Lovers of irony got a double dish this week when the Washington Post mused aloud whether Republicans would accept political outcomes they didn’t like:
.@washingtonpost asking if Republicans can accept political outcomes they don't like is like @BillClinton asking @Mike_Pence if he's learned to accept married fidelity yet.
It takes a lot of damn gall for the Washington Post, one of the Democratic Media Complex’s premier peddlers of the Russian collusion fantasy and the Ukraine impeachment farce, to talk about “accepting the results of an election they don’t like,” since they’re at the tip of a the spear of what Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, neither a conservative nor a fan of President Donald Trump, call a permanent coup:
We are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.
My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.
The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.
Snip.
It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion.
The agencies’ new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. The “intel chiefs” meeting was just the first in a series of similar stories, many following the pattern in which a document was created, passed from department from department, and leaked. A sample:
February 14, 2017: “four current and former officials” tell the New York Times the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence.
March 1, 2017: “Justice Department officials” tell the Washington Post Attorney General Jeff Sessions “spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador” and did not disclose the contacts ahead of his confirmation hearing.
March 18, 2017: “people familiar with the matter” tell the Wall Street Journal that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn failed to disclose a “contact” with a Russian at Cambridge University, an episode that “came to the notice of U.S. intelligence.”
April 8, 2017, 2017: “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” tell the Washington Post the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge had ruled there was “probable cause” to believe former Trump aide Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign power.”
April 13, 2017: a “source close to UK intelligence” tells Luke Harding at The Guardian that the British analog to the NSA, the GCHQ, passed knowledge of “suspicious interactions” between “figures connected to Trump and “known or suspected Russian agents” to Americans as part of a “routine exchange of information.”
December 17, 2017: “four current and former American and foreign officials” tell the New York Times that during the 2016 campaign, an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer told “American counterparts” that former Trump aide George Papadopoulos revealed “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.
April 13, 2018: “two sources familiar with the matter” tell McClatchy that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has evidence Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was in Prague in 2016, “confirming part of [Steele] dossier.”
November 27, 2018: a “well-placed source” tells Harding at The Guardian that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
January 19, 2019: “former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation” tell the New York Times the FBI opened an inquiry into the “explosive implications” of whether or not Donald Trump was working on behalf of the Russians.
To be sure, “people familiar with the matter” leaked a lot of true stories in the last few years, but many were clearly problematic even at the time of release. Moreover, all took place in the context of constant, hounding pressure from media figures, congressional allies like Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, as well as ex-officials who could make use of their own personal public platforms in addition to being unnamed sources in straight news reports. They used commercial news platforms to argue that Trump had committed treason, needed to be removed from office, and preferably also indicted as soon as possible.
A shocking number of these voices were former intelligence officers who joined Clapper in becoming paid news contributors. Op-ed pages and news networks are packed now with ex-spooks editorializing about stories in which they had personal involvement: Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, Asha Rangappa, and Andrew McCabe among many others, including especially all four of the original “intel chiefs”: Clapper, Rogers, Comey, and MSNBC headliner John Brennan.
Russiagate birthed a whole brand of politics, a government-in-exile, which prosecuted its case against Trump via a constant stream of “approved” leaks, partisans in congress, and an increasingly unified and thematically consistent set of commercial news outlets.
These mechanisms have been transplanted now onto the Ukrainegate drama. It’s the same people beating the public drums, with the messaging run out of the same congressional committees, through the same Nadlers, Schiffs, and Swalwells. The same news outlets are on full alert.
The sidelined “intel chiefs” are once again playing central roles in making the public case. Comey says “we may now be at a point” where impeachment is necessary. Brennan, with unintentional irony, says the United States is “no longer a democracy.” Clapper says the Ukraine whistleblower complaint is “one of the most credible” he’s seen.
As a reporter covering the 2015–2016 presidential race, I thought Trump’s campaign was disturbing on many levels, but logical as a news story. He succeeded for class reasons, because of flaws in the media business that gifted him mass amounts of coverage, and because he took cunning advantage of long-simmering frustrations in the electorate. He also clearly catered to racist fears, and to the collapse in trust in institutions like the news media, the Fed, corporations, NATO, and, yes, the intelligence services. In enormous numbers, voters rejected everything they had ever been told about who was and was not qualified for higher office.
Trump’s campaign antagonism toward the military and intelligence world was at best a millimeter thick. Like almost everything else he said as a candidate, it was a gimmick, designed to get votes. That he was insincere and full of it and irresponsible, at first at least, when he attacked the “deep state” and the “fake news media,” doesn’t change the reality of what’s happened since. Even paranoiacs have enemies, and even Donald “Deep State” Trump is a legitimately elected president whose ouster is being actively sought by the intelligence community.
Snip.
Trump, at least insofar as we know, has not used section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor political rivals. He hasn’t deployed human counterintelligence “informants” to follow the likes of Hunter Biden. He hasn’t maneuvered to secure Special Counsel probes of Democrats.
And while Donald Trump conducting foreign policy based on what he sees on Fox and Friends is troubling, it’s not in the same ballpark as CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times engaging in de facto coverage partnerships with the FBI and CIA to push highly politicized, phony narratives like Russiagate.
Trump’s tinpot Twitter threats and cancellation of White House privileges for dolts like Jim Acosta also don’t begin to compare to the danger posed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter – under pressure from the Senate – organizing with groups like the Atlantic Council to fight “fake news” in the name of preventing the “foment of discord.”
I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.
We’ve long whispered about the Deep State, assuming that the Intelligence Community should have counter-intelligence responsibilities, out of sight, protecting the Executive branch from moles planted by foreign foes, and that our secret agents would, if necessary, quietly dispatch a Manchurian Candidate. But we assume that he deep state are protecting us from foreign foes, and that the less said beyond that, the better. And we assume they operate out of some sub-basement of the CIA in Langley.
But what we appear to have here is an alternative version in which the Deep State protects the Domestic interests of the Elite — that group of financial powers of whom nobody went to jail for any misdeeds leading to the 2008 crisis, that group which also happen to control the media which control the boundary lines of permissible political discussion, as Matt has documented in his precious book. Let us suppose that the Washington Swamp works for that elite, serve it and profit from it. And let us suppose that the Deep State are not there to protect the constitutionally designated Executive branch, but to guard and protect the Swamp.
And so for a candidate from outside of those boundaries to be elected president, that’s not merely a threat to the power of the institutional media, it’s an existential threat to the security of all the swamp creatures. Alligators are usually solitary and don’t usually work in teams, but we suppose they are wired to respond with the same instincts and to swarm and attack the intruder.
And since you and I understand that the alligators in the moat, or in the swamp, are there to protect against invaders, and we see them attack, we are conditioned to cheer for the alligators. They are doing their job. And if they are promoting the story that they are protecting us from Russians, all the better.
But who do the alligators serve? Who can protect us against them? That’s the context in which Matt has framed the question, which is the worse choice to lead the country, Donald Trump, with all his known flaws and evils? Or the swamp gators? I heard Rudy Giuliani last week say something to the effect that Trump was elected on the promise of draining the swamp, but none of us has a clue how bad the swamp was. Say it ain’t so.
