A rule published Monday bars migrants from seeking asylum in the United States if they’ve traveled through another country first.
Tens of thousands of migrant families from Central America travel through Mexico to the U.S. each month, many claiming asylum. The Trump administration claims families are taking advantage of legal loopholes it says allow migrants a free pass to the country while they wait out phony asylum requests.
The DOJ’s statement documents one particularly horrifying murder that some of the gang members are charged with where a rival gang member “was abducted, choked, and driven to a remote location in the Angeles National Forest” where he was “dismembered, and his body parts were thrown into a canyon after one of the defendants allegedly cut the heart out of the victim’s body.”
I didn’t initially buy into this business about how Trump’s often-unorthodox tweets and actions are part of a political 3D chess game he’s playing while the rest of the country is playing checkers.
But I do now.
I could go through a lengthy punchlist of examples of Trump statements and moves that prove the 3D chess theory, but that would dramatically overtake the space this column has to offer. Instead, let’s just talk about this weekend’s flare-up over the president’s Twitter outburst aimed at The Squad — the four idiot freshman Democrat congresswomen, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who have spent their time as elected officials offering one inappropriate and stupid anti-American outburst after another.
Trump didn’t initially name any of the four. He didn’t talk about Omar or Ocasio-Cortez, and he didn’t talk about Ayana Pressley or Rashida Tlaib.
Instead he referred to “Progressive” Democratic congresswomen, and then noted that they “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
This was decried by all the Usual Suspects as an abjectly racist statement, a response that Trump certainly anticipated and couldn’t care less about. Even some weak-kneed Republicans thrashed about in paroxysms of self-righteousness about how Trump could possibly be so bigoted and insensitive in calling out The Squad. After all, three of the four were born in this country!
But Omar wasn’t.
Omar is from Somalia. Omar is quite possibly here in this country after having committed immigration fraud. There has been a quite credible, perhaps even convincing, case made that Ilhan Omar married her biological brother in furtherance of that immigration fraud. And Ilhan Omar has not stopped making incendiary anti-American and pro-Muslim Brotherhood statements since she entered public life.
Absolutely everything Trump said in his tweets applies perfectly and without stipulation to Ilhan Omar.
The fact that he didn’t use her name meant that our political betters immediately assumed he was also talking about Pressley, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez.
Which bothered Trump not one bit.
Paragraphs on the unpopularity of Omar and Ocasio Cortez with actual voters (which I covered here) snipped.
So what do you do if you want to ensure Omar and AOC poison those so-called moderate Democrats who won those swing House districts last year?
You force Pelosi into bed with them.
Which is precisely what Trump has done.
The Democrat leadership immediately, reflexively, lined up behind The Squad after an entire week of slapping them down. Al Green, a Democratic congressman from the slums of Houston, is now attempting to use Trump’s tweets as a fresh justification for impeachment, which is all Al Green does in Congress. There will be a House resolution condemning the president’s comments as racist, on which Pelosi has put her stamp of approval, and another seeking to formally censure Trump.
All of this is precisely what Trump wanted. And he proved it by doubling and then tripling down on his statements Monday, first unleashing a new set of tweets mostly quoting Lindsey Graham, who had partially rebuked the president for getting too personal about The Squad in his complaints, and then popping off in a Rose Garden press avail with comments directly eviscerating Omar in a way I can’t remember ever having seen a president do to a member of Congress. Which was glorious, by the way, and if you haven’t seen the video you owe it to yourself to watch it.
Don’t think for one second that Trump doesn’t absolutely love this fight. He is a pig in slop at this point. Trump will continue forcing Pelosi and her leadership team into bed with The Squad from here all the way to Election Day, and when he’s through he won’t just win reelection in a landslide but he’ll also take away every single one of those swing districts.
The four — AOC, Tlaib, Pressley, Omar — have no clout in the Democratic caucus. But because of the confrontations they have caused and the controversy they have created, they have a massive media following.
Paradoxically, their interests in winning cheers as the fighting arm of the Democratic Party coincide with the interests of Donald Trump. He entertains and energizes his base by answering in kind their attacks on him and by adopting incendiary rhetoric of his own. He is now assuming the old “America! Love it or Leave it!” stance in going after the four women as anti-American ingrates.
They, by calling Trump a criminal, racist and fascist for whom impeachment proceedings should have begun months ago, elate and energize the outraged left of their party.
Among the presidential candidates, some have begun to side with the four, with Bernie Sanders saying Pelosi has been “a little” too tough on them.
On “Meet the Press,” Bernie added: “You cannot ignore the young people of this country who are passionate about economic and racial and social and environmental justice. You’ve got to bring them in, not alienate them.”
Trump’s Sunday attack forced Pelosi to stand with her severest critics, and she re-elevated the race issue with this tweet: “When Trump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.”
Do Democrats believe that refighting the racial battles of the 1960s that were thought to have been resolved is a winning hand in 2020?
Does Pelosi think that demeaning white America is going to rally white or minority Americans to Democratic banners?
(Caveat: Patrick Buchanan.)
Democrats tell Jake Tapper off the record that Trump snookered them into embracing The Squad. “And they have to pretend that their party is unified because of their fear of being challenged in primaries by radicals with the support of Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s Svengali chief of staff and the brains behind the Justice Democrats.”
Chakrabarti’s previous HQ was a Knoxville address out of which the Justice Democrats and another PAC operated side by side with a dozen congressional campaign committees. This arrangement flouted a variety of campaign finance laws and prompted several Federal Election Commission complaints, including one alleging that Chakrabarti set up a $1 million slush fund. But this sort of skullduggery is standard practice among Democrats. What exacerbated the already tense atmosphere in their House caucus was Chakrabarti’s response to the $4.6 billion border aid package passed by Congress last month. On June 27, he took to Twitter and berated the Democratic leadership for its shortcomings:
As usual, Dem leadership tried to create a pre-watered down border bill because of a mistaken idea that it’s more “viable.” And they lost to McConnell anyway. This is the entire theory of change that never works. Why not start from your strongest negotiating stance?
Predictably, this presumptuous tweet drew a number of angry responses from various Democrats who had voted for the measure, whereupon Chakrabarti once again betook himself to Twitter and proceeded to accuse his critics of racism:
Instead of “fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” let’s call the New Democrats and Blue Dog Caucus the “New Southern Democrats.” They certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.
Chakrabarti later deleted that tweet, but not before it had clearly signaled who actually calls the shots in AOC’s office.
Snip.
Chakrabarti’s Justice Democrats PAC is also taking fire from the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The Hill reports, “Congressional Black Caucus members are furious at Justice Democrats, accusing the outside progressive group … of trying to oust lawmakers of color, specifically African American lawmakers.” The PAC evidently plans to primary at least six CBC members who occupy safe Democratic seats simply because they don’t lean far enough to the left. Chakrabarti is clearly using his position as AOC’s chief of staff to engineer a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. He said as much during an extensive profile for The Washington Post Magazine:
To me, there wasn’t a difference between working for her and working for the movement … The whole theory of change for the current Democratic Party is that to win this country we need to tack to the hypothetical middle … you don’t take unnecessary risks, which translates to: You don’t really do anything.
Chakrabarti doesn’t see himself as a mere staffer in some congresswoman’s office. He sees AOC as someone who provides him with a headquarters from which he can “fundamentally change” the Democratic Party.
Speaking of The Squad, The Minneapolis Star Tribuneactually reports on allegations against Omar: “New investigative documents released by a state agency have given fresh life to lingering questions about the marital history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and whether she once married a man — possibly her own brother — to skirt immigration laws.”
Powerline, which has been following the story the media wouldn’t, has still more:
In 1995, Ilhan entered the United States as a fraudulent member of the “Omar” family.
That is not her family. The Omar family is a second, unrelated family which was being granted asylum by the United States. The Omars allowed Ilhan, her genetic sister Sahra, and her genetic father Nur Said to use false names to apply for asylum as members of the Omar family.
Ilhan’s genetic family split up at this time. The above three received asylum in the United States, while Ilhan’s three other siblings — using their real names — managed to get asylum in the United Kingdom.
Ilhan Abdullahi Omar’s name, before applying for asylum, was Ilhan Nur Said Elmi.
Her father’s name before applying for asylum was Nur Said Elmi Mohamed. Her sister Sahra Noor’s name before applying for asylum was Sahra Nur Said Elmi. Her three siblings who were granted asylum by the United Kingdom are Leila Nur Said Elmi, Mohamed Nur Said Elmi, and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
Ilhan and Ahmed married in 2009, presumably to benefit in some way from a fraudulent marriage. They did not divorce until 2017.
Democrats have defined racism down yet again. “Thirty-two percent (32%) of Democrats, however, say it’s racist for any white politician to criticize the political views of a politician of color. So being a ‘politician of color’ means that your views are immune to disagreement. Unless–once again–you are a Republican.”
The point is, apparently, Democrats are sick of thinking about that guy, the “guy in a diner in rural” whatever. Once they were safely stowed in a basket — a basket of deplorables — and that worked out so disastrously that the reaction could be to obsess over these imaginary people. Are Democratic Party candidates expected to actually venture into the hinterlands? No, they’ll just worry about those people, and then they come to Madison (where I live) or Milwaukee to try to score enough votes to outnumber those diner people. That’s what Democrats do to win Wisconsin.
Planned Parenthood head ousted over refusal to back transsexual abortions. Tranny madness is going to take out the entire leftwing establishment by insisting that every member must forthrightly declare that 2+2=5.
The Amazon pullout of Seattle continues. The corporate giant announced on Tuesday that it is going to build a 43-story tower in Bellevue.
It will be Amazon’s tallest building anywhere in the world, and it will be the tallest building in Bellevue, which has more than a few skyscrapers. Several thousand employees will be able to work there. So it looks like this is another part in the saga of Amazon leaving Seattle. All of this is because we have a city council and a mayor who have gone fanatic about socialism. They keep pushing anti-business policies.
What this means for the downtown Seattle real estate market is that when the economy inevitably starts to turn, it will be cataclysmic. When you have one company that takes up so many thousands of square feet of downtown real estate, and that company moves out, real estate prices will fall.
I don’t know when this is going to happen, but I am very confident in my analysis; Seattle will fall harder than any other city in the country. This is because Seattle has been the craziest in its Leftist run-up during this boom economy that we’re enjoying right now.
We already have so many businesses on the brink of survival because of the minimum wage because of all of the controlling policies the city government keeps imposing. When the businesses start toppling, you’re going to see all the support industry in downtown Seattle — the food service, etc. — fall hard, too.
The Amazon pullout of Seattle is another dramatic sign that when the people who drive our economy, our tax revenue, our job creation are out because of our politics, it’s time to change our politics.
In addition to his sexual predation with “tweens and teens,” Epstein pursued ambitious, beautiful New York City women in their 20s in the early 2000s, some of them ex-models seeking a professional afterlife. To this woman, and others, Epstein introduced himself as the owner of a hedge fund with clients investing $1 billion or more. He kept his child molestation secret, and came off as a gentle, erudite recluse. He was often at movie premieres, sometimes with a blonde on each arm—a blonde of legal age, but still, as noted this week by David Boies, usually under 25 years old. His predation had not been reported to the police yet, but there were indications that he was somewhat different than most mature men his age. Eleanora Kennedy, the elegant wife of powerhouse lawyer Michael Kennedy, recalls asking Epstein to underwrite a premiere party at the Metropolitan Club for The White Countess, a Merchant Ivory film released in 2005. “I got him on the phone and explained that the event was also a benefit for a women’s medical center conducting a study about menopause,” says Kennedy. “As soon as I said ‘menopause,’ he said, ‘Ms. Kennedy, if you don’t say that word again, I’ll send you a check for $10,000.’”
