The Virtual DNC starts today, voters are not sold on Slow Joe, Team Obama thinks he’s an idiot, he hates the Second Amendment, and we harvest a week’s worth of Kamala Harris bashing. Plus a whole bunch of the Babylon Bee. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
The virtual Democratic National Convention starts today. Finally, a political event that combines the dignity of a Zoom meeting with the raw excitement of a Zoom meeting.
Many of these voters prioritize the economy as their #1 issue in this election and continue to trust Trump on that issue, saying the economy was doing well before the pandemic.
In addition to improving the economy and trying to bring more jobs to the U.S., Jeff O. said he’s picking Trump because “I don’t think that Biden is mentally capable of being president.”
Matt T. described Biden as “up there in age” and “showing signs of dementia” as well as “a puppet” who is “controlled by a lot of people in the deep state.” He went on to define that term as “the lobbyists, the people that have the big money, the people that have influence on a lot of the politicians.”
As we enter the final 90 days of the November presidential campaign, a few truths are crystalizing about the “Biden problem,” or the inability of a 77-year-old Joe Biden to conduct a “normal” campaign.
Biden’s cognitive challenges are increasing geometrically, whether as a result of months of relative inactivity and lack of stimulation or just consistent with the medical trajectory of his affliction. His lot is increasingly similar to historical figures such as 67-year-old President William Henry Harrison, William Gladstone’s last tenure as prime minister, Chancellor Hindenburg, or Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944—age and physical infirmities signaling to the concerned that a subordinate might assume power sooner than later.
Snip.
So we are witnessing a campaign never before experienced in American history and not entirely attributable to the plague and quarantine. After all, the fellow septuagenarian Trump, with his own array of medical challenges, insists upon frenetic and near-constant public appearances. His opponent is a noncandidate conducting a noncampaign that demands we ask the question, who exactly is drafting the Biden agenda and strategy? Or, rather, who or what is Biden, if not a composite cat’s paw of an anonymous left-wing central committee?
When Biden speaks for more than a few minutes without a script or a minder in his basement, the results are often racist of the sort in the Black Lives Matter era that otherwise would be rightly damned and called out as disqualifying. If his inner racialist persona continues to surface, Biden’s insensitivities threaten to expose a muzzled BLM as a mere transparent effort to grab power rather than to address “systemic racism” of the sort the exempt Biden seems to exude.
Biden needs the minority vote in overwhelming numbers, as he realized in his late comeback in the primaries. But the continuance of his often angry, unapologetic racialist nonsense suggests that his cognitive issues trump his political sense of self-control.
The inner Biden at 77 is turning out to be an unabashed bigot in the age of “cancel culture” and thought crimes that has apparently declared him immune from the opprobrium reserved for any such speech.
For Biden, if any African American doesn’t vote for him, then “you ain’t black”—a charge fired back at black podcaster with near venom. Biden more calmly assures us, in his all-knowing Bideneque wisdom, that Americans can’t tell Asians in general apart—channeling the ancient racist trope that “they all look alike.”
In his scrambled sociology, blacks are unimaginatively monolithic politically, while Latinos are diverse and more flexible. Biden seems to have no notion that “Latino” is a sort of construct to encompass everyone from a Brazilian aristocrat to an immigrant from the state of Oaxaca, and not comparable to the more inclusive and precise term “African American.” Moreover, while the black leadership in Congress may be politically monolithic, there are millions of blacks who oppose abortion, defunding the police, and illegal immigration.
You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before.
Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who was known for his mind-meld with the president, wrote in his memoir that “in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.”
Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”
Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”
Baggage, for starters. Enough baggage to fill a fleet of 747s. Tyler goes over much of it here and here.
Harris has been a, shall we say, problematic candidate from the get-go. Her tenures as both the district attorney in San Francisco and the attorney general of California left a lot to be desired. I wrote in a post early last year speculating that she may be her own toughest obstacle because of this:
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is not only running against an ever-growing field of fellow Democrats for the 2020 presidential election, but also against what may prove to be a couple of far more formidable opponents: her own records as the district attorney of San Francisco and later the attorney general of California.
What’s problematic for Harris is that the people who have the most problems with her records are the very progressives she seeks to secure as her base.
A Capitol Hill friend of mine joked that Harris on the ticket might put California in play for the Republicans, which serves as a humorous segue to the next point here.
Conventional wisdom dictates that the out-of-power party’s nominee chooses a running mate that can deliver votes from a part of the country that the candidate needs.
Spoiler alert: California’s electoral votes were already Biden’s.
From a practical, electoral vote standpoint, Harris brings nothing to the ticket. The deep blue states that were already going to vote for der Bidengaffer are still going to vote for him. Does anyone really think that she is going win over hearts and minds in swing states?
Let us not forget that Harris is available for this gig because she was the biggest flop of the “top-tier” (her words) candidates to have to leave the race (no, Beto was never top-tier). She may have lasted until December of 2019 but I was already doing a Kamala campaign deathwatch in September on the Morning Briefing after the big Dem donors fled her in droves.
I saw in a tweet that he was forefronting the Charlottesville “fine people” hoax. On his first day of campaigning with his running mate, he led with that. I say “he,” but I don’t really believe it’s him. I think it’s more likely that he’s a foggy-minded figurehead, and other people have decided to frame the message like that. I consider these people — whoever they are — despicable. They have chosen quite deliberately to commit to a lie that is intended to make black people feel hated and they are doing it for political gain.
As my earlier post about the tweet says, I blogged in April 2019, “If Biden does not come forward and retract [a video relying on the Charlottesville hoax] and apologize and commit himself to making amends, I consider him disqualified. He does not have the character or brain power to be President.” Now, more than a year later, Biden has done the opposite. He’s doubled down on the lie and he’s making it the centerpiece of his campaign!
Somehow, despite the press blockade, word about Joe Biden has gotten out. Rasmussen got this stunning poll result: 59% of respondents don’t think Biden will be around to finish a four-year term, should he be elected. And it isn’t only Republicans who doubt that Biden will be well enough to serve out a term in office. Forty-nine percent of Democrats agree that if Biden wins, it is likely his vice-president will assume the office within four years. No wonder Biden’s handlers are pondering his Veep selection carefully!
Bear in mind that it is only August. Most people haven’t yet begun paying attention to politics. The public’s perception that Joe Biden is more or less incapacitated will only grow as voters see him in action and begin following events more closely. Of course, the Democrats want to make this year’s election a referendum on President Trump, whom they think they have fatally weakened with non-stop smears over the last four years. They might be right. But I seriously doubt that a majority of Americans will vote for a candidate whom they rightly see as suffering from seriously diminished capacities. Which raises once again the question whether Biden will actually be on the ballot in November.
Joe Biden isn’t leaving his Delaware home for the campaign trail anytime soon.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is gearing up to step into the spotlight when he announces his vice presidential pick and accepts the party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention this month. But don’t expect a dramatic shift from Biden away from what Republicans tease is his “basement bunker” strategy to that of a news-cycle warrior in the months before Election Day.
When the coronavirus pandemic first shut down normal life in March, political observers immediately wondered how Biden would be able to campaign effectively while cooped up in his basement. A few months later, after he secured a new in-home studio, started a steady stream of digital events, and rose in the polls, Democrats warmed to his low-key campaign while letting President Trump deal with negative press. Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said in June that Biden is “fine in the basement.”
There was a sense, though, that eventually, in the heat of the fall campaign season, Biden would assume a higher profile in the daily news cycle.
But there are indications that the low-key style could be here to stay.
Snip.
His style is so understated lately that journalists have started hinting annoyance that Biden is not participating in tough national interviews. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said on-air last month that Biden is due for more press exposure. Following a tense interview Trump did with Axios’s Jonathan Swan, several journalists questioned whether the campaign would allow Swan to interview Biden.
All across America, little girls of alternatively Tamil and Afro-Caribbean descent, depending on which is most politically useful at the moment, who have been endlessly told by unspecified haters that they can never be nominated to be vice president, were inspired at Kamala Harris’ selection by whoever selected her on behalf of Grandpa Badfinger. Yes, if they hook up with a powerful married Democrat man, that initial connection can fuel their rise to power too.
Take that, all you modern-day Bull Connors (Connor was a Democrat, but shhhhhhh)! “I won’t cotton to them little girls of alternatively Tamil and Afro-Caribbean descent, depending on which is most politically useful at the moment, thinkin’ they can be vice president someday,” they drawl as they twirl their mustaches. Well, Kamala showed all the haters. Girls of that oddly specific demographic can be nominated to be vice president, and let’s take it one step further – they don’t even have to hook up with a powerful married Democrat man and fuel their rise to power via that initial connection to do it! Well, sure Kamala did, and so did the ethnically uninteresting Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, but those little girls can do it themselves. Well, maybe if they are Republicans.
And speaking of Sarah Palin, it’s great to see that it’s once again bad to criticize a woman running for vice president.
