Victor Davis Hanson « Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

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LinkSwarm for October 23, 2020

Friday, October 23rd, 2020

The third and final presidential debate is in the books, Trump breaks 50% approval, and the hard left plans another riot and arson spree if they lose. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

Consensus opinion seems to be that president Trump won last night’s debate with Joe Biden.

That appeared to be one lesson from a Zoom focus group conducted after the debate by messaging expert Frank Luntz. Speaking to 15 undecided voters — and yes, they appeared to be really undecided — Luntz asked for a one- or two-word description of the candidates’ debate demeanor. For Biden, the words were mostly bad: among them were “vague,” “very vague,” “non-specific,” “cognitively impaired,” “old,” “uncomfortable,” “elusive,” “grandfatherly,” and “defensive.”

For Trump, they were mostly much better: among them were “controlled,” “composed,” “constrained,” “reserved,” “poised,” “con artist,” “surprisingly presidential,” “calmer,” and “restrained.”

There will be more coverage of the debate, of Biden’s promise to end the oil industry and, indeed, more about Mr. Luntz, in Monday’s BidenWatch.

President Trump just hit the “Holy Grail” of breaking the 50% approval rating, hitting 52% approval in Rasmussen polling. All the usual poll caveats apply.

The left is currently planning on how to peacefully protest if President Donald Trump wins. Ha, just kidding! They’re going to burn everything down:

An activist group is planning large-scale and widespread ‘disruptive activity’ starting on the night of the election, in an attempt to stop what it predicts will be an “attempted coup” by President Trump in the form of a refusal to accept the election results.

“Shut Down D.C.” is setting the stage for mass gatherings in D.C., noting that the “resistance” must begin during the “muddied” legal and political debate over the election outcome.

LinkSwarm for August 21, 2020

Friday, August 21st, 2020

Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! This one may be a little short because I was busy buying books last night. This roundup is also light on Democratic National Convention news because, really, who has time to watch that garbage?

President Donald Trump is the last bulwark against the deluge:

Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

Snip.

Most hated Trump not because he hated or ridiculed them, but because he found them useless, as we saw from the fixations of John Brennan and James Clapper to the dazed pundits of NeverTrump to the wise men of the retired military.

What created the hatred of Trump and his supporters, then, was not a rather heterodox political agenda (see below), but a style that took on the Left on its own terms, and shocked a Republican establishment—again not just by conjuring the specter of Lee Atwater, but by shrugging as irrelevant his ostracism by the traditional conservative beltway insider.

Overview of Trump economy snipped.

Joe Biden has claimed the recent historic establishment of diplomatic relationships between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was not of the Trump Administration’s own making, but the logical epilogue to years of hard Obama Administration foundational work.

Biden is right in a sense. For eight years, his Obama team sought to empower Iran—through the lifting of sanctions; through the flawed Iran Deal; through appeasement of Hezbollah, the Assads, and Hamas; through estrangement of the Arab Gulf States and Israel—all as a bizarre Persian/Shiite counterweight to the Sunni Arab world and the U.S.-Israeli special relationship.

Obama and Biden so succeeded that they drove Israel and Gulf States to seek an-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend realist partnership, whose fruition we witnessed last week.

We forget, however, when Trump entered office, that Israel was isolated. Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States were bewildered by U.S. neutrality in the Middle East. Iran was ascendant. The “jayvees” of ISIS had overrun much of Iraq with delusions of caliphate grandeur. The Ottomanizing Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was supposedly our new trusted “bridge” between East and West.

Less than four years later, Iran is isolated, broke, and a veritable client of China. ISIS was bombed out of existence. Israel and much of the Arab world are more worried about Iran than they are about each other. The Palestinians are not the key to regional peace. Turkey is recognized as the rogue that it had become while relations with Greece have warmed.

The United States is energy independent of the Middle East, as is Israel—because of the expansion of fracking and horizontal drilling that a Biden-Harris Administration claims would cease upon assuming office.

Snip.

For all the hoax of “Russian collusion,” Vladimir Putin is in terrible shape and has not fooled the administration as he did with “reset” in the Obama years. In the last four years, the United States upped sanctions on Russia, crashed the world export market of natural gas and oil so dear to Moscow, beefed up NATO spending, hectored Germany about its new energy dependence on Putin, increased U.S. military capability, reached out to frontline Eastern Europe, left an asymmetrical missile deal with Russia, obliterated Russian mercenaries in Syria, sold lethal weapons to Ukraine—even as the likes of James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, and an array of retired generals sermonized that Trump was a Russian “asset.” Translated that means the president who contained Putin they loathed, and the Obama presidency that empowered him they idolized.

Snip.

Trump is neither a traditional conservative in the Ronald Reagan mode nor a centrist establishmentarian Republican like John McCain or Mitt Romney. But he has done more culturally for the conservative cause than any president since Calvin Coolidge. Like him or not, he has appointed more constructionist federal judges at all levels than any prior Republican president in a single term.

He likewise has been more opposed than any prior Republican to the current culture of abortion on demand. His education secretary is trying to enforce the Bill of Rights on what have become sometimes neo-fascistic college campuses, and to discourage race-based set asides and de facto discrimination on the basis of race.

He is a defender of the police while acknowledging the need for greater oversight, and opposed both violence in the streets, and the appeasement of it by blue state governors and mayors. In some sense, there are no conservatives, either by temperament or by political ability, eager to stop the summer madness of statue toppling, arson, spiraling crime, shakedowns, cancel culture and the vows of Antifa and BLM that all this is the beginning of a complete rewriting of American history and a radical recalibration of our shared futures.

Between the abyss and what goes on in Portland and the Magnificent Mile, there is for the moment nothing else but Trump standing in the breach.

No president in the history of the Republic has ever been targeted for removal by the opposition party, the permanent bureaucracy, and members of his own party, and in such an illegal and unethical manner.

There was the first impeachment effort, the Beltway punditry in early 2017 calling for his removal by coup if necessary, the voting machine suits, the Clinton-Obama-Steele subversion of the Trump campaign and transition, the Hollywood assassination chic, the effort to take out former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, the farce of the 25th Amendment that included the bathos of high federal officials contemplating wearing wires in private conservations with the president to the psychodrama of Professor Bandy Lee testifying before Congress about Trump’s mental state, the silly Emolument Clause gambit (Trump has lost over $1 billion while in office and taking no salary), the subversion of the FISA courts, the Russian hoax, Robert Mueller’s two-year long and $35 million witch hunt, the fabricated Steele dossier implanted in the bowels of the Obama government and media, the one-phone-call impeachment circus, the revolt of the retired generals, and what has rightly lately been called “coup porn,” the hysteria over Ukraine and the caricaturing of Trump in 2020 as Typhoid Mary, Herbert Hoover, and Bull Connor as the Left weaponized the contagion, quarantine, and rioting.

The Left, the media, and the NeverTrump Right rarely now any more argue all of the above was warranted or based on verifiable wrongdoing, but see the mish-mash instead as a righteous “any means necessary” tactic to achieve the noble end of destroying a president that they detest.

That Trump is still standing is an unrecognized tribute to his resilience, stamina, and willpower to fight it out to the bitter end.

His critics say 2020 is not 2016. This time the polls are right on, not rigged by the sort who trafficked in absurd Russian hoaxes or were mesmerized by Michael Avanetti. The silent Trump voters no longer exist, they add. The suburban mom, we are told, fears Trump’s temper more than Antifa. The fence-sitter is bothered more by tweeting than Biden’s ever-longer moments of confused silence. And on and on.

Perhaps.

But Americans at some point empathize with an underdog fighter on behalf of what they fear may be a fading America, even someone they are not always fond of, but who does not give up when bullied and subjected to a level of unwarranted abuse that they themselves know they could never endure. The Left never wished to beat Trump at the polls (indeed they feared such an ordeal); they instead wanted to destroy his person, his family, and everyone who followed him.

That Trump withstood such illegal, unconstitutional, and unethical venom also says something about those who dished it out—and, in the end, did so viciously and yet so impotently.

“I think the Democrats want Trump to win“:

One of the more perplexing things was the DNC giving a speaking slot to former Ohio governor and noted mailman’s son John Kasich. Kasich brings slightly less excitement than dryer lint to any gathering he graces but what was most amusing was that during the somnambulant lead-up to the DNC, the Democrats were acting like Kasich was a real big get for them.

He’s a milquetoast squish Republican whom no Republicans like anymore, so he tucked tail and went begging for attention crumbs from the Democrats, which is the way of the spineless squishes. After backstabbing his own party to score points with the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the media, Kasich then — as Matt details at Townhall — crapped all over his hosts by disparaging Bartender of the Year Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Speaking of the Russian collusion hoax, Kevin Clinesmith, the now Ex-FBI lawyer near the center of Crossfire Hurricane, just pled guilty, “admitting that he altered an email that he used to apply for a FISA warrant against former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page…The guilty plea marks the first conviction in the probe of the Russia investigation led by U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham.”

A bit more Clinesmith background:

Of all of the Obama administration loyalists who contributed to the Russia collusion hoax, Clinesmith is the one most obviously guilty of a felony: he altered an email he received from the CIA to say that Carter Page was NOT a CIA source, when in fact the email said Page WAS a CIA source, and submitted that fake document to the federal court in order to obtain a FISA warrant. That is worth five years in prison and, of course, the end of his legal career. Clinesmith’s guilty plea is significant, in part, because he may be willing to implicate others who are higher in the DOJ chain of command.

Soon:

Updated.

I have left space for more additions. pic.twitter.com/k7Dc35JqqQ

— Waiting For Durham – Brian Cates (@drawandstrike) August 16, 2020

Ninth Circuit Court rules that magazine limit bans are an unconstitutional infringement of the Second Amendment. “It should be noted that this will likely go to a full hearing of the 9th Circuit, but it also should be noted that the court is now majority Republican-appointed. If a full hearing brings the same result, then this all but forces Chief Justice John Roberts to stop being a coward and to take this up.” Flipping the Ninth is a huge achievement for the Trump Administration.

The Supreme Court declines to stop construction of the border wall.

“The Hint is ‘GET _ _ _ _ GO _ _ _ _ _.’ “Nike Suffers $790 Million Loss, CEO Confirms Layoffs.”

Goodyear goes full Social Justice Warrior, allows #BlackLivesMatter, bans Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. Now swears it was all a mistake.

Democrats remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. How long until they cut the “flag,” “republic,” “one nation,” and “liberty” parts out as well and just pledge directly to Social Justice? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Democratic big money donor Ed Buck hit with four more felony charges.

Wait, the government can secretly plant cameras on your property as long as they’re outside?

Scott “I ordered my cops to let Parkland kids die” Israel defeated in his attempt to win his old job back.

Microsoft put off a Day Zero fix for two years.

A thread on how lack of concrete engineering know-how in the third world has led to numerous deaths. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

Heh:

The fishing lure has spoken. #DNCConvention2020 pic.twitter.com/u8AYNapc4Y

— Ian McKelvey (@ian_mckelvey) August 20, 2020

True dat:

The Democratic Party is like if a circus had sex trafficking and riots. https://t.co/aN5A7nJNCg

— The Red-Headed Libertarian™ (@TRHLofficial) August 19, 2020

Boom:

Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Brilliant. pic.twitter.com/Imbt6CWEzP

— Lionel (@LionelMedia) August 19, 2020

“Democratic Convention Viewer Wishing They Would Just Get To The Part About All The Free Stuff”

“Brilliant Trump Puts Himself On All Postage Stamps, Forcing Democrats To Push For Abolishing USPS.”

Presumably an Acme piano:

Hillary Clinton Congratulates Nominees And Asks Them To Come Stand On Target Underneath Precariously Dangling Piano https://t.co/zdBDCsMJsX

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 20, 2020

Repeat: “DNC Crowd Erupts As Kermit Gosnell Gives Surprise Speech From Prison.”

“Might I suggest the Faceripper 9000?”

“I am Mark Zuckerberg. I am human just like you.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

Smart dog:

I have never seen a dog look so guilty pic.twitter.com/Oj1oqihafe

— Fuck the Secret Police (@QuayMatt) August 15, 2020

Tags:2020 Presidential Race, 9th Circuit Court, antifa, Babylon Bee, Border Controls, border fence, Crime, Crossfire Hurricane, data security, Democratic National Convention, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ed Buck, Foreign Policy, Goodyear, Guns, Iran, Israel, Joe Biden, John Durham, John Kasich, Kermit Gosnell, Kevin Clinesmith, LinkSwarm, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft, Nike, Republicans, Scott Israel, Second Amendment, Supreme Court, USPS, Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Republicans, Supreme Court | 1 Comment »

BidenWatch for July 6, 2020

Monday, July 6th, 2020

Biden wants to raid your wallet and destroy your suburbs. And the many, many, many oversea trips of Hunter. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

Biden wants $4 trillion in tax increases.

Biden’s tax increases would raise taxes on middle-class families by over $2,000 a year, with a $1,300 annual tax increase on a median-income, single parent with one child. Repealing Trump’s tax reform would cut in half the child tax credit and standard deduction, which currently help lower-income families the most.

There’s more: Biden proposes to reinstate the ObamaCare individual mandate tax, which hits lower-income and middle-class households the hardest, with an estimated bill of $695 to $2,085 per family. Most households paying that tax made less than $50,000 a year. Remember, Trump’s 2017 tax reform zeroed out that ObamaCare tax, to help working people.

He also wants to abolish the suburbs:

Biden and his party have embraced yet another dream of the radical Left: a federal takeover, transformation, and de facto urbanization of America’s suburbs. What’s more, Biden just might be able to pull off this “fundamental transformation.”

The suburbs are the swing constituency in our national elections. If suburban voters knew what the Democrats had in store for them, they’d run screaming in the other direction. Unfortunately, Republicans have been too clueless or timid to make an issue of the Democrats’ anti-suburban plans. It’s time to tell voters the truth.

I’ve been studying Joe Biden’s housing plans, and what I’ve seen is both surprising and frightening. I expected that a President Biden would enforce the Obama administration’s radical AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) regulation to the hilt. That is exactly what Biden promises to do. By itself, that would be more than enough to end America’s suburbs as we’ve known them, as I’ve explained repeatedly here at NRO.

What surprises me is that Biden has actually promised to go much further than AFFH. Biden has embraced Cory Booker’s strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call “little downtowns” in the suburbs. Combine the Obama-Biden administration’s radical AFFH regulation with Booker’s new strategy, and I don’t see how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves. It will mean the end of local control, the end of a style of living that many people prefer to the city, and therefore the end of meaningful choice in how Americans can live. Shouldn’t voters know that this is what’s at stake in the election?

It is no exaggeration to say that progressive urbanists have long dreamed of abolishing the suburbs. (In fact, I’ve explained it all in a book.) Initially, these anti-suburban radicals wanted large cities to simply annex their surrounding suburbs, like cities did in the 19th century. That way a big city could fatten up its tax base. Once progressives discovered it had since become illegal for a city to annex its surrounding suburbs without voter consent, they cooked up a strategy that would amount to the same thing.

This de facto annexation strategy had three parts: (1) use a kind of quota system to force “economic integration” on the suburbs, pushing urban residents outside of the city; (2) close down suburban growth by regulating development, restricting automobile use, and limiting highway growth and repair, thus forcing would-be suburbanites back to the city; (3) use state and federal laws to force suburbs to redistribute tax revenue to poorer cities in their greater metropolitan region. If you force urbanites into suburbs, force suburbanites back into cities, and redistribute suburban tax revenue, then presto! You have effectively abolished the suburbs.

Obama’s radical AFFH regulation puts every part of progressives’ “abolish the suburbs” strategy into effect (as I explain in detail here). Once Biden starts to enforce AFFH the way Obama’s administration originally meant it to work, it will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround. They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing. The latter, of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.

That’s all bad enough. But on top of AFFH, Biden now plans to use Cory Booker’s strategy for attacking suburban zoning. AFFH works by holding HUD’s Community Development Block Grants hostage to federal-planning demands. Suburbs won’t be able to get the millions of dollars they’re used to in HUD grants unless they eliminate single-family zoning and densify their business districts. AFFH also forces HUD-grant recipients to sign pledges to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Those pledges could get suburbs sued by civil-rights groups, or by the feds, if they don’t get rid of single-family zoning. The only defense suburbs have against this two-pronged attack is to refuse HUD grants. True, that will effectively redistribute huge amounts of suburban money to cities, but if they give up their HUD grants at least the suburbs will be free of federal control.

