Beto goes bye bye, sticker shock sets in for Warren, Grandpa Simpson forgets which state he’s in (again), and a failing Harris goes all-in on Iowa. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Polls
The story had been about how Biden was doomed and Warren’s rise was inexorable, but Biden tops every national poll this week, maintaining a modest lead over Warren, while Harris is in freefall. Also notice that there’s not a single poll outside Iowa or New Hampshire where Warren leads Biden. (For one thing, Quinnipiac, which has constantly shown a more pro-Warren tilt than any other poll, evidently didn’t do one last week.)
CNN/UNH (New Hampshire): Sanders 21, Warren 18, Biden 15, Buttigieg 10, Yang 5, Klobuchar 5, Gabbard 5, Steyer 3, Harris 3, Booker 2, O’Rourke 2, Sestak 1. Good news for Yang, Gabbard and Klobuchar, though I’m not sure if this is a DNC qualifying poll or not.
The assumption that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren will win New Hampshire is all but baked, Democratic insiders told POLITICO; the neighbor-state senators could easily take the top two spots. The biggest prize, at this point, is the surge of momentum that would come from eclipsing Joe Biden, as the race turns to Nevada and then South Carolina.
I think the story coming out of this state may not be first place,” said former Democratic state Sen. Andrew Hosmer. “It may be who shows up as a strong second or third place that really propels them.”
Hosmer’s assessment was broadly shared by more than two dozen knowledgeable Democrats interviewed for this story, including the party chair, current and former state lawmakers, several underdog campaigns and one of the candidates. Officials with several Democratic candidates’ campaigns, meanwhile, described the race as fluid, with no real frontrunner despite the advantage enjoyed by Sanders, who won New Hampshire in 2016, and Warren, who has been building inroads for years.
The candidates and campaign aides said superior organization will trump all in the state — more so than a heavy TV ad presence or endorsements. And with more than four of five voters still undecided or only leaning toward a candidate, there’s an enormous opportunity for a lower-polling candidate to emerge.
With no clear frontrunner and at least four plausible candidates, superdelegates might make a comeback in a brokered convention.
Depending on how frontloaded a primary calendar is, late April tends to be around the point where enough delegates have been allocated that the presumptive nominee is, if not already clear, coming into sharper focus. So if three candidates are still cresting above the 15 percent threshold by the six-contest “Acela primary” in late April, when more than 75 percent of delegates will have been awarded, that could wreak havoc on the 2020 Democratic nomination process.
But of course, much of this depends on how wide the margin is by which the candidates clear that threshold. If, say, only one candidate is getting a supermajority while the others struggle to hit 15 percent, then the fact that three candidates are above the threshold matters very little — see Trump in 2016. But if three candidates are tightly bunched at 40, 30 and 20 percent, it potentially becomes much more problematic. This is especially true if that clustering happens early and often, especially on delegate-rich days like Super Tuesday, which is scheduled for March 3 this year and is the first series of contests after the four early states.
But:
Here’s why I think a logjam situation is unlikely: How the threshold is applied tends to already have a built-in winnowing effect on the candidates. Yes, there is a proportional allocation of delegates, but that only applies to candidates who win 15 percent of the vote. And that qualifying threshold is not applied just once, but three different times. A candidate must meet that threshold at the statewide level twice, once for at-large delegates and once for party leader and elected official (PLEO) delegates. A candidate must also win 15 percent of the vote in a given congressional district (or other subdivision) to lay claim to any district-level delegates. In other words, a candidate who surpasses 15 percent of the statewide vote by running up margins in a few concentrated areas will not earn as many delegates as a candidate who hits the 15 percent statewide threshold by earning at least 15 percent of the vote across districts. A candidate must build a coalition of support more uniformly across a state — and the country — in order to win delegates. It’s more than just peeling off a delegate or two here and there.
Hey Democrats, when even Nancy Pelosi says your ideas are too far left to win elections, don’t you think you should listen?
“Voters are sick and tired of politicians promising them things that they know they can’t deliver,” the Colorado senator said in a statement. “Warren’s new numbers are simply not believable and have been contradicted by experts. Regardless of whether it’s $21 trillion or $31 trillion, this isn’t going to happen, and the American people need health care.”
Warren on Friday released the cost estimate of her plan, which increases federal spending by $21 trillion over the next ten years, a significant increase that is nevertheless cheaper than the $31 trillion increase attributed to Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.
While serving as senator of Delaware, Joe Biden reached out discreetly to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to discuss matters his son Hunter Biden’s firm was then lobbying for, according to government records Goodman gathered.
The latest revelations further buttress accusations that Joe Biden’s work as senator and vice president frequently converged with and assisted Hunter Biden’s business interests. Whether it be getting the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son’s company fired or meeting one of his son’s business partners while on a diplomatic trip to China in 2013, Joe Biden’s political activities in relation to his son Hunter have continued to garner scrutiny.
In 2002, while his father was a senator, Hunter founded the lobbying firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which lobbied on the Hill. When his father announced his candidacy for president in 2008, Hunter opted to leave the firm, claiming it was to reduce concerns about conflicts of interest.
While Hunter was still at the firm, in late February 2007, then-Sen. Joe Biden reached out to DHS, expressing concern over the department’s proposed chemical security regulations. The regulations were in accordance with Section 550 of the DHS Appropriations Act of 2007, which called for chemical facilities to submit detailed “site security plans” for DHS approval. Part of these plans were expected to include specifics related to training and credentialing employees.
Biden’s call seems like an eerie coincidence. Two months prior to that phone call, the Industrial Safety Training Council had enlisted Hunter Biden’s firm to lobby DHS precisely on Section 550. The Industrial Safety Training Council is a 501(c)3 that offers safety training services to employees of chemical plants. In the midst of debates over regulations stemming from Section 550, ISTC launched significant lobbying efforts to encourage the expansion of background checks under the new regulation regime.
Hunter was not registered as an individual lobbyist on behalf of ISTC, but he did serve as a senior partner at his namesake firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, which only boasted three partners at the time. According to Goodman, from early 2007 to the end of 2008, his firm earned a total of $200,000 from ISTC in return for its lobbying efforts.
While we don’t know the source of Joe Biden’s concern over Section 550 and whether his “concern” was the one ISTC shared, it is worth noting this repeated crossover between Hunter Biden’s business and his father’s political stratagems. At some point, coincidences stop being merely a product of a chance. In the case of Hunter and Joe Biden, the coincidences continue to pile up.
Joe Biden’s use of his political power for his son’s business dealings didn’t stop there. At one point, Hunter’s firm was lobbying on behalf of SEARCH, a national nonprofit devoted to information-sharing between states in the criminal justice and public safety realm. SEARCH was interested in expanding the federal government’s fingerprint screening system and hired Hunter’s firm to lobby on behalf of this issue.