Too extreme? Only if you believe that every CIA operative and MSM reporter are in on the scam. But when you see that vast swathes of our theoretically neutral elites have signed on to undo President Trump election because it hurts the interlocking interests of the permanent ruling class and the Democratic Party, it doesn’t seem like a stretch at all.
Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America’s institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America’s institutions. So, let’s imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.
What happens then?
What happens then is that it’s back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.
The difference is that in the future they will be much more careful to ensure that no one who is not in on the scam will ever again come anywhere near the levers of power. You can already see it – the demands that we defer to the bureaucrats they own, the attacks on the idea of free expression, and the campaign to disarm us. Their objective is no more Trumps, just an endless line of progressive would-be Maduros with the march toward despair occasionally put on pause for a term by some Fredocon Republican who hates us Normals just as much as the Dems, but won’t admit it until after he’s out of office.
So #NeverTrumpers are upset because Trump called them scum? Well boo freaking hoo:
If you were involved in the 2016 election and, at any point, decided that Hillary Clinton was very bad for the nation and that Evan McMullin was a f***ing bug-eating tool and that Donald Trump was not Beelzebub incarnate, then you became the target of abuse. In my personal experience, there are people who I’d considered friends for several years who I would no longer pee on if they were on fire today because of the abuse and scorn the heaped upon people who disagreed with them and the cheap bullying that they engaged in. Trumpkin. Trumptard. Trumpaloo. Trumphumper. And all manner of other cute names.
Snip.
For three years these people have degraded, demeaned, and libeled anyone who simply decided that, for all his flaws, Trump was better than any Democrat. No grace was offered to people who had considered them friends and colleagues. No common cause was allowed to be made. They stopped being conservatives and Republicans who simply disliked the candidate and then the president and became active Democrat partisans who simply called themselves something else. Every hoax and bad faith allegation made against the President and his administration, from the Russia bullsh** to defending illegal FISA warrants to the “Muslim ban” to “kids in cages,” was spearheaded by NeverTrumpers flagellating themselves with their principles and yodeling “we’re better than that.”
In 2020, these people have a choice to make. They can either earn their way back in–Prodigal Son, and all that–or they can stay gone. I don’t care who they vote for because Trump won last time without them and he’s in a much stronger position today than he was in November 2016. But, no matter what path they choose, there should be no forgetting of how these people have acted and what they’ve done. No one should allow them to forget why no one–right or left–wishes to have anything to do with them. No one should ever forget that they are dangerous, timorous and unfaithful allies and should not be allowed to do any more than hold the coats for the rest of us.
President Donald Trump begins process to formally withdraw from the Paris climate accord. I’m not sure this is strictly necessary, as it was never binding on the U.S. because it was never submitted to the senate for ratification. As opposed to being nonbinding on the rest of the world because they’re just lying about following it anyway.
Sanctions against Iran really biting into its oil revenues, especially as the U.S. becomes more sophisticated about counter attempts to evade it.
As recently as mid-2019, Iranian leaders openly boasted of selling its oil to foreign customers despite the 2017 sanctions. At the time of that boast, Iran was getting a million BPD (barrels per day) out to export customers. In contrast, before the sanctions, Iran exported two million BPD. But by July 2019 exports had been reduced to 365,000 BPD and in August it was a record low 160,000 BPD and that did not change much in September. What the Iranians don’t issue press releases about is how well sanction enforcement efforts have been at reducing those illegal exports to record lows.
The UK is finally having a general election after essentially a year of deadlock. If history is any guide, parties promising to deliver Brexit will win, then not deliver Brexit…
Related: Sanctuary city proposition goes down in flames in Tucson. Funny how not enforcing laws against illegal aliens enjoys crushing defeat when actual voters get a chance to chime in.
Meanwhile, the illegal alien debate in the Democratic Party is between the hard left and the loony left. “While the rest of America frets about illegal alien criminals escaping authorities with the eager help of liberal politicians, liberals are more concerned about proving to each other how wonderful and tolerant they are by opening the border and allowing anyone and everyone with a sob story to be welcomed and cared for.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A recent string of high-profile comments brought “Cancel Culture” to the fore. Stand-up routines by Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Sebastian Maniscalo forced the subject back into the limelight.
“No Safe Spaces,” a documentary about the Left’s serial attacks on free expression, debuts this weekend at the near-perfect time. Comedian Adam Carolla and syndicated radio star Dennis Prager unite to explore how universities are clamping down on healthy debate, and why that woke sentiment is leaking into society at large.
“Joker” director Todd Phillips, who previously helmed the “Hangover” series, amplified the cause. He told Vanity Fair he created “Joker” because making comedies is no longer fun.
“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he says. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’
Science Fiction tries to erase its past over crimes against Social Justice Warrior orthodoxy. To be fair, the people who handed out the (now being renamed) James Tiptree Award were always far-left radical feminist lunatics. The question is why have the theoretically more sober people behind the John W. Campbell and World Fantasy Awards also given in to this Orwellian, history-erasing lunacy?
Is anyone really surprised when a progressive treats institutional charity money as a personal slush fund?
The former head of the L.A.-based anti-poverty nonprofit Youth Policy Institute improperly used the organization’s funds to pay the property taxes on his house, buy furniture for his home office and make national political donations, the group alleged in court documents filed this week.
Dixon Slingerland, who was fired as the group’s chief executive in September, spent the nonprofit’s money on an array of unauthorized and personal expenses, including private tutoring for his children, contributions to his wife’s pension, and “lavish” dining, travel and entertainment, according to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing lodged by the nonprofit in federal court.
Texas candidate Jessica Cisneros has been one of the most high profile candidates backed by Justice Democrats, the liberal group seeking to defeat incumbents they perceive as insufficiently progressive. While Cisneros has received praise from freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), local residents appear more skeptical. She has received just $3,585 of her $190,000 (1.8 percent) in itemized contributions from inside the San Antonio district she hopes to represent.
Cisneros is primarying Democratic incumbent Henry Cueller for the Texas 28th Congressional District. She does not appear to be former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros’ daughter.
“Democrat Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz and Republican Gary Gates are headed to a runoff to decide who will fill the unexpired term of State Rep. John Zerwas (R–Richmond)” for Texas House District 28. Gates is a seven time loser, the founding money behind the “Texas Citizens Coalition” (whose mailers I have not seen recently), and was last seen running a dishonest campaign against Wayne Christian for the Railroad Commission. Still, I can only imagine that he’ll be preferable to a Democrat, and even though Markowitz garnered more votes in the election, all the other candidates were Republicans for a Republican-leaning seat, giving Gates a good chance to retain it.
