Texas Towns Hit By Ransomware Attack

August 20th, 2019

This isn’t good:

Early on August 16, a total of 23 local government organizations in Texas were hit by a coordinated ransomware attack. The type of ransomware has not been revealed, and Texas officials asserted that no state networks were compromised in the attack.

A spokesman for the Texas Department of Information Resources (TDIR) told Ars that authorities are not ready to reveal the names of the entities affected, nor other details of the attack. State and federal agencies are in the midst of a response, and TDIR did not have information on whether any of the affected governmental organizations had chosen to pay the ransom.

But the TDIR did reveal that the ransomware came from a single source. “At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor,” a spokesperson said. “Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.”

Texas Department of Information Resources has more information:

  • On the morning of August 16, 2019, more than 20 entities in Texas reported a ransomware attack. The majority of these entities were smaller local governments.
  • Later that morning, the State Operations Center (SOC) was activated with a day and night shift.
  • At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor.
  • Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.
  • It appears all entities that were actually or potentially impacted have been identified and notified.
  • Twenty-three entities have been confirmed as impacted.
  • Responders are actively working with these entities to bring their systems back online.
  • The State of Texas systems and networks have not been impacted.
  • The following agencies are supporting this incident:
    • Texas Department of Information Resources
    • Texas Division of Emergency Management
    • Texas Military Department
    • The Texas A&M University System’s Security Operations Center/Critical Incident Response Team
    • Texas Department of Public Safety
    • Computer Information Technology and Electronic Crime (CITEC) Unit
      Cybersecurity

    • Intelligence and Counter Terrorism
    • Texas Public Utility Commission
    • Department of Homeland Security
    • Federal Bureau of Investigation – Cyber
    • Federal Emergency Management Agency
    • Other Federal cybersecurity partners
  • And in convenient retweetable form:

    Consider this yet another reminder to use strong passwords you can remember, to backup all your files (especially all your important files) regularly, update your virus definitions and security patches regularly (between starting and publishing this piece, I updated both Firefox and macOS), and to never open an email attachment or click on a link unless you’re absolutely sure you know who it’s from.

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for August 19, 2019

    August 19th, 2019

    Hickenlooper is Out, Sanders slams the press, Gabbard comes out for legal pot and serves joint duty, and Biden just keeps chug-chug-chuging along. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Polls

  • Fox News: Biden 31, Warren 20, Sanders 10, Harris 8, Booker 3, Buttigieg 3, Yang 3, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Williamson 1.
  • Gravis Marketing (New Hampshire): Sanders 21, Biden 15, Warren 12, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7, Gabbard 5, Yang 4, Steyer 4, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2. First for Sanders to top Biden, first recent poll with Buttigieg over Harris, and first poll with Gabbard or Steyer that high.
  • Post and Courier (South Carolina): Biden 36, Warren 17, Sanders 16, Harris 12, Buttigieg 5, Booker 4, Gabbard 2.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Politico has an analysis of candidate fundraising cycles, based on ActBlue data. It’s interesting data, but it’s not the whole story, as candidates have non-ActBlue avenues for fundraising.
  • Are Democrats jumping off the cliff? “I’ve been doing political consulting for over 30 years, and I can tell you that if the 2020 campaign is viewed as Freedom vs. Socialism, we Democrats are in deep trouble. Furthermore, giveaways vs personal responsibility is not a winning argument either.” A lot of the writer’s proposals are less popular than he thinks they are, but they’re clearly less insane than those most of the clown car has been putting forth. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Castro, Gabbard, Gillibrand and Steyer scramble to try and make the debates.
  • It’s another “drop out of the race and run for the senate” piece. “Senate bids by Hickenlooper, O’Rourke or Bullock are no guarantee that Democrats would win either those specific states or the broader majority come November 2020. But it would sure improve their chances.” As you can see below, Hickenlooper took the advice.
  • Guy polls his family BBQ to see who black voters prefer.
  • Here’s sort of a tedious thumbsucker exploring the shocking idea that some Democratic voters actually consider electability.
  • Heh:

  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Threatening To Get In. Lots of Avenatti news, but its all about his impending trials. (Avenatti appears to be a slimy, dishonest creep, but it wouldn’t bother me at all to see him take the NAACP and Nike down with him.) Now it’s been two weeks since his “I might get in” outburst. Unless I see something this week I’ll drop him back down to the Out of the Running list.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Get’s a WBUR profile. “I don’t think banning private insurance and putting a $23 trillion tax on the American people is going to be something that people are going to want to sustain as the price for getting universal health care coverage, which we desperately need.”
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden’s support doubles between the youngest and oldest black voters. “Grassley, invoking ‘Uranium One,’ probes Biden-linked sale of sensitive tech company to China.” That’s going to rustles some jimmies. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) Speaking of rustled jimmies: “Joe Biden heaps praise on GOP during Massachusetts fundraiser.” “Voters Care About Biden’s Age — Not About His Gaffes.” Sort of a package deal, isn’t it?
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Cory Booker’s plan to fight intergenerational poverty, a cornerstone of his presidential bid, includes a novel proposal: a trust fund for every American child seeded by the federal government that could eventually provide up to nearly $50,000 for college tuition, buying a home or starting a business.” This just in: There’s no shortage of ways for Democrats to spend federal money we don’t have. Oh, and he wants a White House office to fight “white supremacy.” “Social Justice Warrior Powers Activate!”
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says Democrats are blowing it by going too far left. Asked if Warren and Sanders could beat Trump, he said “I don’t know that they can win places like Montana or Iowa, Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.” Bitches about Steyer buying his way into the debates.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He lags in Iowa:

    Pete Buttigieg burst into the 2020 presidential race by building national excitement on social media and cable news shows. Now, pork chop in hand, he’s playing catch-up in the all-important first caucus state.

    The 37-year-old mayor has yet to snag a single in-state endorsement in Iowa, and while his campaign has 57 staffers on the ground, it expanded to that number only recently. It’s a sharp contrast to other top Democratic candidates, who made investments in Iowa last winter to try to identify supporters and build a foundation for 2020, knowing the results here will shape the rest of the fight for the Democratic nomination.

    All Buttigieg’s money will buy a lot of campaign infrastructure there. He doesn’t like Trump’s China tariffs.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. His Obama moment that wasn’t:

    The night before Julián Castro delivered the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention for President Barack Obama’s re-election, he had eaten by himself at the T.G.I. Friday’s not far from the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C.

    No one recognized the 37-year-old mayor of San Antonio. As the other delegates party-hopped around Charlotte, Mr. Castro studied his notes over dinner and went to bed by 9 p.m. He wanted to be well-rested before giving the biggest speech of his political career — a speech that he and his family now remember as transforming everything.

    “The next morning, when we walked down the street, he was just mobbed,” said Mr. Castro’s twin brother, Joaquin, who is a United States congressman. “It was this instantaneous example of how things can change so quickly.”

    Mr. Castro’s speech, in a prime-time slot, burst him onto the national stage, just like the one that had catapulted Mr. Obama to superstardom in 2004. Mr. Castro symbolized a new moment in American politics: The grandson of a Mexican immigrant with a fourth-grade education, the young mayor talked about his family’s story, one so common for millions of Latinos and yet almost nonexistent at the highest level of national politics. “My family’s story isn’t special,” Mr. Castro said. “What’s special is the America that makes our story possible.”

    The applause was raucous. The reviews were overwhelmingly glowing (“A Political Star is Born” and “A Latino Obama?” the headlines read). People started to recognize Mr. Castro, even if they often confused him for Joaquin. On the way back to San Antonio, a fan stopped him in a men’s room at the Atlanta airport to shake his hand. (“He wanted to shake my hand in a men’s room!” Mr. Castro said. “I couldn’t believe it.”) Political pundits declared the Castro brothers the future of the party.

    “He was this kind of phenom and, you know, was this symbol of the growing diverse country,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, said of Julián.

    Party leaders waited for him to seize on his “Obama Moment.” And waited. And waited. And waited.

    The keynote, as it turned out, became a turning point that didn’t quite turn him.

    Yeah, it’s another Failure To Launch piece. He’s having a big birthday party September 16. Maybe all those people his twin brother doxxed will show up…

  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s lying about his record:

    Falsehood No. 1: “I’m proud to say in New York, we’ve divested $5 billion” in pension-fund assets “from the fossil-fuel industry,” Hizzoner bragged in Iowa.

    Uh, no. As Politico noted, the city’s pension funds have divested exactly zero from fossil-fuel companies.

    Yes, there are plans to study the idea, but no such study has even begun. And even if, at some point, the pension funds do divest, de Blasio won’t be able to take credit because he doesn’t control their boards.

    Gets bashed by the NYPD police union (again) for being off in New Hampshire while cops were getting shot at.