Now, criticizing Kamala (pronounced “i wil pr?’ nouns h?r nam ene wa i dam wel plez”) Harris has been officially declared racist and cisgender and sexist, as well as sexist, cisgender, and racist, by The New York Times, all of pinko Twitter, and the Fredocons, so we better not criticize her. Got that? No criticism. You must just sit back and let the tsunami of excitement created by the nomination of this avaricious grasper wash over you.
A recap of how Biden got here. “Biden will be the oldest nominee either party has ever had, and would be the oldest occupant of the White House ever on the day he took the oath. But the younger voters who preferred [Bernie] Sanders did not turn out in significant numbers during the primaries, a fact Sanders himself acknowledged.”
Here’s a detailed breakdown of Biden’s hostility to the Second Amendment, including banning import of some AR-pattern rifles and regulating existing rifles.
Watch this. I happen to think it’s a pretty big deal that Kamala’s record is packed with instances where she denied potentially innocent inmates the right to prove their innocence with a simple DNA test.
“Rose McGowan Calls Out Kamala Harris Over Harvey Weinstein: ‘How Many Predators Bankroll You?‘ “Kamala Harris accepted $2,500 from Harvey Weinstein for her re-election campaign for California attorney general in 2014. Three years later, she received another $2,500 donation from Weinstein for her bid for the U.S. Senate.”
After nearly four solid years of CNN screeching about “speaking truth to power,” network staffers are poised to slink back into their usual habit of acting as pro bono spokespersons for the Democratic presidential ticket.
Pour out a cold one for the Golden Age of Journalism.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, campaigned together for the first time this week, promising followers in a socially distanced gymnasium that they will return honor and order to the United States.
CNN employees responded to the campaign event with overwhelmingly positive reviews, singling out Harris’s performance as especially praiseworthy. Some hailed the senator’s allegedly extraordinary rhetorical talents. Some proclaimed the moment an especially historic one in American politics. Some theorized that President Trump must really be scared now. Others marveled simply at what a wonderful smile Harris has.
This is all on top of the fact that many of these same CNN staffers are already awestruck by how incredible and historic it is that Biden picked a woman of color to be his running mate.
“I thought Kamala Harris gave a fantastic speech,” said CNN senior political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson. “She absolutely nailed it. I think this is one of the finest performances I’ve seen her deliver in terms of a speech. She has tremendous range as a speaker.”
It goes on like that for quite a while, each sentence more reverential and cloying than the last.
All true. But did any expect otherwise? I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any member of the Democratic Media Complex who’s expressed the slightest reserve about Harris. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Heh:
The best part in all of this shitshow so far is Biden holding the iPhone upside down. pic.twitter.com/j18kuOTePv
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., used the Kavanaugh nomination in 2018 as a springboard for her failed presidential campaign. Focusing on her support for abortion and position on the Senate Judiciary Committee that handled the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Harris strongly opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination within moments of it being announced, and long before she had a chance to review his record.
She joined other Democratic presidential hopefuls on the steps of the Supreme Court the next day to further express her opposition. She ran 3,600 different advertisements on Facebook before the second round of hearings began in late September 2018.
“Her performance during the Kavanaugh circus stood out as particularly demagogic, cynical & abysmal,” wrote TownHall political editor Guy Benson.
Within a few seconds of the first hearings being gaveled to order, Harris interrupted the proceedings in an attempt to shut them down on procedural grounds, part of a coordinated attack that included attempts by hundreds of compensated activists to get arrested.
Harris, a former prosecutor, led a line of questioning that was an obvious attempt to put Kavanaugh in a perjury trap, albeit a trap he was able to avoid. Harris began by asking Kavanaugh if he had ever discussed Robert Mueller, the special counsel then investigating the Trump presidential campaign, with anyone.
Biden’s positions on tech. He gives lip-service to the corpse of net neutrality, but he has no problem sucking up to donors who hate it (like Comcast). Doesn’t sound like he wants to keep Trump tariffs on China either, which I’m sure will also please many big business donors…
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ former National press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray criticized 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for selecting Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate.
After the news broke that Biden selected Harris to be his running mate, Joy Gray labeled Harris as America’s “top cop” and blasted the Democratic party.
“We are in the midst of the largest protest movement in American history, the subject of which is excessive policing, and the Democratic Party chose a ‘top cop’ and the author of the Joe Biden crime bill to save us from Trump. The contempt for the base is, wow,” Joy Gray said.
Of course, the Social justice Warriors only think they’re the base. The fact Sanders got his ass kicked by Slow Joe proves otherwise…
Ouch!
When a woman uses her body to advance her career, she hurts other women who choose to advance their careers based upon merit and job performance. Any woman who supports Kamala Harris should understand this. #BidenHarrisLandslide2020#SundayMorning
The Biden mental competence story has now fully morphed into a Monty Python sketch about a dead parrot the owner insists is perfectly healthy. I can't even listen to people claiming Biden is perfectly fine without hearing a British accent.
Kamala Harris is that nasty woman at your husband’s work who looks down on you at the Xmas party because you have kids and who tries to hit on your husband to get ahead.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Peace has unexpectedly broken out in the Middle East, the science behind Beirut’s big boom, and more Democrats destroying their own cities.
It’s supposed to hit 105°F in Austin today. Stay frosty…
If Obama had done this, it would be front page news on every paper in America proclaiming what a “historic” peacemaker Obama was. Since no Democrat can take the credit, newspapers that hate Trump and Israel have been downplaying the news as much as possible.
Since people are always talking about “October Surprises,” here’s a possibility: Saudi Arabia and Israel signing their own peace treaty and full diplomatic recognition. Israel and the Saudis have been secretly cooperating against the Iran-Syria axis for quite some time. And now there are public signs of a thaw, including positive depictions of Jews in a new TV drama shown on Saudi TV.
New York’s richest people have fled during the lockdowns. If their kids’ tony public schools don’t offer personal instruction or look likely to maintain the chaos of rolling lockdown brownouts, those wealthy people have better choices. They can stay in their vacation houses or newly bought mansions in states that aren’t locked down. They can hire pod teachers or private schools.
And the longer they stay outside New York City and start to make friends and get used to a new place, the less likely they are to ever return. Cuomo is well aware of this.
“I literally talk to people all day long who are now in their Hamptons house who also lived here, or in their Hudson Valley house, or in their Connecticut weekend house, and I say, ‘You got to come back! We’ll go to dinner! I’ll buy you a drink! Come over, I’ll cook!’” Cuomo revealed in a recent news conference. “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? ‘If I stay there, I’ll pay a lower income tax,’ because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”
Reopening means swimming against their anti-Trump base and teachers union donors’ full-court press to amp school funding and slash teacher duties. That means the below-surface financial and political pressure Cuomo, Pelosi, and Schumer are under to make this kind of a reversal must be huge. It’s likely coming from not only internal polling but also early information about just how many people have left New York and New York City, as well as interpersonal intelligence from their influential social circles.
This means three things. First, the pressure to reopen schools is on everywhere now that New York is doing it. Second, Democrats’ hard opposition to school reopenings has been politically devastating. Third, all the push polls and media scaremongering promoting the idea that most parents shouldn’t and wouldn’t send their kids back to school have failed.
However, the people packing their bags are not coming to New York City — they’re fleeing it for good.
Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.
One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combating mounting crime in the well-heeled ‘hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group NYC Moms for Safer Streets, and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.
“In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” said Carr. “Now you have all this other stuff. It’s a question for families … to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”
She said she started planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance husband and three kids under 7.
“We reached our New York expiration date,” the former nonprofit exec, who’d lived on the UWS since 2007, told The Post from her new home 600 miles away. “Things weren’t heading in the right direction. What we’re seeing now isn’t at all surprising.”
Crimes committed over the past several days would’ve been unheard of a year ago in the quiet neighborhood that’s home to Lincoln Center and restaurants by Daniel Boulud. A 40-year-old woman was randomly stabbed in the 72nd Street subway station at noon Thursday; a 56-year-old man was sucker-punched while dining outdoors with his wife Wednesday night; photos were posted online of a man masturbating on the steps of the New York Historical Society; and onlookers witnessed an apparent overdose in the aisle of a Duane Reade across the street from the Lucerne Hotel.
The Lucerne, at 79th Street and Amsterdam, and the Hotel Belleclaire, at 76th Street and Broadway, were recently converted into homeless shelters, with nearly 300 vagrants between them. Ten of the men are registered sex offenders, including convicted rapists, child molesters and child-porn possessors — all living a block away from a school playground.
“Minneapolis Forcing Riot-Wrecked Businesses To Pay Property Taxes Before Getting Permits To Rebuild.” Pay property taxes for what, since they voted to disband the police. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) (Update: Fortunately, somebody handed the City of Minneapolis a clue-by-four.)
Florida Democrats have a problem: there were supposed to be more of them by now.
