Posts Tagged ‘DNC’

« Older Entries

LinkSwarm for February 10, 2023

Friday, February 10th, 2023

Here’s a longer-than-usual LinkSwarm, since last week’s edition was wiped out by the ice storm power outage.

  • The leftwing corruption of all government institutions continues apace. “US lost 287,000 jobs while government was reporting +1 million in gains.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • More cheery Biden Economy news: “Warning Signs Indicate a Great Depression May Be Coming.”

    “That’s because economic growth is slowing down,” explains research fellow EJ Antoni. “Even the areas which contributed positively to gross domestic product (GDP) are not necessarily signs of prosperity. For example, business investment grew at only 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter, but that was almost entirely inventory growth. Nonresidential investment, a key driver of future economic growth, was up just 0.7 percent.”

    “Meanwhile, residential investment fell off a cliff,” Antoni continued, “dropping 26.7 percent as consumers were unable to afford the combination of high home prices, high interest rates and falling real incomes. No wonder homeownership affordability has fallen to the lowest level in that metric’s history.”

    There was a gain in net exports, but that was largely a mirage created by a major slowdown in international trade. “Imports are simply falling faster than exports, which shows up as an increase in GDP.”

    But probably most concerning to Antoni is the sharp decline in real disposable income in 2022, which exceeded $1 trillion.

    “This is the second-largest percentage drop in real disposable income ever, behind only 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression,” he observed. “To keep up with inflation, consumers are depleting their savings and burning through the ‘stimulus’ checks they received during 2020 and 2021. Credit card debt continues growing, while savings plummeted $1.6 trillion last year, falling below 2009 levels.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Boom. “Texas has punted Citigroup from the syndicate that’s set to manage the Lone Star state’s largest-ever municipal bond offering, saying the bank’s policies for gun retailers discriminate against the firearms industry.”
  • “DeSantis Admin Revokes Liquor License of Orlando Venue That Hosted Sexual Drag Show for Children.” Good.
  • “DeSantis Takes Wrecking Ball To ‘Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion’ Bureaucracy In Florida Public Universities. Even better!
  • Also, the College Board caved and removed Critical Race Theory material from its Advanced Placement African American Studies.
  • DNC to Iowa: Drop Dead.
  • “368 Arrested, 131 Rescued In California Sex Trafficking Operation.”
  • Just what our health care system needs: “25 People Charged In Fake Nursing Diploma Operation,” in Delaware, New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Florida.
  • Hunter Biden admits that that the laptop is his. This is 100 times more important a story than the Chinese spy balloons.
  • “U.S. Deploys 100 New Tank Transporters to Move M1 Tanks Quickly in Europe.”
  • Suicide bomber blows up mosque in Pakistan.
  • Journalists drop the mask. “Objectivity Has Got To Go.”
  • Related: CNN Ratings hit nine year low.
  • Gawker shuts down. Let’s have a moment of silenceOK that’s enough. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Grand Theft Pollo. The food service director of an impoverished Illinois school district was charged with stealing $1.5 million of food — most of which was chicken wings. Vera Liddell, 66, allegedly began stealing from the Harvey School District during the height of COVID-19.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • That old Communist Magic: “Food in Cuba is both scarce and unaffordable as prices double while incomes remain stagnant.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Important safety tip: Try not to poke downed kamikaze loitering munition drones with a stick.
  • It now costs more to fuel an electric car than a gas-powered one.
  • Bill Maher continues to take regular red pills. “The problem with communism and some very recent ideologies here at home, is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it.”
  • We could be heroes, just for one day. Or once a month, as the case may be…
  • Over 400 sandwiches and pre-packaged meals recalled due to listeria.
  • This week in rapper murders: “Tampa rapper arrested for young mother’s murder days after being acquitted of recording studio double-murder.”

    A Tampa jury acquitted Billy Adams of killing two men in a makeshift recording studio in Lutz. He walked free from a Tampa courtroom on January 27.

    Three days later, a young mother who was pregnant with her second child was found shot to death in a residential area of New Tampa. Her toddler was still in her vehicle nearby.

    A week after her death, Tampa police said Billy Adams “did admit to being the one to pull the trigger.”

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • How Louis C.K. uncancelled himself.
  • Related: Louis C.K. discusses how he develops a set on Joe Rogan.
  • The ice storm took out KXAN’s transmitter tower. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The last 747 rolls out. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Ozzy Osbourne retires from touring at age 74. Honestly, the odds Ozzy would even make it to 74 must have seemed pretty daunting throughout much of his life.
  • Professional eater vs. giant calzone.
  • World’s oldest dog is a Good Boy.

    • Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Austin, Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 7 Comments »

    Why Does The Liberal Overclass Hate Joe Rogan?

    Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020

    Glenn Greenwald has a piece up on why the liberal elites hates Joe Rogan:

    Rogan is rarely discussed in mainstream political and media circles, which raises its own questions. Why does someone who packs such a big punch in terms of audience size and influence receive so much less media attention than, say, cable news hosts with audience sizes far smaller than his? Presidential candidates certainly recognize Rogan’s importance: All of the major Democratic candidates, according to him, requested to appear on his show. (The only ones he invited on were Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang.)

    Rogan was in the news this week after President Donald Trump favorably responded to a guest’s suggestion that Rogan host a four-hour, sit-down presidential debate between the two candidates. The mere suggestion that someone like Rogan could host as prestigious and high-minded an event as a presidential debate prompted condescending scorn from establishment media precincts.

    Prior to that, one of the few times Rogan was discussed in mainstream political circles was when outrage among establishment Democrats ensued after Sanders touted a quasi-endorsement from Rogan. The argument was that Rogan’s views are so repellent, bigoted, and anathema to liberalism that no Democratic candidate should be associated with him (this anger was shared by some of Sanders’ own supporters including, reportedly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez).

    What is it, by the standards of U.S. political and media orthodoxy, that makes Rogan so radioactive? In March, billionaire and former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg — who spoke at the 2004 GOP Convention in the middle of the Iraq War and war on terror to urge the reelection of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and who presided over and repeatedly defended the racially disparate “stop and frisk” police practice — endorsed Joe Biden for president, and Biden not only accepted but celebrated the endorsement, praising Bloomberg in the process…

    What are the standards that make Michael Bloomberg an acceptable endorsement to tout but not Joe Rogan, given that the billionaire three-term mayor and former Republican has taken far worse positions and done far more damage to far more people than the podcaster could ever dream of doing?

    Snip.

    What makes all of this more confounding is that Rogan is a fairly basic political liberal on almost every issue: He believes in the need for greater social spending for the nation’s poor and working class, opposes war and militarism, favors drug legalization, is adamantly pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights, and generally adheres to liberal orthodoxies on standard political debates. That is why he was so fond of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, and why Andrew Yang — whose signature issue was the universal basic income — was one of the few candidates he deemed worth talking to.