  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He refuses to label Trump a white supremacist, because, unlike the rest of the Democratic field, he hasn’t gone completely insane. He plans to stay in the race even if he misses the September debates.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. On the next two weeks, Gabbard is on active military duty, but before she went she came out for an end on federal marijuana prohibition. “The Hawaii Democrat announced in a news release earlier this week that she will be joining the joint military exercise.”

    Did Gabbard’s post-debate ads get taken down due to a Google exploit? Maybe Google will blame “Russians.”

  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She wants to put gun owners in prison. I’m just annoyed that we have to keep pretending she’s an actual candidate…
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Want to know which celebrities are supporting Harris? Me neither, but here it is: “Eva Longoria, Elizabeth Banks and Empire director, Lee Daniels…Jane Fonda, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barbra Streisand, Halle Berry, Reese Witherspoon, Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Charlize Theron and a long roster of studio executives.” Also Spike Lee, who held a fundraiser for her. She launched a Spanish-language organizational push.
  • Update: Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Dropped Out. Says he’s mulling a senate run instead. A successful moderate governor of a purple state would be enough to be considered a contender in previous election cycles, but he’s old, white and male, and only Biden is evidently able to overcome those disadvantages in the age of the Democratic Party’s hyperpartisan wokescold hysteria.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of old, white and male governors. “Three Strikes offender on the run after twice given clemency by Inslee“:

    The Washington state Three Strikes You’re Out law holds that felons who have been convicted of two serious violent offenses in the past — such as murder, rape, or child molestation — must go for jail for life with no chance of parole after a third such conviction.

    At that point, the only way for the offender to walk free would be with a pardon from the Clemency and Pardons Board, along with the governor.

    Tracy Hoggatt, 59, had a long list of offenses — first-degree robbery, second-degree assault, second-degree theft, and on and on.

    How is he on the loose today, you might wonder?

    In January of 2017, Governor Jay Inslee and the Clemency Board approved Hoggatt’s request. Inslee wrote that Hoggatt had “taken steps to turn his life around and developed a strong sense of empathy.” So after being put in prison for life without parole, he was granted clemency.

    Three months later, he went back to jail for violating the terms of his release. He had consumed alcohol, he was living at an unapproved address, and he was hanging out with known criminals. So they picked him up again and put him back in prison for life without the possibility of parole.

    Guess what happened then?

    This past Tuesday, Inslee let Hoggatt out on clemency for a second time, with the condition that he go to a halfway house in Kelso.

    However, he got off the bus in Seattle without going all the way to Kelso. He told the Department of Corrections that he missed the bus, but that his fiancée would drive him to Kelso.

    That was Tuesday. This is Friday, and nobody knows where he is. This Three Strikes offender is still on the loose.

    Man, that decision would surely haunt him in the general election he won’t be the nominee for…

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “In Iowa, Amy Klobuchar looks for room to grow.” Hey, when you’re polling at 3%, you have plenty of room to grow.

    Six months ahead of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, that centrist message of electability at the heart of Klobuchar’s long-shot presidential bid has yet to pay off in the polls, adding urgency to her pleas to a Democratic base that has lurched markedly to the left.

    With much ground to make up, and the days of summer growing shorter, Klobuchar’s path to the party’s nomination is dotted with Iowa road signs, each town a stop in a long game to outlast a field of bigger names with more fulsome campaign coffers.

    Over four days in early August, in a state crucial to her presidential hopes, Klobuchar courted Iowa Democrats in cafes and private homes, union halls and farms, at fundraising dinners and the Iowa State Fair. She asked them to look past her low poll numbers and support a fellow Midwesterner as their best hope against Trump in 2020.

    “I think it is pretty important, Iowa, to have a candidate from the Midwest,” Klobuchar told hundreds at the State Fair in Des Moines. “And someone that just doesn’t have a bunch of policies written down on a piece of paper but has a track record of looking out for rural America.”

    Her “I’m the most Midwest of the Midwest” campaign strategy hinges on Iowa Democrats being less insane than national Democrats. Probably, but are they less insane enough? Speaking of less insane: “On judicial nominations, Klobuchar’s bipartisan votes put her out of step with the Democratic field…Apart from Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Klobuchar has voted with Republicans to confirm many of President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, more than the other Senate Democrats running for president.”

  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Onion: “‘And Then There Were 23,’ Says Wayne Messam Crossing Out Hickenlooper Photo In Elaborate Grid Of Rivals…’Another foe vanquished, and another step taken toward Messam’s glorious ascent…My plan is continuing apace. First Swalwell, now you, and soon all these fools who stand before me will begin dropping like flies, and then the era of Messam will be nigh.'”
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Seth Moulton’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad summer vacation.”

    Seth Moulton has been a busy man.

    The North Shore congressman has been crisscrossing the early presidential-primary states like any of the viable candidates. Just last week, he hit Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, before heading to Weare, Exeter, and Hillsborough in New Hampshire. He ate corn dogs and ice cream.

    And America ignored him — as it has, resolutely, since he announced his candidacy in April.

    In poll after poll after poll, Moulton has registered at zero percent. Yes, zero. The same number your dog or cat would poll. Yet the Harvard-educated US Marine Corps veteran soldiers on. He has not approached any of the benchmarks for getting onto the overcrowded Democratic debate stage.

    Snip.

    Why not pack it in? Or, rather, when does he pack it in?

    “My experience working with candidates is that they’re the last ones to know,” said Democratic strategist and pollster Brad Bannon. “They’ve invested all their time and energy and money into running for president, and they have a hard time admitting that they’ve failed.”

    Another piece asks why Moulton is still running for President:

    Moulton is frustrated there hasn’t been more conversation about national security in the presidential primary. “The Democratic Party is failing to have a clear national security strategy. We’ve got to show America how we will make our country strong and safe. How we will stand up for patriotism, for our values. We’ve got to stop letting conservative Republicans own the flag,” he said.

    With his campaign barely registering in the polls, Moulton wasn’t on any of the debate stages to make this case. Barring an unprecedented upheaval in the race, Moulton won’t be the Democratic presidential nominee. So what is he doing?

  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. O’Rourke tries to relaunch his campaign. I’m sure this one will explode on the pad as well. Can he get back into the race?

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Swears “I will not in any scenario run for the United States Senate.” Yeah, if you’re doomed to lose, why not lose nationally?

  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Tim Ryan jokes he’s having ‘dance-off’ with Andrew Yang.” That’s really the only Ryan news this week…
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s proposing a massive criminal justice system overhaul. “The plan calls for banning cash bail, solitary confinement and civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to seize people’s homes and other property even if they are not convicted of a crime. The plan also looks to legalize marijuana and abolish the death penalty, a practice Sanders has long opposed.” Ending civil asset forfeiture and ending federal marijuana prohibition I can get behind. (And why is it that only this week are Democratic candidates coming out for legal marijuana legalization? Hickenlooper and Inslee should have made that their themes week one.) The rest don’t seem like federal jurisdiction. “Bernie Sanders South Carolina crowd size one-third of Elizabeth Warren’s.” (300 vs. 900) Sanders also slammed his treatment in the press:

    Bernie Sanders Monday gave a speech in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. He took shots at the press, mentioning coverage of his campaign against Amazon:

    I talk about (Amazon’s taxes) all of the time… And then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why.

    Employees of the Post were put out by Sanders’s comments. They insisted they hold no ill will against him for regularly bashing the man who writes their checks as one of earth’s most obnoxious plutocrats, and moreover that Sanders is wrong to make the media a “boogeyman” the way he’s turned “billionaires and corporations” into boogeymen. This “doesn’t add up,” noted the Post, going so far as to put the term “corporate media” in quotation marks, as if it were a mythical creature.

    Perhaps the negativity toward Sanders isn’t over Amazon. After all, Sanders gets similar treatment from the New York Times, CNN, the Atlantic and other outlets. Still, the Post’s Bernie fixation stands out. The paper humorously once wrote 16 negative pieces about Sanders in the space of 16 hours (e.g. “Clinton Is Running for President. Sanders Is Doing Something Else,” “Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals,”etc).

    The Post in 2017 asked readers how Democrats would “cope” with the Kremlin backing Bernie Sanders with “dirty tricks” in 2020. In April of this year it described the Sanders campaign as a Russian plot to help elect Donald Trump. They’ve run multiple stories about his “$575,000 lake house,” ripping his “socialist hankering” for real estate. “From each according to his ability,” the paper quipped, “to each according to his need for lakefront property…

    Apart from being described as a faux-Leninist Russian stooge who wants to elect Trump and mass-release dangerous criminals, what does Sanders have to complain about?

    It’s not just about Sanders.