Like most of the older men who date young women, Epstein seemed to take great pride in his behavior. He seemed to desperately want other important men to perceive him as a great lothario, Genghis Khan in a monogrammed sweatshirt. A former model who was on Epstein’s 727 shortly after she graduated college recalls him taking her and some older men on a tour to show off his custom-designed, padded floors. “When I saw that I thought, Wow, rich people are weird,” she says. “I was so stupid and naïve—Why are padded floors cool? I was too young to get it.” The men simply laughed and winked, joking with each other that Epstein padded his floors so that he could have sex on the floor at 10,000 feet.
Also: He liked to keep his bedroom at 54°F when slept.
Media unveils bombshell report of Trump hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein…in 1992.
Yes, that’d be 27 years ago, before Epstein was even known to have done anything illicit. So apparently, Trump is guilty by association because he couldn’t see into the future and know that Epstein would abuse women some years later. In fact, Epstein did not even own his “pedophile island” in 1992, nor are there currently any victims dating back to that time.
The sexual assault charges against Kevin Spacey have been dismissed. The case, which involved Spacey allegedly groping an 18-year old man, evidently had multiple problems and fell apart when the accuser refused to testify. This is the only one of some fifteen accusers (one as young as 14) who alleged Spacey did something sleazy with them.
Related: CNN reporter asks a panel of women to comment on President Trump’s “racist” tweets. Their reply: “It’s not racist.” Including a legal immigrant.
None of these women, including a legal immigrant, think the president's comments were racist.
“Billionaire investor Peter Thiel says one reason for Google aiding in the transfer of AI technology to the Chinese military in favor of America is that “woke” Google employees are anti-American and prefer China to the U.S.”
In addition to being a corrupt scumbag, the Governor of Puerto Rico is also a bit of an asshole. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Today’s stupid ecoscam headline: “Streaming Online Pornography Produces as Much CO2 as Belgium.” From the comments: “If we had a global referendum on whether we’d rather have porn or Belgium, I wouldn’t bet on Belgium.”
#TeamCocaineMitch is already throwing down on Democratic opponent Amy McGrath:
Wes Pruden, editor of the Washington Times, RIP. I like the cut of his jib:
He was the last of the old-time newspapermen, and the word “journalist” was prohibited from appearing in the pages of the Times during his tenure as editor-in-chief.
That rule was one of several variations from the AP Stylebook known as “Prudenisms,” reflecting Mr. Pruden’s preference for plain English and his hostility to euphemism, jargon and lazy writing. For example, “controversial” was prohibited, as were “alleged,” “allegation” and “allegedly.” If someone was accused of wrongdoing, then you had to cite a source making that charge, rather than just saying the person allegedly did whatever it was. Also, under Mr. Pruden’s rules, “gay” was not an acceptable synonym for homosexual, which meant that, as an assistant editor on the national desk, I had to change this in AP wire stories.
The Times used courtesy titles, so the President would be “Mr. Trump” and the Speaker of the House “Mrs. Pelosi” on second reference, and we were not allowed to use “Ms.,” so that on second reference a certain New York Democrat would be Miss Ocasio-Cortez. Also, we did not use “Dr.” as the honorific for a Ph.D., but only for an M.D. This was because doctorate degrees were a dime a dozen in D.C., and even many high-school principals could demand a “Dr.” if we ever let that get started. This particular Prudenism really ruffled the feathers of James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who had a Ph.D. in psychology and always insisted on being called Doctor Dobson, but the editor’s rule was unbending and on second reference he was always “Mr. Dobson.” I seem to recall Ralph Z. Hallow on the phone with Dobson’s people, getting an earful of complaints about this, as the “Doctor” thing was part of Dobson’s brand, as it were, but it was Mr. Pruden’s paper, and complaints were useless.
Some of my colleagues at the paper grumbled about Mr. Pruden’s curmudgeonly ways, but having an old-fashioned editor was in many ways a great blessing, because he was utterly invulnerable to any kind of political correctness or manufactured “controversy.” Of course, every liberal on the planet hated the Washington Times, so there was never any shortage of “activist” types indignant about our coverage, but there was no pressure they could bring to bear on Mr. Pruden that would make him flinch. A reporter whose story touched off a firestorm of outrage knew that, as long as he had the facts right, Mr. Pruden had his back. As long as the Old Man was happy with your work, it didn’t matter who else might be angry about it. He had courage, and a sense of honor.
Bird, an electric scooter sharing startup, lost $100 million over three months. On behalf of every Austinite who’s driven downtown recently, I’d just like to say:
A reminder from 50 years ago: Don’t drink and drive. And if you do, don’t leave the scene of the crash to flee. Especially if there was another passenger in the car. Especially if it’s underwater…
"We are doing a film of the musical 'cats'" "Why" "Shut up" "Are they going to look like cats or humans?" "Fuck you" "Are you ok?" "Cats with avatar human faces" "Why" "Fuck you" pic.twitter.com/dm3ooobmMt
All four members of the Squad (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley) voted against tabling. Others voting to continue impeachment proceedings were Democratic Presidential candidate Seth Moulton (so much for those moderate credentials), former candidate Eric Swalwell, and Julian Castro’s brother Joaquin.
Voting to table was every single Republican, Republican-turned-Independent Justin Amash (who many commenters had assumed was a yes vote on impeachment), Democratic Presidential candidate Tim Ryan, former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz and even Adam Schiff.
Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard didn’t vote on the motion, the only Democrat to skip voting entirely.
Having so many Democrats vote against impeachment is a big blow to Democratic Presidential candidate Tom Steyer’s Need to Impeach PAC:
On Thursday, Steyer announced that he is launching a new political action committee to turn up the heat on key Democrats by going behind their backs and into their districts with a pro-impeachment TV and advertising blitz. According to Politico, Steyer’s top targets include three of the most powerful Democrats in the House: Oversight Chairman Elijah Cumming[sic], Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, and Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal. Other potential targets include Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and even Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Kevin Mack, Steyer’s lead strategist, told Politico that the goal isn’t to put money behind primary challengers—at least not yet. But the group has virtually unlimited money to spend on staff, ads, and volunteers. “Why does Steny Hoyer get a pass, why does Jim Clyburn get a pass?” Mack said. “They’re all hiding behind the Mueller report.”
Despite that threat, Cummings, Neal, Clyburn and Hoyer all voted against impeachment. (As per House tradition, Speaker Pelosi did not cast a vote.)
The vote was a victory for Pelosi, who proved she can still hold together a Democratic majority in the face of demands from more radical members. And it might give pause to impeachment pandering from other presidential contenders. If impeachment isn’t a winning issue for a majority of House Democrats, is it really a winning issue in the Democratic Primary?
Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) filed articles of impeachment against President Trump on Tuesday under a process that will force a House floor vote by the end of this week.
Green introduced his articles of impeachment after the House passed a resolution largely along party lines condemning Trump for suggesting that four progressive freshman congresswomen of color — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — should “go back” to their countries.
Green said that the House should go beyond condemning Trump and move to remove him from office.
It will be the third impeachment floor vote forced by Green in the last two years, but the first since Democrats took control of the House.
Green previously forced procedural votes on articles of impeachment against Trump in December 2017 and January 2018. Both efforts drew the support of about 60 House Democrats.
A total of 84 House Democrats currently support launching an impeachment inquiry, as well as Independent Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.), according to The Hill’s whip list. But Democratic leaders — and the majority of the caucus — are not yet on board as they seek to continue ongoing investigations of the Trump administration.
A floor vote will force all House Democrats to go on the record about an issue on which they have yet to reach consensus.
If Nancy Pelosi thought she had a decent chance of successfully impeaching and removing President Trump from office, she’d call a vote in a hearbeat. But not only is there no way the Senate will convict, but after the Mueller vindication and with the strong economy, she probably doesn’t even have the Democratic votes to pass articles of impeachment. A lot of moderate House Democrats (such as they are these days) resent being yoked to the likes of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and pressured by Tom Steyer to vote for impeachment, as they see the issue as a political loser.
Despite clear evidence Bill Clinton lied under oath, impeachment was a political loser for Republicans in 1998, and there’s no evidence it will be any more popular for Democrats in 2020. President Trump is forcing Pelosi hold a vote that pro-impeachment Democrats are probably going to lose, and one that forces moderates to pick between the perpetually outraged nutroots (and big money donors like Steyer) and their own constituents. Moreover, it makes Pelosi looks weak in the face of demands from “the Squad” (as people are calling the radical House members Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley). And, as mentioned previously, Trump knows that AOC’s Squad is extremely unpopular with independent voters.
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth is in charge of constantly rewriting history to confirm with the current needs of the ruling Party. Quillette has a piece on communist China’s own attempts to revise history.
While the Chinese government continues to transform Xinjiang through its cultural genocide program aimed at eliminating the distinct identity of the Uyghur population, it is also putting a high priority on controlling the history of the region and its people. In October 2018, the state-run newspaper People’s Daily published an article outlining the official stance towards Xinjiang’s history, saying, “A correct understanding of the history of Xinjiang is not about examination of specific historical details. It is about a deep understanding of the Party Central Committee’s basic understanding, viewpoints and conclusions on issues related to Xinjiang’s history, culture, religion and so on, and enhancing our confidence in Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”
The statement illustrates how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) generally regards the purpose of history. For the CCP, the purpose of historical study is not to understand past mistakes to ensure they are not repeated, an extremely important goal for a nation with the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward in the living memory of much of its population. The purpose of history is to serve the political and ideological goals of the government.
Much of the actual history of Xinjiang runs counter to those goals. The province of Xinjiang was founded when General Zuo Zongtang (in fact, the namesake of “General Tso’s Chicken”), re-conquered the area in 1877 under the order of the Qing Government, setting the foundation for the establishment of Xinjiang Province in 1884. The Qing conquest of this region is associated with widespread violence against the local Uyghur and Hui populations as well Uyghur violence against ethnic Chinese. Such historical facts underscore the overwhelming disunity of the region, thereby undermining the CCP’s current narrative about Xinjiang.
Snip.
What is arguably most sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party are discussions of any historical events in which the CCP appears to be at fault, whether it be violence in Xinjiang or the Tiananmen Square Massacre. In the current political environment, these events call into question the legitimacy of the CCP, and therefore, information about them is increasingly restricted. But it wasn’t always this way. In the 1980s, public discussions and writings (known as “scar literature”) of the horrors of Mao’s rule were largely tolerated by the government. This was also a period when such history appeared to be less relevant, and therefore, less threatening to the Party. At that time, the country was reforming its political institutions, liberalizing its economy, and some high-ranking CCP officials were even considering full democratization.
Snip.
One such highly-relevant historical mistake the government is increasingly eager to control is the Cultural Revolution. Even within China, there is virtually unanimous agreement that the movement was a major failure of CCP rule. While this period has always been sensitive, the Party was, until recently, relatively forthcoming about this. However, it is now moving to further restrict knowledge and discussion of it.
Until 2019, national middle-school history textbooks had an entire chapter on the Cultural Revolution, showing the movement in a distinctly negative light. Of Mao’s errors, it said, “In the 1960s, Mao Zedong mistakenly believed that there were revisionists within the Central Party, and the party and the country faced threats of capitalist restoration.” In 2019, the Ministry of Education released a new version of the textbook in which the Cultural Revolution material was significantly shortened and combined with other periods into a single chapter called “Arduous Exploration and Development Achievements.” It not only took out the word “mistakenly” from the above quote, but also downplays the erroneous and tragic nature of the Cultural Revolution by saying “Nothing happens smoothly in the world, and history is always advancing in ups and downs.”