The Booker approach — now endorsed by Biden — may block even this way out. Booker wants to hold suburban zoning hostage not only to HUD grants, but to the federal transportation grants used by states to build and repair highways. It may be next to impossible for suburbs to opt out of those state-run highway repairs. Otherwise, suburban roads will deteriorate and suburban access to major arteries will be blocked. AFFH plus the Booker plan will leave America’s suburbs with no alternative but to eliminate their single-family zoning and turn over their planning to the feds. Slowly but surely, suburbs will become helpless satellites of the cities they surround, exactly as progressive urbanists intend.

Don’t believe the BS about Biden’s inevitable triumph:

Several things give me pause in the Biden Triumphant narrative. First, as we saw in 2016, Trump tends to run ahead of his polls. The Trump vote totals in the uncontested Republican primaries show a lot of enthusiasm—more than for Joe Biden, who doesn’t excite anyone. Aside from the usual problems and biases of polling these days, I think the number of “shy Trump” voters may have soared over the last month because of the riots. Back in 2016, the clever pollsters who got closer to the correct result did so by asking voters who they were voting for, and for Hillary responses, followed up with, “Who do you think your neighbor is voting for?” For the Hillary respondents who answered “Trump,” some pollsters correctly surmised (and adjusted their models accordingly) to count some of these supposed Hillary voters as Trump voters.

Second, I also keep thinking of the last national election in Australia, where every poll for the previous 18 months had the Labour Party beating the [conservative] Liberal Party, and yet the Liberal Party prevailed in the vote, largely because the Labour Party campaigned on a hard-left platform. (I know, that could never happen with our good ol’ “centrist” Joe Biden! /sarc). Ditto the last general election in Britain, where the Conservative Party was favored, but ended up running way ahead of its polls in the biggest rout of the Labour Party in 80 years. The point is, leftist parties continue to be in retreat in most western democracies; why should our Democratic Party buck this trend?

Third, there is one very significant cross-tab in the current polls. While Biden leads Trump in nearly every specific issue area, the one area where Trump is judged ahead of Biden is the economy, which may turn out to be the most important issue in the fall. Voters understand that our current economic crisis is not Trump or the government’s fault. It is hard to say right now whether the economy will be rising in the fall, or whether it relapses if a second wave of COVID-19 strangles the recovery. Either way Trump has a strong argument: does anyone think Biden’s proposed massive tax increases are a good idea for a struggling economy? Advantage Trump.

Plus a mention of the Bush-Dukakis race, also covered in the link below.

The ephemeral nature of a lead in the polls:

There are still four months before the election — and any number of ways for Biden to blow it.

Even the best campaigns “can get f—– up,” said Kelly Dietrich, founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, which trains candidates across the country. “There are a million ways to lose.”

Dietrich, like even the most circumspect observers of the 2020 campaign, does not predict that Biden will fall apart. But Democrats carry checklists in their minds of the universe of things that could alter the course of the campaign.

Biden might say the wrong thing at a debate, or have an awkward moment in an interview or at a news conference. Trump’s massive advertising campaign might begin to resonate, hurting Biden’s favorability ratings. Biden’s campaign might make poor decisions about spending allocations in the battleground states, or the coverage of his campaign may sour if he loses even a percentage point or two in polls. Presidential candidates with large leads have all suffered from less.

And then there are the factors outside Biden’s control. It is possible that Trump before November will announce a coronavirus vaccine, whether real or imagined. And it is possible that the economy will improve, a prospect Republicans are pinning their hopes on.

So much has changed over such a short period of time — so far, much of it to Biden’s advantage — that it’s impossible to rule out any kind of black swan political event.

Late this week, Les Francis, a Democratic strategist and former deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration, sent an email to a circle of friends, including a former congressman and former administration officials, with the subject line, “123 days until the election — and a sobering prospect.”

Right now, he said, “Trump is more than vulnerable.” But then he went on to outline a scenario in which Republicans hold down turnout and sufficiently harden Trump’s base.

“Think it can’t work?” Francis concluded. “Think again.”

Biden’s polling lead over Trump is significant, but not unprecedented. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Biden running ahead of Trump by just less than 9 percentage points.

Richard Nixon maintained double-digit leads over Hubert Humphrey throughout the summer of 1968, then was forced to scramble in the fall as Humphrey surged. Twenty years later, after that year’s Democratic National Convention, a Gallup Poll put Michael Dukakis’ lead over George H.W. Bush at 17 percentage points. As they do today, voters that summer appeared eager for change — before abandoning Dukakis and voting for Bush.

“Sometimes things can look very, very comfortable and it changes, it can change very, very quickly,” said Ken Khachigian, a former aide to Nixon and chief speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. “The psyche of the American voter can be affected by events very dramatically between Labor Day and Election Day.”

Why Biden’s lead will evaporate. Namely because his black female veep choices all suck, and there’s no way Democrats will let him step on a debate stage. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

“Stoke chaos, obstruct economic recovery, and hide Biden in the basement till Election Day.”

Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity.

I say “pretext” without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews, speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office.

But there were always problems with placing Biden in suspended animation in his basement, even as he seemingly surged ahead of Trump in the early-summer polls.

One, seclusion, quiet, and the absence of intellectual stimuli often only enhance dementia, while travel, conversation, and new imagery and experiences tend to unclog for a bit the congested neuron pathways. The more Biden “rests up,” the more he seems to be non compos mentis in his rare staged interviews. His brain is like a flabby muscle, and restful disuse does not make it firmer.

Two, in theory there should be a shelf life to a virtual presidential candidate. True, Biden has climbed in the polls, as the public never sees or hears him — in the manner that an unpopular lame-duck Obama disappeared to the golf courses and retreats in 2016 and yielded the media spotlight to the dog and cat fighting between Trump and Clinton. Obama then discovered that the more he retreated from the public eye, the more the public liked the old idea, rather than the current reality, of him.

Snip.

But by avoiding the campaign trail, Biden is only postponing the inevitable. He is compressing the campaign into an ever-shorter late-summer and autumn cycle. If he really agrees to three debates (he may not agree to any at all), and if he performs as he usually now acts and speaks, then he may end up reminding the American people in the eleventh hour of the campaign that they have a choice between a controversial president and a presidential candidate who simply cannot fulfill the office of presidency. And if Biden is a no-show, Trump will probably debate an empty, Clint Eastwood–prop mute chair.

Read the whole thing.

“Biden says he’s eager to compare ‘cognitive ability’ against Trump’s.”

Joe don’t know much about history:

Joe Biden has once again demonstrated he knows little about U.S. history and the Second Amendment thanks to a recent sit down with Wired in which he was asked about his support for gun control.

Biden responded by launching into a rambling tirade directed at AR-15s, which he says “should be outlawed.” After all, he continued, “From the very beginning you weren’t allowed to have certain weapons. You weren’t allowed to own a cannon during the Revolutionary War as an individual.”

Oh, Joe, you silly, silly man. During the Revolutionary War, not only could individuals own cannons, they could own an entire ship equipped with them. Privateering was an important part of the war effort, especially since the new United States had virtually no real navy of its own.

Snip.

Of course semi-automatic AR-15s aren’t weapons of war, but they’re quite popular among civilians. In fact, they’re the most commonly sold rifle in the country today. When Biden talks about outlawing the possession of these rifles, he’s talking about turning tens of millions of Americans into criminals for simply maintaining possession of the guns they already own. Biden’s grasp on American history may be tenuous, but his commitment to criminalizing the exercise of a constitutionally-protected right is firm.

“‘President Biden’ Would Be Music to Russian and Taliban Ears.”

Biden is not on board with the statue demolition rampage, at least as far as Christopher Columbus, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are concerned. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

Biden names his Florida campaign team:

The former vice president is sticking with Jackie Lee as his Florida state director after Lee led Biden’s Florida campaign ahead of the March 17 Democratic primary, when he trounced rival Bernie Sanders.

For its coordinated director — a position responsible for syncing operations with the Democratic National Committee and the Florida Democratic Party — the Biden campaign has hired Brandon Thompson. He most recently worked as campaign director for Organizing Together 2020 Florida, a political group focused on building campaign infrastructure early for the eventual Democratic nominee.

Thompson previously served as director of national campaigns for California Senator and potential Biden running mate Kamala Harris.
Biden’s campaign is also tapping two Florida strategists who have been involved in efforts to build back the Democratic Party’s registered voter advantage over Republicans in the state: Florida Democratic Party Executive Director Juan Peñalosa and former Organizing Together 2020 Florida political director Karen Andre.

Obama: “Nice country you’ve got here. Too bad all these riots are ruining it. Say, why don’t you hire this Joe Biden guy, if you know what’s good for you? Bet they’ll stop then.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

The press is tossing Biden softballs like a grandmother to her four-year-old niece. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

One reason the media is hyping the Wuhan Coronavirus so hard is a desperate attempt to keep Biden off the debate stage.

♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot easily achieve ‘mail-in’ voting; which they desperately need in key battleground states in order to control the outcome.

♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot shut down rallies and political campaigning efforts of President Trump; which they desperate need to do in key battleground states.

♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot block the campaign contrast between an energetic President Trump and a physically tenuous, mentally compromised, challenger.

♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats do not have an excuse for cancelling the DNC convention in Milwaukee; thereby blocking Team Bernie Sanders from visible opposition while protecting candidate gibberish from himself.

♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats do not have a mechanism to keep voters isolated from each-other; limiting communication and national debate adverse to their interests. COVID-19 panic pushes the national conversation into the digital space where Big Tech controls every element of the conversation.

♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot keep their Blue state economies easily shut-down and continue to block U.S. economic growth. All thriving economies are against the political interests of Democrats.

♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot easily keep club candidate Joe Biden sealed in the basement; where the electorate is not exposed to visible signs of his dementia.

♦ Without COVID-19 panic it becomes more difficult for Big Tech to censor voices that would outline the fraud and scheme. With COVID-19 panic they have a better method and an excuse.

♦ Without COVID-19 panic Democrats cannot advance, influence, or organize their preferred presidential debate format, a ‘virtual presidential debate’ series.

“Biden Trots Out Small Business Owner Who Got Thousands in Gov’t Assistance to Argue Trump Isn’t Helping Small Business.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

“Judicial Watch Obtains Secret Service Records Showing Hunter Biden Took 411 Flights, Visited 29 Countries.”

Ethiopia and India on June 14-22, 2009
Argentina on September 14-17, 2009
France and Spain on November 9-13, 2009
Canada on February 12-15, 2010
Dominican Republic on February 18-22, 2010
Puerto Rico on March 20-27, 2010
China on April 6-9, 2010
Belgium, Spain, and the United Kingdom on May 5-8, 2010
UK, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Ascension Island, U.S. Virgin Islands on June 6-13, 2010
Denmark and South Africa on August 9-24, 2010
Hong Kong, Taiwan and China on April 16-22, 2011
Mexico on May 15-17, 2011
Colombia, France, United Arab Emirates and France again on November 1-11, 2011
UK and Russia on February 15-18, 2012
Germany, France and UK on February 1-5, 2013
UK and Ireland on March 20-22, 2013
China on June 13-15, 2013
Switzerland and Italy on July 26-August 7, 2013
Japan, China, South Korea and the Philippines on December 2-9, 2013
China and Qatar on May 7-14, 2014

Sure visited China a lot, didn’t he?

The Wikipedia edit war over potential Veep pick Kamala Harris’ entry:

In 2016, The Atlantic published an article about Wikipedia edits and how a burst of activity could foreshadow Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick, noting that Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine’s page had seen significantly more edits than any other candidate’s in the weeks leading up to the announcement. The article also cited a 2008 Washington Post report about Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page seeing more than 65 edits in the hours leading up to John McCain’s announcement.

Last month, a Reddit user remembered this Atlantic piece and wrote a Jupyter script to see which 2020 vice presidential contender had the most edits in a span of three weeks: Harris had 408, Stacey Abrams had 66, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had 22, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar had four. Another Redditor pointed out that a majority of Harris’s edits were coming from a single person.

Harris has been working to distance herself on the national stage from her prosecutorial record in California, which has increasingly become a political liability, while taking a lead on Democratic police reform legislation after the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. During the 2020 primary, she branded herself as a “progressive prosecutor” and shifted left on issues like health care and climate change. But the most drastic gap is between her current messaging on crime and her past.

A section in her bio that detailed her decision not to prosecute Mnuchin for financial fraud, despite recommendations from her staff attorneys, has also been deleted:

In 2013, Harris did not prosecute Steve Mnuchin‘s bank OneWest despite evidence “suggestive of widespread misconduct” according to a leaked memo….In 2017, she said that her office’s decision not to prosecute Mnuchin was based on “following the facts and the evidence…like any other case”. In 2016, Mnuchin donated $2,000 to her campaign, making her the only 2016 Senate Democratic candidate to get cash from Mnuchin, but as senator, she voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury.

A section on an Ethics Commission finding Harris guilty of a campaign spending violation during her San Francisco district attorney race has also been deleted. A line about Harris traveling to Israel and the West Bank in November 2017, where she met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was removed altogether.

The Wikipedia user, who goes by the username “Bnguyen1114,” has made hundreds of edits to Harris’s page throughout the last several months, often getting into fights over the proposed edits with other Wikipedia editors, who pointed out that the language was getting pulled directly from press releases and campaign literature. “You seem to have gone through a database of press releases from Harris’s office, cataloging every single one and adding it to the article,” one Wikipedia editor said. “That is not how we write encyclopedic articles.”

(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

Potential Veep Tammy Duckworth is fine with removing statues of George Washington.

Susan Rice is also pimping herself hard for Veep. Why the Iran deal and allowing the rise of the Islamic State would be seen as positive job qualifications by the American people eludes me.

Boom!

Biden is controlled by the radical left.

His leftwing controllers are determined to defund the police and make you and your family less safe.

We can't allow their dangerous and twisted dream become a reality. Too much is at stake! pic.twitter.com/mlx6Wjfz3s

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 3, 2020

Back in 1975, Joe Biden embraced segregation. (Hat tip: Mark Levin.)

“Biden Proves Healthy Cognition By Flawlessly Reciting All The Sounds Animals Can Make.”

Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:

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LinkSwarm for April 10, 2020

Friday, April 10th, 2020

Happy Good Friday, everyone!

Are we finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel? The Wuhan coronavirus numbers have gone from doubling every two or three days to taking more than a week to double, which suggests successfully bending the curve. If hydroxychloroquine is indeed effective against the virus, we should think about opening the economy back up sooner rather than later, as our ICUs won’t be too overwhelmed to save lives.

Speaking of which…

Are fears of the Wuhan coronavirus overblown? This roundup of reader reports from various hospitals around the country suggests that it is. Lots of hospitals having layoff because so many elective procedures have been cancelled and projected coronavirus ICU cases never materialized. Maybe we’ve flattened the curve enough?

Democrats are going to fight Trump to the death over a stimulus aimed at small business. How are they supposed to get their beaks wet there?

“Dem Governor Who Banned Hydroxychloroquine Gets Caught Hoarding It.”

CNN tells the truth that Democrats blocked GOP funding for small business, then changed it, because telling negative truths about Democrats is always bad. (And speaking of bad, Powerline, I’m really not enamored of you launching a full-screen popup ad every time I click on a story (at least on the machine that doesn’t have Ad-Block for everything.)

“How US bureaucrats deepened the coronavirus crisis to deadly effect“:

Public officials across the United States are flying blind against the novel coronavirus epidemic. Because of a government-engineered testing fiasco, they don’t know how fast the virus is spreading, how many people have been infected by it, how many will die as a result of it or how many have developed immunity to it.

The failure to implement early and widespread testing — caused by a combination of shortsightedness, ineptitude and bureaucratic intransigence — left politicians scrambling to avoid a hospital crisis by imposing broad business closures and stay-at-home orders.