Following narrow losses in 2018 races for Florida governor and U.S. Senate, Democrats emerged from the midterms with a new resolve to register more voters in the nation’s largest swing state as a path to victory in 2020. Former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, fresh off a stinging 34,000-vote loss, vowed to “flip Florida blue” by registering or “re-engaging” 1 million voters, including 200,000 new Democrats added by the Florida Democratic Party.
But those initiatives fell well short of their goals. And with seven weeks until mail ballots go out in the Nov. 3 election between presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, Florida Republicans are closer to parity in voter registration than they’ve been in decades — a dynamic that may portend yet another hard-fought, narrowly decided presidential election.
“We won the voter registration war,” Republican Party of Florida Chairman Joe Gruters said last week.
Voter registration — the grunt work of politics — sets the foundation for campaign season. For Florida Democrats, who historically have had a harder time turning out their voters than Republicans, it’s even more crucial.
When former President Barack Obama first won Florida in 2008, he entered the final months of the campaign with an advantage of more than 500,000 registered Democratic voters. That lead has steadily dwindled, dropping to about 259,000 in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Florida by 112,000 votes.
New data posted online Wednesday by the Florida Division of Elections showed that, as of July 20, when books closed on eligible voters for the upcoming Aug. 18 primary, Democrats led Republicans in the state by 240,423 people — about 5,000 fewer than at the same point in 2018.
The videos also show an unnervingly uniform hemisphere of white propagating outward from the blast site, a dome of vicious vapor that eventually hurtles toward every person filming and announces its arrival in the audio with a crash. This hemisphere is the pressure wave produced by the explosion.
No, it’s not a shock wave. It’s a pressure wave, and that key difference affects the number of casualties expected. A shock wave goes from zero pressure to its absolute maximum pressure in literally zero seconds. The impact of a pressure wave is like hitting the ground after rolling down a steep cliff; the force of a shock wave is like hitting the ground after falling through the air and reaching terminal velocity. High explosives produce shock waves; low explosives, like ammonium nitrate, produce pressure waves, which have a bit of slope to their shape, a period of time over which the pressure increases more gradually.
Shocks, because of their fascinating and complex physics, travel faster than the speed of sound, and they cause far more damage than pressure waves. Thankfully, we know this blast did not produce a shock because the speed of the water-vapor-filled white dome can be measured.
The speed of sound in air is 343 meters per second. Based on the viewing angle and distinctive red chairs pictured in some of the later frames, I traced one of the Beirut videos posted by The Guardian to its filming location on the rooftop terrace of La Mezcaleria Rooftop Bar, and measured it to be 885 meters from the center of the blast. From that vantage, the pressure wave can be seen neatly traveling from the center of the blast first to the point halfway between the end of the pier and the edge of the long, massive gray grain silo building, a distance of 151 meters, then to the end of the pier, 262 meters, then eventually to La Mezcaleria.
By measuring the times at which the pressure wave reaches these landmarks on the video, we know that, as it blazed down the pier, its rampage occurred at a speed of only 312 meters per second. That’s slow for a bomb. Then by the time the audible crash and mayhem reached the formerly peaceful and picturesque outdoor bar, it had slowed to at most 289 meters per second. The pressure wave, slower than the 343 meters per second speed of sound, caused destruction, horror, confusion, shattered glass, torn-apart flat surfaces, and disorientation for onlookers as their ears were subjected to the rapid pressure fluctuations. But a shock wave could have caused them to drop dead from lung trauma as they watched.
Snip.
Thanks to modern technology that charge size can be calculated scientifically too, even while waiting for more complete information to trickle out, using the size of the telltale crater. Analysis of the aerial photographs of the pier shows a crater in the range of 120 to 140 meters in diameter; blast physics mixed with history tell us that to carve a chunk that size from the side of the planet requires a charge equivalent to 1.7 to 5.4 million kilograms of TNT (that’s 3.8 to 11.8 million pounds for any Americans dragging their feet on converting to metric). For reference, the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 used the equivalent of 1.8 thousand kilograms of TNT. So, Beirut was at minimum a thousand times more boom than Oklahoma City.
DC comics decided it wanted to get woke, so it’s no surprise that Warner Media decided they needed massive layoffs.
It’s a “bloodbath” at the WarnerMedia-owned DC Comics, with the Editor in Chief, the Publisher, and one third of the editorial staff sacked.
Included in the sackings is — this is a rumor as of yet, not confirmed — leftwing SJW ideologue Andy Khouri, one of the absolute cancers killing the industry, who brought in GamerGate skel Zoe Quinn to “write” “comics” for DC, despite her having no comic book experience and no writing experience (outside Depression Quest and a failed kickstarter). Khouri filled DC’s Vertigo imprint with angry yet untalented SJW freaks; Vertigo was cancelled within a year.
DC had already laid off people last year, and now has to cut even more. Co-publisher Dan DiDio was fired last year, leaving the other co-publisher, Jim Lee, supposedly in charge; now Jim Lee has been pushed out of that position, though he’ll probably be kept in some other role. (He’s a major comic book artist.)
Why did this happen to DC Comics?
Let’s ask Wonder Woman and see if she can tell us.
Oh yeah, everyone involved in this deserved to lose their job:
America:
As a creative Director, this is one of the best ads I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen and worked on a lot across different industries.@realDonaldTrumppic.twitter.com/KcTje7ESIO
Driving back from a barbecue road trip Saturday, I saw a Trump 2020 billboard, which was simplicity itself:
TRUMP: JOBS
BIDEN: MOBS
This is pretty interesting:
Justice Kavanaugh issued a tactical nuke on George Soros & Globalism.
SCOTUS has ruled Organizations affiliated to the “Open Society” lose the protection of 1A and can be treated as international threats as this impacts supporters in the US and abroad.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian™ (@TRHLofficial) August 13, 2020
Google puts its thumb on the scale yet again:
I assumed this was a joke, but it’s real: if you Google “socialism and racism,” the top result you’re offered will be “capitalism and racism.” Big Tech gets more openly ideological by the day. And weird that one of the world’s most profitable companies hates capitalism so much. pic.twitter.com/vhSqflY74g
“I know just the thing to make him complete: Some bacon! I don’t know if it’s cooked, I don’t want to know if it’s cooked. All I need to know is that I get to give him some creepy bacon fingers!
Wants no part of the goat rodeo:
Good morning, Twitter. When you're just trying to get your drunk friend Steve home again and he wants no part of it. pic.twitter.com/5nQv467UnL
I have the great honor to announce that I’ve picked @KamalaHarris — a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants — as my running mate.
The tokenism is obvious, but her history as a prosecutor is a nice “Fuck you!” to the defund the police crowd.
In one sense it mirrors Obama’s pick of Biden himself for VP: A poor rival that was easily bested. But even though Biden only garnered 1% of Iowa caucus votes in 2008, Harris didn’t even make it to the Iowa caucuses, doing so badly on the campaign trail that she dropped out in December.
Let’s stroll through a list of “Kamala Harris Greatest Hits”:
Harris, in contrast, has a legislative agenda that would more than double the size of the federal government. She’s endorsed Medicare for All ($32 trillion over 10 years), the Green New Deal (another $50 trillion to $90 trillion or so), $6,000 in “tax credits” for each working family ($2.8 trillion), and a $78 billion renter-subsidy program. That’s just for starters.
Obama advocated, half-heartedly to be sure, cutting what before Trump was a sky high corporate income tax rate, recognizing that it put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage. Harris wants to crank it back up.
On immigration, Obama promised in his campaign to improve border security. “We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace,” he said.
Harris plans to use executive orders to grant amnesty to millions of illegals.
By the time Harris ran for the Senate, she could count on massive support from Bay Area law firms, real-estate developers, and Hollywood. More important, she appealed, early on, to tech mavens such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Sean Parker, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, venture capitalist John Doerr, Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell, and various executives at tech firms such as Airbnb, Google, and Nest, who have collectively poured money into her campaigns. Their investment was not ill-considered. Harris seems a sure bet for the tech leaders. Her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, was a managing partner with Venable Partners, whose clients include Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and trade associations opposing strict Internet regulations.
Also:
Hey @TwitterSupport. How do you see this as not a conflict of interest when the twitter platform is used for political discussion constantly? What measures do you have in place to ensure a fair platform? pic.twitter.com/cM3lqgOAmJ
One year from now, Democratic voters will believe they made up their own minds to choose Harris as their nominee. Nothing like that is happening. The media giants have chosen Harris (obviously), and now they are assigning that opinion to their persuadable audience. https://t.co/R9hTVdLdaA
“Crime lab scandal rocked Kamala Harris’s term as San Francisco district attorney.”
One reason Harris got where she is: Absolutely fawning social media coverage:
This is just embarrassing. So now journalists are going shopping with Harris, helping pick out clothes and then putting out glowing tweets about it. https://t.co/RX2IY0B8JL
“Twenty Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Kamala Harris.” That’s from early last year, so you probably know about her being Willie Brown’s mistress by now, but might have forgotten her anti-civil liberties stance on things like linking collected DNA evidence to family members and charging the parents of truant kids.