    The objections typically raised to Rogan concern his questioning of some of the very recent changes brought about by trans visibility and equality, particularly asking whether it is fair for trans women who have lived their entire lives and entered puberty as biological men to compete against cis women in professional sports (a question also asked — and even answered in the negative — by LGBT sports pioneer Martina Navratilova, among many others), and whether young children are emotionally and psychologically equipped to make permanent choices about gender reassignment therapies and gender dysphoria.

    If embracing and never questioning the full panoply of trans advocacy is a prerequisite to being permitted in decent society, I seriously doubt many prominent Democratic politicians will pass that test (even Kamala Harris, from San Francisco and the very blue state of California, has a very mixed record on trans rights). Moreover, though polling data is sparse, the data that is available show that there is still much work to do in this area: Only a small minority of Americans believe it is fair to allow trans women to participate in female professional sports.

    If the standard is that anyone who even entertains debates over the maximalist and most controversial questions in this very new and evolving social movement is to be cast out as radioactive, liberalism and the Democratic Party will be a very small group. It will also have to proceed without the vast majority of political leaders whom they currently follow. Even on this issue of trans rights, Rogan’s views are in accord with the standard Democratic Party view: He advocates full legal protection and dignity for the right of trans people to live with their gender respected.

    The other critique centers on Rogan’s willingness to invite on his show various pundits with far-right views. That’s a bizarre criticism of someone who purposely hosts a program designed to foster dialogue with people across the political spectrum. After all, if one employs the blatantly irrational tactic of attributing to Rogan the views of all his guests, he would be simultaneously everything and nothing.

    Snip.

    While Rogan is politically liberal, he is — argues former Obama 2008 campaign strategist and Rogan listener Shant Mesrobian — culturally conservative, by which he does not mean that Rogan holds conservative views on social issues (again, he is pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights). He means that Rogan exudes culturally conservative signals: He likes MMA fighting, makes crude jokes, hunts, and just generally fails to speak in the lingo of the professional managerial class and coastal elites. And it is those cultural standards, rather than political ones, that make Rogan anathema to elite liberal culture because, Mesrobian argued in a viral Twitter thread, liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.

    Lefty Greenwald is right in that Rogan isn’t a conservative, and in the general vicinity of the answers he’s looking for, but not quite on target. A few points:

  • Rogan isn’t just opposed to tranny madness, he’s critical of almost the entire Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Warrior agenda. That’s why he’s had people like James Lindsay and Bret Weinstein on his show.
  • The left (falsely) feels that their supposed ability to police the boundaries of acceptable speech gives them a huge political advantage, and Rogan’s willingness to engage in anti-PC speech and terminology enrages them.
  • When Glennwald says “That’s a bizarre criticism of someone who purposely hosts a program designed to foster dialogue with people across the political spectrum,” that’s the point. Social justice Warriors don’t want dialog across the political spectrum, they want monolithic conformity and unwavering surrender to their demands so that they can burn the entire system down.
  • Remember, Social Justice Warriors hate liberals far more than they hate conservatives, and not just for the fact they stand in the way of the more immediate and important goal of seizing control of the Party. Social Justice Warriors hate liberals the same way the Islamic State hated Shiites far more than they hated Christians. You and I may be infidels, but to Social Justice Warriors, regular liberals are heretics who must repent or be destroyed.
  • Rogan is also hated by the Democratic Party regulars for refusing to hew to the party line. Mainstream Democrats will never forgive him for giving Tusli Gabbard a platform after they deemed her beyond the pale, or for daring to point out that Joe Biden has dementia. Ditto his support of Bernie Sanders, who the Party’s corrupt wing regarded as their biggest threat to maintaining control of the Party.
  • It’s not just language that gives Rogan an air of cultural conservatism. Rogan doesn’t believe in gun control, one of the few issues (along with abortion and a fervent desire to increase the size and scope of the federal government) that still ties the Democratic Party’s increasingly disjointed factions together.
  • Finally, what standards make Michael Bloomberg acceptable to Democratic Party elites and not Joe Rogan? Simple: money. The corrupt wing running the DNC is always willing to chuck ideological purity over the side to do the bidding of its donor class, while the insane wing is happy to sell temporary indulgences for sufficient quantities of Danegeld.

    • But Greenwald is right about one thing: Much of the elites loathing of Rogan, like that of President Trump, is instinctive, visceral and cultural. How dare that uncouth man be so influential? He’s not one of us.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

    Tags:, , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

    BidenWatch for August 10, 2020

    Monday, August 10th, 2020

    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!

  • Biden won’t accept the nomination at the DNC convention in Milwaukee, will accept from his home in Delaware instead. Way to convince people you’re not feeble and senile!
  • 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?
  • Get ready for the Biden amnesty:

    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.

  • “Trump’s campaign knocks on a million doors a week. Biden’s knocks on 0.”

    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.

  • Biden doesn’t make gaffes, he is a gaffe.

    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.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Remember: Hispanics are diverse, but black people are not:

  • 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:

  • No Hispanic speakers at virtual DNC?
  • Devastating:

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Speaking of senile: No, he hasn’t taken a cognitive test, likens it to being tested for cocaine. A failed cocaine test being what got Hunter Biden kicked out of the military.
  • Speaking of Hunter, Judicial Watch is suing over his travel records.
  • Tucker Carlson on Joe Biden. Correction: By the time coronavirus hit, Biden was already stomping Sanders by a 2-1 margin everywhere.
    

  • Slow Joe hops on the “healthcare for illegal aliens” train:

  • Biden, Michael Brown, and hands up don’t shoot, the founding myth of #BlackLivesMatter.
  • “Joe Biden Is Absolutely the Vehicle for the Communist Takeover of the Democrat Party.”

    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.

    There’s that name again…

  • Is this NYT “Wall Street executives are getting on board with Biden” piece real or wishful thinking?

    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…

  • Slow Joe talks China…I think.

    Does he even mean WHO here, or did he mean the WTO?

