Posts Tagged ‘American Enterprise Institute’

BidenWatch for September 21, 2020

Monday, September 21st, 2020

Greetings regular readers! I’m so glad you survived yesterday’s tragic mass die-off! Plus Biden campaign troubles, fundraising updates, the “Harris Administration,” and the Burisma report looms. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Biden says 200 million people will die from the Wuhan coronavirus by the time he finishes his speech.

  • “Biden Says Trump Is Responsible For All Deaths Throughout Human History Since The Dawn Of Time.”
  • “Is the Biden Campaign Struggling?”

    One of the lessons of 2016 was that the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had all kinds of internal reports of problems, signs of insufficient support and enthusiasm in key states, and ominous indicators that they were nowhere nearly as strong and effective as most of the coverage suggested.

    The problem was that only a few reporters knew about those, and the ones that did had pledged to keep what they were seeing and hearing secret until after the election for their campaign narrative books. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, “over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred subjects, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly.” Florida Democratic political consultants warned the campaign they were in danger of losing the Sunshine State. Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking. The Service Employees International Union wanted to send more volunteers to Michigan and the Clinton campaign told them to keep their people to Iowa instead.

    If you had really good Democratic Party or liberal activist-group sources, you heard these portentous stories that look like really key indicators in hindsight. If you didn’t, you were dependent upon the polls and the dominant narrative in the media that the Clinton campaign was an experienced, well-oiled machine while the Trump campaign was a bunch of amateur stumblebums constantly beset by infighting.

    Fast-forward to today, and it feels like these kinds of, “hey, the Democratic nominee’s campaign may not be as strong as it looks” stories are leaking out into the general news coverage much more frequently.

    Earlier this week, the New York Times wondered aloud about Democratic strength in Nevada:

    Nevada’s Democratic political machine was held up as a model for other states where neither party has consistently dominated. But it was a machine built for another era.

    Its success relied on hundreds of people knocking on thousands of doors for face-to-face conversations with voters. Now, there are fewer than half as many people canvassing for Democratic voters as there were in September 2016. And some Democratic strategists warn that Nevada could be in 2020 what Wisconsin was in 2016 — a state that the Democrats assume is safely in their column but that slips away.

    The Washington Post reported that Latino Democrats are worried about Biden having lackluster numbers among this demographic:

    Top Latino Democrats are voicing growing concern about Joe Biden’s campaign, warning that lackluster efforts to win the support of their community could have devastating consequences in the November election.

    Recent polls showing President Trump’s inroads with Latinos have set off a fresh round of frustration and finger-pointing among Democrats, confirming problems some say have simmered for months. Many Latino activists and officials said Biden is now playing catch-up, particularly in the pivotal state of Florida, where he will campaign Tuesday — the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month — for the first time as the presidential nominee. Reaching out to Latino voters will be a key focus on the visit, according to a person with knowledge of the trip. Biden’s campaign said he will be in Tampa and Kissimmee, two areas with large Puerto Rican populations.

    Plus concerns about the campaigns in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

  • Speaking of which:

    “I can’t even find a sign,” [Don] Sabbe says outside a Kroger’s in Sterling Heights, where surrounding cars fly massive Donald Trump flags that say “No More Bullsh-t” and fellow shoppers wear Trump T-shirts for their weekend grocery runs. “I’m looking for one of those storefronts. I’m looking for a campaign office for Biden. And I’m not finding one.”

    The reason Sabbe can’t find a dedicated Biden campaign field office is because there aren’t any around here. Not in Macomb County, the swing region where Sabbe lives. It’s not even clear Biden has opened any new dedicated field offices in the state; because of the pandemic, they’ve moved their field organizing effort online. The Biden campaign in Michigan refused to confirm the location of any physical field offices despite repeated requests; they say they have “supply centers” for handing out signs, but would not confirm those locations. The campaign also declined to say how many of their Michigan staff were physically located here. Biden’s field operation in this all-important state is being run through the Michigan Democratic Party’s One Campaign, which is also not doing physical canvassing or events at the moment. When I ask Biden campaign staffers and Democratic Party officials how many people they have on the ground in Michigan, one reply stuck out: “What do you mean by ‘on the ground?’”

  • Speaking of swing states, voters believe Biden wants to defund the police and hasn’t done enough to condemn rioting.

    Among all Wisconsin voters, 56 percent say Biden hasn’t done enough to denounce the rioting versus just 31 percent who say he has. (Even among Democrats, 28 percent think he hasn’t done enough.) The numbers are similar in Minnesota at 54/35. Biden has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want to defund the police and he’s made several on-camera statements condemning the violence over the past few weeks, but that message isn’t getting through. And it’s helping to keep Trump close.