During that very time, Joe Biden sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales expressing a desire to unpack this very topic. In his letter, then-Sen. Joe Biden asked to meet with DOJ to explore the benefits of the expanding the federal government’s fingerprint system.
From the Yogi Berra Institute for Advanced Whackery — er, Business Insider, actually — comes a new poll showing that while Joe Biden is the most-loved Democratic presidential contender, he’s also the least-liked. According to figures releasedon Sunday, “27% of likely Democratic voters would be unsatisfied with a Biden nomination, 21% would be dissatisfied with a Sanders win, and 15% would be dissatisfied with Warren.”
What that means is, should Biden win the nomination next summer, more than a quarter of Dems would face a serious “Meh” moment when deciding whether to even bother showing up at the polls in November.
Snip.
Registered voters (it’s too soon to narrow down to likely voters) who approved of Trump’s job performance are either “extremely” or “very” enthused about voting next year — by a whopping 79%. If you’re a registered voter and you disapprove of Trump, you’re only 66% likely to be extremely or very enthused. 13 points is a major enthusiasm gap. And as Kilgore also notes, “White folks are more enthusiastic about voting than nonwhite folks; old folks are more psyched than young folks; Republicans are more whipped up than Democrats.” Those demos suggest that Democratic primary voters had better think long and hard about nominating someone who generates serious enthusiasm, but their frontrunner doesn’t seem to be the guy to do that.
Records filed with the Department of Justice show that Rasky is also a registered foreign agent lobbying on behalf of the government of Azerbaijan. The records, which were filed pursuant to the Foreign Agent Registration Act, show that Rasky was hired by the Azerbaijani government on April 23, 2019. Federal documents signed by Rasky show that he reports directly to Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to the United States.
“[The government of Azerbaijan] will pay RASKY a minimum monthly non-refundable fee (the ‘Monthly Fee’) for the Services provided of $15,000 per month, plus a 5% administrative fee as described below,” Rasky’s contract with the foreign government states. “The Monthly Fees totaling $94,500 shall be paid in two equal installments. The initial payment of $47,250 is due upon the signing of this agreement. The second payment of $47,250 is due on July 15, 2019.”
Rasky changed the name of the PAC from “For The People” to “Unite the Country” on Monday, according to FEC filings. The filings do not state which country Rasky intends to unite on Biden’s behalf.
The vainglorious, name-dropping Biden also couldn’t help himself from invoking Pope Francis and noting that he “gives me Communion.”
Such brief asides won’t solve his Catholic problem. For one thing, invoking Pope Francis plays poorly in American politics, as the opponents of Donald Trump found out in 2016. Trump’s poll numbers didn’t fall but rose after the pope slammed his immigration position. Hiding behind an obnoxious left-wing pope won’t help Biden any more than it helped Hillary and Kaine, who tried to drive that wedge between Trump and Catholic voters. Kaine’s faux-Catholic schtick — he would go on and on about his “Jesuit volunteer corps” work in Latin America with commies — went over like a lead balloon.
The Catholics who bother to go to Mass regularly anymore are loath to vote for a candidate who supports abortion in all its grisly stages and presides over gay weddings (which Biden has done since pushing Barack Obama to support gay marriage in 2012). That poses an insuperable impediment to picking up Catholic votes. Notice that Biden’s I-grew-up-Catholic-in-Scranton lines are recited less and less. His strategists have probably concluded that that routine hurts him in the primaries and can only remind people of his checkered Catholicism in the general election. His “private” Catholic stances grow fainter and fainter and can’t even be found in a penumbra.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Could Booker gain from O’Rourke’s exit? I rather doubt it. Booker’s no longer getting fawning profiles, but his director for state communications, Julie McClain Downey, is. The article opens stating she was “on the 12-week gender-blind paid leave available to all of the campaign’s full-time staffers.” Presidential campaigns are intense pressure cooker endeavors that require staffers to work killing hours over the course of (for a competitive campaign) 12-18 months. If key staffers are taking 12 months of leave during the white heat before the primary season, no wonder Booker is languishing around 1%.
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Steve Bullock gets Anthony Scaramucci to unknowingly tape endorsement for $100.” That’s his big, exciting news this week. Maybe next week he can pay for Snooki’s endorsement. (And I know what you’re thinking, but no, she’ll only be 33 next year, making her constitutionally ineligible to be elected President…)
Joe Biden dropped to fourth place in Iowa, according to a new poll released Friday, his worst showing to date in the pivotal early state.
A few hours later, at the largest gathering to date for any 2020 event, it was clear why.
While Biden delivered a solid performance on stage before a crowd of 13,500 Democrats at the state party’s Liberty & Justice dinner, he was overshadowed and outshined by the candidate who just passed him in the polls — Pete Buttigieg.
At the massive state party event known for its catalytic effect on campaigns — it’s widely remembered as a turning point for Barack Obama’s Iowa fortunes in 2007 — Buttigieg captured the audience’s imagination, articulating a case for generational change.
“I didn’t just come here to end the era of Donald Trump,” Buttigieg said to a roaring crowd of supporters. “I’m here to launch the era that must come next.”
Snip.
Matt Sinovic, executive director of Progress Iowa, one of the largest left-leaning advocacy groups in the state, said Buttigieg generated considerable buzz with a recent statewide bus tour. He starts another on Saturday. But the Indiana mayor is also swamping his opponents in digital advertising, something that’s been hard to miss in Iowa.
“I cannot overstate how many Buttigieg ads I see,” said Sinovic, pointing to data showing Buttigieg’s national digital spending numbers surpassing Biden almost five-to-one. “It’s just a massive outspending right now.”
Almost always in politics, an early money lead counts for a hell of a lot more than an early poll lead.
Biden’s campaign announced on Friday a new round of digital ad spending in Iowa. And he’s opening a new office in the state, giving him 23 overall as well as 100 staffers. The campaign also notes an October fundraising bump as a sign they’re not losing momentum — the campaign said it had its best month to date online, raising $5.3 million from 182,000 donations, with an average donation of $28.
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still not getting out. “Julián Castro plans to refocus his 2020 presidential campaign on Iowa, Nevada and Texas in the coming days and is supporting his staffers looking for jobs with other campaigns.” That pretty much says he’s broke, though Nevada and Texas make sense as last-ditch Hail Mary plays. In that CNN/UNH poll, Castro hard the largest net favorability decline of all the candidates listed, a whopping -25%. I’m sort of surprised voters actually noticed him enough to dislike him. Maybe it was the “abortion services for trannies” line that did it…
Coming off a close loss in Texas’s 2018 Senate race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, O’Rourke entered the presidential race with great fanfare in March, though some wondered if he had waited too long to fully capitalize on the national notoriety he gained from his 2018 performance. Still, O’Rourke’s initial polling numbers suggested he might really be in the mix to compete for the nomination — he was polling at 10 percent or more in some national polls not long after he announced. However, his survey numbers quickly deteriorated as the race moved along, and he spent the past four months mostly polling below 5 percent even after he tried to revive his campaign in August by tacking left on some issues and focusing more on President Trump.
