As I previously mentioned, several Clinton Corruption scandals, and the Obama Administration FISA/Unmasking scandal, have been converging into one giant scandal for some time.
Well things just got a whole lot more convergy. So I’m going to crank this out beforethe FISA abuse memo drops.
Would you believe that the FBI has a second secret Trump “dossier”, this one written by well know Clinton crony and dirty tricks man Cody Shearer?
More on the same subject:
Shearer's older brother Derek got a plum job as Clinton's ambassador to Finland in part because of dirty tricks from Sid Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. Derek bragged about them in a 1993 memo to the Clintons. https://t.co/JzfKWwo2c9pic.twitter.com/rQu6swYJ1k
Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SCS) wrote six Judiciary Committee letters requesting information from: John Podesta, Donna Brazille, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Robbie[sic] Mook, the DNC, and Hillary For America Chief Strategist Joel Benenson.
The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s PAC was revealed by The Washington Post to have paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS for the creation of a dossier that would be harmful to then-candidate Donald Trump.
Fusion commissioned former UK spy Christopher Steele to assemble the dossier – which is comprised of a series of memos relying largely on Russian government sources to make allegations against Donald Trump and his associates.
According to court filings, Fusion also worked with disgraced DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and hired his CIA-linked wife, Nellie Ohr, to assist in the smear campaign against Trump. Bruce Ohr was demoted from his senior DOJ position after it was revealed that he met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson as well as Christopher Steele – then tried to cover it up.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, denied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he knew about the dossier’s funding, while Clinton’s former spokesman, Brian Fallon, told CNN that Hillary likely had no idea who paid for it either.
Current and past leaders of the DNC, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) also denied knowledge of the document’s funding.
Podesta met with Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson the day after the Trump-Russia dossier was published by Buzzfeed News.
the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity.
On the eve of the election, the New York Times tracked various pollsters’ models that had assured readers that Trump’s odds of winning were respectively 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 percent, and less than 1 percent. Liberals howled heresy at fellow progressive poll guru Nate Silver shortly before the vote for daring to suggest that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.
Hillary Clinton herself was not worried about even the appearance of scandal caused by transmitting classified documents over a private home-brewed server, or enabling her husband to shake down foreign donations to their shared foundation, or destroying some 30,000 emails. Evidently, she instead reasoned that she was within months of becoming President Hillary Clinton and therefore, in her Clintonesque view of the presidency, exempt from all further criminal exposure. Would a President Clinton have allowed the FBI to reopen their strangely aborted Uranium One investigation; would the FBI have asked her whether she communicated over an unsecure server with the former president of the United States?
Former attorney general Loretta Lynch, in unethical fashion, met on an out-of-the-way Phoenix tarmac with Bill Clinton, in a likely effort to find the most efficacious ways to communicate that the ongoing email scandal and investigation would not harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. When caught, thanks to local-news reporters who happened to be at the airport, Lynch sort of, kind of recused herself. But, in fact, at some point she had ordered James Comey not to use the word “investigation” in his periodic press announcements about the FBI investigation.
How could Lynch in the middle of an election have been so silly as to allow even the appearance of impropriety? Answer: There would have been no impropriety had Hillary won — an assumption reflected in the Page-Strzok text trove when Page texted, about Lynch, “She knows no charges will be brought.” In fact, after a Clinton victory, Lynch’s obsequiousness in devising such a clandestine meeting with Bill Clinton may well have been rewarded: Clinton allies leaked to the New York Times that Clinton was considering keeping Lynch on as the attorney general.
How could former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe assume an oversight role in the FBI probe of the Clinton email scandal when just months earlier his spouse had run for state office in Virginia and had received a huge $450,000 cash donation from Common Good VA, the political-action committee of long-time Clinton-intimate Terry McAuliffe?
Again, the answer was clear. McCabe assumed that Clinton would easily win the election. Far from being a scandal, McCabe’s not “loaded for bear” oversight of the investigation, in the world of beltway maneuvering, would have been a good argument for a promotion in the new Clinton administration. Most elite bureaucrats understood the Clinton way of doing business, in which loyalty, not legality, is what earned career advancement.
Some have wondered why the recently demoted deputy DOJ official Bruce Ohr (who met with the architects of the Fusion GPS file after the election) would have been so stupid as to allow his spouse to work for Fusion — a de facto Clinton-funded purveyor of what turned out to be Russian fantasies, fibs, and obscenities?
Again, those are absolutely the wrong questions. Rather, why wouldn’t a successful member of the Obama administrative aparat make the necessary ethical adjustments to further his career in another two-term progressive regnum? In other words, Ohr rightly assumed that empowering the Clinton-funded dossier would pay career dividends for such a power couple once Hillary was elected. Or, in desperation, the dossier would at least derail Trump after her defeat. Like other members of his byzantine caste, Ohr did everything right except bet on the wrong horse.
From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.
These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton–Obama emails. If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.
If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent. In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton–Obama emails would have been in the spotlight. For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence. More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.
The Justice Department’s inspector general has been focused for months on why Andrew McCabe, as the No. 2 official at the FBI, appeared not to act for about three weeks on a request to examine a batch of Hillary Clinton-related emails found in the latter stages of the 2016 election campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.
The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, has been asking witnesses why FBI leadership seemed unwilling to move forward on the examination of emails found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) until late October — about three weeks after first being alerted to the issue, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
A key question of the internal investigation is whether McCabe or anyone else at the FBI wanted to avoid taking action on the laptop findings until after the Nov. 8 election, these people said. It is unclear whether the inspector general has reached any conclusions on that point.
A major line of inquiry for the inspector general has been trying to determine who at the FBI and the Justice Department knew about the Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop, and when they learned about them. McCabe is a central figure in those inquiries, these people said.
It’s not just McCabe. FBI Director Christopher Wray will be replacing his chief of staff James Rybicki just a week after the latter testified to congress about his handling of EmailGate.
The Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner divorce is off. Gee, do you think this might have to do with the fact that spouses cannot legally be compelled to testify against each other, but ex-spouses can?
it turns out the primary subcontractor worked not for Steele but for Simpson at Washington-based Fusion GPS, and he contributed key material for the investigation of Trump underwritten by the Clinton campaign. His name is Edward Baumgartner, a British national who speaks fluent Russian and runs a p.r. shop out of London (and who spent 2016 tweeting his forceful opposition to Trump’s candidacy).