    The public is not stupid. It sees that companies like CNN and NBC are billion-dollar properties, pushing shows anchored by big-city millionaires. A Vanderbilt like Anderson Cooper or a half-wit legacy pledge like Chris Cuomo shoveling coal for Comcast, Amazon, AT&T, or Rupert Murdoch is the standard setup.

    This is why the White House Correspondents’ dinner is increasingly seen as an unfunny obscenity. The national press at the upper levels really is a black-tie party for bourgeois stiffs who weren’t smart enough for med school, and make their living repeating each other’s ideas and using Trump to sell Cadillacs and BMWs. Michelle Wolf was on the money when she ripped us for only covering “like three topics”:

    Every hour it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel of four people who remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving… You guys are obsessed with Trump… He couldn’t sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric. [But] he has helped you sell your papers, books, and TV.

    That was too much truth for Correspondents’ Association, who decried Wolf’s lack of “commitment” to a “vigorous and free press” and “civility.” They scrapped the comedy idea, and this year brought in a self-described “boring” speaker, who made light of Trump’s complaints about the press by reading from Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People.”

    He’s holding a rally in Sacramento.

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Meet the intriguing presidential candidate you haven’t seen on the debate stage.”

    “I don’t want to be president if I have to win by outrage,” he explained. “I don’t want to just win. I want to govern, and not just by executive order. I understand the outrage people feel right now. But real leadership is taking two different needs and elevating them to one single want.”

    Arguably, Sestak knows a thing or two about this topic. He commanded an aircraft carrier battle group conducting combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq with 30 US and allied ships and more than 15,000 sailors and 100 aircraft. He’s also considered the qualities of a good leader while teaching ethical leadership courses at the historically black college Cheyney University and at Carnegie Mellon.

    It’s sort of like the Jim Geraghty piece on Sestak in last week’s Clown Car roundup.

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. DNC rules make it possible for Steyer to buy his way onto the debate stage. Live in Texas? Now’s your chance to be Tom Steyer’s State Director! He’s loaded, so ask for the sky…
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren: The choice of college-educated white people:

    The latest round of polling shows Elizabeth Warren gaining ground in the presidential race, but she still faces some critical obstacles to winning the Democratic nomination. She’s dominating among white progressive voters and, relatedly, is building support among white college-educated Democrats. But she continues to lag among working-class voters and has demonstrated minimal appeal to African-Americans.

    Unless she builds appeal outside her core constituencies, it will be challenging for her to pull ahead of front-running Joe Biden, who has built his own beachhead of support among moderates, working-class whites, and African-American voters.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Among Elizabeth Warren’s anti-gun-owner proposals: mandatory gun registration and a tax on guns and ammo. “A voter who could be key to Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 hopes? Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” Because he thinks Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is unconstitutional.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Marianne Williamson says ‘powerful forces’ on the left out to end presidential campaign.” Mainly over her questioning various medical orthodoxies. “Marianne Williamson is a danger to feminism — and her ideas could get Americans killed.” Eh, it’s just calling out her New Age power of positive thinking as bullshit and pouting because she’s not Warren or Harris. She spoke to some 350 people in California’s mission district.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Promises a mass pardon for non-violent marijuana offenses. While I suspect this is a crowd-pleasing line, I don’t think there are that many federal felons, and I’m not sure there are that many at the state level where the offender has no other criminal convictions. Gabbard and Yang slightly buck the Democrat’s open borders line. (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.) Hey, I could ace this test as well.
  • 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:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: This week she made it official that she’s not running for President.
  • Actor Alec Baldwin. No presidential run news, but he did say Jeffrey Epstein was killed by the Russians.

  • 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.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • 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 Attorney General Eric Holder
  • 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
  • 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:





    California’s Present, Austin’s Future

    August 18th, 2019

    Wonder where Austin’s “Let the homeless do whatever they want, wherever they want, except in front of the city council building” plans lead to? Watch this.

    (Crap, just before I clicked publish on this, this Tweeter set their account to private. It was a video of a Sacramento business owner talking passionately about how she was leaving because she had gotten tired of removing the needles and washing the poo and pee off the sidewalk in front of her business every day, and how the patrons of her hair salon literally had to step over homeless people to get in.)

    Update: Was poking around and I found an article that transcribes her statement:

    A frustrated California woman took to Twitter on Friday to blast governor Gavin Newsom’s disastrous policies that have created a desperate homeless problem. The woman – who goes by @Jesus_porvida on Twitter – was clearly upset as she posted a video detailing why she may be forced to close the doors of her business.

    I have had a business in downtown Sacramento for 15 yrs, a successful business. I now have to leave my place of business. I have to close my shop.

    Later tweets show pictures of the woman’s shop after the most recent in a series of break-ins, a break-in that apparently was the last straw for the Sacramento are hair stylist.

    I have to clean up the poop and pee off my doorstep. I have to clean up the syringes. I have to politely ask ppl who I care for – I care about the homeless – to move their tents out of the way of the door to my business. I have to fight off people who push their way into my shop that are homeless and on drugs because you won’t arrest them for drug offenses. I have to apologize to my clients as to why they can’t get into my door because there’s somebody asleep there bc they’re not getting the help they need.

    I talk to police offers. They told me to contact you. They want to do something and they can’t because you changed the laws. So I wanna know what you’re gonna do for us, the ones that are unhappy. You wanna make us a sanctuary state. You wanna make it comfortable for everybody except for the ppl that work hard and have tried their hardest to get along in life and now we have to change that because of your laws.

    She shredded Newsom’s “liberal ideology” as the cause for the current chaos that forced her to close the doors of her business.

    While you sit in your million dollar home you don’t have to look at what we have to look at; there’s hard working people who have to deal with this on a daily basis. What are you going to do for us?

    I won’t stop , the gov of CA and his liberal ideology ruined my business.. I decided to close the doors today. I can’t do it anymore and I’m irate. Sincerely , a hard working self built self employed California business owner.

    And Austin is already spending $28,000 in taxpayer money for each homeless person:

    Austin City Council is spending a record-high $62.7 million this year to try and solve homelessness, equivalent to giving roughly $28,000 to each homeless person in the city. But the more startling fact is that Austin officials are leading the city down the same dangerous path San Francisco has already journeyed—a path Austinites should be wary not to travel.

    Before peering down the road toward Austin’s future, let’s look around for a moment at the crisis happening right now in Texas’ capital city. The homeless population is rapidly rising, up 5 percent a year for the last two years; the number of those unsheltered on the streets is the highest it has been in nearly a decade. And you may have even noticed people camping in the middle of public areas all across town, thanks to a recent decision by the city council that has spread contention throughout the community.

    We already know city council’s plan to solve this whole problem is to spend a lot of money, but instead of just writing a $28,000 check to each homeless person, they’re sending pallets of tax dollars through a cash-eating maze of city administration and bureaucracy, hoping that a fraction of it eventually comes out the other side to the people on the streets.

    Will that plan work? Enter San Francisco, the potential Austin-of-the-future.

    If you look just past the shiny Golden Gate Bridge, you’ll see one of the worst homelessness disasters in the United States. The Bay City has recently become infamous for homeless crime, used syringes, and human feces littering the entire downtown area (the city even has a designated “Poop Patrol”).

    San Francisco’s city government created a bold plan to solve everything, a plan Austin is now following: Spend lots of citizens’ money.

    From 2016 to 2020, their city government will have spent over $1.5 billion on homelessness. If you do the math of that four-year spending based on the current homeless population of 9,784, that’s over $153,000 on each person.

    Yet despite San Francisco’s mind-boggling payouts per person, the situation for those on the street—and the rest of the city—has only deteriorated.

    Indeed, the homeless population has grown by nearly 7 percent in just the last two years (and 14 percent since 2013), with the vast majority of those new homeless being hometown folks. Oh, and the dangerous turmoil on the streets downtown has only intensified.

    Here’s a piece on volunteers having to clean up the historically black Walnut Creek Cemetery because homeless people have started camping there. (Homeless people camping in cemeteries is a problem Seattle started to have after they stopped enforcing laws against homeless camping.)

    Some more tweets:

    It appears that the Austin City Council has finally started figuring out just how deeply they screwed up:

    Austin will re-examine its new rules governing homelessness, according to a memo released Friday.

    The memo sent to the City Council on behalf of Austin’s Homelessness Strategy Office says the city could abandon its idea to make space for emergency encampments in every City Council district.

    The office said after meeting with the Downtown Austin Alliance, the Greater Austin Crime Commission, service providers, public safety officials and the city’s newly formed Homeless Advisory Committee, it is prepared to limit where people can camp and sit or lie down in public – as well as limit how long a person can camp or rest.

    The City Council voted to scale back rules on that behavior in June, allowing people to rest or camp in public as long as they didn’t do so on city parkland, completely obstruct a sidewalk, or present a public health or safety risk to themselves or others. The decision was met with pushback from Austinites who argued the new rules allowed for more visible encampments throughout the city.

