Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for February 17, 2020

February 17th, 2020

Bloomberg channels Barney, Yang, Bennet and Patrick are Out, enjoy the Buttigieg Platitude Generator, Bernie bros break out the blacklist for Bloomberg hires, and Mayor Pete has a fake Nigerian problem. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

The Nevada caucus looms, but not until Saturday.

There are now six candidates left in the race with a theoretical chance to earn the nomination (Sanders Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Klobuchar, Biden, and Warren), plus Gabbard and Steyer. I don’t see Warren getting any traction, but I do see the DNC working desperately behind the scenes to make sure she keeps siphoning votes away from Sanders…

Delegates
After New Hampshire, the actual delegate count stands at:

  1. Buttigieg 22
  2. Sanders 21
  3. Elizabeth Warren 8
  4. Amy Klobuchar 7
  5. Joe Biden 6

It’s a neat trick, Buttigieg leading the delegate count after coming in second in the first two states…

Polls

  • Las Vegas Review Journal (Nevada): Sanders 25, Biden 18, Warren 13, Steyer 11, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 10.
  • East Carolina University (South Carolina): Biden 28, Sanders 20, Steyer 14, Buttigieg 8, Klobuchar 7, Warren 7, Bloomberg 6, Gabbard 1.
  • Texas Tribune/University of Texas (Texas): Sanders 24, Biden 22, Warren 15, Bloomberg 10, Buttigieg 7, Yang 6, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 3, Gabbard 2.
  • WBS-TV (Georgia): Biden 32.1, Sanders 14.2, Bloomberg 14, Buttigieg 4.9, Warren 3.7, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 1.5, Gabbard .8.
  • St. Pete Polls (Florida): Bloomberg 27.3, Biden 25.9, Buttigieg 10.5, Sanders 10.4, Klobuchar 8.6, Steyer 1.3. First state with a poll lead for Bloomberg. Sample size of 3,047, which should be excellent for a state poll.
  • High Point (North Carolina) (likely voters): Biden 24, Sanders 20, Bloomberg 16, Warren 11, Buttigieg 8, Steyer 4, Yang 3, Klobuchar 3, Gabbard 2.
  • Economist/YouGov (page 198): Sanders 22, Biden 18, Warren 15, Bloomberg 12, Klobuchar 7, Gabbard 4, Yang 2, Steyer 1.
  • Monmouth: Sanders 26, Biden 16, Buttigieg 13, Warren 13, Bloomberg 11, Klobuchar 6, Yang 4, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1.
  • Morning Consult: Sanders 25, Biden 22, Bloomberg 17, Buttigieg 11, Warren 11, Yang 4, Klobuchar 3, Steyer 3, Gabbard 1.
  • Talk Business/Hendrix College: Bloomberg 19.6, Biden 18.5, Sanders 16.4, Buttigieg 15.5, Warren 8.9, Klobuchar 4.8, Yang 2.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets.
  • Pundits, etc.

  • 538 is now predicting that it’s slightly more likely that no one will win a majority of delegates.

    A brokered convention would be a lot of fun to watch but devastating for Democrats. The chances of Bernie Sanders coming out on top in a brokered convention seem slim to me—and if Bernie goes into the convention with the most delegates but doesn’t leave the convention as the nominee, Bernie supporters are going to be livid. Whoever the candidate is, if the Democrats have to wait until mid-July to know for sure who their nominee is going be, it puts their party at a significant disadvantage.

  • “Majority of Americans would vote against socialist candidate for president.” Ruh-Roh, Rernie! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The problem for Democrats is that Sanders leads, but most Democrats are voting against him:

    While the far-left or more liberal candidates — including Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — collectively earned 35 percent of the New Hampshire vote, the center-left and more moderate candidates — including Biden, former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) — collectively earned more than one-half of the vote, with 53 percent between the three of them.

    Indeed, while Sanders may have eked out a victory, a majority of the New Hampshire voters aligned with the moderate bloc of the party.

    This discrepancy poses a serious problem for Democrats as the primary season continues. In order to build a broad-based coalition of voters to defeat Trump, there needs to be an understanding within the party that the message will be inclusive, will encourage unity and will eventually focus on supporting the nominee.

  • Where everybody stands on everything.
  • There are no moderates, only Zuul. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Master Troll Trump at work.
  • “Trashing America as racist won’t help Democrats beat Trump.”
  • No bounce for anyone out of New Hampshire?
  • Stephen Green drunkblogged the New Hampshire primaries.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Update: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020, after a dismal rounding-error showing in New Hampshire. Not really seeing any post mortem pieces out there, but here’s a piece on his last few days on the campaign trail. The most interesting part is finding out his New Hampshire office is in the same building as Buttigieg and Steyer’s state offices. He’s perhaps the most forgettable politician making a serious run for President this century. If you stuck a gun to the head of each Democratic Party voter and demanded they pick Bennet out of a list of candidates, 99% of those people would be dead.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. South Carolina or bust? The Bidenberg may still be leaking hydrogen, but I think he stays in until Super Tuesday. Cracks in the firewall? He blames his poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire on being outspent. Well, does he think that’s going to get any better with Bloomberg in the race? The benefits of being Joe Biden’s brother:

    It was not the first time — or the last — during his long career that Jim Biden turned to Joe’s political network for the kind of assistance that would have been almost unimaginable for someone with a different last name. Campaign donors helped him face a series of financial problems, including a series of IRS liens totaling more than $1 million that made it harder to get bank financing. Jim Biden took out two more loans from WashingtonFirst before its sale in 2018.

    These transactions illuminate the well-synchronized tango that the Biden brothers have danced for half a century. They have pursued overlapping careers — one a presidential aspirant with an expansive network of well-heeled Democratic donors; the other an entrepreneur who helped his brother raise political money and cultivated the same network to help finance his own business deals.

    Jim Biden, 70, has cycled over the years from nightclub owner to insurance broker to political consultant and fundraiser to startup investor and construction company executive. But the through line of his resume was his bond with his brother, a Democratic Party stalwart in a position to push legislation or make government contracts happen.

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Inside his outreach to black voters.

    A meeting with nearly 80 black pastors in Detroit. A speech before a black Democratic organization in Montgomery. A rally at a historically black university. A tour of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church. An early voting kickoff at an African American museum. All in the past two weeks.

    While Mike Bloomberg’s rivals battled it out in majority-white Iowa and New Hampshire, the billionaire presidential candidate aggressively courted the black voters critical to any Democrat’s chance of winning of the nomination. The effort, backed by millions of dollars in ads, has taken him across Southern states that vote on March 3, from Montgomery, Alabama, and this week Raleigh, North Carolina, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, states where African American voters can decide a Democratic primary.

    His pitch is one of electability and competence — hoping to capitalize on black Democrats’ hunger to oust President Donald Trump. But as he courts black voters he’ll also have to reconcile his own record as mayor of New York and past remarks on criminal justice.

    Bloomberg’s outreach aims squarely at former Vice President Joe Biden, who is banking on loyal black voters to resuscitate his bid after poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire.

    “Who can beat Donald Trump? That’s what people care about,” said former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who is among the black leaders endorsing Bloomberg. Nutter says Bloomberg’s record of accomplishments outweighs the damage of flawed policing.

    Bloomberg has no doubt been helped by his limitless financial resources and his strategy to focus on states conducting primaries on Super Tuesday. One of the world’s richest men thanks to a net worth of roughly $60 billion, Bloomberg has spent more than $300 million of his own money on advertising, including spots on black radio stations, a Super Bowl ad that featured an African American mother who lost her son to gun violence and a national ad touting his work with President Barack Obama on gun legislation and a teen jobs program.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) “The Complete List of Everything Banned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Is Bloomberg the common enemy?

    The Democratic presidential candidates raced on Sunday to make the most of their final weekend day before the Nevada caucuses, selling their messages and tearing into their opponents.

    But the rival they focused on most intently was one who isn’t even competing in the state.