I actually think the guy who used his power to ensure people rot in prison for nonviolent drug crimes picking the lady who used hers to ensure people keep rotting there even in cases where any reasonable person would have had concerns about those convictions makes perfect sense.
Biden inserts foot into mouth yet again, refuses to leave his basement for something as trivial as the DNC, embraces illegal alien amnesty, mumbles about China, plays footsie with more commies, and gives up on door-knocking. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Indeed, there’s not going to be any in-person DNC at all. Why would anyone watch an online streaming convention unless it’s their job? What’s the point if you can’t see the freaks in the funny hats?
On his website, former Vice President (and presumptive Democratic candidate for president) Joe Biden vows, if elected, to pass legislation “providing a roadmap to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants”. Last week, his old boss, former President Barack Obama, explained how Biden (or whoever controls him) will do it: by eliminating the filibuster.
Snip.
Obama believes that Biden will be elected, and that the Democrats will win a majority in the Senate in November, as the Wall Street Journal postulated on July 30. That will enable both to push for legislation that they want — like statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. And amnesty for illegal aliens.
Each of these actions will solidify a Democratic majority into the foreseeable future, and give the party of Jackson the White House for as long.
Snip.
If the Democrats maintain control of the House, win the White House, and gain control of the Senate and end the filibuster, amnesty would be among the first bills that would be rammed through to signature in the 117th Congress, for that most basic (and base) of reasons: power.
Assuming that there are 10.5 million illegal aliens in the United States (a conservative estimate the Pew Research Center in June 2019 made of the population in 2017), and depending on the parameters of the amnesty, that would mean that there could be that many new voters (or more) in 2026.
Donald Trump’s campaign says it knocked on over 1 million doors in the past week alone.
Joe Biden’s campaign says it knocked on zero.
The Republican and Democratic parties — from the presidential candidates on down — are taking polar opposite approaches to door-to-door canvassing this fall. The competing bets on the value of face-to-face campaigning during a pandemic has no modern precedent, making it a potential wild card in November, especially in close races.
Biden and the Democratic National Committee aren’t sending volunteers or staffers to talk with voters at home, and don’t anticipate doing anything more than dropping off literature unless the crisis abates. The campaign and the Democratic National Committee think they can compensate for the lack of in-person canvassing with phone calls, texts, new forms of digital organizing, and virtual meet-ups with voters.
I don’t know how effective door-knocking is in 2020, but I do know that every other method listing is easy to ignore. I suspect that door-knocking and direct mail work better for casual voters than “virtual meetups,” mainly because a 1% chance of effectivity is better than a 0% chance.
Gertrude Stein once quipped of her native Oakland, California, “there is no there there.” Isn’t that how it is with Joe Biden? He doesn’t make gaffes; he is a gaffe, poor thing. (I’ve expatiated on this elsewhere.)
I suspect that most Americans, whatever side of the political aisle they occupy, do not really see Joe Biden—especially when, like Alice, they are looking directly at him. They need to manage a sidelong glance, a sudden shift of perspective to catch his drift (and I employ the word “drift” advisedly).
This was brought home to me by an article that appeared a few days ago in Le Figaro, the biggest newspaper in France. The headline summed up its burden: “La stupéfiante indulgence des grands médias américains envers Joe Biden”—“The stupefying indulgence of big American media towards Joe Biden.”
The author evinced no pro-Trump sympathies. On the contrary. Yet he wrote in amazement at the seamless media distortion that worked to disparage Trump while excusing Biden—a process that “va jusqu’à l’occultation des faits”—goes so far (add an expression of amazement) as to conceal the facts.
Description of plagiarizing Neil Kinnock snipped.
The article in Le Figaro notes that the American media has generally covered for Democrats while castigating Republicans. Just think of their worshipful treatment of JFK and demonization of Richard Nixon. (And the love affair with all things Kennedy reached back to JFK’s father—Hitler’s favorite U.S. ambassador—and forward to Teddy “Chappaquiddick” “waitress sandwich” Kennedy and beyond. And of course, the media positively fawned over Barack Obama while snarling endlessly at George W. Bush.
But there is something different and more extreme about the indulgence lavished upon Joe Biden and the obloquy heaped upon President Trump. Le Figaro quotes Joel Kotkin, an outspoken opponent of Trump’s, who nevertheless acknowledges he has “never seen a president treated the way he was. The effort to remove him was already being considered before he even set foot in the White House!”
Meanwhile, Joe Biden, endeavoring to ingratiate himself with black voters, claims that he was arrested by South African police while attempting to visit Nelson Mandela. But he wasn’t and he didn’t. “Invention,” Figaro notes, “du début à la fin.”
In brief, the difference in the treatment accorded to Trump and Biden is the difference between a bright daytime and a black night. . . . It amounts to a democratic scandal that is essentially Orwellian.
In one sense, the article in Le Figaro tells us nothing we didn’t already know. And yet it reveals a rift or fissure in The Narrative that is obvious to everyone outside the bubble, outside the echo chamber of American punditocracy. Joe Biden is toast. Already the polls, rigged though most of them are, are tightening. President Trump is calmly stealing the Democrats’ thunder, issuing executive orders on everything from payroll tax cuts to instituting a moratorium on evictions.
Coronavirus hysteria has, at least for now, prevented the president from deploying his biggest vote-getter, the huge rally. But he has adapted and is outflanking poor Biden on every front.
Remember: Hispanics are diverse, but black people are not:
Joe Biden says that “Unlike the African-American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community" pic.twitter.com/eSw8tU5fVQ
More on Biden’s black people aren’t diverse gaffe. “I think what happened is that Biden, in cognitive decline, is losing the ability to maintain the boundary between what is said behind the scenes with his advisers and what is appropriate for speech to the general public.”
More on the same subject:
From the media’s way of telling it, if Trump makes a racist statement, it’s proof he’s a racist. Case closed! But if Biden makes 10 racist statements, those are GAFFES. The implication is that Biden isn’t a racist, only a bungler. The guy just misspoke, again and again and again
The Biden/Sanders Unity Platform explicitly calls for defunding police agencies. Black Lives Matter leaders are demanding even more radical changes to the criminal justice system, and in an interview late last month, Biden responded “Absolutely” when he was asked if he would divert funds away from law enforcement.
Yet, just today, Biden said he supports additional funding for police. Perhaps it is a poll-driven statement as polls have repeatedly shown this is deeply unpopular.
Snip.
Now the Radical Communist Party (RCP) has endorsed Biden. They did it very carefully, saying Biden is still a terrible candidate, but he is the lesser of two evils. For them, he certainly is. Trump will stand up to the anarcho-communists in antifa and other groups. Biden’s inner circle sympathizes with their aims, and their allies are ascendant in the Democrat party.
Just today, another candidate supported by the Justice Democrats defeated an incumbent Democrat. Cori Bush, Ferguson Black Lives Matter leader, will join the other ideologues in the Squad when she wins in November. She defeated Lacy Clay, a black man whose father founded the Congressional Black Caucus. Clay supported Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, yet he wasn’t radical enough for new urban Democrats. She is the sixth socialist challenger to win a primary.
Remember that the Radical Communist Party was the group that had pre-printed signs ready to go for the Ferguson riots.
Spokespeople for Refuse Fascism include Carl Dix, a founding member of the RCP and Sunsara Taylor, another member of the RCP. The cutest thing about Taylor is that she also sits on the board of World Can’t Wait. This organization used the exact same language, accusations of bigotry and fascism, and calls to drive out the regime following the reelection of George W. Bush. And the same ridiculous logic to tie their batty ideas together.
It almost seems like the RCP pushes out these satellite groups that borrow the 501(c)(3) status from another organization to fund their riots and destruction every time Democrats lose an election. Refuse Fascism runs its donations through the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ). Its funders read like a who’s who of left-wing radicals from Tides to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.
Last month, multiple Wall Street bundlers, including Alan Leventhal, the chief executive of Beacon Capital; Nat Simons, who runs a clean-tech investment fund; and Mr. Gray, Blackstone’s president, held virtual fund-raisers for Mr. Biden. The giving has been so robust that the Biden campaign is now asking for at least $1 million in donations before it will confirm the former vice president’s attendance at an event, say bundlers.
As the checks roll in, the Biden campaign has been carefully cultivating its relationship with the business community, with a focus on Wall Street. The outreach has included offering private briefings ahead of major policy rollouts and dangling various donor packages for the upcoming, and mostly virtual, Democratic National Convention.
I guess Democrats think the 1% is cool now that the real class enemy is working class cops…
Does he even mean WHO here, or did he mean the WTO?
Speaking of China:
#China is interfering in our election with almost all of its effort directed at unseating Prez #Trump. In this cycle, Beijing will do far more than any other foreign power has ever done, and that includes #Russia. #Biden
I heard someone describe whoever Biden picks for VP as his “living will”. That’s as good a description as any. (Biden would be older on his first day in office than Ronald Reagan, our oldest president, was on his last.)