While Baumgartner was working on the dossier, he was also working for Simpson on another case to smear an anti-Putin whistleblower in an effort to help Putin-tied company Prevezon defend itself against US charges of money laundering.
During that contract, which ran through October 2016, Baumgartner worked closely in Moscow with the Russian lawyer who lobbied Donald Trump Jr. at a now-infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 to help lift US sanctions on Russia. Her talking points were written by Simpson, who also dealt directly with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
During the case, Simpson and Baumgartner also met with her partner, former Russian military intelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin.
As the Prevezon case was winding down, Simpson said he assigned Baumgartner, who shares his enmity toward Trump, to help dig up dirt on him. Baumgartner contributed research targeting the central Trump campaign figures charged in the dossier.
After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 Presidential election to Donald Trump, I assumed that (if she wasn’t indicted), she would go the way of Al Gore and Walter Mondale and step out of the public spotlight. Never did I dream that we’d be almost half a year into the Trump Presidency and Hillary Clinton would still be refighting the 2016 Presidential election.
Say this for the Atlanta Falcons: As bad as their collapse was, I don’t see any of them making the talk shows rounds proclaiming that they really won Super Bowl LI. Yet Hillary Clinton suffers from a world-class case of denial:
New York Magazine dedicated its cover story to covering Clinton’s journey from a one-time presidential loser to a two-time presidential loser. Deep inside the coverage is a key kernel of wisdom: Even if you lose, just pretend you didn’t so people keep giving you money.
When asked about how Trump and Bernie Sanders capitalized on American anger, Clinton responded like a dementia-riddled Civil War veteran: “Yes, and I beat both of them,” she told Rebecca Traister of New York Mag.
Uh huh. I guess when Clinton says things like this we’re just supposed to ignore them like when grandma says something racist at the dinner table. Sure, Clinton won in November, and the maid is stealing money from Nana’s purse.
Snip.
If you think Clinton is ready to take any responsibility, hold your breath. Her unfavorables, the FBI investigation, her shady business practices—that’s all just the fault of The Media.
“Look, we have an advocacy press on the right that has done a really good job for the last 25 years,” Clinton told NY Mag. “They have a mission. They use the rights given to them under the First Amendment to advocate a set of policies that are in their interests, their commercial, corporate, religious interests. Because the advocacy media occupies the right, and the center needs to be focused on providing as accurate information as possible. Not both-sides-ism and not false equivalency.”
Only a Clinton would somehow have the gall to argue that the media didn’t work hard enough to stop Trump from getting elected.
The book further highlights how Clinton’s Russia-blame-game was a plan hatched by senior campaign staffers John Podesta and Robby Mook, less than “within twenty-four hours” after she conceded:
That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.
The Clinton camp settled on a two-pronged plan — pushing the press to cover how “Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by the contents of stolen e-mails and Hillary’s own private-server imbroglio,” while “hammering the media for focusing so intently on the investigation into her e-mail, which had created a cloud over her candidacy,” the authors wrote.
Of course, many Democrats who “wanted to believe” have been taken in by that laughably fake Russian “dossier” on Trump. Including former FBI Director James Comey. “It was a very powerful factor in the decision to go forward in July with the statement that there shouldn’t be a prosecution.”
And now that Comey is out, “a growing chorus is suggesting that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal should be reopened.”
The Office of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina confirmed to Circa that Mrs. Clinton called her office in March 2011 to demand that Dr. Muhammed Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace prize winner, be restored to his role as chairman of the country’s most famous microcredit bank, Grameen Bank. The bank’s nonprofit Grameen America, which Yunus chairs, has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative. Grameen Research, which is chaired by Yunus, has donated between $25,000 and $50,000, according to the Clinton Foundation website.
How Hillary blew the election in five easy steps. “Hillary Clinton had no real sincere position on any issue other than a desire to stay in public office for nearly a quarter-century.”
Also:
Haughtiness, insularity, and laziness characterized the conduct of the Clinton campaign. Even a novice outsider could see that Obama’s successful electoral matrix — record minority turnout and bloc voting, coupled with the drop-off in turnout by a disengaged white working middle class (tired both of left-wing identity politics and Republican bluestocking elitism) — was not going to be transferrable to an off-putting 69-year-old, white multimillionaire.
Not only did Hillary Clinton lack Obama’s youthful vigor and mellifluousness; she also seemed at times geriatric, snarky, and screechy. The result was that she did not win the minority vote at the levels she needed. Further, she galvanized the supposedly ossified and irrelevant white working classes to finally come out and vote, in their own bloc fashion, against her. Obama had guaranteed her his downside but never delivered his upside.
Snip.
She made her disdain concrete by never campaigning in Wisconsin and only sporadically visiting the Blue Wall states eastward to the Carolinas. And she was convinced that demography had doomed the white working classes and empowered Latinos and blacks in red states such as Arizona and Georgia.
Clinton’s inept campaign aimed, then, not just at a win (which was attainable by nonstop populist barnstorming and message massaging in the Rust Belt) but, greedily, at a “mandate” that was impossible, given minority-vote falloff and Democratic estrangement from the working classes. Apparently, no one told the campaign that open borders were not a popular national issue, and that Democrats could not win Texas even with Latino bloc voting, and that they could do so in deep-blue California but without any electoral significance.
Also:
Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash is underappreciated for its effect on the campaign. Through painstaking research, it tied together all the strands of Clinton nefariousness: the Clinton Foundation as an excuse to hire political flunkies and provide free jet travel; the quid pro quo State Department nods to those who hired Bill Clinton to speak; and corruption under Hillary Clinton, from cellphone concessions in Haiti to North American uranium sales to Russian interests.
Add to the Clinton sleaze Hillary’s unsecured server and communications of classified material, the creepy New York and Washington careerists who turned up in the Podesta archives, and the political rigging that warped the conduct of the Democratic National Committee.
The result was that Hillary could no longer play the role of the “good” Clinton who “put up” with her husband’s “good ole boy” sleaze. Her new image was that of an equal partner in crime — or perhaps even a godmother who used the capo Bill as muscle. In comparison, Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump taxes, and Trump ties were old-fashioned American hucksterism, but with one important difference: Trump’s excesses were a private person’s; Clinton’s were those of a public servant.