    “I got news for Mr. Bloomberg,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said at an event in Carson City, Nev., taking aim at the former New York City mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, within five minutes of opening his remarks. “The American people are sick and tired of billionaires buying elections.”

    In a rarity, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. echoed his progressive counterpart. “Sixty billion dollars can buy you a lot of advertising, but it can’t erase your record,” he said of Mr. Bloomberg in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired on Sunday.

    Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, another moderate, had similar thoughts. “I’m here getting votes,” Ms. Klobuchar said in an interview on Sunday. “It’s not something where I can just — what would be the word — transport in a bunch of ads.” She called on Mr. Bloomberg to “go on the shows that every other candidate goes on, on the Sunday shows and the like.”

    She added: “I don’t think I’m going to beat him on the airwaves, but I can beat him on the debate stage.” At a forum on Sunday focused on infrastructure, Ms. Klobuchar, who won the endorsement of The Las Vegas Sun last week, mentioned Mr. Bloomberg early on, referring to President Trump’s comments about his height as she stood to speak. “I am the only candidate that is 5-foot-4,” she joked. “I want that out there now.”

    The fixation on Mr. Bloomberg, the free-spending multibillionaire, reflected his rising prominence in the Democratic race, even though he is skipping the first four nominating contests and focusing on the 14 Super Tuesday states that will vote on March 3.

    As early voting continued in Nevada on Sunday, some of the criticism seemed to be sticking.

    “Bloomberg just has bad connotations that come along with him,” Leah Garwood said as she waited in line with her husband on Sunday in Las Vegas for roughly 45 minutes to vote for a different billionaire, Tom Steyer of California. “It’s just at the back of my mind. It makes me uncomfortable, uneasy.”

    Don’t believe it; Most of the people backing Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar (i.e., the Corrupt Wing) would choose Bloomberg over Sanders without hesitation. The meme machine. Bloomy can buy memes, but can he buy good memes? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Tolerant Bernie Bros want to Blacklist Bloomberg staffers:

    (Tweet has since been deleted, but there’s plenty of reference to it on Twitter.) Are you an old person with cancer? Bloomberg just wants to let you die:

    He also thinks that any idiot can be a farmer. Bloomberg, the Big Purple Dinosaur:

    Don’t worry: It gets worse:

    (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Master of the Platitude:

    Pete Buttigieg really speaks in platitudes a lot. Last night brought, “[You’re] ready to vote for a politics defined by how many we call in, instead of by who we push out . . . So many of you chose to meet a new era of challenge with a new generation of leadership . . . A fresh outlook is what makes new beginnings possible. It is how we build a new majority . . . The answers, they lie in a vision that brings Americans together not only in the knowledge of what we must stand against, but in the confidence of knowing what we are for.”

    Plus a handy link to the Mayor Pete Platitude Generator:

    Why gays think he’s not gay enough.

    Buttigieg is the ultimate candidate of the country’s post-2016 trauma. He is not a woman. He is not a socialist. He is decidedly not a revolutionary. He does not make big, sweeping promises, except one: that nothing much will change, only Donald Trump won’t be President. “What I like about Mayor Pete is that he is not a strong ideologue,” Tod Sedgwick, a volunteer who had gone to New Hampshire to canvass for Buttigieg, told me. Sedgwick, who is seventy-one and the former U.S. Ambassador to the Slovak Republic, was canvassing with his girlfriend, Christina Brown, a seventy-three-year-old community activist from Louisville, Kentucky. Sedgwick lives in Washington, D.C.

    Left out of this reassuring portrait is the fact he’s embraced most of the crazy ideas floated by his fellow candidates this year, and that his father is a hardcore Marxist scholar of Antonio Gramsci. Top Buttigieg advisor Lis Smith has a fake Nigerian burner account named Chinedu that’s a huge Mayor Pete fan. Because of course a Nigerian is going to be a huge fan of a gay Midwestern American politician. If Lis Smith’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she was carrying out an affair with disgraced New York Governor Eliot Spitzer while working for him.

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Drudge floated a trial balloon suggesting Bloomberg would tap her as his veep pick. Which presents the tiny problem that it violates Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution, since both are from New York. Plus:

  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says U.S. military should scale back overseas operations. She blames a total media blackout for her faltering campaign. Eh, she has a point, the Democratic Media Complex does hate her, but her failure to break through that barrier is on her. I mean, if you’re a youngish, attractive woman, how do you lose the Outsider Excitement Race to a 79-year old socialist?
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says that Obama was just too much of an immigration hawk for deporting non-felon illegal aliens, part of her desperate, unconvincing hispandering for Nevada votes, along with saying that English should not be the national language. Gets endorsed by the Houston Chronicle. Thirty years ago that would have meant something. Enjoy her one stump joke:

    “What Klobuchar’s Tater Tot Recipe Says About Her Candidacy.” File that one under “attempted humor”…

  • Update: Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 12, 2020.

    Patrick focused his campaign entirely on New Hampshire, hoping the familiarity of a neighboring state would help boost his chances in the race. He offered what aides felt was a unique message in a field that ultimately boiled down largely to career politicians with little executive or private sector experience: that he had the track record as governor and through years of business experience to deliver on Democratic priorities like fighting climate change and reforming health care.

    You would think the failure of several other governors to run viable campaigns might have deterred him, but no. Patrick got into the race in November, made no impression whatsoever, and sank without a trace. Mike Gravel and Wayne Messam had more compelling reasons to run…

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Democrats fear Sanders could cost them the House. “‘Doomsday Scenario’: Washington Moves To Crush The Sanders Revolution“:

    We have previously discussed the efforts of the Democratic establishment and some in the media to (again) derail the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, including the raw bias against Sanders shown by CNN reporter Abby Phillip in a prior presidential debate. Now, with Sanders’ victory in New Hampshire and rising polls, figures from both politics and media are putting on a full-court press to stop Sanders. Everyone from James Carville to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews are sounding alarms over Sanders. His victory last night was called the “doomsday scenario” by a Democratic Super PAC. The most shocking was MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd who used a quote form a columnist to compare Sanders supporters to Nazi brown-shirted thugs. It is a technique used before by Todd who reads letters or quotes from others to preserve the patina of neutrality like his recent attack on Trump supporters.

    Longtime Texas Democrats fear Sanders getting the nomination.

    “There is overall uncertainty which is growing. The real fear for Texas D’s remains Sanders,” Bill Miller, a longtime Austin lobbyist who has worked with both Democrats and Republicans, said of a Sanders ticket. “’We’d be fucked’ — that’s what they’re saying. The drain at the top goes down to the bottom.”

    Texas may not be a presidential battleground, but a wave of GOP retirements in Congress, shifting demographics and Donald Trump’s lightning-rod presidency offer Democrats a shot at real power after two decades of Republican dominance. And to insiders like Miller, plans to nationalize the health care and electricity sectors will spook voters and weigh down local Democrats who are trying to thread a needle in this still deeply conservative state.

    “Sure you can see my medical records! And by ‘sure’ I mean ‘no way.'” Topless PETA protestors interupt his speech.

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He and Klobuchar can’t name the President of Mexico. Steyer is spending a lot of time on the ground in Nevada and South Carolina.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Warren campaign continues its controlled flight into terrain:

    Elizabeth Warren’s straggling campaign is cutting ad buys worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in key early states after bruising losses in Iowa and New Hampshire.

    The retrenchment follows a dismal fourth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, down from third place in Iowa.

    “We were hoping for a better result in New Hampshire,” Warren’s campaign conceded in an email to supporters Wednesday. “It hurts to care so much, work so hard, and still fall a little short.”

    The campaign has cut more than $300,000 worth of ads in Nevada and South Carolina, according to two advertising trackers. The Massachusetts U.S. senator appears to be shifting her focus to Maine, with ad buys worth tens of thousands of dollars there on Wednesday, according to FCC filings.

    Her New Hampshire finish behind U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has also raised concerns about whether Warren can sustain the national organizing effort her campaign is relying on for success on Super Tuesday on March 3.