  • Speaking of China:

  • Veep pick = “Living Will”

  • 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.
  • But the hard left says no former police officers or prosecutors, which leaves Harris out, assuming Biden (or his handlers) cares what they think.
  • Reminder: Chris “Waitress Sandwich” Dodd is heading up the VP search efforts. What could possibly go wrong?
  • “Biden Says He Can’t Wait To Find Out Who He Picked For VP.”
  • Robin Williams takes down Biden from beyond the grave:

  • Name starts with “B”

  • Trump campaign 404 pages, including some aimed at Slow Joe and Grandma Death. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

    • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections, video | 1 Comment »

    Police to DNC: Since You Hate Cops So Much, Police Your Own Damn Convention

    Wednesday, July 29th, 2020

    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…

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Crime, Democrats | 1 Comment »

    BidenWatch for June 22, 2020

    Monday, June 22nd, 2020

    Exploring the enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden (plus the equally huge campaign technology gap), some fundraising analysis, more Veepstakes, and a majority of Americans think Biden is a few tacos shy of a combo plate. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Fundraising update:

    Joe Biden still trails President Donald Trump in cash, but he’s catching up.

    Biden and the Democratic National Committee hit an all-time monthly fundraising record in May, bringing in $80.8 million. That total topped Trump and the Republican National Committee, which together raised $74 million over the same period.

    But Trump — who has been able to jointly fundraise with the Republican Party at higher levels as the Republican presidential nominee for months — leads Biden in cash on hand, $265 million to $122.2 million, an all-important number that shows how much the candidate and committee can still spend. Notably, May was the first full month Biden raised money in tandem with the DNC, drafting off of a joint fundraising agreement that allowed individual donors to give more than $620,000.

    Some Trump numbers snipped.

    A handful of super PACs are jockeying to be Biden’s preferred outside group. Their fundraising totals showed that one has amassed a commanding lead.

    During the presidential primary, Unite the Country boosted Biden when he needed it most, helping his campaign rebound from losses in Iowa and New Hampshire to a decisive Super Tuesday performance. That March, the super PAC brought in more than $10 million. But over the past two months, the super PACs fundraising cratered, bringing in $723,000 in April and $1.3 million in May.

    The drop occurred after Biden’s campaign initially signaled Priorities USA, another group that led outside Democratic spending in 2016, would be its preferred super PAC. Those moves are closely tracked by big-money donors, who want to stick with the favored outside group.

    Priorities USA, which backed Biden after Super Tuesday, raised $7.5 million last month. The group told the Los Angeles Times it secured $38 million in donations and commitments since early May, two-thirds during the last three weeks. That would mean a huge spike in the group’s June fundraising totals.

    Priorities USA also spent nearly five times more than Unite the Country — $9.7 million to $2.1 million — largely on TV ads, slamming Trump.

    But Unite the Country says it’s still relevant. An aide told POLITICO that the group topped its May fundraising total in the first ten days of June. Unite the Country and American Bridge 21st Century — another pro-Biden outside group that files quarterly, not monthly — also forged a partnership to pool resources and research.

  • For all these polls that say Biden is ahead, doesn’t there seem to be a big enthusiasm gap?

    Team Trump has a legendary data program. Even Democrats have expressed concern over the campaign’s digital prowess and collection methods. Trump rallies are key to this strategy for a number of reasons. And according to Brad Parscale, it seems a return to the road is generating unprecedented enthusiasm.

    This is for a rally in an arena that holds 19,000. If the campaign holds true to form, there will be large screens for those unable to get a seat to watch from outside. But the key to the operation is in Parscale’s tweet. It is the biggest data haul to date.

    What does this data give them? The opportunity to register people who are interested in the rally to vote who are not already registered. The ability to contact these potential voters throughout the rest of the campaign with updates and fundraising efforts. The information to ensure absentee ballots and in-person voting happen right through the close of the polls on Election Day.

  • That piece also cites this Dave Weigel piece, which discusses the significant difference between campaign contact touches:

    On the 48th day of quarantine, as traditional presidential campaigning became a gauzy memory, I immersed myself in the worlds created by the campaigns of Joe Biden and President Trump. I downloaded both campaigns’ apps — TeamJoe and Trump 2020, respectively — and agreed to get notifications. I created a Twitter list consisting of nothing but official campaign accounts and checked in a few times a day. What I found: The Republican effort was designed to keep supporters energized, inspired and sometimes angry. The Democratic effort was genteel and gave me much less to do.

    Signing up for the Trump app subscribed me to not one, but two automated text chains. The first came in from the Trump campaign within seconds of sign-up, informing me that I had just gotten “Reward Access Unlocked,” thus qualifying me to “earn points & meet Pres Trump during the campaign in fall.” One minute later, the Republican National Committee thanked me for joining the “team,” and asked whether I could let the president “know what you think of this week’s accomplishments.”

    Following the first link took me back to the Trump campaign page; following the second gave me a yes or no poll on whether I approved of the president, with space to write about why. I didn’t go further than that, but two hours later, the RNC texted with news: “You were 1 of the 25 President Trump selected for a 5X-MATCH EXTENSION! The other 24 patriots already donated, now it’s your turn.”

    Not wanting to be left out, I clicked through to a page powered by WinRed, the newish Republican donation portal. A photo of the president pointing at me like Uncle Sam was displayed next to a pitch that had become even more urgent: “This offer is only available for the NEXT HOUR, so you need to act fast. Please contribute ANY AMOUNT in the NEXT HOUR and your gift will be 5X-MATCHED!” A $100 donation button was already colored in, and a box that would have made this a “monthly recurring donation” was already checked. When I tried to click away, a window popped up warning me, in vain, that the offer was about to expire.

    All of that happened within two hours. The Biden campaign did not contact me until seven hours after I’d downloaded the app, finally texting me in the late afternoon. “It’s Joe Biden and I owe you my sincere thanks, David,” the account wrote. “You all have been so great to this campaign.” (You all?) “I’ve been calling donors and it’s so great to thank people personally. I’m calling more this week who are helping us start May strong. If you aren’t a May donor yet, you can chip in here and I might be calling you soon.”

    Following that link, I was offered a shot at “a video call from Joe” and told that the “average gift is only $25.” A form to fill in an exact donation amount was left blank; a box that would make this a one-time donation, not a recurring one, was already checked.

    Over the next few days, it was easy to forget that the Biden app existed. Push texts were infrequent, and unlike the Trump app, the Biden app didn’t let me track virtual campaign events. (That was on the website.) TeamJoe offered me a few options and news items, all of which directed me from the app back to the campaign website. For 24 hours, the top news item was a new Biden campaign pledge, which I could take, committing myself to “empathy,” “keeping the faith,” “humility,” and “no malarkey,” among other nice things. If I wanted to volunteer, the app made it easier, but not addictive.

    Trump 2020 did not let me go so easily. A news feed let me read the latest messaging, just as it would appear to a reporter on the media list, or the campaign’s curated tweets, which prioritized big names like campaign manager Brad Parscale. An “engage” button educated me on ways to “fight with President Trump,” from hosting a “MAGA Meet Up” to joining the campaign finance committee as a high-dollar bundler. Sharing the app with a friend would award me 100 points, while sharing any news item to Twitter or Facebook would give me a single point. A good prize, like expedited entry at any to-be-scheduled rallies, cost 25,000 points.