“Plastikov 3D printed AK. 900 rounds on the front receiver, 550 on the rear – with no signs of damage. 7.62×39 goodness in a 7 dollar PLA receiver.” Not quite a revolution, since he used metal parts for the ejector and rails, and spent a total of $393 for all the parts, but definitely interesting, since the receiver is what the federal government counts as the “gun.” Caveat: 7.62x39mm evidently generates lower firing pressure than 5.56 NATO. But I’m hardly an expert here. Still: interesting. (Hat tip: Sal the Agorist.)
Assuming you’re not getting your news from unreliable sources like ABC, you’ve probably already seen the Project Veritas tape with ABC news reporter Amy Robach, about how her network spiked a story on Jeffrey Epstein’s pdophile ring three years ago. But just in case you haven’t, here it is:
Like every other normal person in America, she thinks Epstein was murdered.
Naturally, when this story came out, ABC vowed to find out who spiked the Epstein story and terminate them.
Ha! Just kidding! They’ve sworn to track down and punish the leaker. Because what’s protecting a serial pedophile compared to punishing those who have tarnished your reputation by revealing the truth?
Katie Pavlich thinks the main person behind spiking the story is Clinton-crony-come-on-air ABC personality George Stephanopoulos.
While the mainstream media tries to stonewall the story (yet another reason they all deserve to be abandoned by advertisers and shutdown), just about every blogger has thrown in their two cents worth. So rather than anything like analysis, enjoy this Twitter reaction roundup sampler:
Imagine if ABC investigated Epstein as hard as they hunted down the ABC whistleblower, he might have been murdered in his cell 3 years ago. https://t.co/QAu2xO2TZK
2. It's rather extraordinary that the news division of one of the three broadcast networks is not going address a major controversy involving a huge story by either having someone read a statement on air but more importantly with having one of its reporters cover it as a story
4. It appears that ABC News is trying to sweep this controversy under the rug by refusing to address this matter on-air and by declining to cover it as a news story.
— ABC News Doesn't Meet My High Standards So Sorry (@drawandstrike) November 5, 2019
I guess I'm sort of surprised that wanting to know why an internationally known pedophile was allowed to skate is becoming some kind of fringe issue of the right. Why wouldn't this matter to the left? Because "protect *our* media at all cost" or what?
Here’s an interesting Romanian TV interview with former Columbia tenured acting professor Andrei Serban, who resigned over imposition of social justice warrior ideology over talent and common sense. Here’s a short interview with him (if you don’t see the subtitles, click on the Closed Caption (CC) button before watching).
Serban escaped communist-dominated Romania, and he says that Columbia is “some sort of socialist left, on its way toward full blown communism.”
If you’re not going to believe it from conservative bloggers, maybe you’ll believe it from a guy who actually grew up under communism.
This is your reminder that there is a Texas Constitutional Amendment Election today, as well as various local elections. At the very least, show up to vote for Amendment 4, which constitutionally bans a state income tax.
Links covering other races around the state:
Houstonians have a chance to vote out corrupt incumbent Sylvester Turner. I hear good things about Bill King, but he’s in a tough race with trial lawyer Tony Buzbee (who went from backing Bill Clinton to supporting Rick Perry, David Dewhurst and Donald Trump) to make the runoff against Turner. Either would likely be an improvement over Sylvester.
Ballotpedia has links for other Texas elections, including four special elections for state representatives, local elections, and school board elections.
Beto goes bye bye, sticker shock sets in for Warren, Grandpa Simpson forgets which state he’s in (again), and a failing Harris goes all-in on Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
The story had been about how Biden was doomed and Warren’s rise was inexorable, but Biden tops every national poll this week, maintaining a modest lead over Warren, while Harris is in freefall. Also notice that there’s not a single poll outside Iowa or New Hampshire where Warren leads Biden. (For one thing, Quinnipiac, which has constantly shown a more pro-Warren tilt than any other poll, evidently didn’t do one last week.)
CNN/UNH (New Hampshire): Sanders 21, Warren 18, Biden 15, Buttigieg 10, Yang 5, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 5, Steyer 3, Harris 3, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Sestak 1. Good news for Yang, Gabbard and Klobuchar, though I’m not sure if this is a DNC qualifying poll or not.
The assumption that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren will win New Hampshire is all but baked, Democratic insiders told POLITICO; the neighbor-state senators could easily take the top two spots. The biggest prize, at this point, is the surge of momentum that would come from eclipsing Joe Biden, as the race turns to Nevada and then South Carolina.
I think the story coming out of this state may not be first place,” said former Democratic state Sen. Andrew Hosmer. “It may be who shows up as a strong second or third place that really propels them.”
Hosmer’s assessment was broadly shared by more than two dozen knowledgeable Democrats interviewed for this story, including the party chair, current and former state lawmakers, several underdog campaigns and one of the candidates. Officials with several Democratic candidates’ campaigns, meanwhile, described the race as fluid, with no real frontrunner despite the advantage enjoyed by Sanders, who won New Hampshire in 2016, and Warren, who has been building inroads for years.
The candidates and campaign aides said superior organization will trump all in the state — more so than a heavy TV ad presence or endorsements. And with more than four of five voters still undecided or only leaning toward a candidate, there’s an enormous opportunity for a lower-polling candidate to emerge.
With no clear frontrunner and at least four plausible candidates, superdelegates might make a comeback in a brokered convention.
Depending on how frontloaded a primary calendar is, late April tends to be around the point where enough delegates have been allocated that the presumptive nominee is, if not already clear, coming into sharper focus. So if three candidates are still cresting above the 15 percent threshold by the six-contest “Acela primary” in late April, when more than 75 percent of delegates will have been awarded, that could wreak havoc on the 2020 Democratic nomination process.
But of course, much of this depends on how wide the margin is by which the candidates clear that threshold. If, say, only one candidate is getting a supermajority while the others struggle to hit 15 percent, then the fact that three candidates are above the threshold matters very little — see Trump in 2016. But if three candidates are tightly bunched at 40, 30 and 20 percent, it potentially becomes much more problematic. This is especially true if that clustering happens early and often, especially on delegate-rich days like Super Tuesday, which is scheduled for March 3 this year and is the first series of contests after the four early states.
But:
Here’s why I think a logjam situation is unlikely: How the threshold is applied tends to already have a built-in winnowing effect on the candidates. Yes, there is a proportional allocation of delegates, but that only applies to candidates who win 15 percent of the vote. And that qualifying threshold is not applied just once, but three different times. A candidate must meet that threshold at the statewide level twice, once for at-large delegates and once for party leader and elected official (PLEO) delegates. A candidate must also win 15 percent of the vote in a given congressional district (or other subdivision) to lay claim to any district-level delegates. In other words, a candidate who surpasses 15 percent of the statewide vote by running up margins in a few concentrated areas will not earn as many delegates as a candidate who hits the 15 percent statewide threshold by earning at least 15 percent of the vote across districts. A candidate must build a coalition of support more uniformly across a state — and the country — in order to win delegates. It’s more than just peeling off a delegate or two here and there.
Hey Democrats, when even Nancy Pelosi says your ideas are too far left to win elections, don’t you think you should listen?