    “She put her eggs in a New Hampshire basket. That was the right thing to do, but it didn’t pan out,” said Democratic strategist Scott Ferson. “She’s entering a period of darkness and belt tightening and hard choices about options.”…

    Warren’s much-lauded ground game has now failed her twice, making it harder to generate the millions of dollars needed to sustain her massive operation, strategists say. Warren entered 2020 with $13.7 million in the bank and raised more than $5 million after Iowa. But her campaign also spent $12 million more than it took in at the end of 2019, FEC reports show.

    Maybe Warren had a great ground game, and she just sucks too hard as a candidate to take advantage of it… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Update: Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020. One of the more interesting and least pandering of the candidates, Yang ran much better than anyone (myself included) expected, but never broke out of single digits. He gets an exit interview in the New York Times. Might run for New York City mayor. It would be nearly impossible for him to do a worse job than Di Blasio…
  • Out of the Running

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

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti. Gonna be hard to run for the White House when you’re facing up to 42 years in the big house.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    The Cult of Social Justice

    February 16th, 2020

    I’ve talked about “social justice” being a cult before, but this Jonathan Kay piece in Quillette explicates the idea in detail.

    The words “cult” and “cultish” often are used loosely to describe not only literal cults such as the one created by Jones, but also militant political movements, and even the fanatical followers of entertainers and sports teams. Yet I do think that the cult concept is precise enough to serve as a useful framework for modern forms of ideological tribalism.

    In this regard, I would define a cultish movement as one that (1) purports to offer adherents a complete system of judging human worth on the basis of stated beliefs whose meaning is unstable, and which cannot be explained coherently outside the movement’s own self-reinforcing linguistic subculture; and (2) maintains both internally applied disciplinary mechanisms and externally applied rhetorical strategies as a means to categorize any critique of the cult as a manifestation of the critic’s own personal defects. Prominent examples include Scientologists’ efforts to brand critics as “Suppressive Persons” who must be silenced or punished, and social-justice extremists’ description of pushback against claims of racism as “white fragility.”

    Cult doctrines are, by their nature, unfalsifiable. And so a milieu that becomes infected with cult-think always will be hostile to rational discourse. As the United States shows, multiple cult-like movements can dominate different sectors simultaneously. In the realm of politics, it is now seen as normal everyday news for Donald Trump and his minions to utter obvious lies about everything from Ukraine to the predicted path of a hurricane, and to expect followers and sympathetic media to parrot those claims. In the realm of academia, meanwhile, many students are expected to accede to the claim that sexual dimorphism is a myth, and that biology itself is a colonial construct.

    Snip.

    Cults can never be organized in any kind of democratic way because there is always some anointed class (often consisting of just one person) that monopolizes access to a critical body of revealed truths. And in this aspect, intersectionality is well-suited to a cult paradigm because its adherents presume that the “lived experience” that typifies every sub-group is fundamentally unknowable except to members of that sub-group. The conceit of secret knowledge confers an aura of mysticism on followers, especially in regard to the issue of gender identity, which is cast as an internally experienced secular rapture.

    On one hand, this means that discussions within social-justice circles tend to be tortured and unproductive, as no one is allowed to presume a truth-telling power that extends beyond the narrow confines of one’s own intersectional constituency. On the other hand, this system of balkanized information monopolies helps protect intersectional dogmas from outside criticism, as no argument may contradict the internally experienced pain, trauma or perception of bigotry expressed by an acolyte who identifies as a member of an oppressed group. In this regard, social-justice cults diverge significantly from the interwar ideological cults that formed around various interpretations of Marxism (with which social-justice cultism is sometimes compared), as these older movements tended toward universalism in their underlying epistemological approach.

    Read the whole thing.

    Coronavirus Update: China’s Economy Burns

    February 15th, 2020

    Some interesting news on the coronavirus front.

    First the official infection figures everyone believes are understated:

    Total confirmed cases: 67,097
    Total deaths: 1,527
    Total recovered: 8,578

    Behind the official figures, how badly is coronavirus and the resulting quarantine hurting China’s economy? By some measures, it’s all but ground to a halt:

    However, it is the far more important – for China’s GDP – construction steel sector where apparent demand has literally hit the bottom of the chart, down an unprecedented 88% Y/Y or as Goldman puts it, “construction steel demand is approaching zero.”

    Snip.

    And while we already noted the plunge in coal consumption in power plants as Chinese electricity use has cratered…what is perhaps most striking, is the devastation facing the Chinese real estate sector where property sales across 30 major cities have basically frozen.

    Finally, and most ominously perhaps, as the economy craters and internal supply chains fray, prices for everyday staples such as food are soaring as China faces not only economic collapse, but also surging prices for critical goods, such as food.

  • China says that 1,716 health workers have been infected by coronavirus. I can understand a few hundred contracting it at the beginning of the epidemic before much was known about it (and the government was suppressing the news), but such a large number suggest a staggering lack of basic hygiene and quarantine procedures among Chinese medical personal. Which wouldn’t surprise me at all.
  • Indonesia’s government still claims their nation is coronavirus free. People aren’t buying it.
  • Next to China, it appears that one of the most likely places to contract coronavirus is on a cruise ship.
  • CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield says that coronavirus is probably going to be a concern in the U.S. all year.
  • Here’s a Twitter thread that suggests that China is literally burning, with numerous fires breaking out in the quarantine area. Confirmation bias? Maybe. In a country as densely populated as China, I’m sure fires break out on a regular basis, just like here. But it could also suggest a breakdown in basic government services.
  • Japanese man traveling back from Hawaii comes down with the virus. “News of the man’s case comes a day after Hawaii officials announced that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) sent flawed coronavirus testing kits to Hawaii.” Oops!
  • Closer to home, there’s finally been a confirmed case in Texas, but it’s from someone returning from China to and already quarantined at Lackland Air Force. Chances of additional infections from this patient would seem to be very small.
  • In fact, almost 800 U.S. citizens have been have been in quarantine on U.S. military bases after evacuation from China. 195 were just discharged. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • LinkSwarm for February 14, 2020

    February 14th, 2020

    Happy Valentine’s Day! Or, as we call it in my house, “Passover.”

  • So just who was the jury foreman for Roger Stone’s trial? Would you believe someone who ran for congress as a Democrat and tweeted about Stone before she was empaneled? How is this not automatically a mistrial?
  • The Trump-Cocaine Mitch Judicial Appointment Juggernaut continues apace.
  • That Wuhan hospital built for 1,600 coronavirus victims in a week? There are only 90 patients in it, but they report no spare beds while they herd victims into stadiums.

    The gulf between the vision of vast new hospitals created and thrown into action within days and the more complicated reality on the ground is a reminder of one of the main challenges for Beijing as it struggles to contain the coronavirus: its own secretive, authoritarian system of government and its vast censorship and propaganda apparatus.

    Communist party apparatus well honed to crush dissent also muffles legitimate warnings. A propaganda system designed to support the party and state cannot be relied on for accurate information. That is a problem not just for families left bereft by the coronavirus and businesses destroyed by the sudden shutdown, but for a world trying to assess Beijing’s success in controlling and containing the disease.

    “China’s centralised system and lack of freedom of press definitely delay a necessary aggressive early response when it was still possible to contain epidemics at the local level,” said Ho-fung Hung, a professor in political economy at Johns Hopkins University in the US.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Tales from inside the Wuhan quarantine.
  • I got you babe.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Just when you think it’s impossible to slam #NeverTrump harder than Kurt Schlichter, Kurt himself tweets a piece to this Ian Samuel piece:

    The “Never Trump” guys. How can you not love these guys? They really thought they owned the place, didn’t they? Strutting around in their little bow ties, swapping erudite bon mots about William F. Buckley’s jowls. Masters of the universe, with their little magazines and affected mid-Atlantic accents that made them sound like Frasier Crane’s gay uncle, perpetually explaining the subtle parallels between George W. Bush and Seneca. And then—boom! The guy from the Apprentice walked into their house, ate their lunch, kissed their wives, peed in their brandy snifter, and now their son (Romulus) calls him dad. Come on. That’s funny!