“I’m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party,” she continued.
“What do you mean nothing?” asked interviewer Walt Mossberg.
“I mean it was bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it, the DNC, to keep it going,” Clinton said.
Hell, all that may even be true, but what sort of gratitude is that after the DNC went out of its way to put its thumb on the scales to ensure she beat Bernie Sanders? (Hat tip: Directror Blue.)
That, in turn, lead DNC data guy Andrew Therriault to tweet defending himself:
Clinton blames her data team for election loss. Data team leader tweets (see images), then, mysteriously, deleted them. pic.twitter.com/NFE1QvdIcx
Then he deleted both those tweets, including the one that mentioned DNC limits as a “laundering vehicle.” Why, it’s almost as though he feared criticizing Hillary Clinton…
The real Clinton-Russia nexus is a lot more concrete than the theoretical Trump-Russia nexus.
Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t merely in a state of denial. She has become Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Politically speaking, she is dead, but she doesn’t know it. Her staffers are so many Haley Joel Osments — too kind (and too attached to their salaries) to tell her that her career is over. She doesn’t need briefings. She doesn’t need to do interviews. She doesn’t need to write the book she is writing (after so many indigestible volumes, why bother with one more?). She doesn’t need to stake out a politically nuanced position on James Comey’s firing or scramble to get out in front of the Resistance parade. She lost two exceedingly winnable presidential campaigns in Hindenburgian fashion. There is no demand for her to run again and there is nothing left for her except to receive whatever ceremonial honors and sinecures may come her way. She has been handed her political retirement papers by the American people. She’s done.
A new batch of messages released by the State Department on Tuesday shows the former secretary of state and her team routinely shared her upcoming schedules, talking points and sensitive items – such as her iPad password – via the homebrewed system.
Other newly revealed emails, which were posted as the result of litigation, show Clinton’s top advisers griping about her during her time as secretary of State; an Asian ruler who later implemented Sharia law saying he considered former President Bill Clinton part of his “family”; and Clinton talking about Justin Cooper, one of the key figures who administered to her private server.
“Hey, Hillary Clinton, shut the f— up and go away already.” And that’s from someone who voted for Clinton! “No one deserves more blame for the election debacle than Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
I wanted to do a comprehensive roundup of analysis of last week’s election, so this post just grew and grew to its current Brobdingnagian size. So tuck in! There’s a lot to chew over.
Let me first note that all the pundits were wrong about this race, save two not normally regarded as pundits. Scott Adams said early on that Trump was going to win the nomination and the race through persuasion techniques (and also that human beings are fundamentally not rational, which gives me no joy at night), and Michael Moore said that Trump was going to sweep the rust belt due to blue collar anger. So props to them for getting the fundamentals right when so many others (myself included) got them wrong.
First, this lengthy Washington Post semi-insider look back at the race is unavoidable. (I say “semi” because many of the big names for Hillary Clinton’s Permanent Traveling Circus of Corruption (for example, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills) are missing.) The piece confirms the impression that Hillary Clinton is the Æthelred the Unready of American politics. One big difference between the camps that struck me: The Trump side of the story includes lots of interaction between the candidate and his staff. Clinton? No back and forth interaction recounted at all. It’s like she was a ghost in her own campaign.
Also this:
It was like looking at the lottery ticket and saying, “I think these are the winning numbers, but I’m going to go confirm them again.” . . . “Anthony Weiner.” “Underage sexting scandal.” “Hillary Clinton.” “FBI investigation.” There is no combination in which that word jumble comes up net politically positive.
Iowa: Trump by 148,000 votes (9.6 points)
Trump: 68,000 more votes than Romney
Clinton: 172,000 fewer votes than Obama
Michigan: Trump by 12,000 votes (0.3 points)
Trump: 164,000 more votes than Romney
Clinton 297,000 fewer votes than Obama
Ohio: Trump by 455,000 votes (8.6 points)
Trump: 111,000 more votes than Romney
Clinton: 511,000 fewer votes than Obama
Pennsylvania: Trump by 68,000 (1.2 points)
Trump: 223,000 more votes than Romney
Clinton: 155,000 fewer votes fewer than Obama
Wisconsin: Trump by 27,000 votes (1.0 points)
Trump: 1,500 more votes than Romney
Clinton 238,000 fewer votes than Obama
There were also states where Trump won votes, but not enough to win the state, where both lost votes, etc. Interesting wonky stuff.
County by county results in Texas. Trump lost Fort Bend (which has to be worrisome to the state GOP) but picked up Jefferson, where Beaumont features one of the few significant concentrations of black voters outside the major cities. Also, Libertarian Gary Johnson beat Green Party candidate Jill Stein in every county but one: Loving county, the least populated in both Texas and the nation, where she beat him 2 votes to 1. On the other hand, Stein didn’t receive a single vote in Hall, Kenedy, Kent, King, Roberts, Shackelford and Terrell counties.
Even in California, Stein only beat Johnson in three counties: Humboldt, Mendocino and San Francisco. If the Greens can’t do better than in a safely blue state with the most corrupt Democratic Party candidate ever, and the most corrupt DNC ever rigging the race against Bernie Sanders, their outlook would appear grim.
Most devastating electoral defeats in United States history at least had some mitigating circumstances. In 1984, Walter Mondale got blown out by Ronald Reagan, a popular incumbent President presiding over an improving economy. Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election by a large margin, but his opponent was another incumbent President with extensive resources to marshal.
Hillary Clinton’s stunning collapse is different. It’s hard to think of a historical analog that could come close to resembling the magnitude and depth of the failure. She had a popular incumbent President campaigning for her furiously; the popular First Lady did likewise. The economy is far healthier than it was eight or even four years ago.
The elite media almost universally loathed her rival — a conformity of opinion that we’ve never seen before in modern American politics. Wall Street was 99% behind her. The polling industry put out a constant deluge of bogus data pronouncing Donald Trump’s certain defeat.
With all these massive advantages, Hillary still somehow managed to lose to the guy from “The Apprentice.”
A majority of white women voted for Trump. (Exit poll caveats apply.) Evidently those years of “war on women” blather were all for naught… (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Six million, seventy-thousand, eight-hundred and two people voted for one of the many third-party candidates running for President. To put it into perspective, that’s more than the combined population of Houston and Chicago.