  • Biden took a campaign trip to Duluth, Minnesota. It didn’t work out so well:

    Democrats are concerned that a groundswell of support for President Trump outside of Minnesota’s Twin Cities may be enough to win him the state over 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

    Biden, the former two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator, visited carpenter apprentices and other union workers near Duluth on Friday, his first trip to Minnesota in more than 1,000 days, according to the Trump campaign.

    Yet, despite his team releasing scant details about his itinerary, even to the local press, Republicans outnumbered Democrats at Hermantown’s Jerry Alander Carpenter Training Center, worrying those who are opposed to Trump clinching a second term on Nov. 3.

    The Republican National Committee and the Minnesota GOP organized roughly 300 people to line Miller Trunk Highway for Biden’s stop. Democrats had less than half that number and told the Washington Examiner they didn’t know one another. Some, though, had traveled more than two hours from Minneapolis to see their party’s standard-bearer.

    Tommy Moe, a retired miner from Virginia, Minnesota, predicted that the presidential race in his state would be close again after 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by only 1.5 percentage points (or 45,000 ballots). Moe, 65, based his prediction on the number of union workers he knew who felt “an affinity” for Trump because of the China trade deal and his unorthodox approach to politics.

    “We didn’t have a very good turnout,” he said. “If the Democrats don’t get their act together and start getting as fired up as the Republican side is … we need a turnout. Democrats win if they turn out.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Model that predicted 5 of past 6 presidential elections has Trump in 2020 by ‘landslide.”

    “I focus on early primaries and the way the candidates perform in those early contests,” Norpoth said in the press release. “It’s a very good predictor, and a leading indicator of what’s going to happen in November.”

    The professor said he was unsurprised at the model’s prediction this year, citing Trump’s performance in the primaries earlier in the winter.

    “When I looked at New Hampshire and I saw that Donald Trump got 85 percent of the votes … I was pretty sure what the model was going to predict,” he said in the release.

    Joe Biden, on the other hand, pulled down only 8.4% in New Hampshire, Norpoth said, a number that is “unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of being president,” he stated.

  • Enjoy some “Oh God, how I hate Trump, but Democrats are insane” hand-wringing from American Enterprise Institute wonk Danielle Pletka:

    [Three paragraphs of pro-forma #OrangeManBad snipped]

    I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues. I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses — almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November — would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy. That could include the abolition of the filibuster, creating an executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power; an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority; passage of devastating economic measures such as the Green New Deal; nationalized health care; the dismantling of U.S. borders and the introduction of socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown.

    I fear the grip of Manhattan-San Francisco progressive mores that increasingly permeate my daily newspapers, my children’s curriculums and my local government. I fear the virtue-signaling bullies who increasingly try to dominate or silence public discourse — and encourage my children to think that their being White is intrinsically evil, that America’s founding is akin to original sin. I fear the growing self-censorship that guides many people’s every utterance, and the leftist vigilantes who view every personal choice — from recipes to hairdos — through their twisted prisms of politics and culture. An entirely Democratic-run Washington, urged on by progressives’ media allies, would no doubt only accelerate these trends.

    Nor do Biden’s national-security positions reassure me. While he promises a welcome change in style and a renewed respect for U.S. alliances, Biden would, like Trump, pull our troops from the Middle East and South Asia. Worse yet, he would slash defense spending and likely renew the Obama administration’s misbegotten love affair with Iran’s tyrants. Then there is the Democratic Party’s hostility to the state of Israel. Biden supporters will clamor that the candidate’s history is very pro-Israel, but as president would he be strong enough to stand up to the new Democratic Party’s less-than-ardent support for the Jewish state?

    To which I can only reply: What the hell took you so long to figure this out? (And then, to prove the extent of her Beltway Blinders, she turns out a paragraph on “execrable gun-toting racists.”)

  • “The former vice president’s campaign reported on Sunday that it and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) began September with $466 million in the bank – roughly $141 million more than the cash on hand for the president and the Republican National Committee (RNC).” Snip. “The infusion of cash allowed the Biden campaign to vastly outspend Trump’s team to run TV ads in August and September.” Big ad spends and no ground game? Sounds like Team Biden is trying to rerun the Jeb! strategy…
  • The Burisma report is due out this week:

    Republicans are preparing to release a report in a matter of days on their investigation focused on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, a move they hope will put fresh scrutiny on the Democratic nominee just weeks from the election.

    The controversial probe, spearheaded by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is focused broadly on Obama-era policy and Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.

    The GOP report, which is set to be released this week, is expected to argue that Hunter Biden’s work impacted Obama-era Ukraine policy and created a conflict of interest given then-Vice President Joe Biden’s work in the area.