    Sadly, after Trump won, they mostly bent the knee. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, whoever. They all turned out to be pushovers. (Big surprise). I don’t know if John Kasich is still a Never Trump guy, because I could not honestly tell you whether John Kasich is still alive.

    But some of these precious little lads and lasses held out, and oh, am I ever glad they did.

    Because now they’ve got a new line in the sand. And, of course, we all better listen this time. Because although these guys might be willing to vote for a Democrat, they are putting their foot down about one thing. So get clear on this. If you want their help? Don’t even think about nominating that guy. You know who I mean.

    “The rise of socialist Bernie Sanders is frustrating Never Trump Republicans.”

    Stop. No. It’s the first sentence and I already don’t want this to be over. I am printing this article out so I don’t lose it.

    Tell me: has anything ever not been “frustrating” to “Never Trump Republicans?” Frustration is basically who they are, isn’t it? They stood, watching, getting more and more frustrated as Trump became the only 2016 candidate who actually could break a “ceiling.” Then they stood watching, getting more and more frustrated as he actually won the election. And now, it’s 2020, it’s time for payback, and this time we’ll just see whose pants get pulled down in math cl—wait, what? No! It can’t be! Bernie Sanders is winning now, too? Okay. Alright. Tell me, honestly, how bad is it? Tell me how far behind exactly David French is in the delegate race. I mean, how far behind could he be? He was a JAG!

    “If Sanders is the Democratic nominee, many will sit out the election and be deprived of the opportunity of voting against President Trump, they said.”

    Did you hear that? These extremely good boys and girls will be deprived of the opportunity of voting against President Trump! No! Oh, God, anything but that! First the Weekly Standard collapses, now this? Please. No. This is not a joke. Here! Take my commemorative “Mitt Romney ’12” dog carcass. Take my signed copy of “Hope for America: Evan McMullin and a New Generation of Leadership,” by Diane Sheafor. (Real book). Take my “¡yo quiero Jeff Flake!” fidget spinner. Anything but the opportunity to post a ballot selfie on Twitter so it pops up in the feed of the MSNBC producer that might actually like me!

  • This week, Democrats want to tax…(rolls dice)…insulin. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Dallas ISD internal auditor finds the district overpaying contractors.

    “Internal audit has been highly effective showing the district disregarded state law when it came to Job Order Contracts or JOC’s for 4 years and potentially overpaid for the work,” [auditor Steven] Martin said.

    Two of his audits found the district overpaid $330,000 to contractors, but he says that’s just the beginning.

    “We estimate over payments on only nine contracts at $1.7 million. There are over 400 JOC’s,” Martin said.

    Did the district immediately investigate how this could happen? They did not. Instead:

    • “Last month, the superintendent proposed raising the threshold for investigating fraud to $250,000.”
    • “Dallas ISD has established the Procurement Compliance Committee that meets regularly with the superintendent and Board of Trustees regarding compliance priorities.”
    • “Dallas ISD trustee Miguel Solis said he felt blindsided by the auditor’s statements. ‘I have not once been contacted by internal auditor to discuss any of this. Probably most unprofessional acts that I have ever seen in seven years on school board.'” So the big problem isn’t graft and corruption, it’s uncovering it and announcing it without contacting me first.

    Sounds like Dallas ISD needs a lot more audits, including those of the overseer’s bank accounts. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)

  • Three families file lawsuite to prevent men from competing in women’s athletics. Twenty years ago that headline would have seemed like absurdist comedy, yet here we are…
  • Nukes and lasers! (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • The navy wants to retire the first four littoral combat ships, the newest of which was commissioned only six years ago. (Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)
  • Jussie Smollett indicted on six counts of lying to the police.”
  • Joseph Shabala, RIP.
  • Two reactions: 1. Good for him! 2. And the moon became as blood…
  • Happy dog:

  • Rule in the Time of Coronavirus

    February 13th, 2020

    The cliché is that the Chinese ideogram for “crisis” combines “danger” and “opportunity.” (This is not entirely true.) It’s widely believed that the “real” infection and death rates in China are five to ten times higher than the official rates. (And the official rates jumped from around 45,000 to over 60,000 yesterday.) Much has been written about how the pandemic is a grave threat to China’s Communist leadership. Slow growth was already threatening the nation’s house-of-cards banking system, and the pandemic.

    But Xi Jinping may also be thinking of it as an opportunity. Remember that Xi is part of political party that killed an estimated 65 million of its own people, and was happy to put a couple of million Uighers in concentration camps in order to reeducate them about their racial inferiority to the Chinese. They had to hold off tiananmening a few thousand Hong Kong activists only because too much of the world was watching and too much money is at stake.

    But now? Now they’ve got tens of millions of people under quarantine, they’re reportedly burning thousands of bodies that died from the virus without reporting them, so many that they’re showing up on satellite photos mapping particulates. With the quarantine and even heavier than usual censorship, the communist government has ideal circumstances for score-settling and purging “subversive” elements.

    Imagine how many activists and “agitators” they can make disappear in that chaos, not to mention people with low “social credit” scores. And the need to cremate bodies quickly means no one needs ever know that their actual cause of death was acute lead poisoning. The plague ensures it will be a while before their relatives come looking for them. Maybe they can’t get away with it in Hong Kong, but they can certainly get away with it in the “hot zone.”

    Given that they’re boarding up houses with people trapped inside, would you really put it past them?

    New Hampshire Results: The Bidenburg Crashes and Burns

    February 12th, 2020

    Unlike Iowa, we actually have results to chew on the next morning.

    1. Bernie Sanders
    2. Pete Buttigieg
    3. Amy Klobuchar (only those three pick up delegates)
    4. Elizabeth Warren
    5. Joe Biden
    6. Tom Steyer
    7. Tulsi Gabbard
    8. Andrew Yang
    9. Others
    10. Deval Patrick
    11. Michael Bennet

    Two contests, two Sanders wins, two Buttigieg second place finishes, two cases of Amy Klobuchar doing better than expected, two cases of Biden placing fourth or lower.

    Biden knew he was going to get creamed, and left the state before voting even closed.

    Ann Althouse says he should drop out, and that “he’s been the Jeb of the 2020 Democratic race.” Ouch!

    Here’s a piece suggesting that both Biden and Warren drop out: “They’ve both taken on the stench of death.”

    Are one or both going to drop out? Not this week. I’m pretty sure Biden stays in until Super Tuesday, and I suspect Warren stays in as well just to jam Bernie by siphoning off left-wing voters. And we get to see how much difference Michael Bloomberg’s money makes in the race.

    Other fallout:

  • Andrew Yang, one of the more interesting Democratic candidates, dropped out. he exceeded expectations (none), but never earned a single delegate.
  • Michael Bennet, one of the least interesting candidates, also dropped out. I would say the least interesting, except I was going through the list of also-rans when I came across Seth Moulton’s name, and it had completely slipped my mine that he had been running at all. Then again, Moulton ran against Pelosi for Speaker, so maybe he’s more interesting than Bennet still…
  • Word is that Deval Patrick will drop out as well, but since no one noticed he was in the race in the first place, no one will care.
  • Tom Steyer is not dropping out. Good. I want to see him waste more of his money.
  • This is interesting:

    Even organized labor seems scared of Sanders leading the ticket in the fall.

    Ideally, we’ll have six theoretically viable candidates (plus Tulsi Gabbard) continue on the campaign after Super Tuesday, raising the tantalizing specter of a brokered convention.

    .50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs.

    February 11th, 2020

    A rifle firing .50 BMG is the highest caliber weapon you can own without a special permit. The MK211 Raufoss is a heavy-core/explosive/incendiary .50 BMG round usually employed for anti-matériel and long-range sniping purposes. I was unabale to find any for sale online, but in one of the videos, he said they typically go for $65 a round.

    What happens when this round reaches out and touches something?

    Bad things for the recipient. Let’s take a look.

