This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.
You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.
When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.
There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.
The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.
Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.
We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.
All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.
The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.
Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.
If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.
They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”
They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.
But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.
Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.
Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.
Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.
Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.
Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.
To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.
For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.
We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later
The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.
There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.
Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.
West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:
The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.
They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.
Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”
For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.
Snip.
The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.
It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.
Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:
“One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”
Important questions:
100 million dollar question that leftists are refusing to answer:
To what organization do the funds raised on the Black Lives Matter website go?
BLM raised 40 million dollars in 48 hours because of George Floyd’s death. But WHO did Act Blue direct that funding to?
Rioters in Philly deface a statue of Matthias Baldwin, an early abolitionist who fought against slavery 30 years before it ended. pic.twitter.com/1HKrDusPBh
President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.
President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.
The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.
“The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.
Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.
What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?
The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”
Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
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.
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.)
“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.)
Two reactions: 1. Good for him! 2. And the moon became as blood…
Happy dog:
WELCOME HOME: Astronaut Christina Koch recently returned home after a record-breaking 328-day space mission — and her adorable dog couldn't have been happier to see her. https://t.co/JTBzJnLM1xpic.twitter.com/2RIYeGKaok
Why green-light the Full Monty impeachment farce three days later, when it was clear as day that this “bombshell” was already fizzling, just like all the other “bombshells”?
The answer is simple: the absence of impeachable offenses makes no difference whatsoever, because the outcome is pre-determined, and Pelosi’s options are stark: start the impeachment now, and retain control of the narrative, or start a month or two from now, and lose control completely, with the impeachment hearings dragging on into the primary season.
Pelosi understands perfectly that an election where the Democratic Party is framed as a single-issue party, whose sole concern is an impeaching a president over two casual sentences in a phone call, will be catastrophic. But she has run out of rope.
Impeachment proceedings are a given, because her caucus now almost unanimously demands it, and her caucus demands it because the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the Resistance crazies and the hard left. Pelosi has also run out of cute euphemisms for impeachment—the usual Pelosi mumbo-jumbo, like “inquiry,” “investigation,” and “official inquiry,” no longer work without giving the crazies the real deal.
Pelosi had to get ahead of the tidal wave before it drowned her. As Spartan women used to say to their men, “Return with the shield, or on it.” Pelosi, who generally does not lack in political courage, would rather return with the shield this time, and live to fight another day. So she chose the better of two bad options.
Snip.
With the House vote done by December, Pelosi can congratulate the troops, and move on, regardless of the result (not that it’s in any doubt). She can then proudly proclaim that the House Democrats have been diligent in saving the republic, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and those nasty obstructionist unpatriotic Republicans in the Senate refuse to see the light.
With a straight face, she can tell the lunatics and the impeachment fanatics that she has given them exactly what they asked for, and that it is up to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer now. Then she can privately breathe a sigh of relief.
Pelosi can then spend 2020 working to retain her House majority, while hoping Republican voters lose their energy by next November. Democratic candidates can spend the next year talking about something else, anything else, and at least have a chance of defeating Trump.
Pelosi knows that if impeachment is on the voters’ minds next year, Trump will be reelected in a tsunami. Her majority and speakership will go the way of the Dodo bird. The only way to change that narrative is to do the impeachment show now, and forget all about it next year.
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) However, his idea that the Senate can have a quick up-and-down vote on impeachment simply won’t happen. Article I, Section 3, Paragraph 6 of the United States Constitution states:
The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.
That means a real trial, presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts. That also means that President Trump’s defense team will probably be able to compel witnesses to testify, and given the Constitutional nature of the proceedings, it is entirely possible that witnesses will not be able to plead Fifth Amendment rights and refuse such testimony. Let the Senate call James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Rep. Adam Schiff, Hunter Biden, Andrew McCabe, Bruce and Nellie Ohr and every Fusion GPS and CrowStrike employee involved in both the Russian collusion hoax and Hunter Biden’s crooked dealings in the Ukraine.
The Clinton impeachment lasted a month, had thirteen House members stating the case for the prosecution, and dealt with a much narrower case and criteria. There’s no reason a Trump impeachment wouldn’t take three to six times as long for a much more complex and sprawling case.
If Democrats want an impeachment, let’s give them an impeachment, good and hard.
A rule published Monday bars migrants from seeking asylum in the United States if they’ve traveled through another country first.
Tens of thousands of migrant families from Central America travel through Mexico to the U.S. each month, many claiming asylum. The Trump administration claims families are taking advantage of legal loopholes it says allow migrants a free pass to the country while they wait out phony asylum requests.
The DOJ’s statement documents one particularly horrifying murder that some of the gang members are charged with where a rival gang member “was abducted, choked, and driven to a remote location in the Angeles National Forest” where he was “dismembered, and his body parts were thrown into a canyon after one of the defendants allegedly cut the heart out of the victim’s body.”
I didn’t initially buy into this business about how Trump’s often-unorthodox tweets and actions are part of a political 3D chess game he’s playing while the rest of the country is playing checkers.
But I do now.
I could go through a lengthy punchlist of examples of Trump statements and moves that prove the 3D chess theory, but that would dramatically overtake the space this column has to offer. Instead, let’s just talk about this weekend’s flare-up over the president’s Twitter outburst aimed at The Squad — the four idiot freshman Democrat congresswomen, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who have spent their time as elected officials offering one inappropriate and stupid anti-American outburst after another.
Trump didn’t initially name any of the four. He didn’t talk about Omar or Ocasio-Cortez, and he didn’t talk about Ayana Pressley or Rashida Tlaib.
Instead he referred to “Progressive” Democratic congresswomen, and then noted that they “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
This was decried by all the Usual Suspects as an abjectly racist statement, a response that Trump certainly anticipated and couldn’t care less about. Even some weak-kneed Republicans thrashed about in paroxysms of self-righteousness about how Trump could possibly be so bigoted and insensitive in calling out The Squad. After all, three of the four were born in this country!
But Omar wasn’t.
Omar is from Somalia. Omar is quite possibly here in this country after having committed immigration fraud. There has been a quite credible, perhaps even convincing, case made that Ilhan Omar married her biological brother in furtherance of that immigration fraud. And Ilhan Omar has not stopped making incendiary anti-American and pro-Muslim Brotherhood statements since she entered public life.
Absolutely everything Trump said in his tweets applies perfectly and without stipulation to Ilhan Omar.
The fact that he didn’t use her name meant that our political betters immediately assumed he was also talking about Pressley, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez.
Which bothered Trump not one bit.
Paragraphs on the unpopularity of Omar and Ocasio Cortez with actual voters (which I covered here) snipped.
So what do you do if you want to ensure Omar and AOC poison those so-called moderate Democrats who won those swing House districts last year?
You force Pelosi into bed with them.
Which is precisely what Trump has done.
The Democrat leadership immediately, reflexively, lined up behind The Squad after an entire week of slapping them down. Al Green, a Democratic congressman from the slums of Houston, is now attempting to use Trump’s tweets as a fresh justification for impeachment, which is all Al Green does in Congress. There will be a House resolution condemning the president’s comments as racist, on which Pelosi has put her stamp of approval, and another seeking to formally censure Trump.
All of this is precisely what Trump wanted. And he proved it by doubling and then tripling down on his statements Monday, first unleashing a new set of tweets mostly quoting Lindsey Graham, who had partially rebuked the president for getting too personal about The Squad in his complaints, and then popping off in a Rose Garden press avail with comments directly eviscerating Omar in a way I can’t remember ever having seen a president do to a member of Congress. Which was glorious, by the way, and if you haven’t seen the video you owe it to yourself to watch it.
Don’t think for one second that Trump doesn’t absolutely love this fight. He is a pig in slop at this point. Trump will continue forcing Pelosi and her leadership team into bed with The Squad from here all the way to Election Day, and when he’s through he won’t just win reelection in a landslide but he’ll also take away every single one of those swing districts.
The four — AOC, Tlaib, Pressley, Omar — have no clout in the Democratic caucus. But because of the confrontations they have caused and the controversy they have created, they have a massive media following.
Paradoxically, their interests in winning cheers as the fighting arm of the Democratic Party coincide with the interests of Donald Trump. He entertains and energizes his base by answering in kind their attacks on him and by adopting incendiary rhetoric of his own. He is now assuming the old “America! Love it or Leave it!” stance in going after the four women as anti-American ingrates.
They, by calling Trump a criminal, racist and fascist for whom impeachment proceedings should have begun months ago, elate and energize the outraged left of their party.
Among the presidential candidates, some have begun to side with the four, with Bernie Sanders saying Pelosi has been “a little” too tough on them.
On “Meet the Press,” Bernie added: “You cannot ignore the young people of this country who are passionate about economic and racial and social and environmental justice. You’ve got to bring them in, not alienate them.”
Trump’s Sunday attack forced Pelosi to stand with her severest critics, and she re-elevated the race issue with this tweet: “When Trump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.”
Do Democrats believe that refighting the racial battles of the 1960s that were thought to have been resolved is a winning hand in 2020?
Does Pelosi think that demeaning white America is going to rally white or minority Americans to Democratic banners?
(Caveat: Patrick Buchanan.)
Democrats tell Jake Tapper off the record that Trump snookered them into embracing The Squad. “And they have to pretend that their party is unified because of their fear of being challenged in primaries by radicals with the support of Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s Svengali chief of staff and the brains behind the Justice Democrats.”
Chakrabarti’s previous HQ was a Knoxville address out of which the Justice Democrats and another PAC operated side by side with a dozen congressional campaign committees. This arrangement flouted a variety of campaign finance laws and prompted several Federal Election Commission complaints, including one alleging that Chakrabarti set up a $1 million slush fund. But this sort of skullduggery is standard practice among Democrats. What exacerbated the already tense atmosphere in their House caucus was Chakrabarti’s response to the $4.6 billion border aid package passed by Congress last month. On June 27, he took to Twitter and berated the Democratic leadership for its shortcomings:
As usual, Dem leadership tried to create a pre-watered down border bill because of a mistaken idea that it’s more “viable.” And they lost to McConnell anyway. This is the entire theory of change that never works. Why not start from your strongest negotiating stance?
Predictably, this presumptuous tweet drew a number of angry responses from various Democrats who had voted for the measure, whereupon Chakrabarti once again betook himself to Twitter and proceeded to accuse his critics of racism:
Instead of “fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” let’s call the New Democrats and Blue Dog Caucus the “New Southern Democrats.” They certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.
Chakrabarti later deleted that tweet, but not before it had clearly signaled who actually calls the shots in AOC’s office.
Snip.
Chakrabarti’s Justice Democrats PAC is also taking fire from the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The Hill reports, “Congressional Black Caucus members are furious at Justice Democrats, accusing the outside progressive group … of trying to oust lawmakers of color, specifically African American lawmakers.” The PAC evidently plans to primary at least six CBC members who occupy safe Democratic seats simply because they don’t lean far enough to the left. Chakrabarti is clearly using his position as AOC’s chief of staff to engineer a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. He said as much during an extensive profile for The Washington Post Magazine:
To me, there wasn’t a difference between working for her and working for the movement … The whole theory of change for the current Democratic Party is that to win this country we need to tack to the hypothetical middle … you don’t take unnecessary risks, which translates to: You don’t really do anything.
Chakrabarti doesn’t see himself as a mere staffer in some congresswoman’s office. He sees AOC as someone who provides him with a headquarters from which he can “fundamentally change” the Democratic Party.
Speaking of The Squad, The Minneapolis Star Tribuneactually reports on allegations against Omar: “New investigative documents released by a state agency have given fresh life to lingering questions about the marital history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and whether she once married a man — possibly her own brother — to skirt immigration laws.”
Powerline, which has been following the story the media wouldn’t, has still more:
In 1995, Ilhan entered the United States as a fraudulent member of the “Omar” family.
That is not her family. The Omar family is a second, unrelated family which was being granted asylum by the United States. The Omars allowed Ilhan, her genetic sister Sahra, and her genetic father Nur Said to use false names to apply for asylum as members of the Omar family.
Ilhan’s genetic family split up at this time. The above three received asylum in the United States, while Ilhan’s three other siblings — using their real names — managed to get asylum in the United Kingdom.
Ilhan Abdullahi Omar’s name, before applying for asylum, was Ilhan Nur Said Elmi.
Her father’s name before applying for asylum was Nur Said Elmi Mohamed. Her sister Sahra Noor’s name before applying for asylum was Sahra Nur Said Elmi. Her three siblings who were granted asylum by the United Kingdom are Leila Nur Said Elmi, Mohamed Nur Said Elmi, and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
Ilhan and Ahmed married in 2009, presumably to benefit in some way from a fraudulent marriage. They did not divorce until 2017.
Democrats have defined racism down yet again. “Thirty-two percent (32%) of Democrats, however, say it’s racist for any white politician to criticize the political views of a politician of color. So being a ‘politician of color’ means that your views are immune to disagreement. Unless–once again–you are a Republican.”