The government has also moved to further restrict discussion of the Cultural Revolution and other sensitive history throughout society. In 2013, shortly after Xi came to power, the Central Office of the CCP released a “Bulletin on the Current Situation in the Ideological Field” for local officials across the country, stating that “historical mistakes of the CCP” should not be discussed. Continuing this trend, in 2018, a document was leaked online from the National Radio and Television Administration that required TV and internet series to not only avoid discussing history, but avoid drawing any parallels with real historical events or time periods. The document used Game of Thrones as an example of compliance, as the series contains no historical elements or parallels.
The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has good reason to reduce awareness of the excesses of the Mao period, including the Cultural Revolution: many of President Xi Jinping’s policies and campaigns bear significant resemblance to this period. In 2018, Xi Jinping’s government launched a massive, nationwide campaign called “Eliminate the Dark and Evil Forces.” Both this campaign and the Cultural Revolution were attempts to consolidate personal power over the political system and society. Though billed in China’s English-language media as merely a campaign against organized crime, it is in fact much more far-reaching and ideological in its aims. Similar to the Cultural Revolution, it aims to purge society of “impure” elements.
The targets of this campaign vary by jurisdiction. In multiple locations it has targeted and demonized doctors, as did the Cultural Revolution. In Hunan province, it targeted HIV patients, the mentally ill, and parents who have lost their child as “Dark and Evil Forces.” It has also gone after corrupt party officials with connections to local mafia, making the campaign a convenient excuse to take out political enemies within the party, a liberty that Mao made extensive use of in the 1960s.
Similar to the Mao-era, the campaign ramps up propaganda dissemination, with local governments encouraged to install public propaganda about the “Dark and Evil Forces.” Frequent visitors to China will notice that, since around 2015, ideological propaganda banners have become omnipresent. Earlier this year, Chinese netizens reacted with fury to pictures of a massive red banner above the entrance to a Kindergarten saying, “Insist on starting early to nip the evil forces in the bud.”
Another similarity between Xi and Mao’s rule is that citizens are encouraged to inform on one another to the authorities, creating a culture of fear and self-censorship. For example, as the CCP attempts to reduce the influence of Western ideas in the country, university students have reported on professors deemed to be promoting liberal values. And as part of the “Eliminate the Dark and Evil Forces” campaign, citizens are, in some jurisdictions, even encouraged with monetary incentives to inform on members of groups deemed “Dark and Evil” by local authorities.
Biden still leads, Steyer is In, Warren, Sanders and Harris are all bunched up for second, Castro wants nothing to do with your germ-bearing meatbag spawn, and Williamson channels Neon Genesis Evangelion and raises Gravel’s campaign from the dead.
It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
Remember how Biden was doomed after a few bad polls? Yeah, no so much.
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 35, Sanders 14. Harris 12, Warren 5, Booker 3, Buttigieg 2, Delany 1, Williamson 1, Yang 1.
NBC News/Wall Street Journal: Biden 26, Warren 19, Harris 13, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 7, O’Rourke 2, Yang 2. “Biden performs best among African Americans, older Democrats and those who are moderate or conservative in their political views, while Warren runs strongest with self-described liberals and those ages 18 to 49.”
Morning Consult (national): Biden 31, Sanders 18, Harris 14, Warren 13, Buttigieg 6, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2. “The following candidates received 1% or less of the vote: Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, Tim Ryan, John Hickenlooper, Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Bennet, John Delaney, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, Jay Inslee, Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton and Marianne Williamson. ‘Someone else’ received 2%.”
Morning Consult (early states): Biden 31, Sanders 20, Harris 14, Warren 11, Buttigieg 5, Booker 5, O’Rourke 3. “The following candidates received 2% or less of the vote share: Amy Klobuchar, Tim Ryan, Andrew Yang, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Steve Bullock, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Julian Castro, Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, Eric Swalwell, Seth Moulton, and Marianne Williamson. ‘Someone else’ received 2%.”
“Easily?” I asked, making sure I heard them correctly. Yes, they insisted, with her nodding as he said Democrats had gone bonkers and voters would respond by giving Trump four more years.
The recent Manhattan conversation would be insignificant except that it dovetails with national trends, namely a growing belief that Dems are not coming back to this world anytime soon. The election is still a long way off, but there is no sign that the radicalism surging through the party can be put back in the bottle before the election. What we see now is likely what voters will see in 2020.
One of many defining moments among the presidential contenders and pretenders came with their unanimous support for giving illegal immigrants free health care. They raised their hands to signal yes, as if the question was a no-brainer.
Implicit in their so-called compassion is an invitation for millions and millions more to cross the border and get free care. Free, of course, except to American taxpayers.
To qualify, candidates must have at least 2 percent support in four qualifying national or early-state polls released after the first debate on June 26-27 through two weeks before the third debate on Sept. 12-13 and 130,000 unique donors (including at least 400 individual donors in at least 20 states).1 And while those thresholds might not sound that difficult to meet, it’s definitely raising the ante from the first two debates, in which candidates needed to hit only 1 percent support in three qualifying polls or 65,000 unique donors (including at least 200 individual donors in at least 20 states).
Right now only Biden, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders and Warren have met the criteria.
“The party, in my opinion, has moved for me, personally, too far to the left, and for that reason I don’t have a candidate in the party at this time,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, if a Democrat is going to beat Trump that person, he or she, is going to have to move to the center and you can’t wait too long to do that because the message of some of the programs that the Democrats are pushing are not resonating with the majority of the American people.”
“It’s really working for the party for the primaries, but if you’re going to win a general election against President Trump, who has a lockdown at his base and everybody’s going to contest for the middle and the independents, you can’t be too far left in that process,” he added.
“Sen. Elizabeth Warren stole the show at Netroots Nation’s presidential forum, if only for the fact that she was the lone top-tier presidential candidate who showed up.” Gillibrand, Inslee and Castro also showed up. That so many other candidates felt safe in skipping it (including Booker, who attended last year) is a sign of the conference’s continuing decline in importance.
There was a LULAC convention in Milwaukee. Sanders, Warren, Castro, O’Rourke all put in appearances, as did Jill Biden. Also see the bit on the Bennet/de Blasio being there below.
The NAACP’s 110th convention starts next Wednesday in Detroit, and declared candidates speaking there will be Biden, Booker, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, and Warren…plus Stacey Abrams. Klobuchar being there but not Buttigieg is…interesting.
I suppose I have a duty to link this 538 piece the topic of women running for president, but it starts with a lot of lefty culture war assumptions before inconclusive data scrying.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Local columnist from Rome, Georgia wants her to get in.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. George Will (I know) makes the case for Bennet, such as it is, which amounts to “he’s not as crazy as the rest.” Bennet said Democrats could lose Colorado if Sanders is the nominee. Since Clinton only beat Trump by 71,000 votes out of over 2 million cast in Colorado in 2016, any Democrat could conceivably lose Colorado. He got into an immigration pander-off with di Blasio at a LULAC convention in Milwaukee.
Joe Biden unveiled a proposal Monday to expand the Affordable Care Act with an optional public health insurance program, escalating a fierce debate with his Democratic rivals who favor a more sweeping Medicare-for-all system.
Biden’s plan, which campaign officials estimate would cost $750 billion over 10 years, would also expand tax credits to pay for health premiums, and it would create a new coverage option to help people living in states that have resisted the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid.
Funny how a plan that socializes American medicine than the plan Obama and Pelosi just barely managed to get passed when they controlled all three branches of government is now too timid for the party’s true believers. Just one day before his candidacy, Biden had his records archive at the University of Delaware sealed. How convenient. Speaking of murky university doings, just exactly what is it that the University of Pennsylvania got for the more than $900,000 paid Joe Biden? “The former vice president collected $371,159 in 2017 plus $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 for a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) This is interesting: “Presidential candidate Joe Biden refused to apologize for the nearly three million deportations carried out during his tenure as vice president in the Obama administration, after being confronted by protesters while campaigning in Dover, New Hampshire Friday.” Also this: “‘I will not halt deportations and detentions.’ Protestors continued to chant and demanded an apology but Biden remained intransigent.” Holy crap! Biden might win the nomination by simply not pandering to the Open Borders crowd. “The only thing making Biden look ‘electable’ is his rivals’ extremism.” Yeah, but that ain’t exactly nuthin’, hoss. Late breaking news: “Biden cancer nonprofit suspends operations indefinitely…Biden and his wife left the group’s board in April as an ethics precaution before he joined the presidential campaign. But the nonprofit had trouble maintaining momentum without their involvement.”
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Booker is unveiling new legislation that would give more federal prisoners the chance at early release, building on perviously [sic] passed criminal justice reform that some supporters say didn’t go far enough.” Typos in the very first sentence aside (“layers and layers of fact checkers”), it’s not necessarily a bad idea, but I suspect the number of prisoners it would actually affect are small. He brags about changing Newark’s image of “crime and corruption” as mayor. Don’t know about corruption, but the figures hardly show an unambiguous decline in crime between 2006 and 2013 (all numbers per 100,000). Murders: 105 in 2006, 112 in 2013. Rapes: 87 in 2006, 45 in 2013 (the biggest decline I can spot except for arson, though they’re way up to 116 in 2017); Robberies 1,288 in 2006, 2,433 in 2013, etc. Arson went from 166 in 2006 to 34 in 2013, so maybe there was a significant dent there. Or maybe the economy improved just enough that people weren’t torching their own places for the insurance money anymore. In fact, crime seems to have dropped more after he left.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Pete Buttigieg goes on hiring spree after top fundraising quarter. Buttigieg’s once tiny campaign now has more than 250 people on staff, an aide said Friday, making the South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s campaign more representative of a top fundraising candidate.” The New Republic, once the premier journal of what would come to be called neoliberalism, published a piece attacking Buttigieg for being a neoliberal, and does so in such explicit terms about his gay sex life that it might have been penned by a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. Speaking of tedious explorations of Buttigieg’s sex life, NYT offers up “Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet,” because evidently that’s a subject some fraction their readership deeply cares about. Speaking of tedious, here’s more on Mayor Pete and race relations, because Democrats never seem to tire of scrutinizing every single person on earth for suspected racism. (See also yesterday’s piece.) Someone tracks down at least some of where that huge fundraising haul came from:
Notably, however, it came three days after Buttigieg held a fundraiser at the home of Hamilton James — a longtime Democratic donor, a political bundler for the likes of Hillary Clinton, and also the executive vice chairman of the Blackstone Group and an architect of a $20 billion deal to use Saudi dollars to fund U.S. infrastructure projects.
Blackstone, the largest alternative investment firm in the world, has long counted Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Public Investment Fund as a major client, according to the New York Times. The infrastructure deal was in the works before the last presidential election and long before the death of Khashoggi, for which bin Salman is widely believed to be responsible.
The lights went out on Broadway Saturday night, and Bill de Blasio was a thousand miles away in Iowa. It was the moment that perfectly captured his distracted, ego-driven failure of a mayoralty.
Bill de Blasio does not care about New York City. He does not care about its people. He does not care about how it’s run. He does not care about you or your taxes, creating jobs or improving lives. All Bill de Blasio cares about is Bill de Blasio.
And so, for the good of the city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to remove the mayor from office.
Snip.
De Blasio gave his wife $850 million for her ThriveNYC mental health initiative, and when questioned by the City Council, she couldn’t come up with one thing it succeeded in doing.