“Voters are sick and tired of politicians promising them things that they know they can’t deliver,” the Colorado senator said in a statement. “Warren’s new numbers are simply not believable and have been contradicted by experts. Regardless of whether it’s $21 trillion or $31 trillion, this isn’t going to happen, and the American people need health care.”
Warren on Friday released the cost estimate of her plan, which increases federal spending by $21 trillion over the next ten years, a significant increase that is nevertheless cheaper than the $31 trillion increase attributed to Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.
While serving as senator of Delaware, Joe Biden reached out discreetly to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to discuss matters his son Hunter Biden’s firm was then lobbying for, according to government records Goodman gathered.
The latest revelations further buttress accusations that Joe Biden’s work as senator and vice president frequently converged with and assisted Hunter Biden’s business interests. Whether it be getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son’s company fired or meeting one of his son’s business partners while on a diplomatic trip to China in 2013, Joe Biden’s political activities in relation to his son Hunter have continued to garner scrutiny.
In 2002, while his father was a senator, Hunter founded the lobbying firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which lobbied on the Hill. When his father announced his candidacy for president in 2008, Hunter opted to leave the firm, claiming it was to reduce concerns about conflicts of interest.
While Hunter was still at the firm, in late February 2007, then-Sen. Joe Biden reached out to DHS, expressing concern over the department’s proposed chemical security regulations. The regulations were in accordance with Section 550 of the DHS Appropriations Act of 2007, which called for chemical facilities to submit detailed “site security plans” for DHS approval. Part of these plans were expected to include specifics related to training and credentialing employees.
Biden’s call seems like an eerie coincidence. Two months prior to that phone call, the Industrial Safety Training Council had enlisted Hunter Biden’s firm to lobby DHS precisely on Section 550. The Industrial Safety Training Council is a 501(c)3 that offers safety training services to employees of chemical plants. In the midst of debates over regulations stemming from Section 550, ISTC launched significant lobbying efforts to encourage the expansion of background checks under the new regulation regime.
Hunter was not registered as an individual lobbyist on behalf of ISTC, but he did serve as a senior partner at his namesake firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which only boasted three partners at the time. According to Goodman, from early 2007 to the end of 2008, his firm earned a total of $200,000 from ISTC in return for its lobbying efforts.
While we don’t know the source of Joe Biden’s concern over Section 550 and whether his “concern” was the one ISTC shared, it is worth noting this repeated crossover between Hunter Biden’s business and his father’s political stratagems. At some point, coincidences stop being merely a product of a chance. In the case of Hunter and Joe Biden, the coincidences continue to pile up.
Joe Biden’s use of his political power for his son’s business dealings didn’t stop there. At one point, Hunter’s firm was lobbying on behalf of SEARCH, a national nonprofit devoted to information-sharing between states in the criminal justice and public safety realm. SEARCH was interested in expanding the federal government’s fingerprint screening system and hired Hunter’s firm to lobby on behalf of this issue.
During that very time, Joe Biden sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales expressing a desire to unpack this very topic. In his letter, then-Sen. Joe Biden asked to meet with DOJ to explore the benefits of the expanding the federal government’s fingerprint system.
From the Yogi Berra Institute for Advanced Whackery — er, Business Insider, actually — comes a new poll showing that while Joe Biden is the most-loved Democratic presidential contender, he’s also the least-liked. According to figures releasedon Sunday, “27% of likely Democratic voters would be unsatisfied with a Biden nomination, 21% would be dissatisfied with a Sanders win, and 15% would be dissatisfied with Warren.”
What that means is, should Biden win the nomination next summer, more than a quarter of Dems would face a serious “Meh” moment when deciding whether to even bother showing up at the polls in November.
Snip.
Registered voters (it’s too soon to narrow down to likely voters) who approved of Trump’s job performance are either “extremely” or “very” enthused about voting next year — by a whopping 79%. If you’re a registered voter and you disapprove of Trump, you’re only 66% likely to be extremely or very enthused. 13 points is a major enthusiasm gap. And as Kilgore also notes, “White folks are more enthusiastic about voting than nonwhite folks; old folks are more psyched than young folks; Republicans are more whipped up than Democrats.” Those demos suggest that Democratic primary voters had better think long and hard about nominating someone who generates serious enthusiasm, but their frontrunner doesn’t seem to be the guy to do that.
Records filed with the Department of Justice show that Rasky is also a registered foreign agent lobbying on behalf of the government of Azerbaijan. The records, which were filed pursuant to the Foreign Agent Registration Act, show that Rasky was hired by the Azerbaijani government on April 23, 2019. Federal documents signed by Rasky show that he reports directly to Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States.
“[The government of Azerbaijan] will pay RASKY a minimum monthly non-refundable fee (the ‘Monthly Fee’) for the Services provided of $15,000 per month, plus a 5% administrative fee as described below,” Rasky’s contract with the foreign government states. “The Monthly Fees totaling $94,500 shall be paid in two equal installments. The initial payment of $47,250 is due upon the signing of this agreement. The second payment of $47,250 is due on July 15, 2019.”
Rasky changed the name of the PAC from “For The People” to “Unite the Country” on Monday, according to FEC filings. The filings do not state which country Rasky intends to unite on Biden’s behalf.
The vainglorious, name-dropping Biden also couldn’t help himself from invoking Pope Francis and noting that he “gives me Communion.”
Such brief asides won’t solve his Catholic problem. For one thing, invoking Pope Francis plays poorly in American politics, as the opponents of Donald Trump found out in 2016. Trump’s poll numbers didn’t fall but rose after the pope slammed his immigration position. Hiding behind an obnoxious left-wing pope won’t help Biden any more than it helped Hillary and Kaine, who tried to drive that wedge between Trump and Catholic voters. Kaine’s faux-Catholic schtick — he would go on and on about his “Jesuit volunteer corps” work in Latin America with commies — went over like a lead balloon.
The Catholics who bother to go to Mass regularly anymore are loath to vote for a candidate who supports abortion in all its grisly stages and presides over gay weddings (which Biden has done since pushing Barack Obama to support gay marriage in 2012). That poses an insuperable impediment to picking up Catholic votes. Notice that Biden’s I-grew-up-Catholic-in-Scranton lines are recited less and less. His strategists have probably concluded that that routine hurts him in the primaries and can only remind people of his checkered Catholicism in the general election. His “private” Catholic stances grow fainter and fainter and can’t even be found in a penumbra.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Could Booker gain from O’Rourke’s exit? I rather doubt it. Booker’s no longer getting fawning profiles, but his director for state communications, Julie McClain Downey, is. The article opens stating she was “on the 12-week gender-blind paid leave available to all of the campaign’s full-time staffers.” Presidential campaigns are intense pressure cooker endeavors that require staffers to work killing hours over the course of (for a competitive campaign) 12-18 months. If key staffers are taking 12 months of leave during the white heat before the primary season, no wonder Booker is languishing around 1%.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Steve Bullock gets Anthony Scaramucci to unknowingly tape endorsement for $100.” That’s his big, exciting news this week. Maybe next week he can pay for Snooki’s endorsement. (And I know what you’re thinking, but no, she’ll only be 33 next year, making her constitutionally ineligible to be elected President…)
Joe Biden dropped to fourth place in Iowa, according to a new poll released Friday, his worst showing to date in the pivotal early state.
