in a house in Malibu right now with the same immunity deal the likes of Podesta, Biden, and the Clintons apparently possess if only he had never decided to work for Donald Trump.

    Recall that the supposed original sin of the entire Russian-collusion gambit was that when approached (apparently mostly by agents of the United States government working for President Obama and friends) then-candidate Trump or his team were interested in recovering the emails that Hilary Clinton unwisely and illegally sent and then deleted from her private server so that no one could read them. There would be plenty of reasons for Americans and the U.S. government itself to seek out these emails, of course, if only to determine to what extent they threatened national security—never mind the power and wealth of the foundation engaged in international money collection that her husband ran while she was Secretary of State.

    But while the supposed reasons for it change every week, the Ukraine fiasco reveals the real underlying cause of the Left’s outrageously hypocritical march towards impeachment. The ruling class is now effectively saying to President Trump: “We know that domestically we have nothing to fear from the media and the law—so how dare you ask other countries about us! You must be impeached for this crime and this crime alone—asking other countries about our wrongdoing! Only an insane or evil person would do this!”

  • Speaking of which, “July 2019: Ukraine launched probe of military sale by fundraiser for Adam Schiff.”
  • Related: “Ukraine Mystery: Schiff Staffer Made August Visit for Think Tank Backed by Hunter Biden’s Old Employer.”
  • “Dems, media aim to squash Barr’s probe of Russia collusion hoax.” I bet they do… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • This is the meme they keep trying to get taken off Twitter:

  • Impeachment? Go for it!

  • “Atlantic City Mayor Frank Gilliam pleads guilty to stealing $87K from youth basketball nonprofit he founded.” Hey, which political party do you think Mr. Gilliam is a member of? Let’s start scanning the article and see if we can guess. Headline? No. First paragraph? No. Second paragraph? No. Look, I’ll save you the suspense: You have to go all the way down to the eleventh paragraph to learn what you already assumed: Mr. Gilliam is a Democrat.

  • The whole “white nationalist” charge against President Donald Trump and his supporters was always garbage.
  • Another court victory for President Trump: His name will appear on the California ballot despite Democratic machinations to keep him off.
  • Saying goodbye to the extremely consequential GOP class of 1994, the first Republican House majority in 40 years, the one that ran on the Contract With America and passed welfare reform.
  • A very malevolent incarnation of Florida Woman: Rich Democrat wife files police report over man using a meme on Facebook. “Beth Jaffe, who is the wife of city commissioner Bryon Jaffe, felt that the meme was threatening her life. Ms. Jaffe contacted the district office of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and asked for them to investigate Van Antwerpen.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • A running list of everything Democrats want to ban. Including hamburgers, football and To Kill A Mockingbird.
  • “Honduran president’s brother allegedly took $1 million bribe from drug lord ‘El Chapo.'”
  • Followup: Remember MyPayrollHR, the online payroll company that suddenly closed owing $35 million? Well The CEO has been arrested and admitted to $70 million worth of fraud. And he’d been embezzling for years…
  • Another week, another fake hate crime hoax.
  • Related: “Reporter Who Covered the False Dreadlock Story Pushed for Hairstyle Laws In Earlier Tweets.”
  • No, you silly billies, the world of The Handmaiden’s Tale is not Trump’s America. So says Margaret Atwood. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Sports Illustrated lays off half its staff. I can’t possibly imagine why—

    I said, I can’t possibly imagine—

    Ahem! I said I can’t possibly imagine how Sports Illustrated might have alienated their core—

  • The Guardian: “Women’s magazines are more progressive than ever – and they’re all closing down.” There’s this thing called “causality.” Maybe publishers should look into it while they still can… (Hat tip: Aceof Spades HQ.)
  • Wallace Hall: University admissions scandals go deeper than you think:

    The real cause of these abuses is failure of university trustees to meet their fiduciary obligations, which in the case of public schools is to taxpayers. Weak boards allow university administrators to limit oversight of admissions. The administrators are allowed to see admissions criteria, but not the trustees who are supposed to be in charge. Board members who want admission favors for their own children or their friends go along, while others turn their heads to avoid the wrath of powerful alumni and politicians who benefit from the workarounds.