’Rourke’s tumble in the polls was also accompanied by fundraising difficulties. Having been a prodigious fundraiser in 2018, he seemed capable of attracting the resources to run a top-level presidential campaign, and he showed early promise by raising $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign, the second best opening day after only former Vice President Joe Biden. But fundraising dollars started drying up shortly thereafter. He had raised only $13 million by the end of the second quarter, and added just another $4.5 million in the third quarter.
His debate performances didn’t help him recover either; in fact, his most recent performance seemed to have hurt him. After the October debate, O’Rourke’s net favorability among Democratic primary voters fell by about 6 points in our post-debate poll with Ipsos, the biggest decline for any of the 12 candidates on stage. His place at future debates was in serious jeopardy, too. O’Rourke was two qualifying polls shy of making the November debate and had yet to register a single qualifying survey for the December debate.
But O’Rourke might always have struggled to attract a large enough base of support in the primary given the makeup of the Democratic electorate. As a moderate three-term congressman, he won over many suburban white voters in his Texas Senate bid, but as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote back in July, a base of white moderates, particularly younger ones, wasn’t enough…only about 12 percent of 2016 Democratic primary voters fit all three descriptors — young, white, moderate.
O’Rourke may have been billed as a moderate, but he quickly joined the Twitter Woke Circus, threatened to take our guns, and watched his polls crash even harder as a result. A fact that makes the NRA celebrate his exit:
What do Beto, Gillibrand, and Swalwell have in common? They based their presidential campaigns around demonizing the @NRA, 100M gun owners and trying to destroy our right to self-defense and to even own guns. They messed with the bull and they got the horns. pic.twitter.com/oozFjUgJkr
Across the Democratic Party, ordinary voters, senior strategists, and health care wonks are increasingly nervous that the candidate many believe to be the most likely nominee to face Donald Trump has burdened herself with a policy that in the best case is extraordinarily difficult to explain and in the worst case could make her unelectable.
On Tuesday night, in Concord, one of the more bougie New Hampshire towns that should be a Warren stronghold, Warren stepped inside Dos Amigos, a local Mexican restaurant. She made the rounds talking to voters as locals ate tacos and watched a football game playing above the bar. It didn’t take long before the first Medicare for All question came up.
Martin Murray, who lives in neighboring Bow, came down for a taco and a beer and ended up having a conversation with Elizabeth Warren about single payer and slavery. (That’s what it’s like in New Hampshire.)
“I paid pretty close attention to the last debate when Buttigieg was talking to her,” he told me, “and what I got from him was simply that going for the golden coin, if you will, might be a little too much all at once and maybe we have to take that step by step. And that’s what worries me too: that going for Medicare for All might be unattainable.”
Murray, who is leaning toward supporting Warren, asked her about the Buttigieg critique. “You don’t get what you don’t fight for,” she told him. “In fact, can I just make a pitch on that? People said to the abolitionists: ‘You’ll never get it done.’ They said it to the suffragettes: ‘You’ll never get that passed.’ Right? They said it to the foot soldiers in the civil rights movement. They said it to the union organizers. They said it to the LGBT community.”
She added, “We’re on the right side of history on this one.”
Some Democrats I talked to found the comparisons that Warren used to be jarring. “I have the highest respect for Sen. Warren but she’s wrong about this,” said former Sen. Carol Mosley Braun, the first female African American in the Senate. “Abolition and suffrage did not occasion a tax increase. People weren’t giving something up — except maybe some of their privilege.”
She added, “To compare the health care debate to the liberation of black people or giving women the right to vote is just wrong.”
“Medicare for All does not equate in any shape, form or fashion to the Civil Rights Act, or Voting Rights Act, or the 13th Amendment, or 14th Amendment,” said Bakari Sellers, a Kamala Harris supporter whose father was a well-known civil rights activist who was shot and imprisoned in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968. “It doesn’t.”
Plus a history of Warren’s position, since she’s been on both sides of the issue whenever it suited her. Warren is a great candidate…if you want to see the stock market collapse. New York Times reporter had documents that proved Warren was lying about her “I was fired because I was pregnant” story, and sat on them. We all know why: They want Warren to win and they want Trump to lose. Saturday Night Livemocks Warren’s health care plan. The fact I’m linking here rather than embedding it should tell you how funny it is. Also, as with Hillary Clinton, SNL helps Warren’s campaign by having her played by an actress roughly half her age. “Elizabeth Warren Pledges To Crack Down On School Choice, Despite Sending Her Own Son To Elite Private School.”
The 2020 presidential candidate’s public education plan would ban for-profit charter schools — a proposal first backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — and eliminate government incentives for opening new non-profit charter schools, even though Warren has praised charter schools in the past.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) This does not appear to be an official Warren campaign account, but it does offer up an infinite well of cringe.
“The downsides of that, the entire country gets engrossed in this impeachment process,” Yang said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And then, we’re gonna look up and be facing Donald Trump in the general election and we will not have made a real case to the American people.”
Yang said that while he does support the impeachment, he feels Democrats waste too much time talking about it and not enough about the future of the US.
“That’s the only way we’re going to win in 2020 and that’s the only way we’re actually going to start actually solving the problems that got him elected,” he told CNN.
In the second quarter — from April to June — the campaign had under 20 staff members on its payroll, according to Yang’s Federal Election Commission filings. But a quarter later, it nearly quadrupled to include 73 staff members, POLITICO’s analysis shows, as well as several experienced and well-respected strategists in Democratic politics.
The expansion, fueled by a nearly $10 million third-quarter fundraising haul, ensures that the 44-year-old entrepreneur can stick around through the beginning of early-state voting next year — and gives Yang a platform to build on if he should have a big moment in a later debate or show unexpectedly well in the Iowa caucuses. The hires also add critical experience to Yang’s campaign as it starts to spend on advertising, like a recent six-figure digital ad buy in the early states.
Snip.
Most notably, Yang’s campaign recently brought on Devine, Mulvey and Longabaugh as its media consulting firm. The firm — run by Tad Devine, Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh — worked for Sanders’ insurgent 2016 primary campaign and produced the famous “America” ad before splitting early on with Sanders’ 2020 bid due to “differences in a creative vision.”
Longabaugh says they were drawn to Yang because he’s “is offering the most progressive ideas” of the primary but that they see a long runway for the Yang campaign.
“We wouldn’t have signed on with somebody we didn’t think was a serious candidate,” Longabaugh said, “Yang has a good deal of momentum and there’s a great deal of grassroots enthusiasm for his candidacy and that’s what’s driven it this far.”
Other hires include senior adviser Steve Marchand, a former mayor of Portsmouth, N.H. and two-time gubernatorial candidate, who is a paid adviser to the Yang campaign since April and national organizing director Zach Fang, who jumped ship from Rep. Tim Ryan’s campaign in late August.