That means that the total number of people who voted against Hillary Clinton was 65,682,480 people.
In other words, Hillary Clinton received 47.6% of the popular vote.
For those keeping score, that means the majority of votes cast did not, in fact, go to Hillary Clinton.
Dear Alec MacGillis: How dare you commit actual journalism rather than prop up Democratic talking points???
Back in Dayton, where Clinton never visited during the entire campaign, I had run into two more former Obama voters after Trump’s March rally there. Both Heath Bowling and Alex Jones admitted to having been swept up in the Obama wave, but had since grown somewhat disenchanted. Bowling, 36, a burly man with a big smile, managed a small siding and insulation business, and as he’d grown older he’d had gotten more bothered about the dependency on food stamps he saw around him, especially among members of his own generation, and demoralized by the many overdose deaths in his circle.
Jones, 30, who worked part-time at a pizza shop and delivering medicines to nursing homes, joked at first that his vote for Obama might have had to do with his having been doing a lot of drugs at the time. He grew serious when he talked about how much the Black Lives Matter protests against shootings by police officers grated on him. Chicago was experiencing soaring homicide rates, he said — why weren’t more people talking about that? He was upset that when he went out on the town in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine bar district, he had to worry about getting jumped if he was on the street past a certain hour — and that he felt constrained against complaining against it. “If I say anything about that, I’m a racist,” he said. “I can’t stand that politically correct bullshit.” He had, he said, taken great solace in confiding recently in an older black man at a bar who had agreed with his musing on race and crime. “It was like a big burden lifted from me — here was this black man agreeing with me!”
Also this:
A few days after the release of the tape, which was followed by a string of accusations from women saying they had been sexually harassed and assaulted by Trump, I checked back in with Tracie St. Martin to see if she still supported him. She was working on a new gas plant in Middletown, a working-class town near Dayton that was the setting of the recent best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” Here’s what she wrote back in a text message: “I still appreciate the honesty in some of his comments. Most of his comments. I still favor what he says he may be able to do. I am voting against Hillary, come what may with Trump. It’s important to me that ‘we the people’ actually have political power. And electing Trump will prove that. I am AMAZED at the number of people voting for him. The corruption is disgusting in the press. Yes, as of right now I am voting FOR Trump.” She was sure he would win, she said: “His support is crazy! The polls have to be wrong. Have to be fixed.”
And she shared an anecdote that reflected how differently Trump’s comments had been received in some places than others. “I’m setting steel for this new gas plant…I’m operating a rough terrain forklift,” she wrote. “So today, I kept thinking about the debate and the audio was released…And I got underneath a load of steel and was moving it…I was laughing and laughing and one of the iron workers asked ‘what are u laughing at.’ I said ‘I grabbed that load right by the pussy’ and laughed some more…And said ‘when you’re an operator you can do that ya know’, laughed all fucking day.”
The problem for the left is that, when everyone’s Hitler, nobody’s Hitler.
At which point, enter the Teflon Pussygrabber.
As for the “divisive” policy positions – a wall to keep out Mexicans, a moratorium on Muslim immigration – “divisive” appears to be elite-speak for “remarkably popular”. As with Brexit, in any functioning party system the political establishment can ignore issues that command widespread public support only for so long. In that sense, the rise of a Trump figure was entirely predictable. Indeed, I see an old quote of mine has been making the rounds on the Internet in the last couple of days. I wrote it over twelve years ago in The Daily Telegraph:
In much of western Europe, on all the issues that matter, competitive politics decayed to a rotation of arrogant co-regents of an insular elite, with predictable consequences: if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.
At which point – all together now – enter the Pussygrabber. His supporters didn’t care about his personal foibles (anymore than Rob Ford’s did) because he was raising issues nobody else wanted to talk about.
What was forgotten in all this hysteria was that Trump had brought to the race unique advantages, some of his own making, some from finessing naturally occurring phenomena. His advocacy for fair rather than free trade, his insistence on enforcement of federal immigration law, and promises to bring back jobs to the United States brought back formerly disaffected Reagan Democrats, white working-class union members, and blue-dog Democrats—the “missing Romney voters”—into the party. Because of that, the formidable wall of rich electoral blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina crumbled.
Beyond that, even Trump’s admitted crudity was seen by many as evidence of a street-fighting spirit sorely lacking in Republican candidates that had lost too magnanimously in 1992, 2008, and 2016 to vicious Democratic hit machines. Whatever Trump was, he would not lose nobly, but perhaps pull down the rotten walls of the Philistines with him. That Hillary Clinton never got beyond her email scandals, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, and the Wikileaks and Guccifer hackings reminded the electorate that whatever Trump was or had done, he at least had not brazenly broken federal law as a public servant, or colluded with the media and the Republican National Committee to undermine the integrity of the primaries and sabotage his Republican rivals.
Finally, the more Clinton Inc. talked about the Latino vote, the black vote, the gay vote, the woman vote, the more Americans tired of the same old identity politics pandering. What if minority bloc voters who had turned out for Obama might not be as sympathetic to a middle-aged, multimillionaire white woman? And what if the working white classes might flock to the politically incorrect populist Trump in a way that they would not to a leftist elitist like Hillary Clinton? In other words, the more Clinton played the identity politics card, the more she earned fewer returns for herself and more voters for Trump.
Snip.
The Democratic Party is now neither a centrist nor a coalition party. Instead, it finds itself at a dead-end: had Hillary Clinton emulated her husband’s pragmatic politics of the 1990s, she would have never won the nomination—even though she would have had a far better chance of winning the general election.
Wikileaks reminded us that the party is run by rich, snobbish, and often ethically bankrupt grandees. In John Podesta’s world, it’s normal and acceptable for Democratic apparatchiks to talk about their stock portfolios and name-drop the Hamptons, while making cruel asides about “needy” Latinos, medieval Catholics, and African-Americans with silly names—who are nonetheless expected to keep them in power. Such paradoxes are not sustainable. Nor is the liberal nexus of colluding journalists, compromised lobbyists, narcissistic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, family dynasties, and Clintonian get-rich ethics.
The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which “white privilege” was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement.