    I witnessed this while serving as a member of the University of Texas System Board of Regents. My actions to expose the admissions scandal at UT-Austin, our flagship campus, resulted in impeachment hearings against me by the state legislature and even efforts to convince a grand jury to indict me. While neither worked, the university continues to hide all of the documents that would have exposed the scandal. Even the FBI knows only a fraction of the real corruption.

    Details of the larger problem at the Austin campus were uncovered in a private investigation commissioned by our then-Chancellor and a minority of Board members. The problem is, our university president teamed up with a new Chancellor and the state’s most powerful elected officials to keep the findings sealed. The un-redacted report, which explains how hundreds of unqualified students manage to occupy spots in UT programs—including our law school—is locked in a courtroom after my lawsuit to make it public was challenged by the university. Every one of those students owes his or her presence on campus to a politician who controls state spending at the university, or to a well-connected donor or faculty member.

    (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)

  • Babylon Bee founder starts real news site.
  • “Staffer Nervously Informs Hillary Clinton She Lost 2016 Election.”
  • Jackalopes return to Yellowstone.
  • Wargaming a Sanders Exit

    October 3rd, 2019

    Following yesterday’s news that Socialist Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders suffered a heart attack and had two stents installed, rumors have been rife that Sanders will drop out of the race.

    Give the old commie his due: Bernie appears to be a tough old bird who keeps up a rigorous campaign schedule. And a stent procedure is far less taxing than a coronary bypass, and some people are up and walking about within a week after having a stent inserted.

    That said, heart surgery of any kind is no joke. The people who are up and around in a few days after stent surgery are young people. Sanders is 78. And the next Democratic debate is thirteen days from now. It’s possible that Sanders will be recovered enough to participate, but I rather doubt it. At the very least I expect he’ll need a chair rather than standing for a couple of hours.

    Also, anytime old people undergo general anesthetic, there’s the possibility they’ll suffer from postoperative cognitive dysfunction. Problems can include “impairments in attention, memory, concentration and/or executive function.” And even if he is all there, it’s a good bet that he won’t be as up physically for the grueling schedules of a serious presidential campaign.

    If Sanders drops out, lots of people have calculated that will help Elizabeth Warren as the most viable leftward candidate, but that’s not necessarily the case. Morning Consult polls consistently show that slightly more Sanders voters prefer prefer Joe Biden as their second choice over Warren. I’m pretty sure Sanders voters won’t be wild about backing billionaire candidate Tom Steyer (an opinion they seem to share with the overwhelming voting age population).

    If I had to pick a likely beneficiary of Sanders dropping out beyond Biden and Warren, the longshot that comes to mind is Andrew Yang. After all, both of their followers have a noted devotion to being promised free stuff…

    Breaking: Bernie’s Blocked Arteries

    October 2nd, 2019

    Bernie Sanders has been hospitalized with blocked arteries. He’s suspended campaign events.

    This should shake up the race. And Elizabeth Warren must have a very good voodoo doll maker on staff.

    Update: He’s had surgery to have two stents installed. Seeing reports he’s cancelled Iowa ad buys as well. Hmmm…

    Is Your Minimum Wage $15 An Hour? Behold Your Future!

    October 2nd, 2019

    If you live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, or anyplace else the minimum wage is $15 an hour, and work in kitchen prep, behold your future:

    After three years of quietly toiling away on a robotic food system, Seattle startup Picnic has emerged from stealth mode with a system that assembles custom pizzas with little human intervention.

    Picnic — previously known as Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics — is the latest entrant in a cohort of startups and industry giants trying to find ways to automate restaurant kitchens in the face of slim margins and labor shortages.

    Snip.

    Picnic’s platform assembles up to 300 12-inch pizzas per hour, far faster than most restaurants would be able to make the dough, bake and serve the pizzas. That speed comes in handy in places where large numbers of orders come in during a rush, such as at a stadium or in large cafeterias. It’s also compact enough that it could theoretically be installed in a food truck.