The campaign has also paid Spiros Consulting — a widely used Democratic research firm helmed by Edward Chapman — for research throughout the quarter.
The campaign’s field office game has ballooned recently. Currently all 15 of their field offices are in the first four states; 10 have opened since the start of October, according to the campaign.
That effort has evolved into more than 30 Yang Gangs across the state— 17 that South Carolina campaign chair Jermaine Johnson says are “100% structured.” The Columbia and Charleston group, made up of about 250 members, is the largest of these South Carolina Yang Gangs. The campaign maintains that while not all of these members are showing up to in-person events, the majority are active online.
It was fall of 1999, and Yang, 24, was in the job he had steered toward his whole life. Phillips Exeter Academy, Brown University, Columbia Law — the perfect elite track to land at Davis Polk & Wardwell, one of the country’s premier law firms. His Taiwanese immigrant parents were thrilled. Counting salary and bonus, he was making about $150,000 a year.
He quit because he didn’t like it. “Working at a law firm was like a pie-eating contest, and if you won, your prize was more pie.”
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, who declared then dropped out, or whose campaigns are so moribund I no longer feel like wasting my time gathering updates on them:
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas we’re enjoying intermittant torrential rains, which means that walking your dog after one is like breathing warm soup.
Former President Barack Obama was unhappy with Hillary Clinton and her failed “soulless campaign” in 2016, saying he saw her loss as a “personal insult.”
The new details come from a recently released update to New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker’s book Obama: The Call of History.
The new edition, which includes Obama’s reaction to the 2016 election, said Obama compared himself to Michael Corleone, the titular character of “The Godfather.” Obama thought he “almost got out” of office untouched, like a mob boss avoiding a hit job.
Obama found himself shocked by the election results, thinking before Nov. 8 there was “no way Americans would turn on him” and “[h]is legacy, he felt, was in safe hands.”
The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than when he nearly swept the region in 2016. Polling shows Trump’s job approval rating in the Midwest is in the mid-forties, and his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating in the region is roughly the same as Obama’s was during the same point in his presidency, according to Gallup tracking polls.
The working class, the nearly 70 percent of Americans without a college degree who have been ignored and even ridiculed by both political parties, is flourishing. Five of the top ten cities enjoying the greatest job opportunities for lower-wage workers are in the Midwest. “A majority of the metro areas with the highest shares of opportunity employment are located in the Midwest . . . after adjusting for cost-of-living differences, median annual earnings tend to be relatively high in that region,” according to an April 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Finding enough workers “is a problem playing out in many parts of the Midwest, a region with lower unemployment and higher job-opening rates than the rest of the country,” according to an April 2018 Wall Street Journal report, citing hiring challenges by employers in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Southwestern Ohio, solid Trump country, is in the midst of a warehousing boom. The construction industry is thriving nationwide, but the Midwest is leading the pack.
The administration’s attempts to secure the southern border are gaining popularity in the Midwest. According to a recent Washington Postpoll, 40 percent of Midwesterners say Trump’s approach to illegal immigration will make them more likely to support him in 2020, compared to 36 percent who say they are less likely. Further, 83 percent of Midwesterners called the situation at the Mexican border a crisis or a serious problem. It will take some smooth convincing by the Democratic presidential candidate to not only disabuse Midwesterners of their views, but to assure them that open borders are best for families in Racine and Grand Rapids.
Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.
Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.
The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.
The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.
The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.
The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.
Oh, should we use the word “bombshell” or the phrase “the walls are closing on?”
The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.
And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.
The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.
Huge amounts of aid dollars — including $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency — have flowed to the small city of 90,000 residents to address lead in its water supply, even though it doesn’t have a chief financial officer and, until recently, its finance chair was a gun felon.
The federal money “should be a good thing for the city,” Worthing told TheDCNF, “but given the mismanagement of the pipe replacement program, I am concerned that it’s not going to get used properly.”
The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.
Hey, remember when journalists reported on all the scandals among Virginia’s state leaders, until they noticed the (D)s after their names? “Northam, who largely won on anti-Trump anger, is now less popular than the president in the state.”
Alabama Democratic state representative John Rogers last week: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.” Rodgers this week: “I am now a candidate for United States Senate.” He’s primarying incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who only got in because of the Roy Moore fiasco.
Recent data show that the U.K.’s gun control experiments are actually causing more harm than good. Like its Australian counterpart, which also implemented draconian gun control in the 1990s, negative criminal trends have started to surface since new gun control laws were enacted.
Sexual assaults have seen an alarming rise from 1995 to 2006, specifically increasing by 76.5 percent according to Howard Nemerov’s book 400 Years of Gun Control. All the gun control in the world has not been able to save the U.K. from steadily increasing rates of violent crime.
“The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”
Believe women…unless they’re raped by a homeless person. “Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes.”
I'm in Nebraska for a trip. The national media has done a horrific job covering the catastrophic flooding that has for months made homes inaccessible. It is all you see from the air, and a big deal. pic.twitter.com/XU9DmTb5Ju
Leaked Trump Peace Plan? I’d sort of like President Trump to stay away from all peace plans, as they all seem to be asking for trouble. This one is interesting. It calls for a two state solution, some Egyptian facilities for Gaza, incorporating settlements into Israel, a lot of non-U.S. countries picking up the bill, and penalties for rejecting the deal. It make so much sense that Palestinians will surely reject it out of hand…
More on China’s play for technological dominance: “Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The New York Times had a story in which they breathlessly told us that Trump lost a billion dollars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know, just like Trump himself told us in his book The Art of the Comeback. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.” Better idea: Make all social media companies publish clear, defined reasons for suspending or banning users, and make the processes by which those decisions are made transparent. Nah, they’d never go for that, as that would keep them from arbitrarily banning conservatives… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Jim Goad says Facebook should leave Louis Farrakhan alone…because he’s hilarious. “This cat is one of the most accomplished mind-fuckers in American history, and I’m glad to call him a fellow citizen.”
Moving The Extending Arms of Christ: This probably won’t mean anything to you unless you grew up in Houston, but there was a large, striking mosaic above the emergency room entrance on Houston Methodist Hospital that had to be moved to an interior atrium under construction due to the hospital’s expansion.
Is there any number of illegal border crossings into the United States that would strike Democrats as an emergency?
As they resisted President Trump’s efforts to stem the flow of illegal migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, many Democrats made the point that fewer migrants are coming today than years ago, during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies. The implication was that today’s situation cannot be an emergency, because it used to be worse.
That doesn’t make sense, of course. One could argue that crossings were an unaddressed emergency back then, and that today’s figures, although lower, also qualify as an emergency.
But now, the border numbers are surging back to the bad old days. It appears that Customs and Border Protection apprehended more than 100,000 people in March (the precise figure has not yet been released), a pace that could mean more than 1,000,000 apprehensions this year.