The “final” Biden veep pick “rankings“: Harris, Rice, Whitmer, Duckworth, Bass. I don’t know any pundit that doesn’t think Biden is going to pick a black woman.
Biden promises to shovel trillions into Social Justice and green energy ratholes, how Democrats plan to steal the election, more Slow Joe verbal stumbles, and a potential VP pick has a commie past. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Joe Biden says he wants equality. Who could be against that? But if just declaring yourself in favor of equality were enough, we would not still be arguing about equality in 2020. As always, when politicians talk about inequality, watch your wallet. And in this case, watch the Constitution, too.
In the past week, the Biden campaign has announced plans of Castro-esque length aimed at racial equality and women’s equality. We suppose we should at least welcome Biden’s continued willingness to use that old-fashioned word “women.” But Biden is so stuck in the past that he would pronounce the Equal Rights Amendment already ratified based on state legislative approvals in the 1970s. The deadline for the expiration of those long-ago votes was so clear, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg considers them dead letters. Biden would go further, demanding Senate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a radical-feminist 1970s treaty under which even Scandinavian countries get hectored for allowing women to assume the primary role in child-rearing. Biden would also restore the Obama-era unilateral executive fiat under which domestic violence and sexual violence are made the basis for political asylum, a position with no basis in the immigration laws enacted by Congress, and no limiting principle.
Human rights get rough treatment under the plans. Biden proposes to roll back due-process protections for the accused in campus sexual-assault cases. The secret ballot for union elections is to be replaced by reviving “card check” elections. Biden once posed as a pro-lifer reluctantly supporting legal abortion, while opposing — for four decades — taxpayer-funded abortion. So much for that. He pledges that “his Justice Department will do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that so blatantly violate Roe v. Wade,” and that he will “restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood,” restore U.S. funding to the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund, and “restore the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate” to ignore the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision and restart the government’s assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Many of the proposals boil down to the same old thing: more federal spending of taxpayer money, more power and goodies for unions, more workplace regulations, more dividing people up by race. The price tag of all these initiatives adds up to some $7 trillion in new spending, most of it permanent. Right off the bat, a $2 trillion “accelerated investment” is pledged in a “clean energy future,” with the restriction that “disadvantaged communities receive 40 percent of overall benefits of spending in the areas of clean energy and energy efficiency deployment” — a telltale sign that this is more about spreading money around to favored constituencies than about “science.”
The Biden plan requires we eliminate all greenhouse gases from the electricity grid that powers the country by 2035. As is usual, Biden is an underachieving. We’re all supposed to be dead in 10 years if you believe the climate alarmists. This deadline is just more proof that no one does.
As Reason editor Nick Gillespie pointed out, the current plan is just another way to pander to organized labor. He also correctly pointed out that there is no way we should be spending $2 trillion after all the pandemic spending. However, you can be sure that it will not deter Biden.
However, the Guardian is also pointing out what serious opposition the plan will face. The program requires building tens of thousands of new wind turbines and millions of new solar panels. These numbers are likely an underestimate. Renewable energy sources are very low-density and not well suited to powering urban areas. There are also some areas of the country where neither would be particularly efficient.
Sergio Aguirre and Nitin Chadda had reached the most elite quarters of U.S. foreign policy. Aguirre had started out of school as a fellow in the White House and a decade later had become chief of staff to U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Chadda, who joined the Pentagon out of college as a speechwriter, had become a key adviser to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in even less time. Now, Chadda had a long-shot idea.
They turned to an industry of power-brokering little known outside the capital: strategic consultancies. Retiring leaders often open firms bearing their names: Madeleine Albright has one, as do Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. Their strategic consultancies tend to blur corporate and governmental roles. This obscure corner of Washington is critical to understanding how a President Joe Biden would conduct foreign policy. He has been picking top advisers from this shadowy world.
Snip.
The problem for Aguirre and Chadda was that neither young man was a marquee name. Chadda realized that the latest crop of senior officials hadn’t yet started their own named consultancies. “The thought for us was to build a living and breathing platform, with those who are enthusiastic about serving again,” he said. Staying up late one night, they drafted a plan and came up with the first target they would pitch.
Michèle Flournoy had served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012. Both Aguirre and Chadda had known her well in the Obama administration. Since leaving office, she’d spent several years in consulting and was hitting her stride. With Flournoy as senior adviser, Boston Consulting Group’s defense contracts grew from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. Before she joined, according to public records, BCG had not signed any contracts with the Defense Department.
Flournoy, while consulting, joining corporate boards, and serving as a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, had also become CEO of the Center for a New American Security in 2014. The think tank had an annual budget of about $9 million, and defense contractors donated at least $3.8 million while she was CEO. By 2017, she was making $452,000 a year.
If a Democrat were to win office, she would likely become the first woman defense secretary. She had considered an offer to serve as deputy to Trump’s first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, but ultimately withdrew from the vetting process and stuck to consulting. “That’s more of a labor of love,” she told me. “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important.”
Intrigued by Aguirre and Chadda’s idea of starting her own shop, she had one condition: find another big name, so it wouldn’t just be Flournoy and Associates.
They needed another co-founder. Establishing a new firm was an investment and a risk, and many Obama officials were already spoken for, some headhunted by corporations or consultancies, others returning to academic appointments or finding respite in research institutions—many wearing all those hats at once.
Flournoy could carry her own private practice, but she didn’t want a firm with her name on it alone. The trio reached out to defense and intelligence honchos, but with no luck. Then a particular Washington fixture came to light.
He had been Vice President Joe Biden’s right-hand man for almost two decades and finished out the Obama administration as deputy secretary of state. He was known for his unimpeachable ethics. Having written Biden’s speeches for years, he had started to enunciate with the vice president’s drawl when he appeared on CNN. He had never cashed in on his international connections, years of face time with Saudi, Israeli, and Chinese leaders.
His name was Tony Blinken. With his commitment to join Flournoy as founding partner, a new strategic consultancy was born. They called it WestExec Advisors.
Add Avril Haines, another Obama alumnus, to the list of names.
If you believe that personnel is policy, it’s worth reading the whole thing. WestExec sucked up a lot of defense contractor consulting cash.
They think a businessman is best suited to turn the country around economically. They feel Covid-19 was not Trump’s fault, and he’s doing the best he can to contain it. They conflate the Black Lives Matter protesters with the rioters attacking federal buildings and retail shops. They don’t want historic monuments torn down. And they dismiss defunding the police as ridiculous.
These voters tell me they want America finally to be put first; they oppose immigration and trade policies they say give benefits to foreigners at their expense. And they want a non-politician who relentlessly fights back, after witnessing too many office holders fold in the face of special interests.
These voters may sound like typical Fox News watchers, but, significantly, the overwhelming majority are not. Many are, instead, people who get their news disproportionately from local television, regional websites and Facebook. Compared to the kinds of people who seek out news from national cable channels, many swing voters reside in a national politics desert.
Reading between the lines: “These people are beyond the reach of, or see through, the national MSM preference falsification system.”
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has pledged $20 million this cycle to oppose Democratic-backed efforts to ease voting restrictions while Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said his campaign has assembled 600 attorneys as a bulwark against election subterfuge.
With a little more than three months until Election Day, the voting rules in key battleground states are the focus of bitterly partisan court fights that could influence the outcome of the presidential race. These include lawsuits to expand mail-in voting in Texas, extend vote-by-mail deadlines in key Rust Belt swing states and restore the voting rights of up to one million indigent Floridians with felony records.
At present, the Democrats are attempting to unseat an incumbent president by devising a plan where their candidate doesn’t have to be seen in public for most of the general election campaign. They’re desperate to keep Joe Biden hidden until as many early and mail-in votes as possible are cast for him because they know that the first time he’s on his own in public he’s going to pull down his mask and start sniffing strangers, all the while barking, “Barack likes me!”
On the rare occasions when the idiot in the basement is let off-leash by his wife and handlers, he’s babbling about President Trump trying to “steal” the election. He keeps saying it, too, most recently at a virtual fundraiser hosted by one of the celebrities Hillary Clinton thought would wish her to victory.
Snip.
In each one of these “steal the election” rants, Biden immediately rambles on about mail-in ballots. Again, that’s all they’ve got and they know it. That’s where the real election-stealing can happen and it’s not going to be done by the Republicans.
The Democrats have shown — especially in the Trump era — that most of what they throw at the Republicans is just a bunch of twisted political psychological projection.
For example, take the absurd notion that Dems have recycled from 2016. They are again insisting that President Trump won’t accept the election results, giving it a minor update, saying that he won’t leave the White House now that he’s the incumbent.
This from the party whose vanquished alcoholic grandmother from 2016 is still going on television and saying that the election was stolen from her. Throw in Stacey Abrams and her ongoing psychotic break about being the real governor of Georgia and I think we can see which side has a difficult time accepting the results of an election.
