Democrats want to ban cheeseburgers, Biden’s eye fills with blood, the third debates loom, and Williamson is shocked to find out that leftist activists are mean liars. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
CBS battleground states: Let’s shotgun all these in one line. New Hampshire: Warren 27, Biden 26, Sanders 25, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7. Iowa: Biden 29, Sanders 26, Warren 17, Buttigieg 7, Harris 6. South Carolina: Biden 43, Sanders 18, Warren 14, Harris 7, Buttigieg 4. Nevada: Sanders 29, Biden 27, Warren 18, Harris 6, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3.
Texas Lyceum (Texas): Biden 24, O’Rourke 18, Warren 15, Sanders 13, Harris 4, Castro 4, Buttigieg 3, Klobuchar 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1, McAuliffe (lolwut) 1, Moulton 1, Williamson 1. Keep in mind that the Lyceum poll always oversamples Democrats, but their intra-Democratic poll numbers aren’t necessarily inaccurate. And Biden beating Beto in his home state, and Castro garnering a puny 4%, are both hilarious…
The presidential ambitions of the leading Democrat candidates may not survive CNN’s 7-Hour ‘Climate Change’ Townhall.
It was a man-made disaster, created in the fevered swamps of CNN and fueled by pledges of allegiance to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
The candidates came across as not-serious-people. Worse, they came across as nanny-state monsters who really do want to take away your plastic straws and cheeseburgers to save the planet. It was a self-parody of what woke totalitarianism sounds like, with an abnormal focus on meat.
Republican attack-ad makers have hours of footage that can be sliced and diced to make any of the candidates who appeared at the Townhall look insane. And they wasted no time.
Ban all the things! “Here is a comprehensive list of everything the left wants to have banned for the sake of human survival:
One of Yang’s supporters, Scott Santens, has been keeping track of the apparent slights via Twitter: an MSNBC graphic with other candidates polling at 2 percent but not Yang, oddly unbalanced graphics that seem to include just enough candidates to get in the media favorites but exclude Yang. As Axios recently pointed out, Yang is sixth in the polling average yet 14th in terms of the number of articles written about his candidacy.
Clearly, something is going on here. But what I’ve noticed is that Yang is not alone in facing media contempt. Without fail, every candidate who has come from outside the Democratic establishment, or who has dared to question the Democratic establishment, has been smeared, dismissed or ignored by most media.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who resigned from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in protest of its treatment of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and dares to challenge the bipartisan pro-war foreign policy consensus, has been smeared as “unpatriotic.” This despite the fact that she is an Iraq War veteran who, to this day, serves in the Hawaii Army National Guard. The Daily Beast published an absurd article titled “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign is Being Boosted By Putin Apologists” about how three of her donors, among tens of thousands, had tangential connections to Russia. NBC News published a piece on how Russian bots were boosting Gabbard’s campaign. It cited one expert, a group that reportedly faked Russian bot activity in an Alabama election.
Gabbard had the distinction of being the most-Googled candidate in both of the first two debates. The media, however, have shown little interest in understanding why her pro-peace message might hold appeal.
I’ve talked quite a bit about media bias against Sanders. The latest, most egregious case involved a Washington Post “fact check” that found Sanders accurately cited academic research — but managed to give him three Pinocchios anyway.
Marianne Williamson, an author and activist, is definitely off the beaten path for a candidate, but she is an incredibly accomplished woman, with seven New York Times bestsellers to her name and decades of activism under her belt. Perhaps it would be interesting to hear more of her thoughts on national healing and reconciliation rather than just casting her as a weirdo and mocking her for a tweet about the power of prayer, something to which many, if not most, Americans subscribe.
These candidates occupy much different poll positions and have wildly different approaches, styles and philosophies. Yang, the cheerful prophet of doom; Williamson, the spiritual healer; Gabbard, the teller of hard truths about American imperialism; and Sanders, well, he’s just Bernie. But they have something important in common: They don’t fit the mold. They aren’t in the club. They defy the rules.
Asian techies are supposed to develop the latest AI, not lead the revolution to put humanity first. Democratic female veterans are supposed to burnish the party’s hawkish cred, not doggedly pursue diplomacy and engagement and call out the American war machine. Spirituality is not supposed to be mixed with politics on the left, even though religion is fully weaponized by the right. And septuagenarian democratic socialists who are not fashionable in any way are not supposed to be rock stars with youths or be top-polling presidential contenders.
Rather than deal with these contradictions — which, by the way, clearly fascinate the public, judging by Google and Twitter trends — it’s easier for many in the media to mock, smear or ignore.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida are four states likely to determine the 2020 presidential race, and Donald Trump won each by a percentage point or less. “Of course, we’re deprived of any painfully honest discussion of how much the Democrats need black voters in big cities to control the electoral votes of the swing states and why they’re having trouble getting these votes in the post-Obama era.”
Perhaps part of it is due to the pressure of being an old white man who’s posing as the standard-bearer of a political party whose sole agenda these days is the extermination and debasement of old white men. How taxing must it be to run on the premise of, “Well, sure, everything I represent sucks, but at least I acknowledge it, so vote for me, anyway”? I could see how that could take its toll on a fella.
But most of it is due to the fact that he has always been a liar who jumbled the facts, compounded by a septuagenarian brain that is rapidly fermenting.
Biden is often referred to as a “gaffe machine,” and although that’s accurate, it doesn’t tell the whole story. A gaffe, by definition, is an unintentional mistake. There was the time when, in front of a crowd, he told wheelchair-bound Missouri state senator Chuck Graham to stand up. There was the time he called Barack Obama the “first sorta mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Those are simply dumb, clumsy mistakes.
But throughout his career, he has also blatantly lied about himself:
He claimed he finished in the top half of his law-school class; he actually finished 76th out of 85.
He has repeatedly claimed that both he and members of his family were coal miners. He even plagiarized sections of a speech from British politician Neil Kinnock about how his ancestors would work in the coal mines for 12 hours and then come up to play football for four hours. He was ultimately forced to admit he was lying.
He plagiarized portions of a law-school essay so extensively he had to beg administrators not to expel him.
He implied that Osama bin Laden’s men “forced down” his helicopter in Afghanistan, when the truth is that the pilot landed safely as a precaution to avoid a snowstorm.
He claims he was “shot at” in Iraq, when the truth is that a mortar landed several football fields away from where he was safely ensconced in a Baghdad motel.
He claims he participated in sit-ins and boycotts during the Civil Rights era and then was later forced to acknowledge that, no, he didn’t do any of that, although he did briefly work at a predominantly black swimming pool.
Joe Biden did not bring his fastball tonight. Nor did he know what sport he was playing or when the game was supposed to start. I think he was accidentally wearing someone else’s clothes.
The returns, which Booker released in April as part of his presidential campaign, show that he donated more than $110,000 of stock in Yandex, a Russian search-engine firm, from April 5, 2013 to October 11, 2013. In the middle of that stretch, on May 16, 2013, Booker filed a financial disclosure report. Yet on the report, an accounting of Booker’s assets and liabilities, he did not list Yandex. How could Booker have given away stock in the company if he did not own it?
“I certainly would be interested in hearing the campaign’s explanation,” said Brendan Fischer, director of the federal reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog group. “It’s not uncommon for candidates to divest financial holdings that could be controversial or pose a conflict of interest, but if a candidate does hold assets at the time the financial disclosure report is filed, they have to be reported. And it’s not clear that that’s what happened here.”
Hey, remember all the way back to earlier this year when media companies told us that playing footsie with Russians was the worst thing in the world? Buzzfeed offers up a failure to launch piece.
There’s a world you can imagine where a candidate like Booker would be running strong with younger voters, especially young black voters. Research, such as a recent report titled the Black Millennial Economic Perspectives Report, published just this month found 36% said criminal justice was their top domestic issue — a top Booker issue. (A similar study from two Democratic PACs found that “despite having every reason to be disenchanted with politics and the political process, unregistered black millennials remain aspirational and committed to protecting and empowering their families and communities.”)
But Booker didn’t have strong black support in the race the moment he jumped in, and he can’t bank on it coming later. There is another leading black candidate in the primary, and that’s to say nothing of the high levels of support right now for Joe Biden, or the affinity for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders among some younger black activists and voters.
You can get a good sense of the intellectual vacuity (and religious sterility, if you’re interested in that) of this mode of politics from, e.g., Kirsten Powers’s banal and illiterate conversation with Buttigieg, written up for general amusement in USA Today. (You will not be surprised to read that Mayor Pete has “started a crucial conversation,” and has proceeded from cliché to cliché.) Powers, when she is not half-chiding her fellow Christian for showing what she considers excessive grace to people who have naughty political ideas (one wonders what she would consider insufficient grace), hits the reader with a few insights that are not exactly blistering in their originality: Jesus, she says, never mentioned abortion (but then, neither does the Constitution), while He did speak a great deal about looking after the poor. Powers writes this as though Christianity had been planted in a cultural vacuum and as though “feed my sheep” were synonymous with “vote for the party of the welfare state no matter what other horrifying business may be on their agenda” — and as though these kinds of issues had not been the subject of centuries of Christian inquiry. The New Testament is silent on the questions of, among other things, child pornography and cannibalism, but Christians are not expected to maintain a morally indifferent attitude toward these. Still less would Christians be expected to maintain such indifference in the face of the Supreme Court’s happening upon a right to cannibalism lurking in some unexplored constitutional penumbra and the subsequent establishment of a franchised chain of coast-to-coast cannibalism outlets enjoying public subsidies.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He wants to tax robots. He may throw in the towel if he doesn’t make the October debates. “I’m going to go and try to get into the October debates, and if I can, I think that’s a good reason to keep going forward. And if I can’t, I think it’s really tough to conceive of continuing.” They add: “Should de Blasio make good on his promise and drop out of the campaign in October, he’ll be forced to head back to his day job in New York City—likely to both his and his constituents’ chagrin.” Along those same lines: “NYC Mayor De Blasio Logged Just 7 Hours At Work For Entire Month.” De Blasio is running for President because it gives him an excuse to stay away from the city that hates his guts.
We have an interest, obviously, in Hong Kong. There’s a lot of economic activity that flows through Hong Kong. Obviously, U.S. businesses have a lot of interest in Hong Kong. So we clearly have an interest in Hong Kong maintaining the autonomy that they were promised.
But there’s also a bigger issue, and that is the role the United States has in providing some moral leadership, and standing up for people who are fighting for their rights and for their ability to have some self-governance, particularly self-governance that’s been assured to them, or at least was assured to them. So I think we not only have a direct interest in actually how things unfold in Hong Kong, particularly around their—the rule of law and their legal system that they have that’s very unique, and we have a lot of interest, but more broadly I think we have a leadership role around the world to stand up not only for human rights—which is another, obviously, issue related to China—but also for individuals who are fighting for their right to self-governance. And I think they have it, and I think we should be making our voice clear on this issue.
Snip.
I think it’s right to be a lot tougher on China. In my opinion, China’s acted in many ways like pirates across the last several decades, right? They’ve stolen things. They’ve stolen intellectual property. They haven’t played by the rules, particularly rules that they gave assurances that they would play by. You know, and they are taking islands in the South China Sea.
I mean, so there is a response that’s necessary because China’s become our economic rival by doing, in my judgment, three things. They worked really hard. Good for them. They made very smart investments, in some ways smarter than we did. Good for them. But they didn’t play by the rules. And we can’t allow the next several decades for them to continue to not play by the rules because I think that’ll put us in a very, very significant kind of difficult economic position.
So I think it’s appropriate to draw a hard line with China on a lot of these practices. And I think the president was actually right in raising this issue, but I think his diagnosis of the problem is entirely wrong and the way he’s approaching it is wrong.
You could call it meaningless blather, and you’re not far from wrong, but it’s still more coherent than 99% of prominent Democrats have been on the challenge posed by China.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Opposes impeachment. It is “important for us to think about what is in the best interest of the country and the American people, and continuing to pursue impeachment is something that I think will only further tear our country apart.”
Kamala Harris entered the presidential race with impressive credentials – a popular black woman with an inspiring story who hailed from a large Democratic state and drew accolades for her fiery questioning of President Donald Trump’s nominees.