    .50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs. Hummer window glass and a ballistic gel dummy head (which is a cool thing and and of itself):

    .50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs. a quarter-inch steel plate mounted to a van:

    .50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs. a tactical dummy:

    .50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round (plus various armor piercing rounds and a SLAP round) vs. 3 inches of steel plates:

    The Raufoss round starts about 4 minutes into the video, whereas the SLAP round starts around 5 minutes in.

    And finally, a .50 BMG MK211 Raufoss Round vs. a running V8 engine:

    That’s really going to ruin your gas mileage….

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for February 10, 2020

    February 10th, 2020

    Iowa screws everything up, the Bernie juggernaut gathers momentum, there was another debate, and Biden calls a voter a “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Delegates

    So Sanders got 6,000 more votes than Buttigieg in Iowa…and, somehow, two less delegates. That puts the actual delegate count at:

    1. Buttigieg 14
    2. Sanders 12
    3. Elizabeth Warren 8
    4. Joe Biden 6
    5. Amy Klobuchar 1

    Klobuchar got her delegate with 12.3% of the vote. I guess the way Iowa did things that 15% threshold didn’t matter? Is that only for primaries? Or did it only matter at the precinct level? It seems like the DNC has rigged the process for maximum opaqueness…

    Polls
    The Iowa cock-up scrambled things so badly I’m ignoring most of these this week. All these are from Sunday and are for New Hampshire.

  • CNN/UNH (New Hampshire): Sanders 28. Buttigieg 21, Biden 12, Warren 9, Klobuchar 6, Gabbard 5, Yang 4, Steyer 2, Bloomberg 1.
  • Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce University (New Hampshire): Sanders 23, Buttigieg 20, Warren 16, Biden 14, Klobuchar 6, Yang, Steyer 2, Gabbard 0.
  • Suffolk (New Hampshire): Sanders 23.8, Buttigieg 21.80, Warren 13.4, Biden 10.4, Klobuchar 8.6, Yang 2.6, Gabbard 2, Steyer 1.8, Patrick .4, Bennet .2.
  • Emerson College (New Hampshire): Sanders 30, Buttigieg 20, Klobucher 13, Warren 12, Warren 12, Biden 11, Yang 4, Gabbard 3, Steyer 2, Patrick 1.
  • CBS: Sanders 29, Buttigieg 25, Warren 17, Biden 12, Klobuchar 10, Gabbard 2, Yang 1, Steyer 1, Patrick 1.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. Sanders 38.9%, Bloomberg 20.2%, and Buttigieg at 13.9%? Betting markets don’t seem overly impressed with Mayo Pete…
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Iowa screwing the pooch cocks up everything about the nomination process:

    Maybe there will eventually be a decent-sized Iowa bounce despite all of this. But there’s a good chance that the candidates who did well in Iowa get screwed, and the candidates who did poorly there get a mulligan. To repeat: There’s very little importance in a mathematical sense to who wins 41 delegates. Iowa is all about the media narrative it produces and all about momentum, and that momentum, whoever wins, is likely to have been blunted.

    Who might this help? Let’s pretend for a moment we don’t have any hints about how the results might have turned out. In fact, let’s pretend that Iowa didn’t happen at all. I reran our forecast model as though the Iowa caucuses were canceled….

    The presence of Iowa was helpful to Bernie Sanders, whose chances of winning a national delegate majority would have been 24 percent without Iowa — as compared to the 31 percent chance that he had with Iowa, as of Monday afternoon. Iowa was hurtful to Joe Biden, however, whose chances of a delegate majority would have been 50 percent without it, rather than 43 percent with it.

    And Iowa was extremely helpful to Buttigieg, whose chances of winning the delegate majority were fairly low even with Iowa — keep in mind that he had slipped to third in polls of Iowa and fifth in national polls — but would have been virtually nonexistent (less than 1 percent) without it.

    By giving the winning candidates a boost, the presence of Iowa also reduced the chance of an unstructured race and a potential brokered convention. The chance of there being no delegate majority was 17 percent without Iowa, but would have been 20 percent with it.

    Granted, none of those changes — say, 24 percent versus 31 percent — are necessarily that large. But that’s partly because, as of Monday afternoon, four or five candidates appeared to have a shot at winning Iowa. For the candidate who actually won Iowa, it would have been a much bigger deal. We estimate that Sanders’s chances of a majority would have shot up to from 31 percent to 58 percent with an Iowa win, Warren’s from 5 percent to 32 percent, and Buttigieg’s from 4 percent to 22 percent.

    And in some ways that still discounts Iowa’s impact, because several of the campaigns — for better or worse — built their entire strategy around the state. Would Buttigieg have been a major player in the race without Iowa? Considering his lack of support among black voters, probably not. Would candidates such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Julian Castro have dropped out so soon? That’s a harder call, since Harris, Booker and Castro weren’t polling particularly well anywhere. But the Democratic field might have remained a little more diverse.

    So we’ve arrived at a point of some ambivalence. On the one hand, candidates such as Buttigieg, who seemingly did well there, are liable to be injured by the muddled storylines in Iowa following the results-reporting disaster on Monday night. On the other hand, it’s not clear why Iowa was afforded so much importance in the first place, and Buttigieg possibly owed his entire presence in the campaign to this quirk in the nomination process. Nonetheless, these were the rules of the game, as every candidate understood them. So if Iowa turns out not to matter very much because of the results-reporting snafu, they have every right to be upset.

    To be even more blunt: The Iowa Democratic Party’s colossal screw-up in reporting results will potentially have direct effects on the outcome of the nomination process. The failure to report results will almost certainly help Biden, assuming that indications that he performed poorly in Iowa are correct, as they won’t get nearly as much media coverage. And they’ll hurt whichever candidate wins the state — most likely Sanders or Buttigieg. (Although if Sanders winds up finishing in second place or lower, he also might not mind a reduction in the importance of Iowa, especially with one of his best states, New Hampshire, coming up next.)

    What if burying bad Biden news was the entire point of engineering the cockup? After all, the DNC is backing Biden and battling Bernie.

  • Matt Taibbi: “Yesterday’s Gone: Iowa Was Waterloo for Democrats. In a fiasco for the ages, the blue party faceplants in Iowa.”

    After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery — from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election — the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.

    Coinciding with the flatulent end of the party’s impeachment gambit, and the related news that Donald Trump is enjoying climbing approval ratings, the Blue Party was exposed as an incompetent lobby for doomed elites, dumb crooks with nothing left to offer but their exit.

    Snip.

    Biden performed surprisingly well all year in polls, but he headed into Iowa like a passenger jet trying to land with one burning engine, hitting trees, cows, cars, sides of mountains, everything. The poking incidents were bad, but then one of his chief surrogates, John Kerry, was overheard by NBC talking about the possibility of jumping in to keep Bernie from “taking down” the party.

    “Maybe I’m fucking deluding myself here,” Kerry reportedly said — mainstream Democrats may not have changed their policies or strategies much since Trump, but they sure are swearing more — then noted he would have to raise a “couple of million” from people like venture capitalist Doug Hickey.

    Kerry later said he was enumerating the reasons he wouldn’t run, though those notably did not include humility about his own reputation as a comical national electoral failure, or because there’s already a candidate in the race (Biden) he’d been crisscrossing Iowa urging people to vote for, but instead because he’d have to step down from the board of Bank of America and give up paid speeches. French aristocrats who shouted “Vive le Roi!” on the way to the razor did a better job advertising themselves.

    With days, hours left before the caucuses, there were signs everywhere that the party establishment was scrambling to find someone among the remaining cast members to stop what Kerry called the “reality of Bernie.”

    But who? Yang said smart things about inequality, so he was out. Tulsi Gabbard was Russian Bernie spawn. Tom Steyer was Dennis Kucinich with money. Voters had already rejected potential Trump WWE opponents like the “progressive prosecutor” (Kamala Harris), the “pragmatic progressive” (John Delaney), “the next Bobby Kennedy” (Beto O’Rourke), “Courageous Empathy” (Cory Booker), Medicare for All can bite me (John Hickenlooper), and over a dozen others.

    Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg seemed perfect, a man who defended the principle of wine-based fundraisers with military effrontery. New York magazine made his case in a cover story the magazine’s Twitter account summarized as: “Perhaps all the Democrats need to win the presidency is a Rust Belt millennial who’s gay and speaks Norwegian.” (The “Here’s something random the Democrats need to beat Trump” story became an important literary genre in 2019-2020, the high point being Politico’s “Can the “F-bomb save Beto?”).

    Buttigieg had momentum. The flameout of Biden was expected to help the ex-McKinsey consultant with “moderates.” Reporters dug Pete; he’s been willing to be photographed holding a beer and wearing a bomber jacket, and in Iowa demonstrated what pundits call a “killer instinct,” i.e. a willingness to do anything to win.

    Days before the caucus, a Buttigieg supporter claimed Pete’s name had not been read out in a Des Moines Register poll, leading to the pulling of what NBC called the “gold standard” survey. The irony of such a relatively minor potential error holding up a headline would soon be laid bare.

    However, Pete’s numbers with black voters (he polls at zero in many states) led to multiple news stories in the last weekend before the caucus about “concern” that Buttigieg would not be able to win.

    Who, then? Elizabeth Warren was cratering in polls and seemed to be shifting strategy on a daily basis. In Iowa, she attacked “billionaires” in one stop, emphasized “unity” in the next, and stressed identity at other times (she came onstage variously that weekend to Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” or to chants of “It’s time for a woman in the White House”). Was she an outsider or an insider? A screwer, or a screwee? Whose side was she on?

    A late controversy involving a story that Sanders had told Warren a woman couldn’t win didn’t help. Jaimee Warbasse planned to caucus with Warren, but the Warren/Sanders “hot mic” story of the two candidates arguing after a January debate was a bridge too far. She spoke of being frustrated, along with friends, at the inability to find anyone she could to trust to take on Trump.

    “It’s like we all have PTSD from 2016.”

    Read the whole thing for a detailed breakdown of how Democrats suddenly changed the caucus rules on people, followed by “a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude.” And even if I disgree with some of his lefty conclusions, you have to love this sentence: “Democrats went on to systematically rat-fuck every group in their tent: labor, the poor, minorities, soldiers, criminal defendants, students, homeowners, media consumers, environmentalists, civil libertarians, pensioners — everyone but donors.”

  • “If You Think It’s Bad for Mainstream Democrats Now, Just Wait“:

    It is always darkest, John McCain used to say, before it gets totally black. So it is for the American center-left right now. Bernie Sanders is currently favored to win the nomination, a prospect that would make Donald Trump a heavy favorite to win reelection, and open the possibility of a Corbyn-esque wipeout. While Sanders has not expanded beyond a minority of the party, he has consolidated support of the party’s left wing, and while its mainstream liberal wing is split between numerous contenders, it is hard to see how the situation is likely to improve soon. Indeed, it could get worse, much worse.

    The liberal conundrum begins with Joe Biden. The former vice-president led national polls until very recently, and has been the most plausible mainstream liberal candidate. At the same time, doubts about his ability to handle the rigors of the campaign at an advanced age have caused the Democratic Party to withhold the institutional support it gave Hillary Clinton. Yet his name was big enough to preclude a younger, more vigorous Democrat from emerging in the ideological space he occupied. Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris all tried and failed to run as ideological heirs of Barack Obama, because Obama’s actual partner was still there.

    Actually all failed because all sucked to various degrees.

    Yet Biden underperformed in Iowa, and his campaign appears to be deflating, at least momentarily. So what to do?

    One strategy would be to rally around him, on the grounds that no other candidate has or will have his name recognition and ties to black voters. The other strategy is to hope his campaign collapses as quickly as possible, so that another contender can emerge. (More about them below.) At the moment it is not clear which strategy makes sense. And in the absence of an effective party to coordinate, the most likely scenario is a combination of the two: Some Democrats back Biden, others defect, and others wait to see what happens. That would be the worst possible outcome: a long, slow, painful death that prevents another liberal from taking his place and allows Sanders to gain unstoppable momentum.

    In the meantime, it seems hard to imagine how Biden or a Biden alternative could emerge in the next three contests. The next contest is in New Hampshire, which borders the home states of both Sanders and his closest ideological counterpart, Elizabeth Warren. After that comes Nevada — which, like Iowa, uses the caucus system, which has a fraction of the voting participation of primaries and reward the kind of intense organization Sanders has mastered.

    Then comes South Carolina. Biden has been pointing to this state, where he has always led, as his firewall. But will it hold if he is coming off three straight defeats? It is possible that by this point, Biden will have been supplanted in the center-left lane by Pete Buttigieg or even Amy Klobuchar. However, neither has the inroads to the state’s black community that Biden built, which means neither would be able to count on its support as a bulwark against the left-leaning electorates in the previous states. Also, as an additional morbid touch, the South Carolina primary will feature an organized influx of Republicans voting for Sanders in a specific plan to boost what they see as Democrats’ weakest nominee.

    I suspect any “Operation Chaos” effects will be widely overstated.

    So it is entirely possible that, following South Carolina, Sanders will have won three or all four of the contests. If nobody has emerged as a viable alternative by then, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign will be stepping in. It is extremely hard to estimate the probability of success of a candidate who has skipped the first four races. FiveThirtyEight’s model currently gives Bloomberg less than a one percent chance of winning.

    To be sure, if Bloomberg is the last Democrat standing against Sanders, he may well attract substantial support from Democratic elected officials and put up a strong fight. Still, he would face enormous opposition from the left. This is, after all, a billionaire who endorsed George W. Bush in 2004. And while the left has previously whipped itself into an angry frenzy against, successively, O’Rourke, Biden, Harris, and Buttigieg, the rage against Bloomberg would reach a new level.

    At that point, the victory scenario would involve a long, bloody struggle all the way to the convention, with the Sanders movement claiming at every step of the way that the party is rigging the race against them, culminating in a convention where his enraged supporters will again try to shout down the proceedings. Unless one of the non-Bloombergs can somehow get off the mat and defeat Sanders, this is probably the best-case scenario for liberals at this point. It seems more probable that Sanders crushes the field and brings his historically unique suite of liabilities to the ticket.

    It’s interesting how little Chait mentions Buttigieg, almost as if he’s nothing more than a placeholder. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Low turnout for the Democratic Iowa Caucuses.
  • Seems like everyone took a shot at Mayo Pete in the New Hampshire debate.
  • Stephen Green drunkblogged the debate.
  • Van Jones says that President Trump is serious about trying to win over black voters. “That was a warning to us. A warning shot across the bow to Democrats that he’s going after enough black votes to cause us problems. It’s not just the white suburban voters, he’s going after black votes.”
  • Who got the biggest bang for their buck in Iowa spending? It’s no surprise that Steyer and Bennet wasted their money. More interesting is the fact that Biden actually got one of the best returns on his $4 million in TV ad spending. Which is another way of saying if his campaign wasn’t so bad at fundraising, he might not have been so embarrassed in Iowa…
  • A tweet expounded on at length yesterday:

  • Foreign policy? Not impressed:

  • Where candidates stand on legalizing weed. Biden and Nurse Bloomberg against, all the other Dems they bothered with for. Gabbard, Bennet and Patrick all ignored. Biggest caveat: This is from The Motley Fool, whose every ad I glimpse on those occasions I websurf without adblock seems to be pumping some marijuana-related stock.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of James Carville, he endorsed Bennet. So, you think Bennet’s going to bow out of the race Tuesday night, or will he wait until Wednesday morning?
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He released an attack ad against Buttigieg:

    Pretty devastating to Buttigieg. But also pretty devastating to Biden, tying him as it does to two of the Obama Administration’s most outstanding failures: ObamaCare and the Iran Deal. Shockingly, the Biden campaign is gobsmacked by their own incompetence in Iowa:

    Days before Iowa Democrats went to their precinct caucuses, the news dropped like a bomb.