Michael Barone ponders why the polls failed. A variety of reasons, including this one:
3. Clinton campaign targeting: staggering incompetence. In an excellent Washington Post article, Jim Tankersley points out that in the closing weeks of the campaign, the Clinton campaign put more ads on the air in the Omaha market (aiming, presumably, at the 1 electoral vote of Nebraska 2, since Iowa’s 6 votes were clearly already lost) than in Michigan and Wisconsin combined (26 electoral votes). By one metric, during one period Republicans ran 405 ads in Michigan and 2,319 in Wisconsin while Democrats ran only 31 in Michigan and 255 in Michigan. This, despite the fact that the Clinton campaign had lots more money than the Trump campaign.
This wasn’t the only example of campaign malpractice. The Clinton campaign spent time and money on winning Arizona and Georgia, and while it performed better there than Obama had, it was not by enough to carry their 11 and 16 electoral votes, respectively. At the same time, Clinton didn’t set foot in Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) after its April 5 primary. In effect, Clinton was aiming for her 340th electoral vote and ignored the need to campaign for her 270th, which is the one that counts.
The 70-year-old Bill Clinton apparently repeatedly advised Clinton campaign chairman Robby Mook and others to campaign in white working class areas. The 36-year-old Mook spurned — perhaps ridiculed — his advice. None of this going after men who wear trucker hats unironically; let’s show Brooklyn-type Millennials that supporting Hillary is really cool.
Isn’t it just a little too pat that a guy named “Robby Mook” is being set up as the scapegoat for the Clinton campaign? Are we sure they didn’t just invent him last week just to take the fall?
Another explanation, the polls weren’t wrong, they were fixed. “They did not get it wrong. They chose to lie to you the American electorate.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Why Clinton lost: “The ‘conspiracies’ were true, and the mainstream media lied to you to about everything.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
How the Democratic Party has been more than decimated under Obama:
“Since 2008, by our estimates, the party has shed 870 legislators and leaders at the state and federal levels — and that estimate may be on the low side. As Donald Trump might put it, that’s decimation times 50.”
Stephen Green: “For now then the Democratic Party is a wounded beast, and it will lash out ferociously. The interior fights will be ugly; the desperate attacks on the GOP will be uglier. Try not to get too near.”
“I had faith that the country had to change. It was about working-class people that rose up against the system—against both parties. I had hoped for something that would immediately bring jobs, or at least stop the bleeding, and overregulation can be stopped with a stroke of the pen. I’m excited that Obamacare could change—that’ll be a big benefit to us if we get a better health system. I’m excited about the Supreme Court. I don’t think Roe v. Wade needs overturning, but I think there are reasonable restrictions that could be put in place. This is the biggest political event in my lifetime, and I’ve lived through a lot of elections. I couldn’t be happier.”
That increase in middle-income households meant a mere $2,798 extra in annual income, and was 1.6 percent less than in 2007. The top 5 percent of earners saw a stratospheric jump of 21.8 percent in income, while the poorest Americans, a cohort of 46.7 million, are poorer than they were in 1989.
Four days before the Census Bureau’s report was released, Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables” — something J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” told The Post was “incredibly reductionist.”
“Like a lot of people on the left, Hillary seems to want to put the Trump phenomenon on racial anxiety,” he said. “It’s a really oversimplified way to address the concerns of millions of people who feel invisible to elites.”
Plus celebrity election reactions that, once again, make them sound like smug, entitled pricks.
Had the paper actually been fair to both candidates, it wouldn’t need to rededicate itself to honest reporting. And it wouldn’t have been totally blindsided by Trump’s victory.
Instead, because it demonized Trump from start to finish, it failed to realize he was onto something. And because the paper decided that Trump’s supporters were a rabble of racist rednecks and homophobes, it didn’t have a clue about what was happening in the lives of the Americans who elected the new president.
Snip.
Trump indeed was challenging, but it was [executive editor Dean] Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be broken without consequence.
After that, the floodgates opened, and virtually every so-called news article reflected a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton. Stories, photos, headlines, placement in the paper — all the tools were used to pick a president, the facts be damned.
Now the bill is coming due. Shocked by Trump’s victory and mocked even by liberals for its bias, the paper is also apparently bleeding readers — and money.
I’ve gotten letters from people who say they canceled their Times subscriptions and, to judge from a cryptic line in a Thursday article, the problem is more than anecdotal.
Citing reader anger over election coverage, Rutenberg wrote, “Most ominously, it came in the form of canceled subscriptions.”
For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”
Having lived at one time or another in small-town Pennsylvania, some lower-rung Detroit suburbs, San Francisco, Oakland, Tulsa and, now, Santa Monica, I could only think, well, “Wow.” This is a very large country. I couldn’t even find a copy of the Times on a stop in college town Durham, N.C. To believe the national agenda was being set in a conference room in a headquarters on Manhattan’s Times Square required a very special mind-set indeed.
CNN offers 24 different explanations for Trump’s victory, none of which include “because the American voter was tried of lying outlets like CNN acting as extensions of the Democratic Party.”
Too many of my progressive friends seem to have forgotten how to make actual arguments, and have become expert instead at condemnation, derision and mockery. On issue after issue, they’re very good at explaining why no one could oppose their policy positions except for the basest of motives. As to those positions themselves, they are too often announced with a zealous solemnity suggesting that their views are Holy Writ — and those who disagree are cast into the outer political darkness. In short, the left has lately been dripping with hubris, which in classic literature always portends a fall.
More on the same theme: “Dems didn’t seem to like many of the people who they expected to vote for them. Do not expect this to get better anytime soon, as Dems trot out their continued hatred for flyover country, along with calling all the Trump voters racists, sexists, xenophobes, and so forth.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Donald Trump is going to be the President of the United States.
In July I wrote the piece I put up this morning acknowledging a Hillary Clinton win. It is fitting that it is the ultimate bit of being wrong after a year of being wrong about the election. I genuinely presumed Donald Trump could not win. All of the data agreed. And I and the data were wrong as were so many others.
Snip.
Democrats overplayed their hand on cultural issues. They had a Supreme Court impose gay marriage on the country and then tried to force men into women’s bathrooms. On top of that, they ruined healthcare for many Americans and drove up premiums. Then they nominated the worst politician in American history. Within the next 12 hours they will take off the mask and show just how much contempt they have for the very white working class that just kicked their ass.