Yet despite a shot of adrenaline after confronting front-runner Joe Biden in the first debate, she has failed to catch fire with Democratic voters who are torn between a nostalgic fondness for Biden and a revolutionary desire for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Harris’ attempt to replicate her feat in the second debate backfired among Democrats who say she went too negative on Biden. The Californian also suffers from a perception that she lacks a deep ideological well to guide her policy ideas, in contrast to her three main rivals who are better-defined. And her past as a prosecutor has earned her supporters and detractors.
Harris and Senator Cory Booker “really went after vice president Biden – it redounded to their detriment that they went after Biden so much. Because it also looked like they were not just going after Biden, but they were going after the Obama legacy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is neutral in the primaries.
Weingarten said many Democrats left the June debate thinking, “Kamala seems really feisty and let’s look at her.” But in the July debate they were turned off by Harris and other aggressors because “it looked like they were burning the house down, as opposed to building on what Democrats believe in.”
Harris surged from about 7% to 15% in averages of Democratic polls immediately after the first debate in late June, putting her in second or third place in the crowded field. But it was a sugar high – she’s back to the 7% she had when summer began.
For Harris, the danger is that she’s another Marco Rubio. The Florida senator, too, had a potentially history-making candidacy during the Republican nomination battle in 2016 and was hailed by the party establishment as presidential timber, before he failed to translate that on the ground.
Ouch! And like Rubio, Harris has a senate career to fall back on. “Kamala Harris claimed she ‘sued Exxon Mobil’ as California AG. She didn’t.” Ha ha! “Harris Only Three Points Ahead of Gabbard After Ridiculing Her Poll Numbers a Month Ago.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s not wild about the process, which I can understand from someone stuck in very last place in a field this ridiculously large. But it’s not like he’s run even a minimally competent campaign:
The mayor of Miramar, Florida, has not found much of an audience or appeared in any debates. He has raised a mere $93,812 and assembled a small campaign staff. And now, according to internal campaign documents and interviews with eight former Messam campaign staffers and contractors, his campaign appears to be in near-total disarray.
The documents as well as staffers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect future employment prospects, depicted a no-hope campaign that nonetheless was embroiled in bitter disputes over money and control — a “D-list version of The Sopranos,” in one description. In particular, staff members claim that Wayne and his wife, Angela Messam, have refused to pay them for their work. All of the staffers and vendors that BuzzFeed News spoke with said they were never fully compensated for their work on the campaign and, in some cases, weren’t paid at all for expenses they’d fronted from their own bank accounts, including business cards for the campaign and flights, hotel rooms, and security costs for a trip to the Middle East. In some instances, staffers were told by the Messams that the couple believed them to be “volunteering” for the campaign, despite emails from senior staff to the Messams telling them about start dates for employees, and what staff members say were verbal agreements and offer letters from the campaign for their positions.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently the Odessa shooter was not, in fact, a Beto backer, which I rather suspected when this made the rounds; never beleive something that seems too pat without verifying it. (And yeah, Snopes, but the piece cites some actual, non-risible sources.)
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) And just like with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, you can bet that all that population control is aimed firmly at “undesirable” black and brown kids.
A former ThinkProgress writer took to Twitter to condemn billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer after receiving a job notice for his campaign following news that the liberal news site is shutting down.
Rebekah Entralgo, a writer who covered immigration policy and detention at ThinkProgress, said she received a LinkedIn message that attempted to recruit her after the activist group the Center for American Progress (CAP) said it could not find a new publisher for the site.
“Sorry to learn about ThinkProgress,” the message said in a screenshot Entralgo posted. “Tom Steyer 2020 is hiring for digital and comms roles — we do pay a relocation fee…”
Steyer (a CAP board member whose 2020 run could have funded TP for a decade as @ryanlcooper pointed out) is now trying to capitalize off of the site’s demise. You truly cannot make this stuff up pic.twitter.com/r5dJAhJUVJ
There are plenty of jobs I’ve been solicited for that I didn’t apply for, but in none of the cases did I declare “Screw you, you should have funded my last job!”
Warren is not overwhelmingly popular among women right now, but she has had a small, consistent edge among women in recent polls. Our average of national polls1 taken between Aug. 1 and Sep. 1 do show Warren getting some extra support from women, though not to a huge degree. Women were 2.9 points more likely than men to support Warren on average, while both Biden’s and Harris’s backers were nearly identically split between men and women — with Biden getting the most backing from both groups. And according to Morning Consult’s weekly national primary poll, Biden’s support is particularly strong among black women, too.
Biden will once again be the piñata at Thursday’s debate because the best way for any of his nine rivals to gain ground is to beat up on him, as Sen. Kamala Harris proved in the first debate.
But Warren is the one to watch this time. Most national polls have her second, with two recent ones showing her trailing the former vice president by just four points.
She is drawing by far the largest crowds and is focused, energized and organized. Biden, on the other hand, had a terrible week, with a growing realization in the party that his flubs and memory lapses are not passing problems.
Both his blood-filled eye and his gibberish remarks about climate change added to doubts he can go the distance. His team wants to cut back on his schedule and lowered expectations for Iowa and New Hampshire, moves that smell like panic.
“I know this sounds naive. I didn’t think the left was so mean. I didn’t think the left lied like this,” Williamson told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in an interview. “I thought the right did that. I thought we were better.”
Williamson accused the left of lying about her use of crystals and “crystal gazing,” telling Remnick that there has “never been a crystal on stage” at any of her events and “there is no crystal” in her home.
She accused those on the left of also falsely accusing her of having told AIDS patients not to take their medicines or implying that “lovelessness” causes diseases and “love” is “enough to cure their diseases.”
“I’m Jewish, I go to the doctor,” Williamson said, ripping those on the left for labeling her as an anti-science candidate who does not believe in modern medicine.
Mr. Yang has attracted an ideologically eclectic coalition that includes progressives, libertarians, disaffected voters and Trump supporters who have swapped their red MAGA hats for blue ones that say MATH — “Make America Think Harder.” Those who have come into his camp say his presence on YouTube, on podcasts and in the nationally televised debates helped them begin to see the logic behind giving people free money.
His performance in Houston could be crucial to sustaining his campaign’s newfound momentum. In the days immediately after the July debates, Mr. Yang’s campaign raked in about $1 million — more than a third of what his team had raised during the entirety of the second quarter. About 90 percent of the people who gave were new donors.
The campaign is now on track to raise more than $5.5 million in the third quarter of the year, according to Yang advisers — more than the total amount Mr. Yang had raised during the previous 20 months that he spent as a candidate. While his operation does not rival the size or scale of his more established rivals’ campaigns, his team has ballooned to over 50 staff members from around 10 initially, as new offices have opened in Nashua and Portsmouth, N.H., and Des Moines and Davenport, Iowa. At the New York headquarters, the campaign has leased additional office space and is building an in-house digital team.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Gillibrand is Out, CNN is going to subject America to 7 hours of climate change blather because they hate America (and ratings), Biden suffers imaginary flashbacks, and the next debates loom. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
USA Today/Suffolk University: Biden 32, Warren 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Yang 3, O’Rourke 2, Booker 2, Castro 1, Ryan 1. “The contenders who did not receive the support of a single one of the 424 likely Democratic voters surveyed included Montana Governor Steve Bullock, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maryland Rep. John Delaney, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Miramar (Florida) Mayor Wayne Messam and former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak.”
The Hill/Harris X: Biden 30, Sanders 17, Warren 14, Harris 4, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2. Sample size: 465, 190 males, 275 females. That’s a pretty small samples and a pretty strong sex skew.
Monmouth: Sanders 20, Warren 20, Biden 19, Harris 8, Booker 4, Buttigieg 4, Yang 3, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2, Williamson 2. This is the poll that launched a thousand “Biden is toast!” pieces last week, only for every other poll to come out and go “Yeah, not so much.”
Ten Democrats qualified for the next round of debates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, Warren and Yang. 538 staffers debate the debate. “Isn’t Biden presented with the most downside risk now that the focus gets tightened to 10 candidates? Instead of having to worry about mainly one top-tier challenge (Harris or Bernie or whomever), he now risks getting outshone by any or all of them.”
Believe it or not, the criteria to make the October debates is actually easier.
Here’s the catch: To qualify for the fourth round of debates in October, the candidates must meet the same requirements as those for September. In other words, candidates can raise money or improve in polling with a much longer deadline; for this reason, at least a few candidates will stick around until October.
Of the candidates who failed to qualify, only Gabbard, Steyer, and Williamson came close, so it’s unlikely any of them will call it quits over the next month. (Steyer fell short only one point from qualifying for September’s debates.)
After failing to qualify, both Delaney and Ryan have reiterated their commitment to their campaigns. “We’re moving forward,” Ryan said on Morning Joe on Thursday. “This is not going to stop us at all … we’re picking up endorsements left and right.” And in a story published yesterday over at the Atlantic, Benett has already stated his commitment to stay in the race until the 2020 Iowa caucuses in February.
All of this leaves us with Bullock and de Blasio, our predictions for the next candidates to drop out of the race.
“Cory Booker meditates. Kamala Harris does SoulCycle. Beto O’Rourke eats dirt.” Pretty much posting it just for the headline.
Now on to the clown car itself:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s staying in the race despite not making the debate. “Bennet says he plans to do well in the 2020 Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.” In other news, I plan to date lots of hot supermodels this fall…
Biden is probably mentally and physically fine — or within the parameters of fine for a man who turns 77 in November and who never had the greatest verbal discipline at the height of his career.
When Biden tells a story where he gets just about all of the details wrong, when he mixes up New Hampshire and Vermont, or calls former British prime minister Theresa May “Margaret Thatcher,” or when he says, “those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president” or when he mangles the address of his campaign web site at the end of a debate, it’s probably just a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s behaving like a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s.
I believe that if Biden were genuinely mentally or physically unwell and incapable of handling the duties of the presidency, his family and friends would sit him down and make him withdraw from the race. No one would want their loved one to go out into the national spotlight and stumble and be embarrassed. Watching a loved one succumb to age and gradually lose their mental acuity and memory from Alzheimer’s is an extremely painful process.
(In a strange way, “I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts,” is kind of a cute and charming unofficial slogan. With the news being what it is these days, Mr. Vice President, we’ve all felt the need to reassure others and ourselves of that fact.)
But even assuming that these are just normal septuagenarian memory lapses, it’s more than a little uncomfortable to watch Biden appear to forget Barack Obama’s name, saying during a recent appearance, “he’s saying it was president . . . (pause) My boss’s, it’s his fault.” If part of the reason to vote for Biden is his superior experience and knowledge in foreign policy, it’s a little unnerving to hear Biden say, “I don’t know the new prime minister of England. He looks like Donald Trump, I know that.” Really? Does the former veep need glasses?
The problem for Biden and his campaign is that nothing gets easier from here. Running for president consists almost entirely of long days of extemporaneous speaking in front of cameras and getting asked difficult questions from both reporters and voters. It is physically and mentally grueling marathon even to the healthiest and youngest candidates. Sure, the Biden campaign can rely on ads where Biden barely speaks and try to get him to stick to a prepared script as much as possible. But we know this man. Biden likes to talk. He likes to tell stories. He will tell stories where he doesn’t really remember the details, fills in the blanks with how he wanted it to have happened, and insist, “this is the God’s honest truth.”
Kevin Williamson doesn’t think Biden is senile, he thinks he’s just a liar:
In the most recent example, detailed by the Washington Post, Biden made up a story in which he as vice president displayed personal courage and heroism in traveling to a dangerous war zone in order to recognize the service of an American soldier who had distinguished himself in a particularly dramatic way. It was a moving story. “This is the God’s truth,” he concluded. “My word as a Biden.”
But his word as a Biden isn’t worth squat, as the Post showed, reporting that “Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.” Which is a nice way of saying: Biden lied about an act of military heroism in order to aggrandize his own role in the story.
Like Hillary Rodham Clinton under fictitious sniper fire, Biden highlighted his own supposed courage in the face of physical danger: “We can lose a vice president. We can’t lose many more of these kids.”
If Biden here is lying with malice aforethought, then he ought to be considered morally disqualified for the office. If he is senescent, then he obviously is unable to perform the duties associated with the presidency, and asking him to do so would be indecent, dangerous, and unpatriotic.
The evidence points more toward moral disability than mental disability, inasmuch as Biden has a long career of lying about precisely this sort of thing.