He spent a jaw-dropping $773 million on his Renewal program to turn around failing schools. It did absolutely nothing except keep kids trapped in institutions the city knew were terrible. Shamed? You don’t know Bill. He claims the biggest threat to education is charter schools, which actually deliver results, not his own mismanagement.
I think the central issue facing this country is how terribly divided we are and how our government doesn’t work anymore meaning we don’t get anything done. And I’m running for president to get America working again so that we can actually fix health care, build infrastructure, improve public education, make sure there’s jobs in every community in this country. Those are the reasons I’m running for president. And- but to do any of those things we actually have to start coming together. We have to find common ground. We can’t act like bipartisan solutions are dirty words that we can’t say in Washington anymore.
Snip.
Medicare-for-All” is a great slogan. They’ve hijacked the good name of Medicare and applied it to a law that will cause upheaval in our health care system and I- I was the first person to actually talk about this. Now we’re seeing the debate change on this issue as people start to realize. My plan which is called “Better Care” is a universal health care plan. Every single American gets health care as a basic right of citizenship for free. But I preserve options if people want to opt out and keep their private insurance. They can if they want to buy supplemental plans. They can. It’s a much better way to create a universal health care system.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. At the Milwaukee LULAC convention, Gabbard criticized Trump’s immigration policies on much narrower grounds: non-Americans denied citizenship after serving in the U.S. military. This is a real issue, but it’s one that affected only 227 people in 2018. Gabbard appeared on an NPR podcast. “Asked if there are any wars in American history that she thinks were justifiable, she named only World War II.” She says the two party system sucks. A defensible position, but one not calculated to help win the nomination of the party Gabbard is running to represent. She also wants to eliminate superdelegates, which under the 2020 rules won’t vote unless the nomination goes beyond the first ballot.
Update: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Still In? Twitter. Facebook. Evidently last week’s news that he was dropping out was premature, or else he only plans to drop out after the debates, which he’s met the donor threshold for qualifying for, very possibly thanks to rival candidate William’s appeal for money. He promised the 65,000th donor a signed rock.
“Mike Gravel and His Online Teens Want Weed in the Constitution.” I prefer to see federal marijuana prohibition ended on Tenth Amendment grounds, as passing a constitutional amendment is both the stupidest and least-likely path to legalization, but I’m surprised that more serious candidates haven’t made a play for pro-pot voters. It’s a significant single-issue constituency, albeit it not as big a one as its supporters think.
As a black, female law-and-order Democrat, Harris creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Some liberals, while professing a strong desire to see a woman of color in the White House, fear that California’s former “top cop” won’t fulfill sweeping progressive goals. To them, she seems like a defender of the status quo posing as a reformer. Others are less bothered by her past as a prosecutor—after all, Democrats often struggle to cultivate “toughness”—but believe that the best person to stop Trump’s reëlection is another white man in his eighth decade. To this way of thinking, which contends that the prospect of a liberal black woman President may present too much of a challenge for mainstream America, Harris would make an advantageous Veep. But when, in May, matchmakers in the Congressional Black Caucus speculated about the possibility of a Biden-Harris ticket, she had a snappy retort. “Joe Biden would be a great running mate,” she said.
Snip.
Harris’s father does not participate in her public life (and didn’t answer a request for an interview). The exception to the rule is telling. In February, on “The Breakfast Club,” an urban-market radio show, Harris admitted to smoking a joint in college, and one of the hosts asked if she supported legalizing marijuana. “Half my family’s from Jamaica—are you kidding me?” she replied, laughing. The glib response elided a more complicated record: she opposed recreational pot when she was D.A. of San Francisco, then apparently adapted her view as the public consensus shifted. But that wasn’t the problem. After Harris’s radio appearance, her father gave a statement to the Jamaican-diaspora Web site, reprimanding his daughter. “My deceased parents must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.” When I asked Harris how she felt about this belated, public parenting, she said, “He’s entitled to his opinion.” I asked if she found talking about Donald unpleasant. “I’m happy to talk about my father,” she said, glumly. “But, ya know.” She raised her eyebrows, and said nothing. This was not going to be “Dreams from My Father,” the sequel.
Snip.
Around the time that Owsley met her, Harris was a young prosecutor. She was dating Willie Brown, one of the most visible and powerful politicians in the state. He was sixty—four years older than her dad. Originally from segregated East Texas, he had come to San Francisco during the era of “James Crow” and, rather than join his uncle’s illegal gambling operation, became a defense attorney, representing pimps and prostitutes. Eventually, he won a seat in the State Assembly and, for fourteen years, served as speaker, earning the nickname the Ayatollah. A Democratic power broker with Republican allies, he apportioned the prime office space and knew where to find a legislator if his wife showed up looking for him. In the course of Brown’s career, he was investigated twice by the F.B.I. for corruption, but never charged with a crime. (He played a version of himself in “The Godfather: Part III,” glad-handing Michael Corleone.) Brown’s social life was “spicy,” as he puts it. Married since 1957, he lives amicably apart from his wife, seeing her on holidays. He has had a series of girlfriends—currently, he’s dating a Russian socialite—and maintains a large collection of friends all over the city, notably among wealthy white donors in Pacific Heights. “Willie knows no strangers,” Owsley told me.
During Harris’s short-lived romance with Brown, he ran for mayor; they broke up sometime between his victory party and his swearing-in. The association has clung to her—“an albatross,” she told SF Weekly years ago. Some of the most abhorrent memes of the Presidential campaign riff on their relationship (“Just say no to Willie Brown’s ho”), as does the third comment down on just about any Harris news story. Roseanne Barr has weighed in, scurrilously. Stories that mention Brown have always infuriated Harris; when I asked her campaign about him, a spokesperson testily referred me to statements that she made sixteen years ago.
Among political hopefuls, Brown is known as a mentor and a Pygmalion. Always nattily turned out—he favors Brioni suits and Borsalino hats—he believes that people in public life should present themselves well. “Women in politics need five or six well-fitted sets of pants,” he writes in his memoir. “They also need a complement of blouses or shirts that can be interchanged. And they need a whole series of blazers.” Pelosi is always on point, he writes; Feinstein can look as if she’s caught between seasons. Tactfully, he doesn’t mention Harris, but he may as well have been cataloguing her wardrobe.
“Willie is a bit of a finishing school for some of the people in his orbit,” the local observer told me. “Most people don’t quite know one hundred per cent how to dress for the first Pacific Heights cocktail party they get invited to. The notion that he helped polish somebody like Kamala a little more—I don’t think that is sexist. To use a Colette metaphor, he might have been the Aunt Alicia. ‘Here’s how you dress for this, and when you talk to this person remember that her husband likes to talk about this subject—and you might get a big donation.’ ” Harris grew close to Wilkes Bashford, a friend of Brown’s and one of San Francisco’s most exclusive clothiers, and she became a frequent bold name in the society columns. Even now, she is often featured in the address-restricted magazine the Nob Hill Gazette. Brown also arranged appointments for Harris on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the state’s Medical Assistance Commission, which together reportedly paid her about four hundred thousand dollars over five years. He gave her a car.
In his memoir, published the year Obama was elected President, Brown writes that it is critical for black candidates to “cross over into the white community.” He maintains that black women face a particular challenge being seen as leaders. “When whites look at black women, they see the women as servants, maids, and cooks (just as my mother was),” he writes. “No matter how astute these women are, they’ve never been viewed as worthy of much beyond domestic-service status.” His advice to black women seeking political office: get involved at a high level with cultural and charitable organizations, “like symphonies, museums, and hospitals.” In 1995, Harris joined the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she designed a mentorship program for public-school teens.
Gavin Newsom, the Governor of California, is another Brown protégé, though the connection is rarely held against him. Born into a political family from Pacific Heights, Newsom was a fixture in the social scene to which Brown introduced Harris. “I certainly remember Gavin delivering wine to our house,” Owsley said, remarking that her husband had invested in PlumpJack, Newsom’s hospitality company. When Newsom was twenty-eight, Brown appointed him to chair the Parking and Traffic Commission of San Francisco. Not long after, when a seat opened on the city’s powerful Board of Supervisors, Brown chose Newsom to fill it. “I can candidly tell you with conviction I would not be governor of California—I would not have been mayor of San Francisco—without his support and his mentorship,” Newsom told me. “Kamala was not directly appointed D.A. of San Francisco. I think it’s patently unfair to judge that harshly and not judge my relationship.”
Since Brown fostered both of them, Harris and Newsom have been political siblings vying for primacy. The day Harris was sworn in as D.A., in 2004, Newsom became mayor; when he became lieutenant governor, she was sworn in as state attorney general. They share donors, networks, and consultants, and have backed each other publicly on issues that range from supporting gay marriage to opposing the death penalty. (Harris also endorsed Newsom’s decision to turn undocumented minors accused of felonies over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a decision both have since disavowed.) The two have even vacationed together, Newsom acknowledged to me. I asked Nathan Click, who once served as a spokesperson for Harris and now does the same for Newsom, who the elder was. “I don’t know—twins?” he said. A civic leader in San Francisco told me, “Kamala and Gavin are like two puppies rolling around having fun together, seeing who pops out first.”
Several years ago, Harris and Newsom’s sibling rivalry was nearly put before the state’s voters. As Governor Jerry Brown was entering his final term, Newsom was the lieutenant governor and Harris was attorney general. Governor was clearly the next job for each of them. “It divided the social world,” Mimi Silbert, who co-founded the Delancey Street Foundation, a residency program for ex-convicts, and who is an old friend of both Harris and Newsom, says. “It was, ‘I’m more for Gavin,’ ‘Well, I’m more for Kamala.’ ” As the tension was becoming excruciating, Barbara Boxer unexpectedly announced that she was giving up her seat in the U.S. Senate. Within days, Harris had declared that she would run for the Senate, clearing the way for Newsom eventually to become governor. “It was very important when she decided, because running against her for any office was not something I had any desire to do,” Newsom, who is a co-chair of Harris’s California campaign, said. “If she decided to run for governor, that would have been perilous in terms of my own considerations.”
There’s a lot more there on her various political campaigns and tenure as DA. Harris’ calculated straddles. “She wants to attack Biden on busing with paying the price of embracing a deeply unpopular policy of imposing busing today. She wants to say she’s on Bernie’s side on health care without acknowledging Medicare for All would abolish almost all private insurance.” A critique of her housing subsidy proposal:
Harris says her well-intentioned goal is to close the wealth gap between black and while families. She would give 4 million homebuyers HUD grants of up to $25,000 each to help them make down payments and pay closing costs to buy homes.
However, as we all know, the average cost of even a modest home far exceeds $25,000. That means that recipients of these generous government grants would need to borrow a lot more money to buy homes, even while facing big monthly mortgage payments that in many cases would be greater than they could afford.
Does this sound familiar? If you’ve followed news about the housing market for years, it should. It reminds us of the feel-good government intervention that precipitated the horrendous real estate crash of 2008 and the greatest recession since the Great Depression.
In 2016, the buzz around Hickenlooper was loud enough that Hillary Clinton vetted him to be her running mate. But three years later, Hickenlooper often finds himself talking to voters who have no idea who he is. A columnist for the New Hampshire Union-Leader recently likened the efforts of Hickenlooper — a former brewery owner — to “a fledgling IPA fighting for a tap in the neighborhood bar.”
That was evident during a recent visit to the Foundry, a beer hall and distillery in West Des Moines, where patrons eyed him with mild curiosity. “You are who?” a man said as Hickenlooper wandered near the bar. Upon learning Hickenlooper was running for president, he replied, “There are so many of you.”