A few hours later, at the largest gathering to date for any 2020 event, it was clear why.
While Biden delivered a solid performance on stage before a crowd of 13,500 Democrats at the state party’s Liberty & Justice dinner, he was overshadowed and outshined by the candidate who just passed him in the polls — Pete Buttigieg.
At the massive state party event known for its catalytic effect on campaigns — it’s widely remembered as a turning point for Barack Obama’s Iowa fortunes in 2007 — Buttigieg captured the audience’s imagination, articulating a case for generational change.
“I didn’t just come here to end the era of Donald Trump,” Buttigieg said to a roaring crowd of supporters. “I’m here to launch the era that must come next.”
Snip.
Matt Sinovic, executive director of Progress Iowa, one of the largest left-leaning advocacy groups in the state, said Buttigieg generated considerable buzz with a recent statewide bus tour. He starts another on Saturday. But the Indiana mayor is also swamping his opponents in digital advertising, something that’s been hard to miss in Iowa.
“I cannot overstate how many Buttigieg ads I see,” said Sinovic, pointing to data showing Buttigieg’s national digital spending numbers surpassing Biden almost five-to-one. “It’s just a massive outspending right now.”
Almost always in politics, an early money lead counts for a hell of a lot more than an early poll lead.
Biden’s campaign announced on Friday a new round of digital ad spending in Iowa. And he’s opening a new office in the state, giving him 23 overall as well as 100 staffers. The campaign also notes an October fundraising bump as a sign they’re not losing momentum — the campaign said it had its best month to date online, raising $5.3 million from 182,000 donations, with an average donation of $28.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still not getting out. “Julián Castro plans to refocus his 2020 presidential campaign on Iowa, Nevada and Texas in the coming days and is supporting his staffers looking for jobs with other campaigns.” That pretty much says he’s broke, though Nevada and Texas make sense as last-ditch Hail Mary plays. In that CNN/UNH poll, Castro hard the largest net favorability decline of all the candidates listed, a whopping -25%. I’m sort of surprised voters actually noticed him enough to dislike him. Maybe it was the “abortion services for trannies” line that did it…
Coming off a close loss in Texas’s 2018 Senate race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, O’Rourke entered the presidential race with great fanfare in March, though some wondered if he had waited too long to fully capitalize on the national notoriety he gained from his 2018 performance. Still, O’Rourke’s initial polling numbers suggested he might really be in the mix to compete for the nomination — he was polling at 10 percent or more in some national polls not long after he announced. However, his survey numbers quickly deteriorated as the race moved along, and he spent the past four months mostly polling below 5 percent even after he tried to revive his campaign in August by tacking left on some issues and focusing more on President Trump.
’Rourke’s tumble in the polls was also accompanied by fundraising difficulties. Having been a prodigious fundraiser in 2018, he seemed capable of attracting the resources to run a top-level presidential campaign, and he showed early promise by raising $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign, the second best opening day after only former Vice President Joe Biden. But fundraising dollars started drying up shortly thereafter. He had raised only $13 million by the end of the second quarter, and added just another $4.5 million in the third quarter.
His debate performances didn’t help him recover either; in fact, his most recent performance seemed to have hurt him. After the October debate, O’Rourke’s net favorability among Democratic primary voters fell by about 6 points in our post-debate poll with Ipsos, the biggest decline for any of the 12 candidates on stage. His place at future debates was in serious jeopardy, too. O’Rourke was two qualifying polls shy of making the November debate and had yet to register a single qualifying survey for the December debate.
But O’Rourke might always have struggled to attract a large enough base of support in the primary given the makeup of the Democratic electorate. As a moderate three-term congressman, he won over many suburban white voters in his Texas Senate bid, but as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote back in July, a base of white moderates, particularly younger ones, wasn’t enough…only about 12 percent of 2016 Democratic primary voters fit all three descriptors — young, white, moderate.
O’Rourke may have been billed as a moderate, but he quickly joined the Twitter Woke Circus, threatened to take our guns, and watched his polls crash even harder as a result. A fact that makes the NRA celebrate his exit:
What do Beto, Gillibrand, and Swalwell have in common? They based their presidential campaigns around demonizing the @NRA, 100M gun owners and trying to destroy our right to self-defense and to even own guns. They messed with the bull and they got the horns. pic.twitter.com/oozFjUgJkr
Across the Democratic Party, ordinary voters, senior strategists, and health care wonks are increasingly nervous that the candidate many believe to be the most likely nominee to face Donald Trump has burdened herself with a policy that in the best case is extraordinarily difficult to explain and in the worst case could make her unelectable.
On Tuesday night, in Concord, one of the more bougie New Hampshire towns that should be a Warren stronghold, Warren stepped inside Dos Amigos, a local Mexican restaurant. She made the rounds talking to voters as locals ate tacos and watched a football game playing above the bar. It didn’t take long before the first Medicare for All question came up.
Martin Murray, who lives in neighboring Bow, came down for a taco and a beer and ended up having a conversation with Elizabeth Warren about single payer and slavery. (That’s what it’s like in New Hampshire.)
“I paid pretty close attention to the last debate when Buttigieg was talking to her,” he told me, “and what I got from him was simply that going for the golden coin, if you will, might be a little too much all at once and maybe we have to take that step by step. And that’s what worries me too: that going for Medicare for All might be unattainable.”
Murray, who is leaning toward supporting Warren, asked her about the Buttigieg critique. “You don’t get what you don’t fight for,” she told him. “In fact, can I just make a pitch on that? People said to the abolitionists: ‘You’ll never get it done.’ They said it to the suffragettes: ‘You’ll never get that passed.’ Right? They said it to the foot soldiers in the civil rights movement. They said it to the union organizers. They said it to the LGBT community.”
She added, “We’re on the right side of history on this one.”
Some Democrats I talked to found the comparisons that Warren used to be jarring. “I have the highest respect for Sen. Warren but she’s wrong about this,” said former Sen. Carol Mosley Braun, the first female African American in the Senate. “Abolition and suffrage did not occasion a tax increase. People weren’t giving something up — except maybe some of their privilege.”
She added, “To compare the health care debate to the liberation of black people or giving women the right to vote is just wrong.”
“Medicare for All does not equate in any shape, form or fashion to the Civil Rights Act, or Voting Rights Act, or the 13th Amendment, or 14th Amendment,” said Bakari Sellers, a Kamala Harris supporter whose father was a well-known civil rights activist who was shot and imprisoned in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968. “It doesn’t.”
