Hickenlooper is In, Inslee is more officially In, and the B team (Biden, Bloomberg and Beto) are still Hamleting. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
The Washington Post plays the answer top Google questions about the candidates game. Got a chuckle out of this on Pete Buttigieg: “Not only would he be the youngest person ever elected president, he would also be both the first gay president and the first president who liked University of Notre Dame athletics.”
538 polls which candidate early primary state Democratic activists are considering backing. Finally, a poll Kamala Harris comes out on top of! She’s followed by Booker, Brown, Warren, Klobuchar, Biden and Sanders. Biggest drop between November and February? O’Rourke, whose support halved.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning Toward In. He says people are tired of “rage Olympics,” applauded President Donald Trump’s “America will never be a socialist country” line and says Medicare for all is a pipe-dream. It will be interesting to see if that message gets any traction in a crowed field…
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Likely In. “U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is starting the final leg of his tour of the early presidential primary and caucus states. As he visits South Carolina, Brown says he’s learned a lot as he gets closer to making a decision on a possible presidential run.” Decision? If you’re touring Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, you’ve already decided to get in…
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. With all the attention on Iowa, New hampshire and Couth Carolina, Buttigieg is campaigning at…Scripps College in Claremont, California. I actually had to look that up. It’s part of the Los Angeles sprawl, just west of Rancho Cucamonga…
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Said he’s going to run on education, including pre-K funding. (Tiny problem: It doesn’t work. But don’t expect any of Castro’s rivals to voice that heretical thought…)
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not. But check out this ABC news headline: “Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and other 2020 hopefuls honor march on Selma”
You go to Dewitt, Tipton, Glenwood, Denison, Alba, Knoxville, Perry, Grimes and nine other places this year alone—emphasizing the small Iowa towns that seldom see a presidential candidate. You take out an ad during the Super Bowl two years before the Iowa caucuses — an unheard-of extravagance that no one dared try before. You open six campaign offices in Iowa — before your better-known rivals have opened even one. You win the endorsement of four county central Democratic committees in Iowa — long before the top-tier candidates have lassoed any.
And you make 24 campaign trips to Iowa and another 14 to New Hampshire, the sites of the first two political tests of the 2020 campaign, states that pride themselves on being the political equivalent of the Cheers bar — places where, the civic folklore says, everyone knows your name.
Everyone in the political world knows your name, unless, of course, your name is John Delaney.
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Out.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris wants all the California Benjamins. Politico says she’s she’s just too awesome at connecting emotionally with voters to offer actual details or plans. “She’s been noncommittal or vague on a range of issues.” One plan floated: legalizing prostitution. My libertarian half both agrees and points out that it’s a state level issue, and thus nothing the President can or should affect. That WaPo Google answer bit above offers this tidbit: “Her sister is Maya Harris, a former adviser to the 2016 campaign of Hillary Clinton who now acts as a political analyst for MSNBC.” It’s incest all the way down…
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Website. Twitter. Announced this morning. His kickoff rally is in Denver March 7. Upgrade over leaning toward in.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Maybe. He’s made up his mind! But he’s not telling us. Yet. More from The Dallas Morning News, if you can get past the beg blocker.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
Can @CNN and @BernieSanders explain why these democratic employees are planted in the audience and presented to us as anything but what their actual jobs are? pic.twitter.com/QJyht7B5nv
California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning Toward In. He’s in New Hampshire. Evidently what Swalwell learned from the 2016 Presidential election is that the path to the White House is tweeting crazy shit.
U.S.-backed forces in Syria are closing in on the last patch of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in Syria.
Syrian Democratic Force spokesman Mustafa Bali said Saturday three SDF soldiers have been wounded. Militants have been killed, he said, but he could not confirm a number.
“Fighting continues and heavy weapons are being used,” Bali said. “SDF forces have advanced significantly and have moved into Baghuz. Militants are still planting and using IEDs and bombs are exploding as the SDF forces are advancing. There is also heavy street fighting.”
The advance on the terror group’s remaining fighters began late Friday.
The final assault, announced on Twitter by Syrian Democratic Force spokesman Mustafa Bali, began just a day after the lead commander said the northeast Syrian village of Baghuz would be liberated within a week.
Remember that Livemap image that showed no more Islamic State-held territory left in Baghuz?
Well, this is what it looks like now:
Some of the confusion stems from the American media’s apparent complete disinterest in covering the end of the Islamic State, meaning that reporting on the conflict tends to vary between spotty and distant to non-existent. Part of the pause in the final assault was apparently to evacuate remaining civilians.
Hopefully the final final assault is no underway, and the utter destruction of the last of the Hajin/Baghuz pocket is underway.