For some perspective: According to Border Patrol statistics, U.S. authorities caught 1,643,679 people trying to cross the border illegally from Mexico in fiscal 2000. In 2001 the number was 1,235,718. In 2002 it was 929,809. In 2003 it was 905,065. In 2004 it topped the million mark again, with 1,139,282. In 2005 it was 1,171,396. In 2006 it was 1,071,972.
The full text of the Mueller report is a booby-trap for the Democrats. And many of them not named Schiff must know or suspect it….The natural question will then be — what was all this for? Cui bono? A full airing of the report, what Nadler claims he wants, will instead “open the door,” as they say in court, more than ever for an investigation of why this probe was launched in the first place, by whom and for what reason. The results of that investigation will be quite scary, if not humiliating, for Democrats because they will lead close to, if not over, their highest doorstep — the portals of the Oval Office during the previous administration.
Snip.
Besides whatever Barr decides to do, several other vectors are pointing at the Democrats and their DOJ/FBI/media allies. One is obviously hearings from the Senate Judiciary Committee under chairman Lindsey Graham. The second is the investigation into the provenance of the Russia probe and the attendant FISA court decisions (Steele dossier, etc.) to spy on U.S. citizens by inspector general Michael Horowitz. He is supposed to be working in concert with John Huber, a U.S. attorney appointed by Jeff Sessions ages ago with the power to carry out in the courts the results of Horowitz’s discoveries and who has since been silent.
I noticed that the Russia narrative was increasingly being clung to as an explanation for the media’s failures to understand the country they purport to cover. I pushed back against the idea that the American people had been duped by “fake news” (which then meant something else entirely, we might remember) or “Russia” when they voted for Trump, even if such a vote was obviously unfathomable to most media figures.
The Russia strategy Clinton had deployed was being picked up by Obama’s intelligence agencies and spread far and wide by American media, and it annoyed Trump. When he’d dismiss the fevered theories that Russian meddling was the reason Hillary Clinton had failed to visit the upper Midwest, intelligence analysts responded by threatening him with leaks.
“Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?” The assumption seems to be that Hispanic votes are a birthright for the Democratic Party, and their media partisans are perplexed that they’re not. “While many Democrats expected Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, especially the family separation debacle, to produce a decisive shift to the left among Hispanics, that has not proved to be the case.” Why would Hispanic American citizens be any less worried about illegal alien crime or taking jobs than any other American group? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Hey, remember when all those top Virginia Democrats were called on to resign? “Two of the three officials, Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, wore blackface decades ago. The third, Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax, has been accused of two instances of sexual assault.” Well, they haven’t and they’re not. Evidently the press finally realized that each of them had (D)s after their name…
Chinese woman carrying malware arrested at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s frequent vacation home in Florida.
“Pence Issues Turkey Ultimatum: ‘Choose Between Remaining NATO Member Or Buying Russian S-400.’ I don’t think Erdogan’s Turkey should be kicked out of NATO for buying Russian anti-aircraft missiles, they should be kicked out of NATO for running a repressive jihadist scumbag regime. And we shouldn’t be selling them F-35s in any case.
“Trump Is Turning NATO Into a Viable Military Force.” “The Trump administration has made great strides in recent months to transform the cash-strapped and perpetually ailing North Atlantic Treaty Organization into a viable global military force that has the capabilities to confront Russia and other rogue regimes allied with terror forces.”
Some interesting maps showing American land use. (Hat tip: Gregory Benford on Facebook.)
Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.” The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is “not spending enough to really solve the problem.” For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.
Reporters have in mind a specific quote they’d like to have from you, and have developed great skill in teasing it out of people. Think of it as just one aspect of fake news. I had quite a bit of first-hand experience with this during my years in Washington, and I got good at spotting the technique and having the discipline not to give in to the usual reporter’s tricks. Often I’d get a call from a reporter wanting my comment on something the Bush Administration was doing, and the question, in substance, was usually: “Don’t you think the Bush Administration is doing the wrong thing?” (Though always more artfully put than that.) And when I didn’t give the answer the “reporter” was looking for, they’d keep asking the same question over and over again in different forms, because what they needed for their story was a way to say something like, “But even a conservative at the American Enterprise Institute thinks Bush is making a mistake. ‘Bush is making a mistake,’ said Steven Hayward. . .” Sometimes a reporter would keep me on the phone for 30 minutes or more, hoping I’d give in. I learned the discipline of never giving in to this trick, and what do you know? I was never quoted in any of the stories that “reporters” like this filed. Nor did any of the information or analysis I had about the issue make it into the story, because background information and perspective was not what the reporter was looking for.
Any attempt to discharge the moral crimes of the 18th and 19th centuries with monetary payments in the 21st century is doomed to fail. The logistical and definitional obstacles alone would be a nightmare. The majority of white Americans have no ancestral link to antebellum slavery — they are descendants of the millions of immigrants who came to the United States after slavery had been abolished. Of the remainder, few had any slaveholding forbears: Slavery was abolished in most Northeastern states within 15 years of the American Revolution, while in most of the West it never existed at all. Even in the South at the peak of its “slaveocracy,” at least 75 percent of whites never owned slaves.
That’s just where the complications start. To whom would reparations be owed? Millions of black Americans are recent immigrants or the children of those immigrants, and have no family link to slavery. Are they entitled to compensation for what slaves endured? How about whites whose ancestors were slaves? Or blacks descended from slaveholders? What of the 1.8 million biracial people who identified themselves in the last Census as both black and white? Should they expect to collect reparations, or to pay them?
Almost did a post on all the Unplanned Twitter shenanigans. Basically: Twitter briefly suspends, and then farks with, the Twitter account for a pro-life movie. If you followed it, Twitter would automatically unfollow the account. The shenanigans stopped when enough people noticed, with the result that not only did Unplanned land in the top five for box office that week, but now their Twitter account has far more followers than Planned Parenthood’s official Twitter account. This suggests that a half-century worth of preference falsification by the abortion industry and their media allies is finally falling apart.
If you thought Joe Don Baker’s Mitchell was a bad cop, you haven’t met this one.
MS-13 member on Texas Ten Most Wanted list captured. Seven of the ten are listed as “White (Hispanic) Male” and an eighth is named “Jesus Alberto Villegas.” It doesn’t say (at least on that page) how many are illegal aliens. In other news, Texas has its own Top Ten Most Wanted List.
Gramsci argued that the Bolshevik Russian revolution of 1917 worked because the conditions were ripe for such a sudden upheaval. He described the Russian revolution as an example of a “war of movement” due to its sudden and complete overthrow of the existing governing structure of society. Gramsci reasoned that in Russia in 1917, “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.”
As such, a direct attack on the current rulers could be effective because there existed no other significant structure or institutions of political influence that needed to be overcome.
In Western societies, by contrast, Gramsci observed that the state is “only an outer ditch” behind which lies a robust and sturdy civil society.