The most dramatic instance of that is Biden’s continued insistence on lying about the circumstances surrounding the horrifying deaths of his wife and daughter in a terrible car accident. It is not the case, as Biden has said on many occasions, that they were killed by a drunk driver, an irresponsible trucker who “drank his lunch,” as Biden put it. That is a pure fabrication, and a slander on the man who was behind the wheel of that truck and who was haunted by the episode until the end of his days. Imagine yourself in the position of that man’s family, whose natural sympathy for Biden’s loss must be complicated by outrage at his persistent lying about the relevant events.
Why would Biden lie about the death of his wife and daughter? Why would he lie about the already-heroic efforts of American soldiers? In both cases, to make the story more dramatic, to give himself a bigger and more impressive narrative arc. That he would subordinate other people — real people, living and dead — to his own political ambition in such a callous and demeaning way counsels strongly against entrusting him with any more political power than that which he already has wielded.
Biden is crushing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he is a known quantity, having been on the public stage for decades, most notably as vice president for eight years under Barack Obama. Biden’s lead in matchups between Trump and various Democratic candidates is his single greatest advantage in the Democratic primaries.
The risk for Biden is that he’s not a good presidential campaigner, as his two prior attempts demonstrated. While he may be showing signs of age, the truth is that he’s always been prone to gaffes, malapropisms, exaggerations, and misstatements. Every time Biden opens his mouth in an unscripted situation, there’s a chance he’ll say something goofy that undercuts his elder-statesman status.
So why play the game the way the others are playing it? In most sports, when you’re ahead by double digits, the smart (though boring) strategy is to play it safe and sit on your lead. Getting into arguments with political Lilliputians such as Senator Cory Booker and Andrew Yang elevates their profile while lowering Biden’s. And if Biden loses his cool and starts shouting, “And you can take those ducks to the bank!” or “My pants are made of iron!” the game is over.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hey, remember all the way back to a few months ago to when Mayor Pete was The Next Big Thing? Then it turned out that Mayor Pete wasn’t so good at the mayoring part:
Reports of violent crime increased nearly 18 percent during the first seven months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018. The number of people being shot has also risen markedly this year, after dropping last year. The city’s violent crime rate is double the average for American cities its size.
Policing problems in South Bend came to national attention on June 16, when a white sergeant fatally shot a 54-year-old black resident, Eric Logan. The officer’s body camera was not turned on, which was widely seen as a sign of lax standards in the department. Mr. Buttigieg found himself flying home again, regularly, to face the fury of some black citizens and the frustrations of many others.
It is the great paradox of Mr. Buttigieg’s presidential candidacy: His record on public safety and policing, once largely a footnote in his political biography, has overshadowed his economic record in South Bend, which he had spent years developing as a calling card for higher office.
“When he came in, the goal was to help turn the city around. That had nothing to do with the police department,” said Kareemah Fowler, until recently the South Bend city clerk.
Mr. Buttigieg’s image as a young, results-oriented executive continues to make him popular with many upper-income white liberals. They have delivered an overflowing war chest to his campaign: He had the best recent fund-raising quarter of any Democrat in the race, pulling in $24.8 million.
But criticism of Mr. Buttigieg’s oversight of the police has damaged his viability as a Democratic presidential candidate, given the huge influence of black voters in choosing the party’s nominee. He has slipped in the polls in recent months, from double-digit poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire in the spring to the single digits more recently. In a recent Fox News poll, he earned less than 1 percent support from black Democratic primary voters.
So what’s a guy that’s suddenly not-so-hot but still have lots of campaign money to spend do? Obviously beef up his campaign staff. Especially in Iowa and New Hampshire. Buttigieg is in better shape than the also rans, or, for that matter, Harris, who wasn’t able to translate her brief turn in the sun into a fundraising haul the way the Buttigieg campaign did. If Biden does flame out, Buttigieg is still best positioned to pick up the mantle of “Well, he’s not as crazy as the rest,” and a lot of DNC money seems to be hedging that way.
The audience laughs and cheers and there is time for one more question, and it is the big one: How are you going to beat Trump?
Just as Castro begins to answer, an airplane, landing at nearby Manchester airport, flies low over the party. No one can hear anything over the plane’s growling engines. But Castro keeps talking, smiling, jabbing the air in front of him, uttering words only he understands or can hear.
This should be Julián Castro’s moment. At a time when issues of immigration and family separation, race and the border are front and center in the national consciousness, the story of a third-generation Mexican-American would seem tailor-made to resonate emotionally with voters.
Snip.
And yet, as he spoke to Democratic voters in New Hampshire, Castro’s campaign seemed to be on the cusp of ending. Despite being pegged as the future of the Democratic Party almost as soon as he arrived on the scene as San Antonio mayor in 2009, and as the “Latino Obama” after he delivered a memorable keynote to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, here he was, stuck in the third tier of a sprawling field, polling around the 1 percent mark. And most crucially, he had not yet qualified for the third Democratic debate in September, which required polling at 2 percent to make it on the stage.
Snip.
And yet Elizabeth Warren is the “policy candidate.” And Pete Buttigieg, seven years younger than Castro, is the Millennial Mayor candidate. Joe Biden is the one with better ties to the Obama administration. And even though Castro proposes taxing inheritances of $2 million or more, raising the capital gains tax rate, providing a $3,000 per child tax credit, paid family and medical leave and a $15 nationwide minimum wage, Bernie Sanders is the candidate known for fighting income inequality. And somehow, despite being able to trace his lineage to the American colonies of the 18th century, Beto O’Rourke, a son of El Paso and fluent in Spanish, has become the candidate of immigration and the new Texas.
Snip.
Although Castro had been considering a statewide run in Texas for years, probably for governor, before O’Rourke’s 2018 run against Ted Cruz it was widely thought that the state wasn’t ready to elect a Democrat yet. After losing the veepstakes, he had planned to remain in Washington, angle for a job in the Hillary Clinton administration, possibly as secretary of Education or Transportation or in the Office of Management and Budget, or at some politically influential think tank.
Instead he moved back to San Antonio in 2017 and signaled his interest in running for president almost immediately. He started a PAC, Opportunity First, which raised a half-million dollars and supported “young, progressive leaders” around the country. He wrote a pre-campaign memoir, An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up From My American Dream, which details his rise from the barrios of West San Antonio through Stanford, Harvard Law, San Antonio’s political scene and to the Obama administration, with his twin, Joaquin, younger by one minute, with him all the way.
But other than the book and the PAC, Castro really wasn’t a major figure in the “Invisible Primary” period after the 2016 election. He wasn’t a regular on “Pod Save America,” there weren’t glossy magazine profiles or stories of him stumping for down-ballot candidates in the early primary states. It is hard to go from Housing secretary to presidential front-runner, and much harder when you are last seen in the public eye as being not picked for your party’s presidential ticket. It is telling that few of the most sought-after political operatives in Democratic circles rushed to join Castro’s campaign even though he had signaled he was in the race for a long time. Instead of veterans of the Obama and Clinton or Sanders campaigns, the Castro team is filled with many longtime loyalists from San Antonio and his Housing secretary days.
The most likely and most obvious political path for Castro would be to consolidate the Latino vote, a population which comprises an increasingly growing share of the population but one that, frustratingly for Democratic strategists, doesn’t vote in nearly the numbers that it could. Latinos are the now the largest minority group in the country and account for about 10 percent to 20 percent of the Democratic Party electorate. 2020 polling on Latinos is scant, but the polling that does exist shows that immigration isn’t the big concern among Latinos that many analysts assume it to be. Jobs and health care rank above immigration, and polling shows that Latinos tend to favor the candidates who are preferred by the rest of the Democratic electorate like Warren, Sanders and Biden. A recent open-ended Pew survey put Castro below even Buttigieg in a poll of Latino Democrats.
Castro mouths the words, but he doesn’t hear the music.
Picture the Pacific Ocean after an underwater nuclear catastrophe, and you’ll have some idea of what Bill de Blasio’s public-school system is like.
There would be a few safe islands scattered around, but they would be separated by thousands of square miles of radioactive seawater — patrolled by mutant sharks, fire-breathing giant squids and unnecessarily rude sea turtles.
And what does de Blasio think when he surveys this immense realm of inequality?
“Hey, why not blow up the islands? That way everyone is equal. Problem solved!”
The mayor sent his own kids to be educated on those rare, precious islands. Chiara de Blasio, now 24, attended the selective Beacon School, a public high school that has tough admissions standards, in Hell’s Kitchen. Dante de Blasio, 21, graduated from the even more selective Brooklyn Tech, admission to which is granted entirely based on performance on a famously difficult test.
Yet de Blasio, the longtime Iowa resident who owes New Yorkers a large salary refund for all the days we’ve been paying him to wander the Midwest sucking on corn dogs, set up a commission to investigate the problem of de-facto segregation at New York City schools.
The city has a lot of underperforming high schools, these schools are filled with black children, and de Blasio is doing zilch to help them.
That’s because the teachers union won’t allow any solution that even whispers a hint of a rumor about the main problem at these schools, which is the large number of radioactive sharks: the lousy teachers who work there.
As de Blasio knew it would, the commission he stocked with his ideological cronies recommended this past week to get rid of the Department of Education’s selective schools and ax the Gifted & Talented (G &T) programs.
These programs operate within schools — sometimes effectively setting up a good school within an otherwise mediocre or bad one. That amounts to creating islands of safety away from the tired, lazy, inept, ambition-destroying teachers whose only goal is to kill time until their pensions kick in.
I know this story is only barely relevant to the 2020 Democrat Presidential Race. Much like de Blasio’s campaign…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s not dropping out. More than any other candidate, Gabbard seems to be screwed by the DNC debate rules. “Rep. Gabbard has exceeded 2% support in 26 national and early state polls, but only two of them are on the DNC’s ‘certified’ list. Many of the uncertified polls, including those conducted by highly reputable organizations such as The Economist and the Boston Globe, are ranked by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight as more accurate than some DNC ‘certified’ polls.” 538 on the same topic, noting Gabbard and Steyer might be in under different criteria.
Go back to Gillibrand’s biography. If you had a daughter who was accepted to Dartmouth and studied two semesters abroad in Beijing and Taiwan, you would probably be pretty proud. If she got into UCLA law school, and then was accepted for internships in her senator’s office and at the United Nations in Vienna, Austria, you would be proud of that, too. If, after law school, she got hired by one of Manhattan’s oldest and most distinguished law firms, and went on to get selected for coveted law clerk positions, you would probably be bragging to the neighbors.
By a lot of standards, Gillibrand did what a bright and ambitious woman is supposed to do. In fact, by the standards of America’s self-labeled meritocratic elite, Gillibrand’s path to success is exactly what a young person is supposed to pursue. This comparison hasn’t been made much, but in this way she’s like Pete Buttigieg — the bright young son of professors at Notre Dame who is accepted to Harvard, moves on to Oxford, and immediately gets hired by McKinsey consulting. They’re both Type-A personalities with grades to match, carrying around golden resumes and heads full of answers that wow teachers, professors, and potential employers. Quite a few parents look at standout young people like this and wish their kids could be more like that.
America’s self-labeled meritocracy (please avert your eyes from all the nepotism, bourgeoisie readers, it’s gauche to bring it up) unsubtly turns all aspects of life into a competition. You want to get the best grades, get into the best school, study under the best professors, get the best internships, get the best jobs, get the highest salary, move into the best house, drive the best car, have the biggest portfolio . . . This isn’t new; America has long had a competitive sense of “keeping up with the Joneses.” It’s easy to understand why many Americans would grow to find this rarely openly expressed but almost omnipresent mindset unappealing. People sigh about “the rat race.” Seemingly high-achieving workers hit burnout. People dream of winning the lottery and moving to some sparsely populated island somewhere and “leaving it all behind.” People crave a sense of being valued for who they are, not just for their big salary, prestigious job, or fancy car. A seemingly endless stream of nonfiction and fiction works explore “the cost of the American dream.”
When you have a competition, there are usually going to be a few winners and a lot of people who “lose.” We conservatives have grumbled about “class envy” for a long time, but maybe some resentment is natural. People who have thrived in America’s “meritocracy” include Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Eric Schneiderman, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, Elizabeth Holmes. We’ve seen plenty of millionaires and self-proclaimed billionaires who turned out to be terrible human beings. We’ve seen plenty of celebrities demonstrate every repugnant behavior under the sun, to the point of self-destruction. Lots of people who are in the middle or bottom have reason to doubt the notion that the best really do rise to the top in America.