The point is, apparently, Democrats are sick of thinking about that guy, the “guy in a diner in rural” whatever. Once they were safely stowed in a basket — a basket of deplorables — and that worked out so disastrously that the reaction could be to obsess over these imaginary people. Are Democratic Party candidates expected to actually venture into the hinterlands? No, they’ll just worry about those people, and then they come to Madison (where I live) or Milwaukee to try to score enough votes to outnumber those diner people. That’s what Democrats do to win Wisconsin.
Planned Parenthood head ousted over refusal to back transsexual abortions. Tranny madness is going to take out the entire leftwing establishment by insisting that every member must forthrightly declare that 2+2=5.
The Amazon pullout of Seattle continues. The corporate giant announced on Tuesday that it is going to build a 43-story tower in Bellevue.
It will be Amazon’s tallest building anywhere in the world, and it will be the tallest building in Bellevue, which has more than a few skyscrapers. Several thousand employees will be able to work there. So it looks like this is another part in the saga of Amazon leaving Seattle. All of this is because we have a city council and a mayor who have gone fanatic about socialism. They keep pushing anti-business policies.
What this means for the downtown Seattle real estate market is that when the economy inevitably starts to turn, it will be cataclysmic. When you have one company that takes up so many thousands of square feet of downtown real estate, and that company moves out, real estate prices will fall.
I don’t know when this is going to happen, but I am very confident in my analysis; Seattle will fall harder than any other city in the country. This is because Seattle has been the craziest in its Leftist run-up during this boom economy that we’re enjoying right now.
We already have so many businesses on the brink of survival because of the minimum wage because of all of the controlling policies the city government keeps imposing. When the businesses start toppling, you’re going to see all the support industry in downtown Seattle — the food service, etc. — fall hard, too.
The Amazon pullout of Seattle is another dramatic sign that when the people who drive our economy, our tax revenue, our job creation are out because of our politics, it’s time to change our politics.
In addition to his sexual predation with “tweens and teens,” Epstein pursued ambitious, beautiful New York City women in their 20s in the early 2000s, some of them ex-models seeking a professional afterlife. To this woman, and others, Epstein introduced himself as the owner of a hedge fund with clients investing $1 billion or more. He kept his child molestation secret, and came off as a gentle, erudite recluse. He was often at movie premieres, sometimes with a blonde on each arm—a blonde of legal age, but still, as noted this week by David Boies, usually under 25 years old. His predation had not been reported to the police yet, but there were indications that he was somewhat different than most mature men his age. Eleanora Kennedy, the elegant wife of powerhouse lawyer Michael Kennedy, recalls asking Epstein to underwrite a premiere party at the Metropolitan Club for The White Countess, a Merchant Ivory film released in 2005. “I got him on the phone and explained that the event was also a benefit for a women’s medical center conducting a study about menopause,” says Kennedy. “As soon as I said ‘menopause,’ he said, ‘Ms. Kennedy, if you don’t say that word again, I’ll send you a check for $10,000.’”
Like most of the older men who date young women, Epstein seemed to take great pride in his behavior. He seemed to desperately want other important men to perceive him as a great lothario, Genghis Khan in a monogrammed sweatshirt. A former model who was on Epstein’s 727 shortly after she graduated college recalls him taking her and some older men on a tour to show off his custom-designed, padded floors. “When I saw that I thought, Wow, rich people are weird,” she says. “I was so stupid and naïve—Why are padded floors cool? I was too young to get it.” The men simply laughed and winked, joking with each other that Epstein padded his floors so that he could have sex on the floor at 10,000 feet.
Also: He liked to keep his bedroom at 54°F when slept.
Media unveils bombshell report of Trump hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein…in 1992.
Yes, that’d be 27 years ago, before Epstein was even known to have done anything illicit. So apparently, Trump is guilty by association because he couldn’t see into the future and know that Epstein would abuse women some years later. In fact, Epstein did not even own his “pedophile island” in 1992, nor are there currently any victims dating back to that time.
The sexual assault charges against Kevin Spacey have been dismissed. The case, which involved Spacey allegedly groping an 18-year old man, evidently had multiple problems and fell apart when the accuser refused to testify. This is the only one of some fifteen accusers (one as young as 14) who alleged Spacey did something sleazy with them.
Related: CNN reporter asks a panel of women to comment on President Trump’s “racist” tweets. Their reply: “It’s not racist.” Including a legal immigrant.
None of these women, including a legal immigrant, think the president's comments were racist.
“Billionaire investor Peter Thiel says one reason for Google aiding in the transfer of AI technology to the Chinese military in favor of America is that “woke” Google employees are anti-American and prefer China to the U.S.”
In addition to being a corrupt scumbag, the Governor of Puerto Rico is also a bit of an asshole. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Today’s stupid ecoscam headline: “Streaming Online Pornography Produces as Much CO2 as Belgium.” From the comments: “If we had a global referendum on whether we’d rather have porn or Belgium, I wouldn’t bet on Belgium.”
#TeamCocaineMitch is already throwing down on Democratic opponent Amy McGrath:
Wes Pruden, editor of the Washington Times, RIP. I like the cut of his jib:
He was the last of the old-time newspapermen, and the word “journalist” was prohibited from appearing in the pages of the Times during his tenure as editor-in-chief.
That rule was one of several variations from the AP Stylebook known as “Prudenisms,” reflecting Mr. Pruden’s preference for plain English and his hostility to euphemism, jargon and lazy writing. For example, “controversial” was prohibited, as were “alleged,” “allegation” and “allegedly.” If someone was accused of wrongdoing, then you had to cite a source making that charge, rather than just saying the person allegedly did whatever it was. Also, under Mr. Pruden’s rules, “gay” was not an acceptable synonym for homosexual, which meant that, as an assistant editor on the national desk, I had to change this in AP wire stories.
The Times used courtesy titles, so the President would be “Mr. Trump” and the Speaker of the House “Mrs. Pelosi” on second reference, and we were not allowed to use “Ms.,” so that on second reference a certain New York Democrat would be Miss Ocasio-Cortez. Also, we did not use “Dr.” as the honorific for a Ph.D., but only for an M.D. This was because doctorate degrees were a dime a dozen in D.C., and even many high-school principals could demand a “Dr.” if we ever let that get started. This particular Prudenism really ruffled the feathers of James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who had a Ph.D. in psychology and always insisted on being called Doctor Dobson, but the editor’s rule was unbending and on second reference he was always “Mr. Dobson.” I seem to recall Ralph Z. Hallow on the phone with Dobson’s people, getting an earful of complaints about this, as the “Doctor” thing was part of Dobson’s brand, as it were, but it was Mr. Pruden’s paper, and complaints were useless.
Some of my colleagues at the paper grumbled about Mr. Pruden’s curmudgeonly ways, but having an old-fashioned editor was in many ways a great blessing, because he was utterly invulnerable to any kind of political correctness or manufactured “controversy.” Of course, every liberal on the planet hated the Washington Times, so there was never any shortage of “activist” types indignant about our coverage, but there was no pressure they could bring to bear on Mr. Pruden that would make him flinch. A reporter whose story touched off a firestorm of outrage knew that, as long as he had the facts right, Mr. Pruden had his back. As long as the Old Man was happy with your work, it didn’t matter who else might be angry about it. He had courage, and a sense of honor.
Bird, an electric scooter sharing startup, lost $100 million over three months. On behalf of every Austinite who’s driven downtown recently, I’d just like to say:
A reminder from 50 years ago: Don’t drink and drive. And if you do, don’t leave the scene of the crash to flee. Especially if there was another passenger in the car. Especially if it’s underwater…
"We are doing a film of the musical 'cats'" "Why" "Shut up" "Are they going to look like cats or humans?" "Fuck you" "Are you ok?" "Cats with avatar human faces" "Why" "Fuck you" pic.twitter.com/dm3ooobmMt
The Jeffrey Epstein child sex trafficking scandal dominates today’s LinkSwarm, as does other people getting arrested for the same offense. Some kind of crackdown going on? We can only hope so.
Even by the standards of stomach-turning celebrity criminal scandals, the bits of information about multi-millionare Jeffrey Epstein and allegations of an underage sex-trafficking ring are utterly bizarre, pointing to something perhaps even bigger and worse going on. Just the reports out this morning prompt at least ten big questions.
One: How did Jeffrey Epstein make his fortune in the first place? One claim is a massive Ponzi scheme.
Two: Could Epstein really have been connected to some sort of intelligence service? In yesterday’s press conference, labor secretary Alex Acosta offered a weird, vague, contradictory, meandering answer when asked about this. If Epstein was working for some sort of spy agency, which one? What was the aim, to collect blackmail on prominent figures? Who was being blackmailed, and what did they do?
Three: Why did the office Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance try to keep Epstein from being registered as a top-level sex offender? “A seasoned sex-crimes prosecutor from Mr. Vance’s office argued forcefully in court that Mr. Epstein, who had been convicted in Florida of soliciting an underage prostitute, should not be registered as a top-level sex offender in New York.” The judge denied the request and declared, “I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this.”
Four: After Epstein was labeled a “Level 3 sex offender” — meaning the worst — Epstein was required by law to check in with the NYPD every 90 days. He never checked in at all over an eight-year span. How did that not generate any consequences?
The former Palm Beach County State Attorney had made national news three times during his career. Once when he went after Rush Limbaugh, then after Ann Coulter, two Republicans, and when, after being handed the case of Epstein, a co-founder of the Clinton Global Initiative, he gave him a pass.
Barry Krischer is a Democrat. Jeffrey Epstein is a billionaire donor to Democrats.
As Chief Prosecutor, Krischer had made his reputation with a zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting juveniles as adults. But after Epstein had abused underage girls, Krischer, according to the detective on the case, ignored police efforts to charge him with four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor and instead the billionaire abuser was indicted only on a minor charge of solicitation of prostitution.
Interviews with over a dozen girls and witnesses were ignored.
The victims were not notified of when they needed to appear before Krischer’s Grand Jury. Calls by the police to issue warrants for the arrest of Epstein and his associates were ignored by Kirscher’s subordinates. Eventually, Kirscher’s people stopped taking phone calls from the police.
The Palm Beach police chief claimed that information was being leaked to Epstein’s lawyers and wrote a public letter attacking Krischer and urging him to disqualify himself from the case. Instead the travesty went on. State prosecutors allowed Epstein to skip sex offender counselling, and hire a private shrink.
When the judge asked assistant state prosecutor Lanna Belohlavek if all the victims had signed off on the deal, she claimed that they had. The lawyer for the victims has said that was not the truth.
“Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta on Friday resigned from his post amid scrutiny over a plea agreement he cut with wealthy investor Jeffrey Epstein for sex abuse charges over a decade ago.”
Over on Althouse’s blog, many commenters are suggesting that Scott Walker replace him. To which I say: Bring it!
Speaking of child sex offenders, singer R. Kelly has been arrested on 13 federal sex trafficking charges, including “child pornography, enticement of a minor to engage to engage in criminal sexual activity and obstruction of justice.” The only question is, after all the similar crap Kelly has pulled over the years, how is he not already in jail for the rest of his life?
While serving as the highest-ranking elected woman in America for decades, San Fran Nan has chronically downplayed, whitewashed or excused the sleazy habits and alleged sexual improprieties of a long parade of Dem pervs — from former San Diego Mayor Bob Filner to former New York Reps. Eric Massa and Anthony Wiener to former Oregon Rep. David Wu to former Michigan Rep. John Conyers and current presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Since the woke-ty woke Democrats are now gung-ho on undoing special treatment of wealthy liberal sex creeps, perhaps they will soon be revisiting the matter of two of their other “faves,” Oregon real estate mogul and deep-pocketed left-wing White House donor Terry Bean and West Hollywood Clinton pal Ed Buck.
Here, let me help.
Terry Bean is the prominent gay rights activist who co-founded the influential Human Rights Campaign organization. He is also a veteran member of the board of the HRC Foundation, which disseminates Common Core-aligned “anti-bullying” material to children’s schools nationwide.
Like Epstein, Bean had a penchant for rubbing elbows and riding on planes with the powerful. Upon doling out more than $500,000 for President Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2012, he was rewarded with a much-publicized exclusive Air Force One ride with Obama. His Flickr account boasted glitzy pics with Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton.
Buck, of course, is the Democratic donor who had two dead overdosed black men in his apartment on different occasions. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Speaking of our supposed betters raping children, “Ex-U.N. Worker Jailed for 9 Years in Nepal for Raping Two Boys in ‘Alarm Bell for the Humanitarian Community.'” Oh, now there are alarm bells over Canadian Peter John Dalglish raping children? But not so much when various UN peacekeepers did the same thing in Africa in past decades.
Meet the anti-woke left. The usual quotient of socialist claptrap, but also a fierce critique of victimhood identity politics and the dysfunction of the Democratic Party.
