Now that President-elect Donald Trump has officially nominated retired Marine Corps General James Norman “Mad Dog” Mattis as his Secretary of Defense, here’s a roundup of some Mattis links:
@20committee My new Patron Saint. #SaintMattisOfQuantico #HeIsMySECDEF #PatronSaintOfChaos pic.twitter.com/lkqG5VfD9H
— Kevin (@75almanac) December 2, 2016
(Hat Tip: Dwight.)
Republicans everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief:
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean dropped out of the race to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Friday.
Dean, who served as DNC chairman from 2005 to 2009, announced in a pre-recorded video to a conference of state Democratic chairs that he would step aside to allow for a new face to lead the party as it seeks to rebuild.
That reduces the field of candidates to three.
The front-runner is Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who has racked up endorsements from Washington lawmakers and national labor unions.
South Carolina Democratic Chairman Jaime Harrison and New Hampshire Chairman Ray Buckley are also in the race.
President Obama’s allies are trying to recruit Labor Secretary Tom Perez for the role, and NARAL President Ilyse Hogue is also considering a bid.
I didn’t have Ray Buckley in my last roundup. Among the first links that comes out on the openly gay Buckley are a story about unproven child pornography charges against him and this oddly-edited hit video:
So we have a black Muslim vs. a gay white man for DNC Chair. Well, this ought to be interesting…
Confirming widespread rumor, President-elect Donald Trump announced he’s nominating retired Marine Corps General James Norman “Mad Dog” Mattis as his Secretary of Defense.
Being Trump, he made the announcement at his “Victory Tour” rally in Cincinnati.
Mattis is a universally respected a military leader (at least outside the fever swamps of the left that hate all American military power, as well as those who serve), and should make a great Secretary of Defense.
House Democrats have re-elected Nancy Pelosi as their leader.
The California lawmaker, who has led the party since 2002, turned back a challenge from Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan on Wednesday.
Her win came despite disenchantment among some in the Democratic caucus over the party’s disappointing performance in the elections earlier this month. Democrats will remain in the minority in the House and Senate next year and won’t have the presidency as a bulwark against Republicans.
Pelosi defeated Ryan 134 votes to 63.
In 2009, the House Democratic caucus had 257 seats. When the 115th Congress convenes on January 3rd, they will have 194.
Nancy Pelosi has lead Democrats as either Speaker or Minority leader for that entire period of time. Today, House Democrats will vote whether to reelect the 76-year California Democrat as their leader, or to vote for Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, 43, as their leader instead.
Odds are good they’re going to opt for the septuagenarian hard liberal over Jim Traficant’s former aide.
Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein is raising money for a recount in three states Donald Trump won: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Funny thing, through: Stein is not only raising far more money than the recount actually requires, but she keeps raising the amount she’s requesting:
November 24, 2016 at 3:46AM – In the beginning, Stein figured she needed a total of $2.5mm to fund her recount efforts. That figure included $2.2mm for the actual filing fees and presumably another $0.3mm for legal fees and other costs.
November 24, 2016 at 1:20PM – Then, just 12 hours later, after the cash just kept flowing in, Stein figured she needed at least another $2mm as her fundraising goal was raised to $4.5mm in total. Of course, the filing fees of $2.2mm didn’t change but the “attorney’s fees” apparently surged by about 300% and the total costs of the effort skyrocketed to $6-7mm.
November 25, 2016 at 6:11AM – Now, just this morning as Stein approaches $5mm in total donations, her overall fundraising goal has surged once again and now stands at $7mm.
And that’s on total filing fees of $2.1 million for recounts in those three states. As Zero Hedge puts it, “So, with nearly $5mm raised so far, the question is no longer whether recounts will occur in WI, MI and PA but just how much Jill Stein will be able to drain from the pockets of disaffected Hillary supporters to fund her long-shot efforts.”
Indeed, Stein has raised more money for the recount than she did for her actual Presidential campaign. It’s also garnered 12 times the press coverage her actual campaign did.
And all this for a recount that experts say has no chance of changing the actual results:
Recounts typically don’t swing enough votes to change the winner. Out of 4,687 statewide general elections between 2000 and 2015, just 27 were followed by recounts, according to data compiled by FairVote, a nonpartisan group that researches elections and promotes electoral reform. Just three of those 27 recounts resulted in a change in the outcome, all leading to wins for Democrats: Al Franken’s win in Minnesota’s 2008 U.S. Senate race, Thomas M. Salmon’s win in Vermont’s 2006 auditor election and Christine Gregoire’s win in Washington’s 2004 gubernatorial race.
Recounts also typically don’t change the margin by an amount that would be large enough to affect the result of this year’s presidential election. The mean swing between the top two candidates in the 27 recounts was 282 votes, with a median of 219. The biggest swing came in Florida’s 2000 presidential election recount, when Al Gore cut 1,247 votes off George W. Bush’s lead, ultimately not enough to flip the state to his column. In each state Trump won or leads in, his advantage is more than 10,000 votes.