The grand failure of federal health bureaucrats foreclosed the possibility of a more proactive and targeted approach, focused on identifying carriers, tracing their contacts and protecting the public in a more measured way through isolation and quarantines.

The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was reported at the end of December. The first confirmed case in the United States was reported on Jan. 20, by which time it seems likely that many other Americans were already infected.

At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective.

The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests before relaxing the restrictions that made it impossible to assess the progress of the epidemic. Making a false virtue of necessity, the CDC set irrationally narrow criteria for testing, which meant that carriers without severe symptoms or obvious risk factors escaped detection.

(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Is Twitter using the health emergency to settle political scores?

Nate Jones and I dig deep into Twitter’s decision to delete Rudy Giuliani’s tweet (quoting Charlie Kirk of Turning Point) to the effect that hydroxychloroquine had been shown to be 100% effective against the coronavirus and that Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) had threatened doctors prescribing it out of anti-Trump animus. Twitter claimed that it was deleting tweets that “go directly against guidance from authoritative sources” and separately implied that the tweet was an improper attack on Gov. Whitmer.

I call BS. Hydroxychloroquine has looked very effective in several tests in France and China, but it hasn’t passed any controlled trials, and along with all the other promising drugs, it won’t pass those trials until the wave of death has begun to recede. In a world of bad choices, the drug looks like one of a few worthwhile gambles, as even Gov. Whitmer recognized by reversing course and asking to be allocated a lot of doses. Giuliani was closer to right than Whitmer. But Twitter decided that Giuliani’s view was so far from the mainstream that it had to be suppressed.

To be clear, Twitter management decided to suppress a legitimate if overstated view about how to survive the coronavirus. Twitter readers would not be allowed to see that view. That’s a stance that requires some serious justification.

Only Verified Official Coronavirus views are allowed, because Orange Man Bad.

Point/Counterpoint: National Review says that Sweden’s non-lockdown solution to coronavirus (isolate elders, but no shutdowns) has been better than our own, but Time disagrees. “Sweden has a relatively high case fatality rate: as of April 8, 7.68% of the Swedes who have tested positive for COVID-19 have died of the virus.”

Does the virus have an Achilles heel ?

Could the Wuhan coronavirus have been in California already last fall? “[Victor Davis] Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.”

Another 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.

Texas is doing comparatively well:

NY — 362 deaths per million
LA — 151
NJ — 192
MI — 108
CT — 106
WA — 61
MA — 73
FL — 17
CA — 14
TX — 7

April 9, 2020 https://t.co/sfDBdOkPli

— Jubal E. Harshaw (@alimhaider) April 10, 2020

But: “Texas unemployment agency plagued by tech issue, backlogs as claims near 750K.”

Texas local governments need to start trimming their budgets right now.

A World Poker Tour organizer’s diary of the Wuhan coronavirus’ onset. I’m not really interested in poker tournaments, but this piece is really valuable for it’s detailed, almost minute-by-minute breakdown of those crazy days less than a month ago when the Wuhan Coronavirus went from Something We Might Have To Worry About to The Event Horizon of Absolute Change.

“Diamond Comics Announces They Will ‘Hold Payments To Vendors‘ Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.” Also, they won’t ship comics to stores, either. Given that Diamond has a defacto monopoly on comics distribution, this is going to drive a lot of indie comics makers completely out of business. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)

Another weird coronavirus wide effect: You can no longer ship packages to Saudi Arabia.

New York Democratic represntative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez draws a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “Word broke yesterday that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is reportedly planning to endorse Caruso-Cabrera, probably because they don’t want to be the first with their backs up against the wall after AOC’s glorious people’s revolution.”

Colleges and universities are already starting to panic over the loss of revenue. “How long will it take for Democrats to propose a higher education bailout? When that happens, Republicans should hold out until schools start cutting pointless administrators and departments.” Like a malware-infected Windows system, what higher education needs is a shutdown, reboot, reformat and reinstall before it’s safe to start up again.

Laredo mandates masks.

Keir Starmer replaces Jeremy Corbyn as head of UK’s Labour Party:

Corbyn’s tenure has cost Labour the trust and patience of millions, including political observers around the world. By rights, it should have been Corbyn’s hidebound socialism and barely concealed tolerance for anti-Semitism that did him in. But what ultimately cost Corbyn the support of his party was electoral defeat. And not just any defeat, but a disastrous one.

British Labourites and voters more broadly knew who Corbyn was well before the summer of 2017. His first shadow cabinet was a mess. His nostalgic Marxism was laid bare in a manifesto that called for the nationalization of infrastructure and industry alike. His fondness for terrorists—from the IRA to Hezbollah and Hamas—was no secret. But the conservative government under Theresa May plodded into the general election with all the grace of a muskox, confirming voters’ fears that the government could not completely manage Brexit and transforming a 20-point margin in the polls into a 13-seat loss for the Tories. Though it was a defeat for Labour, Corbyn’s party managed a halfway decent showing. It was enough to avoid the impression that Labour had suffered a rebuke.

In the interim, Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem rapidly became Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The party was wrought by schism when it pledged to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism but amended it to allow its members more freedom to criticize Israel, all without consulting relevant Jewish organizations or even the party’s Jewish members. The unearthing of a variety of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic online affiliations compelled his own members to openly criticize their party’s leadership. Under Corbyn, his party’s affinities trended steadily in one odious direction, leading to the high-profile resignations of many longtime Labour MPs. “I am sickened that Labour is now perceived by many as a racist, anti-Semitic party,” said outgoing MP Mike Gapes.

All this weighed heavily on British voters. One survey found that 85 percent of Britain’s Jews believed Corbyn was himself anti-Semitic, despite his pro forma denunciations of Jew-hatred. Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the Labour Party’s leader as “unfit for office,” a sentiment with which the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed. By the eve of the 2019 general election, only the most unwavering of Labour voters told pollsters that their primary concern about the prospect of a Labour-led government was “Jeremy Corbyn being prime minister.” But the inevitability of the disaster headed Labour’s way was not acknowledged until it was upon them, and by then it was too late. On December 12, Labour turned in the party’s worst electoral performance since 1935. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism that did Corbyn in. It was his failure to deliver at the polls.

Technically, that’s Sir Keir Starmer, providing just the right amount of irony that a party theoretically representing the interests of the working class is now lead by an Oxford-educated lawyer-knight.

That Hungary emergency act the left was screaming “dictatorship!” about last week: worrisome, but not that worrisome:

The tests are those most people would impose. Is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.

Plus it’s not like other European countries haven’t passed similar liberty-abridging laws in response to the crisis.

“‘Voter fraud’? California man finds dozens of ballots stacked outside home.” “The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.”

Austin’s holy homeless don’t need to practice the social distancing that mere citizens are required to observe:

I went to downtown Austin to see if the homeless were practicing social distancing. They weren’t. Also getting more territorial and violent. No law enforcement in sight. pic.twitter.com/zTEJQ3YBiu

— J Owen Shroyer (@allidoisowen) April 9, 2020

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of the ICU for coronavirus. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Rand Paul has also receivered from his bout with the coronavirus and volunteered to work at a local hospital.

Man steals guns from police firearms store…to sell them to cops. I don’t think you thought your cunning plan all the way through there, sport…

Feminist media personalities have no idea what it takes to run a business, details at 10:

“Why don’t business owners just pull a bunch of $20s off the money tree I assume grows in each of their backyards?”

— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) April 9, 2020

Don’t trust Jussie Smollett in scrubs.

Dwight has a good anniversary roundup on the Newhall shooting.

Beast Mode.

Classic footage of the Gipper, showing what a thoughtful and learned man he was:

Reagan Jumped The Aisle from Dems to GOP LIKE ME in 2012! Retweet!

We have a realignment of voters who find themselves at the wrong party, said Reagan in 1975.

“When my party left, I turned right,” I said in my 2012 book “Jumping The Aisle.”

That’s @realDonaldTrump’s NEW @GOP! pic.twitter.com/2KcUM6JVgo

— Oliver McGee PhD MBA (@OliverMcGee) April 9, 2020

Cry. Me. A. Freaking. River. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Here’s a really good essay by Open Blogger over on Ace of Spades about Quintin Tarantino. I was unaware of the Terry Gilliam connection.

FINALLY! Former Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich is being inducted into the basketball hall of fame. A long-overdue honor for the man who guided the Houston Rockets to two NBA championships.

Awww:

Daddy's picking me up because I'm scared of escalators pic.twitter.com/fyHNCqDfJ2

— Dogs Funny (@DogsFunni) April 5, 2020

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LinkSwarm for January 3, 2020

Friday, January 3rd, 2020

Start your new decade out with another LinkSwarm!

Iranian Revolutionary Guard Leader and Qods force commander Qasem Soleimani was killed in an airstrike in Baghdad.

Further thoughts from Graeme Wood:

Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force who was killed in Iraq yesterday, was the most successful military figure of his time. One should grade success not in absolute terms, but by how much is done with how little—and on that scale, Soleimani was a prodigy. The end of his career is as pivotal in the region as the retirement of an athlete who has dominated his sport, or a musician whose sound, once unique, somehow has become imitated by every young crooner out there. One difference is that Bob Dylan is still touring and Michael Jordan has moved on to hawking sneakers and steaks. Soleimani has earned the only retirement befitting a man of his long and appalling record, which is to be vaporized in a U.S. air strike.

Soleimani’s obituaries will note his involvement in numerous wars along Iran’s periphery (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen). But all these wars are in fact one war, the sole war he was fighting for his entire career, starting from his days as a young officer in the early 1980s fighting against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Consider Iran’s pathetic fortunes then: Its civilian population cowered in terror at Iraqi air raids; its military wasted itself in “human wave” attacks that generated “martyrs” at a startling pace. The territory Iran and Iraq traded, at immense cost, was minimal, and strategically worthless. Iran’s goal (and Soleimani’s) then would have been to avoid annihilation by Iraq—and then, only as a distant dream, to overrun its enemy and capture the Shiite holy places in Najaf, Karbala, Samarra, and Baghdad.

Now the notion of Iranian control of these cities hardly beggars the strategic imagination. The Iran-Iraq War has lasted three decades longer than history supposed, and the machinations of Soleimani have been largely responsible for its outcome now looking favorable to Iran. (The other contribution to this outcome was the botched occupation of Iraq by the United States.) Because the Iraqi side of the war against the Islamic State was fought in part by Iranian-backed militias, Soleimani in 2015 could appear in the city of Tikrit while supervising a take-back operation. The power of that image to an Iranian audience that remembered the sorrows of the 1980s cannot be overstated—the most recognizable Iranian general striding confidently through Saddam’s hometown!

Reciprocity is the key to President Donald Trump:

Reciprocity has been the key to understanding Donald Trump. Whether you are a media figure or a mullah, a prime minister or a pope, he will be good to you if you are good to him. Say something mean, though, or work against his interests, and he will respond in force. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be polite. There will be fallout. But you may think twice before crossing him again.

That has been the case with Iran. President Trump has conditioned his policies on Iranian behavior. When Iran spread its malign influence, Trump acted to check it. When Iran struck, Trump hit back: never disproportionately, never definitively. He left open the possibility of negotiations. He doesn’t want to have the Greater Middle East—whether Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, or Afghanistan—dominate his presidency the way it dominated those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. America no longer needs Middle Eastern oil. Best keep the region on the back burner. Watch it so it doesn’t boil over. Do not overcommit resources to this underdeveloped, war-torn, sectarian land.

The result was reciprocal antagonism. In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by his predecessor. He began jacking up sanctions. The Iranian economy turned to shambles. This “maximum pressure” campaign of economic warfare deprived the Iranian war machine of revenue and drove a wedge between the Iranian public and the Iranian government. Trump offered the opportunity to negotiate a new agreement. Iran refused.

Mess with the bull and you get the horns. (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)

Remember the reckoning Donald Trump brought to our smug, out-of-touch elites in 2016? Victor Davis Hanson says that in 2020, he’s bringing it even harder:

In my hometown near my central California farm, I spent autumn 2016 talking to mostly Mexican American friends with whom I went to grammar or high school. I had presumed then that they must hate Trump. Remember the speech in 2015 announcing he was going to stand, when he bashed illegal immigration, or his snide quip about the ‘Mexican judge’ in the Trump University lawsuit, or his expulsion of an interrupting Univision anchor, Jorge Ramos, from one of his campaign press conferences? But I heard no such thing. Most said they ‘liked’ Trump’s style, whether or not they were voting for him. They were tired of gangs in their neighborhoods and of swamped government services — especially the nearby Department of Motor Vehicles — becoming almost dysfunctional. I remember thinking that Trump of all people might get a third of the Latino vote: of no importance in blue California, but maybe transformative in Midwest swing states?

During the last two weeks I made the same rounds — a high-school football game at my alma mater, talks with Mexican American professionals, some rural farm events. Were those impressions three years ago hallucinations? Hardly. Trump support has, if anything, increased — and not just because of record low unemployment and an economy that has turned even my once-ossified rural community into a bustle of shopping, office-construction and home-building, with ‘Now Hiring’ signs commonplace. This time I noticed that my same friends always mentioned Trump in contrast to their damnation of California — the nearby ‘stupid’ high-speed rail to nowhere, the staged power shutoffs, the drought-stricken dead trees left untouched in flammable forests, the tens of thousands of homeless even in San Jose, Fresno and Sacramento, the sky-high gas prices, the deadly decrepit roads, the latest illegal-alien felon shielded from ICE. Whatever Trump was, my friends saw him as the opposite of where California is now headed. His combativeness was again not a liability but a plus — especially when it was at the expense of snooty white liberals. ‘He drives them crazy,’ Steve, my friend from second grade, offered.

One academic colleague used to caricature my observations in 2016 that Trump’s rallies were huge and rowdy, while Hillary’s seemed staged and somnolent — and that this disconnect might presage election-day turnouts. ‘Anecdotes!’ I was told. ‘Crowd size means as little as yard signs.’ If anything, Trump’s rallies now are larger, the lines longer. Maybe the successive progressive efforts to abort his presidency by means of the Electoral College, the emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller investigation and now Ukraine only made him stronger by virtue of not finishing him off.

When I talked to a Central Valley Rotary Club in November 2016, I assumed on arrival that such doctrinaire Republicans would be establishment Never Trumpers. But few were then. When I returned this week to speak again, I found that none are now. These businesspeople, lawyers, accountants and educators talked of the money-making economy. But I sensed, as with my hometown friends, that same something else. There was an edge in their voices, an amplification of earlier fury at Hillary’s condescension and put-down of deplorables. ‘Anything he dishes out, they deserve,’ one man in a tailored suit remarked, channeling my grade-school friend Steve. I take it by that he meant he and his friends are frequently embarrassed by Trump’s crudity — but not nearly so much as they are enraged by the sanctimoniousness of an Adam Schiff or the smug ‘bombshell’ monotony of media anchors.

It is easy to say that 2020 seems to be replaying 2016, complete with the identical insularity of progressives, as if what should never have happened then certainly cannot now. But this time around there is an even greater sense of anger and need for retribution especially among the most unlikely Trump supporters. It reflects a fed-up payback for three years of nonstop efforts to overthrow an elected president, anger at anti-Trump hysteria and weariness at being lectured. A year is a proverbial long time. The economy could tank. The president might find himself trading missiles with Iran. At 73, a sleep-deprived, hamburger-munching Trump might discover his legendary stamina finally giving out. Still, there is a growing wrath in the country, either ignored, suppressed or undetected by the partisan media. It is a desire for a reckoning with ‘them’. For lots of quiet, ordinary people, 2020 is shaping up as the get-even election — in ways that transcend even Trump himself.

“Anything Trump dishes out, they deserve.” I should put that on a T-shirt. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

President Trump’s reelection committee goes in to 2020 with $200 million on hand, which is probably more than all of the remaining Democratic contenders combined. Ann Althouse: “The news this morning is making me think of 1984. Not the book. The election. Remember that? Biggest difference: The ex-Vice-President who got his party’s nomination to fend off the hated, show-biz, imposter President… was so fresh-faced!” Oh for the youthful excitement of a 56-year old Walter Mondale…

“The reality may be the very opposite of what Democrats planned. The more the Left tries to abort the Trump presidency before the election, the more it bleeds from each of its own inflicted nicks.”