    Leaked poll numbers from what would have been the final Des Moines Register Iowa Poll showed Joe Biden in fourth place with 13 percent.

    Biden’s Iowa staffers were floored, according to a person familiar with discussions among several aides at the time.

    “None of us thought we were at 13 percent,” the person said. “We can’t be in fourth place. That just cannot be right.”

    But it was right. And it confirmed what rival campaigns had whispered for months — Biden wasn’t inspiring Iowa voters and his support was inch-deep.

    While the full Iowa caucus results still aren’t in, Biden’s unexpectedly weak performance Monday — he’s in fourth place with 16 percent with 97 percent of precincts reporting — has provoked frustration and recriminations within the campaign, according to interviews with more than a dozen campaign aides and surrogates.

    Bet it did. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) Quid Pro Joe gets testy over Ukraine. Everyone thought the impeachment farce was meant to protect Biden, but what it may end up doing is dooming him. Oh, and he did this:

    Thing is, if you listen to all of that clip, the subtext you hear is “our organization sucked in Iowa.”

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 starts to pay more attention:

    Bloomberg is a tricky candidate to forecast, given that his strategy of essentially skipping the first four states but then spending enormous amounts of money on the race is fairly unprecedented. Although Bloomberg is at only 11 percent in national polls right now — below the 15 percent threshold required to pick up delegates in states and congressional districts — he’s getting close enough to the threshold that the model actually has him picking up a decent number of delegates in its average simulation.

    Forecast omitted, but they have him doing better in the delegate count than Klobuchar.

    On the other hand, the model thinks it’s quite unlikely that Bloomberg can get a majority of delegates because he’s getting off to a late start. It’s not that skipping out on Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina is itself all that costly; those states have relatively few delegates. Rather, it’s that Bloomberg is unlikely to have a huge surge before Super Tuesday.

    Here’s why that matters. Bloomberg could certainly do reasonably well on Super Tuesday and get a surge in later states. But at that point, 38 percent of delegates will already have been chosen. Say Bloomberg wins 30 percent of the delegates on Super Tuesday; that would certainly get him some attention, probably make him a real contender, and perhaps knock other moderate candidates out of the race. Bloomberg, however, would need to get 64 percent of the delegates in all the states beyond Super Tuesday to earn a majority of pledged delegates, which is an awfully high bar to clear.

    Bloomberg getting a plurality of pledged delegates, on the other hand, is more likely. (There’s a 1 in 40 chance of that, or about 3 percent, according to our model — as compared to a roughly 1 in 100 chance he gets a majority.) More likely still is that Bloomberg appears to be the strongest candidate at the end of the process, even though he doesn’t necessarily have a plurality. There’s a 5 percent chance that Bloomberg will be leading in national polls at the end of the race, our model estimates.2 Being able to point to indicators like that could be helpful to Bloomberg in the not-at-all-unlikely event of a contested convention.

    He’s really against marijuana legalization. He met with some Democratic governors, who might be looking for a new horse now that Biden looks like he’s going to be euthanized on the track.

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Suddenly Buttigieg is right behind Bernie in New Hampshire. He’s the master of meaningless pablum. 1,800 people show up to Buttigieg rally in New Hampshire, which are pretty good numbers…for a non-Trump rally…in a small state. A piece on Buttigieg billionaire backer Seth Klarman and his backing of Shadow. The writer is really upset about Klarman being pro-Israel, so caveat lictor. “The Nevada State Democratic Party hired a former Pete Buttigieg campaign staffer as its new Voter Protection Director.” How convenient. Speaking of marijuana, ABC asks Mayor Pete why South Bend police arrest so many black people for smoking the devil’s cabbage.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Veep spot? Two different headlines, about the same Ellen DeGeneres apperance on the same day: “Hillary Clinton says her joining Democratic ticket as VP nominee is ‘not going to happen.’ “Hillary Clinton on being vice president: ‘Never say never.'” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Newsweek covers where Gabbard stands after Iowa. Gabbard sends best wishes to cancer-stricken Rush Limbaugh. Oooo, basic human dignity has no place in the modern Democratic Party…
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Klobuchar joins the swelling ranks of Democrats with a shot.” Ah, no. She got one delegate in Iowa. One. Uno. Exceeding expectations doesn’t mean she gets anywhere close to sniffing the nomination (though it probably does help raise her status as a possible veep pick). She tried to pop the Buttigieg bubble at the debate. I see little evidence she succeeded.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. Thinks he has a chance in New Hampshire. Also thinks he has a chance in South Carolina. Why Cory Booker Minus is still wasting our time at this point is anyone’s guess.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Once again, everything is coming up Bernie:

    Bernie Sanders has by far the best chance of any candidate to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, according to the Nate Silver model. Moreover, the odds that Sanders wins that prize outright are twice as good as the odds for a brokered convention in Milwaukee, in Silver’s view. Sanders has a better chance than anyone else to win the Nevada caucuses, according to Silver’s site, FiveThirtyEight, and a better chance than Joe Biden to win the South Carolina primary.

    California? Sanders. Texas? Sanders. North Carolina? Sanders. Virginia? Sanders. Massachusetts? Sanders. Minnesota? Sanders. Colorado, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah, Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Washington, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho, North Dakota, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Hawaii, Alaska, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island? Ibid.

    At the moment, Silver gives Sanders a 44 percent chance of winning Delaware, against 40 percent for Biden.

    Could Silver be wrong? Of course. Could Sanders slip? Certainly. Could Biden regain his momentum? It could happen. Could voters take a second look at Mike Bloomberg (whom Silver gives less than a 1 percent shot at winning the nomination)? Sure. But at the moment there is little doubt that Bernie Sanders is your Democratic Party frontrunner.

    And the Democratic establishment is in total freakout mode over it:

    Sanders backers contend he is the only candidate capable of bringing out young people and others who normally wouldn’t vote. While there is evidence that Sanders did pull in more young voters in Iowa, overall turnout was significantly below record numbers posted in 2008, when Democrat Barack Obama rode a wave of enthusiasm to the White House. That casts doubt on Sanders’ argument that his brand of left-wing populism can inspire enough new voters to defeat Trump, said Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff and the ex-mayor of Chicago.

    “There wasn’t this magic army” that materialized in Iowa, Emanuel said. “The cavalry wasn’t coming.”

    Snip.

    Former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell called the bungled count a “fiasco.”

    “We don’t look very good when one of our biggest arguments against Donald Trump is that he’s incompetent, and every day something happens where we screw something up,” Rendell, a Biden supporter and former DNC chair, told Reuters.

    Two person race?

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s surging in South Carolina:

    Tom Steyer has blanketed South Carolina in cash. Over the past seven months, he’s spent $14 million in TV and radio ads, spent over $100,000 on ads in black-owned newspapers, hired 93 staffers, an army of volunteers and assembled the largest state-wide operation of any other campaign.

    The billionaire activist has poured more money into South Carolina in a short period of time than anyone in the state can remember — and it’s beginning to reshape the contours of the Feb. 29 primary.

    “The unemployment rate in South Carolina has probably dropped an entire percentage point thanks to the Tom Steyer campaign,” said Tyler Jones, a Democratic strategist based in South Carolina. “Every YouTube video that comes on in South Carolina has a Tom Steyer ad in front of it. And he says things that every Democrat agrees with.”

    While there hasn’t been much public polling in the state, Steyer’s been in double-digits in all three surveys released this month. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Steyer is second only to Joe Biden in the state, with Bernie Sanders a close third.

    In a state where African Americans are expected to cast more than half of the primary vote, the Biden campaign has long held up South Carolina as his firewall due to the large amount of black voter support he has there. Rival campaigns have struggled to close the gap. But as Steyer continues to not only spend big on TV ads but also on local minority media, he’s been able to steadily gain ground among some African American voters.