— Struggle Of Kurds 🦅 (@1StrugleOfKurds) March 2, 2019
Heavy fighting continues at outskirts of #Baghouz at the moment. #SDF and #YPG–#YPJ made a remarkable progress since yesterday evening, recaptured many positions from #ISIS terrorists.#DefeatDaesh.
— Struggle Of Kurds 🦅 (@1StrugleOfKurds) March 2, 2019
If you wonder how many great men & women people of Kobanî gave in the fight to #DefeatDaesh. This is Kobanî cemetary. These are the graves of the fallen heroes & heroines. They fell on behalf of ALL the world 🌹Şehîdên Me Rûmeta Me Ne🌹 pic.twitter.com/EPqhfePEBx
India and Pakistan seem to be cooling off slightly, and President Donald Trump prefers no deal to a bad deal with North Korea. So enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
“Previously Deported Illegal Alien Convicted of Child Rape After Release by Sanctuary City.”
Speaking of planes, Pakistan is swearing up and down that India shoot down an F-16…because the terms of the U.S. sale bar them from being used for offense.
“This is a nuanced discussion,” said Senator Kamala Harris, who voted against the act. “I mean, should we or shouldn’t we murder babies? It’s not really cut and dry for many Americans. What if the baby is inconvenient? What if the mother has already decided it’s a nuisance and might interfere with her school or work? What then?”
Borepatch co-blogger ASM826 calls a tool company to get a screwdriver tip replaced, ends up talking two hours with the owner who was a marine in the battle of Iwo Jima.
Evidently the Indian Air Force staged several mock runs to stress Pakistan’s air force before the actual strike.
Not buying all the points here, but the analysis of differing Pakistani and Indian nuclear strategy is interesting:
The Pakistani military’s fear is that the Indian army has an overwhelming advantage, in terms of men and tanks, so may mount a “Cold Start” conventional attack that quickly could seize the major Pakistani city of Lahore and effectively win a war without employing nuclear weapons. As a consequence, whereas India, initially at least, developed strategic nuclear weapons designed to reach all of Pakistan, the latter’s military switched to tactical nuclear weapons to stop dead any Cold Start Doctrine adventure.
But how easy would it be to halt Indian tank divisions pouring across the desert in the flat border region south of the mountainous terrain of Kashmir, where the current action is taking place? It may sound that I have strange friends, but I know people who have “run the numbers” on this. The answer is that it would take more than 20 Pakistani nuclear weapons to blunt an Indian attack.
The conventional wisdom is, or certainly was, that nuclear weapons create a balance of terror between rivals. That logic may have applied in the days of the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, but it no longer is valid — at least between India and Pakistan.
In both India and Pakistan, people are asking the important questions: Will the war interfere with the Cricket World Cup? In fact, Pakistan’s president Imran Khan is a former cricketer.
In a follow-up to yesterday’s story, Pakistan claims it shot down two Indian aircraft, though India says Pakistan only shot down one, and that India shot down a Pakistani aircraft. The Indian plane lost is reportedly a MiG 21, a plane so old it was used in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, AKA the Bangladeshi Liberation War. Pakistan has closed off its airspace to all commercial flights and India has instituted a more limited ban on its northern airspace.
Pakistani PM Imran Khan is calling for talks. Meanwhile, significant portions of India’s population seem positively giddy over India’s airstrikes against the Jaish-e-Mohammad camp. Indian PM Narendra Modi’s tough stance towards Pakistan seems to be boosting his chances in the forthcoming April-May general elections.
Here’s the BBC News live feed. Local news sources in both India and Pakistan seem too biased to trust.
Pakistan has been playing its double game of backing Islamic terrorists while denying it’s doing so for a long, long time. They’ve been doing the same with the Taliban in Afghanistan for three decades. It would be nice if they could be dissuaded from continuing this course of action short of full-scale war.
India and Pakistan’s on-again/off-again conflict over Kashmir is on again:
Pakistan says India launched an airstrike on its territory early Tuesday that caused no casualties, while India said it targeted a terrorist training camp in a pre-emptive strike that killed a “very large number” of militants.
The overnight raid was the latest escalation between the nuclear-armed rivals since a deadly militant attack in the disputed Kashmir region earlier this month killed more than 40 Indian soldiers. Pakistan has denied involvement in the attack but has vowed to respond to any Indian military operation against it.
The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad claimed responsibility. The bomber, who made a video before the attack, was a resident of Indian Kashmir.
Pakistan’s military spokesman, Maj. Gen Asif Ghafoor, said the Indian “aircrafts” crossed into the Muzafarabad sector of Kashmir, which is split between the two countries but claimed by each in its entirety. He said Pakistan scrambled fighters and the Indian jets “released payload in haste” near Balakot, on the edge of Pakistani-ruled Kashmir.