What Boris Johnson’s win says about political realignment:

The 2016 Brexit vote revealed that a large portion of the British population was unrepresented in Westminster party politics, and its aftermath exposed the fact that a large number of politicians would stop at nothing to keep that group unrepresented. To be sure, these MPs would not have put it in such words — they thought that attempting to stop Brexit for three years was acting in their constituents’ best interests. But constituents express their beliefs at the ballot box, and most of them simply did not think that their representatives knew what was best better than they did.

There is plenty to criticize about Johnson and the government that he will now lead, but the same accusation cannot be leveled against them. Johnson ducks scrutiny, avoids substance, and can often seem entirely devoid of empathy. His campaign consisted of the three words “Get Brexit Done,” spun around like a broken play toy. But these words had more power than Labour’s message of social justice, just as the Brexit slogan “Take Back Control” held more sway than the countless predictions that Brexit would bring about economic doom in the run up to the referendum. Both phrases were fashioned by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s infamous chief adviser, and their success point to a very simple fact: Voters believe in democracy, and they do not take nicely to politicians who don’t. No handout can compensate for the snobbery of those offering it, because voters disdain moral superiority more than they appreciate moral purity.

The roots of this tension go back decades, as successive British governments implemented EU treaties and constitutional reforms without democratic assent. In 1992, when the European Economic Community turned into the European Union, John Major’s government refused to offer the public a referendum on the issue. And in 1997, under Tony Blair, monetary policy was placed in the hands of the Bank of England. The same Blair government pushed for executive asymmetrical devolution in Scotland and Wales, without considering its extreme constitutional implications for England’s representation in Westminster. Then came the 2007 EU Lisbon Treaty, a major change to the U.K.’s constitution that Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided he could ratify without asking for voters’ consent. This move effectively rendered any future promise on migration numbers a lie, because the United Kingdom’s borders were made subservient to Eurozone economics. Voters are not stupid: They realize that an open-borders policy raises problems for the welfare state. Ignoring this fact only made room for extremism when the Eurozone’s economy eventually fell into crisis in 2008.

These were the beginnings of a political realignment that has found its voice in liberal democracies across the continent and beyond — a realignment based on the divide between democratic politics and technocratic politics, in which liberals turn to the courts in order to entrench cultural values for which they cannot not secure democratic consent. The Blair years might have seen continuous government, but they also saw a significant drop in voter participation. Labour’s 2001 and 2005 electoral victories saw turnouts of 59.4 percent and 61.4 percent, respectively — some of the highest levels of voter apathy recorded since World War II. This was rule under the primacy of law and economics masked by the pretense of political consent and temporary economic stability. Divides between the electorate and their representatives on questions of immigration, foreign policy, and national identity were buried under a centrist carpet.

Brexit brought the divide into the open, because it gave voters an opportunity to reject the new constitution of a United Kingdom that had been radically transformed since it joined the EU in 1973. An unprecedented number of people did exactly that, and it is no surprise that this vote then took on the political and cultural significance that it did. Politicians across the Commons agreed to let the voters decide, only to explain away the referendum’s result as an aberration of common sense. Such arrogance meant that Brexit became a symbol of the cultural divide between those who had political control and those whose wishes were considered problems to be solved.

Any politician unwilling to reckon with the scale of the referendum was destined to shrivel into electoral insignificance. Corbyn had no easy way out, because Labour was effectively three different constituencies mashed uncomfortably into one party: middle-class Remainer liberals, woke millennial students, and socially conservative workers. These groups hold irreconcilable views on Brexit and stand in different places along the democratic–technocratic divide. It is a split similarly represented by their Westminster MPs, albeit in distinctly different ratios.

When Corbyn tried to win over Brexit voters, he could not deny that he had allowed a majority of his MPs to prevent Brexit’s implementation. And when he tried to win over Remainers, he was forced to face the fact that he had never been a Remainer (not to mention the fact that his anti-Western brand of foreign policy is antithetical to many Remainers’ liberal internationalism). The only group that truly stuck by him were the students, and anyone who knows anything about democracy knows that students don’t win you elections.

President Donald Trump is at 50% approval rating in the latest Zogby poll. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

“Top DOE official arrested for trying to set up sex with underage boy.” That’s de Blasio’s NYC Department of Education Deputy Chief of Staff David Hay.

“Sex offenders, MS-13 gang member nabbed near border checkpoints.” You know, the same border checkpoints Democrats want to do away with…

“African Americans Are Taking Back Jobs Stolen By Illegal Aliens.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

Two dispatches from Adler’s Austin. First: “Man allegedly made bomb threat then stood in traffic and threw himself at car.”

Second: “Austin attacker sentenced to 200 days in jail released two weeks later.” That’s the Congress Avenue Bridge attack case. (Hat tip: Austin_Network.)

Bad cop sentenced.

“Black Israelites” attacking Jews in New York is deeply inconvenient:

The Jersey City murders are the culmination of years of incitement against Jews. But the perpetrators in that case were themselves minorities from the African American community. The perpetrators have been identified as coming from an extremist religious group called Black Hebrew Israelites, making them a minority of a minority. The perpetrators are seen as a “militant” fringe within that minority.

The authorities are now looking at the case as domestic terrorism fueled by antisemitism. However major media have endeavored to dismiss the murders as unimportant and unique. The New York Times described the Black Hebrew Israelites as being “known for their inflammatory sidewalk ministers who employ provocation as a form of gospel.” It’s a bit more than that. In fact, the group and the milieu around it tend to view religion through a racial lens, such that Jews are described as “white” and “fake” and the “real Jews” are portrayed as black, along with all the prophets and religious figures. The ADL pointed out that this group views itself as the real “chosen people” and that it sees people of color as the real descendants of the 12 tribes. The group was in the media earlier in the year in Washington DC when they shouted insults at Catholic high school students.

Mainstream society wants to view this as “provocation,” because if they viewed it as a burgeoning racist violent movement targeting Jews then they would have to confront it and ask tough questions of why it is tolerated in a community. Expert J.J. McNab told the Associated Press that in fact this group takes pride in “confronting Jewish people everywhere and explaining that they are evil.”

In American society there is generally only place for one kind of racism. There are far-right white supremacists and everyone else. This Manichean worldview of antisemitism and racism means we are only comfortable with one type of perpetrator. An angry white man. Those are the racists. Dylann Roof, the racist who murdered black people in a church in 2015 is the most normal kind of America racist. The El Paso shooter or the Tree of Life Synagogue attacker are also the kind of killers that fit into an easy narrative. But when the perpetrators stray from that we have a problem dealing with it. In New York City, according to a post by journalist Laura Adkins, data shows that of 69 anti-Jewish crimes in 2018, forty of the perpetrators were labelled “white” and 25 were labelled “black,” the others were categorized as Hispanic or Asian.

To keep the focus on the white supremacists, headlines need to explain to us that “right wing terrorists” have killed more than Jihadists, as Slate.com said earlier this year. Other types of terrorism are watered down a bit. During the Obama administration Islamist-inspired terror was even rebranded as “violent extremism” so as not to mention the religion of the perpetrators. For some reason even though Islamist terror is also a far-right ideology, it is portrayed as something else. For instance, when Jews were targeted at a kosher supermarket in France they were called “random folk in a deli.” They weren’t random, they were targeted, like the Jews in Jersey City, but they needed to be random or we’d have to ask about the antisemitism that permeates Islamist terror.

In the wake of all the attacks in New York against Jews, culminating in the shooting attack at the kosher market, it became difficult to ignore the rising tide. But there is discomfort in looking at the depth of the perpetrators. The comfort society has with expecting perpetrators to be “far-right” and “white” even led Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib to blame “white supremacy” for the Jersey City attack. Her tweet was deleted. When it wasn’t white supremacy and there was no one to condemn, it didn’t fit the narrative and was less important.

Snip.

How did we get here? The motivation behind the Jersey City attack is clear from social media posts one of the perpetrators made, according to a research by the ADL. This included claims that Jews are “Khazars,” and that “Brooklyn is full of Nazis-Ashkenazis,” and that the “police are in their [the Jews] hand now.” The worldview matches with the larger milieu in which Jews are portrayed as not merely “white Jews” but in fact as controlling the slave trade and police violence. In this new antisemitism Jews are reframed as both being “fake,” as in not really Jews from the Middle East, and also being “white” and running white supremacism. This replaces German Nazis with Jewish Nazis; it replaces white supremacists with a hidden hand of Jews controlling both the American far-right and also the police. Instead of pushing back against this there are attempts to excuse it or just remain quiet about it and hope this antisemitism goes away.

Left out of this Jerusalem Post piece is the fact that blacks provide a disproportionate share of Democratic Party voters, while Jews are heavily over-represented among its big-money donor base. Pointing out that one part of the Democratic Party coalition routinely commits assault against the part actually paying the bills isn’t useful to the narrative…

“Forced organ harvesting has happened in multiple places in the People’s Republic of China and on multiple occasions for a period of at least twenty years and continues to this day.”

“Major US Companies Breached, Robbed, and Spied on by Chinese Hackers.”

“Navy Saved Money with Touch-Screen Controls, Sailors Paid with Their Lives.”

Remember how people used to joke that we supported Israel, the only country in the Middle East that didn’t export oil? Well, guess what?

“Media Disappointed To Learn Armed Citizen Stopped Mass Shooting.”

Shoe company cheers gun control bill. Shoe company goes broke. (Hat tip: Stehen Green at Instapundit.)

Speaking of idiots cheering gun control: “Tom Nichols is an insufferable elitist prick.”

Ireland fast-tracks law banning all gasoline-powered cars within a decade.

MSM fact-checking doesn’t.

Charles Murray on the statistical differences between males and females in America:

And yet we live in a society where males are the privileged sex. https://t.co/697M4dgKZl

— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) January 1, 2020

A look back on Galaxy Quest on it’s 20 year anniversary.

Will Betelgeuse go supernova? Supposedly it’s “not likely to produce a gamma-ray burst and is not close enough for its x-rays, ultraviolet radiation, or ejected material to cause significant effects on Earth.” A good thing, too, since it’s only 640 light years away, which is practically next door in galactic terms.

Dad takes son to Mongolia just to get him off his phone.

Moderately amusing Texas signs.

Rip tire.

Tumblegeddon.

Tags:1984 Presidential Race, 2020 Presidential Race, anti-semitism, astronomy, Austin, Betelgeuse, black, Black Hebrew Israelites, Border Controls, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Charles Murray, China, Colin Furze, Communism, Crime, David Hay, Democrats, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Get Woke Go Broke, Graeme Wood, gun control, homeless, impeachment, Iran, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Jews, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Middle East, Military, Mongolia, MS-13, Navy, New York City, oil industry, pedophilia, polls, Qassem Suleimani, Qods Force, sex, Social Justice Warriors, spying, Steve Adler, supernova, techn, terrorism, Texas, Tom Nichols, Tom's Shoes, tumbleweed, UK, Victor Davis Hanson, Walter Mondale, Welfare State
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | No Comments »

LinkSwarm for September 20, 2019

Friday, September 20th, 2019

Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I thought fall started tomorrow, but various reference sources say the fall equinox doesn’t actually occur until Monday, September 23.

Flash flooding hits the Houston area from Tropical Storm Imelda. “Gov. Greg Abbott has declared a state of disaster for 13 counties.” Plus a post office roof collapsed and I-10 was closed in both directions for a while east of Houston.

Democrats remain stuck on stupid:

What happens when a political party is hijacked by fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics who don’t care whether they win or lose an election?

They lose elections.

That’s where the Democrats are headed because they’d rather be “right” than clever. And when it comes to the issue of race, Democrats think they have a corner on “right.”

They’ve got a small problem, though. In order to appeal to the fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics to tap them for money and support, they have to at least give lip service to their warped views on race. And that includes calling you and me and about 70 percent of the American voters “racist.”

(Hat tip: Instapundit.)

How New York Times ignored the real bombshell in the Kavanaugh book:

Not only did Christine Blasey Ford’s key witness and friend — Leland Keyser — state that she didn’t recall the party where Ford claimed she was assaulted, she also says she doesn’t remember “any others like it.”

Her words were strong: “It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home,” she said. “I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.”

Even more, Pogrebin and Kelly uncovered a pressure campaign to get Keyser to alter her testimony, to back Ford. Keyser told the writers, “I was told behind the scenes that certain things could spread about me if I didn’t comply,” and they report on group texts containing ominous language about Keyser’s allegedly “f***ed up” life.

While the reaction to the allegations against Kavanaugh was almost uniformly partisan (Republicans rejected the claims; Democrats either believed them or thought they cast enough doubt on Kavanaugh to deny him the nomination), there is — in fact — a truth of the matter here. Kavanaugh did or did not assault Ford, and in any fair proceeding Keyser’s testimony would detonate like a bomb. Remember, this wasFord’s witness and friend. She’s a Democrat. And, moreover, there was now evidence of a pressure campaign that looked a lot like an attempt to suborn perjury.

And Pogrebin still doesn’t get what she did wrong:

Pogrebin is at the center of a discussion of gross journalistic malpractice after publishing a story Saturday night with colleague Kate Kelly that failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL. Pure confirmation bias.

Though the woman at the center of the story wants no part of it, Kelly and Pogrebin published her name anyway (in their book, albeit not in the Times). “You’re kind of directing attention at a victim and she’s gonna be besieged,” Pogrebin said on the radio show, in explaining why the Times piece left the name out. “Even if people can ultimately find her name, it’s not necessarily important to make it easier for them to do so.” Oh, so publishing her name in a book does not constitute making it too easy for people to find this private citizen? It’s a separate but serious scandal. This woman has been made a public figure in a national story without her consent. Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy? Is every woman in America to think of herself as potential collateral damage should she ever cross paths with any Republican whom Times reporters later tried to take down?

In her WMAL interview this morning, Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. Calling her a victim would be begging the question if the woman claimed this status for herself. She would then be only an alleged victim. But she isn’t even that. She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion. Pogrebin then impugns the woman by saying she was so drunk that her memory can’t be trusted. She also says that “everyone” at the party was massively drunk and that their memories are therefore unreliable.

Does she hear herself talking? If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter — the woman in question at the Yale party — in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.

Trump’s Kulturekampf:

A new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care and abortion on demand.

An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.

No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.

Trump variously goes after antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities and, above all, the media — especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

For all the acrimony and chaos — and prognostications of Trump’s certain failure — a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.

In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran Deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord mere virtue signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller’s bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.

Some of the most prominent Trump haters — Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci and Rep. Adam Schiff — either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.

Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved further to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.

In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.

(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Democrats are lying about healthcare. For starters: How much ObamaCare sucks. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Democratic megadonor Ed Buck finally arrested after overdosing a third black man. This one, unlike the previous two, survived. He’s also been charged with running a meth ring.

So evidently TWO dead black men is the absolute limit for rich gay white Democratic Party donors to get away with before attracting the attention of California law enforcement! THREE times is just one too many!

JFK, even Clancy Wiggums would have slapped the cuffs after death #2

— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) September 18, 2019

Chronicle of an apocalypse foretold. And foretold. And foretold. And foretold. And foretold… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Why Britain should ditch the EU:

The real issue is far older and more important than whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the increasingly anti-democratic and German-controlled European Union.

England is an island. Historically, politically and linguistically, it was never permanently or fully integrated into European culture and traditions.

The story of Britain has mostly been about conflict with France, Germany or Spain. The preeminence of the Royal Navy, in the defiant spirit of its sea lords, ensured that European dictators from Napoleon to Hitler could never set foot on British soil. As British admiral John Jervis reassured his superiors in 1801 amidst rumors of an impending Napoleonic invasion, “I do not say, my lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.”

Britain’s sea power, imperialism, parliamentary government and majority Protestant religion set it apart from its European neighbors — and not just because of its geographical isolation.

The 18th century British and Scottish Enlightenment of Edmund Burke, David Hume, John Locke and Adam Smith emphasized individualism, freedom and liberty far more than the government-enforced equality of result that was favored by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is no accident that the American Revolution was founded on the idea of individual freedom and liberty, unlike the later French Revolution’s violent effort to redistribute income and deprive “enemies of the people” of their rights and even their lives.