In Cresco, Iowa, where Hickenlooper spoke at a local Democratic Party gathering, a woman mistook the former governor for Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), who is also running for president. “Two Coloradans,” the woman declared, as Hickenlooper walked away. “I can’t keep them straight.”
During a recent visit to the Des Moines farmers market, the unassuming Hickenlooper walked through the buyers in almost complete anonymity. He made little effort to call attention to himself, and the shoppers and merchants appeared to have no idea a presidential candidate was in their midst.
Hickenlooper’s road became even lonelier last week. Several top aides, including campaign manager Brad Komar, left the campaign or announced they would do so soon. Hickenlooper played down the departures, but a Democrat close to the campaign said the aides had urged him to drop his presidential bid and instead run for the Senate, which Hickenlooper refused to do.
When the rodents depart the dinghy, maybe it’s time to take the hint.
Hickenlooper also rejects some of the high-profile liberal initiatives embraced by other Democratic hopefuls. He is against Medicare-for-all, arguing there are “less disruptive ways” of achieving universal health care. And while citing a “sense of urgency” on climate change, Hickenlooper opposes the Green New Deal, saying it could never win Republican support.
He’s sought a similar middle path on immigration. At a deli in Boone, Iowa, Dean Lyons, a utility company manager, asked Hickenlooper what he would do about the “mess” at the border. The former governor replied, “We need borders. And we need people to obey the law. You cannot continue to have laws that people don’t obey.”
But he also said the nation can’t ignore the humanitarian issues at the border or its need for low-skilled workers, and he listed several policy ideas, such as a 10-year renewable visa program. Afterward, Lyons praised the nuanced answer but also stressed Hickenlooper’s long odds. “I was pretty impressed with him,” Lyons said. “But he’s got a long road to get up the ladder.”
Hickenlooper has recently tried to stand out by being ever more aggressive about the party’s leftward turn, arguing that “socialism is not the answer” and that embracing it will only lead to a Democratic defeat. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up reelecting the worst president ever in American history,” he has argued.
That line elicited boos from liberal attendees at last month’s California Democratic Convention in San Francisco, a reaction that lit up social media and attracted the first significant headlines of his campaign.
But the same line attracted polite nods in Iowa, where Hickenlooper hopes his “extreme moderate” message, as he calls it, will catch fire with a Midwestern electorate that often prefers middle-of-the-road candidates.
I wouldn’t hold your breath. “Hickenlooper refuses to condemn protesters who hoisted Mexican flag at ICE facility.” It must suck to be pandering as hard as you can and still be stuck at 1%.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Piece wondering why Moulton, Ryan and the now-departed Swalwell are even running for President. “‘I think he’s got a better shot at being president than being a senator from Massachusetts,’ said [Democratic consultant Scott] Ferson, who worked for Moulton’s winning congressional race in 2014 but is not involved with his presidential run. ‘He burned a lot of bridges in Massachusetts in the Democratic Party, and for statewide office you need party support.'” Asked whether he knew Buttigieg at Harvard, Moulton said:
“No. I think we hung out with different groups of friends. Not at all, I was not hanging out with the Harvard Democrats,” Moulton said.
He was then asked to describe what his friend group was like.
“Athletes. People who went out and, you know, had a good time,” Moulton said.
The excitement that greeted Beto O’Rourke’s presidential candidacy is long gone. The former Texas congressman has been stuck in low single digits in most polls, and CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny reports he’s now running low on cash.
“On the eve of the fundraising deadline for all the candidates to report their money, he’s yet to report,” Zeleny said. “I’m told by a couple of top supporters familiar with his financial situation that it’s bleak. A few staffers have begun leaving El Paso, moving on to other things. … He has a lot of high-powered, high-paid staff members so there are discussions going on, I’m told, as to what the next step is. He’s committed to staying in, but it’s not the summer he envisioned.”
Just nine months ago, attorney Katie Baron was so inspired by Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign in Texas that she commissioned a sprawling mural on the side of a building in east Austinfeaturing the candidate in a Superman-like pose.
After O’Rourke lost race and began mulling a presidential campaign, the artist added a sweeping “2020” in blue paint – providing what seemed to be yet one more call for O’Rourke to get into the crowded race.
Now, four months into O’Rourke’s campaign, Baron wishes he had stayed out.
After the first Democratic presidential debate last month, Baron posted an altered picture of the mural on a Facebook page dedicated to the artwork. She had replaced O’Rourke’s face with Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s and wrote: “Don’t worry, still got PLENTY of love for Beto, but Kamala earned herself a little recognition too last night!” The comments filled with messages from angry O’Rourke supporters and a few excited Harris backers.
While Baron says she will be forever grateful to O’Rourke for inspiring her and thousands of others to become politically active, she doesn’t think he’s the strongest candidate for president, nor has he shown he can nationalize the magic of his Senate campaign.
“If the primary vote was tomorrow, he wouldn’t have my vote,” said Baron, 35, who likes Harris, D-Calif., for her sharp intellect and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for her methodical policy papers.
“Being part of the Beto-mania that was fueling the fire, I can see why he kind of thought he had no choice but to enter,” she said. “Honestly, I did get a little caught up. We were still riding the wave of the midterms.”
As O’Rourke slogs through a difficult primary season, he’s not only struggling to gain the support of voters who don’t know of him, but also to hold on to the support of those who know him best, Texans who powered his long-shot campaign against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year.
On the one hand, yeah, there’s the widespread impression that he missed his mark. On the other hand, I still see a lot of Beto 2020 signs and stickers around Austin…
Indeed, if you’re going to construct a path to the nomination for Sestak, it probably goes something like: If Biden stumbles, here’s another white man with gravitas who can speak credibly to middle America (and doesn’t call himself a socialist). But he has a problem that other candidates in this position (e.g., Sen. Michael Bennet or Gov. Steve Bullock) don’t — he’s made a lot of enemies in the Democratic establishment. In 2010, in defiance of party leadership, Sestak primaried Sen. Arlen Specter, who had recently switched parties from the GOP. Although Sestak impressively came from behind to topple Specter in the primary, he lost the general election by 2 points, and some Democrats blamed him for blowing a winnable race. So when he tried for a rematch in 2016, party elders recruited another Democrat, Katie McGinty, to block his path, and she handily defeated him in the primary. That was the last time Sestak ran for office — until now.
O’Connell wouldn’t say which specific constituencies within the party Sestak would try to woo, but his campaign strategy so far has been focused on retail politics — shaking hands at parades and convincing one voter at a time — in Iowa. But Sestak also plans to tap his old donor base in Pennsylvania, which raised millions for him in his previous campaigns, although O’Connell acknowledged that presidential fundraising will be a challenge because of Sestak’s late entry into the race. Without question, Sestak is starting from behind: Since 1976, only one successful nominee, Bill Clinton, kicked off a campaign later than April of the year before the election. And with only 27 percent of Democrats having an opinion of Sestak, according to a recent YouGov poll, he can scarcely afford to get a late start. However, he didn’t do so by choice: O’Connell says Sestak would have jumped in the race much sooner, but he didn’t want to run as long as his daughter was undergoing treatment for brain cancer. (She was given the all-clear earlier in June.)
Sestak was always going to have an uphill climb. He hasn’t won an election in nine years, and long layovers between campaigns can make for weaker candidates. It’s also hard to win a nomination without at least some support from the party establishment, which he seems unlikely to get. Finally, he has yet to reach 1 percent in any poll, which is a severe handicap to his chances of making the stage for future debates (not to mention getting enough votes to win the nomination). Unfortunately for “Admiral Joe,” on-the-ground campaigning simply may not reach enough voters to make up for that.
Today, a century after the progressive movement that inspired Kane and real-world patricians, class and inequality are once again at the center of American politics. Two of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have pushed inequality to the center of the Party’s political discourse, levelling indictments at the millionaires and billionaires who have absorbed much of the gains that the economy has made over the past few decades and particularly post-recession. The chief villain of this narrative is now Donald Trump—the self-proclaimed populist billionaire President who got to the White House with the help of a press that both burnished and indulged his reputation as a savvy businessman worth hearing out and taking seriously. Much of the free publicity his campaign was granted can be tallied among the many complimentary perks that the wealthy are habitually offered in this country.
This week, Tom Steyer—who is not only a billionaire but one of the largest political donors in the country, having spent an estimated hundred and twenty-three million dollars on last year’s midterms—joined Sanders and Warren in the progressive lane of the Democratic primaries. Both candidates greeted his entrance coldly. “I like Tom personally,” Sanders said in an MSNBC interview, “but I do have to say—as somebody who, in this campaign, has received two million campaign contributions, averaging, I believe, nineteen dollars a person—I am a bit tired of seeing billionaires trying to buy political power.” Warren tweeted, “The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they’re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that’s powered by a grassroots movement.”
To his credit, Steyer has already built a movement of sorts. His campaign to impeach Trump, publicized in ubiquitous social-media and cable-news ads, claims to have collected 8.2 million e-mail addresses. His nonprofit and political-action committee, NextGen America, registered about a quarter million young voters for the midterms last year and helped rally activists behind environmental campaigns like the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and the effort to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In his campaign-launch video, however, Steyer focusses on an all-encompassing fight against inequality. “We have a society that’s very unequal,” he says to the camera, “and it’s really important for people to understand that this society is connected. If this is a banana republic with a few very, very rich people and everybody else living in misery, that’s a failure.”
Sanders and Warren rail against the upper class as a whole—both individual millionaires and billionaires and the corporate world for unbalancing politics and the economy. In Steyer’s narrative, the villains are not the wealthy as a class but a malevolent set of corporations that have bought a disproportionate share of influence within our political system. “If you give them the unlimited ability to participate in politics, it will skew everything, because they only care about profits,” he says in the launch video. “I think eighty-two thousand people died last year of drug overdoses. If you think about the drug companies, the banks screwing people on their mortgages—it’s thousands of people doing what they’re paid to do. Almost every single major intractable problem, at the back of it you see a big-money interest for whom stopping progress, stopping justice, is really important to their bottom line.”
Steyer himself is a big-money interest, of course. But his campaign seems to hinge on the argument that his own wealth has bought him both political independence and courage. “I’m an outsider,” he said in a CBS interview, on Thursday. “I’ve been doing this—successfully beating the oil companies, the tobacco companies, closing tax loopholes—from the outside for ten years. I don’t believe that this failed government is going to be reformed from the inside.” This is part of the case Trump made for his own candidacy in 2016—that only he, an outsider with the privilege to jump into the political system—could drain Washington’s swamp. “Remember, I am self-funding my campaign, the only one in either party,” he tweeted in January of 2016. “I’m not controlled by lobbyists or special interests-only the U.S.A.!”
Tom Steyer, you beautiful madman. You’re about to turn the Democratic primary into an expensive demolition derby: “Billionaire Tom Steyer announced Tuesday that he will join the crowded field vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and promised to commit at least $100 million of his personal fortune to the campaign.
Steyer will not be the 2020 Democratic nominee. But with $100 million, he can do a lot of damage to anyone he deems an obstacle, and it’s worth remembering that Michael Bloomberg just overwhelmed every opponent with a tsunami of ad money when running for mayor in New York City three times. Steyer has limited name recognition now, but a nearly unlimited television advertising budget will change that fast. He can promise anything and accuse anyone else of being a “Washington insider.”
Steyer’s probably not quite a threat to overtake Biden or Harris or Sanders or Warren. But everybody below that might as well call it quits.