This piece was published the day after the election and, boy, did he get that one right.
I have never seen anything like this election. The disdain for Hillary Clinton is obvious, but the real struggles and hurt of many voters went unregistered. The data that I have long relied on to help shape my opinions is no longer reliable and, frankly, a lot of people I thought were full of crap turned out to be as right as I was wrong. There are really two Americas and I have to do better relating to one I thought I knew already.
I’m still a conservative. I still believe limited government is best and a strong man in Washington is a dangerous thing. I think protectionism is a bad idea. But I think the #NeverTrump Republicans need to do a reset and give Donald Trump the chance we did not give him up to now. There clearly were voters who would not admit to supporting Trump and they have sent a strong signal that they should be listened to.
I was wrong about so much about this election and so were so many others. The sooner we get over our pride, eat some crow, and realize we missed the mood of the country, the sooner we can move on. The Brexit polling was more accurate than the American election polling this year. That is stunning. But it is also somewhat exciting to be flying blind into the future knowing the gauges we’ve always used to see where we are going no longer work.
The media mocked him ruthlessly for putting undue weight behind rallies over polling — a fatal error, according to Mitchell. “Rallies equal newly engaged voters,” he said. In 2008 Obama had tens of thousands who stand in line for six hours because they want to experience and taste and feel all this.” Mitchell refers to them as the “monster vote” and suggests that it’s these perhaps previously disenfranchised voters who aren’t on pollster call lists. “And so the big question was, will the 20 million who didn’t vote in 2012 come out for Trump? I kept saying it’s going to happen, no question — it’ll be something like 2008 where the previously quiet black vote came out for Obama. And it did.” It’s also worth noting — while his predictions were overly enthusiastic — that Trump would do better with Latino and black voters, and there’d be a low black voter turnout.
Matt Walsh: “Liberals, it’s clear that you wish to continue losing.”
You found the taste of defeat so novel and exciting that you’ve become intoxicated by it. Indeed, you’ve done everything you possibly could over these past few days to ensure that your losses are magnified and replicated in the future. Not satisfied to simply lose in 2016, you’ve now begun the project of losing in 2020 and beyond.
Truly, your performance since Tuesday has been astounding in its tone deafness. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone could paint such a masterpiece of ineptitude and self-destruction by accident. I can only conclude that you’re doing it on purpose because, for whatever reason, you are not satiated by just one stunning, historic loss. You want more. And if that is in fact your aim, I would like to make a few suggestions to help you accomplish the goal.
Including this:
5. Continue calling everyone who disagrees with you racist.
It’s a settled fact on the Left that Trump won because 60 million people are slobbering, inbred racists. On that point, I’d like to arrogantly quote myself from a piece I wrote last week:
It turns out that white people don’t like being called racists every second of the day. It seems that guilt, shame, and self-loathing are not the best ways to generate electoral turnout. Evidently, “Repent, you bigots!” is not the most effective rallying cry.
On a related note, it’s not true that all white people are racist. Of course it isn’t true. Again: stop being ridiculous. You can’t take some random sin or vice and assign it to an entire group of people based solely on their skin color. In fact, do you know what it’s called when you accuse everyone in a certain racial group of possessing some negative characteristic? Racism, by definition.
The other problem with writing off all of your political opponents as racist is that, if you come to believe your own propaganda, you’ll quickly develop a deep hatred for the half of the country that disagrees with you. And if you hate people, you tend to alienate them. For example, take the Democrat strategist on CNN who sarcastically blurted out, “Oh, poor white people” when she was asked about the white Trump voter who’d been savagely beaten by a group of black protesters.
If you really believe that all white people are despicable racists — or at least the white people who don’t vote Democrat — you will not be able to muster even the pretense of empathy or concern when white people are attacked. White middle class voters have taken note of this, understandably. And now they are a bit hesitant to vote into a power an ideology that detests them.
Plus this great line about the perpetually clue-deprived Lena Dunham: “A regular woman doesn’t wake up the morning after an election and declare that the results made her vagina hurt.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Beltway chin-pullers expediently focused on Trump’s white and conservative supporters who are rightly sick and tired of social justice double standards. But they ignored the increasingly vocal constituency of hyphen-free, label-rejecting American People Against Political Correctness who don’t fit old narratives and boxes.
And the same “Never Trump” pundits and establishment political strategists who gabbed endlessly about the need for “minority outreach” after 2012 were flummoxed by the blacks, gays, Latinos, women and Democrats who rallied behind the GOP candidate.
The most important speech of the 2016 election cycle wasn’t delivered by one of the presidential candidates. It came from iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel who best explained the historically significant backlash against the intolerant tolerance mob and phony diversity-mongers.
“Louder voices have sent a message that they do not intend to tolerate the views of one half of the country,” he observed at the National Press Club last week. He recounted how the gay magazine The Advocate, which had once praised him as a “gay innovator,” declared he was “not a gay man” anymore because of his libertarian, limited-government politics.
“The lie behind the buzzword of diversity could not be made more clear,” Thiel noted. “If you don’t conform, then you don’t count as diverse, no matter what your personal background.”
Trump’s eclectic coalition was bound by that common thread: disaffected individuals tired of being told they don’t count and discounted because their views do not properly “match” their gender, chromosomes, skin color or ethnicity. That is exactly why the more they and their nominee were demonized, the stronger their support grew.
Trump needs help, she says. And these people need jobs and power, she doesn’t say. The elite, her people, lost the election, but they should have the victory anyway, because a “young man” and a “beautiful lady” spoke of fear. Throughout the whole political season, Trump was battered with the fear of fear, and now he’s won and he’s told to pander to the people who said whatever they could to oppose him, the people who stoked the fear that he needs to prioritize calming. As if it could ever be calmed, as if his opponents will ever stop stoking it.
The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level. Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.
However, he also says that those rebuilding the party “have to do so in a way that doesn’t erode the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable.” So, in other words: Though Shalt Not Question the Holy Social Justice Warriors, and we’re going to keep calling our political opponents racist, sexist bigots, because that worked out so well this year. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Liberals rioting in the streets might want to heed Dionne Alexander’s message:
“You are the exact reason Donald Trump won the election. We’re tired of you crybabies!”