    Machines have been making frozen pizzas for years, but Picnic’s robot differs in a few respects. It’s small enough to fit in most restaurant kitchens, the recipes can be easily tweaked to suit the whims of the restaurants, and — most importantly — the ingredients are fresh….The robot is also highly customizable, comprised of a series of modules that dole out what

    There is a catch: “The dough preparation, sauce making and baking — the real art of pizza — is left in the capable, five-fingered hands of people.” How long do you think it will take before that part is automated as well?

    I don’t think it’s any accident this startup hails from Seattle.

    I don’t know how it tastes, but I’d certainly be willing to give it a try.

    As always, the true minimum wage is “Zero.”

    Why Nancy Pelosi Is Screwed

    October 1st, 2019

    Interesting piece on the politics and timing of the impeachment vote.

    Why green-light the Full Monty impeachment farce three days later, when it was clear as day that this “bombshell” was already fizzling, just like all the other “bombshells”?

    The answer is simple: the absence of impeachable offenses makes no difference whatsoever, because the outcome is pre-determined, and Pelosi’s options are stark: start the impeachment now, and retain control of the narrative, or start a month or two from now, and lose control completely, with the impeachment hearings dragging on into the primary season.

    Pelosi understands perfectly that an election where the Democratic Party is framed as a single-issue party, whose sole concern is an impeaching a president over two casual sentences in a phone call, will be catastrophic. But she has run out of rope.

    Impeachment proceedings are a given, because her caucus now almost unanimously demands it, and her caucus demands it because the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the Resistance crazies and the hard left. Pelosi has also run out of cute euphemisms for impeachment—the usual Pelosi mumbo-jumbo, like “inquiry,” “investigation,” and “official inquiry,” no longer work without giving the crazies the real deal.

    Pelosi had to get ahead of the tidal wave before it drowned her. As Spartan women used to say to their men, “Return with the shield, or on it.” Pelosi, who generally does not lack in political courage, would rather return with the shield this time, and live to fight another day. So she chose the better of two bad options.

    Snip.

    With the House vote done by December, Pelosi can congratulate the troops, and move on, regardless of the result (not that it’s in any doubt). She can then proudly proclaim that the House Democrats have been diligent in saving the republic, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and those nasty obstructionist unpatriotic Republicans in the Senate refuse to see the light.

    With a straight face, she can tell the lunatics and the impeachment fanatics that she has given them exactly what they asked for, and that it is up to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer now. Then she can privately breathe a sigh of relief.

    Pelosi can then spend 2020 working to retain her House majority, while hoping Republican voters lose their energy by next November. Democratic candidates can spend the next year talking about something else, anything else, and at least have a chance of defeating Trump.

    Pelosi knows that if impeachment is on the voters’ minds next year, Trump will be reelected in a tsunami. Her majority and speakership will go the way of the Dodo bird. The only way to change that narrative is to do the impeachment show now, and forget all about it next year.

    Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) However, his idea that the Senate can have a quick up-and-down vote on impeachment simply won’t happen. Article I, Section 3, Paragraph 6 of the United States Constitution states:

    The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

    That means a real trial, presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts. That also means that President Trump’s defense team will probably be able to compel witnesses to testify, and given the Constitutional nature of the proceedings, it is entirely possible that witnesses will not be able to plead Fifth Amendment rights and refuse such testimony. Let the Senate call James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Rep. Adam Schiff, Hunter Biden, Andrew McCabe, Bruce and Nellie Ohr and every Fusion GPS and CrowStrike employee involved in both the Russian collusion hoax and Hunter Biden’s crooked dealings in the Ukraine.

    The Clinton impeachment lasted a month, had thirteen House members stating the case for the prosecution, and dealt with a much narrower case and criteria. There’s no reason a Trump impeachment wouldn’t take three to six times as long for a much more complex and sprawling case.

    If Democrats want an impeachment, let’s give them an impeachment, good and hard.