(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

Hillary Clinton blames her 2016 presidential defeat on “voter suppression.” Which is a weird way to say “refusing to campaign in the Midwest.”

Poll of Palestinian opinions. I’m sure many will point out the 37-50% (depending on the question) who support war against Israel. I’m more interested in the 48% who believe in possession by djinn or demons. (To be fair, the percentage in America would probably be similar in 1973…)

Israel’s election is still up in the air. The liberalish Blue and White faction appears to have edged Likud 33 to 31, but 61 votes are required to form a government. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has 55 votes to form a coalition government with orthodox religious parties that Blue and White vows not to join a coalition with.

“Fmr DNC Chair Donna Brazile: ‘I get in trouble’ when I refuse to say that Trump is a racist.”

“‘Rats, All of You!‘ Comedians Bill Burr, Spade, Schneider Slam Cancel Culture.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

A tweet on the racist history of gun control:

RETWEET THIS.

ALL gun control is racist.#ChangeMyMind

Comment your perspective and retweet if you agree. Shouts to @YALiberty for the lane. https://t.co/gyBAjxPRyC pic.twitter.com/9tReWtghuU

— Maj Toure (@MAJTOURE) September 18, 2019

How to get emails in a freedom of information act request from the LAPD. Bonus: In 2015, they were still using Groupwise… (Hat tip: Amy Alkon.)

Here’s a long study on the effects of red meat consumption. Conclusion?

Although meat has been a central component of the diet of our lineage for millions of years, some nutrition authorities—who often have close connections to animal rights activists or other forms of ideological vegetarianism, such as Seventh-Day Adventism (Banta et al., 2018 Banta, J. E., J. W. Lee, G. Hodgkin, Z. Yi, A. Fanica, and J. Sabate. 2018. The global influence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on diet. Religions 9 (9):251. doi: 10.3390/rel9090251.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar])—are promoting the view that meat causes a host of health problems and has no redeeming value. We contend that a large part of the case against meat is based on cherry-picked evidence and low-quality observational studies. The bald claim that red meat is an “unhealthy food” (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is wildly unsupported.

Based on misrepresentations of the state of the science, some organizations are attempting to influence policy makers to take action to reduce meat consumption. Simplification of complex science increases persuasive power but may also serve ideological purposes and lead to scientistic approaches. According to Mayes and Thompson (2015 Mayes, C. R., and D. B. Thompson. 2015. What should we eat? biopolitics, ethics, and nutritional scientism. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4):587–99. doi: 10.1007/s11673-015-9670-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), manifestations of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics can have various ethical implications for “individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being”. Well-meaning yet overemphasized and premature recommendations may eventually cause more damage than benefit, not only physiologically but also by unjustifiably holding individuals accountable for their health outcomes. We believe that a large reduction in meat consumption, such as has been advocated by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), could produce serious harm. Meat has long been, and continues to be, a primary source of high-quality nutrition. The theory that it can be replaced with legumes and supplements is mere speculation. While diets high in meat have proved successful over the long history of our species, the benefits of vegetarian diets are far from being established, and its dangers have been largely ignored by those who have endorsed it prematurely on the basis of questionable evidence.

(Hat tip: Powerline.)

Bill Gates says not to break up tech giants. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

Speaking of Gates, here’s a list of all the connections between Gates and Jeffrey Epstein. Plus lots of denials.

First Blood author David Morrell on the meta-genius of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which I highly recommend seeing if you haven’t already.

Baby Shoggoth found.

“Snopes: ‘The Claim That Trump Is Hitler Lacks Concrete Evidence But Alludes To A Deeper Truth.'”

“Millennial Diagnosed With Tragic Inability To Even.”

Heh: I seem to have my own Fark logo now:

. Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…

Tags:2016 Presidential Race, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Atkins, Babylon Bee, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Burr, Bill Gates, Blue and White (Israel), Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Christine Blasey Ford, comedy, Crime, David Spade, Democrats, Donald Trump, Ed Buck, environmentalism, EU, flooding, Foreign Policy, Green New Deal, gun control, Guns, Hillary Clinton, Houston, Israel, Israeli Elections, Jeffrey Epstein, Jihad, LAPD, Leland Keyser, Likud, Microsoft, ObamaCare, Palestinians, Rob Schneider, Robin Pogrebin, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, technology, UK, vegans, Victor Davis Hanson, weather
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Guns, Jihad, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court | No Comments »

Democratic Clown Car Update for July 8, 2019

Monday, July 8th, 2019

Biden is down, Harris is up, Gravel is out, Swallwell is ~~soon to follow~~ out, Tom Steyer is getting in, and Williamson sends out a fundraising request…for Gravel. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

Polls

This week’s polls are really interesting, and divergent. Some show Biden with a huge slump and Harris with a huge bump, while others only show a tiny bit of movement each way:

ABC News/Washington Post: Biden 30, Sanders 19, Harris 13, Warren 12, Buttigieg 4, Castro 3, Klobuchar 2, O’Rourke 2, Bennet 1, Booker 1, Hickenlooper 1, Inslee 1, Williamson 1, Gabbard 1. (Those are from the registered voters only screen, read from a list of candidates (question 6), which is what RealClearPolitics is tracking; the numbers are different if voters name their own candidate (question 5).)

Economist/YouGov (page 162): Biden 21, Warren 18, Harris 13, Sanders 10, Buttigieg 9, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Castro 2, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, de Blasio 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Inslee 1, Klobuchar 1.

Quinnipiac: Biden 22, Harris 20, Warren 14, Sanders 13, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1, Gabbard 1, Yang 1.

CNN: Biden 22, Harris 17, Warren 15, Sanders 14, Buttigieg 4, Booker 3, O’Rourke 3, Klobuchar 2. Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Gabbard 1, Yang 1.

Harvard Harris (page 151; be prepared to zoom in): Biden 34, Sanders 15, Warren 11, Harris 9, Buttigieg 3, O’Rourke 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 1, Bloomberg (!) 1, Castro 1, Yang 1, Delaney 1, Hickenlooper 1, Ryan 1, Gillibrand 1.

Real Clear Politics

538 polls

Election betting markets

Q2 Fundraising

Q2 numbers continue to trickle out. Some polls show Harris within striking distance of Biden, but so far her fundraising doesn’t reflect it.

Pete Buttigieg: $24.8 million
Joe Biden: $21.5 million
Bernie Sanders: $18 million (plus $6 million transferred from “other accounts”)
Kamala Harris: $12 million
Michael Bennet: $2.8 million
Steve Bullock: $2 million

Notice who hasn’t announced anything yet? Elizabeth Warren. Bad fundraising quarter?

For sake of comparison, President Donald Trump raised $105 million for his reelection campaign.

Pundits, etc.

Kurt Schlichter: Trump Just Won in 2020.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty good about the election after last week’s two-day Democratic clusterfark, and the president has got to be feeling pretty good too, since he just won it. Oh, we have 17 more months of media pimping of whichever commie candidate is currently the least embarrassing, but the debates made it very clear that Trump is going to be POTUS until Ric Grenell is on the victorious GOP ticket in 2024.

In the Dems’ defense, they do have an uphill battle. The economy is on fire, we’ve dodged all the new wars our garbage elite has proposed, Mueller (who went unmentioned) delivered only humiliation, and all 723 Democrats running are geebos. But say what you will, they are a diverse bunch in every way except thought – among the weirdos, losers and mutations onstage were a fake Indian, a furry, a guy so dumb he quotes Che in Miami, a raving weather cultist, America’s shrill first wife, a distinctly non-fabulous gay guy, T-Bone’s homie, whatever the hell Andrew Yang is, and Stevie Nicks.

But it was the thought part where they came together in a festival of insane acclamation. They agreed on everything, and it was all politically suicidal. Yeah, Americans are thrilled about the idea of subsidizing Marxist puppetry students and getting kicked off their health insurance so that they can put their lives in the hands of the people who brought you the DMV.

Exactly who, outside of Manhattan and Scat Francisco, think Americans are dying to stop even our feeble enforcement of the border, make illegal immigration not illegal, never send illegals home once they get here and – think about this – take our tax money to give these foreigners who shouldn’t even be here in the first place better free health care than our vets get? That should go well in places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I eagerly await Salena Zito’s interview with a bunch of construction workers at a diner near Pittsburg who tell her, “It really bugs me, Lou and Joe here that those people coming into the country illegally aren’t getting free heath care on our dime. We all want to work an extra shift so we can give it to ‘em. We need a president who finally puts foreigners first! Also, we all agree we ought to give up our deer rifles because people in Cory Booker’s neighborhood can’t stop shooting each other.”

Democrats are not on a winning track:

Presidential candidates from both parties usually sound hard-core in the primaries to appeal to their progressive or conservative bases. But for the general election, the nominees move to the center to pick off swing voters and centrist independents.

Voters put up with the scripted tactic as long as a candidate had not gone too extreme in the primaries and endorsed positions too far out of the mainstream.

A good example of this successful ploy was Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. In the primary against Hillary Clinton, Obama ran to her left. But he was still careful not to get caught on the record going too far left. That way, he was still able to tack to the center against John McCain in the general election.

As a general election candidate, Obama rejected the idea of gay marriage. He blasted illegal immigration. He railed against deficit spending. And he went so far as to label then-President George W. Bush as “unpatriotic” for taking out “a credit card from the bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt.”

The result was that Obama was elected. After taking office, in cynical fashion he endorsed gay marriage, ran up far more red ink than did Bush, offered blanket amnesties, and relaxed immigration enforcement.

Yet the current crop of would-be Democratic nominees has forgotten the old script entirely. Nearly all of them are currently running so hard to the left that the successful nominee will never be able to appear moderate.

Bernie Sanders leads the charge for abolishing all student debt. Kamala Harris wants reparations for slavery. Joe Biden talks of jailing health insurance executives if they falsely advertise.

The entire field seems to agree that it should not be a criminal offense to enter the U.S. illegally. The consensus appears to be that no illegal entrant will be deported unless he or she has committed a serious crime.

Not a single Democratic candidate has expressed reservations about abortions, and a number of them have fought proposed restrictions on partial-birth abortions.

Elizabeth Warren has said guns are a national health emergency and would not rule out the possibility of federal gun confiscation.

Early in the campaign, no major Democratic candidate has questioned the Green New Deal and its radical proposals. No one has much objected to dismantling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or scrapping the Electoral College. An unworkable wealth tax and a top marginal income tax rate of 70 percent or higher are also okay.

Yet none of these positions currently wins 51 percent of public support, according to polls.

What are the Democratic frontrunners thinking?

The Democrats’ illegal alien schemes are completely unworkable, says Obama’s own DHS chief:

Democratic presidential candidates have “unworkable” and “unwise” immigration policies, according to Obama administration Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson.

“That is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders,” Johnson told the Washington Post on Tuesday, referring to a push to decriminalize illegal immigration. “That is unworkable, unwise and does not have the support of a majority of American people or the Congress, and if we had such a policy, instead of 100,000 apprehensions a month, it will be multiples of that.”

Johnson’s comments follow sharp criticism of the 2020 Democratic contenders, who all raised their hands during the second night of debates when asked if illegal immigrants should receive taxpayer-funded health insurance (let’s not forget that Obamacare penalized American citizens who weren’t covered).

“Did the Russians pay the 2020 Democratic candidates to throw the 2020 election to President Donald Trump? Watching all four hours of the first Democratic debates, it became increasingly difficult to reach any other conclusion.”

The candidates unanimously agreed on “Medicare for All” and that it should cover illegal aliens — or as the moderator and candidates generally called them, the “undocumented.” Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., even said that Medicare for All requires the elimination of private health insurance. Sanders correctly asserted that a majority of Americans support Medicare for All. What he did not say, however, is that support steeply drops once people are informed that their taxes will go up to pay for it or when they learn that they may experience longer waiting periods before receiving health care. But give Sanders credit. Asked whether he intends to increase taxes on the middle class to pay for his health care plan, Sanders, after talking about the elimination of premiums, co-pays and deductibles, said that, yes, the middle class would pay more taxes.

Snip.

The biggest loser at the Democrat debates, however, was the American taxpayer. In addition to “universal health care,” Sanders touted his plan to hit up taxpayers for “free college” and student debt forgiveness. The candidates agreed that illegal entry into the U.S. ought not be a crime but rather a civil violation. This would simply encourage more illegal entry. How much would this cost the taxpayers just for the education of their children in public schools?

And a big issue was AWOL in the debate. Not brought up by any moderator, even though it enjoys the support of the most blacks, was the issue of reparations. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Harris all support reparations. Yet the only who brought it up, and then in passing, was fringe candidate Marianne Williamson. Why would the debate’s moderators omit a topic being widely discussed during the Democratic primary campaign? The answer is that the issue of reparations is a political loser. Polls and surveys suggest that the majority of blacks support it, but that’s about it. It appears that moderators did not want the candidates endorsing an issue so unpopular. The candidates, of course, could have volunteered their support for reparations. But with the exception of Williamson, they elected not to.

Why are Harris and Booker talking like it’s still the 1960s?

After Obama served two terms as president; after Oprah became one of the richest people Earth has ever known; after America became history’s most diverse nation where the descendants of black slaves, as a group, are more successful than any that ever existed, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are talking about race as if we’re still living in the ‘60s. And they do it not to solve real moral and socioeconomic problems in poor black communities – but to get political power.

It’s infuriating.

Cory and Kamala are mixing anecdotal scraps from America’s bad old days with “microaggressions” from today’s classroom racism, to cobble together a political scarecrow that tricks people into believing that racial oppression still exists. It doesn’t.

Greg Gutfeld thinks that Biden looks tired and Harris will be the nominee. Eh, I think he’s falling prey to recency bias here. Biden has plenty of time to recover, and Harris to stumble, between now and Iowa.

Ten candidates appeared at the NEA convention in Houston, including Biden, Warren, Castro, O’Rourke. I’d love to tell you who else, but the Texas Tribune couldn’t be bothered to actually name the rest.

Candidates who will have a tough time making the fall debates:

Currently, the only locks for the fall debates are former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, California Sen. Kamala Harris and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke is likely to qualify, but after an underwhelming debate performance last week, even he is not guaranteed to make the polling threshold. Only polls taken between June 28 and Aug. 28 will count.

Now on to the clown car itself:

Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Sheriff David Clarke notes that Abrams is no longer a rising star:

Abrams continues to traverse the country in a state of delusion, telling audiences that she won her race for Georgia governor but that it was stolen from her through racist Republican gerrymandering. She lost by 55,000 votes, not even enough to trigger an automatic recount. Georgia has 156 counties. Abrams won—are you ready for this—20 counties. The only reason the race was as close as it was is because she won Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia and where 54% of blacks live. The reality is that she lost because her base of support didn’t go outside of Atlanta. It wasn’t diverse enough, ironically. She tried to get elected to the highest office in the state of Georgia by basically winning in one county. Maybe she should have considered building her bio by running for mayor of Atlanta first and governing from there. Her ambition wouldn’t allow that. She was trying to be the first—as in first black and female governor of Georgia. She could not fulfill being the first black mayor of Atlanta. Maynard Jackson beat her to it having become Atlanta’s first black mayor in 1974. Democrats are still trying to become the first in some office whether regarding skin color, gender, or sexual preference.

Now Democrats want to force Stacey Abrams down the throats of the rest of America after the voters of Georgia rejected her. They mention her as a potential presidential or VP candidate. She has a thin resume just like a replay of Obama circa 2008. I hope that conservatives push back this time with the gumption they did not have in 2008 when they decided to flaunt their racial sensitivity because of the fear of being called racists.

Let me get the drumbeat in rejecting Stacey Abrams for national office started. Too many in the GOP will be afraid to do so. She is a flawed candidate with no real political experience outside of activism. She is a career race-baiter having started a voter registration campaign called the New Georgia Project, which was investigated for voter fraud, and that was unable and unwilling to say what the organization did with the $3.6 million they raised to register voters. It failed.

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an LA Times interview. For a supposed moderate, there’s evidently nothing Obama did that Bennet hasn’t endorsed, including the Iran deal.

Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. The MSM finally takes a look at Hunter Biden’s business entanglements, something they failed to do when Joe Biden was Obama’s Vice President for eight years:

In September, 2008, Hunter launched a boutique consulting firm, Seneca Global Advisors, named for the largest of the Finger Lakes, in New York State, where his mother had grown up. In pitch meetings with prospective clients, Hunter said that he could help small and mid-sized companies expand into markets in the U.S. and other countries. In June, 2009, five months after Joe Biden became Vice-President, Hunter co-founded a second company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, with Christopher Heinz, Senator John Kerry’s stepson and an heir to the food-company fortune, and Devon Archer, a former Abercrombie & Fitch model who started his finance career at Citibank in Asia and who had been friends with Heinz at Yale. (Heinz and Archer already had a private-equity fund called Rosemont Capital.) Heinz believed that Hunter would share his aversion to entering into business deals that could attract public scrutiny, but over time Hunter and Archer seized opportunities that did not include Heinz, who was less inclined to take risks.

In 2012, Archer and Hunter talked to Jonathan Li, who ran a Chinese private-equity fund, Bohai Capital, about becoming partners in a new company that would invest Chinese capital—and, potentially, capital from other countries—in companies outside China. In June, 2013, Li, Archer, and other business partners signed a memorandum of understanding to create the fund, which they named BHR Partners, and, in November, they signed contracts related to the deal. Hunter became an unpaid member of BHR’s board but did not take an equity stake in BHR Partners until after his father left the White House.

In December, 2013, Vice-President Biden flew to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping. Biden often asked one of his grandchildren to accompany him on his international trips, and he invited Finnegan to come on this one. Hunter told his father that he wanted to join them. According to a Beijing-based BHR representative, Hunter, shortly after arriving in Beijing, on December 4th, helped arrange for Li to shake hands with his father in the lobby of the American delegation’s hotel. Afterward, Hunter and Li had what both parties described as a social meeting. Hunter told me that he didn’t understand why anyone would have been concerned about this. “How do I go to Beijing, halfway around the world, and not see them for a cup of coffee?” he said.

Hunter’s meeting with Li and his relationship with BHR attracted little attention at the time, but some of Biden’s advisers were worried that Hunter, by meeting with a business associate during his father’s visit, would expose the Vice-President to criticism. The former senior White House aide told me that Hunter’s behavior invited questions about whether he “was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasn’t done in that White House. Optics really mattered, and that seemed to be cutting it pretty close, even if nothing nefarious was going on.” When I asked members of Biden’s staff whether they discussed their concerns with the Vice-President, several of them said that they had been too intimidated to do so. “Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a former adviser told me. Others said that they were wary of hurting his feelings. One business associate told me that Biden, during difficult conversations about his family, “got deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It’s like you’ve hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him.”

For another venture, Archer travelled to Kiev to pitch investors on a real-estate fund he managed, Rosemont Realty. There, he met Mykola Zlochevsky, the co-founder of Burisma, one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas producers. Zlochevsky had served as ecology minister under the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. After public protests in 2013 and early 2014, the Ukrainian parliament had voted to remove Yanukovych and called for his arrest. Under the new Ukrainian government, authorities in Kiev, with the encouragement of the Obama Administration, launched an investigation into whether Zlochevsky had used his cabinet position to grant exploration licenses that benefitted Burisma. (The status of the inquiry is unclear, but no proof of criminal activity has been publicly disclosed. Zlochevsky could not be reached for comment, and Burisma did not respond to queries.) In a related investigation, which was ultimately closed owing to a lack of evidence, British authorities temporarily froze U.K. bank accounts tied to Zlochevsky.

In early 2014, Zlochevsky sought to assemble a high-profile international board to oversee Burisma, telling prospective members that he wanted the company to adopt Western standards of transparency. Among the board members he recruited was a former President of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who had a reputation as a dedicated reformer. In early 2014, at Zlochevsky’s suggestion, Kwaśniewski met with Archer in Warsaw and encouraged him to join Burisma’s board, arguing that the company was critical to Ukraine’s independence from Russia. Archer agreed.

When Archer told Hunter that the board needed advice on how to improve the company’s corporate governance, Hunter recommended the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, where he was “of counsel.” The firm brought in the investigative agency Nardello & Co. to assess Burisma’s history of corruption. Hunter joined Archer on the Burisma board in April, 2014. Three months later, in a draft report to Boies Schiller, Nardello said that it was “unable to identify any information to date regarding any current government investigation into Zlochevsky or Burisma,” but cited unnamed sources saying that Zlochevsky could be “vulnerable to investigation for financial crimes” and for “perceived abuse of power.”

Vice-President Biden was playing a central role in overseeing U.S. policy in Ukraine, and took the lead in calling on Kiev to fight rampant corruption. On May 13, 2014, after Hunter’s role on the Burisma board was reported in the news, Jen Psaki, a State Department spokesperson, said that the State Department was not concerned about perceived conflicts of interest, because Hunter was a “private citizen.”

Funny how the Clinton and Biden kin are always “private citizens,” but any low-level Trump staffer bumping into a Russian was cause for ruining his life. One amazing thing about that New Yorker piece is how it was obviously written by someone sympathetic to the Bidens, but which nonetheless paints a devastating portrait of a Vice President’s son deeply entangled in foreign interests. And I haven’t even talked about the cocaine and alcohol abuse. Joe Biden wants to bring back the ObamaCare individual mandate. Remember how super popular that turned out to be for Democrats in the 2010 election? Speaking of reruns, Biden says he’s open to renominating Merrick Garland. Something tells me that the activist base has discovered that Garland is, in fact, an old white man sometime since 2016…

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Cory Booker wants catch and release for illegal aliens, so no more of that icky “detention.” Booker is a “unifyer,” or so says that paragon of unity, Al Sharpton. “I’m shocked, SHOCKED that there’s big pharmacy money flowing into the Democratic Presidential Primaries!” “Your big pharmacy donations, Mr. Booker.”

Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Among Bullock’s Q2 donors: Jane Fonda. “2020 Democratic candidate Bullock open to Keystone XL pipeline.” And there’s your first sign that Bullock is thinking of dropping out of the Presidential race and filing for a senate run against Steve Daines in 2020 (he’s term-limited as governor).

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Let the black pandering begin! “Pete Buttigieg Uses Essence Festival to Start His Rehab With Black Voters.” Also: “Democrat Buttigieg announces minority-focused small business investment plan.” With as much money as he’s raised, and with Harris and Booker in the race, I’m not sure making a play for minority voters is the best use of his time and money. He should be attacking Biden and making a play for what’s left of the Democratic Party’s white working class voters. I guess this support for striking workers qualifies, but given they’re striking on Martha’s Vineyard, I suspect the “working class solidarity” vibe is somewhat muted. Then again, he says Democrats need to veer further left to win in 2020, so maybe his “moderate’ reputation is overblown.

Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. For all this talk of Castro having a “breakout debate,” what it seems to boil down to is he went from 1% to 3% in the polls…at best. He says he’s feeling better, but can’t quote climb out of the corpse wagon on his own power. Like a good little social justice warrior, Castro is falling in line and declaring the Betsy Ross flag as racist. And speaking of being a good social justice warrior, he says the reason he can’t speak Spanish is “internalized oppression.” Said he had a “better” fundraising quarter, but hasn’t released his Q2 numbers yet.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently “Look, I have a mixed race son!” isn’t quite the Ace-in-the-hole de Blasio thinks it is. “It’s beyond telling that he’s already relying on the same gimmick — rather than his record in office — to get him out of the 1 percent doldrums in the 2020 campaign.”

Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He was on Face the Nation. “We can’t act like bipartisan solutions are dirty words that we can’t say in Washington anymore.” Also: “”Medicare-for-All” is a great slogan. They’ve hijacked the good name of Medicare and applied it to a law that will cause upheaval in our health care system and I- I was the first person to actually talk about this. Now we’re seeing the debate change on this issue as people start to realize.” Yeah, not seeing the debate change among the candidates polling higher than him, which is most of them.

Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a “profile” in Business Insider, if you can call a 50-picture listicle a profile. Moving in the opposite direction, feel like reading a 2,000 word essay on the streak of gray in her hair? Not me, but I’m guessing there are some fashion aware out there might want to tackle that pressing issue…

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another entry in a rich genre: “The Ignoring of Kirsten Gillibrand“:

I’d asked to attend the workout of the senator from New York and aspiring president after seeing her do chest presses on Instagram, thinking it would work as a facile metaphor for the strength she’d need to break out in a 24-person Democratic field. I’d hoped the sight of 52-year-old Gillibrand’s now-famous biceps might reveal some larger, heretofore obscured appeal. Some reserve of magnetism, also hiding under a navy blazer. A glimpse into the reasons she’s not gaining ground as a candidate.

The majority of Democratic hopefuls have yet to experience a moment like the surge of interest in Mayor Pete or Beto or Elizabeth Warren, let alone the preexisting support afforded the two candidates approaching their 80th birthdays. But Gillibrand’s lack of anointing seems conspicuous. After all, on paper, she’s set herself up to succeed: Gillibrand has never lost an election in her 13-year career in politics. She’s an advocate for women and families at a time when the law has been lapped by societal sentiment. She’s progressive enough to have supported Medicare-for-all since 2006, but she had enough bipartisan reach to get Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to vote for her (as yet unpassed) Military Justice Improvement Act, which would protect those sexually assaulted while serving. She also co-sponsored the 9/11 first responders bill.

Yet Gillibrand is currently polling between 0 and 1 percent in national surveys, nestled in the bleak data crevice between Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. “Kirsten Gillibrand Is Struggling,” announced the New York Times in May. “Will Abortion Rights Be Her Rallying Cry?” Two weeks later, a Politico headline read: “Kirsten Gillibrand’s Failure to Launch.”

Yes, we’ve reached the point in the “why isn’t Kirsten Gillibrand doing better” genre where the piece namechecks previous entries in the “why isn’t Kirsten Gillibrand doing better” genre…

Update: Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Dropping Out. Twitter. Facebook. Gravel announced that he’s ending his campaign. And that’s right after the Williamson campaign sent out a fundraising email…to support Gravel

Williamson’s campaign on Sunday sent out an email asking people to donate to her opponent Gravel — who served as a U.S. Senator from Alaska from 1969 to 1981 — because he’s “only 10,000 donations short of qualifying for the July debates.”

“Thanks to you, I’m on the debate stage. And that’s why today I’m using this platform, granted to me by you, to ask for your help,” Williamson wrote in the email.

“You may not have heard of him,” she continued, referring to Gravel, “because he hasn’t yet qualified for any debates. But his voice is important.”

the @marwilliamson bump is in full effect pic.twitter.com/SanBwqVogd

— Sen. Mike Gravel (@MikeGravel) July 7, 2019

Give Williamson credit: She really is a different kind of candidate… (Downgrade from In.)

California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Kamala 2020 Makes Obama 2008 Look Positively Right Wing.”

In 2008, Obama complained about “the orgy of spending” under President George W. Bush. He pledged that all his spending plans would be more than offset with expenditure reductions.

“What I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut,” he said.

Harris, in contrast, has a legislative agenda that would more than double the size of the federal government. She’s endorsed Medicare for All ($32 trillion over 10 years), the Green New Deal (another $50 trillion to $90 trillion or so), $6,000 in “tax credits” for each working family ($2.8 trillion), and a $78 billion renter-subsidy program. That’s just for starters.

Obama advocated, half-heartedly to be sure, cutting what before Trump was a sky high corporate income tax rate, recognizing that it put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage. Harris wants to crank it back up.

On immigration, Obama promised in his campaign to improve border security. “We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace,” he said.

Harris plans to use executive orders to grant amnesty to millions of illegals.

When Obama was pitching Obamacare in 2009, he made it clear that under no circumstances would it provide benefits to illegals.

“There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally,” Obama told a joint session of Congress. That prompted Rep. Joe Wilson’s famous “You lie!” response.

Harris, like every other Democrat running, has promised that, if elected, she will provide free health care to those who must now be referred to as “undocumented immigrants.”

On the other hand, a lot of Harris’ positions are hard to pin down:

Who is the real Kamala Harris?

Ten days ago, the senator from California dominated the Democratic presidential debate when she excoriated Joe Biden for his opposition to mandatory busing to achieve school desegregation. Her poll ratings shot up; his sagged.

Then came the details. When reporters asked Harris if she supports federally mandated busing in 2019, she seemed to say no. Busing should be voluntary, a “tool that is in the toolbox” if school boards want to use it, she said last week.

“Absolutely right,” Biden replied; that’s his position too.

A consensus? Not so fast.

“We do not agree,” Harris insisted the next day. The real problem, she said, is that Biden has never admitted he was wrong to oppose busing in the 1970s.

Lesson One: Harris’s debate gambit wasn’t really about busing — not busing in 2019, anyway. It was mostly about knocking Biden down a peg by reminding voters of the baggage he carries from nearly half a century in politics, and elevating her profile in the process.

Lesson Two: Harris’ positions can be maddeningly elusive. She has staked out stances on some issues that sound bold, only to qualify them later. Her stances often seem designed to straddle the divisions in her party — to make her sound progressive enough for leftist voters but moderate enough for those in the center.

CNN loves Kamala Harris, both in lavish on-air praise and their parent company showering her with money. “The second largest contributor to the Senator is AT&T Inc., the parent company of CNN. To date, she has received over $53,000 from this source.” Berkeley classrooms were integrated before Kamala Harris was born. Harris wants a repeat of the policies that lead to the 2008 subprime debacle. Willie Brown (yes, that Willie Brown) says that Harris and Buttigieg are a dream ticket. Note that this is the same Willie Brown who said just last week that Harris can’t beat Trump.

Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says he’s staying in the race and not running for the senate. Good news for Republicans. Says that Hickenlooper has been the problem with the Hickenlooper campaign.

The frank assessment of his challenges come after a number of top staffers on Hickenlooper’s presidential campaign left the team, after Hickenlooper failed to gain traction in early polls and has struggled to raise money in the first few months of his campaign. But he told the Perry voters that, despite pushback from his staff, he plans to stay in the race and sees Iowa as his opportunity to break out.

“Despite pushback from the staff.” Evidently even the people receiving paychecks think he should drop out.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. Staying in the race is jamming up other Washington state Democrats:

As Gov. Jay Inslee pursues his long-shot run for president, political dominoes are lining up for Washington’s 2020 elections.

Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz, state Sen. Christine Rolfes and state Rep. Drew Hansen are among those waiting to see which way their domino will fall: Run for re-election or a new office?

Inslee still has a gubernatorial re-election campaign committee on file with the state Public Disclosure Committee. It has raised some $1.4 million and spent $1.2 million since he was re-elected in 2016. But it has only collected about $2,400 and spent less than $1,800 since he formally announced his presidential bid early this year.

Washington doesn’t term-limit its state officials, and Inslee hasn’t ruled out seeking a third term if he steps away from the presidential race, although that may be getting less likely with each passing week.

Only one governor, Republican Dan Evans, served three terms. Since then, all three of Inslee’s two-term predecessors – Booth Gardner, Gary Locke and Christine Gregoire – discussed running again but ruled it out, usually announcing they were retiring during the summer before the election year.

None of them pursued a different office while keeping open the option of seeking re-election.

Under Washington law, a person can’t appear on the same ballot for two offices, so at some point Inslee will have to choose. Because governor stands at the top of the state election ladder, not knowing whether Inslee is in or out has created a bottleneck for the upward movement of others, especially Democrats, on the rungs below.

My heart bleeds…

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She and Inslee unveiled education plans. Sounds like Democratic boilerplate, right down to opposing school choice and charter schools. She appeared in a photo-op with a misbuttoned shirt. Man, I can only imagine all the objects hurled at the staffer who let her go out like that… (Hat tip: Reader BrandoN Byers.)

Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Messam news is so thin on the ground, I’m having to resort to extreme measures: actually linking to a profile on Vox. “Like San Antonio, Miramar’s chief executive is technically a city manager appointed by its city council. This means Messam does not have the same power over policy or decision making that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — another primary candidate — has, for example.” The two policy proposals they highlight are eliminating student debt and gun control, which means there’s zero to distinguish him from better-known candidates, which is literally every single candidate in the race.

Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Seth Moulton says Dems can’t keep ‘rehashing votes from 40 years ago.” Except that the debates, and Moulton’s approximate 0% standing, says they can…

Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Beto O’Rourke: Let’s Forgive All Student Loan Debt For Teachers.” Given that his opponents are already going full on eliminating everyone’s student debt for everything, one wonders what he hopes to accomplish with this modest pander. “Beto O’Rourke says he’s not aware of his fundraising numbers.” The two possibilities are that he’s telling the truth, because he runs a disorganized campaign and isn’t on top of details, or he’s lying, because his fundraising numbers suck like a Dyson. We’re finally starting to get the first prebituaries on his campaign:

Today, even as he’s assembled a stable of experienced operatives and released a spate of policy proposals, the former Texas congressman is polling at 2 percent nationally in the latest Morning Consult survey. One Iowa poll released this week put him at 1 percent in the state. A fundraising machine in his Senate campaign last year, O’Rourke has dodged questions about his latest performance in the money race.

Yet O’Rourke returned to Iowa this week in seemingly high spirits, campaigning alongside his wife and young children as they toured the state in an RV. The candidate has been expanding his organization at his Texas headquarters and in early primary states. And his advisers and supporters insisted they aren’t worried: The race is nothing if not fluid, they said, and O’Rourke has the political talent to catch fire.

He’s merely resting! Beautiful plumage on the Texas Beto…

Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Tim Ryan’s Uphill Battle with 2020 Fundraising, Second Round of Debates.” No Q2 numbers yet.

Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. The network boosting Kamala Harris says that Sanders campaign is in trouble:

While much of the attention in post-debate polling has focused on the drop of former Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders’ polling looks far worse. Sanders’ Iowa and national polls are quite weak for someone with near universal name recognition.

Sanders was at just 14% in CNN’s latest national poll. That’s down from 18% in our last poll. As important, Sanders is now running behind California Sen. Kamala Harris (17%) and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (15%). These are candidates who have lower name recognition than he does.

It’s not just the CNN poll, either. Sanders doesn’t look much better in Quinnipiac’s latest poll, which puts him at 13%. A poll released Wednesday morning by ABC News and The Washington Post did have somewhat better news for him, putting him at 19%, second behind Biden, among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Still, an average of the three polls out this week puts him at 15%.

History has not been kind to primary runner-ups of previous primaries polling this low of a position. I went back and looked at where 13 previous runner-ups since 1972 have been polling at this point in the primary. All six who went on to win the nomination were polling above Sanders’ 15%.

Vast swathes of the Democratic Media Complex never forgave Sanders for interrupting Hillary’s coronation and relish the chance to start writing his political obituary. “Bernie Sanders didn’t give a definitive answer on sex work vs. sex trafficking.” Truly we live in stupid times. Profile of Sanders surrogate campaigner and Cleveland politico Nina Turner.

Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a five minute Bloomberg video interview. As he yammers about the Green New Deal he displays all the raw political charisma of Michael Dukkakis.

Addition: Billionaire Tom Steyer: Getting In? So says The Atlantic:

Billionaire investor Tom Steyer, who in the last decade has been both the top Democratic donor in the country and the prime engine for pushing for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, appears ready to become Democratic candidate number 26. Last week in San Francisco, Steyer told staffers at two progressive organizations he funds, Need to Impeach and NextGen America, that he is launching a 2020 campaign, and that he plans to make the formal announcement this Tuesday.

Steyer certainly has the money to self-fund, but does he have the personality or know-how to win the nomination? My guess is no, but we’ll find out. I actually like him wasting money on his own candidacy than showering money on other candidates in down-ballot races who might actually know what to do with it.

Tom Steyer's staff hard at work: pic.twitter.com/GdUHU36Y7m

— skepticalifornia (@skepticaliblog) July 8, 2019

Does his focus on impeachment drag the field leftward? Well, it’s not like there was a lot of Democratic Presidential candidates firmly opposed to impeachment. The biggest winner may be Trump, who seems to thrive on confrontation. (Upgrade over Out of the Running.)

Update: California Representative Eric Swalwell: ~~Dropping~~ Out. Twitter. Facebook. Word is that Swalwell is dropping out of the Presidential race to run for reelection to congress instead. 1 PM Pacific Time conference, so it will be after I post this. Update: He’s Out.(Downgrade from In.)

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Sacremento Bee interview. Here’s a Chicago Tribune piece that says she’s pandering the black women in the right way. Color me skeptical that she’ll make any inroads there with Harris and Booker in the race. Speaking of unlikely: “Elizabeth Warren, Economic Nationalist. She’s no social conservative. But on economics, it isn’t so difficult to imagine her on a Republican debate stage.” Despite vaguely pro-American rehetoric, there’s nothing enticing about her concrete policy proposals, including a new Department of Economic Development and subsidies for American manufacturers. Hard pass on both.

Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She and Yang have made it into the next Democratic debates. 10 wild facts about Marianne Williamson, including that she spent the 1970s enjoying “bad boys and good dope.” Vogue did a photoshoot of five female Democratic Presidential contenders…and left Williamson out.

Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He got an interview on The View. He also got an interview with The Concord Monitor, where he talked about the automation menace. “This has been ongoing for a number of years and it’s only now going to accelerate. So if someone were to come and say, ‘Hey, we should stop the automation,’ it is essentially impossible to do so.”

Out of the Running

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:

Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti

Actor Alec Baldwin

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Former California Governor Jerry Brown

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown

Former one-term President Jimmy Carter

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.

Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti

Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Removed from the master list for this update.

Former Vice President Al Gore

Former Attorney General Eric Holder

Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine

Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

Oregon senator Jeff Merkley

Former First Lady Michelle Obama

Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)

Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey

Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:

Tags:2020 Presidential Race, Al Sharpton, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Yang, AT&T, Berkeley, Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke, BHR Partners, Bill De Blasio, Border Controls, China, Christopher Heinz, CNN, cocaine, Cory Booker, Democrats, Devon Archer, Elections, Elizabeth Warren, Eric Swalwell, fundraising, Houston, Hunter Biden, Illegal Alien Crisis, Illegal Aliens, Jane Fonda, Jay Inslee, Jeh Johnson, Joe Biden, Joe Sestak, John Delaney, John Hickenlooper, John Kerry, Jonathan Li, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kurt Schlichter, Marianne Williamson, Media Watch, Michael Bennet, Mike Gravel, Mykola Zlochevsky, National Education Association, Nina Turner, ObamaCare, Pete Buttigieg, Rosemont Capital, Rosemont Seneca Partners, Seneca Global Advisors, Seth Moulton, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Tim Ryan, Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, Ukraine, Victor Davis Hanson, Viktor Yanukovych, Washington, Willie Brown
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LinkSwarm for March 15, 2019

Friday, March 15th, 2019

In one of the more important but confusing stories this week, UK’s Parliament rejected PM Theresa May’s Brexit deal, rejected a no-deal Brexit, and rejected a second referendum, but voted to delay Brexit until June. Whether the EU will consent to this delay or not remains to be seen. Borepatch thinks not, mainly due to EU elections coming up.

Enjoy a complimentary LinkSwarm:

Democrats have a race problem:

In the Trump era, Democrats are so intent on appealing to immigrants and minority voters they will tolerate insults to Jews, a constituency that voted for Clinton by better than a 3-to-1 margin in 2016. This is not inconsequential, as Jewish conservative Jeff Dunetz pointed out last week: “According to the FBI, almost 60% of the hate crimes in 2017 based on religion were against Jews.” Liberals would like us to believe that Trump supporters are responsible for this, but who is to blame when, for example, Somali immigrant Mohamed Mohamed Abdi is charged with attempted murder for allegedly trying to run over two men outside a Los Angeles synagogue? How can liberals claim Trump is responsible for three black men attacking Jews in Brooklyn? Police are alarmed by increasing anti-Semitic violence in New York City, which probably has a lot more to do with the “progressive” politics of that Democrat-run fiefdom than it does with who’s occupying the White House. Meanwhile, 11 white people were attacked in New York over the weekend, and a black transgender suspect has been arrested in what police say was an apparent hate-crime spree. Such is the toxic racial climate in the city that sends to Congress such Democrats as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spent her weekend trashing Ronald Reagan for a capacity crowd of liberals in Austin, Texas.

Democrats and their media allies have spent years building this bonfire of racial resentment. CNN devoted hour upon hour of coverage to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that provoked riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and by the time of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, anti-Trump protesters were marching with Communist posters advocating revolution. Barely six weeks before Election Day 2016, a “Black Lives Matter” riot erupted in downtown Charlotte, N.C., and does anyone still wonder why Hillary lost North Carolina, a state that Obama had carried twice? Trump got 63 percent of the white vote in North Carolina, carrying the state by a margin of more than 170,000 votes. Is it likely that Democrats can reverse that verdict by doubling-down on identity politics? Yet liberals continue intensifying their incendiary rhetoric that has sparked incidents like the smearing of the Covington Catholic boys, the Jussie Smollett hoax, and a spree of attacks on Trump supporters across the country. Democrats and their media allies have done everything in their power to demonize the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, and what does that foreshadow for November 2020?

Certainly by now, working-class white voters must be tired of deranged Trump-haters getting in their faces and shouting, “RAAAAACIST!” Perhaps that’s why the latest Iowa poll shows Democrat primary voters favoring two old white guys, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. However, the crowded field of Democrats contending for the 2020 presidential nomination, cheered on by their Greek chorus of left-wing journalists, will probably make it easier for Trump to get re-elected. The more white voters become alienated from the Democrats, the more extreme the Democrats become, and the media are so out of touch with voters in places like Iowa that Democrats are caught in a sort of feedback loop of extremism.

The left-wing crackup:

The constituent elements of the American left have radicalized and they are tearing the Democratic Party apart. Meanwhile Donald Trump has delivered on a growing economy, deregulation, strong borders, the rule of law, and he is apparently going to leave the cows and their diapers for later.

The radicalized Democrats are now running as socialists. In the middle of a growing economy they are casting their lot with Venezuela. They expect to win in 2020. Call it the left-wing crack-up.

(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Is Corbynism coming to America?

Less than four years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was an obscure backbencher in the British Parliament. In his 30 years as a member of the Labour Party, his greatest legislative accomplishment was paradoxically the lack of any: From 1997 to 2010, when Labour was last in government, Corbyn was the MP who voted against his own party more than any other. Despite his perpetual insubordinations, successive Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown declined to expel Corbyn from their party. “There was no threat,” a deputy Labour chief whip told the Financial Times about Corbyn and his small band of hard-left rebels in 2016. “These people were tolerated because no one had ever heard of them.”

Today, everyone in British politics has heard of Jeremy Corbyn, who, as leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, has utterly transformed the Labour Party. Once a broad-based movement that could command large parliamentary majorities, today it is a sectarian personality cult, offering meager resistance to a shambolic Conservative government. Once the party whose leaders created NATO and stood stalwart against the threat of international communism, today Labour is led by people who sing the praises of anti-Western despots and terrorists. And once the natural political home of British Jewry, Labour today is mired in an anti-Semitic morass, to the point where 40 percent of Jews say they would “seriously consider” leaving the country were Corbyn to become prime minister. Indeed, Labour has become so toxic that, last month, nine MPs quit the party, calling it “sickeningly, institutionally racist,” “a threat to national security” and “a danger to the cohesion of our society, the safety of our citizens, and the health of our democracy.”

How Labour reached this deplorable condition is one that should seriously concern liberals in the United States, where a similar dynamic is playing out in the Democratic Party. An insurgent progressivism favorably disposed to socialism, hostile to Jews and openly admiring of Jeremy Corbyn and all that he represents is steadily making inroads against an aging, centrist Democratic establishment. Here, a constellation of elected officials, media personalities, and activists are mimicking the tactics of their ideological comrades in Britain to take over and transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle for their extreme agenda.

Related: Jexodus.

“Migrants Use Almost Twice The Welfare Benefits As Native-Born Americans.”

According to a report by Breitbart, in recently released research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), analysts discovered that about 63 percent of non-citizen households, those who live legally and illegally in the U.S., use some form of public welfare while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.

“Five adults arrested at compound in Taos County indicted on terrorism charges.”

“Twice-Deported Illegal Alien Charged With Raping 12-Year-Old Girl.”

Illegal alien arrested for murder of 59-year old woman. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said agents tried to deport Carranza nine times before, but their detainer requests were not honored in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties, both so-called ‘sanctuary cities.’ In every occasion, local authorities declined to cooperate with a federal request to hold Carranza in jail due to his immigration status — as is often the policy with “sanctuary cities” and counties — and he was released back on the street.”

“At a 10-year high, wage growth for American workers likely to keep accelerating.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Meanwhile, some manufacturers can’t fill open jobs. (Hat tip: TPPF’s Cannon.)

Never Trump Bulwark writer attempts to take down Victor Davis Hanson. The attempt goes very, very badly for him.

[Gabriel] Schoenfeld only fuels the popular perception of The Bulwark Never Trumpers as an angry, coastal elite who are anguished that their warnings about Trump were ignored by both hoi polloi and their conservative “grifters and trolls.” In careerist fury, he now damns others for his own self-immolation — as if the country must suffer for the sins of not listening to his own genius, which would probably have given the country a 16-year Obama-Clinton regnum.

That Never Trumpers at The Bulwark were wrong about the Trump nomination, the general election, and the first two years of the Trump administration seems only to have fueled their spitefulness. If Schoenfeld is representative of this rump movement, then they are engaging in projection.

Read the whole thing for a detailed, comprehensive takedown.

Another big money Democratic donor caught up in the college admissions scandal.

The CDC’s “gun violence” numbers are useless, says that well-known pro-gun outlet, 538.

How China is screwing Vietnam out of energy opportunities.

Another week, another UK Muslim rape gang.

SPLC founder Morris Dees fired, though evidently for sexual harassment rather than smearing innocent conservatives.

“California Veterans Home Threatens to Eject 84-Year-Old Widow for Bible Study Group.”

Some of the power has been restored, but Venezuela’s water runs black.

Venezuela’s premier university destroyed by socialism. A sad photo essay. (Hat tip: Wretchardthecat on Twitter.)

Related tweet:

The collapse of Venezuela’s electrical grid and public services is due to years of Maduro’s corruption, a refusal to invest in the public sector, and neglect of maintenance. It’s simple: machinery breaks down when you steal all the money intended to buy parts to keep it running.

— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) March 13, 2019

“Son defends parents caught in college admissions scandal while smoking blunt.” Can’t imagine why such a fine specimen of academic scholarship would need a leg up in their college admissions. (Had tip: IowaHawk via Andrew Wimsatt.)

“Media Matters President Wrote Blog Posts About ‘Japs,’ ‘Jewry’ And ‘Trannies.’” Political correctness for thee, but not for me. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Democratic Governor of overtaxed New Jersey wants to hike taxes even more.

What if Ayn Rand was right?

“The Army’s Next-Generation Combat Helmet Has Arrived.”

“To Avoid Confusing Words, Ilhan Omar Will Now Respond To All Questions With ‘I Am Groot.'”

You know, Hayek’s Nobel Prize would look good on my mantle.

Random tweet:

"Excuse me! Did you see a sign on my cave that said 'Dead Messiah Storage?!?'"

— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) March 12, 2019

Tags:#NeverTrump, Ayn Rand, Border Controls, Brexit, California, China, Crime, Democrats, Economics, economy, EU, F. A. Hayek, Guns, Ilhan Omar, Illegal Aliens, Jeremy Corbyn, Jews, LinkSwarm, Media Matters, Military, morons, Nancy Pelosi, New Jersey, oil industry, Phil Murphy, rape, San Jose, sanctuary cities, Sheffield, Theresa May, UK, Venezuela, Victor Davis Hanson, Vietnam, Welfare State
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Military, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

LinkSwarm for August 10, 2018

Friday, August 10th, 2018

This week has been saner but still busy:

Israel and Hamas have essentially been going at it all week.

“Illegal Immigrant Released by ‘Sanctuary City’ of Philadelphia Convicted of Child Rape.”

Why Dianne Feinstein was an easy mark for Chinese spys:

In June 1996 — after the staffer had begun working for Feinstein — the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.

The warning proved prescient.