    The “gamified” Trump app has made some Democrats nervous, not least because Biden hasn’t tried to compete with it. Everything that came from the Trump campaign had an act-fast, as-seen-on-TV feeling; nothing from the Biden campaign did. Biden’s campaign texted me a poll (“Are you planning to vote for Joe Biden in the general election in your state?”) and a longer “strategy survey,” asking if I wanted to volunteer and what issues I cared about.

    The Trump campaign and the RNC, in the same time period, invited me to “the Trump 100 Club” (“offer permanently expires in SIX HOURS”), a “2020 sustaining membership” with the campaign, and a poll that claimed the president had closed “ALL borders to Keep America Safe.” (While citizenship applications have been halted, and while resources have been sent to the Mexican border, the nation’s borders are not closed.)

    All of this fit snugly with the rest of the campaign’s other media and messaging. The point of the Trump app, social media accounts and Web TV was not just to keep me informed — it was to replace some of the news I might be getting from other outlets. “Forget the mainstream media,” went one ad that played at the start of the daily Trump video broadcasts. “Get your facts from the source.”

    Snip.

    I had more company watching Trump content than I did watching Biden content. As of Thursday morning, the Biden campaign’s Cinco de Mayo broadcast had clocked 7,000 views on YouTube and 180,000 on Facebook, while the Trump campaign’s had clocked 11,000 and 900,000 views, respectively. Trump’s campaign has 29 million followers on Facebook, while Biden’s has less than 2 million. Biden got a higher percentage of his active supporters to tune in, but Trump had exponentially more supporters to draw from.

    In some ways, the Biden campaign is years behind on this kind of engagement. By this point in the 2012 campaign, Obama’s team had established a popular video series in which deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter shared good news and debunked Republican attacks. There’s no such block-and-tackle effort from the Biden social media experience, apart from the occasional tweet responding to the Trump campaign — and no Trump-style points for helping get the message out.

    Gee, Biden is running an old-fashioned campaign decades behind the state-of-the-art? What are the odds?

  • It’s been 76 82 days since Biden held a press conference. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Poll: 55% Believe That Biden Potentially Has ‘Early Stages Of Dementia.'”

    “Overall, subgroups who normally approve of Trump’s job as president, were the most likely to believe Biden could be suffering from dementia,” the poll found. “Thus, majorities of Republicans (77% more likely/23% less likely) and Independents (56% more likely/44% less likely) thought Joe Biden had early-onset dementia; while nearly a third of Democrats (32% more likely/68% less likely) thought this was the case.”

    Takeaway: Almost a third of Democrats and over half of independents think Biden is already a few Cocoa Puffs shy of a full bowl. (Hat tip: Ian McKelvey.)

  • Daniel Pipes offers a guide for deciphering the Bidenese. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Biden hasn’t just lost a step, he’s lost a lap:

    Vote for President Trump and you are voting for the Constitution, military strength and robust economic growth.

    Vote for former vice president Joe Biden and you are voting for bureaucrats, appeasement abroad, and economic entropy.

    These are the policy choices embedded in each candidate. There is also a temperamental choice to be made.

    Trump is chaos theory contained in a man, an explosive combination of complete candor as to what he thinks and feels, a willingness to brawl, an almost animal energy for the fray.

    Biden is clearly not that. He is mostly invisible these days, but he hasn’t just lost a step. He’s lost a lap. His White House would be marked by echo-chamber enthusiasts and the control of the appointees he brings along with him, a haphazard and dangerous step for the republic.

    With Trump, all will be well in the country and all will be in upheaval inside the Beltway, Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

    With Biden, the deep-blue centers of genuine privilege will have their restoration. The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner will regain its luster.

  • Amy Klobuchar’s veep chances just flew out the window like a stapler hurled at a staffer’s head:

    “Senator Amy Klobuchar said Thursday that she is withdrawing her name from consideration as Joe Biden’s running mate, saying a woman of color should be chosen as vice-presidential nominee instead.”

    This morning, some political observers are concluding that Klobuchar could see the writing on the wall — as in, the writing on the wall was graffiti from Black Lives Matter activists declaring, “Don’t pick Amy Klobuchar.”

    But let’s think through the absolute worst-case scenario for Klobuchar. Right now, the polls look golden for Joe Biden. Imagine that Biden picked Klobuchar, helping him among some demographics in the Midwest but largely disappointing African-Americans, and infuriating progressive activists who don’t like Klobuchar’s record as a prosecutor. Then imagine that on Election Day 2020, turnout among African-Americans is lower than expected in places like Florida and Pennsylvania and Ohio and North Carolina . . . and Trump emerged with more than 270 electoral votes again. The entire Democratic Party would be livid with the Biden-Klobuchar ticket, and the Minnesota senator would be known as that other woman who had a golden opportunity to beat Donald Trump and blew it.

    If a Biden administration comes to pass, it will have plenty of other prestigious cabinet posts for Klobuchar if she wants one. Joe Biden may even feel he owes her a plum posting.

    And if Biden crashes and burns, it won’t be her fault!

  • BBC writer does a Veepstakes roundup. In addition to the usual names he includes Kyrsten Sinema (would never happen, because she’s strayed from the party line too much) and Michelle Obama (who so many on the left are pining for).
  • “Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe faced backlash and has apologized for his comments about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate choice, saying that when Biden picks his running mate, he should do it based on each contender’s qualifications and reputation, not skin color.”

    via GIPHY

  • Michigan Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell doesn’t believe Biden’s lead:

    “And look at what’s happened in five months. The world is upside down and not one of us on this phone call would have predicted that the world will be as it is today. And it is five months from now until November.”

    Real Clear Politics currently shows Biden to have a 7.3% lead over President Donald Trump in its average of recent polling in Michigan and an 8.1% average polling lead nationally.

    Four years ago, when polling showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to have leads over Trump, Dingell voiced concerns before Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to carry Michigan since 1988. Trump won the state by 10,704 votes against Clinton, his closest margin of victory nationally.

    “Four years ago, many of you on this phone call thought that I was nuts,” Dingell said. “I was in enough communities and heard enough people talking that I was very worried about the outcome of that election.”

    Dingell said Democrats should take nothing for granted in 2020.

  • Biden will accept the Democratic nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. Stop the presses!
  • You know those “Bolton is voting for Biden” stories? More fake news.
  • “Will Joe Biden Become Our First Female President?” “Under Biden’s own understanding of gender and his own proposed policy, it is entirely up to him what gender he identifies as after the election.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Biden: ‘Republicans May Have Standards, But We Have Double Standards.'”

    • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

    BidenWatch for May 4, 2020

    Monday, May 4th, 2020

    Is the Tara Reade rape allegation going to be the silver bullet that drops Biden? It seemed unlikely when the story first broke, but just enough supporting evidence has come to light, and just enough Democrats not acting like total hypocrites and supporting an investigation into the charges, that the scandal won’t go away.

    Oh, and New York just threw Bernie Sanders off the ballot. Funny how things like that happen when you cross the DNC. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Another witness who heard Tara Reade talk about being sexually harassed by Biden.
  • Reade wants Biden to released his sealed senate records.
  • The Washington Post called on Biden to address the Tara Reade accusations and release his records.
  • Cracks in the blue wall?

    The New York Times follows up the Tara Reade story with news that activist women’s groups and key Democratic officials have not remained entirely silent about the allegation of sexual assault. Over the last three weeks, those groups have pressed Joe Biden to speak out and deal with Reade’s allegations, and they have held their fire after being promised action.

    Now, however, they’re tired of getting strung along — and may soon make their unhappiness public:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • A quick recap of the evidence:

  • Potential veep pick Sen. Kamala Harris believed Biden’s accusers in 2019.
  • Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen “Lockdown” Whitmer saysnot every sexual assault claim is equal. Of course she does; her party has always treated those against someone with a (D) after their name as unworthy of investigation.
  • Women’s groups on Biden accuser Tara Reade: “Who?”
  • Nancy Pelosi’s Brett Kavanaugh opinions updated for Joe Biden. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Reade Says Complaint Would Prove Biden Aides Dennis Toner And Ted Kaufman Lied About Not Knowing Her.”
  • “Senate Democrats Refuse To Acknowledge Sexual Assault Accusations Against Joe Biden.”
  • Can you still hear it, Tara? The Silence of the Dems?
  • “U of Delaware Must Release Biden Senate Records Amid #MeToo Scandal, FOIA Request Demands.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • TeamBiden lied enough that even the New York Times got miffed:

  • Speaking of the New York Times, they suggested the DNC assemble a team to go through Biden’s papers. DNC: “You’re high.”
  • More on that subject:

  • Speaking of the DNC, New York just removed Bernie Sanders from the ballot for the June 28 primary.

  • Powers of 10, how do they work? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Biden tosses more word salad. Will he get tossed by the DNC?

  • And sometimes he doesn’t even speak at all:

  • The Biden-Kavanaugh double standard:

    The operative question for many in the press as they assess Tara Reade’s assault allegation against Joe Biden is the correct one: Is Tara Reade telling the truth? It does not matter what other senators may or may not have done to other women in other places or at other times. It does not matter — for purposes of establishing Joe Biden’s culpability — whether the Long Arc of History Bends toward Justice, whether other women who look like Tara Reade were assaulted by men who look like Joe Biden, or whether it would facilitate a more equitable future if we jettisoned Joe Biden, guilt be damned. What seems to matter to the media, for purposes of assessing Biden’s candidacy, is whether then-senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. digitally penetrated Tara Reade in 1993.

    But this, crucially, is not what mattered to these same media players when then-judge Brett Kavanaugh was accused of assault, then indecent exposure, then gang rape in a series of successively more lurid allegations. What mattered then were not only the merits of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation — and that’s Dr. Ford, to you — but also the behavior of parties completely unrelated to those allegedly involved in the assault, parties who, by accident of birth, happened to look like Brett Kavanaugh, grow up like Brett Kavanaugh, and inhabit the “world of privilege” that Kavanaugh allegedly inhabited.

    Joe Biden is being treated as an individual — a man being accused of a specific crime that either did, or did not, occur. Brett Kavanaugh was treated as a totem — an antihero, an anti-messianic stand-in for all of History’s various Straight White Men who “got away with it,” who were cushioned from the vagaries of life by their unthinkable “privilege,” lashing out against the browning of America and the long-prophesied end of the Old Boys’ Club.

  • Biden wants the benefit-of-the-doubt, innocent-until-proven-guilty standard that he helped deny male college students.

    The problem with defending due process in a case like Biden’s with respect to Tara Reade is that Biden himself, when it comes to allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, doesn’t believe in it. Perhaps in part to atone for his shabby treatment of Anita Hill, Biden was especially prominent in the Obama administration’s overhaul of Title IX treatment of claims of sexual discrimination and harassment on campus. You can listen to Biden’s strident speeches and rhetoric on this question and find not a single smidgen of concern with the rights of the accused. Men in college were to be regarded as guilty before being proven innocent, and stripped of basic rights in their self-defense.

    Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen noted the consequences of Biden’s crusade in The New Yorker last year. “In recent years,” she wrote, “it has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, the evidence, the identities of witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses … According to K.C. Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on Title IX lawsuits, more than four hundred students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011 have sued their schools under federal or state laws — in many cases, for sex discrimination under Title IX. While many of the lawsuits are still ongoing, nearly half of the students who have sued have won favorable court rulings or have settled with the schools.”

    On Friday’s Morning Joe, Biden laid out a simple process for judging him: Listen respectfully to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or disprove her specific claim. The objective truth, Biden argued, is what matters. I agree with him. But this was emphatically not the standard Biden favored when judging men in college. If Biden were a student, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evidence provided, who was charging him, who was a witness, and no right to question the accuser. Apply the Biden standard for Biden, have woke college administrators decide the issue in private, and he’s toast.

    Under Biden, Title IX actually became a force for sex discrimination — as long as it was against men. Emily Yoffe has done extraordinary work exposing the injustices of the Obama-Biden sexual-harassment regime on campus, which have mercifully been pared back since. But she has also highlighted Biden’s own zeal in the cause. He brushed aside most legal defenses against sexual harassment. In a speech at the University of Pittsburgh in 2016, for example, Biden righteously claimed that it was an outrage that any woman claiming sexual assault should have to answer questions like “Were you drinking?” or “What did you say?” “These are questions that angered me then and anger me now.” He went on: “No one, particularly a court of law, has a right to ask any of those questions.”

    Particularly a court of law? A court cannot even inquire what a woman said in a disputed sexual encounter? Couldn’t that be extremely relevant to the question of consent? Or ask if she were drinking? It may be extremely salient that she had been drinking — because it could prove rape, if she were incapacitated and unable to consent and sex took place. But Biden’s conviction that young men on campus should be legally handicapped in defending themselves from charges of sexual abuse occluded any sense of basic fairness.