Speaking of tantrums, Trump calls on supporters not to attack anyone (not that they actually were)…and CBS refuses to air the clip. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Washington Post runs a piece declaring states “a relic of the past.” I’m betting most Americans are far more likely to see the Washington Post as a relic of the past…
From reading the various mainstream media accounts of these events, one comes away with the distinct impression that they are grassroots actions that began organically among ordinary, concerned, well-meaning citizens.
But alas, if one were to think that, one would be wrong.
Contrary to media misrepresentations, many of the supposedly spontaneous, organic, anti-Trump protests we have witnessed in cities from coast to coast were in fact carefully planned and orchestrated, in advance, by a pro-Communist organization called the ANSWER Coalition, which draws its name from the acronym for “Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.” ANSWER was established in 2001 by Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, a group staffed in large part by members of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. In 2002, the libertarian author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz described ANSWER as an “ultra-Stalinist network” whose members served as “active propaganda agents for Serbia, Iraq, and North Korea, as well as Cuba, countries they repeatedly visit and acclaim.”
Since its inception, ANSWER has consistently depicted the United States as a racist, sexist, imperialistic, militaristic nation guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity—in other words, a wellspring of pure evil. When ANSWER became a leading organizer of the massive post-9/11 demonstrations against the Patriot Act and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it formed alliances with other likeminded entities such as Not In Our Name (a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party) and United For Peace and Justice (a pro-Castro group devoted to smearing America as a cesspool of bigotry and oppression).
The poll with the best track record over the last three presidential elections gave Donald Trump a 2-percentage-point edge over Hillary Clinton on Saturday.
The Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP tracking poll has Trump with 42.1 percent and Clinton at 39.7 percent.
Thoughts on #NeverTrump: “They are putting a great volume of energy into bringing about a disaster, for which they will not take any ownership.”
No one trusts the media anymore. “Only one in nine Americans believes that Hillary Clinton is ‘honest and trustworthy.’ They don’t trust the media’s cover-up of her misdeeds, and the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
More than anything, I can’t sit idly by and allow these perpetrators of fraud to celebrate and leak tears of joy like they did when they helped elect Barack Obama in 2008. I have to know I weighed in not only in writing but in the voting booth. The media needs to be destroyed. And although voting for Trump won’t do it, it’s something. Essentially, I am voting for Trump because of the people who don’t want me to, and I believe I must register my disgust with Hillary Clinton.
Here’s a New Yorker piece on the failure of the Euro. It provides a good, but incomplete, overview of the Euro’s failure (nowhere does it note that Europe’s cradle-to-grave welfare state is unsustainable, and it fails to note that none of the nations practicing “austerity” in southern Europe have cut outlays to match receipts). And the myopic policy prescription offered is, of course, more central planning. But there are some good bits. Like this:
The U.S. unemployment rate hit ten per cent for a single month in 2009 and is now below five per cent; the eurozone unemployment rate hit ten per cent around the same time, and is still in double digits. In some European countries, youth unemployment is more than forty per cent. America’s economy is bigger than it was when the crisis hit. The eurozone’s is smaller. To take just one example, Italy, the third-largest economy in the eurozone, has a per-capita G.D.P. that’s lower than it was at the end of the last century.
Also this:
Stiglitz observes that if the countries that committed to the single currency in 1992 had known what they know now, and if people had had the chance to vote on the proposal, “it is hard to see how they could have supported it.” That’s a hell of an indictment.
Hey, remember how we were told California’s assisted suicide law would only apply to terminally ill people who wanted to die? Now insurance companies are enouraging suicide rather than pay for life-extending drug treatments.
But if you’re not sure yet what you want to do, then take time to decide before you spend $30,000, $50,000, or $100,000 you don’t have for something you don’t need. In the meantime, start working. You’ll probably only find low-paying, hard-working jobs at first, but guess what? If you go to college, you’ll be working those same jobs when you get out, only you’ll be four years older and fifty grand poorer.
Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol. Better idea than corn subsidies…
For the last ten years you’ve been told that the LHC must see some new physics besides the Higgs because otherwise nature isn’t “natural” – a technical term invented to describe the degree of numerical coincidence of a theory. I’ve been laughed at when I explained that I don’t buy into naturalness because it’s a philosophical criterion, not a scientific one. But on that matter I got the last laugh: Nature, it turns out, doesn’t like to be told what’s presumably natural.
It’s been a while since I did a Texas vs. California update, so this is going to be a meaty one:
The Texas Comptroller has released a 50 state overview of how Texas stacks up to other states. There’s a lot of information to mine there. A few nuggets”
Texas ranks first as the best state for business, while California ranks 50th.
Texas ranks as the best state for net migration; California ranks 49th.
There are area in need of improvement. Texas ranks 49th in states whose residents over 25 hold high school diplomas. California? 50th.
I was unaware that CalPERS owns its own planned community in Mountain House, California, and which it’s invested more than $1 billion in. A community that in 2008 was the most underwater in terms of mortgages in the entire country, and which was estimated to be worth only $200 million at some point. And now their water is being cut off due to the drought. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
We suffer in California from a particular form of progressive immorality predicated on insular selfishness. The water supplies of Los Angeles and the Bay Area are still for a year longer in good shape, despite the four-year drought. Neither area is self-sufficient in water; their aquifers are marginal and only supply a fraction of their daily needs. Instead these megalopolises depend on intricate and expensive water transfer systems — from Northern California, from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and from the Colorado River — that bring water and life to quite unnatural habitats and thereby allow a MGM or Facebook to thrive in an arid landscape that otherwise would not support such commerce and population. Without them, Atherton would look like Porterville.
Quiet engineers in the shadows make it all work; the loud activists in the media seek to make it unwind. These transfers have sterling legal authority and first claims on mountain and northern state water. If Latinos in Lemon Cove are going without household water, Pyramid Lake on I-5 or Crystal Springs Reservoir on 280 are still full to the brim.
Why then do those who have access to water delivered in a most unnatural way seek to curtail supplies to others? In a word, because they are either ignorant of where their own water comes from or they have not a shred of concern for others less blessed, or both. We will confirm this ethical schizophrenia should a fifth year of drought ensue. Then even the most sacrosanct rights of transferred water will not be sufficient to accommodate the San Francisco and Los Angeles basins. Mass panic and outrage will probably follow, and no one will care a bit about the delta smelt, or a few hundred salmon artificially planted into the San Joaquin River watershed, or a spotted toad that holds up construction of an urgently needed reservoir.