Gramsci believed that the conditions in Russia in 1917 that made revolution possible would not materialize in more advanced capitalist countries in the West. The strategy must be different and must include a mass democratic movement, an ideological struggle.
His advocacy of a war of position instead of a war of movement was not a rebuke of revolution itself, just a differing tactic—a tactic that required the infiltration of influential organizations that make up civil society. Gramsci likened these organizations to the “trenches” in which the war of position would need to be fought.
The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as state organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the “trenches” and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely “partial” the element of maneuver which before used the “the whole” of war, etc.
Gramsci argued that a “frontal attack” on established institutions like governments in Western societies may face significant resistance and thus need greater preparation—with the main groundwork being the development of a collective will among the people and a takeover of leadership among civil society and key political positions.
Snip.
Gramsci, however, viewed civil society in Western societies to be a strong defensive system for the current State, which in turn existed to protect the interest of the capitalist class.
“In the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks,” he wrote. In short, in times when the state itself may have shown weakness to overthrow from opposing ideological forces, the institutions of civil society provided political reinforcement for the existing order.
In his view, a new collective will is required to advance this war of position for the revolution. To him, it is vital to evaluate what can stand in the way of this will, i.e. certain influential social groups with the prevailing capitalist ideologies that could impede this progress.
Gramsci spoke of organizations including churches, charities, the media, schools, universities and “economic corporate” power as organizations that needed to be invaded by socialist thinkers.
The new dictatorship of the proletariat in the West, according to Gramsci, could only arise out of an active consensus of the working masses—led by those critical civil society organizations generating an ideological hegemony.
As Gramsci described it, hegemony means “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership over allied and subordinate groups. The intellectuals, once ensconced, should attain leadership roles over these groups’ members by consent. They would achieve direction over the movement by persuasion rather than domination or coercion.
The goal of the war of position is to shape a new collective will of the masses in order to weaken the defenses that civil society provides to the current capitalist state.
Now I have an excuse to embed this:
“CNN Blames Ratings Slump On Lack Of News They Want To Report.” “It’s perfectly natural to see a little bit of a dip in ratings when your entire narrative is being destroyed and you’d rather just not talk about it,” Stelter added. “All part of the business.”
You know that whole “We’ve got to drop rote memorization and teach critical thinking!” thing? It’s not just bunk, it’s really old bunk. “Memorization and practice are still essential elements of learning and prepare students for the kind of higher level thinking we all claim to value.”
Have I ever shared The Worst Web Page In History with you before? If not, behold the abomination in all its glory! (Or rather, a snapshot of the page as it existed in 2005.) Bonus: it’s from a radical leftist! (Warning: Everything!)
It’s worth recalling in the wake of the Northam controversy that the “what about David Duke?” slogan of the Left is a distraction and a ruse. In fact more than 90% of all Ku Klux Klan leaders over the past 150 years have been Democrats! pic.twitter.com/1cp3XGVIfy
Immediately liberals tried to draw comparison with the Brett Kavanaugh nomination fight. (Or, even stupider, the Billy Bush tape, because they still haven’t gotten over how that “bombshell” failed to derail Trump’s campaign.) Except for the tiny detail that Northam’s offense to current norms is real, and those of Kavanaugh were entirely made up. If Kavanaugh had worn blackface, we all know he would have been forced to withdraw his nomination. But the rules are always different for Democrats.
Oh, and in college before med school, his friends called him “coonman.” Because that’s a perfectly normal nickname for a random white person to have.
After all that, Northam set out to prove that there’s no political crisis that you can’t make worse by lying about it.
The problem with Northam’s new modified limited hangout is the sheer stupidity of actually making things worse and less believable. So it took him three decades before he noticed an offensive photo on a two page yearbook spread that wasn’t him? Think he maybe should have addressed that a wee bit earlier? “Wow, I’ve never been in blackface or a Klan outfit! Should I tell the yearbook staff they goofed? Naaaaahhhhhhhh….”
The cherry on the top: Back in the 2017 gubernatorial election, Northam allies ran on painting opponent Ed Gillespie and Republicans as racists, including an ad where a pickup truck with a Gillespie sticker flying a confederate flag literally tries to run over black children:
Now Northam is steadfastly insisting he won’t resign despite numerous calls for him to from across the political spectrum. That’s probably the ideal outcome…for Republicans.
Do I believe people should resign over something stupid in their yearbook photos from 30 years ago? No. But do I believe that elected Democrats should resign over same? Awww, hell yes! Democrats have been the ones enabling the Social Justice Warrior mob outrage rules lo these many years, so now they can live by them. Only when they’re forced to live by their own rules will the rules change.
Some related Tweets:
An apple can't be called a banana, but a Democrat can be called a Republican? CNN misidentifies Northam during coverage for his racist photo.https://t.co/NMRTyzN8mK
The whole murdering babies thing aside, on one hand it's ridiculous to expect someone to resign for a stupid photo from 35 years ago, but on the other hand, fuck this guy. This is the game he decided to play so now he can enjoy experiencing the new rules as a suppository.
Before you rush to judge Ralph Northam, remember, context is everything. He merely posed in blackface/KKK as recently as medical school. It is a proven FACT that Brett Kavanaugh enjoys beer!
Antifa radicals were behind several violent assaults that resulted in injuries in Portland, Oregon, during a right-wing free speech rally on Saturday [August 4]. The assaults included a journalist who was hit in the head with a water bottle, a counter-protester who was clubbed in the head with a modified trench club, and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, who was attacked while he walked through the antifa crowd. There were only four arrests.
Far-left agitators stormed Portland City Hall Wednesday, cursing through bullhorns, disrupting a meeting, and assaulting security guards.
The activists, including masked antifa agitators, were protesting what they called “police brutality” after Portland Police used strong crowd-control techniques to control the violent “antifascist” counter-demonstration Saturday at the Patriot Prayer rally.
Police fired rubber bullets and flash-bangs into the rioting crowd after antifa counter-protesters refused police orders to get out of the street, and threw rocks and bottles at officers.
But it wasn’t just in Portland. Over in Charlottesville, on the one-year anniversary of the LARP Nazi’s supposed “Unite the Right” rally, in addition to police, Atifa was also assaulting NBC reporters:
All-white crowd in Charlottesville chants “Black Lives Matter” as State Police officer is beaten pic.twitter.com/PU1X6aRRYB
It’s easy to understand why young, unemployed left-wing losers would join antifa: It’s fun beating up people and smashing stuff. But one wonders what George Soros hopes to accomplish, other than alienating moderates, by throwing funding their way…
Edited to add: Saw this just after I posted this. Antifa brought their special brand of happiness to Toronto on Saturday as well:
Berkeley police released video Thursday of roving bands of black-clad vandals who smashed the windshields of 21 city vehicles, setting one blaze, during a violent weekend clash between anti-fascist and anti-Marxist protesters.