Life just stinks if you’re Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bennet these days, doesn’t it? You’ve worked hard to try to get things done in the U.S. Senate and it means bupkus to most Democratic primary voters. You could call for Trump’s impeachment, but you can’t do anything until the House of Representatives actually passes articles of impeachment. You’re sharing the stage with no-name House members and some spiritual guru from California who’s talking about the power of love. You’re going to spend your summer eating corn dogs in small towns in Iowa singing the praises of ethanol while reporters ask why you’re not raising as much money as the mayor of South Bend, who nobody had heard of a year ago. And now some billionaire who you’d prefer to have as a benefactor rather than an enemy has decided he wants the same job you want.
Lots of lefty activists are upset that Steyer’s money is going to Steyer’s campaign rather than into their pockets. Even environmentalists, frequent recipients of his largess, aren’t pleased with him. “Steyer’s campaign could blunt momentum generated by candidates, such as Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who have elevated climate change as a priority in the primary elections by proposing detailed policies to curb it.” Given that Inslee has zero momentum, I don’t see how it could.
It’s still early. There will be 16 more months of speech making and glad-handing and glitzy ballroom fundraisers before Election Day. Not committing to a presidential candidate just yet would make sense. But here at Netroots Nation, the premier annual convention for progressive activists, many attendees already seem fairly certain about their choice: They want Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, to be their next president. And if they have to pick a second choice? It’s Senator Kamala Harris of California.
Warren officials say she did not violate that pledge when her campaign turned to one of California’s top Democratic donors, a wealthy Silicon Valley physician named Karla Jurvetson, to help pay for access to a crucial voter database earlier this spring.
The so-called national “voter file,” a pool of data about millions of people that presidential campaigns use as a foundation for their own private data as they identify and track support over time, is managed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and costs campaigns a total of $175,000, according to the DNC’s voter file contract.
The DNC term sheet outlines two ways campaigns may pay for the voter file: by transferring funds directly to the DNC, or raising that money “to” the DNC through donors.
Jurvetson, who contributed about $7 million to Democratic causes during the 2018 election, gave a total of $100,000 to the DNC in April 2019, Federal Election Commission filings show. The donations, according to two Democratic operatives with knowledge of the agreement, helped Warren pay for the voter file.
To me the most interesting part of the story is: How does a physician have $7 million to give away in political donations? Doctors make good money, but not that good. Oh wait: “Jurvetson was married in 1990 to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, an early-stage investor in companies including SpaceX and Tesla.” Mystery solved! Hmmm: “Sanders and Warren voters have astonishingly little in common. His backers are younger, make less money, have fewer degrees and are less engaged in politics…In poll after poll, Sanders appeals to lower-income and less-educated people; Warren beats Sanders among those with postgraduate degrees.” “Warren criticizes powerful businesses. She also worked for them.” In addition to Dow Chemical:
At issue are two decades when Warren enhanced her income as a law professor by consulting on various legal issues and representing clients. Some seem to fit her present-day brand: She worked on behalf of asbestos victims and represented the environmental lawyer whose story became the basis of the 1998 film “A Civil Action.”
But in about a dozen cases, Warren used her expertise to help major companies or their lawyers navigate corporate bankruptcies. In many cases she was brought in to argue motions, swooping in to offer her analysis and persuade a judge with her knowledge of bankruptcy law.
These include her work on behalf of plane manufacturer Fairchild Aircraft after a crash killed four people, including NASCAR star Alan Kulwicki. Warren argued that Fairchild should be shielded from liability because the plane that went down was made by a company that had gone bankrupt. (She lost.)
In another case, Warren represented Southwestern Electric Power Company, a firm that relied on Warren when its bid to buy power plants from a bankrupt energy co-op was jeopardized by allegations of vote buying. (She won.)
The work supplemented her salary from Harvard, which was about $185,000 a year in the mid-1990s, employment records show. Warren has not released tax returns from the 1990s, when she did much of the corporate work. But court records show she was paid as much as $675 an hour, which was at or below market rate for her level of expertise.
From 2008 to 2010, a period for which Warren has released tax returns, her outside work brought in an average of about $200,000 a year. That included royalties from books and enabled Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, to bring in nearly $1 million in each of those years.
In her 2007 book A Republic of Mind and Spirit, Catherine Albanese argues that religiosity has taken three major forms in American history: evangelical Christianity, the mainline denominations, and what Albanese calls “metaphysical religion.” In that third strand, the material world is believed to be “organically linked to the spiritual one,” allowing people to tap into a “stream of energy” that “renders them divine and limitless.” The followers of this tradition believe that the “trained and controlled human imagination” can be honed “to bring desired and seemingly miraculous change.”
This worldview has Old World roots, but it has taken on a variety of distinctly American forms. One of the central threads of this tradition is what William James called the “religion of healthy-mindedness.” You hear its echoes whenever someone uses phrases like the law of attraction or the power of positive thinking.
Overview of the career of Phineas Quimby, who combined mesmerism and herbal teas, snipped.
(Maybe a decedent…)
If this reminds you of Christian Science, there’s a reason for that: Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy was one of Quimby’s patients, and she drew on Quimby’s ideas as she developed her own distinctive doctrines. (Just how much she drew on Quimby became a matter of considerable dispute between Eddy and Quimby’s disciples.) Enthusiasts outside Eddy’s orbit began to refer to their core concepts as New Thought, a term borrowed from the transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“To redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action,” Emerson said, “that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.”) Others adopted different names, such as “mind cure.” When Charles and Myrtle Fillmore of Kansas City founded a church based on New Thought principles in 1889, they called it Unity. (The Unity congregation that hosted Williamson’s D.C. rally was founded in 1920, though it didn’t move to its current space until much later.)
Some of these new-thinkers were recognizably Christian. Others roped in a smorgasbord of other spiritual ideas, from Theosophy to bastardized versions of various Eastern traditions. Some of them argued that modern medical theories were entirely baseless; others acknowledged that doctors often knew what they were doing but suggested that New Thought techniques could either amplify medicine’s effects or work as an alternative when other remedies failed. As the movement evolved, its interests extended beyond physical health; in particular, the notion took hold that those streams of divine energy could be used to attract personal riches.
As these ideas grew more popular, they inevitably intersected with politics. Wallace D. Wattles, author of 1910’s The Science of Getting Rich, was to the left of Marianne Williamson: He was a member (and mayoral and congressional candidate) of the Socialist Party. Indeed, Horowitz’s book lists several social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who mixed their politics with mind-cure concepts. That shouldn’t be surprising. From the left-libertarian mystic Stephen Pearl Andrews to the spiritualist suffragette Victoria Woodhull, it was common in that period for populists, anarchists, socialists, feminists, and other radicals to draw on Albanese’s tradition of metaphysical religion. Why wouldn’t some of them be interested in New Thought too?
But New Thought also planted the seeds of the health-and-wealth school of Christianity, whose political sympathies often trended in a different direction. Consider the career of Norman Vincent Peale, born to a Midwestern Methodist minister in 1898. Peale followed in his father’s footsteps and helmed a mainline Protestant congregation in New York, but he also read New Thought literature and soon started mixing it with his denomination’s doctrines. He was particularly taken with the writings of Napoleon Hill, a serial entrepreneur who left a trail of shady business practices and dubious biographical claims. Hill’s articles and books—most famously, his 1937 bestseller Think and Grow Rich—repackaged New Thought techniques as business advice, often putting Hill’s ideas into the mouths of the successful executives he allegedly interviewed. (In an entertaining article published in Gizmodo in 2016, Matt Novak makes a compelling case that few if any of these conversations actually happened. Hill’s habit of inventing interviews reached its peak in the posthumously published Outwitting the Devil, in which he claimed to have had a Q&A session with Satan.) Hill eventually drifted into a Long Island sect called the Royal Fraternity of the Master Metaphysicians, which attracted a degree of infamy when it declared its plans to unlock the path to physical immortality through a mixture of New Thought practices and vegetarianism.
All its missing is the Fox sisters and John Murray Spear. Skipping ahead to Williamson:
In Williamson’s case, that background begins in Houston, where she was born to a Jewish family in 1952. (She still considers herself a Jew, even as she regularly invokes Jesus and Buddha. Entertainment Weekly once called her Christ’s “most eminently eccentric Jewish exponent.”) She drifted in her 20s: dropping out of college, working briefly as a cabaret singer, imbibing a lot of alcohol and other drugs. Her life turned around after she discovered A Course in Miracles, a lengthy text that the historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal has called “a synthesis of psychoanalysis and mystical philosophy.” The book was “scribed” by the psychologist Helen Schucman from 1965 to 1972. (I say “scribed” rather than “written” because Schucman insisted that it had been dictated by Jesus.) Course says that everyone is a child of God, that our separate egos are an illusion, that the physical world itself is an illusion, and that one day we will wake into a state of eternal love.
Williamson embraced the book, calling it “my personal teacher, my path out of hell.” By 1983 she was giving talks about it at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles.
The Philosophical Research Society is a venerable New Age institution, having been founded in 1934 by a Theosophist named Manly P. Hall. Hall wrote frequently about secret societies and esoteric symbols, and he was a devotee of the idea that a benevolent conspiracy has been guiding America toward a higher destiny. Williamson remembers Hall fondly, though she wouldn’t describe him as an influence on her. “By the time I got to the Philosophical Research Society, my reading Manly Hall was more affirmation of the things I already believed in,” she tells me after the D.C. rally, in a little room adjacent to the senior minister’s office. “I was already on that basic course of knowing that there’s much more to life than what meets the physical eye.”
That said, there is one rather Hallian passage in Williamson’s first political book, 1997’s The Healing of America. The Great Seal of the United States—that eye-in-the-pyramid logo on the back of the dollar bill—”illustrates our Founders’ sense of America’s destiny,” Williamson writes. “The seal shows the Great Pyramid at Giza, with its missing capstone returned and illuminated. The Eye of Horus, the ancient Egyptian symbol for the consciousness of higher mind, is displayed within the capstone. Beneath the picture are written the words ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’—new order of the ages. This Masonic symbolism reveals democracy’s function as a vehicle for the realization of humanity’s highest potential.”
And now we’re back in Robert Anton Wilson territory. And speaking of hip pop culture references, Williamson is now memeing famed Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Given that show’s Kabbalistic underpinnings, that ties right back into the whole spiritualist enchilada above…
According to his campaign, some 300 malls will fold over the next 4 years, a number in line with an estimate by Credit Suisse that one-quarter of all malls will close by 2022. Many dozens or hundreds more will struggle as anchor stores collapse and retail outlets wither. Yang’s American Mall Act would devote $6 billion to finding new purposes for these dying retail complexes.
So, in other words, make them yet another sinkhole to toss taxpayer money into to prop up failing business models. Pass. “Andrew Yang on Automation: “You Can’t Turn Truck Drivers into Coders.'” He’s largely right there, but Universal Basic Income isn’t a solution, unless the question is “How do we prop up pot sellers, liquor stores and video game makers.”
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:
Pelosi told me, after the A.O.C. Squad voted against the House’s version of the border bill and trashed the moderates — the very people who provided the Democrats the majority — that the Squad was four people with four votes. She was talking about a legislative reality. If it was a knock, it was for abandoning the party.
That did not merit A.O.C.’s outrageous accusation that Pelosi was targeting “newly elected women of color.” She slimed the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden and who was instrumental in getting the first African-American president elected and passing his agenda against all odds, as a sexist and a racist.
A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.
Why on earth would she do that? For years, if not decades, accusing random people of racism has been the social justice warrior finishing move for every occasion, the magic incantation that makes people back down and give in. Every person and problem in the world is a nail, and accusations of racism (or sexism, or gay bashing, or Islamophobia, or whateverphobia) is the hammer to be used on everything. You expect her to stop now, just because her far left lunacy is endangering the key hold on power absolutely vital to keeping the insane and corrupt wings of the Democratic Party together?