The greens who pontificate about the need to return the San Joaquin watershed to its 19th-century ecosystem will become pariahs. When the taps run dry in Hillsborough and Bel-Air, very powerful people will demand water for their desert environs, which will in fact begin to return to the deserts that they always were as the thin veneer of civilization is scraped away.
There’s so much news going on in the world that it’s hard to sit down and focus on one story to get a single blog post out of it when there’s another huge story coming down the pike. Iraq, Ukraine, the VA Scandal, the dog eating Lois Lerner’s emails (“Barack Obama has brought us Jimmy Carter’s economy and Richard Nixon’s excuses”); too damn much going on to focus on one thing. So here’s a LinkSwarm instead:
Bill Gates wants to propagandize you into accepting illegal alien amnesty. Actually, what Gates and his high tech baron compatriots really want is more H1-B visas, but since that doesn’t help the Democratic Party as much as illegal alien amnesty, it gets rolled into the giant “comprehensive immigration reform” ball.
Does anyone really think West Virginia Democratic Senate candidate Natalie Tennant is any more “pro-coal” or “pro-gun” than Bart Stupak was “pro-life”?
Chelsea Clinton got paid $600,000 by MSNBC. That worked out to $26,724 for each minute she was on the air. In other news, your betters in the overclass really don’t care what you think of the financial compensation one member of the class gives to another…
Millions in “urban redevelopment” money in Democratic-controlled Philadelphia ends up in certain people’s pockets with almost nothing to show for it. Try to contain your shock. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Dear anyone who’s ever self-published their own book: you’re a fascist Ayn Rand supporter, using your evil individualism to bypass the holy gatekeepers of traditional publishing.
And if you think that’s the stupidest left-wing essay you’ll read today, think again.
There was enough voter fraud in a Weslaco City Commissioner Race for the judge to order a new election. “Some of the disallowed ballots were cast by voters claiming Rivera’s childhood home as their address.” Note: Weslaco is down in the valley right next to Donna, Texas, which had its own voting scandal.
Doggies! (Patriotic doggies, no less.) (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“This harlot-sized ensemble will make you the envy of your trampish posse on your fraudulent wedding day.”
The California city of Vallejo emerged from bankruptcy just over two years ago, but it is still struggling to pay its bills.
The main culprit: Ballooning pension costs, which will hit more than $14 million this year, a nearly 40% increase from two years ago.
Amid threats of legal action from the state’s pension giant, CalPERS, Vallejo did little during its nearly three-year stint in bankruptcy to stem the growth in its pension bills.
Now when I think about California, I think of a liberal oppressive police state and regulations and taxes and fees. I’d rather go someplace and have my own little place out on the edge of town. I’m a country girl at heart. It makes me happy when I see people in Texas open-carrying. It makes me feel safe. I’m not even a gun owner, but I’d like to see a gun rack in every pickup truck, like my boyfriend had when I was fifteen years old in Florida. An armed society is a polite society.
Steyn on the shutdown. “The conventional wisdom of the U.S. media is that Republicans are being grossly irresponsible not just to wave through another couple trillion or so on Washington’s overdraft facility.”
Kent Hance to retire as Texas Tech Chancellor. Hance’s political career is in many ways emblematic of the evolution of Texas politics, starting out as a conservative Democrat, elected to the state Senate in 1974, defeating George W. Bush for a U.S. congressional seat in 1978, played key roll in backing the Kemp-Roth tax cuts in 1981, narrowly losing the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate to Lloyd Doggett (who would then get stomped by Phil Gramm in the general election) in 1984, followed Gramm by switching to the Republican Party in 1985, losing the GOP Gubernatorial nomination to an un-retired Bill Clements in 1986, getting appointed to the Railroad Commission in 1987, winning re-election to it in 1988, and losing to Clayton Williams in the 1990 Republican Gubernatorial primary. He had a long, long career as a bridesmaid…
“This 20 year old has discovered Sex Is Awesome!!! and just wants us all to know that. Yeah Sugar-Tits we sort of know. We’ve been enjoying it for years, but without quite as much Noob Squeeing about it.”
New California law to shield pedophiles in teacher’s unions in California each year, seven to eight times as much sexual misconduct takes place in public schools as in the Catholic Church.
What it’s like living in bankrupt Stockton: “Anderson called the police recently after a boy was shot riding his bike down the alley that runs alongside her home. It took them four hours to show up.”
California toll road agency misses overly optimistic projections, may have to declare bankruptcy. “The Foothill-Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency, which operates 39 miles (63 kilometers) of toll highways in Orange County, risks default on $2.4 billion in debt.”
Rick Perry goes fishing for new businesses to relocate to Texas in Maryland.
Also Missouri, where the Democratic governor just vetoed a tax cut.
Funny how three day weekends where you have to work Friday always leave you with more stuff you need to do rather than less. So here’s the Friday LinkSwarm on Monday.
“Barack Hussein Obama: You Killed the Arab Spring.” And other anti-Obama signs from Egyptian protesters.
Thomas Sowell: “The political left’s welfare state makes poverty more comfortable, while penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty. Unless we believe that some people are predestined to be poor, the left’s agenda is a disservice to them, as well as to society.”
“All the net growth in employment among the working-age (ages 16–65) over the last decade went to immigrants (legal and illegal). Since 2000 the total number of immigrants employed is up by 5.3 million, while native-born employment is down 1.3 million.”
“Modern liberalism, among other things, is a psychological state, in which very-well-off Americans find ways through their income and privilege to be exempt from the ramifications of their own ideologies, while adopting causes and pets that exempt them from guilt over their own status and limitless opportunities. Judging by their concrete actions, they are indifferent to the poor whom they romanticize at a safe distance.”
Disgraced former NY governor to run for New York City comptroller…against his former madam. Gee, the Eliot Spitzers and Anthony Weiners of the world must really miss all the fawning and graft.
UT ranks 26th on the list of top 100 universities in the world. Don’t know how accurate that ranking is, but it must rankle Yalies to rank a mere 10th…and behind Harvard!
How does a Western cost $250 million to make, even after Johnny Depp has taken a pay cut? Unless half the budget went to cocaine?