When Kirsten Gillibrand — super accomplished, $500,000-per-year lawyer — turned her attention and ambitions to the political world, the best opportunity to run for office was a purple district in the middle of New York state. The top-tier Manhattan lawyer might not seem like the perfect fit, but she adapted, her opponent got caught in a scandal, and she won.
There’s a particular circle of elite New York Democratic party and media voices who found Gillibrand to be exactly what they wanted; she had risen to the top, and other people at the top found her to be as close to perfect as they could imagine. Their swoon spurred those ridiculous-in-retrospect overestimations of her appeal as a presidential candidate: Politico (“Her moment has arrived”), GQ (“the most fearsome contender”), The New Yorker (“the new face of moral reform”), and Vogue (“she’s got newfound street cred among lefties and progressives”).
The swoon started soon after her appointment to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. I love making fun of Vogue’s 2017 profile of Gillibrand, but the gushing in the 2010 profile — entitled, “In Hillary’s Footsteps” — is pretty over-the-top, too:
“Gillibrand is nothing if not genuine, and through sheer force of personality she bends the occasion to suit her style, which is essentially folksy and earnest. She radiates kindness. But she is also direct and no-nonsense. Despite the fact that she is a Democrat (and a fairly progressive one, at that) and worked for fifteen years as a hotshot Manhattan lawyer, she seems utterly at ease among this crowd of mostly Republican farmers, with their rough hands and weathered faces.”
For some reason, Iowa and New Hampshire farmers did not find her as appealing.
Gillibrand kept getting compared to the character of Tracey Flick from Election, and perhaps that is indeed sexist. But let’s reexamine that character and that movie. On paper, the villain of the story is Matthew Broderick’s high school social studies teacher, who grows so infuriated and antagonistic to Reese Witherspoon’s Flick that he’s willing to try to cheat to ensure she doesn’t win the election for student body election. Technically, Flick is the victim in the story. But we, the audience, relate to Broderick. Flick is a fascinating but thoroughly unlikeable character, and she’s supposed to be one. At one point she declares, “I feel sorry for Mr. McAllister. I mean, anyone who’s stuck in the same little room, wearing the same stupid clothes, saying the exact same things year after year for all of his life, while his students go on to good colleges and move to big cities and do great things and make loads of money — he’s gotta be at least a little jealous. It’s like my mom says, the weak are always trying to sabotage the strong.” Tracey Flick doesn’t have much beyond her all-consuming ambition and determination, and probably the single most important characteristic is that we never see her actually caring about anyone besides herself, and perhaps the desire to make her mother proud. Why was Election a hit that is remembered and still referred to, two decades later? Because a lot of people knew high school class presidents who reminded them of Tracey Flick.
I have two minor quibbles with this analysis, both related to the same facet of Gillibrand. One, Gillibrand’s rise strikes me as less meritocracy at work than credentialism (a point Geraghty implies without actually stating). In truth, nothing I’ve seen from Gillibrand suggests that she’s actually bright. It seems like liberal female New York political writers bestowed that unearned distinction on Gillibrand because she came across as one of them, someone with the right pedigree who held all the right fashionably liberal opinions. Gillibrand’s one-woman show of The Wokeist Sorority Girl is finally over. Good riddance:
From the beginning, her upstart campaign was characterized by an enormous amount of virtue-mongering, insisting not only that her progressive bona fides made her superior to you, but that only she could help you comprehend exactly how backwards you are. In the last debate, for instance, she promised to traverse the suburbs explaining “institutional racism” and white privilege to white women.
It was an interesting tactic from a candidate attempting to distinguish herself as a female candidate running for women, and it’s easy to see why the effort failed to gain much traction. The major policy centerpiece of her campaign was called “Fighting for women and families” and focused exclusively on issues like unlimited abortion rights, universal paid family leave, public education, and sexual harassment. Perhaps the most news attention she got all campaign came when she compared being pro-life to being racist. Light on substance, she needed a forum to peddle her platitudes, and without the debate stage, she had little hope of convincing Democrats to listen to her at all.
The news that she had terminated her campaign came just a few days after a former Gillibrand staffer told the New York Post, “I don’t know that anyone even wants to see her on the debate stage. Everyone I have talked to finds her performative and obnoxious.”
On paper, though, Gillibrand’s campaign didn’t seem especially quixotic. She was on the national stage for more than a decade before throwing her hat in the ring, and established herself as a strong advocate for women’s rights issues such as paid family leave and sexual assault in the military. She was also explicitly pitching her candidacy toward groups like white college-educated suburban women, whose political enthusiasm had just helped sweep a record-breaking number of women into office in the 2018 midterms.
So Gillibrand’s biggest problem may have simply been that there wasn’t a clear base for her in the Democratic electorate — at least not one for which there wasn’t also fierce competition in the rest of the primary field. After all, she was running against a number of other women who are also strong on issues like abortion rights and equal pay. Without another signature issue to help her stand out, she often got lost in the melee of the primary.
Snip.
In some ways, Gillibrand’s campaign may have also shown just how tricky outreach to women voters can be, even in a year where issues such as abortion and the #MeToo movement are prominent. Women make up about 60 percent of the Democratic base, but there isn’t a lot of evidence that they gravitate automatically toward female candidates because of their shared identity, or even because of shared priorities. In that Politico/Morning Consult poll, for instance, only 5 percent of Democratic women voters said that gender equality was a top voting priority. And Warren and Harris appear to be polling only very slightly better with women than men; that gap is actually bigger for Biden.
Harris’ tumble in the Democratic primary race has worried donors and supporters after her launch attracted huge crowds amid high expectations. A rising charismatic and accomplished star, they did think she couldn’t go wrong. They also figured she could ride her early summer ascent to a face-off with the front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. After all, her decision to jolt her campaign by attacking Biden at the first candidate debate had initially proven successful — Harris had left him wobbly-kneed and doubted. New endorsements came in from the Congressional Black Caucus, along with a surge in donations, and media accounts of voters and insiders talking about her unique ability to “prosecute the case” against Donald Trump, as the former California attorney general likes to say.
But last week a CNN national poll that had her at 17% support — in second place — in June now showed her in fourth place with only 5%. In the new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll out Wednesday, Harris is at 6% but now in fifth place, behind Pete Buttigieg.
I’m going to go with “no.” Harris’ stumbles revealed that, like Gillibrand, her “charisma” was more media creation that real, and that she’s actually unpopular with black voters, a huge problem if the media positions you as ‘the black candidate.” “Five times prosecutor Kamala Harris got the wrong guy.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. There’s no Messam news this week. His Twitter timeline is discussing preperations for Hurricane Dorian, so he’s evidently doing the job he actually has now, and will presumably continue having once he stops pretending he’s running for President. Maybe Mayor Pete could take notes…
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Missed the debate, still running, but he’s also fundraising for his congressional campaign. Hardly burning his boats. Says there’s no shot of him dropping out of the Presidential race. So I’m guessing he’s out in about five weeks or so…
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. In the latest case of Bernie spending taxpayer money he doesn’t have, he promises to cancel all medical debts. At this rate, Democrats will be promising to cancel all debts on everything, credit cards and mortgages included, so why pay any bills any more ever? The Magic Power of Socialism™ will take care of it all! A California restaurant owner says that Brnie is a rude asshole. “It was all very nice, except for rude and cranky Bernie…He didn’t want to shake hands, he didn’t want a picture. No campaign face…He wasn’t nice to any of the staff.” Campaigned in Porland, Maine.
Tom Steyer’s campaign was confident he would make it into the September debate. With the help of a nearly $5 million online advertising blitz, the billionaire presidential candidate had scooped up the necessary 130,000 unique donors in just over a month, meeting the Democratic National Committee’s donor threshold to qualify.
But he also had to meet the polling requirement. As the party’s deadline approached, Steyer had notched the necessary 2% in three qualifying polls, meaning he needed just one more to make it into the debate. The campaign hoped for another in an early primary state, where Steyer had spent more than $8 million on TV ads in six weeks, according to Advertising Analytics — more than any candidate, including President Donald Trump.
That poll never materialized.
The campaign vented that there hadn’t been a qualifying poll in Nevada, where Steyer spent $1.7 million and finished fifth in one survey that wasn’t approved by the DNC. But several political strategists offered another possible reason Steyer’s strategy came up short: No amount of paid media can match the influence of actual coverage, referred to in media parlance as “earned media.”
“Advertising you pay for can increase your name recognition, but unless people are hearing about you from third parties like earned media that are reinforcing a real narrative, then it’s not really going to go anywhere,” said Robby Mook, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.
And if there’s anyone who knows about tremendous campaign failures, its Robby Mook. Steyer’s only been in the race for two months and we already have our first failure-to-launch piece:
Even before liberal billionaire Tom Steyer was shut out of the next Democratic debate, there were tell-tale signs his rocket-fueled six-week presidential bid was failing to launch.
At last weekend’s Democratic National Committee summer confab in San Francisco, Steyer’s home turf, his campaign had a fancy booth complete with a snazzy “Tom2020” photo backdrop, but only a handful of supporters were happily snapping pics and there were no sign-waving foot soldiers to compete with Kamala Harris’ k-hive entourage.
Still, just before his remarks to the gathering, there was a slight buzz in the ballroom from Democrats eager to hear from the familiar activist in person.
To put it bluntly, Steyer underwhelmed. The wooden speech fell especially flat when he lectured his DNC hosts to stop accepting corporate cash.
“We can’t be chasing corporate money. … We should only be chasing people’s votes,” he said. “As president, I would insist that the DNC not take one single penny from any corporation.”
Overall, the party faithful assembled there offered tepid applause even after Steyer reminded them that his NextGen group organized and paid for the “largest youth mobilization in American history” in 2018, helping to flip 33 GOP House seats to the Democratic column.
Strangely, with the notable exception of slamming Donald Trump as the “biggest swamp rat of them all,” Steyer didn’t focus much on the president despite the months he spent demanding Democrats in Congress move to impeach him.
Steyer’s speech left some DNC delegates scratching their heads, though no one wanted to go public berating a billionaire who has invested so many dollars in liberal causes. Steyer was the single largest individual donor to Democratic-aligned groups in 2016 and his voter registration drives in California and Arizona helped fuel the 2018 blue wave.
The spending largesse aside, many Democrats privately say Steyer, an Exeter/Yale/Stanford graduate and a former Goldman Sachs associate who made his fortune running a $26 billion hedge fund, is simply the wrong person to pitch the party’s anti-corporate message to voters.
Elizabeth Warren came to last week’s Native American presidential forum in Sioux City, Iowa, with, as you might expect, a plan. And she executed it perfectly.
First, the Massachusetts senator expressed sorrow for the “harm I caused,” referencing her attempt to prove she had Native American ancestry through a DNA test. Then she pivoted to her literal plan, her sweeping and detailed set of ideas to expand tribal nation sovereignty and invest in social programs benefiting Native American communities. The long list of proposals was repeatedly praised by the forum’s attendees, several of whom excitedly predicted that they were speaking to the next president of the United States.
While Warren’s campaign staff might have breathed easier coming out of the forum, her Republican antagonists have made it clear they have no intention of forgetting the episode. Shortly before Warren’s appearance at the forum, the Republican National Committee released an opposition research memo titled, “1/1024th Native American, 100% Liar,” which quoted its deputy chief of staff Mike Reed as saying, Warren “lied about being [Native American] to gain minority status at a time when Ivy League law schools were desperate to add diversity to their ranks.” A few days earlier, President Donald Trump, after lamenting that “Pocahontas is rising” in the polls, assured his supporters at a New Hampshire rally that he still has the ability to derail her: “I did the Pocahontas thing. I hit her really hard, and it looked like she was down and out. But that was too long ago. I should’ve waited. But don’t worry, we will revive it.”
Has Warren effectively addressed the controversy? In conversations I had with Democratic and Republican political strategists, unaffiliated with any presidential campaign, there was no bipartisan consensus. The Democrats believed Warren’s rise in the polls is evidence she has weathered the storm. The Republicans argued Warren remains vulnerable to charges of dishonest opportunism.
They’re both right. Warren is enjoying a comeback because she has convinced many skittish progressives that she won’t let Trump disrupt her relentless focus on policy solutions. And she has convinced many Native American leaders that her policy proposals for indigenous communities are more important than what she has said in the past about her ancestry.