One Chinese bagman, Nanping-born John Huang, showed up at Feinstein’s San Francisco home for a fundraising dinner with a Beijing official tied to the People’s Bank of China and the Communist Party Committee. As a foreign national, the official wasn’t legally qualified to make the $50,000-a-plate donation to dine at the banquet.

After a Justice Department task force investigated widespread illegal fundraising during the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, Feinstein returned more than $12,000 in contributions from donors associated with Huang, who was later convicted of campaign-finance fraud along with other Beijing bagmen. The DNC and the Clinton campaign had to return millions in ill-gotten cash.

Still, Beijing got its favored trade status extended — thanks in part to Feinstein. In speeches on the Senate floor and newspaper op-eds, she shamelessly spun China’s human-rights violations, as when in 1997 she compared Beijing’s 1989 massacre of hundreds of young demonstrators to the 1970 Kent State shootings, calling for the presidents of China and America to appoint a human-rights commission “charting the evolution of human rights in both countries over the last 20 to 30 years,” that “would point out the successes and failures — both Tiananmen Square and Kent State — and make recommendations for goals for the future.”

Feinstein also led efforts to bring China into the World Trade Organization in 1999, which gave Beijing permanent normal trade relations status and removed the annual congressional review of its human-rights and weapons-proliferation records.

Feinstein, still among the Senate’s most influential China doves, travels to China each year. Joining her on those trips is her mega-millionaire investor husband, Richard C. Blum, who has seemingly benefited greatly from the relationship.

Starting in 1996, as China was aggressively currying favor with his wife, Blum was able to take large stakes in Chinese state-run steel and food companies, and has brokered over $100 million in deals in China since then — with the help of partners who sit on the boards of Chinese military front companies like COSCO and CITIC.

China investments have helped make Feinstein, who lives in a $17 million mansion in San Francisco and keeps a $5 million vacation home in Hawaii, one of the richest members in Congress.

“Of all Donald Trump’s many sins against the Great Church of the Transnational Leftist Establishment, his greatest may be his stubborn refusal to subordinate the needs of the normal citizens of the United States to the dogmas of our alleged betters.”

Good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun in Florida.

Elites vs. the Deplorables:

Academic dogma postulates that white people cannot be the victims of racism, and such banal white demonization has now seeped into the larger liberal commentariat. With that bias comes the notion that one can smear the white working classes with impunity. Caputo, however, was not brave or stupid enough to visit a Trump rally and to suggest to the crowd around him to get to a Clear Smile clinic.

If you are a non-white purveyor of such prejudice, venom like Jeong’s is contextualized through the lens of compensatory historical grievances. Someone’s grandfather mistreated your grandmother, so you can invert and then replay the roles with impunity. Or less charitably, life’s disappointments are always due to past cosmic injustice, not one’s own perceived tragic shortcomings or bad luck or just cruel fate.

If you are an elite white liberal, you are a twofer: virtue signaling your identity politics bona fides, while psychologically squaring the circle of your own privilege. Those who ridicule less fortunate white others for their supposed racial privilege—themselves often the products of old boy networks, elite upbringings, inherited perks, prep schools and parental leveraging—end up as the privileged smearing the non-privileged for their privilege.

Jeong is a Harvard Law graduate. Strzok has a master’s degree from Georgetown. The ridicule of the white working class by NeverTrump conservative pundits is read on the pages of the nation’s premier newspapers or voiced in hallowed symposia.

Is such ignorance of an entire class because of, or in spite of such, elite training?

Snip.

“In answer to the now hackneyed question, who or what created Trump? All these purveyors of class and racial prejudice need only look in the mirror.”

“It has become apparent that the Democratic Party and its media supporters seem to have a problem with representative democracy and how it works. They lost an election they thought they’d handily win, and their reaction to it has been to have a long, screeching public tantrum.” (HT AoSHQ)

That “Democratic Socialist wave” crested and broke-up before it ever hit the shore: Just about all Bernie bros go down in Democratic primary defeats. “Rather than demonstrate that his movement has a broad reach across the electorate, Sanders has instead demonstrated that’s a fringe movement even within the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Why the left are afraid of Jordan Petersen.

It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind. When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.

When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.

In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.”

If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.

Though it must be said that only a small fraction of the amorphously named “alt-right” embraces identity politics. (Hat tip: Will Shetterly on Twitter.)

Syrian chemical weapons scientist blows up real good.

Social Justice Warriors want biological women to never win another women’s sporting ever again.

Why Europe is drafting away from America.

The global influence of Europe continues to wane, at least as defined by demographic robustness, technological innovation, the quality of higher education, and the ability to defend its interests. Its aristocratic elite classes are currently under constant challenge from populist reformers. And 73 years of peace have been hard on Europe, in the sense that the postmodern European cultural ideal is to avoid childbearing, most religion, and national defense.

Snip.

Europe continues to believe that the “Palestinian issue” is key to “peace” in the Middle East — a euphemism for distancing itself from Israel. In truth, the Middle East is undergoing the greatest revolution since the end of colonialism. The worries about Arab security are not the tardiness of Palestinian statehood but the existential threats emanating from theocratic Shiite Iran and the neo-Ottomanism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. In that sense, a conventionally strong and nuclear Israel is for now allied with an Arab world at odds with both Tehran and Ankara, and is likely in any major war to be on the side of an Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Yet for Europe, the Palestinians are the rusty key to peace, even as the latter are increasingly under suspicion by Arab nations as pro-Hezbollah and pro-Iranian.

Europe for now is on the wrong side of the energy revolution, perhaps best epitomized by the near-suicidal green policies of Germany. As it dismantles coal and nuclear plants, Angela Merkel’s government finds its subsidized wind and solar projects utterly incapable of meeting Germany’s competitive industrial needs. The result will likely be a continual and massive importation of natural gas, increasingly from NATO’s supposed archenemy, Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The dream of hydraulic fracturing of shale gas throughout Europe is now largely dead and buried by opposition from radical environmental groups. The result is not a self-sufficient Europe enjoying renewable energy but a continent increasingly dependent for its mounting conventional energy needs on costly imports, with resulting energy costs that are making it uncompetitive with North American industries. Again, the contrast with the United States is telling: The latter went from foreordained, “peak oil” fossil-fuel dependence to becoming the largest oil, gas, and coal producer in the world.

One symptom of European demographic decline, multiculturalism, and military impotence is massive illegal immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. The ensuing crisis of large unassimilated populations is said to be analogous to the influxes of illegal immigrants into the United States from Central America and Mexico. But there are key differences. As an immigrant nation without a hereditary aristocracy, the melting pot of the United States even in postmodern times has far better integrated, assimilated, and intermarried newcomers. Illegal immigrants to the United States are largely Catholic; challenges to assimilation are national, ethnic, and linguistic but not additionally religious as in Europe. Congressional and presidential policy reflects a majority opinion in the United States that now supports secure borders and measured, legal, meritocratic immigration. In Europe, official immigration policy is still at odds with voters.

(Hat tip: Gregory Benford’s Facebook page.)

Is an upset brewing in Rhode Island?

Woman who was the daughter and granddaughter of women who used men simply as sperm donors wonders why men are suspicious of her. Also, from the comments: “What the writer only lets on, deep into the article, is that she was raised in a lesbian commune.”

Not even Democrats are wild about an abortion mill parking lot comedy tour. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Austin’s CodeNext planning process dies a very justifiable death.

Austin American Statesman kills weekly Spanish-language newspaper, offers all Statesman staffers voluntary severance package. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

DIY Pancreas. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

“Ocasio-Cortez Severely Burned After Accidentally Touching Book On Basic Economics.”

Ten honest plumbing tips. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)

A tweet:

This sign was on the door of a restaurant in Kansas. Me and my clients went in and enjoyed a very nice steak dinner. No one was harassed, asked to leave, or in fear for their lives. And I expect 80% of us were carrying. It’s become a regular stop because it is a safe space pic.twitter.com/3bRtPGQvxn

— DamnSkippy (@LaneySkip) August 9, 2018

Tags:Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, alt-right, Austin, Border Controls, China, Crime, Democrats, Dianne Feinstein, Elections, EU, Europe, feminists, Florida, Foreign Policy, gay, Guns, Hamas, Israel, John Huang, Jordan B. Peterson, Kurt Schlichter, Media Watch, Military, rape, Republicans, Rhode Island, sanctuary cities, Social Justice Warriors, Syria, Texas, Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

LinkSwarm for June 8, 2018

Friday, June 8th, 2018

Another week full of bears. Enjoy a LinkSwarm:

In South Texas, more of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist.

Elites Value Mellifluous Illegality over Crass Lawfulness:

Despite Obama’s recent projection that his eight-year tenure was “scandal-free,” along with the reality that the media’s biased compliance sought to make such a startling fantasy true, the Obama administration was in many respects lawless. It will eventually rank as the most scandal-ridden administration since Warren G. Harding’s.

The Fast and Furious scandal was, among other things, about deliberate government gun-running of weapons to Mexico, perhaps in a warped effort to discredit current U.S. firearms laws. The Benghazi debacle involved a cover-up of a preplanned terrorist hit on our consulate, an attack that was possible only because it was well known that the consulate’s security was lax. The Benghazi cover-up involved U.N. ambassador Susan Rice lying five times on national television in a single day, when she claimed that the terrorist operation was the result of a spontaneous riot over a video. And to justify that reelection-cycle concoction, the video maker, a foreign resident on U.S. soil, was summarily jailed on a trumped-up probation charge.

An IRS regional high official, and Obama partisan, Lois Lerner, weaponized and discredited the IRS, by hounding conservative groups that were seeking tax-exempt status. Lerner staged a self-serving public stunt to leak her misbehavior to friendly ears — she had a reporter ask her a planted question about targeting conservatives. At her later congressional testimony, Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. She was never charged by the Obama State Department. Indeed, Obama himself, after expressing initial pseudo contriteness in the face of public furor, waited the public out before finally announcing that there was not a “smidgeon” of corruption in the IRS. Lerner, in effect, was rewarded for successfully neutralizing many conservative activist groups just months before the 2012 election. In October 2017, facing a lawsuit by conservative groups, the IRS admitted in court that it had unfairly targeted them during the Obama administration. It agreed to a multi-million-dollar settlement, and the current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, apologized to the more than 450 conservative organizations in question.

Nadine Strossen, a liberal and the former president of the American Civil Liberty Union, conceded — but only in hindsight when both Obama and she were out of their respective offices — that Obama was one of the most hostile presidents to civil liberties in history. Perhaps she was referring to the fact that Eric Holder’s and Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department had spied on Associated Press reporters, monitored the communications of Fox reporter James Rosen, and subpoenaed New York Times reporter James Risen to force him to reveal his confidential sources. Holder was also the first Attorney General in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over subpoenaed documents.

But it was during the 2016 election cycle that the Obama administration descended to a level of corruption not seen in a century. Right in the middle of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Obama, as judge and jury, announced that candidate Clinton had violated no criminal law while secretary of state. Obama also lied when he stated that he’d known nothing about such an unlawful server, although emails prove that he himself had communicated over it on several occasions. His FBI director, James Comey, deliberately scrambled the law and exonerated Hillary Clinton from wrongdoing, not because she had not broken the law, but, according to Comey’s own invented interpretations of the statute, because she had not intended to violate the law. Comey also admitted to tailoring his circus-like investigation of Clinton around the assumption that she would soon be president.

We are slowly appreciating over the last year that lying under oath was an Obama-administration requisite for a high position in the intelligence community.

How Twitter is attacking Stephen Kruiser’s account.

The most frustrating aspect of all is the lack of communication. If the goal is to create a better overall experience on the site, then it would make sense to tell people who have had their accounts restricted exactly why it happened so the problem could be avoided in the future.

The fact that they don’t do so really heightens the perception that it isn’t about anything other than punitively targeting accounts that don’t fit in with the hive mind. The appearance of deliberate censorship could be gotten rid of with a bare amount of transparency and communication from Twitter. That, sadly, does not seem to be a priority.

Tommy Robinson and the collapse of governmental legitimacy in the UK:

Question 2: Who is speaking the truth here?

Sharp-eyed readers will note that I referred to Robinson as an “activist” while Peter refers to him as “Alt-Right”. I used this journalistic technique intentionally, partly because it highlights what the left-wing media does all the time when referring to Left Wing terrorists like Earth First! and the like. But it also cuts to the heart of this question. If we don’t look at who the messenger is and whether we like him, and instead look at who is speaking the truth, things start to look grim for the UK establishment. The Government certainly did not speak the truth, and in fact covered up these crimes for decades. The media did at least publish the stories when they came out, but there is a strange soft peddling of the story.

The alleged perpetrators are described as “asian males”, as if some of them were from China or Korea. This leads to more questions, as we try to peel the onion to get to, you know, the truth.

Are the “asian males” actually Pakistani immigrants? Are they all muslim? Is their muslim identity a key factor in why they chose English girls as victims? To simply ask these questions is to answer them.

The Government officials damn themselves by their silence here. It’s actually worse – one single person in a position of power (a Shadow Cabinet Secretary – the Cabinet of the out of power party) actually did speak the truth here, and was promptly sacked.

It seems very unhealthy that the only people who appear to be speaking the truth here are what we’re told is an “Alt-Right” fringe.

Question 3: Is the root cause of all these crimes the fact that Europe is really bad at assimilating different cultures?

This is the Question That Must Not Be Asked, whether in Leeds Crown Court, in Cologne or Berlin, or in Paris. If Europe does a particularly poor job at assimilating immigrants from other cultures into a collective Body Politick, then the Europe-wide governmental policy of massive immigration from the 3rd World assumes a very different perspective.

You might get, you know, mass instances of gang rape.

This is a particularly ugly question, and it the question that all European governments (and their lap dog media) are trying desperately to suppress.

Because if the State will not protect the public, then the whole deal is off. Blood feud may be the only option.

Attempting to secure the border in the Rio Grande Valley:

On May 16, agents discovered 2,119 pounds of marijuana concealed in a commercial shipment of charcoal into the U.S. On May 20, agents discovered 56 pounds of cocaine, approximately $432,500 in street value, on a Mexican commercial bus on the McAllen-Reynosa International Bridge and another $1.4 million worth of cocaine at the Kingsville checkpoint. In the first week of May, $247,000 worth of methamphetamine was apprehended at the Falfurrias checkpoint. Over Memorial Day weekend, $2.2 million in marijuana was seized in Harlingen, another 300 pounds was confiscated in Roma, and another 90 pounds of marijuana along with 35 illegal immigrants were apprehended at the checkpoints.

Bonus: Seized baby tiger.

Charles Krauthammer is is dying of cancer, and is only expected to have weeks to live. There was probably no columnist or pundit more vital to holding Obama to account during the first year of his first term.

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lupe Valdez has yet to run a single Facebook ad since she won the primary. It would be some kind of anti-miracle for Valdez to run a worse campaign than Wendy Davis ran in 2014, but thus far she’s been all but invisible. Also this: “The Valdez campaign was also recently ensnared in a bit of controversy after the Houston Chronicle unearthed public records showing Valdez, ‘owes more than $12,000 in overdue taxes on seven properties in two counties.’ Valdez had been ‘campaign[ing] to close loopholes in the state’s broken property-tax system,’ according to the report.” (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)

“Miss America is scrapping its swimsuit competition, will no longer judge based on physical appearance.” In other news, American Idol to eliminate all that annoying singing.

Theater reviewers must not be allowed to give positive reviews of plays that exhibit wrongthink.

White House intern on how she lost her virginity to John F. Kennedy.

How Social Justice Warriors ruined Portland’s food scene.

Literary agency bookkeeper accused of embezzling $34 million. Chuck Palahnuik among those ripped off.

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain dead of apparent suicide. More from Dwight.

Seven pairs of tweezers. Guess where they were found?

“Resistance Win: When One Of Her Students Wore A MAGA Hat To Class, This Incredible Teacher Stopped Having Sex With Him After School.

Tags:Anthony Bourdain, Border Controls, Charles Krauthammer, Crime, Democrats, JFK, Jihad, Media Watch, Obituary, Portland, rape, Rio Grande Valley, Rotherham, Social Justice Warriors, Stephen Kruiser, Texas, The Onion, Tommy Robinson, Twitter, UK, Victor Davis Hanson
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Jihad, Media Watch, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

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