Plus a history of Warren’s position, since she’s been on both sides of the issue whenever it suited her. Warren is a great candidate…if you want to see the stock market collapse. New York Times reporter had documents that proved Warren was lying about her “I was fired because I was pregnant” story, and sat on them. We all know why: They want Warren to win and they want Trump to lose. Saturday Night Livemocks Warren’s health care plan. The fact I’m linking here rather than embedding it should tell you how funny it is. Also, as with Hillary Clinton, SNL helps Warren’s campaign by having her played by an actress roughly half her age. “Elizabeth Warren Pledges To Crack Down On School Choice, Despite Sending Her Own Son To Elite Private School.”
The 2020 presidential candidate’s public education plan would ban for-profit charter schools — a proposal first backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — and eliminate government incentives for opening new non-profit charter schools, even though Warren has praised charter schools in the past.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) This does not appear to be an official Warren campaign account, but it does offer up an infinite well of cringe.
“The downsides of that, the entire country gets engrossed in this impeachment process,” Yang said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And then, we’re gonna look up and be facing Donald Trump in the general election and we will not have made a real case to the American people.”
Yang said that while he does support the impeachment, he feels Democrats waste too much time talking about it and not enough about the future of the US.
“That’s the only way we’re going to win in 2020 and that’s the only way we’re actually going to start actually solving the problems that got him elected,” he told CNN.
In the second quarter — from April to June — the campaign had under 20 staff members on its payroll, according to Yang’s Federal Election Commission filings. But a quarter later, it nearly quadrupled to include 73 staff members, POLITICO’s analysis shows, as well as several experienced and well-respected strategists in Democratic politics.
The expansion, fueled by a nearly $10 million third-quarter fundraising haul, ensures that the 44-year-old entrepreneur can stick around through the beginning of early-state voting next year — and gives Yang a platform to build on if he should have a big moment in a later debate or show unexpectedly well in the Iowa caucuses. The hires also add critical experience to Yang’s campaign as it starts to spend on advertising, like a recent six-figure digital ad buy in the early states.
Snip.
Most notably, Yang’s campaign recently brought on Devine, Mulvey and Longabaugh as its media consulting firm. The firm — run by Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh — worked for Sanders’ insurgent 2016 primary campaign and produced the famous “America” ad before splitting early on with Sanders’ 2020 bid due to “differences in a creative vision.”
Longabaugh says they were drawn to Yang because he’s “is offering the most progressive ideas” of the primary but that they see a long runway for the Yang campaign.
“We wouldn’t have signed on with somebody we didn’t think was a serious candidate,” Longabaugh said, “Yang has a good deal of momentum and there’s a great deal of grassroots enthusiasm for his candidacy and that’s what’s driven it this far.”
Other hires include senior adviser Steve Marchand, a former mayor of Portsmouth, N.H. and two-time gubernatorial candidate, who is a paid adviser to the Yang campaign since April and national organizing director Zach Fang, who jumped ship from Rep. Tim Ryan’s campaign in late August.
The campaign has also paid Spiros Consulting — a widely used Democratic research firm helmed by Edward Chapman — for research throughout the quarter.
The campaign’s field office game has ballooned recently. Currently all 15 of their field offices are in the first four states; 10 have opened since the start of October, according to the campaign.
That effort has evolved into more than 30 Yang Gangs across the state— 17 that South Carolina campaign chair Jermaine Johnson says are “100% structured.” The Columbia and Charleston group, made up of about 250 members, is the largest of these South Carolina Yang Gangs. The campaign maintains that while not all of these members are showing up to in-person events, the majority are active online.
It was fall of 1999, and Yang, 24, was in the job he had steered toward his whole life. Phillips Exeter Academy, Brown University, Columbia Law — the perfect elite track to land at Davis Polk & Wardwell, one of the country’s premier law firms. His Taiwanese immigrant parents were thrilled. Counting salary and bonus, he was making about $150,000 a year.
He quit because he didn’t like it. “Working at a law firm was like a pie-eating contest, and if you won, your prize was more pie.”
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, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
Seems like we as a society have been remiss in communicating to Millennials what a horrible murderous failure communism has been.
We don’t need more “civics lessons,” we need more movies like The Killing Fields and The Lives of Others. And given how eagerly Hollywood kowtows to China, we’re not likely to get them…
Former nanny, warez-trader, would-be punk rock star, El Paso City Councilman, three-term U.S. Representative, magazine cover boy, and losing 2018 U.S. Senate candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke is now a former Presidential candidate.
Our campaign has always been about seeing clearly, speaking honestly, and acting decisively.
In that spirit: I am announcing that my service to the country will not be as a candidate or as the nominee. https://t.co/8jrBPGuX4t
O’Rourke’s rise was quick, and his fall was even quicker. Backed by family wealth and political connections, Bobby Francis became Beto and successfully primaried a Democratic incumbent in a district that hasn’t voted for a Republican since 1962, where he spent three largely undistinguished terms before running against Ted Cruz for the Senate in 2018.
The senate race is what fueled O’Rourke’s rise to national prominence. Though supported by national Democrats’ absolute hatred for Cruz, O’Rourke brought real strengths to the race. First and foremost, he did the work, campaigning hard all across the state with a grueling personal appearance schedule that rivaled similar hard work put in by Cruz in his winning 2012 race. He also built out a competent campaign infrastructure and a national fund-raising apparatus to channel in the huge sums of cash national Democrats were throwing into the race. (O’Rourke raised more money than any senate candidate ever.) “Competent campaigning and fundraising” may seem like tepid praise, but it was more than any statewide Democrat had accomplished in two decades. (Wendy Davis had gotten similar fawning press coverage and solid out-of-state money, but ran a manifestly incompetent campaign.) And he was photogenic.
All of which lead to O’Rourke receiving some of the most fawning national campaign coverage for a statewide race ever seen. National magazine after national magazine showered rose petals of praise on O’Rourke from on-high. They were so predictable you could construct a checklist of the elements included. Skateboard? Check. Punk rock? Check. Sweaty? Check. “Kennedy-esque good looks”? Check.
O’Rourke lost, but he made the race a lot closer than it should have been, and dragged a lot of down-ballot Democrats into office on his coattails in a “wavelet” year for Democrats fired up in opposition to the Trump Administration. O’Rourke picked up more votes for a Democrat than any race in Texas ever. But a side effect was helping Republicans hold onto the senate, with several Democratic incumbents (Florida’s Bill Nelson, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, and North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp) going to down to defeat in winnable races that didn’t receive nearly a fraction of the resources thrown at O’Rourke.
All of which naturally fueled talk of O’Rourke running for President. As I said in the very first clown car roundup, “I don’t see any reason for him not to run, with high favorables, strong polling and having just received a zillion fawning national media profiles.” He came in third behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in a November 2018 preference poll of candidates, and he was Daily Kos’ second-ranked straw poll candidate behind Elizabeth Warren. And he had a huge fundraising list from his Senate run. So there were several factors that made O’Rourke’s run entirely logical.
Yet he dithered, and hemmed, and hawed, letting a dozen other candidate get the jump on him into the race, before finally launching with yet another fawning national media profile, this one in Vanity Fair, complete with Annie Leibovitz photographs, that endlessly talked about his youth and charisma.