    Here’s an idea: How about they just restore the ban on public camping?

    Want to contact the Austin City Council? Dwight has you covered.

    Bonnen/Sullivan Controversy Takes Down Burrows

    August 17th, 2019

    I haven’t been following the Texas Speaker Dennis Bonnen/Empower Texans head Michael Quinn Sullivan meeting controversy due to lack of time (like I’ve said, the past weeks have been a bear), but this Texas Monthly piece provides an overview of the meeting, which took place June 12. “Bonnen appears to have offered to take an official action if Sullivan would use his political organization to go after ten legislators whom Bonnen found objectionable while avoiding attacks on Bonnen.” Depending on the applicability of various statutes, that’s very possibly illegal.

    Here’s Sullivan’s description of the meeting:

    I was surprised when I got to Bonnen’s office to also be greeted by the GOP Caucus chairman, State Rep. Dustin Burrows (R–Lubbock).

    The meeting started off pleasantly enough. And, indeed, there was a little tongue-lashing. The notoriously thin-skinned Burrows didn’t like a tweet from the session in which I wrote he was “moronic” for floating a proposal that would have gutted property tax reform. For his part, Bonnen said he wants to fight the Democrats—offering amusing (if slightly vulgar) comments about Reps. Michelle Beckley (D-Carrollton) and Jon Rosenthal (D-Houston).

    But the thrust of the meeting took me by surprise. Bonnen invited me there to make me an offer.

    A little context: Given my news background, Empower Texans has long operated as a news-media entity. Our focus on providing information that empowers citizens to exercise their rights as a self-governing people has taken the form of reporting on the actions of lawmakers—especially in exposing the difference between what they say and what they do.

    For the past two sessions, our Texas Scorecard Capitol bureau has applied for House media credentials. Despite falling clearly inside the boundaries of the House’s criteria, and despite being granted credentials by the Texas Senate, those applications have been repeatedly denied. The 2019 session was no exception. We filed a federal lawsuit on the matter, which is going up before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

    Sitting in his Capitol office on June 12, Speaker Bonnen was adamant he wanted to do something for me. I told him I didn’t need anything from him or Burrows. But he really wanted me to listen to what he “wanted to do for me.”

    Bonnen insisted: He would ensure Texas Scorecard reporters received House floor access in 2021 if we would lay off our criticism of the legislative session, not spend money from our affiliated PACs against certain Republicans, and—most shockingly—go after a list of other Republicans in the 2020 primary elections.

    Spending political money was the issue, Bonnen said. Not just refraining from spending it against his pals. He wanted us to spend it against Republicans he saw as not being helpful.

    What strikes me most about this, beyond the rank impropriety, is what a shoddy deal Bonnen is offering. Spend time and money attacking Bonnen’s preferred targets in exchange for…media credentials to the Texas House? That’s it? It’s not only underhanded and unethical, it’s insultingly tacky. “Hey, if you help me whack this guy, I promise there’s a six-pack of Bud Light in it for you!”

    Yesterday, meeting participant Burrows reigned as House Republican Chair. “Following Burrows’ resignation as Chairman, Fort Worth Republican State Rep. Stephanie Klick has confirmed with a North Texas news outlet she has assumed the role of Chairman of the caucus and expects the members to fill her, now vacant, role as vice chair according to House Republican Caucus rules.”

    Cahnman also has some pungent commentary, such as:

  • The hardest part to wrap your head around is that the substance of Bonnen’s ask isn’t necessarily crazy. While he’s doing it for the wrong reasons, Bonnen basically asks Sullivan to focus on rural members instead of suburban ones. There’s a certain logic to that strategy. Unfortunately, there’s no logic that suggests one make oneself a party to a felony in the process.
  • The most surprising part is the degree to which Bonnen’s talking out of both sides of his mouth on his alleged “no campaigning” edict. Bonnen spends nearly a quarter of the meeting telling Sullivan how he plans to vigorously enforce the edict against Democrats, but casually look the other way with Republicans. At this point, the Democrats have every right to tell Bonnen to pound sand.
  • Snip.

    Bonnen, and especially Dustin Burrows, are super thin-skinned about criticisms of the session. They spend a quarter of the discussion trying to spin the results to Sullivan. At one point, Burrows laughably accuses Sullivan of gaslighting the members.

    Snip.

  • Burrows claims the list is about members who voted against the ban on taxpayer funded lobbying, but Ken King and Gary van Deaver also voted against the ban and didn’t make the list.
  • The list: Steve Allison, Trent Ashby, Dirty Ernie (Bailes), Travis Clardy (“the ringleader of all opposition” according to Burrows), Drew Darby, Kyle Kacal, Stan Lambert, Tan Parker, John Raney, Phil Stephenson.
  • Cahnman also thinks that Burrows is a dead speaker walking.

    There was widespread belief that Bonnen would be easier to work with than former speaker Joe Straus (even by Sullivan), but this year’s legislative session seemed to have just as many conservative bills die in the process as they had under Straus.

    With Burrows down, it’s hard to see how Bonnen survives the scandal as Speaker.

    LinkSwarm for August 16, 2019

    August 16th, 2019

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! It hit 107°F in Austin this week, but it was probably only 104° when I rode my bike. Cleared up my sinuses!

  • David Brock’s ShareBlue Media certainly seems to be freaking out over the Epstein “suicide,” sends out talking points to Democratic loyalists to downplay the possibility of conspiracy. Hmmmmm…
  • Illinois is farked.
  • On the same theme: 40% of Illinois education spending goes to pensions. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
  • Trust no one.
  • Democrats are convinced that a wave of Republican retirements is going to help them flip Texas’ congressional delegation. Don’t count on it. “If they nominate a candidate like Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, or somebody like, God forbid, Bernie Sanders, if they nominate somebody who is extremely left of center, they’re not going to get there.”
  • For Democrats, filing for bankruptcy doesn’t prevent you from running for the senate. Boy, Democrats sure love nominating people who can’t even handle their own finances, much less ours.
  • Two illegal aliens charged with repeatedly raping an 11-year old girl.
  • Disillusioned liberal sees Obama as a lying tool of corporate greed. “Our political order is oriented around legitimizing only those who can claim some form of victimization. It’s why the woke stuff/white supremacy is so powerful. It’s a fundamentally anti-enlightenment model of politics.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • More on last week’s Russian nuclear accident:

    United States intelligence officials have said they suspect the blast involved a prototype of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall. That is a cruise missile that Mr. Putin has boasted can reach any corner of the earth because it is partially powered by a small nuclear reactor, eliminating the usual distance limitations of conventionally fueled missiles.

    As envisioned by Mr. Putin, who played animated video of the missile at a state-of-the-union speech in 2018, the Skyfall is part of a new class of weapons designed to evade American missile defenses.

    Lots of Russian military superweapons turn out to be vaporware. This one turned out to be vaporizedware. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Inside the Polar Star, America’s antiquated rustbucket of an icebreaker.
  • Speaking of ice: President Trump contemplates buying Greenland. On the one hand, in the long run, land purchases have worked out very well for the United States. On the other, Liebensraum is bunk and we’ve got plenty of development left to do with Alaska.
  • New York Times editor demoted for daring to voice obvious political truths…and criticizing The Squad. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Important safety tip: Don’t use NULL for your vanity license plate.
  • Shorn of the music and nostalgia, Woodstock was “a field full of six-foot-deep mud laced with LSD.” Bonus: Pete Townshend kicking Abbie Hoffman’s ass. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Lessons from a “local food” scammer.

    My instructions were to claim that all the produce was local, although nothing was or could be local: It was early June in northwestern New Jersey’s Kittatinny Mountains, and the produce had been shipped from warmer parts of the world to the distributor who’d sold it to my boss. But “local” was the magic word hand-painted on our signs; it was what made our customers, most of them New Yorkers driving to country vacation cottages, slam on their brakes and pull over.

    For the first time in my life, I heard about the naturalness, tradition and superior flavor of New Jersey produce. “Taste-wise, nothing compares to Jersey Silver Queen,” the New Yorkers declared, clawing at ears of a fat-kerneled, North Carolina-grown supersweet hybrid, all sugar and no corn flavor, nothing like Silver Queen. They tossed the husks on the ground for me to rake up.

    “Give me Jersey peaches over Georgia peaches any day.” Those were Georgia peaches they were palming to their kids, whispering, “eat up,” before the fruit had been weighed and paid for.

    “I wait every year for the real Jersey tomatoes. You can’t get that country flavor in the city!” They couldn’t get it here, either: These were New Mexican beefsteaks, greased with mineral oil to an enticing sheen and petroleum fragrance. Didn’t they notice the absence of any roses-and-resin tomato-y perfume?

  • CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the lesser son of a greater father, gets called “Fredo” and hilarity ensues:

  • The Brooklyn bridge used to double as a wine storage facility.
  • Max Boot Hits Bottom, Tunnels Down to the Hollow Earth, Falls, Somehow Keeps Digging

    August 15th, 2019

    One inkling of just how important Max Boot was to the conservative movement prior to 2016 (when he famously declared he’d vote for Stalin over Trump) is the fact I never bothered to tag him in a BattleSwarm post prior to 2018, when his Trump Derangement Syndrome was already in full bloom.

    Well, maybe not full bloom, since he’s managed to find a deep end of the deep end. Consider this triptych of National Review pieces:

    John Hirschauer starts out:

    One of Max Boot’s most recent columns in the Washington Post is titled “Get a grip, white people. We’re not the victims.” The headline says in nine words what the text says in 800, doing predictably little to elevate our national discourse at a moment of intense racial polarization.

    Boot’s central contention is that whites in America are beset with a victimhood mentality, one that “can justify everything from a public temper tantrum to a shooting spree.” In the wake of the El Paso tragedy, Boot can make a plausible case that racial grievances (real and imagined) facilitate discord and violence, because, of course, they do. Instead, Boot denounces white-grievance politics (a politics well worth denouncing) while simultaneously granting other grievance groups a blank check to raid the expansive store of imputed guilt and collective punishment. As a matter of course, he favors any repatriation for injustices to which racial minorities and their ancestors may (or may not) have been subject — as long as it’s in an effort to “redress past wrongs,” as he puts it.

    His ultimate prescription to the “white people” he instructs to “get a grip” is something like “Stop whining.” And that’s fine; we could certainly stand less whining in the United States. In effect, however, Boot sets up a Faustian choice for “white” readers: Side with the white supremacists and their detestable program, or sell your political soul to Max Boot and become one of the self-loathing whites so paralyzed by intersectional deference that they can hardly advance an argument without first reciting that neutered prelude: “As a straight, white, cisgender man with privilege, I . . .”

    If Boot believes what he is saying — and I’m not sure he does — and assumes that “many” Trump supporters believe “that white supremacy is the natural order of things,” then he’d do well to provide them with a better set of options than white nationalism on the one hand and political impotence on the other.

    Boot was shocked, shocked to find National Review calling him on his blatant social justice warrioring, prompting Hirschauer to deliver a second rhetorical beatdown:

    Max Boot has devoted much of the past twelve hours to distorting a response I wrote to his column “Get a grip, white people. We’re not the victims.” Boot has insisted that mine is “a white supremacist piece,” and implied that I am a “white supremacist.”

    Boot makes my point for me: In the world of Max Boot’s creation, there is only Max Boot’s policy preferences on the one hand, and white nationalism on the other. It’s toxic, and predictable from someone who writes so casually about “fears” that plague “white people” as an indiscriminate bloc in the Washington Post.

    Snip.

    In the piece, I state several times that white nationalists and white supremacists are evil people with repugnant ideologies. I did not do so to create an elaborate ruse to deflect attention from some deeply held, clandestine racist agenda of mine. I did so because I believe that white supremacy, in all its forms, is a sin against the Creator and His creation. I meant, in other words, what I said.

    My point in the self-loathing comment: If Boot is really condemning all white people — and his piece often leaves out any qualifier and talks directly to the unmodified mass of “white people” — then he, as he admits, is part of this all-encompassing category he finds worthy of such rank condemnation (as are Bernie Sanders, Rob Reiner, Howard Dean, etc.).

    This collectivization and mass imputation of guilt would not withstand scrutiny if it were applied to any other group, nor should it.

    All throughout his initial Washington Post piece, Boot speaks in unqualified terms about “white people,” stating categorically that “they fear they are losing their privileged position to people of color,” and that they “can be pretty clueless.” Think, for a moment, of the utter outrage that would have met Mr. Boot had he stated that some other demographic category were in the grip of a group-wide “fear,” or were disproportionately “clueless.”

    Such “totalizing racial language,” as I wrote in my response, is wrong. It treats fraught issues of race with a sledgehammer and stokes division at a time of “intense racial polarization.”

    It only poisons public debate for Boot to pretend that any defection from his ex cathedra declaration of what constitutes a legitimate “attempt to redress past wrongs or foster equal treatment” is a form of white supremacy. No serious or respectable person has any objection to fostering “equal treatment” for all races and ethnicities, but there are basic political disagreements over what an “attempt to redress past wrongs” ought to look like.

    When this takedown failed to have the desired effect, Charles C. W. Cooke stepped in to whale on him like Boom Boom Mancini pummeling Bobby Chicon:

    Before yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot was political in nature. As I wrote in a recent book review, I found it regrettable that Boot’s opposition to the president had not prevented him from “succumbing reactively to Trump’s cult of personality, or from making Trump the origin of every graph onto which he plots himself.” As of yesterday, my primary criticism of the Washington Post’s Max Boot is that he is a narcissistic, dishonest, calculating, manipulative writer who is prone to engaging in precisely the sort of willfully dishonorable conduct that he claims to disdain in others.

    Various line-by-line takedowns of manifest Boot dishonesty snipped.

    Those who wonder why so few writers are willing to pen long, thoughtful, descriptive pieces that grapple seriously with the opposing arguments and incorporate honest appraisals of what voters actually want need look no further than this incident for their answer, which is: because bankrupt toadies such as Max Boot use their work as launching pads for calumny. In a sensible world, the editors of the Washington Post would have looked at what Boot has tried to do over the last couple of days, and tattooed “hack” on his forehead. But we are not operating in a sensible world.

    Boot’s approach over the last couple of days has not only been at odds with both honesty and honor, it has been at odds with the reputation he had developed as a serious and rigorous thinker. Such as it is, Boot’s newfound modus operandi works as follows: First, he scans entirely innocuous pieces for sentences that he can willfully misconstrue; second, he presents those misconstrued sentences as evidence of a deeper flaw with a person or outlet or institution; and, finally, he submits the conclusions he has drawn as confirmation of why he, Max Boot, convert to truth and light, is on the Right Side of History. Because Twitter is an echo chamber and the Post is one-tracked, he does this safe in the knowledge that those whom his mendacity incites to outrage will never read the primary sources he is corrupting — and that, if they do, they will never comprehend them.

    And thus the feedback loop is completed. In return for being so flattered, Boot’s readers provide him with wild, conspiracy-laden confirmations that the target he has chosen is indeed perfidious — confirmations that allow him to backfill his story on the fly, to flesh out any subsequent columns he feels compelled to write on the topic, and to insist that any pushback he receives is affirmation of his original critique. By this discreditable process did Boot’s nasty little lie about John Hirschauer’s original criticism become first an “attack”; then a “white supremacist” or “alt-right” attack; then a sign of the institutional decline of a magazine he once admired; then a sign of how awful that magazine has always been; and, finally, an indictment of the entire conservative movement in America that is apparently worthy of a prime-time appearance on CNN. Would that Boot had a sober friend who, early in his spiraling, could tell him, “Max, you messed up here.” Evidently, he does not.

    In and of itself, Boot’s techniques are both tiresome and reprehensible. But when coupled with the ersatz I-take-no-pleasure-in-this lamentations that have become his hallmark in the Trump era, the affectation becomes too much to bear. Boot seems to fancy himself as Mark Antony, here to bury a Caesar he once loved, when in reality he is more like Romeo Montague: a callow, selfish, monomaniacal, self-pitying featherweight, who is constitutionally unable to prevent the escalation of petty infractions. Reading Boot these days is akin to listening to a teenager talk incessantly about himself. “And then I didn’t like this. And then I discovered that. And then this person was mean to me. And then I was attacked.” Oh, do shut up, dear, before we all die from nausea. And learn to read before you come back.

    Boot is just the latest example of hysterical Democratic Party hacks giving up even the pretense of rational argument: “Support every word of the Democratic Party’s agenda or you’re a white supremacist!” It’s as though they looked at the 2016 elections results, then said to themselves: “You know why we lost the Midwest? We just didn’t call ordinary American voters there racists hard enough! Let’s double-down by calling them “white supremacists” at every turn! That will shame them into abandoning Trump!” “White supremacy” is the boogieman that replaced the Russian collusion fantasy, and Boot is a good little solider about parroting the latest lie, as long as it hurts Trump and Republicans.

    Calling him a narcissistic, dishonest, calculating, manipulative hack is probably far too kind…

    A Crackdown in Hong Kong

    August 14th, 2019

    China has ratcheted up its crackdown against pro-freedom protestors in Hong Kong following days of protests that shut down Hong Kong’s airport.