In fact, the violence we’re seeing now has more to do with hating Trump than it does with the death of George Floyd. The Democrats began their “peaceful protests” almost the moment Trump was elected and have been ranging back and forth between simple public incivility and violence ever since. It’s been one long tantrum about not accepting the 2016 election results.
“It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of s–t in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still s–t’, ” Sanders co-chair Nina Turner told The Atlantic.
Turner, a former Ohio state senator, was quoted in an article analyzing Trump’s paths to re-election, including by exploiting disaffected supporters of Sanders’ socialist campaign, which lost to Biden despite winning the first three state Democratic contests this year.
UK’s Sunday Expresshas a poll up showing President Trump leading Biden by a couple of points:
The third in a series of monthly Democracy Institute/ Sunday Express polls has given President Trump a surprise lead over his Democrat rival of 48 percent to 46 percent, his clearest lead yet.
Crucially, President Trump has a lead of 48 percent to 43 percent in the swing states Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin which would put him back in the White House with an electoral college tally of 309 to Biden’s 229.
Specifically, in Florida Trump has a 47 to 45 point lead, Minnesota (where the black lives matters protests began) a 46/45 lead, and New Hampshire a 46/43 lead.
The polling suggests Mr Trump is emerging as the race leader because of a belief he is best in handling the economy.
With a third of voters putting the economy as the top election issue and 66 percent thinking that the economy is bouncing back after coronavirus, voters believe that Trump is better for the economy by 57 percent to 43 percent.
Snip.
According to the poll 71 percent of Trump voters are “shy” to admit it compared to 66 percent a month ago.
However, 79 percent of Trump voters are enthusiastic about their candidate compared to just 41 percent of Biden voters, two points lower than a month ago.
Meanwhile, only 4 percent of Trump voters believe they could change their mind while 10 percent of Biden voters could switch.
And here’s a Twitter thread on just that question:
Joe Biden last year in Keene, New Hampshire: "I’ve been here a number of times…I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?” pic.twitter.com/YZBP4ybQ3z
Democrats are waking up to the terrifying realization that if #HollowJoe debates, he's done. And if he doesn't debate, he's done because he didn't debate.
Dems also suspect they really DID push Trump supporters to lie to pollsters. #Landslide2020
Bill Clinton’s ex-pres secretary (not him, not her, yeah, him) wants you to know that Biden can still lose. But you have to wade through Democratic Party talking points to get to that, so I’ve saved you some time…
‘Squad’ Member Tlaib Won’t Endorse Biden. She supported Sanders in the primaries.
“Biden Campaign Says He Is So Close To A VP Pick He Can Smell Her.”
If you’ve ever read about the the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and said to yourself “You know, there just wasn’t enough rioting and violence going on there!” you may get your wish:
More than 100 law enforcement agencies have reportedly pulled out of security agreements to send personnel to help with security at the Democratic National Convention next month in part because they are concerned about recent efforts to limit law enforcement’s use of tear gas and pepper spray in responding to violent riots.
Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales was ordered last month to change the department’s policies to ban the use of tear gas and pepper spray.
“Since the Milwaukee order was issued, more than 100 law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin and across the country decided against coming to Milwaukee, Morales told WTMJ-TV on Tuesday,” the Associated Press reported. “They were concerned with directives placed on the police department, including not allowing tear gas or pepper spray, he said.”
In Wisconsin, Franklin Police Chief Rick Oliva said, “It is apparent there is a lack of commitment to provide the Milwaukee Police Department with the resources it needs to ensure the safety of peaceful protesters, attendees, citizens and police personnel. I can not send personnel if they are not properly equipped or will not be allowed to engage in appropriate actions which would ensure their safety.”
Waukesha Police Chief Daniel Thompson responded by indicating that his department would not be sending officers to event, saying, “I understand that use of chemical irritants and pepper spray is serious and those are to be used only when legally justified. But when you take that out of the continuum that doesn’t leave the officers much other than getting harmed or using deadly force and that’s not good for any officer or the public.”
The news comes as violent left-wing riots have rocked multiple cities across the U.S. in the weeks since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“Unfortunately, some have chosen to respond to George Floyd’s death in a far less productive way – by demonizing the police, promoting slogans like ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), and making grossly irresponsible proposals to defund the police,” Attorney General William Barr said in prepared remarks to the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “The demonization of police is not only unfair and inconsistent with the principle that all people should be treated as individuals, but gravely injurious to our inner city communities. There is no harder job in America today than being a police officer.”
This will provide a handy test of just how much control centrist Democrats have over the radical antifa and #BlackLivesMatter rioters their financial backers have helped underwrite. My guess is: Less than they think.
The Milwaukee DNC has been scaled-down to being “mostly” virtual, but hundreds still plan to “protest.” Maybe the larger #BlackLivesMatter/antifa community will see it as a new opportunity to bus in for mayhem and to set an entirely new city on fire.
The International Order of Police and Fraternal Order of Police have both endorsed President Trump, and given how much leftwing activists openly hate their guts, I’m betting a lot more prominent local police unions will follow suit.
Come convention time, one wonders if the entirety of the Milwaukee police force will stage a “blue flu” sick-out.
Alternately, the DNC may view this as a great excuse to completely cancel all the “in-person” portions of the Democratic National Convention entirely. The certainly don’t want to expose Joe Biden to any more human interaction than necessary…
Over 90 field organizers for the Florida Democratic Party signed a scathing letter Friday to the party’s leadership, claiming among other things that the campaign is “suppressing the Hispanic vote” in Central Florida.
The seven-page internal letter, obtained by the Miami Herald, contains eight allegations from field organizers about what they say is a lack of a “fully actionable field plan” from the Biden campaign as it transitions into the Florida party to coordinate voter outreach efforts.
This letter comes 100 days out from the general election and as recent polls show enthusiasm about voting among Latinos in battleground states like Florida could be waning in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among the claims: mistreatment of field organizers, relocating trained staff members without explanation, lack of organizing resources and taking on volunteers who are then left in limbo.
In a battleground state where elections are historically won by thin margins — and as presidential campaigns ramp up outreach efforts in Florida’s Hispanic communities — organizers claim that the Coordinated Campaign lacks key infrastructure and perpetuates a “toxic” work culture that is hurting morale among on-the-ground staffers.
One big issue is that at least a handful of organizers were recently transferred from a heavily-Puerto Rican part of the state to counties with a small percentage of Hispanics.
“Four of five Spanish-speaking organizers along the I-4 corridor who were moved to North Florida were Puerto Rican,” the letter says.
Field organizers add that input from staffers connected to Puerto Ricans living in Central Florida is often dismissed.
“The [Coordinated Campaign of Florida] is suppressing the Hispanic vote by removing Spanish-speaking organizers from Central Florida without explanation, which fails to confront a system of white-dominated politics we are supposed to be working against as organizers of a progressive party,” the letter adds.
A Democratic official familiar with internal discussions who asked not to be named said the letter comes amid negotiations between the Coordinated Campaign in Florida and the field organizers’ union, the IBEW Local 824.
So the Biden campaign is plagued by internal dissension thanks to Social Justice pandering, ethnic identity groups, and unions.
“Trump neck and neck with Biden, 45%-47%, approval equal with Obama’s in 2012.” The usual “polls are meaningless” caveats apply, along with the perception that Rasmussen favors Republicans. As opposed to all the other polls, which favor Democrats by about 3% in a good year… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
We’ve all heard the rumors. Joe Biden is running for president. Joe Biden has a huge lead in the polls. Joe Biden can tie his own shoes.
All are difficult to prove or understand.
I know that Joe Biden’s Twitter account is running for president. It’s a horrible candidate, by the way, maybe worse than he is in person. As for the shoe-tying thing, I’d wager good money that, if you asked Joe to tie his shoes he would try to shove a peanut butter and jelly sandwich up his nose.
The lead in the polls is the most mystifying, however. It’s true that many of us have a well-founded distrust of pollsters. In the past, however, when they’ve been deliberately skewing things one could at least find the occasional supporter of the candidate they were trying to prop up. They were ridiculously off about Granny Maojackets in 2016, but most of us at least met some Hillary voters.
Joe Biden is a different thing altogether. Last week, a friend of mine who is well-placed on Capitol Hill remarked that no one in D.C. is talking about Joe Biden. In the ensuing four days, three other friends whose opinions I also respect mentioned that nobody ever meets a Biden supporter in person.
I live in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the most liberal city in Arizona. It’s left-wing bumper sticker (Coexist!) and yard sign hell here. None of them mention Joe Biden. Bernie bumper stickers abound, however. Heck, I have a neighbor up the street who still has a Bernie 2016 sign up, so it’s not like the local folk aren’t dedicated.
This is all anecdotal, of course, but so were the rumors about flyover country support for Trump in 2016.
Snip.