And then there’s the real instigator, Saikat Chakrabarti, A.O.C.’s 33-year-old chief of staff, who co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, both of which recruited progressives — including A.O.C. — to run against moderates in Democratic primaries. The former Silicon Valley Bernie Bro assumed he could apply Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast and break things,” to one of the oldest institutions in the country.
But Congress is not a place where you achieve radical progress — certainly not in divided government. It’s a place where you work at it and work at it and don’t get everything you want.
The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.
You mean they consider their opponents deplorable? Or irredeemable?
Wow, are you just now noticing this trend, Ms. Dowd? Just now? Social justice warriors have been dragging opponents for decades with false accusations of racism for daring to depart from the victimhood identity politics line, but it’s just now, just now that it’s aimed at the sacred Democratic Party institution of Nancy Pelosi that you finally deign to notice? That’s like living in the penthouse of a 20 story building, watching a raging fire consume the first 18 floors, and then, only when it’s reached the 19th floor, do you finally perceive that the building is on fire. Not in the 1980s, when people first started to use the phrase “political correctness,” not the thousands of false accusations of racism hurled against decent, non-racist people who happened to be Republicans over the decades, no it’s just now that you finally recognize the viper Democrats have clasped to their bosom all these years.
And it’s only just now that you recognize the horrific threat it holds to Democrats clinging to any sort of nationwide political power.
She goes on to quote Rahm Emanuel:
We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”
I think Emanuel’s wrong, I think they have decided. To the hard left, gaining control of the party levers of power is far more important than winning elections. It is moderate Democrats who must be defeated, as they’re the ones preventing the SJW ranks of the righteous from immanentizing the eschaton. We saw this in Texas, where the hard left pushed moderates out of the state Democratic Party as means of seizing control, with the result that they haven’t elected a statewide office-holder since 1994.
The SJW left didn’t undertake their long march through the Democratic Party merely to bow to moderates from unfashionable hinterlands like Georgia and Kentucky, no matter how necessary they might be to forge an actual House majority. Without those moderates, 2006 doesn’t happen and 2018 doesn’t happen, and Pelosi is never Speaker. AOC’s cadres don’t care. Pelosi is just another obstacle that stands between them and control of the party. And if you disagree with them, if you stand in their way, you are a racist, QED.
Top Democrats are circulating a poll showing that one of the House’s most progressive members — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — has become a definitional face for the party with a crucial group of swing voters.
Why it matters: These Democrats are sounding the alarm that swing voters know and dislike socialism, warning it could cost them the House and the presidency. The poll is making the rounds of some of the most influential Democrats in America.
“If all voters hear about is AOC, it could put the [House] majority at risk,” said a top Democrat who is involved in 2020 congressional races. “[S]he’s getting all the news and defining everyone else’s races.”
The poll — taken in May, before Speaker Pelosi’s latest run-in with AOC and the three other liberal House freshmen known as “The Squad” — included 1,003 likely general-election voters who are white and have two years or less of college education.
These are the “white, non-college voters” who embraced Donald Trump in 2016 but are needed by Democrats in swing House districts.
The group that took the poll shared the results with Axios on the condition that it not be named, because the group has to work with all parts of the party.
The findings:
Ocasio-Cortez was recognized by 74% of voters in the poll; 22% had a favorable view.
Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — another member of The Squad — was recognized by 53% of the voters; 9% (not a typo) had a favorable view.
Socialism was viewed favorably by 18% of the voters and unfavorably by 69%.
Capitalism was 56% favorable; 32% unfavorable.
“Socialism is toxic to these voters,” said the top Democrat.
The genius of Trump is that his unorthodox, street-brawler style has goaded Democratic activists into letting their masks of moderation slip. They seem to believe that a majority of Americans share their absolute instinctual aesthetic loathing of Trump, and this delusion has lead them into foolishly telling Americans what they actually want: completely socialize medicine, open borders for a new flood of illegal aliens, transsexuals as the latest unchallenged victim class, etc. Trapped in their self-enforced media bubble, they don’t see how ordinary Americans recoil in horror at their vision, and AOC’s hardcore activists don’t care.
Who worries about the petty concerns of the racist petite bourgeoisie when there’s a revolution to conduct?
The ruling, a split 2-1 decision, said the Department of Justice (DOJ) was within its rights to withhold Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants from sanctuary cities and states over their refusal to work with federal immigration enforcement authorities and instead prioritize agencies that focused on unauthorized immigration and agreed to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) access to jail records and immigrants in custody.
The city of Los Angeles first sued the administration after it was denied a $3 million grant on the grounds that it did not receive the money because it did not focus on immigration for its community policing grant application. The decision reversed a district court’s ruling.
“The panel rejected Los Angeles’s argument that DOJ’s practice of giving additional consideration to applicants that choose to further the two specified federal goals violated the Constitution’s Spending Clause,” wrote Judge Sandra Ikuta, joined by Judge Jay Bybee.
Ikuta and Bybee are both George W. Bush appointees. Judge Kim Wardlaw, who dissented, is a Clinton appointee.
The Ninth Circuit, of course, was the most notoriously liberal of the circuit courts, though Trump appointees have been slowly changing the balance of the court. It is possible that a majority of active circuit judges could grant a petition to order an en banc rehearing of the ruling before an eleven judge panel, but “en banc hearing or rehearing is not favored and ordinarily will not be ordered.” Though one of the exceptions is for cases of “exceptional importance,” so who knows? Neither an en banc rehearing nor a Supreme Court appeal would be a slam-dunk to overturn the decision.
Slowly but surely, the Trump Administration is making headway in actually enforcing federal border control laws.
The Jeffrey Epstein child sex trafficking scandal dominates today’s LinkSwarm, as does other people getting arrested for the same offense. Some kind of crackdown going on? We can only hope so.
Even by the standards of stomach-turning celebrity criminal scandals, the bits of information about multi-millionare Jeffrey Epstein and allegations of an underage sex-trafficking ring are utterly bizarre, pointing to something perhaps even bigger and worse going on. Just the reports out this morning prompt at least ten big questions.
One: How did Jeffrey Epstein make his fortune in the first place? One claim is a massive Ponzi scheme.
Two: Could Epstein really have been connected to some sort of intelligence service? In yesterday’s press conference, labor secretary Alex Acosta offered a weird, vague, contradictory, meandering answer when asked about this. If Epstein was working for some sort of spy agency, which one? What was the aim, to collect blackmail on prominent figures? Who was being blackmailed, and what did they do?
Three: Why did the office Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance try to keep Epstein from being registered as a top-level sex offender? “A seasoned sex-crimes prosecutor from Mr. Vance’s office argued forcefully in court that Mr. Epstein, who had been convicted in Florida of soliciting an underage prostitute, should not be registered as a top-level sex offender in New York.” The judge denied the request and declared, “I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this.”
Four: After Epstein was labeled a “Level 3 sex offender” — meaning the worst — Epstein was required by law to check in with the NYPD every 90 days. He never checked in at all over an eight-year span. How did that not generate any consequences?
The former Palm Beach County State Attorney had made national news three times during his career. Once when he went after Rush Limbaugh, then after Ann Coulter, two Republicans, and when, after being handed the case of Epstein, a co-founder of the Clinton Global Initiative, he gave him a pass.
Barry Krischer is a Democrat. Jeffrey Epstein is a billionaire donor to Democrats.
As Chief Prosecutor, Krischer had made his reputation with a zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting juveniles as adults. But after Epstein had abused underage girls, Krischer, according to the detective on the case, ignored police efforts to charge him with four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor and instead the billionaire abuser was indicted only on a minor charge of solicitation of prostitution.
Interviews with over a dozen girls and witnesses were ignored.
The victims were not notified of when they needed to appear before Krischer’s Grand Jury. Calls by the police to issue warrants for the arrest of Epstein and his associates were ignored by Kirscher’s subordinates. Eventually, Kirscher’s people stopped taking phone calls from the police.
The Palm Beach police chief claimed that information was being leaked to Epstein’s lawyers and wrote a public letter attacking Krischer and urging him to disqualify himself from the case. Instead the travesty went on. State prosecutors allowed Epstein to skip sex offender counselling, and hire a private shrink.
When the judge asked assistant state prosecutor Lanna Belohlavek if all the victims had signed off on the deal, she claimed that they had. The lawyer for the victims has said that was not the truth.
“Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta on Friday resigned from his post amid scrutiny over a plea agreement he cut with wealthy investor Jeffrey Epstein for sex abuse charges over a decade ago.”
Over on Althouse’s blog, many commenters are suggesting that Scott Walker replace him. To which I say: Bring it!
Speaking of child sex offenders, singer R. Kelly has been arrested on 13 federal sex trafficking charges, including “child pornography, enticement of a minor to engage to engage in criminal sexual activity and obstruction of justice.” The only question is, after all the similar crap Kelly has pulled over the years, how is he not already in jail for the rest of his life?
While serving as the highest-ranking elected woman in America for decades, San Fran Nan has chronically downplayed, whitewashed or excused the sleazy habits and alleged sexual improprieties of a long parade of Dem pervs — from former San Diego Mayor Bob Filner to former New York Reps. Eric Massa and Anthony Wiener to former Oregon Rep. David Wu to former Michigan Rep. John Conyers and current presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Since the woke-ty woke Democrats are now gung-ho on undoing special treatment of wealthy liberal sex creeps, perhaps they will soon be revisiting the matter of two of their other “faves,” Oregon real estate mogul and deep-pocketed left-wing White House donor Terry Bean and West Hollywood Clinton pal Ed Buck.
Here, let me help.
Terry Bean is the prominent gay rights activist who co-founded the influential Human Rights Campaign organization. He is also a veteran member of the board of the HRC Foundation, which disseminates Common Core-aligned “anti-bullying” material to children’s schools nationwide.
Like Epstein, Bean had a penchant for rubbing elbows and riding on planes with the powerful. Upon doling out more than $500,000 for President Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2012, he was rewarded with a much-publicized exclusive Air Force One ride with Obama. His Flickr account boasted glitzy pics with Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton.
Buck, of course, is the Democratic donor who had two dead overdosed black men in his apartment on different occasions. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Speaking of our supposed betters raping children, “Ex-U.N. Worker Jailed for 9 Years in Nepal for Raping Two Boys in ‘Alarm Bell for the Humanitarian Community.'” Oh, now there are alarm bells over Canadian Peter John Dalglish raping children? But not so much when various UN peacekeepers did the same thing in Africa in past decades.
Meet the anti-woke left. The usual quotient of socialist claptrap, but also a fierce critique of victimhood identity politics and the dysfunction of the Democratic Party.
Just as significant as Trump’s victory was Hillary Clinton’s loss, they tell me, in that it represented a rejection of an era of neoliberalism. ‘I’m from Indiana’, Frost tells me. ‘Bill signs NAFTA. That obliterated the towns where I’m from. People are extremely bitter about Bill Clinton for very good reasons. And she is married to that, literally and figuratively – she defends that legacy. How did we not see Trump coming?’
What’s more, Trump represented a repudiation of the entire establishment – Democrats and Republicans. ‘There is a severe crisis of legitimacy in our institutions’, says Frost: ‘The Republicans did not want Trump to win either… He was nobody’s first choice, except the American people’s, apparently.’
Snip.
Three years on from the 2016 presidential election, Democrats are still largely in denial or in despair about Trump’s victory. The now-discredited Russia-collusion narrative provided an excuse to avoid any soul-searching. ‘The whole Rachel Maddow and the NBC crowd have infected the minds of boomers with this dystopian narrative’, Khachiyan tells me. ‘Even my mom, who’s from Russia, buys the collusion narrative.’