    There are widespread reports of Peoples Liberation Army units massing just outside Hong Kong:

    If it comes to giving in to the demands of Hong Kong freedom fighters or slaughtering them by the thousands, I have little doubt that Communist China will unhesitatingly choose the latter, even though it will result in severe setbacks to their already faltering economy. Xi Jinping is the most hardline Chinese leader since Mao.

    Olive Garden is a Bad Prepping Strategy

    August 13th, 2019

    The day after the clown car update is bad for deep insights, so instead let me set this strawman blazing.

    The Olive Garden is offering a lifetime endless pasta bowl pass for $500. (Or rather, they’re offering 50 of these, so it’s a gimmick for free publicity…

    …rather than a real offer. But let’s pretend it’s a real offer.)

    Some Twitter users suggested that this is a great lifetime hedge against starvation.

    Even if it weren’t just a gimmick, this would be a bad prepping strategy:

  • A lifetime eating pass sounds like the sort of last-gasp attempt of a dying restaurant chain to stay solvent. They might not stay around long enough for you to get your $500 worth.
  • The price includes breadsticks and salads, but not beverages or tips, which increases your costs. Sure, you can get away with water and no tip for a while, but pretty soon it’s going to be “Oh God, here comes LardButt McCheapSkate again!” and the waitresses start saving the day-old pasta in the fridge just for you.
  • In a true it-hits-the-fan apocalypse, do you really think a midprice family chain is what you want to bet on for survival? How do you get past the zombies? Do you suppose the corporate resupply trucks are going to make it past the roving apocalyptic biker gangs outfitted in vaguely 1980s cyberpunk cliche gear? Likewise, do you think your lifetime all-you-can-eat card will really do you any good in the post-money barter wasteland? You’ll be lucky if they don’t size you up to serve as the next day’s Long Pig Special.
  • You can get 6 pounds of Angel Hair Pasta for just under $6 at Sam’s. That’s 500 pounds of pasta for what you’d pay for the Olive Garden Platinum Club. (Of course, for a real hits-the-fan scenario, you’ll need a solar oven, as shown here.) And beans and rice provide even cheaper bulk staple hedges against starvation.
  • Finally, you have to face the dreaded fact: It’s the Olive Garden. It’s a perfectly acceptable place to eat, especially if you’re going out with old people who can’t eat spicy food, but you can certainly do better.
  • If prepping is out, is there anyone who would actually benefit from this deal? I can think of a few cases:

  • You’re just a horrific glutton with low standards.
  • You want to commit passive-aggressive suicide by clogged arteries.
  • You’re one of those annoying people who can eat like a horse and never gain an ounce.
  • You’re a full-time university student, there’s an Olive Garden within walking distance, and $500 is less than two semesters of the dorm meal plan.
  • You’re a regular marathon/triathlon competitor, and you do lots of carb loading every week.
  • That’s pretty much it.

    I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Burning Strawman Theater! Tune in next week when we discuss why radioactive mutants won’t take your Bitcoin.

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for August 12, 2019

    August 12th, 2019

    Biden continues to lead the field despite his senior moments, witches boost Williamson, and Harris has become really unpopular…among black voters. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Caveat: Between a new job and a cold, this week has been a bear, so the clown car update may seem merely large rather than extra-extra-extra large…

    Polls

  • Survey USA: Biden 33, Sanders 20, Warren 19, Harris 9, Buttigieg 8, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1.
  • Monmouth (Iowa): Biden 28, Warren 19, Harris 11, Sanders 9, Buttigieg 8, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 3, Gillibrand 2, Yang 2, Booker 1, Bullock 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Hickenlooper 1.
  • Survey USA (California): Biden 25, Warren 21, Sanders 18, Harris 17, Buttigieg 6, Yang 1, Gabbard 1, Booker 1. So Harris is in fourth place in her own state…
  • Survey USA (North Carolina): Biden 36, Sanders 15, Warren 13, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, Gabbard 1, Yang 1, Booker 1, Castro 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Candidates who have qualified for the third round of debates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, Warren, Yang.
  • Michael Barone analyzes polling data:

    Let’s look at how different segments of Democratic primary voters are responding to candidates this year.

    Start with white college graduates, once a negligible splinter, now about 40 percent of them, according to exit polls. They’re also the Democrats’ leftmost voters on issues, from impeachment to racial reparations. A post-Detroit Quinnipiac poll with subgroup results shows Warren leading Biden 28 to 25 percent in this group, well ahead of Sanders (11 percent) and Harris, who is tied with Buttigieg (8 percent). White college grads are among the best groups for the articulate Harvard Law professor and the articulate Notre Dame professor’s son.

    Black voters, solidly Democratic for a half-century, are about 25 percent of Democratic primary voters. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki’s useful summary of their primary voting history shows how they’ve voted near-unanimously or heavily for one candidate — Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, and Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton since. Note that each of these since Jackson has won the party’s nomination. Big margins among one-quarter of an electorate can overcome small margins among the other three-quarters.

    Black Democrats’ clear choice now is Biden (47 percent in Quinnipiac), with Sanders (16 percent) a very distant second, while the white college grads’ favorite, Warren, lags behind (8 percent). Quinnipiac has black candidates Harris and Booker receiving 1 and zero percent from blacks; they do better in other polls but struggle to hit double digits.

    Their left-wing issue stances may not help. Echelon Insights polling shows 13 percent fewer nonwhite Democrats identifying as liberal than white Democrats. That suggests that most blacks may not switch to the strident liberal Booker or flexible liberal Harris, as black voters in early 2008 switched to Barack Obama after he showed he could win the Iowa caucuses.

    Some Democratic constituencies seem to have an active aversion to certain candidates. Black voters seem to be repelled by Pete Buttigieg; he gets only 1 percent from them in Quinnipiac and has been getting zero percent in other polls. Black voters have been the Democratic constituency least supportive of same-sex marriage.

    And very high-income voters, heavily Democratic these days, nonetheless seem to have little use for Bernie Sanders. Among high-income ($100,000-plus) Democrats polled in Quinnipiac, only 6 percent chose the socialist and admirer of 70 percent income tax rates. Similarly, in 2016, he lost the highest-income suburbs — Greenwich, Connecticut; Winnetka, Illinois; Wellesley, Massachusetts; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan — to Hillary Clinton by roughly 2-1 margins.

  • Lots of candidates put in an appearance at the Iowa State Fair. CNN has details in a sort of low calorie tracker substitute for a high calorie event.
  • “Democratic strategist Jennifer Holdsworth predicted Friday that most 2020 presidential hopefuls won’t be dropping out of the race anytime soon, saying those who do will most likely wait until late fall.”
  • “Forget ‘Lanes.’ The Democratic Primary Is A Whole Freaking Transit System.” Mainly an analysis of who Clinton and Sanders voters in 2016 are supporting this time around.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Threatening To Get In. No news since last week’s outburst.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Trevor Noah compared him to South Park’s Mr. Mackey.

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “The Biden Campaign Admits Its Central Theme is a Lie.” Back to the debunked Charlottesville hooey. Joe Biden, gaffe machine. Yet Andrew Sullivan would have us believe that Biden possess “enviable sharpness” at age 76. “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Biden claims there are three genders. Bill Maher says you better just get used to Biden’s senior moments.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s missed more votes than any other Presidential candidate. Says he’s right where he wants to be in Iowa. Where’s that, ninth?
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says “Trump reelection ‘more likely with each passing minute.” Wants to go all in on gun control, which is a great way for Democrats to win back the Midwest. Opposes eliminating private insurance.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. In Austin, he claimed he was a different kind of candidate before uttering a string of platitudes. “At 37, he is barely half the age of former Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, among the frontrunners. Buttigieg would be the youngest Democratic nominee since William Jennings Bryan in the first of his three runs just before and after the turn of the 20th century.” And nothing says “success” quite like a comparison to the Democrat who lost Presidential elections more times than Hillary…
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s all gun-grabbing pandering and his brother’s screwup this week.
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. “De Blasio wins stuffed pig, scarfs down corn dog at Iowa State Fair.” I’m pegging that day as the peak of his campaign. Hopefully the pig will fare better than the groundhog…
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Why Delaney won’t drop out:

    Yet Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland who began his career in business, has outpaced the rest of the field in at least one respect. Of all the Democrats vying to challenge Trump, he is the only candidate to have visited each of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties. He has held twice as many events in the state as anyone else, spent more than a million dollars on local television advertisements, and staffed up early, opening his eighth office there before the first debates. (Recently, he hired away a deputy state director from Marianne Williamson’s campaign.) Last week, as Delaney drove across Iowa in a crimson pickup truck that once belonged to his father, completing his thirty-fourth swing through the state, he seemed, for once, to be carrying some momentum. During the twenty-four hours following his showdown with Warren, in the second debate, his campaign received a ten-fold surge in fund-raising. “I have people who are moderates who thought I crushed it,” Delaney told me on Tuesday, as he sipped an iced tea at the counter of a diner in Marshalltown, Iowa. “And people who, you know, really are pretty far to the left, who think I did terribly. No one thinks I did an average job.”