Just as significant as Trump’s victory was Hillary Clinton’s loss, they tell me, in that it represented a rejection of an era of neoliberalism. ‘I’m from Indiana’, Frost tells me. ‘Bill signs NAFTA. That obliterated the towns where I’m from. People are extremely bitter about Bill Clinton for very good reasons. And she is married to that, literally and figuratively – she defends that legacy. How did we not see Trump coming?’
What’s more, Trump represented a repudiation of the entire establishment – Democrats and Republicans. ‘There is a severe crisis of legitimacy in our institutions’, says Frost: ‘The Republicans did not want Trump to win either… He was nobody’s first choice, except the American people’s, apparently.’
Snip.
Three years on from the 2016 presidential election, Democrats are still largely in denial or in despair about Trump’s victory. The now-discredited Russia-collusion narrative provided an excuse to avoid any soul-searching. ‘The whole Rachel Maddow and the NBC crowd have infected the minds of boomers with this dystopian narrative’, Khachiyan tells me. ‘Even my mom, who’s from Russia, buys the collusion narrative.’
‘The narrative isn’t itself so interesting’, she argues, but it shows ‘the willful failure of the Democratic Party. Again and again, they fall on their face. There’s some kind of Freudian, masochistic thing they have where they get off on publicly humiliating themselves.’
“Democratic lawmaker unloads on Ocasio-Cortez, chief of staff for ‘using the race card.'” The AOC-Pelosi tiff reminds us, yet again, that the primary purpose of “social justice” is to force in-group ideological conformity on the left. But when it comes to actually threatening a politician’s ability to get their beak into the trough, Rep. Clay and others still know which side their bread is buttered on. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Democrats have tapped former fighter pilot Amy McGrath to lose to Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky senate race. In one day, she raised $2.5 million…and flip-flopped on whether she would have confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. She lost her last race by 10,000 votes, and expect her to do much, much worse against Cocaine Mitch.
John O’Sullivan wonders if anyone can beat Boris Johnson for Tory leadership and the PM spot. Probably not, but it provides a light romp through Borismania…
David Scheller of Ammo To Go wrote to point out his deep, detailed look at suppressors. I was happy to see that Texas has more silencers owned than the next three states combined.
Greek conservatives win in a landslide over leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza’s party. Kyriakos Mitsotakis took over as Prime Minister on July 8.
Did the Russians who died aboard the A-12 Losharik submarine prevent a “planetary catastrophe?” Color me skeptical. Short of a Red Tide nuke launch scenario, it’s hard to conceive of any sort of accident, up to complete meltdown or even nuclear warhead detonation, that would result in “planetary catastrophe” on the Russian arctic seafloor. Assuming they were actually in the Barents Sea when the fire broke out, I don’t see how they’d be tapping undersea cables (as widely speculated), as the only one there is the Norway-to-Svarbald cable, which is hardly of crushing information importance. But the Russians have been known to lie before, and the fact that no less than seven first rank captains died aboard the ship (all but unheard of on a submarine) only fuels the speculation. And the arctic is way too far north for discovering either Cthulhu or Godzilla…
“It’s gotten worse under this entire current council,” he said. “Because we’ve practiced the policy — and I give Chris Rufo credit for this — the policy of false compassion where we’re not holding people accountable, where we’re not investing in adequate services, where we’re not allowing our law enforcement professionals to do their job.”
“We just need a sea change at City Hall. We need to reverse the culture because it’s only getting worse … We can offer them treatment and shelter and then insist that if they don’t accept services, we will enforce the law unless they choose to move along. We need both carrot and stick.”
For those readers who blessedly have not had to drive I-95, it is a national disgrace. It has been congested for as long as I can recall (over 30 years of personal experience with the stretch shown, and what we drove yesterday). It has been congested in exactly the same locations for those 30 years.
The same exact locations. 30 years. Offered for your consideration, the 20 miles on each side of Fredericksburg, VA. It was a parking lot in the 1980s; it was a parking lot yesterday. The reason then was that the highway lost a lane (more lanes in Richmond to the south and Washington to the north). The reason now is the same.
So riddle me this, Big Government Man: how in 30 years is it not possible to widen 40 miles of Interstate to remove what everybody in the Northeast Corridor knows is a notorious choke point? And please don’t be so dim and predictable as to say “there isn’t enough funding” – we spent a cool trillion dollars on a “stimulus” that the President swore would be “shovel ready” projects. You don’t get more shovel-ready than widening I-95.
So we see that it’s not possible for the government to provide services that don’t suck.
“A traffic stop turns up whiskey, a gun and a rattlesnake, police say — and that was before they found the uranium.” The big surprise here is that it’s from Oklahoma rather than Florida… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Tankfest 2019. I visited the Bovington Tank Museum in 2014, and if you’re interested in tanks and in the UK for an extended period of time, I highly recommend it.
And speaking of unlikely events of mass hysteria: 300,000 people on Facebook swear to storm Area 51. Great, they’re going to kill off Alex Jones’ entire audience…
Post-debate analysis, Biden is down a little, Harris is up a little, Buttigieg banks big Benjamins, Yang rises, and Williamson beams love into the cosmos. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update! And it’s absolutely packed to the gills this time.
Debate Roundup
Lots of reactions to the first two debates:
The headline out of tonight’s debate is going to be Kamala Harris starting off the second hour by turning to Joe Biden and just kicking the snot out of him on the previously long-forgotten issue of forced busing in Delaware. No older white male wants to get into a fight about racism with a younger African-American woman in a Democratic presidential primary. Biden tried to defend himself by first contrasting his work as a defense attorney with Harris’ record as a prosecutor, then moved on to a not terribly convincing, “I did not oppose busing in America; I opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education,” and then he cut himself off. Septuagenarians who have been in the Senate longer than I’ve been alive should probably avoid the term “my time is up.” Biden would have been better off defending his stance on the merits, declaring that busing kids across town to new schools away from their homes was angering parents and exacerbating racial tensions instead of healing them.
One night won’t sink the Joe Biden campaign, but boy, did he look like he had a glass jaw, and he also seems to have aged a decade since he left the vice presidency. When asked what his first priority as president would be, Biden answered that it would be defeating Donald Trump.
Snip.
It’s a shame Andrew Yang couldn’t be there tonight. . . . Oh, he was on stage? I must have blinked too many times. The man with a million ideas literally got three minutes over two hours to pitch his ideas. This is an egregious mismanagement of the debate by MSNBC, and the Yang Gang has every right to be livid over this.
I wonder if non-Republicans felt about Donald Trump in 2016 the way I, and it seems quite a few other conservatives, feel about Marianne Williamson. Marianne, you beautiful lunatic. Every time you spoke, I didn’t know whether you were going to do a rain dance, cast a hex, or hold a seance. On those rare moments you got a chance to talk, I leaned forward because I had no idea what kind of absolute insanity was going to come out of your mouth. It was as riveting as a hostage situation. She contends American have chronic illnesses because of “chemical policies,” she wonders where the rest of the field has been for decades (er, in public office), and her first call will be to the prime minister of New Zealand, and she wants to harness the power of love for political purposes. In many ways, she is exactly the candidate that today’s Democratic party deserves.
The debates were the first chance voters got to look at the latest crop of Democratic presidential contenders, and they didn’t like what they saw.
Voters see most of the Democratic presidential candidates as more liberal than they are and rate their agenda as outside the mainstream.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 25% of Likely U.S. Voters consider most of the announced candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination to be about the same as they are in political terms. Fifty-four percent (54%) say most of these candidates are more liberal than they are, while only 13% think they are more conservative.
Wait, health care for illegal aliens, eliminating private insurance and taxpayer subsidized abortions for trannies aren’t popular with the American public? Who knew?
Immigration and Customs Enforcement forcibly removed 256,086 people in 2018, 57 percent of whom had committed crimes since they arrived in the U.S. So that’s an annual removal rate of 2 percent of the total undocumented population of around 12 million. That means that for 98 percent of undocumented aliens, in any given year, no consequences will follow for crossing the border without papers. At the debates this week, many Democratic candidates argued that the 43 percent of deportees who had no criminal record in America should not have been expelled at all and been put instead on a path to citizenship. So that would reduce the annual removal rate of illegal immigrants to a little more than 1 percent per year. In terms of enforcement of the immigration laws, this is a joke. It renders the distinction between a citizen and a noncitizen close to meaningless.
None of this reality was allowed to intervene in the Democratic debates this week. At one point, one moderator tellingly spoke about Obama’s record of deporting “3 million Americans.” In that bubble, there were no negatives to mass immigration at all, and no concern for existing American citizens’ interests in not having their wages suppressed through this competition. There was no concession that child separation and “metering” at the border to slow the crush were both innovated by Obama, trying to manage an overwhelmed system. Candidates vied with each other to speak in Spanish. Every single one proposed amnesty for all those currently undocumented in the U.S., except for criminals. Every single one opposes a wall. There was unanimous support for providing undocumented immigrants immediately with free health care. There was no admission that Congress needed to tighten asylum law. There was no concern that the Flores decision had massively incentivized bringing children to game the system, leaving so many vulnerable to untold horrors on a journey no child should ever be forced to make.
What emerged was their core message to the world: Get here without papers and you’ll receive humane treatment while you’re processed, you’ll never be detained, you’ll get work permits immediately, and you’ll have access to publicly funded health care and a path to citizenship if you don’t commit a crime. This amounts to an open invitation to anyone on the planet to just show up and cross the border. The worst that can happen is you get denied asylum by a judge, in which case you can just disappear and there’s a 1 percent chance that you’ll be caught in a given year. Who wouldn’t take those odds?
This is in a new century when the U.S. is trying to absorb the largest wave of new immigrants in our entire history, and when the percentage of the population that is foreign-born is also near a historic peak. It is also a time when mass immigration from the developing world has destabilized liberal democracies across the West, is bringing illiberal, anti-immigration regimes to power across Europe, and was the single biggest reason why Donald Trump is president.
I’m told that, as a legal immigrant, I’m shutting the door behind me now that I’ve finally made it to citizenship. I’m not. I favor solid continuing legal immigration, but also a reduction in numbers and a new focus on skills in an economy where unskilled labor is increasingly a path to nowhere. It is not strange that legal immigrants — who have often spent years and thousands of dollars to play by the rules — might be opposed to others’ jumping the line. It is not strange that a hefty proportion of Latino legal immigrants oppose illegal immigration — they are often the most directly affected by new, illegal competition, which drives down their wages.
I’m told that I’m a white supremacist for believing in borders, nation-states, and a reduction in legal immigration to slow the pace of this country’s demographic revolution. But I support this because I want a more successful integration and Americanization of immigrants, a better future for skilled immigrants, and I want to weaken the populist and indeed racist movements that have taken the West by storm in the past few years. It’s because I loathe white supremacy that I favor moderation in this area.
When I’m told only white racists favor restrictionism, I note how the Mexican people are more opposed to illegal immigration than Americans: In a new poll, 61.5 percent of Mexicans oppose the entry of undocumented migrants, period; 44 percent believe that Mexico should remove any undocumented alien immediately. Are Mexicans now white supremacists too? That hostility to illegal immigration may even explain why Trump’s threat to put tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t crack down may well have worked. Since Trump’s bluster, the numbers have measurably declined — and the crackdown is popular in Mexico. I can also note that most countries outside Western Europe have strict immigration control and feel no need to apologize for it. Are the Japanese and Chinese “white supremacists”? Please. Do they want to sustain their own culture and national identity? Sure. Is that now the equivalent of the KKK?
The Democrats’ good ideas need to be put in contact with this bigger question if they are to win wider support. In the U.S. in the 21st century, should anyone who enters without papers and doesn’t commit a crime be given a path to citizenship? Should all adversely affected by climate change be offered a path to citizenship if they make it to the border? Should every human living in violent, crime-ridden neighborhoods or countries be granted asylum in America? Is there any limiting principle at all?
I suspect that the Democrats’ new position — everyone in the world can become an American if they walk over the border and never commit a crime — is political suicide. I think the courts’ expansion of the meaning of asylum would strike most Americans as excessively broad. I think many Americans will have watched these debates on immigration and concluded that the Democrats want more immigration, not less, that they support an effective amnesty of 12 million undocumented aliens as part of loosening border enforcement and weakening criteria for citizenship. And the viewers will have realized that their simple beliefs that borders should be enforced and that immigration needs to slow down a bit are viewed by Democrats as unthinkable bigotry.
Advantage Trump.
What Sullivan can’t say is that activists in the Democratic Party, including almost all of the 2020 Presidential candidates, do want more illegal aliens crossing the border, as they view every single one of them as a likely Democratic voter, either illegally or though amnesty.
The first question of last night’s debate, asked by Savannah Guthrie to Elizabeth Warren, was a good one: “You have many plans — free college, free child care, government health care, cancellation of student debt, new taxes, new regulations, the breakup of major corporations. But this comes at a time when 71 percent of Americans say the economy is doing well, including 60 percent of Democrats. What do you say to those who worry this kind of significant change could be risky to the economy?”