  • Consistency, Democratic Party style:

  • Meanwhile, if the DNC does whack Biden off the ticket, Grandma Death is ready for the call.
  • Speaking of which, those two titans of charisma were palling around on video:

    

  • Who best to vet female VP candidates? Would you believe Chris “Waitress Sandwich” Dodd?
  • Twitchy has some thoughts on that.
  • Early Presidential race dropout California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell thinks Reade’s claim should be investigated. How many of you had “Eric Swalwell” on your Biden Scandal Bingo cards? Now put your hands down you damn liars!
  • “Big money donors are pressuring Joe Biden against picking Elizabeth Warren for VP: ‘He would lose the election.'” For once, big donors and Bernie Bros are on the same page…
  • “Blue-check feminist who was AOK with innocent men losing jobs over false allegations believes Tara Reade but still voting Biden.”

  • How desperate are Democrats? Desperate enough to float a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket, Constitution be damned. (The author’s attempt to tapdance around the constitutional issue should cause thousands of legal scholars to faceplam themselves.)
  • “‘I Have Never Treated A Woman Inappropriately,’ Joe Biden Whispers Into Journalist’s Ear.”
  • “Biden Attempts To Win Over Youth With Appearance On ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.'”
  • “Judge Dismisses Sexual Assault Allegations Against Biden On Grounds That He Is Not A Republican.”
  • Heh:

  • Heh 2:

  • Titania McGrath weighs in:
    

    • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch | 1 Comment »

    Grandpa Commie Has Left The Building

    Thursday, April 9th, 2020

    And then there was one:

    Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) announced on Wednesday that he is dropping out of the presidential race.

    Sanders said in a speech from his hometown of Burlington that while his campaign had won the “ideological” battle, “the path toward victory [in the primary] is virtually impossible.”

    “In state after state…we received a significant majority of the votes” from people under the age of 50, Sanders said. “The future of this country is with our ideas.”

    Sanders added, “I will stay on the ballot in all remaining states and continue to gather delegates. While Vice President Biden will be the nominee, we must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible…to exert significant influence over the party platform.”

    Sanders has remained in the primary despite multiple sweeping victories by rival Joe Biden. The Vermont senator has won 883 delegates in state primaries to Biden’s 1,196. Biden gained support from moderate and African American voters to pull ahead of Sanders, while Sanders has relied on younger voters as well as broad support among Latinos.

    Sanders badly misread the moment following his 2016 defeat, thinking his competitive run meant Democrats were yearning for a socialist true believer dedicated to nationalizing everything. What it actually meant was Democrats were desperately yearning for someone who wasn’t Hillary Clinton. The DNC helped engineer his defeat in 2016 and they did so again this year, though we may have to wait a decade or so for tell-all books to describe exactly how the DNC pressured candidates to exit the race after South Carolina to align so perfectly behind Biden right before Super Tuesday, given his campaign’s near-death experience up until then.

    There are tons of Bernie supporters claiming they’ll never vote for Biden ever ever ever, but I suspect most are just Twitter-mad rather than real-life mad. Come October most will have their “Trump just said [same thing Trump has said for five years], and that’s the last straw! I’m voting for Biden!” moment. In theory, some should vote for whoever the Green Party candidate is, which seems likely to be co-founder Howie Hawkins, who is also running as the Socialist Party USA candidate. You would think that watermelon green-on-the-outside/red-on-the-inside flavor would be perfect for Bernie supporters, but a lot of the 2016 Green and Libertarian Party vote totals were based on how odious Hillary Clinton was. Ditto probable Libertarian candidate Jacob Hornberger, who seems to be holding off the juggernaut that is Vermin Supreme but is unlikely to reach Gary Johnson’s 4 million plus votes in the general election.

    This is clearly Bernie’s last Presidential hurrah, and the hard left will need to pick a new champion for their 2024 campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be constitutionally eligible then, but don’t discount the possibility of a celebrity outsider campaign.

    So it’s Biden vs. Trump. Polls show big leads for Biden, but that’s due to The Current Unpleasantness. How quickly does the economy recover, and how long can Democrats hide Biden’s obvious cognitive decline from the American public?

    Does this mean an end to the Clown Car update? You’ll have to tune in Monday to find out…

    Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for April 6, 2020

    Monday, April 6th, 2020

    The frozen campaign continues. Slow Joe racks up Pinocchios and launches a podcast, the Democratic Convention has been moved back a month (and may turn into a virtual-only affair), and Bernie’s doppelganger says it’s time to throw in the towel. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Wisconsin may or may not have a primary tomorrow. It’s theoretically going ahead but there seem to be numerous legal challenges due to the difficulty of holding it due to the Wuhan coronavirus.

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Joe Biden 1,217
    2. Bernie Sanders 914
    3. Elizabeth Warren 81
    4. Michael Bloomberg 55
    5. Pete Buttigieg 26
    6. Amy Klobuchar 7
    7. Tulsi Gabbard 2

    Not updated since March 26.

    Polls
    Yet again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, and polling itself seems to have dropped off to almost nothing, a victim of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.

  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • Joe Rogan says he’d rather vote for President Donald Trump than Joe Biden. “I’d rather vote for Trump than [Biden]. I don’t think he can handle anything. You’re relying entirely on his cabinet. If you want to talk about an individual leader who can communicate, he can’t do that. And we don’t know what the fuck he’ll be like after a year in office.” (It’s an interesting interview, but then I get to the part where his guest talks about a friend’s self-trepanation and go “Well, this is a little far afield of fodder for a political blog…”)
  • Democrats have postponed the start of their convention from July 13 to August 17.
  • In fact, Democrats are considering cancelling it entirely.

    • Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Inside Biden’s coronavirus bunker:

    From the nuts and bolts of campaigning (fundraising, door-knocking, holding rallies) to the most basic assumptions about the economy and how the public sees Trump, nearly everything needs to be reassessed. Biden’s Philadelphia headquarters has been cleared out. “Everybody’s working remotely across the whole campaign,” said Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s communications director. “We’re all discovering the joys of a Zoom conference call.”…

    The presumed date by which Biden’s delegate nerds predicted Bernie Sanders would be unofficially knocked out of the race has been upended by a series of canceled primaries. Biden had planned to use a predicted victory in Georgia on Tuesday to essentially end the race by declaring that he had achieved “an insurmountable delegate lead.”

    Instead, the Georgia primary was moved to May and Biden retreated to a makeshift studio in his basement at home in Delaware to broadcast Zoom videos that have had to compete — poorly, so far — with briefings from elected officials like Trump and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who are actually responsible for dealing with the crisis.

    “Everything that’s happening right now is like nothing I’ve experienced in previous presidential campaigns,” said Dunn.