Then he got out on the national campaign trail, where mainstream media outlets had already lined up behind candidates like Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren as their preferred favorites, and the nation found out what Texas conservatives had been saying all along: O’Rourke is a big bag of nothing. All the qualities that the media found “endearing” and “authentic” were now goofy and eminently mockable. The flaws were always there.
Quick, name a single signature issue O’Rourke stood out from other candidates on. Until his disasterous “I’m gonna grab your guns” moment, there wasn’t any. Warren was the candidate that wanted to socialize healthcare; O’Rourke was the candidate that Instagrammed his dental visit. The more a national audience saw of him the less they liked him. The harder he pandered to the hard left the more phony he seemed and the softer his poll numbers, racking up some perfect “0.0” scores, where not a single person polled planned to vote for him.
Faced with an obviously failing campaign, O’Rourke made the decision to pull the plug. That was the right decision, but I’m slightly surprised he made it, since his $3 million cash on hand was probably enough to coast into Iowa and New Hampshire with something resembling a functional campaign on one last roll of the dice. But maybe shorn of his protective media glow, O’Rourke was finally able to read the writing on the wall. The question is when the half-dozen other candidates in the race doing even worse than O’Rourke drop out.
Who does his departure help? Given how minimal his remaining support was, probably no one. An earlier O’Rourke exit might have helped Julian Castro snag additional Texas funding, but his campaign has been flatlined for a while.
O’Rourke was a deeply flawed candidate, but I suspect he might have peaked higher and lasted longer if he’d jumped into the race right after the senate race loss. By the time he finally got in, his buzz had already died and a lot of higher profile candidate had locked up funding and campaign talent before he could. I think he still would have lost, but he might have gone out in a big bang rather than a whimper.
There’s something weirdly appropriate about the fake Hispanic candidate ending his campaign on the Day of the Dead.
“Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elites Slept,” a new book by U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding (Ret.), confirms this assessment. Spalding served as the chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as senior U.S. Defense official and defense attaché to China in Beijing, and later in the Trump National Security Council (NSC), where he was the chief architect of the NSS’s framework for national competition.
According to Spalding, even organizations that would seem to have a vested interest in exposing China’s malign behavior remain mum. Spalding writes that upon his arrival at NSC:
I made it a personal mission to meet with many leading think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, and law, auditing, and public relations firms that dealt with China. I was eager to seek their help in exposing the Beijing government’s influencing operations and sanctioning of illegal behavior. Additionally, I hoped they would help me explore policy options to counter China’s economic malfeasance.
Time after time, I was rebuffed.
People at these organizations would talk with me, and many of them even said they agreed with my concerns, but they claimed they couldn’t help. Doing so, some of the more forthright people said, might anger their Chinese funders or business accounts. The list of organizations that refused to engage with me publicly in my official capacity was stunning. Top white-shoe New York law firms. Organizations with mandates to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights would refuse to support my mission.
…They were, in essence, being manipulated by a foreign power that is America’s greatest enemy.
The willingness of American organizations to remain silent about Chinese Communist tyranny can be seen against a correlative backdrop of our burgeoning cancel culture, the censorship of Big Tech, and general decline of devotion to First Amendment principles alongside the Long March of political correctness through our institutions.
China is not the cause of the general erosion of American fidelity to free speech, but it is a contributor and one of its chief beneficiaries. As China poses arguably the greatest threat of any foreign actor to our liberties of all, the corruption resulting from our commercial ties is particularly acute.
For President Xi to start a dynasty, his only daughter has to get married. At 27, she is of the age when she should get married. But it can’t be to someone of peasant stock. It has to be to one of China’s princelings — or “Revolutionary Successors,” as they prefer to be known. President Xi has stressed the need for “red genes” in China’s rulers. The problem is that all the princelings are all already very wealthy, so marrying into the Xi family wealth would be of no consequence. China’s princesses do well, too. The Huawei executive arrested in Canada, Meng Wanzhou, has a stepsister, Annabel Yeo, who had her debut into high society at Le Bal des Débutantes in Paris in November 2018.
For a princeling, if you married Xi’s daughter, you would become consort to the empress, but there would be a downside: you would be killed in any palace coup.
If Xi Mingze is at Harvard, that suggests that the project to get her married off has had pushback and that President Xi isn’t having things going all his way. Another problem with Xi establishing a dynasty is that all the other families living in the gated community in Beijing for China’s elite, Zhongnanhai, would become less than equal, something that would stick in their craw more than the president-for-life thing.
The communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe lasted about 70 years before they burned out, and it has been wondered if the 70-year rule will also apply to China. The communist party in China recently celebrated 70 years since its founding, and it looks as if burnout is happening on cue. The princelings are jealous of the fortunes made by China’s entrepreneurial class and have started to take their fortunes from them, starting with the likes of Jack Ma, who had founded Alibaba. Another Chinese billionaire, Miles Kwok, has predicted that Jack Ma will be either in prison or dead within a year. Once started, expropriation will work its way down through the economy, and it will be a profound productivity-killer.
A lot of China’s managerial class now has at least part of its fortune offshore and has sent its children, often only one child, to foreign universities. Some of those children have been told, “Never come back to China.”
Xi Mingze at Harvard means that a coup is possible in China.
Built at a cost of $2.2 billion, the Salesforce Transit Center and Park formed the cornerstone of the Bay Area’s ambitious regional transportation plan: a vast, clean, efficient web of trains, buses, and streetcars, running through a hub acclaimed as the Grand Central Station of the West.
Snip.
Earlier that day, workers installing panels in the STC’s ceiling beneath the rooftop park uncovered a jagged crack in a steel beam supporting the park and bus deck. “Out of an abundance of caution,” officials said, they closed the transit center, rerouting buses to a temporary terminal. Inspectors were summoned. They found a similar fracture in a second beam.
Structural steel is exceptionally strong, but given certain conditions—low temperatures, defects incurred during fabrication, heavy-load stress—it remains vulnerable to cracking. Two types of cracks occur in steel: ductile fractures, which occur after the steel has yielded and deformed, and brittle fractures, which generally happen before the steel yields. Ductile fractures develop over time, as the steel stretches during use, explains Michael Engelhardt, Ph.D., a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the peer-review committee overseeing the STC’s response to the cracked-beam crisis.
Engineers can predict ductile fracture and make adjustments during design, such as redistributing the load among various parts of the structure,” Engelhardt says. “Brittle fractures, by contrast, happen suddenly and release a great deal of energy. They’re concerning. They aren’t supposed to happen.”
Entire world: Good riddance!@AndrewFeinberg: We can’t celebrate the death of a genocidal jihadist deathcult’s leader because it might reflect well on Trump.
Enjoy this roundup of links on the Islamic State in specific, and Syria, Turkey and the Kurds more generally, after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s timely demise:
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the hirsute rapist whom hundreds of thousands of Islamic State supporters considered their absolute leader, died yesterday during a U.S. military raid in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province, President Donald Trump announced on Sunday morning. Baghdadi became the head of ISIS in 2010 but was not seen in public until 2014, when the group designated him caliph and he addressed the world in a florid speech from the pulpit of the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq. Since then he has shown himself only once, on a dull video filmed in a windowless room and released in April.