Warren answered that the public is wrong to feel that satisfaction with the economy, that the economy is only “doing great for a thinner and thinner slice at the top.” Apparently, those 71 percent of Americans have all been hypnotized or something.
A more honest answer would be that the Democratic party is interested in a drastic overhaul of the economy because of two factors relating to the outcome of the 2016 election.
First, the departure of Barack Obama from office means it is safer for Democrats to openly discuss how his presidency disappointed them. Think back to how much wild optimism surrounded Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency in 2007-2008. Think of Oprah declaring that he was “the one.” Think of the massive crowds chanting, “O-ba-ma!” Think of the downright messianic coverage of Obama. Many Democrats genuinely believed that Obama’s election would usher in a golden age.
Different Democrats will give Obama different grades, but many would acknowledge that on some level they were disappointed by the outcome of his presidency — if for no other reason, the gradual decimation of the Democratic party at the local, state, and national levels from 2009 to 2016. George Soros called Barack Obama “my greatest disappointment.”
Matt Stoller contends Obama was far too cozy with big corporations and backed bailouts. The Affordable Care Act turned out to be a much more mixed bag than Democrats expected. As Michael Brendan Dougherty observed, last night ten Democrats discussed health care at length and never mentioned Obamacare.
Obama’s inability to deliver what Democrats truly wanted — and Democrats’ unwillingness to reexamine whether their expectations are realistic — leaves them wanting bigger, bolder changes. If the stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank didn’t do it, then the only thing that will is having the federal government cover the costs of every major expenditure in Americans’ lives — health care, college education, child care, etcetera.
He also says that Republicans’ inability to even pretend to care about deficits has emboldened Democrats to ask for everything as though they had infinite money.
Positive and negative impressions of the candidates following the debates. Biden’s negatives went up and his positives went down…but his positives are still higher than Harris (though now ever-so-slightly behind Sanders).
Politico says that, following he debates, the primary is now wide open, because that’s the sort of headline political reporters always want to right after the first debate. I suspect pundits are overstating the case to how badly Biden has been bloodied or Sanders surpassed by the hard-left female candidate they favor.
Video roundup from The Five:
Senator John Kennedy (the living Republican from Louisiana, not the dead Democrat from Massachusetts), said the Democratic debates were a clear win for Castro. Fidel, that is. “I know many of the candidates running, but I felt like I was listening to folks who were Castro without the beard, or Cuba without the sun.”
Morning Consult: Biden 33, Sanders 19, Harris 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, O’Rourke 2, Yang 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Moulton 1, Ryan 1. That’s good news for Harris and Yang, bad news for Biden (down 5, but still the frontrunner), O’Rourke and Castro.
Gravis (Maine primary): Biden 27, Warren 17, Sanders 15, Uncertain 11, Buttigieg 8, Yang 5, Ryan 4, Booker 3, Williamson 3, “Bennett” 2, Harris 2, O’Rourke 1, Swalwell 1, Gillibrand 1. Seems Maine likes Massachusetts liberals more than Vermont socialists. Of course, Maine used to be part of Massachusetts before becoming a state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, when [long, tedious historical digression excised].
(From here on down pre-debate polls)
Economist/YouGov: Biden 24, Warren 18, Sanders 15, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, Gabbard 3, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Moulton 1, Yang 1. That’s the highest I’ve seen Gabbard.
Emerson: Biden 34, Sanders 27, Warren 14, Harris 7, Buttigieg 6, Booker 3, Gillibrand 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1, Inslee 1, Gravel 1. That’s as high as I’ve ever seen Sanders, but it’s pre-debate and a small sample size (457).
Fundraising
Lots of candidates claimed they got a bump off their debate performances, and we finally have our first Q2 number:
Buttigieg says he raised nearly $25 million in Q2. That is a huge, impressive haul for someone that’s not even in the top three, much less a frontrunner. That’s just under where Sanders was in a two-man race in Q2 2015. This suggests that a lot of big money donors are disastisfied with both Biden and his primary hard-left opponents. Buttigieg is in until Iowa and probably beyond.
Harris says she raised $2 million following the debates.
“Castro sees strongest fundraising day post-Democratic debate.” “Over Wednesday and Thursday, the campaign raised 3,266 percent more money than it had the previous two days, according to the statement.” Absent a baseline, this jump if sort of meaningless. Maybe he pulled in all of $20 the previous two days…
“Inslee’s campaign said in a press release it enjoyed a record number of donations in a 24-hour period following his appearance in the debate Wednesday night, though it did not specify how much it had actually raised.” Sensing a pattern here.
“Dem debates spark fundraising gusher for breakout stars. The Democratic digital fundraising platform ActBlue raised $6.9 million on Thursday alone — the party’s biggest day in more than two months.” Are there individual candidate numbers? There are not.
Finally some numbers here, though a lot of it is rumors, guesswork and speculation.
Warren has built up one of the biggest campaign operations of any candidate, rapidly hiring experienced staffers in early primary and caucus states. In the first three months of 2019 alone, she spent nearly $1.9 million of the $6 million she raised to hire and retain more than 160 people.
Since then, that number has swelled upward of 200 and she’ll need to show that she’s raising the money to keep her operation going. Still, her campaign finances have been bolstered in part by a $10.4 million transfer from her Senate campaign committee, and her growing political support bodes well for her second-quarter haul.
Snip.
So far, all signs point to a massive second-quarter haul for Biden. He’s devoted a substantial portion of his time to attending high-dollar fundraisers in traditional donor hubs such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington.
He hinted earlier this month that he had raised nearly $20 million up to that point, and some prominent donors expect him to report as much as $25 million this quarter.
Two weeks ago that might have looked impressive, but now the frontrunner merely tieing Mayor Pete is not going to get it done.
Pundits, etc.
“This One New Poll of Democrats Explains Why Donald Trump Will Be Reelected. Just 25 percent of Democratic voters want a candidate promising a “bold, new agenda,” which is exactly what party and media elites will cram down their throats.”
One of the questions asked Democratic voters whether they will vote for a candidate with a “bold, new agenda” or one “who will provide steady, reliable leadership.” Fully three-quarters of respondents want the latter, with just 25 percent interested in the sort of “bold, new agenda” that virtually all Democratic candidates are peddling so far. This finding is consistent with other polling that shows that Democratic voters are far more moderate than their candidates. Even allowing for a doubling of self-described Democrats who identify as liberal over the past dozen years, Gallup found last year that 54 percent of Democrats support a party that is “more moderate” while just 41 percent want one that is “more liberal.”
Yet with the exception of Joe Biden (more on him in a minute), all of the Democratic candidates—certainly the leading ones—are pushing a massively expansionist agenda, thus putting themselves at odds with their own base. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All would cost $37 trillion in new spending over a decade and his free-college plan would cost the federal government about $47 billion a year. He plans to spend much, much more, as does Elizabeth Warren, who is running on promises to spend $3.3 trillion over a decade in new giveaways that will be paid for by an unworkable, probably unconstitutional “wealth tax” that will at best raise $2.75 trillion.
“How the Democrats Could Blow the Election Over Health Care.” Notable for being from lefty Daily Beast, not notable in that it’s a “Members Only” story, so I guess I’ll never know how “these positions stand to lose the Democrats votes. Lots of votes.” Though I think I have an idea…
All those big Democratic plans? Fugitaboutit. “The Democrats have no plan for ‘Cocaine Mitch.'”
Now on to the clown car itself:
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s evidently highly in demand as a speaker and consultant. But: “Does the Stacey Abrams method — a charismatic figure painstakingly courting disadvantaged and often-ignored voters — really work for anyone besides Stacey Abrams?”
In the end, Abrams came within fewer than 60,000 votes of becoming the first black woman to lead Georgia, or any other state for that matter, in a much better showing than the usual 200,000-vote loss for Democrats in Georgia. Republicans say a loss is still a loss; they call her complaints of voter suppression sour grapes, and the notion that she represents some brilliant new Democratic future a fantasy.
To me, it was clearly Biden. I didn’t like Harris’s attack on Biden when I was experiencing it emotionally, watching TV late at night, and I don’t like it now, as I examine the transcript this morning. She yelled at him, and she would have won if he had broken down and just yelled at her or if he’d gotten confused and said something wrong. But he made sense, and though I could see on TV that he was aggravated by the attack, on the page, he’s completely lucid. He gets his points in and the points are sound. That’s all I need him to do. I am not won over by Harris’s “That little girl was me” pathos or her prosecutorial aggression. But maybe a lot of people think she won the night. It didn’t work on me. I woke up this morning with an okay, it’s Biden feeling.
The Georgian-style home — from the front a brick version of the White House — once belonged to Alexander Haig, the former secretary of state. Nestled on a wooded lot in McLean, the nearly 12,000-square-foot residence has five bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, marble fireplaces, a gym and a sauna.
“Surrounded by Washington elite and sitting high above the Potomac River, there is an undeniable grandeur in the design of this home,” said the British-accented agent in a video released when it went on the market in 2015. “This property makes an imposing statement with parking for over 20 cars and creates a perfect setting for the most lavish of events.
“This may have already been the residence to a very important person,” he continued. “But I suspect it will be home to many more.”
It is currently home to Joe Biden. He and his wife, Jill, rented it after leaving the vice presidential quarters at the Naval Observatory in 2017. The house had been purchased for $4.25 million in June 2016 by Mark Ein, a wealthy venture capitalist who lives next door.
Biden points out on the presidential campaign trail that he was often the poorest member of the U.S. Senate and, for at least a decade, has referred to himself as “Middle Class Joe.” But since leaving office he has enjoyed an explosion of wealth, making millions of dollars largely from book deals and speaking fees for as much as $200,000 per speech, public documents show.
Snip.
Since leaving the vice presidency, Biden has rented the McLean home and purchased a $2.7 million, 4,800-square-foot vacation house near the water in Rehoboth Beach, Del., to go along with his primary residence, the nearly 7,000-square-foot lakeside home he built more than two decades ago in Wilmington, Del.
Let he who has never owned two 4,000 square foot homes and rented a third cast the first stone. Also:
Biden released his tax returns in the past but has not done so since 2016, his last year as vice president. He has vowed to release the current ones as part of this campaign. A financial disclosure required of presidential candidates would have provided the first window into the financial boost he has received since leaving the vice presidency. The deadline for that document was set for last month, but Biden filed for an extension until July 9.
(Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who also notes that Biden’s speech riders obligate hosts to serve him the exact same Italian meal every time: “angel hair pomodoro, a caprese salad, topped off with raspberry sorbet with biscotti.”) This is an interesting look state of the Democratic Party that Biden participated in the 1970s. “By the 1970s, opposition to ‘busing’ was strongest in Democratic strongholds, cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Baltimore — as well as Biden’s own Delaware.” Lindsey Graham: “Underestimate Joe Biden at your own peril.” Also says about Harris: “She is very talented, she’s very smart, and she’ll be a force to be reckoned with.” He’s not necessarily wrong with either assessment…
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Booker wants Biden to confess his racial sins. It’s an interesting approach for someone polling at 2%, which is even less than Biden was polling at going into the 2008 Iowa caucuses. A guy down in that range is usually thinking about possibly being a VP pick than taking down the frontrunner. Similarly unusual is his white knighting for Harris. Usually you’re attacking the candidate in your “lane.”
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. His Q2 fundraising numbers are late-breaking news, so no reactions yet. South Bends’ police union isn’t happy with him, so he has one more thing in common with Bill de Blasio. Hugh Hewett thinks Buttigieg and Harris were the winners of their debate. “Both displayed an almost effortless eloquence and command of rhetorical devices. They did not need gimmicks and appeared completely unrehearsed. They connected.” Though I take his “Biden is doomed” take with several grains of salt. Rich Lowry had a lot less rosy assessment of Buttigieg’s chances:
The elite media fell in love with Buttigieg, not just because he’s genuinely talented, but because he’s the type of candidate — young, earnest, credentialed, progressive but with a self-image as an ideologically moderate pragmatist — it always falls in love with.
It is attracted to the idea of an intellectual as a presidential candidate. This doesn’t literally mean someone with deep intellectual interests or genuine accomplishments — think the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan — but an impressive academic résumé, a copy of The New Yorker on the nightstand and true verbal acuity.
In this sense, Pete Buttigieg is the new Barack Obama, except with limits that will likely keep him from reaching the next level in the 2020 nomination contest and even if he did, would make him perhaps the weakest plausible prospective Democratic general-election candidate.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Castro is barnstroming through Texas bragging about his debate performance: “‘A few months ago they were writing me up as the other Texan,’ the former San Antonio mayor told supporters at a rally in Austin on Friday night. ‘But that’s no more. I am the Texan in this race.'” Honestly, neither his nor O’Rourke ‘s chances look particularly bright right now. Castro also did the same white knighting of Harris that Booker did. Maybe they all got the same memo…
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Nothing says “political SUPERgenius” quite like quoting Che Guevara in Miami. He also came out for “Medicare for all” paying for “gender reassignment surgery.” I’m sure “Taxdollars for Trannies” will play super-well in helping Democrats win back states in the Midwest. But this piece suggests his entire purpose in running is to push the Democratic Party to the left. They hardly needed any help.