India’s foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale, told reporters in New Delhi that Indian fighter aircraft targeted Jaish-e-Mohammad camps in a pre-emptive strike after intelligence indicated another attack was being planned.
“Acting on intelligence, India early today stuck the biggest training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed in Balakot,” he said. “In this operation a very large number of Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists, trainers, senior commanders and Jehadis being trained were eliminated.”
The best working assumption here is that everyone involved is lying, which is to assume that Pakistan is backing and funding Jaish-e-Mohammad (probably, like the Taliban, through the ISI), and that Indian planes did hit their targets, but have no way of knowing how much damage they actually inflicted.
The Indian Air Force used Sukhoi-30MKIs and Mirage 2000s with laser-guided bombs in the strike. Neither of those is state-of-the-art. Sukhoi-30MKI is a local build of a Russian F-15 clone introduced in the 1990s. The French Mirage 2000 was first introduced in the 1970s, though the Indian version has been considerably upgraded. None of those are remotely close to state-of-the-art. Fortunately for Indian, Pakistan’s air force is not much more modern, with American F-16s and the Pakistani/Chinese co-built F-17 Thunder being their top of the line.
Three of India and Pakistan’s four wars have been fought over Kashmir, mostly recently in the Kargil War of 1999, when Pakistani troops infiltrated into Kashmir over the “line of control” and got their asses kicked. The biggest difference between 1999 and now, of course, is that both India and Pakistan have considerably expanded their nuclear arsenals, both thought to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 nukes each.
Making things even more unpredictable is that both Pakistan and India are ruled by weird religious-ethnoationalist populist parties, Imran Khan’s Islamist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and Narendra Modi’s Hindu Bharatiya Janata. It’s hard to know just how far either will take things if push comes to shove. Probably well short of letting the nukes fly, but who knows?
It would be nice if our media would focus on things like “possible nuclear war” rather than, say, the beliefs of Trump’s pastry chef, but that’s not the media we have…
I updated last week’s clown car update to note that Bernie Sanders was In, and he promptly raised $6 million for his campaign. Now we’re waiting on the other three Bs (Biden, Beto and Bloomberg) to make up their minds.
15 Democratic contenders ranked by a Washington Post columnist, with Harris at the top, just in case you needed a nice tall glass of consensus MSM grab-fanny.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Learning toward In. All people know about him is a speech slamming Ted Cruz. Like slamming President Trump, that’s not exactly going to make you stand out from the field. Also, if he does run, his brother, James Bennet, will step down as New York Times option editor. Thanks for reminding everyone, yet again, how incestuously intermixed our elite mainstream media is with the Democratic Party.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning toward running. Hamlet is still expected to run. 538 notes that Biden not running wouldn’t be unprecedented, with Gore 2004 as the closest example, but the latter had just come off a huge losing general election effort. Vox wonders what happens if he doesn’t run.
Booker, long the darling of the tech industry and some of its marquee leaders, is traipsing into a transformed Silicon Valley when he touches down in town this weekend for his first fundraising trip here since he announced he was running for president. Friday lunch guests at the San Francisco home of David Shuh, Friday dinner guests at the 9,300-square-foot Piedmont home of Ali Partovi, and Saturday evening guests at the Atherton home of Gary Lauder (an heir to the Estée Lauder beauty empire) are paying up to $2,800 each to rub shoulders with Cory Booker.
Then again, most have probably met him before. The presidential candidate has collected half a million dollars from the internet industry over his five years in the Senate, from people like LinkedIn’s Hoffman, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Emerson Collective founder Laurene Powell Jobs, and early Facebook exec Sean Parker.
Why? He is culturally of this place, donors say.
But times have changed, and Silicon Valley is no longer merely an ATM for Cory Booker.
Twitter is no longer primarily a place to find an elderly man snowtrapped in his home in Newark, like Booker once did — it is now also a cesspool of hate and misinformation. Mark Zuckerberg is no longer a hero brandishing a $100 million check in a well-meaning attempt to save Newark’s schools, like Booker once described him — he is a bogeyman who badly mishandled our last election and is now as divisive as any of the people running for president.
Silicon Valley is itself a minefield that in some ways sums up the broader political challenge for Booker in 2020: He’s running as a liberal on issues including tech regulation, but the progressive left holds him in suspicion — and he could face more as he begins to court tech money more openly.
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Likely In. Say’s he’ll make a decision next month and swears he’ll be the most pro-union candidate. Would being the darling of an ever-fading part of the blue coalition be enough to win in a divided field? Maybe.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not. But she met with Biden and Klobuchar. Her endorsement could be a serious boost for Klobuchar. For Biden? Doubt it.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Out.