At least 20 people were arrested, many armed with a variety of weapons, at Sunday’s “No to Marxism in America 2” rally. During the height of the violent confrontation, a group of masked persons dressed in black clothing used hammers to vandalize 21 City of Berkeley vehicles parked in an off-street parking lot.
One of the vehicles was set on fire.
In a separate act of vandalism, at least two black-clad protesters can be seen smashing the windows of the Marine Corps Recruiting Center with hammers. The suspects repeatedly hit the windows with a hammer or tire iron causing an estimated $2,000 worth of damage. An ATM machine was also vandalized.
How’d I miss that?
On the other hand, I just naturally assume at this point that Antifa riot in Berkeley more often than not…
Remember Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that came up with the ludicrously fake Trump Dossier? They were called to testify before congress…and plead the fifth. “So you have what seems to be the Democrats, and Fusion GPS and these officials — intelligence agency bureaucrats — all blocking every single attempt we’re making to get the most basic information about this document, which … may have been the single document that sparked the entire Russia investigation in the first place.”
The media only hires nominal conservatives who already agree with liberals, liberals have no idea what real conservatives think or why. This is the reason they end up baffled when they lose and lose and lose again – sure, Felonia von Pantsuit was also stupid and drunk, but you get the point. As Sun Tzu observed, and I believe this is a verbatim translation from the original Chinese text, a wise general must seek to know and understand the true nature and schemes of his enemy lest he end up as forlorn and humiliated as a foxy fern in the Miramax head office.
This piece on how Facebook changed the 2016 election is peppered with the usual left-wing slant (has any liberal media outlet ever been labeled “hyperpartican”?), but is also filled with nuggets of insight on how liberal complacency and conservative mastery of social media blind-sided Democrats.
In short, among the truly contested states in 2016, the only ray of hope for the Democrats is Colorado, and even there, the trends have flattened some. They have stabilized New Jersey and Delaware, but Republicans continue to gain significant ground in Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada, and above all, Pennsylvania. If these trends continue through 2020, Florida would be have a slight Republican registration edge, North Carolina would be nearly even, and New Mexico would be close enough that it could never be taken for granted. Moreover, Pennsylvania and Iowa would be solid Trump states.
The remarkable thing about the Republican trending states is that they have moved steadily ever since last November, in almost every case without a single break. Democrats continue to lose voters, and they are not becoming independents. All of this appears to be due to Trump and Trump alone, as the Republican Party has not offered any reasons to embrace it.
They were a tiny band of idiots who traveled the country protesting gay rights at military funerals for some damn reason. The mainstream media reported constantly on their stupid antics as a means to smear, by implication, any Republican opposition to any liberal culture war issue.
White nationalist Richard B. Spencer and his tiny band of neo-Nazis are the new Westboro Baptist Church.
In case you were off in a sensory deprivation tank, “hundreds” of neo-Nazis/Klansmen/white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend, where they clashed with left-wing counter-protestors, leaving one person dead of apparent vehicular homicide. (Two state troopers died in a helicopter crash in the vicinity, but at this point there’s no evidence of foul play in the crash.)
Law enforcement in Charlottesville have received widespread criticism from counterprotesters, bystanders, and participants of the white nationalist “Unite The Right” rally. Many called the police’s handling of the event hands-off, often appearing outnumbered and waiting too long to break up skirmishes between protesters and counter-protesters.
Former police officials in New York and Philadelphia made similar criticisms that, despite a large mobilization of law enforcement personnel — Charlottesville’s mayor put the number at 1,000 — police failed to separate the clashing factions at the beginning of the event, allowing the violence to quickly grow out of hand.
There’s been some debate over what to call Spencer’s band of neo-Nazis/white supremacists/whatevers. But since they were literally marching down the street with cardboard shields chanting “Blood and soil!”…
(Really, chanting “Blood and soil”? Real nationalists tends to chant about specific historical grievances and causes, not just “blood and soil,” which is an abstraction of an abstraction…)
Some of the nomenclature confusion stems from vague use (intentional or otherwise) of the phrase “alt-Right”:
Actually, there are a lot more than two “alt-Rights”, depending on how you count. When the MSM uses the term, they’re frequently lumping in several of the following:
Actual neo-Nazis/Klansmen/white supremacists, as seen in Charlottesville, plus some garden variety anti-Semites.
People pretending to be neo-Nazis/Klansmen/white supremacists, just to piss other people off. (Seen much more online than In Real Life.)
People who take leftwing victimhood identity politics framing to its logical conclusion and see “whiteness” as a victimized group identity.
“Paleoconservatives” (Patrick Buchanan, some of the old Southern Agrarian conservatives, etc.)
4Chan /pol members and other online pro-Trump communities
Critics of Social Justice Warriors and feminism (Milo Yiannopoulos, Christina Hoff Sommers, etc.)
Libertarians
Anyone who reads Breitbart
Reagan Democrats
Free trade skeptics
Tea Party groups
Anyone who leans right but has been critical of Trump-hostile conservative media outlets (National Review, The Weekly Standard, etc.)
Anyone who leans right but has been critical of the national Republican Party establishment
Gun owners
Anyone who voted for Trump in the Republican primary
Anyone who ever posted a Pepe meme
Anyone who believes in limiting Muslim immigration
Anyone who believes in enforcing immigration laws
Anyone who believes in traditional male/female marriage
Republicans
Anyone who voted for Trump in the general election
Anyone from a state that voted for Trump in the general election
Christians
This lets the left perform their own dishonest mental shorthand: “If you support Trump you’re supporting Hitler!” Alt-Right is as meaningless a term as “fascist,” having come to mean “someone holding beliefs the speaker dislikes.”
And if you think I’m exaggerating about liberals doing that:
Though the LARP Nazis were the ones rallying, they weren’t the only ones committing violence, with antifa getting into the act assaulting people and hurling rocks and bottles.
People immediately called on President Trump to denounce the hate groups. Guess what?
We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!
Naturally President Trump’s denunciation wasn’t enough, Because Trump, and because it clashed with the liberal elites’ religious belief that Trump’s entire rise has been due to him sending “dog whistles” of “secret support” to white supremacists.
Also condemning the hate groups were Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (among many, many others), which lead to even more MSM stupidity:
Sorry to be cynical, but most of all Rubio and Ted Cruz to me seem mostly to be doing a tremendous job of posturing for 2020.
Gosh, you're right. Because Nazis & the Klan have such love for Cuban-Americans. If only we worked for a paper that shilled for Stalin…. https://t.co/PBsFqauXq2
Media: "Conservatives must denounce white supremacy!" Conservatives: "Down with white supremacy!" Media: "You don't really mean it." https://t.co/kgXkGf7IAY
So just who paid for the LARP Nazi cardboard shields? Logical or not, the first thought that occurred to me on seeing those was “George Soros.” I was not the only one.