His plan would be a catastrophic insurance package that would cover only major, high-cost medical expenses. Everyone under the age of 65 would be enrolled, with individuals given the ability to opt-out and use a tax credit to purchase their own insurance. Those enrolled in the program would be free to purchase supplemental insurance, either individually or through their employers. His proposal calls for the new insurance system to absorb both Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Since his plan doesn’t socialize medicine nearly enough for Democratic activists, expect him to continue getting ignored.
When she represented her upstate congressional district 10 years ago, Gillibrand had an “A” rating from the NRA and was against protections for sanctuary cities. She quickly changed those positions to jibe with her downstate constituents, a move that got her plenty of critique as disingenuous. That rapid evolution is part of what makes her 2020 campaign trail mix of progressivism and professed moderate appeal so interesting — it’s high-risk moderation, given that Gillibrand has already been labeled pliable to the whims of the electorate at any given moment.
(For “interesting” I’d probably substitute a phrase like “nakedly political” or “lacking moral principle.”) “‘I honestly think that Sen. Gillibrand is closer to Kirsten Gillibrand the human being than the congresswoman was,’ David Paterson, the former governor of New York who appointed Gillibrand to her Senate seat told me.” Oh, that makes it all better! “Of course you have to lie to those gun-toting upstate rubes from JesusLand! She’s really one of us.” Gillibrand is all in on abortion (just in case you were unclear on that), including wanting to repeal the partial-birth abortion ban, but her own campaign is so moribund I doubt it makes it to the third trimester…
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mike Gravel is the anti Joe Biden, by which I guess they mean he’ll never be a Presidential frontrunner. He spends a good deal of the interview yammering on about a “Legislature of the People,” which is some sort of direct democracy scheme that would require a constitutional amendment. It takes a certain kind of mind to come up with a proposal even less likely to be enacted than “Medicare for all” or the “Green New Deal”…
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Of all the many, many, many potential issues Harris could attack Biden over, possibly the most inexplicable is forced busing.
1) It is unconstitutional and bad policy to assign students to public schools on the basis of their skin color.
2) This means that Jim Crow segregation was unconstitutional and bad policy; it also means that racial balancing of schools (which I have no doubt is now supported to one degree or another by all the Democratic presidential candidates, including both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) is unconstitutional and bad policy.
It wasn’t just unconstitutional, it was widely hated by the school districts it was inflicted on. Forced busing tore communities apart, engendered white flight, threatened the integrity of public school systems, and shifted suburban voters sharply towards the Republican Party. Biden was right when he called forced busing inherently racist.
The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school,” he said in the same interview. “That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with. What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
Despite Harris’ claims, huge numbers of parents opposed forced busing for reasons other than racism:
The implication is that all those “working-class Democrats” in Delaware who demanded that Biden take a firm stand against busing were racists, and so were all the other parents across the country who objected to a policy that forced their kids, because of their skin color, to take long bus rides to unfamiliar neighborhoods in the name of racial equality. Yet according to a 1978 RAND Corporation study of the demographic shifts spurred by mandatory busing, “racism does not explain white flight.” The study cited survey data indicating that most whites who opposed busing simply preferred schools in their neighborhood, mentioning “issues such as distance, loss of choice, lost time, and lost friends.” And “when asked about the benefits and harms of desegregation, a large majority of white parents believed it would improve neither minority education nor race relations, while it would increase discipline problems and racial tensions.” In other words, “most white parents believe they are being forced to give up something they value—the neighborhood school—in return for a policy that benefits no one and may even being harmful.”
Most black parents took a different view, but that does not mean the white parents’ concerns were illegitimate or covers for racism. The RAND report noted that “the vast majority of whites accept desegregated schools when brought about by voluntary methods but reject them when their children are mandatorily bused or reassigned to schools outside their neighborhoods.” The study also cited data indicating that “whites with low racial prejudice scores were nearly as opposed to busing as persons with high prejudice.”
As fundamentally dishonest as Harris’ busing attack may have been, her social justice warrior tactic may end up working because it might achieve a primary goal to help her nab the nomination: make Biden unacceptable to black voters, no matter how much collateral damage she inflicts on the Democratic Party (and the nation) in the process. Even Harris’ former paramour Willie Brown thinks she can’t beat Trump:
The first Democratic debates proved one thing: We still don’t have a candidate who can beat Donald Trump.
California Sen. Kamala Harris got all the attention for playing prosecutor in chief, but her case against former Vice President Joe Biden boiled down in some ways to a ringing call for forced school busing. It won’t be too hard for Trump to knock that one out of the park in 2020.
Trump must have enjoyed every moment and every answer, because he now knows he’s looking at a bunch of potential rivals who are still not ready for prime time.
Listening to Hickenlooper, it seemed to me that there was something else that bothered him about the socialist idea that he was not quite putting into words. He seemed drawn to projects in which people could take action on their own behalf, that existed at the human scale: the bottom-up economic plan, designed around what nurses and small-business owners wanted for their town. A brewpub that could revive a neighborhood; an ambitious light-rail project that helped connect Denver to its suburbs, which he had accomplished through diligent personal lobbying of suburban politicians; an apprenticeship program built through coöperation with Colorado’s business leaders, so that teen-agers who were not headed directly for college would graduate with “skills and a sense of direction.” What seemed to spook him about socialism was an implied passivity. “That rut of thinking that government’s going to solve all our problems,” he said. “I think, as long as we’re demonizing business, as long as we’re saying we have all the answers—the rest of you just wait while we provide you all the answers—I think we’re going to have problems.”
Hickenlooper’s entire campaign summarized in one incident:
Security person outside debate site just now : “are you here to pick up press credentials?” John Hickenlooper: “…I’m a candidate”
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Amy Klobuchar made a mark in the first Democratic debate, but was it enough?” A skidmark, perhaps. She went into the debate with zero momentum and went out the same way. Weirdly, her campaign’s popularity seemed to peak at the same time everyone was writing articles about how she abused her aides. “Amy Klobuchar owned Jay Inslee on abortion rights at the Democratic debate.” That’s like Kramer dominating his karate class.
Shortly after gaining office back in 2015, Messam spoke out in support of local legislation that would have seen small amounts of cannabis decriminalized in the county his jurisdiction resides in.
“We have to ensure our city doesn’t become a place where lives are destroyed due to recreational possession of marijuana while providing real rehabilitation options that offer offenders resources to avoid a life of drug addiction and bad choices,” Messam said in a Facebook post.
I think Hickenlooper and Inslee both missed the boat by not becoming notable pro-pot candidates. As governors of legal pot states, they could have made the case for legalization and generated buzz for their campaigns that has been sorely lacking. (“Heh heh heh. He said ‘buzz!'” “Shut up, Beavis!”)
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another guy with a lot of “he missed the debates” articles. He visited a gay pride parade in New Hampshire. Given his lack of attention and funding, he could do a lot worse than an “All in on New Hampshire” strategy. At least he could drive to all the events…
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. A look behind the O’Rourke-castro tiff and Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. With the two now polling more evenly, the Texas porimary is now wide open. Vanity Fair wonders if Castro dealt him a fatal blow. Probably not, because his campaign was already stumbling lisstlessly down a trash-strewn alley. Believe it or not, O’Rourke actually came up with a novel idea: A small “war tax” on households where no one has ever done military service. Shades of Robert A. Heinlein! But I don’t see that idea gaining a lot of traction among Democrats. He and Castro had dueling Austin rallies.
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Sanders thinks he won both debates. Of course he does. WSJ thinks Sanders “won” the debate by pushing Democrats to the left. “President Trump is a lucky man. Typically a re-election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent, and Mr. Trump is losing that race. But the Democrats are moving left so rapidly that they may let him turn 2020 into a choice between his policy record and the most extreme liberal agenda since 1972 (which may be unfair to George McGovern).” He came out against forced busing. Maybe the super secret social justice warrior plan to take over America is to push the Democrats so far to the left on race issues that Bernie Sanders looks like a voice of moderation by comparison. He and Warren’s student debt plans make no sense.
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an interview with The National Interest. His take on a possible war with Iran is presumably well-informed by his navy experience:
With an intricate knowledge that rivals any of the other contenders, Joe Sestak described in detail the difficulties the United States would have if it used a military strike against Iran. “[I]t would take us weeks if not months to destroy it [their nuclear facilities] if we go full bore to do so. Because part of it…is buried under three hundred feet of rock, hard rock.”
A war with Iran would imperil our strategic naval positioning in the area and force us out of the gulf. “We cannot survive in the Persian Gulf with our aircraft carriers. I know, I’ve operated there. There are about two places that we operate because the depth of water to do fight operations is the best right there. Our sonar doesn’t work there in the Persian Gulf and we cannot find their nineteen midget submarines at all. So, we will withdrawal our carrier groups out of the Strait of Hormuz before we even begin to think about striking and have to do it from a greater distance.” While the United States is flying air sorties and launching Tomahawk missiles on Iranian positions, they have the strength to return fire in kind. “[T]hey can rain hundreds of long-range missiles on Israel and our regional bases there.”
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a smallishWashington Post profile, as befits his campaign’s stature. Gets a Polifact profile, which lists one endorsement (Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego), and that he’s known as “the Snapchat king of Congress.” Well, Anthony Weiner isn’t there anymore…
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a People profile: “Williamson was raised Jewish in Houston and still practices today. Her teachings and writing draw from multiple religious practices, sometimes referencing Jesus and Buddha, and the book that inspired her spirituality, A Course in Miracles, is heavily influenced by Christianity.” “Marianne Williamson is the Kanye West of the Democratic Party, a hard to reconcile mix of truth, depth and kookiness that can baffle and lead to as much harm as good.”
A couple of weeks ago, I drank human blood and ate human flesh. It was an expression of my belief in a higher power. No one mocked me for living out my faith the way Christians do, and yet many others have been mocking Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson since Thursday night’s debate.
I wasn’t stuck near the summit of Mt. Everest and forced to become a cannibal in a desperate attempt to survive. It was a voluntary act to acknowledge that I was “born again” and freed from my sins. I was in my Christian church in South Carolina during a normal Sunday service taking what we call communion, an exercise in which we drink a juice and eat a wafer that we are told to imagine are the literal blood and body of Jesus Christ.
Snip.
If you understood the faith, you’d understand the power and beauty of those beliefs, we argue. And yet, when it comes to Williamson’s new age spirituality, we don’t hesitate to think her strange — even if we haven’t taken the time to understand her. Those of faith should remember that we live in glass houses, that it’s as easy for others to deem us whackos as it is for us to condemn others to that kind of mockery.
The debates produced lots of awesome tweets about Williamson:
It’s like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for the healing crystal set. “Republicans Donate To Marianne Williamson To Keep Her In Democratic Debates.” BattleSwarm commentor T Migratorious made an interesting point: “The other thing that set her apart from the rest of the candidates was her lack of anger. I sense that a lot of Democrats and many more swing voters are tired of the Dems constant rage and are willing to give someone who is calmer and kinder a second look.”
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a New York Post piece by Mary Kay Linge that notes Yang gained over 100,000 Twitter followers after the debate, and even quotes Your Humble Blogger. Yang claims his mic was not on so he couldn’t jump in to other candidates answers. A better question is why anyone but the designated speaker’s mic was on during these exchanges. How about you let one person speak at a time and provide a level playing field rather than playing favorites? Calls for “human-centered capitalism“:
In his book The War on Normal People, Yang defines human-centered capitalism as an update to or the next stage of classical capitalism. Contemporary American culture, Yang argues, imagines capitalism as a natural fit for the human condition, especially when compared to the centralized mechanisms of socialism. In turn, our culture tends to view the two as binary, almost Manichaean, opposites.
But these cultural arguments often miss some important points, including: Capitalism is not natural, and Western societies have experimented with many economic systems; there has never been a pure, laissez-faire capitalist system; and our form of corporate capitalism is but one of many.
So how do we know if laissez-faire capitalist works if we’ve never tried it? “Andrew Yang’s Proposals Aren’t As Popular In Silicon Valley As You Might Think.” (Actually, I’ve long thought he was regarded as a fringe candidate there as well.) “It’s expected that [Universal Basic Income] would cost more than $3 trillion annually. For perspective’s sake, the proposed federal budget for 2020 is $4.746 trillion.” And the idea that we’ll just “consolidate” a lot of existing programs down into UBI ignores the sad fact that welfare programs are historically harder to kill than Thanos. But Yang did offer this:
I’ve noticed that conservatives often follow liberals on Twitter – but the reverse does not seem to be true.