    The first big political issue is whether the Sanders campaign has any chance of returning from the dead. With many remaining primaries getting kicked to May and June, Biden might not be able to deliver his “insurmountable delegate lead” line until the summer. And while the pandemic has essentially erased Sanders from the news, there is an undercurrent of frustration — and a little nervousness — among some Biden aides that he has been robbed of a clean victory as the presumptive nominee at the end of March, as they had assumed he would. “There’s no closure,” said a top Biden adviser.

    The pandemic exploded and inserted itself as the only issue that matters just as Biden made his remarkable transition from lost cause to incredible comeback. The rebound was so swift and his dominance over the race so sudden, that a lot of Biden advisers and outside allies are still processing what happened. Did Biden build an excellent team that just took some time to get things right? Or was Biden’s team hapless and he was simply the beneficiary of underlying dynamics in the primary that allowed him to beat Sanders?

    The latter view was expressed by an informal adviser to the campaign.

    “After Super Tuesday, Biden got catapulted to the front of the line in spite of himself and his campaign,” he said. “The classic example of that obviously is Massachusetts, where he never went there, didn’t spend any money, didn’t have any people on the ground, and he beat Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. It’s extraordinary. And there’s a reason for it: Democratic voters were saying that the most important thing to them is to beat Trump and he was happy to be the beneficiary of that. But perhaps many of us were overly critical of how they ran the campaign and, frankly, how he performed. He has some fundamental strengths that those of us watching this undervalued.”

    “Coronavirus is killing the Biden campaign — and making him look like a fool“:

    When Biden has been heard from, he has looked frankly pathetic. After disappearing for more than a week after his primary victories in Missouri, Michigan and Washington, Biden emerged this week for a series of speeches and interviews from his Wilmington, Del., home.

    The purpose was obvious­ — his campaign desperately needs to muscle its way back into the news cycle. But that turned out to be easier said than done…Biden is clearly not working for the Biden campaign.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Speaking of looking like a fool, watch Sundown Joe stumble his way through another interview.

    Robert Gates makes the case against Biden as commander-in-chief:

    Gates is a Republican and is certainly no liberal, but his reputation for moderation, pragmatism, and managerial talent was such that Barack Obama wanted to retain him for a long stint as secretary of defense. It wasn’t the easiest of tenures, but for two and a half years, Gates worked diligently and as smoothly as he could with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the Obama-Biden national security team.

    It is therefore a matter of grave alarm—at least a DEFCON 2 and possibly DEFCON 1, the ultimate state of alert—when Gates, that most centered of centrists, asserts that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue for the past four decades.”

    The entire syllabus of Biden’s foreign policy and national security errors is a target-rich environment for the many American Greatness writers with expertise on particular issues. Anyone who makes the case for Biden’s election to the presidency should be made to defend the extremism and demonstrated failure of Biden’s national security record.

    Speaking of bad judgment, remember that Biden was calling President Trump’s travel bans “xenophobia” before the Wuhan Cornavirus really got going. (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Is Biden a chronic liar or just senile?

    The former VP doesn’t just stick to marginal lies or spin either, he goes directly at major issues knowing that he’ll be shown to be fibbing.

    But does he know? That’s a real question when you’ve got a guy who’s clearly losing his mental faculties. As I’ve documented here, here, and here (among many others), Biden’s inability to process his thoughts and his constant “gaffes” are apparent at this point. There have also been bouts of anger on the campaign trail in which he’s berated or even physically accosted Democrat primary voters.

    These are the kinds of things someone wouldn’t do if they had the ability to understand what they were doing. Trump may be a brute at times, but you’ll never find him jabbing his finger in a voter’s chest and yelling at them.

    All of these things raise serious questions about just how stable Biden is. If you’ve watched him lately, he looks like he’s about to fall over while just trying to do remote TV hits. This is not a guy who looks — or acts — like he’s all there. So while the constant lies are worthy of coverage — and every single one needs to be slammed — the reality of his condition may be much more serious than just a case of being a politician.

    Given Biden’s lying, it’s no surprise that he’s racked up the Pionocchios. “He’s collected a total of eleven Pinocchios from the Washington Post in just the past few weeks.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) Biden thinks it likely that there will be no in-person Democratic National Convention. He may be right, but he’s sending mixed messages:

    Did you know that Joe Biden has a podcast? Speaking of which: “Biden’s New Podcast Available Exclusively On Vinyl.” “Joe Biden did a town hall about coronavirus last night [March 27] on CNN, and I don’t think there is a single news article about it other than on CNN itself, which doesn’t seem to have a transcript.” Biden is running ahead of where Hillary Clinton did against Sanders four years ago. “Biden held onto much of the turf that Clinton won in 2016, but he also captured a lot of territory that Sanders carried four years ago. We found that much of Biden’s success can be explained by his dominance in areas with larger shares of white voters without a college degree.” Time’s Up: We’re here to fight for all women who make accusations of sexual assault. Well, except those against Joe Biden. For Reasons. Related:

    Elizabeth Warren all but endorses Biden.

  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Convention Substitute? Will Democrats dump Joe for Cuomo?

    Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee. Yet many Democrats have ‘buyers’ remorse’ as the COVID virus has driven Biden off centerstage and into a hastily-built basement studio in his Delaware home.

    Biden has tried to remain relevant to the public through TV broadcasts, but those appearances have been gaffe-prone and interspersed with lapses in lucidity. Last Friday, he announced on CNN that ‘I speak to all five of my grandkids,’ which must make his very much alive sixth grandchild feel a little neglected. Dave Catanese of McClatchy found his interview last Monday painful to watch: ‘Joe Biden struggled mightily at the top of his MSNBC interview where he looked to be reading from notes to answer a question.’

    Democrats openly worry about the lack of enthusiasm for Biden. A new Washington Post/ABC poll found 86 percent of Trump supporters enthusiastic about their choice. Only 74 percent of Biden backers said the same thing. Most ominously, the poll found that 15 percent of Democrats who still back Bernie Sanders say they’d vote for Trump, not Biden, in November. That’s more than the 12 percent of Sanders voters who plumped for Trump in 2016.

    (Hat tip: Gail Heriot at instapundit.)

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Sanders camp says he has a narrow path to victory, but refuses to say what it is. Presumably it involves walking The Path of the Dead through the White Mountains.


    Looks legit.

    The knife-in-the-back anonymous-top-aides-say-he-should-consider-dropping-out stage is already in full swing. Of course, it’s from the Washington Post and contains the magic “just trust me bro” phrase (“according to two people with knowledge of the situation,”) so who knows if it’s real or just more DNC rat-farking. His Saturday Night Live doppelganger Larry David says Sanders should drop out and everybody should back Biden.

    • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020 and endorsed Warren)
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard (Dropped out March 19, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)

    • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

    James Carville Is Right, But Not In The Way He Thinks

    Sunday, February 9th, 2020

    Key Bill Clinton political advisor James Carville is not high on the current Democratic Party presidential field…or their policies:

    “I’m 75 years old. Why am I here doing this? Because I am scared to death — that’s why!” Carville said on MSNBC.

    “We’ve got to decide what we want to be. Are we going to be an ideological cult? Or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party?” he went on to say.

    Over the course of his lengthy interview, Carville declared that the Democratic Party needs to “wake up;” compared Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Jeremy Corbyn, a radical liberal who recently resigned as the head of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party; admitted Democratic voters are less than enthusiastic about their 2020 options; said DNC Chairman Tom Perez should be canned; and declared the Democratic Party was hurt by the media who have become “AOC crazy.”

    Carville said he would vote for Sanders if he wins the Democratic nomination, but only begrudgingly because he wouldn’t have “another choice.”

    “But look at the British Labour Party. We’re like talking about people voting from jail cells. We’re talking about not having a border. I mean, come on people,” Carville said.

    In the end, Carville said that Democrats should focus on running smart campaigns that focus on retaking control of the Senate.

    “You and I know that 18% of the country elects 52 senators,” he said, addressing former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. “The urban core is not gonna get it done. What we need is power! Do you understand? That’s what this is about!”

    All this is true, especially the part about needing power, but not in the way Carville means it.

    Broadly speaking, there are two wings to the modern Democratic Party: The corrupt wing, represented by the Clintons, and the insane wing, currently represented by Bernie Sanders. (The insane wing is, itself, probably split into two factions, the socialists and the social justice warriors, but the significance of that particular split is less important to the topic at hand.) The split in the factions dates back at least to the anti-Vietnam War New Left in 1968, with Eugene McCarthy facing off as their champion against Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, where the foundational myth of a racist, oppressive America was baked into the faction’s core beliefs. The New Left has been carrying out it’s long march through both the Party and various Democratic institutions ever since. George McGovern was its champion against Humphrey and Edmund Muskie in 1972, and the last insane wing factional candidate to win the Democratic Presidential nomination.

    Obama was a fusionist candidate, with a background in both Alinsky radical politics and Chicago Daley machine corrupt wing politics. That, and a huge store of white liberal guilt, let him appeal to both wings, and Obama filled his cabinet with corrupt wing figures (Biden, Clinton, Kerry, etc.).

    Sanders, a hardcore socialist who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, is the clear favorite of the insane wing, though almost half of the candidates who jumped into the race (Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Tom Steyer, Jay Inslee, Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, etc.) were vying for the insane wing’s “lane.” Sanders supporters were left very bitter by the DNC putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and they’re determined not to let it happen again.

    If you read their writings, the insane wing is absolutely convinced that America is naturally a left-wing nation and that their triumph is “inevitable” thanks to changing demographics. George Soros and his ilk have been pumping money into the insane wing infrastructure for over twenty years, and they believe that only the inertia and opposition of the corrupt wing (which they refer to as “neoliberalism”) has halted their inevitable rise.

    Before they can seize control of the means of production, they must first seize control of the Democratic Party. Only then can they assure that their personnel, and their ideas, take key positions in the Party. The corrupt wing, more in tune with electoral reality, more concerned with the immediate graft, and currently controlling most of the Party apparatus, stands in their way.

    Just as the Bolsheviks purged the Mensheviks almost immediately upon taking power, the insane wing must push the corrupt wing out to seize control of the Party, something they were too poorly organized to carry out in 1972. (At the state level, liberal Democrats purged moderates and conservatives from the Party in Texas, encouraging them to vote in the Republican primary, because they calculated (correctly) that they could never seize control of the state Party as long as they were there. They calculated incorrectly that the Party rank and file would continue to vote for Democrats after their takeover; the result was over two decades of Republican control.)

    The corrupt wing knows it’s toast if the insane wing takes over, which is why Tom Perez immediately purged all Sanders supporters after taking over as head of the DNC. That’s why the corrupt wing has Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Bloomberg as its champions. Both sides in the fight see the other as an existential threat to their control of the Party, and both sides have control of the Party as their most important and immediate goal. To quote Blazing Saddles, “Gentlemen, we have to protect our phony baloney jobs!”

    To be sure, both sides hate Trump with the sort of white hot fury only reached by people whose Facebook friends seem to do nothing but share anti-Trump memes all day. But Trump isn’t the enemy at hand, or even really the enemy. (Old Cold War joke: An army general asks a colonel to name the enemy. “The Soviet Union,” says the colonel. “No!” says the general. “The Soviets are the opponent. The navy is the enemy!”) When push comes to shove, both sides see four more years of a Trump presidency as more survivable than letting the other faction control the Party.

    Being creatures of the corrupt wing, the mainstream media hasn’t been covering this split, since Trump Derangement Syndrome sells better than interfactional fights. The irony is that this has let the Sanders brigades get to the foot of Mount Doom while nobody was paying attention. An additional irony is that the entire impeachment farce, designed to protect corrupt wing champion Biden, has backfired spectacularly, making Sander’s nomination much more likely.

    If the DNC didn’t try to screw Sanders in the Iowa caucuses, they certainly gave every impression they were. It’s entirely possible that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and that the DNC will try to screw Bernie even more this year than they did in 2016. Expect dirty tricks to make 1968 and 1972 look like a cakewalk in comparison.

    The insane wing is probably correct in that they make up a majority of voting Party activists. The corrupt wing is probably also correct in that Sanders is much too far left for the American electorate.

    All that points to President Donald Trump winning in a 1972-style electoral blowout in November.

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors | 9 Comments »

    Iowa Caucuses Winners: Trump. And Chaos.

    Tuesday, February 4th, 2020

    I’ll just go to bed tonight, I thought, then bang out a blog past tomorrow when it’s clear who won Iowa.

    Ha!

    You know who won Iowa last night? President Donald Trump, both literally, with 97% of the vote, as well as figuratively and symbolically, as Democrats still don’t know who won, reportedly due to additional time necessary to rig the results “technology problems and reporting ‘inconsistencies.'”

    Which didn’t keep Pete Buttigieg from declaring victory. Sort of.

    The Twitterverse is not sanguine about the results, as indicated by this snapshot of trends this morning:

    For the #Shadow and #PetetheCheat and #MayorCheat trends, here are two tweets explicating the theory:

    Hot on the heels of that mysteriously cancelled poll, lots of Sanders supporters see a conspiracy afoot between the DNC and members of the media to screw Sanders and boost Buttigieg, a theory that has at least the veneer of plausibility.

    More tweets:

    As they say: Developing.

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Elections | 3 Comments »

    « Older Entries