    Snip.

    Delaney has yet to qualify for the third round of debates, in September, which require candidates to reach two-per-cent support in four approved polls and to attract a hundred and thirty thousand unique donors. Earlier this week, a memo from the D.N.C. informed campaigns that the requirements for the fourth round of debates, in October, will remain the same, extending the window for more candidates to qualify and postponing the long-awaited winnowing of the Democratic field. Delaney told me that he views the third and fourth rounds as “somewhat interchangeable.” It’s important to be in one of them, he clarified, adding that he had a “much better chance” of qualifying in time for the latter. When I caught up with Delaney’s wife, April, after his soapbox speech at the Iowa State Fair, she criticized the voter threshold for working against “a more centrist voice.” “To go online, you actually have to have a more fringe message, because that incites,” she said. “We’ll get there. It’ll just take us a little bit longer to get there, because we’re not going to make these impossible promises.”

  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Who’s Afraid Of Tulsi Gabbard?”

    Having wounded a presumptive frontrunner backed by nearly $25 million in campaign funds, Gabbard instantly became the subject of a slew of negative leaks, tweets, and press reports. Many of these continued the appalling recent Democratic Party tradition of denouncing anything it doesn’t like as treasonous aid to foreign enemies.

    Harris national press chair Ian Sams tweeted, “Yo, you love Assad!”, a reference to Gabbard’s controversial visit with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2017. He then tweeted a link to an insidious February 2 NBC News story, which asserted that Gabbard’s campaign was the beneficiary of Russian bots.

    Harris herself meanwhile gave a sneering interview to Anderson Cooper.

    “This is going to sound immodest,” she said, but as a “top-tier candidate,” she could “only take what [Gabbard] says and her opinion so seriously.”

    She added Gabbard was an “apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”

    The New York Times wrote Gabbard believes the United States has “wrought horror on the world,” and that “critics have called her actions un-American.” Politico denounced Gabbard’s “Star Wars bar scene-like following” and hissed that the Daily Stormer was a supporter (Gabbard has repeatedly condemned white nationalism and sworn off their support). On The View, co-host Sunny Hostin called Gabbard a “Trojan Horse,” while Ana Navarro viciously insinuated Gabbard, an Iraq veteran, was part of a foreign column.

  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She launched ads in Iowa and new Hampshire in an attempt to get into the third round of debates. Heh: “Kirsten Gillibrand’s son nearly casts ‘vote’ for Elizabeth Warren before mom corrects him.”
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris is down to 1% support from black Democrats. Ouch!

    That unquestionably is most troublesome for the Harris campaign is the dramatic drop in support from black Democratic voters, down to 1% after reaching 27% in early July:

    In today’s results: Biden gets 47 percent of black Democrats, with 16 percent for Sanders, 8 percent for Warren and 1 percent for Harris

    Contrast that with the pre-second debate poll from July 29th:

    Biden gets 53 percent of black Democrats, with 8 percent for Sanders, 7 percent for Harris and 4 percent for Warren

    And also the survey from July 2nd:

    Harris also essentially catches Biden among black Democratic voters, a historically strong voting bloc for Biden, with Biden at 31 percent and Harris at 27 percent.

    When Quinnipiac asked Democratic voters after the first round of debates who performed the best, 47% said Harris. After her last debate, that number landed at 8%.

    Harris’s support among female Democrats has also been in a freefall. She’s at 7% now in comparison to 24% a month ago.

    So her support has dropped significantly among two crucial Democratic voting blocs: black people and women.

    What went wrong for Harris? I bet Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s epic takedown of Harris on her record as California attorney general helped escalate the fall in her numbers. Gabbard raised incredibly essential issues to black Democratic voters about Harris’s time as AG on criminal justice reform.

    Her ongoing racially-tinged attacks against Joe Biden may not sit well with black voters who remember (and are frequently reminded of) his eight years with President Obama.

    Other polls taken after her second debate confirm the genuine drop in support for Harris.

  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Bad news for Hickenlooper: He’s dead in the water in the Presidential race. Worse news for Hickenlooper: He’s no sure thing in a senate race now. “As we shall not be following up on Hickenlooper’s further and presumptively fruitless activities, we urge citizens to pursue any other avenue of information they deem necessary, which from a practical perspective is, of course, none.”
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Washington state politicos are not waiting for Jay Inslee to drop out and have started declaring for higher offices.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an interview with the Des Moines Register. It’s really boring, though we do find out her favorite fair food is cheese curds.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a profile from ABC News. Though typically thin, it’s the most substantial national news coverage he’s received since he announced. I bet his campaign celebrated with a pizza from Domino’s, assuming they could scrounge up a coupon…
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Moulton reportedly laid off half his staff and skipped a major Iowa dinner to attend a reunion of army buddies. He also says he’s not dropping out. The unvoiced word at the end of that last sentence is “yet.”
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Comes just short of calling all Trump supporters racist, and repeats the widely debunked “very fine people” lie. The MSM is trying to reinflate O’Rourke’s campaign over gun control:

    It’s always important to remember that O’Rourke’s only claims to national fame are losing a Senate election and launching an ill-advised presidential campaign that couldn’t have disappeared from prominence more quickly had David Copperfield been managing it.

    The media created Beto, then the media forgot Beto, now the media is heartlessly giving the delusional narcissist false hope.

    The headline of the article is ” After El Paso Shooting, Will Voters Revisit Beto O’Rourke?”

    That’s a little misleading. In terms of this primary race, the voters weren’t really visiting Beto in the first place. They were mostly passing by and saying hi on their way to Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Mayor Pete.

    The article does correctly note that times are tough for Team Beto right now:

    A new Monmouth University poll, conducted Aug. 1-4, found Mr. O’Rourke with less than 1 percent of support from likely Iowa Democratic caucusgoers. He was at 6 percent in the Monmouth poll in April.

    His poll numbers have also been weak in New Hampshire and South Carolina, as well as nationally, and his July debate performance and his most recent campaign fund-raising report both fell short of the heightened expectations for his candidacy among some in the party earlier in the year.

    Those “heightened expectations” were another thing that the media manufactured out of whole cloth. They were quickly ditched in favor of Mayor Pete, who was to be the MSM’s next hype concoction.

    This is the ray of sunshine through all the murders that the Times sees for a Beto bounce-back:

    But Mr. O’Rourke’s allies and advisers hope that his impassioned response to the massacre in his hometown, with flashes of raw anger that match the mood of many Democrats, will prompt voters nationally to give him another look. His remarks calling President Trump a white supremacist, and his cussing out of the news media as he urged journalists to “ connect the dots” between the El Paso killings and Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant language and exploitation of racism, drew praise from both liberals and moderates.

    Clarifying: “Mr. O’Rourke’s allies and advisers” (all seven of them!) are pinning their hopes for Beto’s return to whatever relevance he had on him saying and doing the same exact things that every one of his primary opponents have been for the past week.

    That illustrates the central problem with Beto, which I wrote about back in May when the MSM first began ignoring him in favor of Mayor Pete: under scrutiny, there is no “there” there.

    He isn’t a particularly sharp thinker. What attention he’s gotten recently has come from carefully crafted publicity stunts.

    What he is is a guy who spent too much time last year reading and believing the hype being spewed about him in the media.

    If gun control was such a surefire winning issue for Democratic candidates, Eric Swalwell wouldn’t have dropped out.

  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Calls himself a “uniter,” then yammers about Trump and “white supremacy.”
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He appeared on Joe Rogan:

    “Bernie Sanders staffers manhandle press at Iowa State Fair.”

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Jim Geraghty: “Joe Sestak: The Most Interesting Democrat You Forgot Was Running.” (Sorry, Jim, I have to disagree with both parts of that headline.)

    And while Sestak answers questions at length, with streams of consciousness that mix his personal history, tales from his Navy days, and John McCain–style invocations of country over party, he frequently wanders back to his fairly nonpartisan core message, that Americans are grappling with a crisis of unaccountability.

    “I think what Americans want today, more than anything else, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, is somebody who they think is accountable to them,” Sestak tells me. “Above party, above ideology, above any special interest, above oneself. I think they need someone who has a breadth and depth of global experience in national security — and by that I mean from trade issues, economic issues, all the way over to military issues, understanding all the elements of our power, including the power from our ideals, and who has experience in that and has learned certain principles in how those are to be used. We need to restore U.S. leadership to a world order that is rules-based in order to protect our American dream here at home.”

    “If you have a president who is really trusted, then you can move and advance those policies that actually make the American dream available to everyone. There are too many who have not shared in the benefits of this economy. We can be so much more productive, but how do you move them?”