Biden flip-flops, the race tightens in Iowa, Bennet and Gillibrand qualify for the debates, de Blasio and Messam earn Iowa goose eggs, and Swalwell continues his All Cringe All The Time Campaign. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
Des Moines Register/Mediacom/CNN Iowa Poll: Biden 24, Sanders 16, Warren 15, Buttigieg 14, Harris 7, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2. Biden has come back to the pack some, and that’s the best showing for Warren and Buttigieg I’ve seen in any poll. Also: “Two candidates — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Miramar, Florida, Mayor Wayne Messam — were not listed by a single poll respondent as either first or second choice for president.”
The Economist/YouGov (page 95): Biden 27, Sanders 16, Warren 11, Buttigieg 9, Harris 8, Booker 2, De Blasio 2, O’Rourke 2, Bullock 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Hickenlooper 1, Klobuchar 1, Yang 1. 2% for De Blasio is 2% more than I (or just about anybody else) ever thought he would get. Nobody knows nothin’.
The Democratic presidential contenders are ready to break the bank with expensive policy proposals that would add trillions of dollars to the deficit if enacted.
The 2020 hopefuls are angling to one-up each other with big policy ideas that would overhaul the U.S. health care system, address climate change and provide free college tuition or erase student debt.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s “Global Climate Mobilization” plan, hailed by environmental activists as the gold standard, would cost the U.S. government $3 trillion over the next decade.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (Mass.) proposal to eliminate tuition at public colleges and erase existing student debt carries a $1.25 trillion price tag.
And Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) “Medicare for All” bill, co-sponsored by four other 2020 Democrats, would require $32 trillion in government spending, according to one study.
Most of the contenders (not including Biden or Sanders) appeared on the same stage in Iowa, with Warren and Booker marshelling the most supporters at the event.
Some Democratic presidential campaigns are like the protagonist in an M. Night Shyamalan movie: They’re dead already, they just don’t know it. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say they were never really alive.
The first Democratic presidential primary debates will be held in two weeks. The threshold for participation is exceptionally low, particularly for any candidate who announced near the beginning of the year: Either reach just 1 percent in three surveys approved by the Democratic National Committee or have 65,000 or more donors that include 200 people from at least 20 states. If you think reaching that threshold is difficult, keep in mind, this limit has already been reached by Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, John Delaney, and Irving Schmidlap.
(Okay, I threw Irving Schmidlap in there just to see if you were paying attention.)
The latest polls show Schmidlap already running well ahead of Messam and Swalwell.
If people wonder why complaints about fairness are so frequently ignored, it’s because of circumstances like this one. The DNC is being really generous, their thresholds are low, and if you can’t reach one percent — one percent! In either national or early primary state polls! — then no, you really don’t belong up there on that debate stage. You’re not supposed to run for president because you want a national reputation; you’re supposed to have a national reputation before you run for president. Presidential campaigns are not supposed to be publicity stunts or longer book tours. If you want to be the next commander in chief, I don’t want to year you whining about how hard all of this is. The job that you claim to be qualified for is going to have much tougher challenges than reaching one percent in a survey or attracting 130,000 donors.
A pen of donkeys will paw summer’s debate stage. Entrepreneur Yang figures his young grassroots fund-raising translates to a win. Lotsa luck. In BC, gladiators in Roman amphitheaters fought live animals. In 2020, Tiger Trump will swallow this creature like he’s granola.
NYC’s savvy dude mayor, a “much-derided presidential candidate,” grabs attention — but, bleat the pros, “he’s running because he’s got no more day job.” Even Kevin Costner would nix playing him in a movie.
Our only local woman to maybe break the gents barrier is Laurie Metcalf, who plays Hillary on B’way. Cutlery is out for struggling Kirsten Gillibrand, who once said she’s not around the state enough because she can’t be everywhere since she has children to raise. Now she’s around the country. So, pros ask, what’s with those kids?
Former frontrunner Bernie Sanders’ base gets youngisher and whitisher. He’s sinking into the lavatory.
Grampa Joe Boredom? Recalling his multiple heresies and zero accomplishments, the antis plan to make Bidenburgers out of him.
Don’t book on Booker. Wall Street and Silicon Valley keep Cory funded but, despite showing African-Americans he’s their Medicine Man, he’s trailing.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock. Late start and zero name ID. While Montana made statehood 1889, the only other VIP from there was Gary Cooper. Also Dana Carvey.
A chorus line of other whocares from whoknowswhere are also scratching around for whoknowswhy. They figure this eventually grabs them a book deal, speaking gig, bigtime p.r. or a free trip to Times Square.
Supposedly 13 will be propped up for June 26’s debate: Biden, Bernie, Buttigieg, Beto, Booker, Kamala, Klobuchar, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard (who??), Jay Inslee, Marianne Williamson, Warren — and Yang — plus a partridge in a pear tree — with de Blasio and Gillibrand, still iffy.
Beto O’Rourke. Do not bet-o on him. Waning in the polls. Anyway, who cares.
Elizabeth Warren wows wonks with policy proposals and, for some reason, has a strong left-leaning organization in Iowa. But there’s also her “likability” — of which much there isn’t.
Kamala Harris. Trailing. Main asset is strategic. If she does well in South Carolina, she might twinkle in home state California’s early primary.
Buttigieg. Age 37. I mean, please. My pedicurist has a better shot. His college-educated white voters met the minimal polling threshold, but his résumé in public office is smaller than mine.
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. I mean, please. Paris Hilton has a better shot.
If Hilton jumped in tomorrow, she’d be in the top eight easy…
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? “The Stacey Abrams Myth Becomes the Democratic Catechism.”
The claims of voter suppression rest primarily on the fact that as Georgia secretary of state, Kemp enforced a statute passed by a Democratic-majority legislature and signed by a Democratic governor in 1997. It required the voting rolls to be periodically purged to remove names of voters who were dead, or who had moved away or were incarcerated. Under this law, 600,000 names of people who hadn’t voted in the last three elections were removed from the rolls in 2017 by Kemp’s office.
Those who were removed got prior notification in the mail about the impending purge, and they were given a menu of options to retain their registration. Moreover, it took four years to complete the process by which a name was removed. The reason so many names were taken off in 2017 was that a lawsuit by the Georgia NAACP had delayed the routine enforcement of the law for years before the organization eventually lost in the U.S. Supreme Court.
If you assume that most of the 600,000 were Democrats who were denied the right to vote — rather than voters who were deceased or who had moved or been jailed — that gives credibility to Abrams’s story. But there aren’t many people stepping forward since November 2018 to say they were wrongfully removed from the rolls, let alone the tens or hundreds of thousands necessary to substantiate Abrams’s claim that the election was stolen.
The other argument that purportedly backs up the stolen-election claim is that lengthy lines caused by the closing of 212 precincts in the state since 2012 deterred Georgia voters from turning out. But Kemp had nothing to do with that, since all decisions on consolidating voting stations were made by county officials. Which means if there were fewer precincts and longer lines in Democratic-majority counties in Georgia, it was almost certainly due to the decisions made by local Democrats, not Kemp or a national GOP conspiracy.
When examined soberly, Abrams’s claims evaporate. Kemp’s win was no landslide, but his 1.4 percent margin of victory didn’t even give her the right to demand a legal recount. Demographic changes may mean that Georgia is trending away from the red-state status it has had in the last decade, but Stacey Abrams lost because Republicans still can turn out majorities there even in years when the odds favor Democrats.
But by continuing to swear to the lie that the election was stolen, Biden, Buttigieg, and every other Democrat who repeats that claim while paying court to Abrams and hoping to win African-American votes are poisoning the well of American democracy.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He met the polling criteria for the first debate. “Bennet appears to be the 21st Democratic candidate to qualify for the first debates under one of the criteria, according to an estimated count from The Hill. So far only 13 appear to have met both criteria.” Five takeaways from his CNN town hall. Sanders goes too far on Medicare for all, Bennet backs the Georgia abortion boycott, opposes impeachment, criticizes Trump’s Mexico tariffs, and makes vague noises about building a “bigger coalition.” Among who? Gun owners? Pro-life advocates? Coal miners? People who want to stop illegal aliens from crossing the border? I’m sure they’ll all be just itching to pull that (D) lever. “Bennet hires Iowa state director, a former Indiana congressional campaign manager,” one Brian Peters.
The last month has featured the former vice president switching his stance on Hyde no fewer than three times — he tried to explain away one of his U-turns by claiming he’d “misheard” the reporter’s question — before finally settling on opposition to it. He explained his final decision in a tweet that could just as easily have been written by an activist from NARAL.
Biden’s rejection of his decades of support for Hyde betrays the reality: He was never actually pro-life. Though he has long had a reputation as “personally opposed” to abortion on religious grounds, his political actions have merited no such label. (Nor has he ever offered a sufficient explanation for why a man who believes, for whatever reason, that abortion kills innocent human beings ought to refrain from legislating that belief.)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He unveiled a stupid and unworkable housing subsidy idea. Cory Booker 2012: “Listen to me, the people dying in Chicago, the people dying in Newark are not being done with law-abiding gun owners. We do not need to go after the guns. A law-abiding, mentally stable American, that’s not America’s problem.” Now? Not so much.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mr. Zero Percent protests too much. “The presidential campaign of Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is fundraising off claims that Republican forces fear his candidacy — even though the attacks are to damage him in a Senate run if, as expected, he drops out of the White House race.” Also: “Jon Tester endorses fellow Montana Democrat Steve Bullock for president.” Because that was his problem, not enough endorsements from Montana.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana and presidential hopeful, and his husband have over $130,000 in student loan debt, according to financial disclosures reviewed by the AP on Sunday. A campaign spokesperson would not tell AP whether the loans belong to Buttigieg, his husband, or both.” Hey, that means I get to recycle this from last week:
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He flips reality on its head by insisting that antisemitism is a right-wing problem. “And so, to cope with the cognitive dissonance involved in Jews getting beaten up in deep blue New York, naturally he comforts himself with the belief that this is a right-wing problem. Somehow.” And that piece embeds this tweet:
“The New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council announced Wednesday that it is endorsing de Blasio and will send members to campaign for him in early voting states including New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina.” Bread, know thy butter…
Since there’s so many people running for President (& not enough for Senate), instead of obsessing over who‘s a “frontrunner,” maybe we can start w some general eliminations.
This awful, untrue line got boo’ed for a full minute.
Then he challenged her to a debate. Good job! If you can reach those Democrats that don’t want Occasional Cortex to be the face of their party, you might start registering in polls…
I thought “how can we tell that’s not an Apple store opening?” but I slowed down the video and, yes, at least one person is in a Tusli t-shirt.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She secured a spot in the first debate. “Over the weekend, we crossed 65,000 donors to our campaign—guaranteeing our spot at the first debates.” Really? Just now? A sitting senator from America’s fourth-most popular state, and it took her that long to cross the threshold. She unleashed a plan to legalize marijuana, which is possibly the first smart move she’s made in this campaign. (And how come pot-friendly governors Hickenlooper and Inslee aren’t making the devil’s lettuce issues in their campaigns?) “Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: Boneless Wonder.” Sample: “Kirsten Gillibrand announced on National Public Radio that the Church is wrong about abortion, homosexuality and the male priesthood.” But other than that, she’s totally Catholic…
Many things, most of them unlikely, would have to transpire for former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel to win the Democratic nomination for president.
A few possibilities: All the other candidates drop out, and no successful write-in campaign is waged. A capricious President Trump orders a catastrophic invasion of another nation, lending massive credibility to Gravel’s perennial anti-war stance (he helped put the Pentagon Papers into the public record). The Democratic primary electorate all of a sudden decides that it would prefer an octogenarian candidate to the current septuagenarian front-runners. (Gravel is 89 years of age; meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is a youthful 77 years old, and Joe Biden is a spring chicken, at 76.)
Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. He unveiled a plan for rural communities, which suggests he’s looking past the primary to the general election, which may not be the optimal strategy for someone currently topping out at 1%.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. His campaign is shaking its tiny fist at the DNC’s decision not to hold a climate change debate. The other Inslee news this week could be assembled from a book of Madlibs where the only words entered in every blank are “climate change.” (Example: “Inslee: Build U.S. foreign policy around climate crisis.”)