    He calls for $22 an hour minimum wage; enjoy your new $10 Big Macs, America. Steyer went after a Biden surrogate (SC State Sen. Dick Harpootlian) over allegedly saying something racist, but actually Harpootlian pointed out that Steyer “hiring” a black SC state rep for $50,000 a month looks shady as hell:

    Evidently “social justice” means it’s forbidden for a white politician to point out a black politician’s graft.

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Dark Money Group Behind Elizabeth Warren’s Rise:

    As the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Obama administration’s consumer watchdog, Warren rewarded Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), which pressured the Obama administration to appoint her to the post in the first place. She gave the group unparalleled access to the CFPB while she led the agency, meeting with AFR associates on twice as many occasions as she did with any other Washington, D.C., interest group. As a member of the Senate, she has supported bills backed by the group. On the campaign trail, she has issued proposals that would benefit leaders of the group.

    AFR, which represents more than 200 deep-pocketed liberal organizations including the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, is not required to disclose its donors. In 2010, it drummed up both grassroots and institutional support for Warren’s appointment to the CFPB. AFR representatives went on a media blitz to support Warren and directed rank-and-file members to sign pro-Warren petitions that were submitted to the Obama administration. One letter to the White House sent by AFR’s sister organization was signed by nearly two dozen of D.C.’s most powerful liberal interest groups.

    Elizabeth Warren, racist. Fake Indian, real Indian casino. Remember, making sacrifices for “climate change” is always for the little people:

  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yang is doing well enough that the New York Times published a hit piece on him.

    “In his life before politics, they said they saw in Mr. Yang a man who was smart, had good ideas, was a persuasive speaker and was occasionally inspiring. But he sometimes stumbled in his dealings with gender and race, expressing what the former employees said were antiquated and unnerving views for a presidential candidate seeking the nomination from a Democratic Party that has been moving to the left,” the Times reported.

    Former employees alleged that there was a “collective shrug” about previous reports on how Yang “treated women who worked for him” and that his “cavalier use of racial stereotypes about Asian-Americans” and a “lack of attention of his record as a chief executive” have “gnawed” at staffers who claim they “watched their boss similary fumble delicate topics and conversations for years.”

    Sounds like he didn’t bow and scrape to Social justice Warrior pieties enough. He’s sounding better and better all the time…

  • Out of the Running

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

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    James Carville Is Right, But Not In The Way He Thinks

    February 9th, 2020

    Key Bill Clinton political advisor James Carville is not high on the current Democratic Party presidential field…or their policies:

    “I’m 75 years old. Why am I here doing this? Because I am scared to death — that’s why!” Carville said on MSNBC.

    “We’ve got to decide what we want to be. Are we going to be an ideological cult? Or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party?” he went on to say.

    Over the course of his lengthy interview, Carville declared that the Democratic Party needs to “wake up;” compared Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Jeremy Corbyn, a radical liberal who recently resigned as the head of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party; admitted Democratic voters are less than enthusiastic about their 2020 options; said DNC Chairman Tom Perez should be canned; and declared the Democratic Party was hurt by the media who have become “AOC crazy.”

    Carville said he would vote for Sanders if he wins the Democratic nomination, but only begrudgingly because he wouldn’t have “another choice.”

    “But look at the British Labour Party. We’re like talking about people voting from jail cells. We’re talking about not having a border. I mean, come on people,” Carville said.

    In the end, Carville said that Democrats should focus on running smart campaigns that focus on retaking control of the Senate.

    “You and I know that 18% of the country elects 52 senators,” he said, addressing former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. “The urban core is not gonna get it done. What we need is power! Do you understand? That’s what this is about!”

    All this is true, especially the part about needing power, but not in the way Carville means it.

    Broadly speaking, there are two wings to the modern Democratic Party: The corrupt wing, represented by the Clintons, and the insane wing, currently represented by Bernie Sanders. (The insane wing is, itself, probably split into two factions, the socialists and the social justice warriors, but the significance of that particular split is less important to the topic at hand.) The split in the factions dates back at least to the anti-Vietnam War New Left in 1968, with Eugene McCarthy facing off as their champion against Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, where the foundational myth of a racist, oppressive America was baked into the faction’s core beliefs. The New Left has been carrying out it’s long march through both the Party and various Democratic institutions ever since. George McGovern was its champion against Humphrey and Edmund Muskie in 1972, and the last insane wing factional candidate to win the Democratic Presidential nomination.

    Obama was a fusionist candidate, with a background in both Alinsky radical politics and Chicago Daley machine corrupt wing politics. That, and a huge store of white liberal guilt, let him appeal to both wings, and Obama filled his cabinet with corrupt wing figures (Biden, Clinton, Kerry, etc.).

    Sanders, a hardcore socialist who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, is the clear favorite of the insane wing, though almost half of the candidates who jumped into the race (Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Tom Steyer, Jay Inslee, Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, etc.) were vying for the insane wing’s “lane.” Sanders supporters were left very bitter by the DNC putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and they’re determined not to let it happen again.

    If you read their writings, the insane wing is absolutely convinced that America is naturally a left-wing nation and that their triumph is “inevitable” thanks to changing demographics. George Soros and his ilk have been pumping money into the insane wing infrastructure for over twenty years, and they believe that only the inertia and opposition of the corrupt wing (which they refer to as “neoliberalism”) has halted their inevitable rise.

    Before they can seize control of the means of production, they must first seize control of the Democratic Party. Only then can they assure that their personnel, and their ideas, take key positions in the Party. The corrupt wing, more in tune with electoral reality, more concerned with the immediate graft, and currently controlling most of the Party apparatus, stands in their way.

    Just as the Bolsheviks purged the Mensheviks almost immediately upon taking power, the insane wing must push the corrupt wing out to seize control of the Party, something they were too poorly organized to carry out in 1972. (At the state level, liberal Democrats purged moderates and conservatives from the Party in Texas, encouraging them to vote in the Republican primary, because they calculated (correctly) that they could never seize control of the state Party as long as they were there. They calculated incorrectly that the Party rank and file would continue to vote for Democrats after their takeover; the result was over two decades of Republican control.)

    The corrupt wing knows it’s toast if the insane wing takes over, which is why Tom Perez immediately purged all Sanders supporters after taking over as head of the DNC. That’s why the corrupt wing has Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Bloomberg as its champions. Both sides in the fight see the other as an existential threat to their control of the Party, and both sides have control of the Party as their most important and immediate goal. To quote Blazing Saddles, “Gentlemen, we have to protect our phony baloney jobs!”

    To be sure, both sides hate Trump with the sort of white hot fury only reached by people whose Facebook friends seem to do nothing but share anti-Trump memes all day. But Trump isn’t the enemy at hand, or even really the enemy. (Old Cold War joke: An army general asks a colonel to name the enemy. “The Soviet Union,” says the colonel. “No!” says the general. “The Soviets are the opponent. The navy is the enemy!”) When push comes to shove, both sides see four more years of a Trump presidency as more survivable than letting the other faction control the Party.

    Being creatures of the corrupt wing, the mainstream media hasn’t been covering this split, since Trump Derangement Syndrome sells better than interfactional fights. The irony is that this has let the Sanders brigades get to the foot of Mount Doom while nobody was paying attention. An additional irony is that the entire impeachment farce, designed to protect corrupt wing champion Biden, has backfired spectacularly, making Sander’s nomination much more likely.

    If the DNC didn’t try to screw Sanders in the Iowa caucuses, they certainly gave every impression they were. It’s entirely possible that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and that the DNC will try to screw Bernie even more this year than they did in 2016. Expect dirty tricks to make 1968 and 1972 look like a cakewalk in comparison.

    The insane wing is probably correct in that they make up a majority of voting Party activists. The corrupt wing is probably also correct in that Sanders is much too far left for the American electorate.

    All that points to President Donald Trump winning in a 1972-style electoral blowout in November.

    Rush Limbaugh on Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom

    February 8th, 2020

    Here’s Rush Limbaugh describing what it was like to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Donald trump:

    The first seven minutes or so of the show are about his cancer diagnoses, the rest about receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The clip displays how, after all these years, Rush remains an eminently listenable performer.