But because Warren’s comeback has relied on restoring her standing on the left, she has not done anything to address concerns potentially percolating among swing voters. A detailed white paper on Native American policy has no bearing on whether a moderate white suburbanite believes Warren is of good character. And since Warren has apologized for her past claims, she remains open to the charge she was dishonest when, during her academic career, she relied on nothing more than family lore to identify herself as Native American.
That means if she becomes the Democratic nominee for president, Warren would still face a “Pocahontas” problem, one that threatens the core of her candidacy.
It used to be that the Boston Globe practically had a monopoly on slobbering, unctuous flattery of the erstwhile Native American, the first woman of color at Harvard, emeritus.
It wasn’t enough for the Boring Broadsheet to pretend that the New England Historical and Genealogical Society hadn’t busted her melanin-impaired grift, or to peddle fake statistics about her scam DNA test. No, the bow-tied bumkissers also penned hagiographies of her dead dog (Otis), her new dog (Bailey) and her campaign headquarters in Charlestown (complete with a cameo appearance by Bailey).
But the Globe is one busy Democrat fanzine these days, what with having to break out the pom-poms for, among others, Ed Markey (he may be a doddering old fool, but he’s our doddering old fool), JoJoJo Kennedy (look, a Kennedy! And he has red hair!), and of course Seth Moulton (America’s loss is Essex County’s gain, or something).
So when it comes to open and gross cheerleading for Lieawatha, there’s an open lane, and boy, are the Democrat operatives with press passes rushing to fill the void.
The thesis is that Fauxcahontas is, well, thoughtful and substantive, plus you always have to mention, as the New Republic gushed, “her passion, her intellect and her lack of artifice.”
Here’s how Lieawatha’s thoughtful, substantive policies work: Bernie Sanders goes in front of some whining group of self-proclaimed victims demanding handouts, and promises them, say, $10 trillion.
So the fake Indian follows and says, I’ll raise you, Bernie – how’s $20 trillion in handouts sound?
Scott Adams thinks Warren has gotten much better as a candidate but Biden is done (political portion starts about 34 minutes in):
Talking about how to beat Warren, China Fentanyl, G7, Homes for low income people, #Hoax5, and coffee. https://t.co/56TiTm0ni1
He also thinks Warren is vulnerable on making the healthcare of everyone who already has it worse. Also thinks Harris is the worst candidate of all time. “Even worse than Beto, and he’s terrible.”
Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a thread on the many ways MSNBC and CNN have blatantly kept Andrew Yang out of newsgraphics describing all the candidates, even those polling lower than him. It’s pretty egregious. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) “Yang climate plan heavily relies on entrepreneurship, nuclear.” If you’re going to do something incredibly stupid like the Paris Climate Accords or the Green New Deal, then Yang’s approach is indeed the one that does the least collateral damage, and a pro-nucelar voice is a breath of fresh air among Democrats.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Democracies around the world should hope that President Trump wins the trade war with China. “China’s victory [would] bring about a world in which democracies are enfeebled and the largest autocracy is emboldened.”
For this, Johnson is being pilloried as a dictator by Remainers. Why? By doing this, Johnson has made it harder for parliamentarians who oppose a no-deal exit from the European Union to interrupt Johnson’s Brexit negotiation strategy, which includes the possibility of no deal. Johnson has very sharply limited the time in which parliamentarians could organize to force the government to request another extension from the EU and thus make a mockery of Johnson’s promise of leaving the European Union — deal or no deal — by October 31. Essentially, parliamentarians will face a choice: Allow Johnson to proceed with his form of brinkmanship while negotiating with Brussels, including the possibility of no deal, or make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.
Remainers should look into the mirror, however. They have shaped this outcome as much as any hardcore Brexiteer. At every single turn, in fact, it has been Remainers who have increased the chances of the U.K.’s not only leaving, but crashing out on a series of ad hoc emergency measures, rather than a comprehensive adjustment to its relationship to Europe.
While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees], the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.
Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”
The power struggle between the UN employees and Hamas was tested before during clashes over the teaching of the Holocaust in UNRWA schools and the use of UNRWA schools to launch attacks on Israel.
The real crackup came when the Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA.
Snip.
“I am the captain of the ship which has 13,000 sailors on it and they have basically thrown me off the bridge and consigned me to my captain’s quarters,” Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director of field operations in Gaza, whined.
Schmale had never actually been the captain. [Hamas co-founder Mahmoud] Zahar and other Hamas leaders had been running things.
The UNRWA was forced to evacuate most of its 19 international staffers from Gaza, including its ten senior leaders, leaving behind only 6 international staffers. This made no practical difference as the UNRWA operation on the ground was actually being run by the 13,000 Hamas UN employees.
But the UN isn’t moved by protests or violence. It runs on reports. And soon a report arrived.
Al Jazeera debuted an internal UN report alleging corruption and misconduct by UNRWA leaders. Al Jazeera is an arm of Qatar. The Islamic terror state is currently the biggest backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, supports Hamas, and is extensively involved in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s barrage of stories on the UNRWA report was a clear signal that Qatar was targeting the UN agency on behalf of Hamas.
Al Jazeera claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report from agency employees “concerned” that action wasn’t being taken against an “inner circle” running UNRWA. The inner circle consists of the international leadership that Hamas is angry at for trying to fire hundreds of its people.
The report, aired by Al Jazeera, claimed that UNRWA boss Pierre Krahenbuhl had carried on an affair with his senior adviser, Maria Mohammedi, which “embarrassed” their colleagues and donors.
Krahenbuhl, a Swiss NGO vet, is officially married to Taiba Rahim, the head of an Afghan non-profit, and Maria Mohammedi, is an Algerian who was, at least in the past, married to Rashid Abdelhamid, a “Palestinian filmmaker”, who is really an Algerian educated in France, and living in Gaza, and while this is all very multinational, it’s also the sort of “international diplomacy” that the UN frowns upon.
But if the allegations are true, the Swiss humanitarian had just gone native by adopting polygamy.
The report is filled with allegations of bullying, nepotism, abusing travel vouchers, and, the worst possible sin in a bureaucracy, bypassing official channels. And it might be more serious if the behavior being described weren’t slightly eclipsed by the fact that the rest of the UNRWA, which likely includes the employees behind the report, is an Islamic terror group dedicated to murdering children.
But in the UN, using schools as munition dumps isn’t a serious issue, going outside official channels is.
Result: Other nations, including the Swiss and the Dutch, are cutting off money to UNRWA.
In a grim determination never to take “Yes” for an answer, a different breed of feminist waddled onto the scene. Feminism had taken a vicious, vindictive and male-hating turn. Like other “civil rights” movements, it turned out to have less to do with “justice” and more to do with raw, abusive power, payback, quotas, unqualified people having set-aside slots based on their plumbing, and getting rich. Society needed to make some changes. And it did. However, we’ve all heard the expression “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Well, don’t look now, but there goes the baby…literally.
Abortion was always a divisive subject. The first time Mr. AG and I heard a friend wax poetic about what a great thing abortion would be, I almost got into a fistfight with him, except he was also a pacifist! Where’s the fun in pummeling a pacifist? To a non-psychotic, the very idea of killing a baby is appalling, admit it. But by the early ’70s there was a growing consensus that in the first 12 weeks, the proverbial “clump of cells” should be able to be terminated. How quickly and predictably that morphed into abortion any time for any reason, including the sex of the baby, or no reason at all. I knew one certifiable, deranged feminist who used abortion as birth control. She had had 8 abortions that I heard of before I lost track of her.
Today, after ultrasound has proven that the clump of cells looks remarkably like a baby, only 7 percent of the American people agree with third trimester abortion. SEVEN PERCENT! You could get more than 7 percent to say they have had lunch with Bigfoot and Elvis. (Bigfoot selected the steak tartare; Elvis chose the Biscuits and Gravy.) Yet seven of nine black-robed arbiters set the stage for what has become legalized infanticide.
As they say on late-night informercials: But WAIT, there’s more! The old guard, who educated and litigated and lobbied for the rights and privileges women have today are driven from the movement, indeed from the public square. They have failed to get onboard with the quaint and unscientific notion that sex is a more or less imaginary construct and can change on a whim. How shocked Eve Ensler must have been to find that her tedious but lucrative play about chattering vaginas is now verboten because “some women don’t have vaginas.” Though she died in 1986, De Beauvoir herself wrote, “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.” Gotta love those cheery existentialists!
Newly-minted women who are actually men can now win every athletic competition against real biological women. Title IX has been rendered meaningless. Protest if you dare, even if you’re an iconic lesbian tennis pro, and you will face a Twitter storm or legal action in Canada. Even backpedaling and groveling will not save you. As the famous novelist Max Cossack queried the other day over breakfast: “If men and women are exactly the same, why don’t we see women who’ve transitioned into ‘men’ winning athletic events against other men? How come that only goes one way?” Bueller? Mueller? Is that in anybody’s purview?
So what you might call Fairness Feminism is dead. The loony ghouls feasting on its corpse will carry on, but it will never again approach being any kind of mass movement.
Kurt Schlichter is delighted that our liberal media elites are being hoisted on their on petards:
You must have a heart of stone not to burst into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter at the agony of the failing New York Times and the rest of the media over how conservative activists are going to apply the same internet colonoscopy to lib journalistas as they apply to us.
Monsters!
Fascists!
Meanies!
Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.
Drink in their pain.
Drink it all in.
Mmmmm, that’s some delicious pain.
Yeah, conservatives are fighting back, and to the other side it’s an assault on the free press and further evidence that Trump is totally Hitler and probably Stalin too. But to us, it’s long-overdue counterpunching right into the progs’ soft gut. (Note: The author knows some of the conservatives allegedly involved, but was not involved in this glorious initiative).
This is righteous retribution, and the screaming and hollering about it is further evidence that there’s plenty of dirt to dig up.
Welcome to Accountability City. Population: All you liberal media jerks.
Ann Althouse wonders how a New York Times travel writer balances their job demands of selling air travel to rich people with his bedrock religious belief in global warming. Answer: with good old-fashioned hypocrisy:
After a few more tips — including buy carbon offsets — [Seth] Kugel ends with this mind-bogglingly elitist paragraph:
Most of this will make travel more expensive — and that may mean traveling even less. Think of it as a progressive tax paid by those lucky enough to travel for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in. It is a small price to pay. And maybe it will make you feel a little less shame.
No! You should feel MORE shame for even thinking like that. Kugel is saying that the people with the money to pay more will pay more and should feel lucky and less ashamed for “for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in.” But refraining from doing what you can do is a core component of morality! To travel is to choose to cause damage. Kugel is just desperately trying to scare up every argument for continuing to travel by air…. other than relinquishing the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the world’s climate.
First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.
And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.
Flies and flooding can often go together, and Karachi is no stranger to either. But Dr. Seemin Jamali, the executive director for the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, one of Karachi’s largest public hospitals, said this was the worst infestation of flies she had ever witnessed.
“There are huge swarms of flies and mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s not just affecting the life of the common man — they’re so scary, they’re hounding people. You can’t walk straight on the road, there are so many flies everywhere.”
The city started a fumigation drive, but the flies remain, and frustrations are growing. It’s all drawing new attention, and anger, to the city’s longstanding problems with garbage and drainage — an issue that feuding political factions have wielded against each other for years, but that hasn’t gotten any better.
Experts say this infestation was probably brought on by the combination of stagnant rainwater, which stood in the city for days, with garbage on the streets and waste left behind from animals slaughtered during the recent Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.
“Gun stolen during anonymous masked orgy, police admit ‘we’re probably not going to solve this one.'” Bonus: Exactly the state you think.
Critics hate Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because it’s not boring and woke. (I saw this last Saturday, and I highly recommend catching it in theaters while you can.)
“When black people agree with me, I very much want their voices to be heard,” said Helga Bannerman, 28, Portland, she/they/her/xen. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re pretty much just not black anymore. They’re basically an evil white person like me at that point. And the last thing we need on this planet is more white people like Dave Chappelle.”
Like Jonathan Pie, Philomena Cunk is a fake British media personality, in this case the alter ego of comedienne Diane Morgan. Cunk comes in on the dim end of the celebrity stick, and in this episode she tackles climate change.
Iran’s official press has recently bragged about its military prowess when downing a US drone worth about $130 million, touting it as a nasty black eye for the world’s military superpower.