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. That “zero people picked him or de Blasio” poll news is in fact the only Messam news I could locate this week. There’s an absence of evidence on his campaign, but there is evidence of absence…
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s all in on Iowa. “O’Rourke is also running a much more traditional Iowa campaign with a strong presence on the ground, probably only eclipsed by Elizabeth Warren’s efforts.” Heh: “Let’s hear it for the blank slate!” Unclear on the concept:
Beto O'Rourke on IA poll that has him at 2%: "There is a lot of time before the IA Caucus. We've never been guided by a poll before. If you were to look at the Texas Senate race the first couple of months after we were in, no poll was going to say that we were going to win that." pic.twitter.com/g2FNG7kacS
Sanders has changed the debate in great measure because he has never really changed himself. His consistency is the selling point—his mantras against billionaires stealing the American Dream, the system being rigged, working people needing to form a movement to take power back. And yet he is now running against nearly two dozen competitors, many of whom have chipped away at his distinctiveness by emulating his stances, and just being Bernie may not get the job done. Sanders is solidly in second place behind Biden in national and state polls. And while the movement he built in 2016 has proven durable, there are few signs that it’s growing. Between March and May, according to a national survey by Monmouth University, Sanders’ support dropped from 25% of likely Democratic votes to 15%, as several rivals increased their share.
There is a feeling in Sanders’ orbit that he will, in certain ways, have to evolve if he wants to do more than change the conversation. Tell his story more. Navigate the shoals of racial and gender politics with greater awareness of contemporary expectations and his own blind spots. Overcome his self-image of being a solitary outsider—alone, unheard, disrespected—and cultivate allies. “It’s one thing to talk to your 20% to 25% who are your core believers, but we’ve got to work on persuading people into the fold,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, told me. “And that’s why it takes, I believe, a continual evolution of the message, freshening up the message and also sharing more about him.”
See, Bernie just isn’t touchy-feely enough for today’s modern Democratic Party pieties:
After a few of these town halls, Sanders’ own stoicism makes more sense. He begins to seem almost a secular priest: People come to him with stories of despair, and he lifts their pain up into the air, to a place where it is no longer personal but something civic. He gives them the language and information to know it isn’t their fault. His speeches are like that hug in Good Will Hunting. It’s not your fault; it’s not your fault. The system did this. Big corporations did this. A bought-and-paid-for government did this. He connects their pain to the pain of others, and in the process that pain is remade, almost transubstantiated, into a sweeping case against a corrupt system. The priest, in this metaphor, doesn’t reveal himself because his job is to float above his own feelings, own needs, own desire to be liked. His job is to make space for, make sense of and make use of your pain.
This covenant with his supporters is his great achievement. No rival for the Democratic nomination has anything quite like it. Even Steve Bannon, the right-wing populist who ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, admires it. Sanders’ agenda is “a hodgepodge of these half-baked socialist ideas that we’ve seen haven’t worked,” Bannon told me in his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, sitting in front of a painting on which the words Follow your dreams were written above a monkey sitting on a Coca-Cola box. But, he said, “Bernie has done a tremendous job of galvanizing a segment that hasn’t gone away. I mean, he has a real movement.”
Building a following fueled by pain and personal hardship is an especially big accomplishment for a candidate who is himself so emotionally inaccessible, reluctant to share more than the barest glimpses of his own history and inner life. “Not me. Us.” is his 2020 campaign slogan, and he means it. “Almost to a tee, what defines a politician is they love to tell their story,” Shakir told me. “He has absolutely zero inclination to do that. He abhors it.”
Sanders seems to believe the public doesn’t have a right to know him more intimately—even though there is abundant evidence that the essential character traits of our Presidents eventually shape all our lives: Bill Clinton’s appetites; George W. Bush’s certitude; Barack Obama’s instinct to hire bankers; Donald Trump’s narcissism. In our first interview, on a bench in the Des Moines airport, I asked Sanders a simple question: How did he first experience the idea that people blame themselves for systemic problems? “Well, before we get to me,” he said, “what the political revolution is about is the millions of people beginning to stand up …”
Many of Sanders’ advisers are eager for the Senator to get more personal.
And, of course, there’s the Old White Man issue for a party so blatantly racist aware of race as the Democratic Party circa 2019:
With Trump in the White House, Democrats cannot ignore Macomb. But there are other votes that need to be courted. Minorities and women, and black women especially, are the lifeblood of the modern Democratic Party—and for them, Sanders’ way of diluting the truth about Trump voters can be troubling.
The dilemma came to a head an hour later. We got off the bus at Detroit’s Sweet Potato Sensations, a bakery famous for its sweet-potato pies ($14 for a 9-in.). The audience was almost entirely African-American women. Sanders stood among them and took questions. A woman named Janis Hazel rose. She said she used to work for Representative John Conyers, a long-serving former House member from Michigan. Conyers (with Hazel’s assistance) had long ago proposed a bill mandating a commission to study how reparations for descendants of slavery might be undertaken in the U.S. Hazel asked Sanders whether he backed the idea, which Conyers had reintroduced each session until he resigned in 2017 over allegations of sexual harassment.
Before she could finish, Sanders cut her off, undermining the proposal by reminding people that it is merely for a “study.” She tried to complete the question, and again Sanders jumped in. “Well, I’ve said that if the Congress passes the bill, I will sign it. It is a study.” He pivoted. “You know Jim Clyburn from South Carolina? Clyburn has a bill which I like. He calls it ‘10-20-30.’” The plan calls for 10% of all funds from certain federal programs to go to distressed communities to rebuild those communities.
Afterward, Hazel told me she felt Sanders avoided her question. As it is, he had only recently come around to his tepid support for studying reparations. And his irritation at being pinned down on the issue was revealing. The dismissal of a mere “study” suggested an unfamiliarity with what advocates for reparations seek: a program so sweeping it would be impossible to administer without years of forethought.
The interaction also called into question Sanders’ ability to navigate the complex social terrain that is the Democratic electorate in 2019. A room full of black women who didn’t seem bought into the Sanders agenda were trying to figure out, as all voters are, if he got them. There were a thousand ways in that moment to say, “Yes, I back reparations” or even, “No, I don’t, and here’s why,” and still convey your grasp of what lay beneath the question—the desire to be seen and reassured that your community wouldn’t be forgotten. But Sanders didn’t do that.
The Democrat who emerges to take on Trump in 2020 will have to compete for those Reagan Democrats and those black women, two tribes living in different worlds, a short distance apart on I-94. An issue like reparations is a perfect example of how difficult this can be; pleasing Detroit may hurt you a few exits to the north.
In presidential elections past, the tension between what Macomb wanted and what Detroit wanted tended to be resolved in Macomb’s favor. But 2020 seems unlikely to repeat that history. It is being called the “woke primary” by people on the Republican side, because of the early pressure on candidates to take positions on questions of race and gender and identity—questions that matter to people other than white working-class men. The high maternal mortality rate for black women. Transgender rights. The question of when physical contact between men and women escalates from friendly to predatory. The problem of combating hate crimes.
The woke primary is a challenge for Sanders. In part because he is an old-style leftist whose overriding lens is class, not identity. In part because woke culture often craves the kind of gesturemaking to which he’s allergic. And in part because Sanders seems to struggle with the expectation that a 77-year-old white guy needs to learn, evolve and prove that he “gets it,” even if he was at Dr. King’s march.
It seems a little early for this: “Is Bernie Sanders Finished? Democrats like him. They just show no signs of wanting to vote for him this time around.”
That said: I think it’s starting to sink in that Senator Bernie Sanders is right at the fringes of plausibility. At best.That’s what I’m seeing from the mainstream media, some liberal bloggers and sophisticated polling analysis. Recent Iowa polls show Sanders at about 15%, essentially in a three-person race for second place with Senator Elizabeth Warren and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. That’s for a candidate who won half the vote there in 2016.And while Sanders is faring somewhat better nationally, that’s mainly because almost all the other candidates remain unknown to voters. As Nate Silver points out, only about 8% of Democrats say they’re definitely supporting Sanders. In other words, it’s entirely plausible that Sanders could fail to reach the delegate threshold in Iowa, Nevada, and South Carolina (and possibly New Hampshire).
I’m no Sanders fan, but all that is based on a bad poll or two and nothing else, which is pretty much meaningless at this point. He’s being more aggressive in South Carolina than he was in 2016. He also scolded Walmart.
Eric Swalwell: "To my fellow candidates, I consider us all a part of being the Avengers. The Republicans in 2016, that was the Hunger Games. We are in this, and with your help and support, to save this country we love so much."
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Her slow but steady rise continues, and she appears to be eating into Sanders’ base. “Senator Warren’s ‘economic patriotism’ consists of calling the bosses at the Fortune 500 a**holes and then writing them a check for tens of billions of dollars. I suspect the gentlemen in pinstripes will find a way to endure the insult.” With all her plans, does Warren have a plan to deal with Mitch McConnell? “If I’m still the majority leader of the Senate, think of me as the Grim Reaper…None of that stuff is going to pass. None of it.” Also, her campaign unionized.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Speaking of “all in on Iowa,” she moved to Des Moines. A bold move, but one when Chris Dodd did the same thing in 2007, it netted him 2% of the Iowa vote and zero delegates. Here are some excerpts from a Williamson speech that are half warmed-over “Democrats good, Trump bad” talking points and half something else:
Too often the Democrats have been the party that stands for the right thing, but still cozies up to the forces that do the wrong thing, thinking that that’s okay because once we get in power we will do the right thing, and then we naively think that that doesn’t smell to people, that the putrid stench of that more complicated corruption will not be wafting into the nostrils of the average voter.
In other words, too many Democrats are half-truth tellers, ladies and gentlemen, and Donald Trump will eat the half-truth tellers alive.
She also talks about Trump using persuasion in a way that sounds like a funhouse mirror distortion of Scott Adams’ explanations of Trump’s techniques: “Trump has spoken to a very dark and primal place within the human psyche, a place of fear that becomes like an emotional knot in people’s brains and this knot cannot be unraveled by mere intellectual or rationalistic argument for I assure you the part of the brain that rationally analyzes an issue is not the part of the brain that decides who to vote for.”
In November 2017, Yang registered his presidential bid with the Federal Election Commission. In April 2018, he published a book titled, “The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future.” “We are in the third inning of the greatest technological and economic shift in human history,” Yang often says, arguing that job losses in swing states propelled Donald Trump to the presidency. To survive the invasion of intelligent machines, Yang argues, America needs an economic and social overhaul, which would be spurred by a government-sponsored universal payment of $1,000 a month to every American adult. Or, in the language of nerd: Yang is an underdog hero rising up to fight the robots and save humanity. His weapon: allowance for grown-ups.
Yang now leads thousand-person rallies on the regular. Fans wave signs that say “MATH” to support the self-proclaimed candidate of numbers and data — the guy who wants to Make America Think Harder. “I’m going to be the first president in history to use PowerPoint in the State of the Union,” Yang announced to a crowd in Seattle in early May. “How do you feel about that?” Cheers. “Yeah, break out the PowerPoint chant! No — don’t do it —”
Too late. Fists were already pumping in the air, demonstrating the demagogic potential of Microsoft Office Suite.
“Yes, this is the nerdiest presidential campaign in history,” a triumphant Yang shouted. “We did it!”
Another improbable thing Yang has done: catapulted himself, an entrepreneur with few claims to fame and no political experience, into the Democratic presidential conversation. After a viral campaign seeking $1 donations, Yang earned a place in the upcoming primary debates by accruing 65,000 individual donors two months ahead of the deadline. (He celebrated with a cartoon GIF of himself doing the robot amid cascading dollar bills.) CNN hosted a Yang town hall event in April. By the end of May, the polling average at RealClearPolitics showed Yang with 1 percent of the vote — which is small, yes, but puts him ahead of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), who has 0.4 percent, and not far behind such established politicians as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), who has 1.8 percent, and former Cabinet secretary Julián Castro, who has 1.2 percent.
Conservative columnist Matthew Walther has characterized Yang as “Ross Perot for millennials” — “a soft reboot of the Texan businessman’s maverick populist wonkery.” Yang, too, is an improvisational outsider with an out-of-nowhere campaign. But he is also the product of so many colliding forces in contemporary America that comparisons to anyone who came before him are kind of useless. Yang’s ascent from anonymity has been instantaneous in a way that can only exist in the age of social media. (His fans, who call themselves the Yang Gang, sometimes Photoshop him into robot-fighting scenes from science fiction.) His staff credits podcasts for building Yang’s die-hard base almost overnight. Digital media shapes Yang’s worldview and his self-presentation; his website’s prodigious policy section could be recast as a Facebook-friendly listicle, something like “108 Big Ideas That Could Save America Right Now.” (Yes, he really has 108 policy proposals. At least, he did as of press time; the number changes frequently.) His tone blends irony and earnestness in the manner of late-night political comedy. And the source of Yang’s relentless focus — universal basic income — is, at the moment, popular in future-minded circles that take cues from the likes of Pierre Omidyar, Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Yang’s campaign belongs to a mode of popular American discourse that did not exist 20, 10 or even five years ago: He is an emblem of the everyman thinkers of the Internet age.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running (and I’ve even gone back and put in names that were mentioned as possibilities for running that I’ve dropped, just for the sake of completeness):
Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:
I should really find some outlet to pay me to do these updates. PJ Media? Townhall? Daily Caller? Washington Examiner? Daily Wire? Breibart? Who pays the most?