  • “Biden Institute Board Member, Obama-Era Cabinet Sec Met With Chinese Communist Party To ‘Create More Ties,’ Visited Communist Propaganda Front.” That would be Obama Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.
  • AOC thinks hard-left Democrats can make Biden dance to their tune.
  • Kamala Harris called the next Presidential Administration “the Harris Administration“…
  • … and so did Joe Biden.

  • Biden’s incoherent Iran policy:

    Trump, Biden claims, “could not rally a single one of America’s closest allies” to support the extension of the [arms] embargo. What he neglects to mention is that the expiration date on the embargo was set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration and described by Biden as “a policy that was working to keep America safe.” That policy was, per Biden, discarded by Trump in favor of one “that has worsened the threat.” So which is it: Did the Obama-Biden Iran policy keep America safe? Or is the best argument against the Trump administration that they have failed to successfully roll back Obama-era policies?

    Snip.

    He fails entirely, in his op-ed ostensibly addressing the Iranian threat, to come even close to describing the full extent of how its regime has targeted U.S. forces in the Middle East, committed grievous human-rights violations against its own people, and funded terrorist organizations and plots around the globe. His failure to reckon fully with the evil of Ayatollah Khamenei seems indicative of not only his less serious estimation of the Iranian threat, but also the fact that he has made his peace with the current regime staying in power over the long term. He makes this belief explicit when he calls “Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’” strategy “a boon to the regime in Iran.” He again avoids explaining how, probably because this claim is untrue by every available metric.

    Maximum pressure has effectively choked the Iranian economy. The JCPOA had helped Iran achieve GDP growth rates of 12.5 percent in 2016 and 3.7 percent in 2017. In 2018 — the same year the U.S. exited the deal — Iran’s economy contracted by 5.4 percent. 2019 was even worse, at -7.6 percent. Notably, this economic disaster has led to Iranians flooding into the streets many times over the last two years to protest not only pocketbook issues, but the regime’s restriction of basic freedoms. While Biden may be content to leave the ayatollahs in power, the Iranian people appear to be far less willing. Furthermore, Iran’s regional position has been undermined by the Trump administration’s successful efforts to strengthen Israel’s relationships with Arab nations, including the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

    Instead of backing maximum pressure, Biden supports what he calls a “smart way to be tough on Iran.” Ignoring Iran’s flagrant violations of the JCPOA even before the U.S.’s withdrawal, the sunset provisions on the agreement, and Israel’s discovery of documents detailing Iran’s nuclear program, Biden falsely asserts that the JCPOA had “verifiably block[ed] Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.”

  • Trump “Strongly Approve” number hits highest level ever.
  • Creepy Joe plays Spanish-language song “Despacito” whose lyrics translate into things Creepy Joe is famous for. “I want to breathe your neck slowly.”
  • “Biden Attempts To Appeal To Hispanics By Performing Authentic Mexican Hat Dance While Firing Pistols Into The Air.”
  • “A man featured in a campaign video with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is under federal investigation for soliciting sex with minors, according to USA Today.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Ace of Spades HQ has a Slow Joe speech roundup.
  • College professors give seven times as much to Biden as Trump. That’s quite shocking. I would have expected the ratio to be more like 20-1 or 50-1. Biden must have remarkably poor fundraisers. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • ” Democrats’ new strategy for winning the White House: Threaten riots if they lose.” The public doesn’t seem so hoit on the idea…
  • Team Trump isn’t messing around:

    (Hat tip: ConservativeTreehouse.)

  • “CNN Forum Throws Nothing But Softballs and Pathetic Biden Strikes Out Anyway.” “A real low point came when the declining Biden couldn’t remember what to call the place where the mail goes.”
  • It was even more slanted than the snippets suggest.
  • “Here Are Biden’s Biggest Lies From His CNN Town Hall.” Including his fracking flip flops and that golden oldie, the Fine People Hoax. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • It wouldn’t be a Democratic “Town Hall” if they’re weren’t at least one plant:

  • Feel the enthusiasm:

  • Slow Joe getting even slower:

  • More:

  • A theme emerges:

  • How old is he Johnny?

  • Profiles in pandering.
  • “Biden Getting Excited As Segregation Coming Back Into Style.”

    Segregation, what a blast from the past! I remember when I was already a full-grown man in the year 1960 and me and the boys would gather outside the soda shop to make sure only the white folks got in. Maybe those jeans and that jacket I wore are back in style again too. Jill? Where’s that trunk with all my old clothes?”

    “I was way ahead of the curve on this one, man.”