What we’re looking at now is a candidate who is, according to polling, a juggernaut but one whose real world support is nigh on invisible. It hasn’t been that long since the national pollsters were really, really wrong, of course. However, this disconnect between Biden’s poll numbers and the nonexistent enthusiasm for his candidacy is weird even when you factor in the plague year and Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The leftist loons that run the New York Times editorial board wonder who Biden listens to. It’s pretty tiresome, but it does let us capture the names of some of Biden’s advisors.
The Democratic Party’s activist base, especially its younger members, harbors grave doubts about Mr. Biden and has vowed to keep the pressure on as he charts a path forward. One big, basic question on many people’s minds is, Just how far left will Joe go?
Snip.
Skepticism about Mr. Biden runs deep on the left. During more than four decades in public office, he earned a reputation as a pragmatic centrist (sorry!) — the guy President Obama sent to negotiate deals with congressional Republicans that no one else wanted to be in the room with. Some progressives regard him as just the sort of compromised, compromising, politics-as-usual establishment tool standing in the way of meaningful change, and they fear that he has surrounded himself with other establishment tools who see the activist base as a threat to the existing power structure that must be neutralized.
“There’s a whole wing of the Democratic Party establishment that doesn’t simply want an electoral victory,” they want it on terms that let them “weave a narrative” to discredit the left, said Mr. Mitchell. “They want to defeat Trump and progressives in one fell swoop.”
Conversely, the Social Justice Warriors in the party’s insane wing are just as willing to lose this election if it means getting to control the party’s levers of power.
As the saying goes: Personnel is policy. But the campaign has been cagey about who is advising it and how the policy sausage gets made. Members of its extended economics team, for instance, were ordered to keep quiet about their campaign work. They can tell friends and colleagues, according to a memo acquired by The Times, but should not mention their affiliation “on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn or in your professional bio.” And they should steer clear of the news media. Period.
Some names have trickled out. Progressives are not happy that Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff/congressman/mayor of Chicago is advising the campaign on economic policy and political strategy. (The left’s grievance list against this former Clintonite is long, and his mayoral tenure was marred by serious police scandals, including the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, which prompted protests and an investigation by the Justice Department.) “Not the sign we want to see,” said Rahna Epting, the executive director of the grass roots group MoveOn.
Even more explosive was the April news that Lawrence Summers has been offering his economic insights. A veteran of the Clinton and Obama White Houses, Mr. Summers is viewed as a neoliberal, business-cozy monster by the left, his name invoked with a level of distaste normally reserved for child predators.
In early May, more than two dozen progressive groups sent an open letter to Mr. Biden, demanding that he remove Mr. Summers from any campaign advisory role and “exclude him from a future Biden administration.” Charging that Mr. Summers had “put the interests of large corporations ahead of working families in the United States and around the world, fueled the climate crisis, and undermined efforts to ensure gender equality,” they declared it “hard to imagine a worse person than Larry Summers to guide the next President toward an economy that works for all.”
The Biden campaign has met such criticisms with assurances that it is listening to a wide range of voices.
Translation: “Run along, little girl, the adults are trying to speak.”
With Mr. Biden having spent the last half-century collecting friends, aides and advisers, not to mention this campaign’s fast-growing official staff, the org chart for Team Biden can be hard to decipher. His inner circle is defined differently depending on whom you ask, and even reasonably senior staffers aren’t always clear about who does what. But whether you think in terms of concentric circles or Venn diagrams or pyramids of power, there are legions of people offering counsel.
For instance, the campaign is consulting with more than 100 left-leaning experts on economic policy. The nominee’s regular briefings are conducted by a smaller core of liberal economists, former Obama officials and advisers to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Former Clinton 2016 advisors: There’s a surefire recipe for victory!
On foreign policy, the nominee has a large network of working groups subdivided according to specialty: nuclear proliferation, the Middle East, China, etc. Who is running these groups, and how much real influence they have, is hard to pin down. For all Mr. Trump’s ravings about China, international matters typically receive less play in presidential races than do domestic issues such as jobs or health care — meaning the Biden campaign is facing relatively little leftward pressure. When Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders formed a collection of working groups in the spring to hammer out joint proposals on various policy issues, foreign policy was not even among the topics tackled.
This likely suits Mr. Biden just fine. Foreign policy is kind of his thing. His expertise runs deep. He knows the players and the issues. As vice president, his instincts were more cautious and minimalist than those of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Times once described the two as representing “the yin and the yang of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy.”
But, in this as in so many areas, Mr. Biden is a solidly establishment player, and he relies on a clutch of trusted hands, including Julie Smith, Tom Donilon and Tony Blinken, who sits atop the campaign’s foreign policy shop. Mr. Blinken has been with Mr. Biden for nearly two decades and served as his national security adviser in the Obama White House.
Don’t expect his team to be taking on the military-industrial complex or taking up calls to slash funding for the Pentagon. The nominee’s message thus far has been mainstream and soothing, with talk of rebuilding frayed alliances and restoring American leadership on issues ranging from nuclear arms to the Middle East to global warming.
Other top policy dogs: Stef Feldman is the campaign’s official policy director, while Jake Sullivan serves as a combination gatekeeper and air traffic controller, gathering input, coordinating info and bringing order to the chaos across fields and working groups. Bruce Reed, one of Mr. Biden’s chiefs of staff in the Obama White House and a former head of the now-defunct centrist Democratic Leadership Council, also plays a central advisory role. (He used to brief Mr. Biden on campaign trips — in the pre-Covid days when people could still travel.)
Many of those with the most influence operate outside any official lines of authority. Mr. Biden’s inner circle includes longtime loyalists like Mr. Klain; Mike Donilon (brother of the aforementioned Tom), Mr. Biden’s political guru; Steve Ricchetti, who was another of his chiefs of staff in the Obama administration, and Ted Kaufman, who has been with Mr. Biden since his 1972 Senate race. These are the kitchen cabinet folks who make progressives super nervous. They are considered establishment fogies unlikely to challenge the nominee or push him to think big.
The inner ranks are not entirely closed to newcomers. Anita Dunn, a veteran of Obamaworld, effectively took control of Mr. Biden’s primary campaign in the shake-up following his loss in Iowa, and continues to wield serious clout. But Ms. Dunn is herself a Washington fixture and an object of suspicion for some on the left.
“He’s not listening to the folks he needs to listen to,” said Yvette Simpson, who leads the political action committee Democracy for America.
“Wah! He’s not listening to the right leftwing lunatics! Wah!”
It’s all tedious inside baseball stuff, but I’m harvesting and tagging those names so I can track them for future reference if, say, one of them testifies at a future congressional hearing on illegal Chinese contributions to the Biden campaign, just to pluck a random hypothetical out of thin air.
Also mentioned: Sister Valerie Biden Owens and wife Jill Biden.
Instead of telling people Biden is not competent, let Biden continue to show it. The former vice president will misspeak a lot in the coming weeks and months. Let the American people see by his words and actions that he’s not all there. Leave it to surrogates to draw attention to his gaffes. They should do so with sadness rather than ridicule. The message should be: We’ve all seen loved ones struggle with memory loss as they age. No one likes to see it, or point it out. But in Biden’s case, it can’t be ignored. Because our loved ones aren’t asking to be given the nuclear codes. Biden is.
It all started when, after about 40 minutes of an almost-continuous Biden monologue at an April event, Frank Fahey, a Claremont, N.H., teacher, asked Biden: “What law school did you attend and where did you place in that class?”
Here’s Biden full answer:
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”
Biden didn’t even mention where he went to law school, but it was at Syracuse University. The problem was, as Newsweek revealed:
Biden did not go to Syracuse Law School on a “full academic scholarship.” It was a half scholarship based on financial need.
He didn’t finish in the “top half” of his class. He was 76th out of 85.
He did not win the award given to the outstanding political science student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware.
He didn’t graduate from Delaware with “three degrees,” but with a single B.A. in political science and history.
Gallup says there’s little reason Biden will appeal more or less to Catholics, being the first Catholic Vice President and supporting abortion. Maybe. But it’s pretty obvious that Social Justice is the only allowed religion of the Democratic Party…
“Senate Republicans secure impeachment witness who flagged concern about Hunter Biden.” That would be George Kent. Remember that the Burisma scandal never went away…
Biden says Trump is wrong to hold China accountable for coronavirus because Americans can’t distinguish “between a South Korean and someone from Beijing.”
The patronizing view of voters aside, not sure what that has to do with the CCP, or anything. pic.twitter.com/hWUbIRK910
Tara Reade would still like to look at Biden’s records at the University of Delaware. So would Judicial Watch:
Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of itself and the Daily Caller News Foundation against the University of Delaware for former Vice President Joe Biden’s Senate records, which are housed at the university’s library (Daily Caller News Foundation v. University of Delaware (N20A-07-001 CEB)). The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware.
The university said it will not release the records until two years after Biden has retired from public life.