There is a growing sense that the Democratic Media Smear Machine Complex has finally overreached with the latest unsubstantiated smear against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Far from demoralizing Republicans our getting Kavanaugh to withdraw, instead it’s stiffened senate spines and galvanized Republican voters heading into midterms.
Describing earlier calls with other conservative leaders, [Family Research Council president Tony] Perkins said there is growing dissatisfaction with the manner in which the GOP has treated the accusations, while cautioning that in his own view McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley have handled the situation as best they could.
“There’s a sense that the Republicans have bent over backwards to accommodate only to be kicked in the process,” he told TheDCNF.
Elsewhere in the interview, Perkins warned that Republican lawmakers would pay an electoral price in the November election should Kavanaugh’s nomination fail. (RELATED: Kavanaugh Addresses His Encounter With Parkland Dad In Written Supplement To Testimony)
“Conservatives want the Republicans to fight for this,” he said. “This is what the election in 2016 was about and that’s what I believe the midterm election will be about as well.”
Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, detected similar enthusiasm in her own conversations with conservative groups and Kavanaugh allies following the appearance of the Ramirez allegations.
“Conservatives have been galvanized by the coordinated smears of the Democrats and especially outraged at the publication of discredited allegations.”
Not only has it galvanized conservatives in general, but some who were resolutely #NeverTrump in 2016 are now falling in line:
The last-minute ambush validates key assumptions of Trump’s supporters that fueled his rise and buttress him in office, no matter how rocky the ride has been or will become. At least three key premises have been underlined by tawdry events of the last couple of weeks.
First, that good character is no defense. If you are John McCain, who genuinely tried to do the right thing and carefully cultivated a relationship with the media over decades, they will still call you a racist when you run against Barack Obama.
If you are Mitt Romney, an exceptionally earnest and decent man, they will make you into a heartless and despicable vulture capitalist, also for the offense of campaigning against Obama.
If you are Brett Kavanaugh, a respected member of the legal establishment who doesn’t have a flyspeck on his record across decades of public service in Washington, they will come up with dubious accusations of wrongdoing from decades ago when you were a teenager.
Second, that the media is an unremitting political and cultural adversary. In the Kavanaugh controversy, the press has been wholly on the other side, presuming his guilt and valorizing his accusers and their supporters, including Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, whose most famous contribution to the debate was telling men to “shut up.” The advocacy isn’t limited to cable networks or the Twitter feeds of journalists. It reaches all the way up the food chain.
The New Yorker, which imagines itself an upholder of the finest standards of American journalism, which sports a refined monocle-wearing dandy as its mascot, which was once edited by that famous paragon of editorial care, William Shawn, happily published a new accusation against Kavanaugh even though the accuser herself had doubts about it (she only became convinced of it after days of consideration and talks with her lawyer).
The New York Times passed on the story when it couldn’t find any first-hand corroboration of it. The New Yorker didn’t allow that to become an obstacle.
Third, that politics isn’t just rough-and-tumble; it’s red in tooth and claw. Process and norms are nice, but they go out the window as soon as something important is at stake, like a potential fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Senate Democrats may delicately talk about the importance of norms and civility on Sunday shows, but watch how they act. They sat on an accusation throughout an extensive process of vetting and questioning a nominee, then declared it dispositive evidence against his confirmation when it leaked at the 11th hour. They delayed a hearing with Christine Blasey Ford long enough to allow time for the second accuser to be persuaded to come forward.
All of this plays into Trump’s support. Surely, a reason that the president appealed to many Republicans in the first place, despite his extravagant personal failings, was that they had decided that virtuous men would get smeared and chewed up by the opposition’s meat grinder, so why be a stickler for standards?
Widespread disgust over the sheer nastiness of Democratic tactics may be (along with a booming economy) why Republicans have passed Democrats in generic favorability polls, the GOP’s highest ratings since 2010, a year that was not notably kind to Democrats at the ballot box.
The rubber is about to meet the road for Senate Republicans. They have a simple choice: they can vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, thereby ending the baseless and unsubstantiated Democrat- and media-fueled smear campaign against him, or they can kiss House and Senate majorities goodbye for the next decade, if not longer.
In case the election of one Donald J. Trump was not enough to compel the D.C. Republican establishment swamp creatures to wipe the muck from their eyes and see what’s happening with their own constituents, Republican voters have had enough of feckless do-nothings whose careers consist of little more than not doing everything they promised to do.
Give us the House, the Senate, and the White House, they said, and we’ll repeal Obamacare. Give us power across the major elected branches, and we’ll secure the border, they promised. With a Republican president in the White House and a Republican majority in the Senate, we’ll confirm the most conservative Supreme Court nominees you can imagine, they claimed.
Snip.
Republican lawmakers have to understand that their voters have zero patience for their excuses for not doing what they promised. It’s why they elected Trump in the first place. Republican senators failed to repeal Obamacare after promising to do so for years. That was strike one. They’ve steadfastly refused to secure the border, let alone build a barrier along the most porous sections of the nation’s border with Mexico. That was strike two.
A refusal to vote to confirm Kavanaugh in the face of a blatantly obvious Democrat smear campaign, orchestrated in concert with a compliant and obscenely partisan national media, will be strike three, and there will be no more at-bats. I have spent a career working in and covering politics, and I have never witnessed the kind of anger among rank-and-file GOP voters generated from a combination of the unsubstantiated Democrat attacks on Kavanaugh and the flaccid response of emasculated Republicans.
Snip.
If Kavanaugh is not safe from reputation- and career-destroying smears, no one is. Not you. Not your husband. Not your son, father, or brother. If they can destroy Kavanaugh, they can do it to anyone you love and trust, regardless of any mountains of facts or evidence to the contrary.
Snip.
if GOP lawmakers show that they do have a spine and are no longer willing to let the other side get away with reputation murder, they might actually keep both their House and Senate majorities in November. As Trump has shown, even discouraged Republican voters are willing to stand behind somebody who’s willing to stand up for them.
Even the famously calm/embalmed majority leader Mitch McConnell was showing signs of irritation at the sheer dishonest on display from Democrats
I have never seen Mitch McConnell this riled up. He is finally feeling the same anger and the same passion that his constituents have been feeling for years. There may yet be hope for the @GOP . They need more reinforcements tho. Vote Red in November.
Early on it looked like McConnell was letting Democrats walk all over him by bending over backwards to accommodate their “witnesses” and ever-changing demands. Now it appears he may just have been playing possum while Democrats reeled out enough rope to hang themselves.
Welcome to a pre-Christmas LinkSwarm! (Pro-tip: The week before Christmas is the bad time to try rolling out a new diet.)
Female Kansas City Democratic congressional candidate drops out of race after sexual harassment charge. I’m betting this is the point when Democrats start going “Now wait a minute, this has gone on long enough…”
EU files formal article 7 complaint against Poland for “undermining the independence of the judiciary” (read: de-communizing it). They’ve also started action against “Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic for blocking the EU migrant relocation plans to settle some 160,000 migrants among its member states.” The more they tighten their grip, the more member states will slip through their fingers…
“12668 buildings have been damaged in Raqqa city due the battles between ISIS and SDF supported by Coalition. 3289 building in the red colour are completely destroyed. 3924 building in the orange colour are heavily damaged. 5444 building in the yellow colour are partially damaged.”
I’ve checked out of the NFL, but this is worth noting: Houston Texans offensive lineman David Quessenberry has been promoted to the active roster, and will step on the field for a regular game for the first time ever after beating cancer.
I would say this week has been a bear, but it’s more like a bear claw…
There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the debt deal President Donald Trump made with congressional Democratic leaders that pushes U.S. debt over the $20 trillion mark.
Is it a bad deal? From my perspective, almost certainly. Debt is an existential threat to the Republic, and I believe that we should reduce spending by eliminating vast swathes of federal government programs (Federal housing sibsidies? End them. Department of Education? Eliminate it. Agribusiness subsides? End them all. Etc.) until the budget is balanced. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about hitting the debt limit at all.
Sadly, my position seems to be a decidedly minority one in D.C. Since politics is the art of the possible, it’s better to ask: How bad is President Trump’s deal among the constellation of actual debt limit deal possibilities?
The answer seems to be: Still not great, but maybe not as bad as first impressions.
It’s possible that President Trump went for the deal because he had no choice, as Republican congressional leadership was woefully unprepared on the issue:
With much of the Washington Republican establishment still grumbling about President Donald Trump’s decision earlier this week to strike a deal with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, one prominent member of the House Freedom Caucus took to the Sunday Talk Shows to deliver what sounded like the faction’s official response to the week’s events.
In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan struck a delicate balance: criticizing the consequences of the president’s decision without impugning the man himself.
Jordan explained that while the Trump-Schumer-Pelosi deal wouldn’t be “good for the American taxpayer” the president can be excused for agreeing to it because Republicans in Congress failed to provide him with a suitable alternative.
And just like that, a member of the House’s most intransigent, conservative faction – the group that almost singlehandedly crushed the Trump administration’s health-care ambitions – turning the blame for Trump’s debt-ceiling can-kicking, and the powerful leverage that Democrats gained because of it, back on the president’s favorite opponents: Congressional Republicans.
Here’s Jordan:
I don’t think this was a good deal for the American taxpayer. We didn’t go anything to address the underlying $20 trillion debt but frankly what options did the president have in front of him? The first time the Republican conference talked about the debt ceiling was Sunday morning. And the Freedom Caucus had called for, nine and a half weeks ago, we said ‘don’t leave town until you have a plan on the debt ceiling’ and instead we went home for the longest August recess in a decade, longer even than in elections years.
Trump on Wednesday agreed to the proposal of House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to increase the national-debt limit for three months, and attach that to emergency aid for victims of Hurricane Harvey. But just days earlier, conservatives had been wringing their hands in fear that Schumer would turn the debt ceiling into the Democrats’ newest set of brass knuckles.
If not for the high-profile urgency of, in essence, stapling the debt limit to Harvey assistance, the pressing need to re-charge Uncle Sam’s credit card would have given Schumer a fresh way to beat up Republicans. Absent Harvey, Schumer and his band of toughs would have kidnapped the debt limit in exchange for something else, perhaps “DACA or death!” Instead, the debt-limit increase slid through, behind Harvey’s shield, with no last-minute hostage drama.
Trump rejected the offer of House speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to extend the debt limit for 18 months, past the 2018 mid-term elections. This would have removed federal borrowing from the list of issues on which the GOP could have run next year. Obama hiked the national debt from $10.6 trillion to $19.9 trillion — a staggering 87.8 percent. That mess, and how to escape it, would have been a worthy GOP issue. Ryan and McConnell largely would have obviated that opportunity.
Ryan and McConnell’s 18-month proposal also would have deprived Republicans of a priceless “must pass” vehicle to which they could append items that Senate Democrats dislike. The GOP similarly handed Obama multiple long-term debt-limit extensions that prevented Republicans from sending him short-term debt-limit measures that he would have had to sign, notwithstanding amendments that rankled him. Republicans should not deploy the debt limit every month, in order to corner Schumer and Senate Democrats. But mothballing this weapon until spring 2019 smacks of unilateral disarmament.
From all reports, Ryan and McConnell were ready to drop-kick the debt-limit 18 months down the road, in return for . . . nothing. Even worse, as conservatives correctly complain, they did not tie the debt-limit boost to any structural reforms, such as a cap on federal spending as a share of GDP, adoption of the brilliant Penny Plan (which would balance the budget by cutting total spending by 1 percent every year for eight years), a private-sector audit of every federal department and sub-cabinet agency, or even converting Washington’s books from cash-basis to accrual accounting. Ryan and McConnell promised 18 months of borrowing and spending on autopilot. Trump properly rejected such fiscal brain death.
Now, in three months, fiscal conservatives can and should append reformist language to the next debt-limit increase. Ryan/McConnell would have denied them that opportunity until nearly two Easters hence.
If Schumer wanted to demand “DACA or death!” I would have seen how he likes death: no debt limit vote, cut spending until the budget is balanced, and let Schumer explain why it was necessary for welfare recipients to lose their checks so Democrats could amnesty more illegal aliens.
Like I said, mine seems to be a minority viewpoint.
There are also reports that the deal is written in such a way that McConell might get the last laugh:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote in some “extraordinary” provisions to the debt ceiling bill that could mean there won’t be another debt ceiling fight in 2017 after all, he revealed on “The New Washington” podcast Monday.
McConnell insisted, in the face of Democrats’ objections, that the bill be written to preserve the Treasury’s ability to extend federal borrowing power by moving money around within government accounts. In layman’s terms, that means the Republicans can work around the December debt limit deadline and push that issue into 2018.
All this is just rearranging deck chairs on the Debtanic as long as the driving motivation for current congressional leadership is avoiding bad poll numbers rather than actual conservative governance. But short of a debt deal that includes spine replacement surgery for congressional leadership, there seems precious little chance of congress fulfilling any of the myriad conservative promises they made when Obama occupied the White House.