If you don't understand that both sides in this were paid in Charlottesville by Soros Funding.. You really aren't getting what's going on..
(We have to be careful not to yell “Soros!” every time something bad happens. (Remember when the left yelled “Koch Brothers!” at every political setback? Good times, good times…) But mass-organizer agitators and agent-provocateurs have been his trademark for many years now, so we should probably at least explore the possibility he was funding both sides fighting in Charlottesville…)
Nationalism is a poor substitute for real patriotism, and white nationalism is a collectivist mockery of the American ethos of colorblind individualism and judging people based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Don’t let the MSM’s hyping of a small crowd of idiots distract you from the fact that it’s a minuscule fringe movement with no power or influence in the Republican Party, the conservative movement, the Trump Administration, or America itself. And, like the Westboro Baptist Church, they’ll disappear from public’s consciousness when deprived of the oxygen of unwarranted media attention.
A good bit of education used to be dedicated to helping people avoid poor life choices. “Gallant studies hard to pass tests, while Goofus knocks over liquor stores to feed his meth habit.” But some people go above and beyond the call of duty to make the worst lifestyle choices possible.
U.S. Marshals need help tracking down a convicted sex offender recently released from a Virginia prison after he failed to show up at a transitional center in Texas.
News outlets report authorities say 44-year-old Matthew Ezekiel Stager was released Thursday from the Federal Correctional Complex in Petersburg.
He was supposed to check into the transitional center that day but never did.
Marshals say it’s possible Stager is in the Hampton Roads area or has recently traveled through the region.
Authorities say Stager has known connection to multiple states and has a history of drug abuse and mental health concerns.
You don’t say.
Marshals describe Stager as a white or Hispanic man, about 145 pounds, 5 feet 8 inches tall with blond or strawberry hair. He has tattoos on his face, head and neck.
Anyone with information can contact the U.S. Marshals at 1-877-926-8332.
Qatar gave the Clinton Foundation $1 million for Bill Clinton’s birthday while Hillary was head of the State Department, in violation of Department policy and Clinton’s own “ethics agreement,” and without Hillary informing the State Department. “While Qatar was obvious engaged in pay to play, what makes this instance even worse, is that Hillary and Bill were confident enough they could simply get away with it by never telling the State Department of the new influence money.”
When the Clintons left the White House in 2001, pilfering over $190,000 worth of china, flatware, rugs, and furniture as they cleared out, they claimed they were flat broke. Their net worth today is now in excess of $150 million, accumulated not by traditional means of work and investment, but rather by pay-for-play influence peddling through speeches and Clinton Foundation fundraising — with the tacit understanding that the Clintons would be in a position to return favors to donors after Hillary won the 2016 presidential election.
The Clintons symbolize the institutionalization of corruption in Washington, which now permeates almost all the government agencies. Even the so-called independent Federal Reserve has been corrupted by politicians whose profligate deficit spending puts pressure on the Fed to maintain a zero-interest policy that artificially masks the real cost and risk of a growing unsustainable level of debt.
For the better part of eight years of the Obama administration, polls have consistently shown that nearly 70% of Americans believe that the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Separately, a recent MSNBC poll shows “liar” is the most common word that comes to mind when voters think of Hillary Clinton. Another recent NBC poll shows that only 11% think of Hillary as honest and trustworthy. Even if one doubts the accuracy of these polls, how is it possible for a majority to think the country can get on a better track by electing as the next U.S. President a liar who embodies the corrupt status quo?
The mystery of the Clinton Foundation’s missing $20 million in Haiti relief funds. Money that came from Frank Giustra and Carlos Slim. Also involved: Jean Marc Villain, who oversaw the fund while going through his own bankruptcy, and who “violated state laws in 2001 when he did not file donation reports for the Haitian-American Political Caucus.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Chris Wallace: “I think the media could not do a worse job than this year….It’s like watching a badly refereed basketball game where we’re seeing make-up calls and we’re seeing particularly print going – and I’m not a Trump defender at all – but going after Trump in ways that I think violate every canon of ethics for news reporting.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The fact that the Clinton campaign is panicing over Michigan, deploying both Bill Clinton and Obama there, also lend credence to the theory. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
False story alert: That story about a “murder suicide” of an FBI agent who leaked Clinton scandal info from the non-existent “Denver Guardian” is a hoax.
Michael Moore on why Trump will win: “He is the human Molotov Cocktail that they’ve been waiting for; the human hand grande that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.”
The polls pervasively understate his support (the “shy Trump voter”).
Enthusiasm for Clinton is low, enthusiasm for Trump is high. Early voting is showing a pattern closer to 2008 than 2012 (high turnout). Given the enthusiasm gap, this is bad news for Clinton and supports the Shy Trump Voter hypothesis.
This (like 2008) is a “Change Election”. Three quarters or more of voters think that the country is on the wrong track. Clinton is the insider, Trump is the outsider. Advantage: Trump.
The Clinton camp is paralyzed by the emerging scandals. It’s been 5 days [post is from 11/2 – LP] and there’s no coherent reply to the FBI reopening the email investigation. The paralysis says that Clinton’s inner circle is divided on what to do, and she has poor leadership skills – and so the campaign twists in the wind. This is a very, very bad sign for her.
The Marc Rich announcement today is almost inexplicable. There’s no reason that a FOIA request announcement couldn’t wait until after the election. Instead, it came out 4 days after the previous FBI announcement. My take is that Obama has polling showing that she’s going to lose, and lose big. It’s no secret that the Obamas and the Clintons despise each other – this is his chance to dismantle the Clinton machine in the Democratic party (and hill the resulting power vacuum with his people).
The UK betting markets are showing the same pattern as before the Brexit vote – a few big money bets on Clinton (as with Remain), but a huge number of small bets on Trump (Leave).
Independents are leaving Gary Johnson and breaking hard for Trump. The latest poll from North Carolina has Johnson down 5 and Trump up 5. This feels like more confirmation of the Shy Trump Voter hypothesis.
There is very little or no equivalent data pointing to a strengthening by Clinton. If she were actually as far ahead as we’ve been told, there would be evidence dropping from the trees. There isn’t.
Things are getting really, really bad in Turkey. This is not a surprise, and the writing was on the wall when the “coup” failed and Erdogan’s crackdown began. But Erdogan’s purge is even more extensive than I anticipated.
What China learned from the Gulf War. And what they then unlearned: “China did try adding more officers selected for skills rather than loyalty but since 2010 have shifted back to the “loyalty first” model. This was necessary because of problems eliminating the corruption in the military and the realization that the military would more likely be needed to deal with an internal threat rather than an external one.” (Hat tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)
ESPN lost 621,000 cable subscribers in October. “Of we’re very conservative and project that ESPN continues to lose 3 million subscribers a year…within five years ESPN will be bringing in less subscriber revenue than they’ve committed for sports rights.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
(@JackPosobiec) 