Indeed, Trump’s victory margins in those three states are:
Even Democrats are calling Stein’s recount a waste of time.
“It’s a waste of time and money. It is not going to change anything,” said Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, who served as campaign manager for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign.
“I think it probably was the Stein people looking for a way to stay relevant, raise some money and take the stink off of them. Instead of everybody screaming, ‘You made Trump happen,’ she is counting the votes to change that whole narrative.”
Even the Clinton team thinks it’s a waste of time:
In a Medium post on Saturday, Clinton lawyer Marc Elias wrote, “Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves.”
The Clinton team’s involvement will likely be limited to having lawyers or other experts at recount sites to watch over the proceedings.
“My sense is that the Clinton people would have preferred this not to happen and are going to be involved only in a monitoring capacity,” said Robert Shrum, a Democratic strategist and a veteran of several presidential campaigns, including that of 2004 nominee John Kerry.
Shrum added that he believed “people are way over-excited about the thing.” There is, he added, “no chance” that it will change the election’s outcome.
But Stein missed Pennsylvania recount deadline. So now Stein’s not only suing, she’s asking her supporters to file precinct-by-precinct recount requests. “Further complicating the effort, the Pennsylvania Department of State noted that some of the precincts are in counties that had finished certifying their election results, closing the five-day window for petitioning precincts to hold recounts.”
Wisconsin has denied Stein’s request to do a time-consuming hand-recount. So naturally she’s suing there as well.
Michigan has already certified its election results for Trump.
There’s been speculation that the entire strategy is to delay official electors from casting their votes for Trump in order to cast the election into the House, but that seems equally unlikely. All electoral votes must be finalized December 13 so they can be cast December 19. Michigan and Wisconsin both have Republican governors (and Michigan a Republican Secretary of State), so the chances they would play along in this Hail Mary charade by not certifying electors is nil. Nor do I see three separate federal judges (Michigan is in the Sixth Circuit, Pennsylvania in the Third, and Wisconsin in the Seventh) all moving to block electors from voting.
Stein’s play is a scam to extract money from gullible liberals, and will not prevent Donald Trump from being certified as the 45th President of the United States of America.
Now that the world has time to digest Fidel Castro’s death, here’s a roundup of more proof that, yes, he was a tyrannical torturing commie scumbag.
- He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.
- He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.
- He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.
- He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.
- He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.
- He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.
- He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.
- He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.
- He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.
- He censored all means of expression and communication.
- He established a fraudulent school system that provided indoctrination rather than education, and created a two-tier health-care system, with inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and superior care for himself and his oligarchy, and then claimed that all his repressive measures were absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these two ostensibly “free” social welfare projects.
- He turned Cuba into a labyrinth of ruins and established an apartheid society in which millions of foreign visitors enjoyed rights and privileges forbidden to his people.
- He never apologized for any of his crimes and never stood trial for them.
What all of these pols and pundits lazily presume is that if the state of Cuban health care and education have markedly improved on Castro’s watch, surely the situation was dire during the final years of the Batista dictatorship.
Well, not exactly. In 1959 Cuba had 128.6 doctors and dentists per 100,000 inhabitants, placing it 22nd globally—that is, ahead of France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. In infant mortality tables, Cuba ranked one of the best in the world, with 5.8 deaths per 100,000 babies, compared to 9.5 per 100,000 in the United States. In 1958 Cuba’s adult literacy rate was 80 percent, higher than that of its colonial grandfather in Spain, and the country possessed one of the most highly-regarded university systems in the Western hemisphere.
Cuba improved, as have most countries, on some of these indices in the years since the revolution. As Reason Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin points out, “countries like Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil have posted equal gains in literacy during the same time period without resorting to totalitarian governments.”
Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro has died.
Says Texas Senator Ted Cruz: “Fidel Castro’s death cannot bring back his thousands of victims, nor can it bring comfort to their families. Today we remember them and honor the brave souls who fought the lonely fight against the brutal Communist dictatorship he imposed on Cuba.”
Castro was known both for opressing and torturing his people (and more recently putting gay people in concentration camps) and for getting left-wing useful idiots to sing his praises. The sort of clueless leftists who sing the praises of Cuba’s “modern” healthcare without ever having experienced the filthy hellholes that are its hospitals firsthand. There are political prisoners who have rotted in jail for more than two decades merely for speaking out against Castro’s brutal regime.
Those interested in the real Cuba beyond the tourist Potemkin villages for the useful idiot fellow travelers should read Michael Totten’s many dispatches from the island.
The world is a better place for Fidel Castro’s too-long-delayed passing.