But a recent Reuters report said Iran’s oil exports are down to a scant 300,000 barrels per day. In April 2018, before Trump exited the Iran deal, which provided the country with sanctions relief in exchange for its commitment to not build nuclear weapons or their key components, Iran was exporting 2.5 million barrels a day.
At today’s rate per barrel, the Trump-induced decline in exports has probably cost Iran $120 million a day from oil alone — almost the cost of the US’s pricey drone.
For the US, losing a drone is costly and destabilizing [?-LP] but not really a big deal for a country with a $718 billion annual defense budget. In Iran, the currency has crashed, and the country has become gripped by protests and strikes. And it has felt a crackdown on the financial freedom for all of its citizens.
Martin Peretz reflects on the two towering achievements brought about by the Oslo Accords since 1993, namely “jack” and “squat”:
For years even after the failure of Oslo and of the 2000 summit at Camp David, D.C. notables and even some prominent Zionists had photos with Arafat displayed on their credenzas.
That sociology stuck in my mind. It testified to the tenaciousness in certain left-liberal circles of an idealizing impulse—one that altered the judgments of normally lucid people, leading them to make heroes of figures like Arafat who didn’t fit the bill. They justified this impulse with the old progressive belief in rational political improvement—a respectable belief when it’s applied in context, a misleading one when the context is altered to fit the wish. Their willed naiveté struck me, and not just on Oslo, as the place where effective progressivism goes to die.
Snip.
The counterpoint to this accommodation of Iran was the marginalization of Israel—the cutting-down-by-proxy of the country to what Obama saw as its physical and psychological size. True, it wasn’t a financial marginalization—as his defenders have said ad nauseam, Obama allowed Israel to buy more weapons than any other president before him. But by centering his policy on compromising with Iran, the one major Mideast power that had yet to reach some détente with Israel, and allowing Israel’s other enemy Assad to murder unimpeded, Obama shifted the strategic ground under Israel’s feet. Rhetorically, he did even more: He used the president’s bully pulpit to dramatically change the terms on which conversations about Israel would be conducted among Democrats and the world.
You can draw a line from his tepid 2009 justification of Israel to the speech he sent his towering shikying’l John Kerry to give to the United Nations in 2016: a refusal to block a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for its support of right-wing settlements in the West Bank. A lot of people—myself included—oppose some of the outlier settlements, without seeing them as a major cause of the current impasse. But Kerry’s speech made them equal—or greater than equal—problems to the Palestinian leadership’s endemic corruption, its weakness in the face of Hamas and refusal to accept peace offers made by four Israeli prime ministers from 1993 to 2009. (Actually, the Palestinians haven’t made a territorial compromise in 52 years—that is long enough for the Israelis to grow impatient.) Kerry’s speech, itself an instance of sacrificing the reality to the ideal through the principle of making Israeli and Palestinian histories equivalent, shifted the terms of the debate.
That rhetorical shift, coupled with Obama’s highly publicized, ultimately corrosive enmity towards Bibi Netanyahu—a partisan leader with a surer grasp of regional realities than the American president had—helped create the Democrats’ current political condition, which is not just counterproductively idealizing but supportive of the party’s most destructive foreign policy impulses. A party that defines itself by the chances it gives to marginalized groups always has, on its edges, radicals pushing in toward the center who define their politics by the principle of marginalization: the boiled-down Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. When the center of the party shows weakness, the radicals naturally move in, and that’s what Obama’s rationalists allowed them to do: By shifting the party from its center and creating a rhetoric of false equivalence, they gave the hard leftists an opportunity they were only too happy to take.
In essence, the EU’s freedom of movement guarantees an absence of barriers for anyone looking for a job within the 28 countries and makes discrimination based on nationality in work or employment illegal. For many of the EU’s new entrants in the East—including Poland, Hungary and Romania—a future where capital and people could move more freely between themselves and France, the UK, or Germany looked like a fast-track to the top-tier of developed nations. But somewhat ironically, it has only accelerated the departure of those who are crucial to getting there.
In the last century, Eastern Europe has suffered the most dramatic population decline in recent history. According to one study, between 2013 and 2016, approximately 230,000 people left Croatia—a country with a population of only four million—for the 11 “core EU countries” of Western Europe. In the United States, this would be the equivalent of a city the size of Chicago leaving every year. This mass exodus of people is not lost on the country’s politicians; last year the Croatian President called the freedom of movement the “biggest drawback” of the EU. “Mobility is good, as long as people come back. But Croatia is now recording strong negative demographic trends,” she said during a visit to Brussels.
Since Latvia joined the EU, it has lost one-fifth of its population. Romania, a country that according to one organisation is due to see the most drastic population decline, has seen over three million leave the country since it joined the EU in 2007. It lost half of its doctors between 2009 and 2015, the vast majority to better-paid employ in the richer hospitals and surgeries of Western Europe, leaving its health service poorly staffed and on the brink of collapse. High mortality (including infant mortality) and low birthrates are only accelerating the decline.
Large-scale migration of healthcare workers from East to West has been an uncomfortable reality for over a decade, and the young needn’t travel long distances to drastically increase their standard of living. One Estonian doctor who graduated from medical school in 2001 was able to quadruple his salary by moving only 200 kilometres to Finland. In 2018, Denmark enjoyed the EU’s highest average gross annual pay at nine times that of the continent’s lowest in Bulgaria. Who can blame those who head for the greener pastures on the other side?
It’s not just highly skilled labor. When I visited London, it seemed that at least half the workers in restaurants and hotels were from eastern Europe.
Dwight found an amazing story of corruption in the Honolulu DS’s office. (One guess as to which party controls Hawaii.) The list of sleazy crimes Katherine Kealoha engaged in is staggering.
Prosecutors alleged that Shih, alongside co-defendant Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California, conspired to gain access to a sensitive system belonging to an unnamed US firm which manufactured semiconductor chips and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs).
The victim company’s PC systems were accessed fraudulently after Mai posed as a potential customer, giving Shih the opportunity to obtain custom processors. While the firm in question believed the chips would only be used in the United States, Shih transferred the products to the Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), a Chinese firm building an MMIC manufacturing plant.
Last time I checked, finding electrical engineers with experience designing RF circuits for mixed signal ICs is hard. I bet finding those that can design MMICs is even harder…
Whenever I read a court opinion describing a campus sexual-assault proceeding, I routinely find myself shocked at the staggering unfairness and ridiculous bias of campus kangaroo courts. Driven by the need to find more men guilty — and rationalized by a #BelieveWomen ideology — campus administrators have systematically discarded every fundamental notion of due process in American law.
Across the nation, courts on the right and on the left are saying no. They’re blocking biased sexual-assault adjudications, protecting basic fairness, and restoring a degree of sanity to colleges’ procedures. On Friday it was the turn of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to protect the Fourteenth Amendment, and an all-woman panel, led by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, established a precedent that could be used against woke college administrators nationwide.
The facts of the case are extraordinary. After a female college student accused her ex-boyfriend of groping her in her sleep, Purdue University conducted an investigation and adjudication so amateurish and biased that it’s frankly difficult to imagine that human adults could believe it was fair or adequate. The plaintiff (John Doe) alleged that he was “not provided with any of the evidence on which decisionmakers relied in determining his guilt and punishment,” his ex-girlfriend didn’t even appear before the hearing committee, he had “no opportunity to cross-examine” his accuser, the committee found his accuser credible even though it did not talk to her in person, the accuser did not even write her own statement or provide a sworn allegation, and the committee did not allow the plaintiff “to present any evidence, including witnesses.”
After that farce of a process, Purdue found the student guilty and suspended him for a year. The suspension meant the automatic loss of the student’s Navy ROTC scholarship and expulsion from the ROTC program. Incredibly, the lower court dismissed the student’s claims. He appealed to the Seventh Circuit, and a unanimous panel resurrected his lawsuit.
The conclusion is that campuses are are blaming men as a class and this is a clear violation of Title IX. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“I have never met antisemitism in Britain…until now.”
I generally come to Britain from my home in Portugal whenever a new work of mine is released to give talks at bookshops, libraries and literary festivals. My publisher’s attempts to interest event organisers in me aren’t always successful, of course. But this year, for the first time, I have been turned down for being Jewish. A little context. Peter Owen Publishers launched my new novel, The Gospel According to Lazarus, in mid-April. An old friend of mine who is a part-time book publicist began trying to set up events for me three months earlier.
In early March, he called and confessed – in a distressed tone I’d never heard before – that he had just been turned down by two cultural organisations that had previously shown enthusiasm for hosting an event with me. “They asked me if you were Jewish, and the moment I said you were, they lost all interest,” he said. “They even stopped replying to my emails and returning my phone messages.”
Snip.
Has the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement played a role in deepening this atmosphere of fear? That’s what my friends in the UK tell me. They also speak bitterly of the unwillingness of the Labour party to take a firm stand against antisemitic discourse. If cultural organisations are afraid of hosting events for Jewish writers, then Britain has taken a big step backwards.
Let’s not get sidetracked with references to Israel. Although it’s perfectly legitimate for those who oppose Netanyahu’s policies to protest against them, I have no connection with Israel. I have neither investments nor family there. And my most well-known books take place in Portugal and Poland. It’s true my new novel is set in the Holy Land, but it takes place 2,000 years before the foundation of the state of Israel.
Of course, that piece is from that notorious bastion of right-wing belief, The Guardian…
* Joe Biden * Immigrant holding cells at the border * The Betsy Ross flag * Using the OK sign
Using the objective criteria the media has outlined for us, we must come to the reluctant conclusion that @BarackObama is, by the evidence presented, a white supremacist.
Man, it’s been a week. The clown car and NRA pieces have been blowing up my stats, and I’ve got a bunch of other things happening. I tried to watch the Group of Death debate last night, but the stream kept cutting out, so I’ll probably save the reactions for Monday’s Clown Car Update. This LinkSwarm features Dan Crenshaw, Google, and Dan Crenshaw grilling Google.
Pelosi caves, gets the House to pass the Republican Senate bill to address the crisis on the Southern border 305-102. The Senate bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a vast improvement on the House’s laughable effort. But the fact that 90% of the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders are demonstrably to the left of Nancy Pelosi on the issue might give a more reflective party pause…
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw says Democrats live in another world when it comes to the crisis on the border.
“In Emergency Bill, House Dems Vote To Send More Fake Tears To Address Border Crisis.”
Professor Posner is correct in pointing to the rivalrous nature of political power and market power. What is less well understood is that markets won that fight in a knockout a decade or more ago. The new reality is that markets — not corporations, but markets — are more powerful than states, and much of the angry, angsty, mob-inciting politics of the Left and the Right in the past decade is simply the emotional noise and churn generated as societies and governments readjust their affairs to accommodate themselves to that new reality. Bill Clinton spent much of his presidency bitching about the bond market, which was his shorthand for the ways in which global markets (especially financial markets) limited politicians’ effective scope of action. He was, uncharacteristically for a man of such modest imagination, ahead of his time.
The power of capital flows is a reality that has made itself known bit by bit to states both liberal and autocratic, from the members of the European Union to the caudillos in Beijing. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy with no regard for life or property, brutal and vicious — and constantly getting slapped around by volatility in the energy market. Mohammed bin Salman can command almost anything — except the commodity markets that rule his world.
Much of the hysteria on display in the Democratic presidential primary is American progressivism’s shrieking protest of the new facts of life. Progressives such as Elizabeth Warren are intelligent enough to understand what’s happened: That just at the moment they were primed to take power, power was taken away from them.
Speaking of Big Tech censorship of conservatives, Reddit has “quarantined” The_Donald subreddit for Trump fans, one of the largest and most heavily trafficked groups on Reddit. You can still reach The_Donald by following that link, but you get a warning and you can’t search for the content anymore.
“Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne Used To Hate Donald Trump. Now, He’s Kind of a Fan.” Also worries (if you listen to the podcast) about China’s rise as a techno-authoritarian hegemon.
Stop laughing. This isn’t funny. Louis CK is now an unperson. You can no longer applaud him or enjoy his comedy hate speech. If you insist on supporting an enemy of the people, there will be consequences. You will be punished. Your life will be upended. If you care about your future, you will keep your excitement and happiness to yourself when presented with the verboten.