    In a Democratic field with seven senators, three governors, four mayors and four sitting congressman who can easily blur together, Sestak stands out for at least having done significant things in his life outside the realm of politics.

    Following in the footsteps of his Slovakian immigrant father, Sestak was accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he graduated second in his class. He earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1980 and 1984. He rose through the naval ranks, serving on the U.S.S. Richard E. Byrd, the U.S.S. Hoel, and the U.S.S. Underwood. By 1991, he commanded the guided-missile frigate the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts, and by November 1994 he was the director for defense policy on the National Security Council. Three years later, he was commanding the Navy’s Destroyer Squadron 14. (You can watch a snippet of younger Sestak discussing the history of his fleet and duties on the U.S.S. George Washington in this video from 1998.)

    After 9/11, Sestak became the first director of the Navy Operations Group (Deep Blue), the Navy’s strategic anti-terrorism unit, and in 2002, Sestak assumed command of the George Washington Aircraft Carrier Battle Group — ten U.S. ships with 10,000 sailors, SEALs, Marines, and 100 aircraft. During a six-month deployment, the George Washington group launched approximately 10,000 sorties, including offensive strike missions, first against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, then enforcing the no-fly zone against Iraq.

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s spent more than $7 million on ad buys in early states. Every cycle, there always seems to be one candidate proving the “money isn’t everything” adage, and Steyer looks like at least one of the people to prove it this time around…
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. This seems to be the week for Democrats to lie their asses off about recent events, and for Warren that means lying about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri:

    This is an outright lie, one day after Warren complained of the dangers of rhetoric.

    Michael Brown was not murdered. Michael Brown was shot by officer Darren Wilson in an act of self-defense. This is why the grand jury declined to indict Wilson for murder or manslaughter, and it was also the conclusion of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.

    “Every police officer in America should be offended by Sen. Warren’s ill-informed, inflammatory tweet today,” Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers Association told me via email. “Holding a would-be cop killer out as some sort of victim or worse yet, a hero, does no justice to the truth or to reconciliation. Her careless words disqualify her from fitness to serve impartially as commander-in-chief.”

    Warren has evidently built an extensive campaign infrastructure in Nevada:

    “Elizabeth Warren just has a gigantic campaign,” said Laura Martin, executive director of the social justice organization Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. “There are counties all over rural areas where some campaigns are just doing tours, but she has staff there. And that was a strategy President Obama had in 2008 when he won Nevada.”

    Another Democratic operative put it more bluntly: “Warren has built a monster.”

    Among 17 Democratic strategists, activists and experts interviewed by POLITICO for this story, Warren’s campaign was mentioned most often as the most impressive of the field, followed by Harris’.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets profile in The Atlantic that sounds vaguely like all the other Williamson profiles.

    Williamson floated through the fairgrounds like some sort of celestial being, unbothered by the harsh sun and perpetually surrounded by a throng of sweaty supporters demanding selfies and hoping to soak up some of her good vibes. Speaking at The Des Moines Register’s Political Soapbox, a mini stage where candidates take turns offering truncated stump speeches and fielding questions from curious Iowans, Williamson commanded a much larger crowd than either the entrepreneur Andrew Yang or former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, who had both spoken before her. The Iowans in attendance may well have known about her low polling numbers—and about recent criticism she’s generated with her comments on science and medicine—but they seemed drawn to her nonetheless.

    “We have an amoral economic mind-set that has corrupted our government and hijacked our value systems,” she told the audience, standing onstage in wedge heels and a marbled, blue-and-mauve blazer as a quiet drumbeat played ominously from the speakers. The “conventional political establishment” is the problem, she said, to loud applause, and it’s time for the American people to wake up. “While it is true that sometimes Americans are slow to wake up,” she added, “once we do wake up, we slam it like nobody’s business!”

    Williamson’s eccentric performances in the first two presidential-primary debates are what put her on the map for many Americans: Hers was the most Googled name in the hours after the first debate, when, speaking in a quasi-Mid-Atlantic accent not unlike Katharine Hepburn’s, Williamson threatened to “harness love” to conquer President Donald Trump. In the second debate, she promised to combat the “dark, psychic force” of hatred in America, and offered a forceful argument for the payment of reparations to descendants of enslaved people in America.

    Although Williamson describes herself as a “pretty straight-line progressive Democrat,” she’s taken pains to set herself apart from the other liberal presidential hopefuls. She criticized Elizabeth Warren’s oft-discussed plans in the first primary debate by labeling them “superficial fixes” to the much deeper problems facing the country. “If you think we’re going to beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming,” Williamson said, citing America’s so-called sick-care system and the need for improved preventative care. “I’ve had a career not making political plans but harnessing the inspiration and the motivation and the excitement of people, masses of people,” she told the audience.

    “‘Witches’ for Marianne Williamson Launch ‘Occult Task Force.'” She hired former Sanders staffer and accused serial groper Robert Becker for her campaign. “I believe in forgiveness. I believe in redemption. I believe in people rising up after they’ve fallen down…I had not read anything or heard anything that made me feel this was a man who never deserved to work again.”

  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s qualified for the September debate(s). Gets Elon Musk’s endorsement.
  • 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:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Since I see no sign she’s gearing up for a Presidential run, I’ve moved her out of the clown car proper. However, I wouldn’t rule out those early rumors of her becoming a Biden VP pick coming to pass…
  • 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.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • 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 Attorney General Eric Holder
  • 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
  • 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:





    More on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Suicide”

    August 11th, 2019

    Jeffrey Epstien’s “suicide” sounded suspicious when news first broke, but the news that’s come out since only make it sound even more suspicious:

    Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who hanged himself in a federal jail in Manhattan, was supposed to have been checked by guards every 30 minutes, but that procedure was not being followed the night before he was found, a law-enforcement official with knowledge of his detention said.

    In addition, the jail had transferred his cellmate and allowed Mr. Epstein to be housed alone in a cell just two weeks after he had been taken off suicide watch, a decision that also violated the jail’s normal procedure, two officials said.

    The disclosures about apparent failures in Mr. Epstein’s detention at the Metropolitan Correctional Center deepened questions about his suicide and are very likely to be the focus of inquiries by the Justice Department and the F.B.I.

    Officials cautioned that their initial findings about his detention were preliminary and could change.

    The federal Bureau of Prisons has already come under intense criticism for not keeping Mr. Epstein under a suicide watch after he had been found in his cell on July 23 with injuries that suggested that he had tried to kill himself.

    A person with knowledge of the investigation said that when the decision was made to remove Mr. Epstein from suicide watch, the jail informed the Justice Department that Mr. Epstein would have a cellmate and that a guard “would look into his cell” every 30 minutes.

    But that was apparently not done, the person said.

    Senior law-enforcement officials, members of Congress and Mr. Epstein’s accusers have all demanded answers about why Mr. Epstein was not being more closely monitored.

    Yet, after all that, the New York Times has the gall to state “Mr. Epstein’s suicide has also unleashed a torrent of unfounded conspiracy theories online, with people suggesting, without evidence, that Mr. Epstein was killed to keep him from incriminating others.” Uh, unfounded save the fact that everyone following the story knows that Epstein hobnobbed with the rich and powerful, had the dirtiest of dirt on them thanks to his under-aged sex ring, and was found dead in a high security jail when it was obvious that he was not only at risk for murder or suicide, but that he had already “attempted suicide” and was was on 24-hour suicide watch until just before he was found dead.

    Unfounded.

    Scott Adams calls it the world’s most suspicious suicide.

    Twitter reactions:

    Various other Epstein tidbits:

  • Investigations into Epstein’s sex ring remains “ongoing.”
  • Information on the Metropolitan Correctional Center where Epstein was housed.
  • When news of Epstein’s “suicide” first broke, there were widespread rumors of mysterious “camera malfunctions,” but those rumors appear to be false.
  • A timeline of the Epstein case. Tidbit: “Flight logs obtained as part of civil lawsuits against Epstein show an assortment of politicians, academics, celebrities, heads of state and world leaders flying on Epstein’s jets in the early 2000s. Among them: former President Bill Clinton, former national security adviser Sandy Berger, former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.” That would be Sandy “I stuffed classified documents down my pants so I could destroy them” Berger.
  • A look at Epstein’s enablers, including Sarah Kellen, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jean-Luc Brunel and Lesley Groff. “A source told The Post that Maxwell is cooperating with federal authorities.”
  • One more person who evidently enjoyed the “services” of Epstein’s underaged girls was Simpsons creator Matt Groening, though he evidently only got a foot massage.
  • A list of everyone who visited the Palm Beach jail where Jeffrey Epstein was incarcerated over a decade ago. Part 2. Part 3. Use your PDF browser tool to rotate clockwise.