The Daily Caller and Judicial Watch filed requests on April 30 for all of Biden’s records and for records about the preservation and any proposed release of the records, including communications with Mr. Biden or his representatives.
If current trends continue until Election Day, the economy will be surging, vaccinations will be imminent, and Biden will no longer be allowed to use cutlery at dinner.
Incompetent, George Soros backed St. Louis Democratic prosecutor Kim Gardner announced that she’s filing felony charges against Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who defended their home against #BlackLivesMatter intruders by merely brandishing their weapons on their own property. In fact, Gardner charged the couple with both a felony and misdemeanor count, evidently intending to pressure the couple into pleading guilty to the misdemeanor charges to avoid jail time.
Within hours of the ruling, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a brief seeking to dismiss Gardner’s charges against the McCloskeys on the grounds that their Second Amendment rights are being violated.
“The right to keep and bear arms is given the highest level of protection in our constitution and our laws, including the Castle Doctrine, which provides broad rights to Missourians who are protecting their property and lives from those who wish to do them harm,” Schmitt said in a prepared statement provided to Fox News.
“Despite this, Circuit Attorney Gardner filed suit against the McCloskeys, who, according to published reports, were defending their property and safety. As Missouri’s Chief law enforcement officer, I won’t stand by while Missouri law is being ignored,” Schmitt said.
The brief filing says the attorney general “respectfully requests that the Court dismiss this case at the earlier possible opportunity.”
Note that this is not the first time Schmitt has rebuked Gardner for being unwilling to do her damn job.
Since the beginning of the 2020 campaign season, Donald Trump has been behind in almost every single poll.
When there were 16 Democrats running, America was presented with polls showing that he’d lose to almost every single one of them — and now that the nominee is former Vice President Joe Biden, we are shown polls weekly that have Mr. Biden ahead by more than 10 points, as well as winning every battleground state. Those numbers seem not only illogical, but unbelievable — because they are — and the behavior of Democrats backs that up.
Democrats are acting with the same grasping-for-straws panic that they have been since 2016.
Snip.
Actions speak louder than words — and where Democrats continue to spike the football with their words by touting double-digit leads by the former vice president over President Trump, their behavior remains panicked, violent and desperate. Winners exert confidence and understand that their time is coming. There’s no need for them to continue to pile on their opponent and burn the system to the ground — but they know they aren’t winning and their time isn’t coming.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, losers would scratch and claw, scream and bring violence into what should be peaceful. They get louder and flail when they know their time is coming to an end. Ever watch a playoff football game when it’s a blowout? The losers always start pushing and mouthing off at the winners when they know the inevitable loss is coming.
That’s why, if Democrats believed the polls, there wouldn’t be riots. They would instead only need to wait a few months to take control of our government, defund the police and erase the American history that they claim offends them.
This result is not a resounding vote of confidence among likely voters for Joe Biden and his ability to debate President Trump. One could wonder how yesterday’s speech on his climate change proposal might drive that number lower. With several gaffes reading from a teleprompter, Biden took no questions from reporters after unveiling a $2 trillion package. It seems freeform interactions are being discouraged by the campaign, which should raise concerns.
Presidential candidates have had televised debates since Kennedy and Nixon in 1960. It is the way many voters assess candidates and their policy proposals. It may not be a perfect forum, but it is a staple. That they are more infotainment than substance is a function of the quality of the moderators, but that does not make them less relevant.
Unless you live and breathe politics, you might not know the history of Joe Biden being soft on China. His acquiescence may matter more to voters after Beijing caused a worldwide pandemic and the realization we are dependant on them for essential supplies. Likewise, because of media bias, it one of the only forums where President Trump can make his case to the voters based on his record and agenda in his own words. This kind of information is why debates matter.
The New York Times tried to give Biden an out by setting preconditions for the debate that President Trump must agree to. The two conditions are the president disclosing his tax returns and agreeing to fact-checking during the debate. This idea was proposed because even supporters are worried about Biden being extemporaneous for a few hours without preplanned questions.
There may not be any excuses as far as voters are concerned. Rasmussen Reports found 68% of voters think it is important for the debates to occur. A full 56% percent believe it would hurt his candidacy not to debate Trump.
A refusal could undoubtedly increase the chances of additional voters questioning his ability as the pretext is rather thin. Fact-checking occurs in post-debate commentary, and Trump’s tax returns are a years old conflict that is in the courts. His failure to provide them did not prevent Hillary Clinton from debating him. Why should it be a precondition for Biden now?
Because Hillary was only physically weak, not mentally weak…
We’ve all been joking that Biden has been campaigning from his basement since the plague hit, but no one has really proven the joke wrong so far. For all we know, Dr. Jill has him duct-taped to a recliner and only lets him go when it’s time for another one of his now-trademark disastrous virtual campaign events.
Stacey wrote a couple of days ago that Biden was going to have to eventually leave the basement and prove to the American public that he isn’t the drooling fool that so many of us now believe him to be.
As we have discussed here many times, Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep has benefited greatly from the Coronapocalypse excuse to avoid the campaign trail. He can’t spend 3 minutes on camera reading a teleprompter without barking nonsense. He may not even be able to speak English if he’s off-leash at a campaign event. It’s a given that his handlers want to keep him away from public campaigning for as long as possible.
The Biden campaign has been lucky most of all, but it’s also been smart, at least smart enough.
To go, as Joe Biden did, from left for dead to sweeping to the nomination and quickly thereafter emerging as the favorite in November is a run of success that would be the envy of any national politician.
It’s easy to consider this a mere accident given the weakness of Biden’s opponents, first a socialist in the Democratic primaries who had a ceiling on his support and now an incumbent president whose ratings have sagged.
The Biden team certainly isn’t going to rewrite any campaign playbooks or dazzle anyone with its brilliance, but it has avoided serious mistakes and demonstrated an understanding of the basic political terrain and its candidate’s strengths.
Snip.
Above all, the campaign has avoided the most politically perilous ideological excesses throughout. This has required some discipline, given how influential woke Twitter is on the left.
Biden’s theory of the Democratic Party, even if it seemed doubtful at the outset, proved correct — that the center of gravity of the party was still with, as he put it, Obama-Biden Democrats rather than with the avowed socialists and social-justice warriors.
Biden hewed to this line when other candidates went the other way. It might seem obvious that endorsing “Medicare for All,” which involves yanking away the private health insurance of more than 100 million Americans, is foolish and politically indefensible, but several candidates in the Democrat race did it anyway.
He’s steered clear of other pitfalls since locking up the nomination. He’s said he wouldn’t ban fracking. He didn’t endorse defunding the police. He defended the statues of America’s founders.
He’s indisputably slid left. This has been his MO his entire career — to stay smack in the middle of whatever is the consensus position of the Democratic Party at any given time. He’s running on the leftmost platform of any Democratic nominee in a couple of generations but has tried to soften the edges as much as possible.
Joe Biden signed the death warrant for his campaign last week, even if he doesn’t know it. The joint manifesto he released with Bernie Sanders is 110 pages of radical far-left policies — from a job-killing $2 trillion climate agenda to eliminating cash bail and dismantling border protection.
It betrays the working-class voters Biden claims to represent and destroys any pretense that he is a “moderate.”
As Sanders has boasted, Biden would be “the most progressive president since FDR.”
Well-meaning people might stick their fingers in their ears and vote for Biden out of nostalgia for a Democratic Party that no longer exists or out of exhaustion at the relentless anti-Trump barrage.
But with his “Unity Task Forces” document, Biden has proven only that he is an empty husk. Old Joe, who was for police and working people and law and order, is long gone. His body is there but, like his party, it has been invaded by the socialist left.
Under Biden’s manifesto, “Climate change is a global emergency” which requires “decarbonizing” American industries and eliminating carbon dioxide emissions to “net zero.”
It is the Green New Deal on steroids.
It will eliminate fossil fuel power by 2035, aka “commit to eliminating carbon pollution from power plants by 2035.”
Biden also promises to “fight gentrification.” Because America’s inner cities just aren’t enough like Detroit…
Read between the lines of various Democrats saying how “powerful” and “consequential” Joe Biden’s running mate pick will be, and it’s obvious they don’t expect him to be up to the job. Or in office long.
The largest donor, supplying $1 million, was billionaire hedge fund manager Stephen Mandel Jr., founder of Lone Pine Capital, according to Federal Election Commission filings released Wednesday.
Other supporters include Hollywood billionaire David Geffen (who donated $100,000), Boston media magnate Amos Hostetter Jr. ($100,000) and Silicon Valley investors Michael Moritz ($50,000) and Chris Sacca ($10,000). Martha Karsh, who is married to private equity billionaire Bruce Karsh, gave $50,000.
This group of donors is following in the footsteps of Walmart heiress Christy Walton, who gave $20,000 to the Lincoln Project in January. Apparently pleased with her investment, she contributed another $10,000 in May. All of the donors except Walton have also contributed to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign or a super-PAC supporting the former vice president.