“Well, if you don’t like Louis CK, don’t listen to him. You can’t tell other people what they should and shouldn’t laugh at.” We hear that a lot from fascists, don’t we? They think hate speech is free speech, and they don’t think they need to do what they’re told. But they’ll learn. They will be corrected.
Today you’re cheering for an unapproved comedian. Tomorrow you’re marching with tiki torches and tweeting dank memes. The day after that, you’re annexing the Sudetenland. These people must be controlled before the fascism spreads.
A few bits of news about India have crossed my path this week, enough to do a little mini-roundup. India is a vast topic, and a vastly important one for the 21st Century, but the news we get about it light on insight and heavy on disasters and politics.
So naturally this post is about disaster and politics.
Disaster: India is suffering from an epic heat wave, hitting 123°F.
We didn’t see it coming. The tsunami of support that propelled Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into a second five-year term was a surprise to many of us reporting on the mammoth Indian general election.
Getting an accurate reading on how 900 million people will vote is extremely difficult and almost impossible to gauge from big cities like Delhi or Mumbai. Far in advance of the April-May voting, Reuters made a series of sorties into the farms and small towns where most of India’s people live to get a sense of what was being talked about, what was at stake.
Snip.
Despite the rural anger, at no time did we get a feeling that Modi was going to lose the general election. The assessment by Reuters’ correspondents was that he was going to win with reduced support from voters and might need partners to stay in power.
But instead, the BJP increased its seats tally to 303 against 282 in the 2014 election. And including its partners, Modi’s National Democratic Alliance has more than 350 MPs in the lower house, close to the two-thirds majority it would require to make transformative changes to the Indian constitution.
Snip.
But after a suicide bomber killed 40 Indian paramilitary policemen in Kashmir in February, and a Pakistan-based Islamist militant group claimed responsibility, the election focus immediately swung to national security from economic issues.
We decided to check back in the rural core of the country – and found that the attack and a strong response from Modi – including sending warplanes into Pakistan – had changed some minds and Modi was benefiting.
Is Modi an economic reformer, streamlining India’s economy? This piece argues yes, but in a way that distinctly tempers my enthusiasm:
First, he’s ensured that the government has more revenue to spend. Thanks to the Goods and Services Tax enacted in 2017, Modi has streamlined an enormously complex system of state and federal tax collection, broadening the tax base and sharply reducing the amount of money lost to fraud. That’s a historic accomplishment in a country with so many development needs.
Modi has directed unprecedented amounts of money toward the country’s seemingly endless need for new infrastructure. Construction of roads, highways, public transport and airports have sharply increased the country’s long-term economic potential. Although the process remains unfinished, the government has also brought electricity to remote villages that have never had it, a boon for economic potential, public safety and basic quality of life.
The BJP-led government has also expanded a biometric identification system, begun under the previous Congress Party–led government, that has already taken iris scans and fingerprints from well over a billion people to help citizens prove who they are so they can receive services. It has provided bank accounts for 300 million people who have never had them, creating new opportunities for these people to access credit and state subsidies. It also brings them into the formal economy to potentially make the government more responsive to their needs. The government says these measures have cut sharply into waste and fraud within India’s welfare system, allowing the state to provide more and better services at a much lower cost.
Health care reform could help half a billion poor people afford treatment for cancer and heart disease. A program known as Ujjwala Yojana has helped women in the countryside gain access to cooking gas for the first time. The Swachh Bharat program has built tens of millions of toilets for hundreds of millions of people. Modi’s commitment to renewable energy is part of his plan to make India a leader on climate change. None of these projects are complete, but all of them will help the vast majority of India’s people lead safer, healthier, more productive and more prosperous lives.
Some of that is good. Some of the infrastructure spending is probably necessary, on the order of the rural electrification and infrastructure projects the U.S. undertook in the 1930s. I would not want to live in a country that makes biometric ID mandatory for free citizens (also, it’s hardly immune to errors, fraud or hacking). And the “climate change” rathole just increases living costs for ordinary people to no demonstrable benefit.
When I was an idealistic 20-something in the late 1990s, my hope was that India would one day elect a free-market reformer like Ronald Reagan, who would begin to shrink the dysfunctional bureaucracy and free the economy to grow faster. Looking back, I see how clueless I was.
In Delhi every politician is wedded to big government, and there is no constituency for free-market reform. I kept hoping for Reagan, and India kept electing Bernie Sanders.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is no exception. Five years ago he led the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, known as B.J.P., to power on a Reaganesque promise of “minimum government,” and now he seeks a second term in the general election that ends on Thursday. But in office, Modi has wielded the tools of state control at least as aggressively as his predecessors. In this campaign, he went toe to toe with rivals, vying to see who could offer the most generous welfare programs, and it appears to have worked.
Snip.
Hopes for a big-bang Indian reformer revived years later with the rise of Mr. Modi, who in 2002 had been elected as chief minister in the western state of Gujarat. By courting multinational companies, building roads and streamlining the state bureaucracy, Mr. Modi oversaw a stunning boom. The state economy grew at a pace close to 12 percent annually in his first term. In 2014, Mr. Modi’s record in Gujarat helped lift him into the prime minister’s office.
Like many India watchers, I heard in Mr. Modi’s call for “minimum government, maximum governance” the voice of a red-tape and regulation-busting reformer in the Reagan mold. In retrospect this reading ignored how Mr. Modi had delivered “maximum governance” in Gujarat: by force of personality, cutting foreign investment deals himself and intimidating bureaucrats into building roads on time without demanding bribes.
This was economic development by executive order, not economic reform by systematically expanding freedom. Mr. Modi has tried to govern India the same way, but the top-down commands that rallied tens of millions of his fellow Gujaratis haven’t worked nearly as well on the sprawling Indian population of 1.4 billion. He centralized power in the prime minister’s office, and many private business people now say he treats them much as his socialist predecessors did, often suspicious of their motives and contribution to society.
One November evening in 2016, he ordered the withdrawal of large rupee bills — 86 percent of the currency in circulation — at midnight. The aim was to flush cash out from under the mattresses of rich tax dodgers. One of his cabinet ministers said Mr. Modi was delivering on a “Marxist agenda” to reduce inequality. Today, however, the aftershocks are still rippling through the economy, and have been especially painful for the poor.
In some ways Mr. Modi has proved more statist than the Gandhis. Before he took power he criticized Congress welfare programs as insulting to the poor, who “do not want things for free” and really want “to work and earn a living.” As prime minister, Mr. Modi doubled down on the same programs, expanding the landmark 2006 act that guaranteed 100 days of pay to all rural workers, whether they worked or not.
On the economic front, then, every Indian party is on the left, by Western standards. The Congress traces its economic ideology to socialist thinkers, but the B.J.P.’s thinking is grounded in Swadeshi, a left-wing economic nationalism.
The consensus from all this seems to be that Modi has indeed run a cleaner government than his Congress Party predecessors, has some real economic reforms under his belt, but isn’t what anyone in America would consider a real free market reformer.
I did not intimately track every step of the Australian election, but it seems that Labor campaigned in large measure on that holy shibboleth of transnational leftism, climate change. By contrast, in 2017, “Morrison addressed the House of Representatives while holding a lump of coal, stating ‘This is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you,’ and accusing those concerned about the environmental impact of the coal industry of having ‘an ideological, pathological fear of coal.'”
Labor’s policies mirror those of the America’s Democrats in another way, in that they’ve made a huge stink about the “rights” of illegal aliens entering Australia. In 2009, with Labor in power and the Liberals out, Morrison became shadow minister for immigration and citizenship, urging a policy of strict immigration enforcement, which he continued to follow as actual minister when the Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party kicked out Labor in 2013, before becoming Prime Minister in 2018 following a “leadership spill” which resulted in Liberal Party Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (who had replaced Abbott in another “spill” in 2015) stepping down. So it’s rather like the director of ICE becoming President.
And once again a left-leaning party has lost an “unloseable” election that polls said was in the bag. Why, it’s almost as though modern “scientific” polling has a built in bias against conservative parties!
Keep that in mind (yet again) the next time someone confidently predicts victory for a left-wing party or candidate based on polls…
Biden is up big, Bennet is In, Beto is down and de Blasio is about to unite all of America together in ridicule against him. Plus the raw sex appeal of Walter Mondale. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Polls
In a Harvard-Harris poll, Biden leads his Democratic opponents by a whopping 30 points. Biden 44, Sanders 14, Harris 9, Warren 5, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 3. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Quinnipiac: Biden 38, Warren 12, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 8, O’Rourke 5. First poll I’ve seen Warren edge Sanders. Maybe all that “free everything for everybody” pandering is paying off for her…
Election betting markets. Warren (5.7%) is now up over Yang (5.3%) who is now up over O’Rourke (5.1%).
The Eight Tiers In This Race
People usually sort candidates into “First Tier, Second Tier, Third Tier,” but that’s not applicable to a race this crowded:
Right now Biden is alone in the first tier, and…
Sanders is alone in the second.
The third tier is Warren, Buttigieg and Harris all bunched up together (Warren is enjoying a little bounce, Buttigieg’s bounce faded as soon as Biden joined, and Harris is just barely hanging on as the media-boosted SJW darling).
O’Rouke has probably free-fallen alone into the fourth tier, his telegenic hype long over and people scratching their heads as to why people ever thought he was exciting when not running against Ted Cruz.
The fifth tier consists of Booker and Klobucher, who seem to be running competent, unexciting campaigns awaiting their turn to catch fire in a hype cycle.
The sixth tier is Interesting Weirdos, lead by a rising Yang and a hasn’t-showed-us-anything-yet Williamson. Let’s also stick Gabbard here, since she generates tons of buzz only because the Democratic base seems to actively hate her, and she seems to have more followers than the lower tiers.
The seventh tier is Dead in the Water, people who have resumes that suggest they should be credible Presidential candidates (mostly senators and governors), but somehow aren’t: Castro, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Inslee, and probably the newly-joined Bennet.
The eighth and lowest tier (sorry Dante) is Wasting Our Time, including all the representatives other than Gabbard: Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, Delany, Messam. Maybe one could break out, but I rather doubt it.
Pundits, etc.
How much a candidate’s announcement coverage boosts them in polls. Caveat: They relied on cable news coverage, which leaves out a lot of things, like legacy MSM outlets slathering fawning coverage on Harris like ketchup on french fries.
“If you have an appetite for schadenfreude, one of the pleasures of the ongoing 2020 Democratic primary will be watching once-highly-touted politicians realize just how limited their appeal is, as they struggle to reach 5 percent in a crowded field.” Special mention of Castro, Gabbard and Gillibrand.
Stephen Green on electability. “If the economy is still booming in November 2020, maybe none of this year’s massive crop of Dems is electable. Maybe they’re all Mondales, albeit with far less of Walt’s raw sexual magnetism.”
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s not running for the senate. Maybe she’s regretting turning down that Biden VP trial balloon. She also got a voter suppression pander from O’Rourke.
Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. Still nothing since that now four-week old tweet. But his estimated net worth is $85 million, and he was “a political science major at George Washington University (where he ran for student body president and lost).” Baldwin could probably talk himself into a run if he really wanted to…
Update: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. “Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., announced he will run in the Democratic primary to seek his party’s nomination to go up against President Trump in the 2020 election.” More: “Bennet has built a reputation as a bipartisan, policy-focused senator on Capitol Hill, trending toward the center of the Democratic spectrum. He opposes a single-payer health care system, instead hoping to expand Obamacare.” Oh yeah, that’s just what the Democratic base in crying out for: bipartisanship. Data point: The guy’s a U.S. senator, and I have exactly one entry for him before I started doing the Clown Car update, and that was just a mention in the 2016 election. If you stuck guns to the heads of Democratic voters and said “Pick Michael Bennet out of these photos of all 21 declared Democratic Presidential candidates or die,” then you just killed a greater percentage of Democratic voters than Thanos.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “A $1.5 billion sweetheart deal Hunter Biden’s private equity firm secured from the state-owned Bank of China is ‘looming on the horizon’ as a potential line of attack against his father’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen.” It’s going to be fun hearing Democrats claim that random contacts by low-level staffers constituted collusion with Russia for Trump, but that $1.5 billion from China to the Vice President’s son was just no big deal. Why Biden is not Jeb Bush. Four of these points I agree with, but the fifth (“unlike Jeb, who was weakened by the presence of his one-time protege Marco Rubio in the field, Biden has no immediate competitor in his primary ‘lane'”) is probably untrue, as Buttigieg, Moulton, Hickenlooper, Ryan and Bennet could all plausibly fill the “white moderate” lane. He appeared on ABC’s The View, where he promised to be less creepy. Biden picked up a very early endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters, another example of his strong play for union support. He appeals to forgotten blue collar Democrats. Flashback: In 1998, Joe Biden said Anita Hill was lying. (Right the first time.) Biden the liar. Speaking of which, the Washington Post gave him four Pinocchios for stating that the Trump tax cuts applied only to the rich. Biden’s campaign may be a well-oiled machine. Biden himself? Not so much:
How far will the left wing of the Democratic Party go to drag Biden? Here’s a Newsweek piece dinging him for opposing forced busing in 1974. Here’s a hint: everyone hated forced busing. “We’re going to take your daughter and ship her across town to a school in the ghetto because that’s a whole hell of a lot easier than spending more money to improve ghetto schools or take on teachers unions.” Democrats gave up on forced busing because it was a horrible idea that didn’t actually address the problem and they didn’t want be wiped out in elections.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Maybe? I didn’t think he was going to run if Biden got in, but what the hell is this? It came up as an ad when I Googled “Michael Bloomberg President.” That sure as hell looks like the website of someone who is thinking of running for President. Upgraded from “Probably not” after I stumbled across it.