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Leaning toward In. He appeared in Iowa for crowds of 20 to 40.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Gov. Jay Inslee says he could decide on presidential run ‘as soon as’ this week.” Wait, I thought he was already in. I mean, he even has a SuperPAC Sometimes it’s hard to see all the way to the back of the clown car…
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.
The Hamlet of West Texas—who recently retired from Congress after somehow managing to lose a Texas Senate race against an opponent with sky-high negatives despite raising more than $70 million from a national donor base, and then went on a “listening tour” across America to find himself—recently acknowledged that he is trying to make up his mind about whether to spend 2020 running for president or taking another stab at the Senate by challenging Republican incumbent John Cornyn.
My guess is that O’Rourke will ultimately travel whatever road is lined with the most television cameras. Of course, vanity—even to the point of narcissism—is not a disqualifier in a politician. It’s practically a job requirement.
Snip.
Take the name, which he switches on and off like a light switch. He was “Robert” at birth, “Beto” in childhood, “Robert” again in boarding school and at Columbia, and “Beto” again when he returned to El Paso to run for office.
Either this guy has an identity crisis the size of Texas, or he is just crafty enough to try to have his flan and eat it too—becoming Latin, or a white male, whichever is more convenient.
The urban legend has it that O’Rourke came by his nickname the ol’ fashioned way—by having it bestowed upon him by Latino friends in El Paso, who thought he was pretty decent for a white guy, dubbed him an honorary Mexican, and declared that, from that day forward, he would be known as “Beto.” According to this narrative, O’Rourke became Latino simply by rubbing shoulders with Latinos. It’s like how you get poison oak.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning toward In. The big Swalwell story last week was him tweeting about not having coffee at Trump Tower. Because nothing says “sacrifice” like walking an extra half block…
The army started receiving the SEPv3 upgrade version of the M1A2 Abrams tank (now dubbed the M1A2C) back in 2017. But this week they released pictures of M1A2C’s sporting some interesting modifications (including more turret armor):
A picture has popped-up online showing the latest variant of the Army’s M1 Abrams tank with what appears to be a new armor package on its turret. The U.S. Army is already in the process of adding the Trophy active protection system to the vehicles, which will help guard against anti-tank guided missiles and infantry anti-tank rockets. But the service is also interested adding additional passive armor in light of the threat of potential adversaries, such as Russia, with their own upgraded tanks and new armor-piercing shells.
The Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona posted a picture of an M1A2 System Enhancement Package Version 3 tank, or M1A2 SEPv3, with both Trophy and the add-on armor package, as well as explosive reactor armor, on its Facebook page on Feb. 21, 2019.
Snip.
There do not appear to be any specific announcements about improved passive armor for the M1A2 SEPv3 in the past beyond statements that the variant would include added ballistic protection. Earlier pictures of the prototype M1A2 SEPv3s show weights on the front of the turret, as well as similar weights on the hull front.
These surrogates were supposed to simulate the added weight of the SEPv3’s Next Generation Armor Package (NGAP). There had been no indication, however, that the final turret shape would change significantly.
More about Trophy:
The Trophy active protection system that will go onto the latest M1A2 SEPv3s is another “hard-kill” system that works by firing a shotgun-like blast to knock down incoming threats. The Army first announced it would install the Israeli-made defensive system on its tanks in September 2017.
Unfortunately, these systems are far less effective against fast-flying kinetic penetrators, such as those in modern armor-piercing discarding-sabot tank shells, which rely on sheer force to break through armor. So, there is still a need for a passive armor layer to defend against these threats.
Trophy is designed to defeat close-in top and sides attacked from things like RPGs, not kinetic perpetrator APFSDS rounds fired from another tank. That green section on the Abrams looks like the Trophy system.
Interesting interview with actor Dax Shepard (Frito in Idiocracy) about recovering from addiction, and how addicts frequently hit several bottoms:
I’m doing everything I had dreamt of doing for 30 years. It all came true. And I am the least happy I’ve ever been in my life. I’m closest to not wanting to be alive as I’ve ever been, and I have every single thing on paper that I wanted. And that was a very weird…I feel grateful for this, because I was able to say something much more profound is broken. Because up to then I could tell myself “Well, if I had money, I wouldn’t need to do this. If I was doing the thing I wanted to do, that would solve everything.” I think a lot of us proceed through life thinking: We would be happy if, we would have self-esteem if, we would know contentment if. And those are illusions that most people don’t get to find out are illusions, and I got to find out it’s an illusion. I was lucky enough to have million dollars. My whole life, if I had a million dollars, like, do you know how I would feel if I had a million dollars? You know what my life would be like with a million dollars? Well, I had a million dollars.
Shepard also talks about how another friend in recovery came across his AA book (“the big book”), where he had written down the dates he had fallen off the wagon. Shepard saw it as a record of his failure. His friend found it inspiring, because he hadn’t given up.