As with Osama bin Laden, the most intriguing fact about Baghdadi’s assassination was its location, deep in what was considered enemy territory. The dominant force in Idlib is not ISIS—which is no longer dominant anywhere—but Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an affiliate of al-Qaeda. Recall that ISIS broke from al-Qaeda in 2013, and since al-Qaeda’s leaders rebuffed Baghdadi’s invitation to bow before him, the groups have traded nonstop insults and their members have tried to kill one another. Some of these insults do not strike me as the type that either side could easily take back: accusations of apostasy, disloyalty, cowardice, and idiocy. For Baghdadi to seek refuge among people who want to kill him probably means that the places where he had more support, such as within his home country of Iraq or near its border with Syria, could no longer provide him with any measure of safety. Finding him in HTS territory is like finding Derek Jeter hiding out in South Boston, or Martin Bormann living quietly by a synagogue on the Upper East Side.
Snip.
Baghdadi was special. By calling for the allegiance of all Muslims—and actually being taken seriously by a large number of them—he accomplished something no previous terrorist leader had done. He channeled, for the masses, a collective sense of connection to a glorious fantasy of an Islamic past. Bin Laden had asked Muslims to rise up in defense of Islam. But his concerns were distinctly 20th-century: overthrowing Arab despotisms, snuffing out the Jewish state, knocking over skyscrapers.
Baghdadi possessed a dramatic vision, one that any Muslim could partake in, that placed himself and anyone brave enough to join him in a line of warriors that extended back to the Prophet Muhammad himself. He noted, ostentatiously, that he hailed from the tribe of Quraish, the Prophet’s own. Historically, Muslims have counted membership in that tribe as one of about half a dozen criteria required of a valid caliph. That criterion had lapsed in importance for literally centuries, with numerous caliphs having no plausible claim to Quraishi ancestry. But Baghdadi claimed that he was a caliph, sensu stricto, in the classical tradition going back to the Abbasids. Furthermore, he would bring back a version of classical Islamic law, including legalized sex slavery and other abominations, in which he partook personally.
And now, like the Abbasids, he is dead—smashed to bits, according to Trump, by a self-detonated suicide vest. (His death was less tidy than that of his immediate Abbasid predecessor, al-Musta’sim Billah, 1213–58. The Mongols who deposed him believed that splattering his blood on the streets of Baghdad would bring bad luck, so they wrapped him in a carpet and stampeded their horses over it until his corpse was nicely tenderized.) Killing al-Musta’sim ended a dynasty. The Islamic State will likely name a successor to continue Baghdadi’s line. But the second caliph of the modern Islamic State will begin his reign in an even more impotent and pathetic state than Baghdadi left it.
When I began speaking with ISIS supporters five years ago, they parroted all the points of propaganda that the group has since made famous. But they included one point that the Islamic State has since de-emphasized. To be a valid caliph, they said, one must have control over territory and implement Islamic law within it. A pledge of allegiance to a caliph (called bay’ah, both classically and by ISIS), they stressed, is a contract, an agreement between parties in which each offers something to the other. The caliph offers an Islamic state; his subject offers obedience. The contract evaporates when the caliph stops providing a state.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has not provided a state for quite a while. Within the Islamic State, members have grumbled that he has been an absentee caliph, gone for months at a time, and not even clear in his instructions about whom to follow in his absence. The group long since stopped promising a paradise, and downgraded its territorial offering to a hellscape soon to be overrun by its enemies. It became ideologically split, with hard-liners accusing others of being softies, and both the softies and the hard-liners trying to kill one another. Baghdadi, it seems, was gone for much of this debate, and provided only vague guidance and little in the way of security or leadership. Some former supporters have felt abandoned, and have voiced their disgust.
His death will therefore definitively end an era that had already, in a sense, ended, if not with a whimper then with an inglorious bleating of complaints from his own flock. For years now, the hardest thing for outsiders to understand about the Islamic State has been its ability to inspire—to get some Muslims to leave comfortable circumstances to fight and die. For the past year, even as the world has diverted its attention from ISIS, the group’s ability to inspire has been severely diminished, and almost no one is leaving home to die for ISIS, or choosing to die in suicide attacks for ISIS at home. The inspiration is gone, and the party is over, for now. And although Baghdadi has obtained the martyrdom he sought, he got it in the end not as a caliph but as just another bloody hairball in a pile of rubble.
Legacy media outlets responded to President Trump’s announcement of the U.S. military’s successful mission against ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with their trademark hostility and anger. That’s because the inarguably good news threatens corporate media goals for shaping foreign policy, impeaching the president, and defeating Trump in 2020.
Snip.
Corporate media have moved from at least projecting concern for reporting the actual news into unembarrassed political actors. That enables them to flamboyantly spin — as opposed to their previous method of subtly spinning — even major news with indisputable facts.
The 2016 campaign was a humiliating defeat for Hillary Clinton, but also for political media. Media outlets never understood the electorate they were paid big dollars to write and broadcast news about. They confidently asserted Trump had no chance to win, and convinced themselves that casting off journalistic standards was defensible because of the certain ruin Trump would bring.
Instead, President Trump’s administration has been marked by success in the domestic and foreign spheres. The economy is humming, including job and wage growth the media had previously said was unlikely to impossible to achieve. This is due to tax cuts, tax reform, and unprecedented deregulation. No new wars have been launched, much less the apocalyptic nuclear wars the media predicted. A long overdue recalibration with China is taking place.
What is good news for the country is bad news for the media and their political allies.
One of the tools they can utilize in their war on the president is to deny him honest media coverage of his successes, making it more difficult to clip news of them discussing those successes in an honest fashion. It’s not a conspiracy so much as a shared mindset that kicked into action this weekend.
Snip.
Trump Foreign Policy Successes Undermine Media Impeachment Drive
The biggest champions of impeachment are the media, seeking to save face after their 2016 and Russia collusion hoax failures. They have all but forced the Democrats to launch the proceedings even though their path is fraught with difficulties.
Yesterday’s Sunday Morning shows — no matter the outlet or the particular host — were all scheduled to throw more fuel on the impeachment fire. Instead, they were forced to cover a major success in the battle to defeat the Islamic State.
Impeaching the president who oversaw the operation looks even worse than just impeaching the president who has survived a non-stop, years-long campaign from the media, Democrats, and other Resistance members. For impeachment to have any chance of survival, the media need to both downplay and move quickly from the story back to their uncritical repetition of Democratic Party talking points.
Elsewhere, Syrian and Turkish forces are reportedly slugging it out with one another near Ras al-Ayn on the Turkish-Syrian border. Evidently that’s actual Syrian regulars engaged against actual Turkish regulars, not just their respective proxy forces (which are also involved), though I’m not sure that’s been verified. I fail to see how having a small contingent of U.S. troops there in harm’s way would improve the situation. (See here for my previous update.)