  • “Genius Trump Nominates Joe Biden To Supreme Court Forcing Dems To Accuse Him Of Sexual Assault.”
  • “Biden Forgets To Put On Clothes, Media Praises His Majestic Outfit.”

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    LinkSwarm for December 14, 2018

    Friday, December 14th, 2018

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Austin just had a wind storm, to top off a year of weird weather.

  • Apple to spend $1 billion on Austin campus. This is going to be a couple of miles from my house. Expect more detailed examination in a latter post.
  • This Andrew Sullivan piece is half-useful for it’s look at Social Justice Warrioring as a religious substitute:

    For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness.

    And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.

    Unfortunately, the second half is just Christian-concern-trolling as a way to bash Trump. Pace-Sullivan, there’s nothing new in his critique that couldn’t also be applied, to say, the “prosperity gospel” movement of the 1980s on, and it all boils down to “Those stupid Christians voted for Trump rather than the positions we enlightened betters believe in.”

  • “Census confirms: 63 percent of ‘non-citizens’ on welfare, 4.6 million households.” The ideal number there should be “zero.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Incoming New York Democratic attorney general vows to get Trump and his little dog Toto, too.
  • “Mexican National Sentenced to 8 Years for Trafficking Girls into U.S., Forcing Them into Prostitution.”
  • ICE workplace arrests up 700% in President Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year.
  • Think the Paris riots are bad? Just think what would happen if the biggest climate alarmists got their way:

    If Paris streets burned over a proposed 25 cents per gallon climate change tax, imagine the global conflagration over a $49 per gallon tax.

    That’s what a United Nations special climate report calls for in 12 years, with a carbon tax of $5,500 per ton—equal to $49 per gallon of gasoline or diesel. That’s about 100 times today’s average state and federal motor fuels tax.

    By 2100, the U.N. estimates that a carbon tax of $27,000 per ton is needed—$240 per gallon—to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    Of course, that isn’t going to happen. The economic wreckage of such a punitive tax would plunge the global economy into a permanent depression—and that’s assuming politicians could enact such huge tax increases over the will of their voters.

    Keep in mind that the unrest in France was triggered by a looming 25-cent hike, which is a little less than 10% more in taxes than French drivers already pay. To meet the $49 per gallon tax hike recommended by the U.N., fuel taxes in France would have to go up 17-fold.

  • “When you said, ‘Paris is going to be so hot,’ I did not realise it would actually be on fire…’Eye-watering opportunities’ did not, in my mind, involve tear gas.”
  • The weirdness of the Huawei story.
  • How corrupt is the Chicago Way? A college student running against Democratic Party boss Michael J. Madigan’s hand=picked alderman Marty Quinn found out:

    To get on the ballot, Krupa was required to file 473 valid signatures of ward residents with the Chicago Board of Elections. Krupa filed 1,703 signatures.

    But before he filed his signatures with the elections board, an amazing thing happened along the Chicago Way.

    An organized crew of political workers — or maybe just civic-minded individuals who care about reform — went door to door with official legal papers. They asked residents to sign an affidavit revoking their signature on Krupa’s petition.

    Revocations are serious legal documents, signed and notarized. Lying on a legal document is a felony and can lead to a charge of perjury. If you’re convicted of perjury, you may not work for a government agency. And I know that there are many in the 13th Ward on the government payroll.

    More than 2,700 revocations were turned over to the elections board to cancel the signatures on Krupa’s petitions. Chicago Board of Elections officials had never seen such a massive pile of revocations.

  • Mark Steyn: “If you’re having trouble keeping track, the French protests, Trump, Brexit, the Austrian and Italian elections, and the sudden cancellation of the ‘Murphy Brown’ reboot are all the work of Russian bots. Whereas the Tijuana caravan, the UK grooming gangs and that rental car heading toward you on the sidewalk outside the Berlin Christmas market are the authentic vox populi.” Plus some Max Boot bashing, which is now a year-round pursuit. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • 1. Google gets accused of anticompetative practices. 2. Google donates money to the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 3. Same think tanks write pieces defending Google. 4. Google boosts those studies in its search results. It’s like the human centipede of political policy studies…
  • Another drawing Mohammed death.
  • Boy Scouts file for bankruptcy. Get woke, go broke.
  • Texas constitutional carry bill introduced.
  • Nike: It’s fine to insult patriotic Americans by kneeling at NFL games, but criticize Islamist scumbag Recep Tayyip Erdogan? That’s not allowed.
  • Janitor in Greece is facing a decade in prison after 18 years on the job for lying about the years of primary school she completed.
  • Keith Richards gives up drinking. And I saw seven angels blowing seven trumpets… (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)
  • Scott Adams nails it:

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Global Warming, Guns, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Welfare State | 1 Comment »