‘The narrative isn’t itself so interesting’, she argues, but it shows ‘the willful failure of the Democratic Party. Again and again, they fall on their face. There’s some kind of Freudian, masochistic thing they have where they get off on publicly humiliating themselves.’
“Democratic lawmaker unloads on Ocasio-Cortez, chief of staff for ‘using the race card.'” The AOC-Pelosi tiff reminds us, yet again, that the primary purpose of “social justice” is to force in-group ideological conformity on the left. But when it comes to actually threatening a politician’s ability to get their beak into the trough, Rep. Clay and others still know which side their bread is buttered on. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Democrats have tapped former fighter pilot Amy McGrath to lose to Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky senate race. In one day, she raised $2.5 million…and flip-flopped on whether she would have confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. She lost her last race by 10,000 votes, and expect her to do much, much worse against Cocaine Mitch.
John O’Sullivan wonders if anyone can beat Boris Johnson for Tory leadership and the PM spot. Probably not, but it provides a light romp through Borismania…
David Scheller of Ammo To Go wrote to point out his deep, detailed look at suppressors. I was happy to see that Texas has more silencers owned than the next three states combined.
Greek conservatives win in a landslide over leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza’s party. Kyriakos Mitsotakis took over as Prime Minister on July 8.
Did the Russians who died aboard the A-12 Losharik submarine prevent a “planetary catastrophe?” Color me skeptical. Short of a Red Tide nuke launch scenario, it’s hard to conceive of any sort of accident, up to complete meltdown or even nuclear warhead detonation, that would result in “planetary catastrophe” on the Russian arctic seafloor. Assuming they were actually in the Barents Sea when the fire broke out, I don’t see how they’d be tapping undersea cables (as widely speculated), as the only one there is the Norway-to-Svarbald cable, which is hardly of crushing information importance. But the Russians have been known to lie before, and the fact that no less than seven first rank captains died aboard the ship (all but unheard of on a submarine) only fuels the speculation. And the arctic is way too far north for discovering either Cthulhu or Godzilla…
“It’s gotten worse under this entire current council,” he said. “Because we’ve practiced the policy — and I give Chris Rufo credit for this — the policy of false compassion where we’re not holding people accountable, where we’re not investing in adequate services, where we’re not allowing our law enforcement professionals to do their job.”
“We just need a sea change at City Hall. We need to reverse the culture because it’s only getting worse … We can offer them treatment and shelter and then insist that if they don’t accept services, we will enforce the law unless they choose to move along. We need both carrot and stick.”
For those readers who blessedly have not had to drive I-95, it is a national disgrace. It has been congested for as long as I can recall (over 30 years of personal experience with the stretch shown, and what we drove yesterday). It has been congested in exactly the same locations for those 30 years.
The same exact locations. 30 years. Offered for your consideration, the 20 miles on each side of Fredericksburg, VA. It was a parking lot in the 1980s; it was a parking lot yesterday. The reason then was that the highway lost a lane (more lanes in Richmond to the south and Washington to the north). The reason now is the same.
So riddle me this, Big Government Man: how in 30 years is it not possible to widen 40 miles of Interstate to remove what everybody in the Northeast Corridor knows is a notorious choke point? And please don’t be so dim and predictable as to say “there isn’t enough funding” – we spent a cool trillion dollars on a “stimulus” that the President swore would be “shovel ready” projects. You don’t get more shovel-ready than widening I-95.
So we see that it’s not possible for the government to provide services that don’t suck.
“A traffic stop turns up whiskey, a gun and a rattlesnake, police say — and that was before they found the uranium.” The big surprise here is that it’s from Oklahoma rather than Florida… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Tankfest 2019. I visited the Bovington Tank Museum in 2014, and if you’re interested in tanks and in the UK for an extended period of time, I highly recommend it.
And speaking of unlikely events of mass hysteria: 300,000 people on Facebook swear to storm Area 51. Great, they’re going to kill off Alex Jones’ entire audience…
Wondering why hurricane recovery aid hasn’t been helping Puerto Rico? The usual reason: corruption.
The FBI on Wednesday arrested two former senior officials who served in the administration of Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, leading the chair of the House committee that oversees Puerto Rico to call for the governor to step down.
The arrests also spurred concerns on Capitol Hill about the billions of dollars in aid that Congress has approved for the island.
The federal indictment says the former officials illegally directed federal funding to politically connected contractors. The arrests come about a month after Congress approved a controversial disaster aid bill that earmarked additional funding for Puerto Rico’s recovery from Hurricane Maria in 2017, which were tied up in part because President Trump called island officials “incompetent or corrupt.”
Snip.
Six people were charged in the 32-count indictment. They include Julia Keleher, who served as Puerto Rico’s education secretary until April; and Ángela Ávila-Marrero, who was the executive director of the Puerto Rico Health Insurance Administration until late June.
“Keleher and Avila-Marrero exploited their government positions and fraudulently awarded contracts funded with federal monies,” U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez-Vélez said in a statement. “The charged offenses are reprehensible, more so in light of Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis.”
Prosecutors said Rosselló was not involved in the investigation, according to the Associated Press. The governor said on Twitter he had cut short a vacation to return to the island.
Remember all the grief President Donald Trump took for calling Puerto Rico’s government “incompetent or corrupt?” Looks like he was right again.
Last year, the mayor of Sabana Grande and two other officials were arrested on corruption charges involving $8 million in federal and local funds. Also last year, the House held hearings on corruption in the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority? “PREPA officials allegedly were paid $5,000 and provided free entry tickets worth $1,000 apiece to restore power to exotic dance clubs ahead of schedule. In other instances, PREPA officials are accused of restoring power to their own homes before restoring power to ‘critical locations such as San Juan’s Rio Piedras Medical Center and the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport.'” Indeed, Puerto Rico has a long tradition of corruption and fraud.
Rossello is affiliated with both the New Progressive Party and the Democratic Party (most Puerto Rican politicians are a members of one of the three local parties and either the Republican or Democratic Party, and one does not always map cleanly or automatically to the other), and was a Clinton delegate in 2008 and an Obama delegate in 2012.
Puerto Rico has always occupied an odd place, being both a nearby American territory and the source of one of New York City’s poorest ethnic groups, meaning that much of attention paid Puerto Rico itself was driven by the domestic political concerns of NYC democratic politicians. Providing honest government is vital to an island as poor as Puerto Rico, but given how this cuts against the need for reaping the fruits of political patronage, both on the island and here, the prognosis for radical improvement anytime soon would appear to be grim.
On Saturday, billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for the alleged sex trafficking of dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005. In a criminal indictment unsealed Monday, federal prosecutors claimed that Epstein lured underage girls, some as young as 14, to his luxurious homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach under the guise of paying them cash for massages. He then molested them and encouraged them to recruit other young girls to return with them. The victims who returned with new victims were paid a finder’s fee.
“In this way, Epstein created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit, often on a daily basis,” the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement.
Snip.
According to the Daily Beast and Miami Herald, the Southern District of New York’s public-corruption unit, with an assist from the office’s sex-trafficking unit, has been investigating Epstein for months and conducting interviews with his victims. Arrested Saturday, Epstein now faces one count of sex trafficking and one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. The case is focused on victims he lured to his homes in both New York and Florida.
Epstein infamously avoided federal charges — and the potential lifetime sentence that could have come with them — a decade ago after he was accused of molesting dozens of underage girls at his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. He was instead allowed to plead guilty to two counts of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Epstein was forced to register as a sex offender and sentenced to 18 months in prison, but he only served 13 months in all — and got to spend 12 hours a day at an office, six days a week, as part of his work-release privileges. In return, Epstein’s secret plea deal shielded him and four alleged accomplices from federal prosecution.
The new charges against Epstein carry a 45-year maximum sentence. Prosecutors are also seeking the forfeiture of his 21,000-square-foot townhouse on East 71st Street, where some of his alleged crimes took place. Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a press conference Monday that investigators also found “nude photographs of what appeared to be underage girls” at the Upper East Side home. The indictment implicates several of Epstein’s employees, who are accused of helping the billionaire arrange the encounters and ensuring “that minor victims were available for encounters upon his arrival in Florida,” according to the indictment.
The fact he (allegedly) had child pornography in his home after pleading guilty to a felony sex charge suggests that Epstein does not learn from experience.
Police originally identified more than three dozen possible victims when they investigated in 2005 and 2006. The Herald has since identified nearly 80 girls molested by Epstein, most of whom were listed only as “Jane Doe” in court documents to protect their identities as minors. Most were girls between the ages of 13 and 16 when they were targeted by Epstein as far back as 2001. Many also came from low-income households and thus may have been more susceptible to the cash-for-massage ploy Epstein allegedly used to lure girls to his homes. Witnesses have also testified in subsequent civil-court proceedings that hundreds of additional victims were brought to Epstein from around the world.
Now let’s look at some of the issues surrounding the latest charges:
The hedge fund magnate’s true role in creating the foundation could not be confirmed. Whether Epstein was an actual founder of the foundation or exaggerated his role in a phony effort to appear altruistic is not clear.
Epstein is not cited in official paperwork filed by the Clinton Global Initiative as a founder or director. Neither The Clinton Foundation nor Dershowitz responded to FoxNews.com’s inquiry as to the extent of Epstein’s involvement. FoxNews.com first reported that flight logs show the former president flew on Epstein’s private plane dozens of times. But Clinton has publicly credited longtime assistant Doug Band, now counselor and director of the foundation, as conceiving of the idea.
Bill Clinton says he’s shocked, shocked by the accusations against Epstein, and claims that nobody should believe those lying flight logs about his many trips aboard the Lolita Express to Orgy Island, or him ditching his Secret Service detail to do so.
Investigative reporter Conchita Sarnoff says that Bill Clinton is a damn liar, that he flew on the Lolita Express 27 times, sometimes with Secret Service, sometimes without, and many of the flights included underage girls.
She also says the soft plea bargain Epstein received was partially to avoid embarrassing Hillary Clinton during her 2008 Presidential run.
If you want to read the actual flight logs, you can do so here. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Donald Trump, of course, knew Epstein, and infamously said he was a “terrific guy” who was “a lot of fun to be with.” He added: “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” That sounds somewhat damning, except for the fact that’s precisely what you wouldn’t say if you were having sex with underage girls procured by Epstein. The piece goes on to note:
Trump isn’t known to have gone on any trips with Epstein, which would have been out of character. “I don’t think Trump would go to someone else’s property or someone else’s island or villa,” Nunberg said. “He doesn’t even play golf at anyone else’s clubs.” But Trump did host Epstein as a guest at Mar-a-Lago, where he appears in photos in 1997 and 2000. Epstein’s personal little black book, which was leaked by an employee in 2009, contained 14 phone numbers for Trump, his wife, Melania, and several people who worked for him.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, President Trump dismissed his past appearances with Epstein, describing him as a “fixture in Palm Beach” in those years. “I had a falling out with him a long time ago,” he added, though he declined to elaborate. “I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years.”
Indeed, Trump reportedly barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago “because Epstein sexually assaulted an underage girl at the club,” according to court documents filed by Edwards.
There are a whole lot of conspiracy theories floating around, each more unlikely than the last, including the possibility that Epstein’s entire fortune came from blackmailing important figures for the underage sex, which I view as extremely unlikely. Also, Epstein’s black book reportedly contained some 1,000 names, and we should keep in mind that probably the vast majority are merely business associates or acquaintances and never took a ride on the Lolita Express…