Update: Montana Governor Steve Bullock: All But In. “Montana Gov. Steve Bullock will announce his bid for the presidency in two weeks, MTN News has learned — adding to the 20 Democrats already running for the 2020 nomination to challenge President Trump.” Upgrade over Leaning Toward In.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Julian Castro hits 65,000-donor threshold to secure spot in first presidential debate.” That’s probably a great relief to him. He’s making a play for Nevada, which falls right after New Hampshire and has a large Hispanic population. That’s a strategically sound decision, and even if it fails, it can’t fail worse than anything else he’s tried…
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But she says the 2016 election was “stolen” from her.
Update: New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: All But In. “It’s Now A Clown Bus: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Expected To Announce 2020 Run Next Week.” De Blasio unites all of America in contempt against him. “76 percent of New Yorkers say he shouldn’t run. Politico New York surveyed 30-odd members of Team de Blasio, and all but two said it was a bad idea, with one calling it ‘fucking insane.'” Also this: “He may have a shot if every Democratic candidate is caught sending racy selfies to minors.” Upgrade from Leaning Toward In.
According to the DNC, the max number of candidates participating will be a total of twenty even if all 21 announced candidates qualify as it threatens to eliminate candidates who had already made the cut – so much for “transparent, fair and inclusive.” Ten will appear on June 26 with the next ten on June 27th and selection will be determined by drawing lots. Conceivably, the Main Show of Bernie and Biden may occur on June 26th, or they may be split, appearing on two different nights. In any case, it may be difficult for the public to determine a clear ‘winner’ by virtue of candidate separation from the total field.
Snip.
Given her almost totally hostile reception by every MSM outlet who deigned to interview her, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has experienced, as an opponent of regime change wars, more bad manners and outright personal antagonism than any other candidate. While Gabbard easily qualified for the debates via the $65,000 requirement and continues to attract SRO audiences in NH, Iowa, California and elsewhere, yet until the newest CNN poll, she failed to register any % of public support. Something here does not compute given the ‘favored’ polls past history of favoritism. If the Dems continue to put a brick wall around her, Jill Stein has already opened the Green Party door as a more welcoming venue for a Tulsi candidacy. The Dems, who tend to be unprincipled and vindictive, better be careful what they wish for.
Caveat: Counterpunch, so grains of salt time. On the other hand, the author can smell the stench of the Russiagate corpse, so maybe actual clues are involved here…
Senator Kamala Harris was supposed to be a frontrunner. According to the rules of “the invisible primary,” in which donors and party activists coalesce around their chosen nominees, sending signals about candidate quality that primary voters, more often that not, eventually validate, Harris seemed to check all the boxes of a frontrunner. Her campaign team is full of veterans of the campaign of the last Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. She led the large donor fundraising race, with most of her big donors also being former donors to Clinton. Seth Masket, a political scientist and expert on the party system, conducted an informal poll last December of precisely the sort of party activists who are said to decide these things, and a healthy majority leaned toward supporting Harris. And in FiveThirtyEight’s weighted listing of endorsements, Harris ranked second among the declared candidates, losing out only to Senator Cory Booker (before Joe Biden formally entered the race last week).
Judging by all available polling, though, Harris is not even close to the frontrunner. (And Cory Booker’s campaign seems to be utterly foundering, suggesting that counting up endorsements may not be the best way to measure the viability of a candidate from a state, like New Jersey, with a powerful, old-fashioned party machine.) Most national polls put her in a distant third or fourth place, frequently trailing South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a relative neophyte who was polling at basically zero a month ago.
This doesn’t render “the invisible primary” obsolete as an explanatory factor. The seemingly overnight rise of Buttigieg is in fact evidence of the concept’s durability: People have heard of him, and tell pollsters they support him, because his press is managed by Lis Smith, a well-connected Democratic operative who formerly worked for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, and Politico’s big donor analysis shows he is extremely popular among former Obama and Clinton bundlers. The energy around Mayor Pete is partly a reflection of the political press translating its knowledge of his advisers’ records and his popularity with the donor class into stories about his candidacy that create a sort of aura of “viability.” The new frontrunner, the former vice president, has, as you’d expect, even more institutional support behind him, especially among Democratic mega-donors and longtime elected officials.
So, what has, thus far (there is a lot of election left to go), prevented Harris’s campaign from breaking out? And for that matter, how is Elizabeth Warren receiving so much glowing press for her transformative policy agenda, but still polling just as poorly as Harris?
As the horserace quants at FiveThirtyEight explained, both are victims of the Democratic electorate’s fixation on “electability.” Polling broadly shows Democratic voters thinking Joe Biden has the best chance at winning the general election. That is exactly what Biden would like everyone to think, and that belief practically constitutes the sole argument for his candidacy.
Wait, primary voters focus on electability? Do tell. The New Republic writer is pouting because he wanted Harris. That’s why he says “‘Electability’ is a crock of shit,” because he wants hard-left candidates and the majority of Democratic primary voters aren’t having any. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) There’s a ton of “Oh yeah, she went after AG Barr! She’s my hero!” schoolgirl crush media pieces I’m omitting here, since the default setting on Harris coverage is “Fawning.”
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Climate Change Guy offers a pie-in-the-sky “carbon neutral by 2030” that also promises to destroy the coal industry. I guess he figures “Hey, everyone else is offering impossible bullshit! Why not me?”
Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. She too unveiled a mental health plan. Funny how people who hang out with Democrats all the time naturally assume that large numbers of Americans are crazy…
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. He visited all four early primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina) and got a WGBH profile. “Moulton is a centrist among more aggressively liberal candidates. The progressive base fawns over Bernie Sanders’s calls for economic revolution, and Elizabeth Warren’s lengthening list of plans, but it’s unclear that the majority of primary voters, let alone general-election voters, will opt for radically upending an economy that seems to be humming along pretty well.”
California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. He appeared on Face the Nation, and spent his time nattering about the Russian Collusion Fantasy, which is far too precious for liberals to give up on despite being complete bunk.
The bill made it harder for individuals to file for bankruptcy and get out of debt, a legal change that credit card companies and many major retailers had championed for years. The bill passed Congress with large majorities, but most Democratic senators, including Barack Obama, voted no. Biden voted yes and was widely seen at the time as one of the bill’s major Democratic champions.
So far, her efforts haven’t yet translated into much success. Despite her Hollywood connections, she managed to raise just $1.5 million as of the end of the first quarter — not chump change, but it does put her toward the bottom of the list of serious contenders. Nor has she yet managed to clear the 65,000-donor threshold that would qualify her to participate in the first two Democratic primary debates, although according to her campaign website, she’s about 90 percent of the way there.
And although her books have sold 3 million copies, her name recognition is among the lowest in the field. In a national poll conducted by Change Research in mid-April, 66 percent of likely Democratic voters had never heard of her; the same was true of 53 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers in an early-April Monmouth poll of Iowa. Candidates with low name recognition can still have a shot at the nomination if they’re backed by a decent percentage of the people who have heard of them, but Williamson gets almost no support in horse-race surveys: She has gotten 0 percent support in 27 of the 35 polls in our database that have asked about her. And she is unlikely to become better known as long as cable news networks and newspapers continue to cover her far less often than the candidates with more traditional credentials.
She visited Iowa, where she spoke to about 60 people, and Nevada, where she got interviewed by Politics Now, where it looks like they’re using cameras and a set from 1979.
A review of existing federal laws makes clear that President Donald Trump has clear statutory authority to build a border wall pursuant to a declaration of a national emergency. Arguments to the contrary either mischaracterize or completely ignore existing federal emergency declarations and appropriations laws that delegate to the president temporary and limited authority to reprogram already appropriated funding toward the creation of a border wall between the United States and Mexico.
Gun homicides have dropped substantially over the past 25 years — but most Americans believe the opposite to be true. Why? Perhaps in part because of the media focus on multiple-victim shooting incidents in recent years. Perhaps, too, because of the number and deadliness of those incidents. We’ve noted before that the number of fatalities in major mass-shooting incidents has increased dramatically in recent years; it’s possible that people are conflating increases in frequency and deadliness of mass shootings with the United States getting more dangerous generally.
New York Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez adapts quickly to the ways of Washington, puts her boyfriend on her congressional payroll. But that’s not all! She also featherbedded him on her campaign payroll by laundering the funds through a third party.
The time for division is not now. We need a strong NRA. If you quit NRA over bump stocks or red flag laws, you aren’t helping. I’m not saying we can’t have disagreement, but we all need to be rowing in the same direction and understanding what’s important. Miguel notes that activists in Florida are concentrating on Open Carry. I would advise concentrating on stopping the ballot measure Bloomberg is going to foist on you in 2020. NRA has to have money to fight that. We cannot write off the third most populous state. We will never be able to outspend Bloomberg, but we sure as hell can out-organize him. We have a blueprint, and last I heard the dude who pulled off defeating the Massachusetts handgun ban is still alive. The odds were stacked against him too.
Forget about the fucking bump stocks. It’s not where the fight is. That’s over. The fight is preserving the right to own semi-automatic firearms. That’s ultimately what they want, because they are well aware no state’s gun culture has ever come back from an assault weapons ban. Gun bans are a death blow to the culture. If you want to get the hard-core activists worked up over saving an impractical range toy, or in some misguided effort to (badly) get around the machine gun restrictions, you’re not paying attention to where the actual fight is.
The Supreme Court unanimously rules that there are limits to civil asset forfeiture under the Eighth Amendment. Good. Now congress should tackle such abuse legislatively.
Note the obvious truth that the media is overwhelmingly liberal? Expect to be attacked.
His army evidently relies on Cuban military personnel. Too bad for him that Cuba’s military intervention in Angola showed the world that Cuban troops sucked. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Suppose that instead of one shepherd boy, there are a few dozen. They are tired of the villagers dismissing their complaints about less threatening creatures like stray dogs and coyotes. One of them proposes a plan: they will start using the word “wolf” to refer to all menacing animals. They agree and the new usage catches on. For a while, the villagers are indeed more responsive to their complaints. The plan backfires, however, when a real wolf arrives and cries of “Wolf!” fail to trigger the alarm they once did.
What the boys in the story do with the word “wolf,” modern intellectuals do with words like “violence.” When ordinary people think of violence, they think of things like bombs exploding, gunfire, and brawls. Most dictionary definitions of “violence” mention physical harm or force. Academics, ignoring common usage, speak of “administrative violence,” “data violence,” “epistemic violence” and other heretofore unknown forms of violence.
Philadelphia’s stupid soda tax has not reduced consumption, brought in less revenue than expected, and has cost Philadelphia over 200 jobs. Also, corrupt union officials helped push it through as a “screw you” to the Teamsters. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Trump-supporting comedian Terrance K. Williams recovering from a car accident:
Update! I want to thank everyone for all the love and support. Everything happened so fast & I thought it was the end so I’m thankful to be alive. My neck & back is out of commission so I can’t eat anything. Still in ER Trauma Care waiting to be admitted to a room. Love y’all! pic.twitter.com/QlJgfmgtRl
