I follow neither rap music nor Hollywood gossip, so I was only vaguely aware of Sean Combs, AKA Puff Daddy, AKA P. Diddy, AKA Diddy. I knew he was a rapper and a rap mogul with his own label, but that was about it, except for noting he was raided by the FBI back in March. And I’m never surprised when a rap star (or really, just about any rich entertainment figure) is involved in a drug or sex scandal.
But the sheer range of Mr. Combs alleged criminality is fairly breathtaking:
Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and William S. Walker, the Acting Special Agent in Charge of the New York Field Office of Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”), announced that SEAN COMBS, a/k/a “Puff Daddy,” a/k/a “P. Diddy,” a/k/a “PD,” a/k/a “Love,” was arrested last night and charged in a three count Indictment with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution. The Indictment unsealed today alleges that between 2008 and the present, COMBS abused, threatened, and coerced women and others, and led a racketeering conspiracy that engaged in sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice, among other crimes….
According to the Indictment unsealed today:[1]
From at least 2008 through the present, COMBS led a criminal enterprise that existed to facilitate his abuse and exploitation of women, to protect his reputation, and to conceal his conduct. As part of that criminal enterprise, COMBS, along with other members and associates of the enterprise, committed crimes including sex trafficking, forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice.
Among other things, COMBS’ sexual abuse of women included causing them to engage in frequent, days-long sexual activity with male commercial sex workers, some of whom were transported over state lines. These events, which COMBS referred to as “Freak Offs,” were elaborate sex performances that COMBS arranged, directed, and often electronically recorded. To ensure participation in Freak Offs, COMBS used violence and intimidation, and leveraged his power over victims—power he obtained through obtaining and distributing narcotics to them, exploiting his financial support to them and threatening to cut off the same, and controlling their careers. COMBS also threatened his victims, including by threatening to expose the embarrassing and sensitive recordings he made of Freak Offs if the women did not comply with his demands.
COMBS’ efforts to control women included repeated physical abuse. COMBS assaulted women by, among other things, striking, punching, dragging, throwing objects at, and kicking them. COMBS similarly assaulted witnesses to his abuse. These assaults often resulted in injuries to the victims, which took days or weeks to heal.
To commit these crimes, COMBS relied on his power as the leader of a multi-faceted business empire. Employees of COMBS’ businesses—including high ranking supervisors, security staff, personal assistants, and household staff—acted as COMBS’ intermediaries to, among other things, arrange travel and hotel rooms; stock the hotel rooms for COMBS’ commercial sex activity; contact or locate women and other individuals whom he targeted for abuse; and conceal and cover up the abuse. This criminal concealment included efforts to prevent law enforcement from learning about his abuse.
If you believe you are victim of a crime perpetrated by Sean Combs, please contact HSI at Sextrafficking_outreach@hsi.dhs.gov or via their mobile tip-line at 1-877-4-HSITIP, and reference this case.
* * *
COMBS, 54, of Miami, Florida, is charged with one count of racketeering conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison; one count of sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison; and one count of transportation for purposes of prostitution, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
That’s a fairly breathtaking array of sleazy, slimy criminality. And it doesn’t even mention some of the other allegations against Combs, so here are not one, not two, but three videos covering his illegal, unsavory antics.
First up, the originally Penguinz0 video that first clued me in to the magnitude of Combas alleged misdeeds.
“This is a moment for celebration. For so long, P. Diddy has gotten away with heinous crimes that tons of people knew about, from car bombs to assaults to sex crimes. It’s like P. Diddy was going for some kind of high score, trying to catch every possible crime like a Pokemon.”
“The allegations mirror 11 civil complaints filed against him since 2023.”
“Really, that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the P Diddy lore.”
“Also mentioned is that he had thousands of bottles of lube and baby oil that were seized from his home during those raids as part of his freak off supplies.”
“He also had tons of narcotics as well.”
“Diddy became infamous for his freak off parties that would go on for days, where he’d force attendees to not only stay there and perform non-consensual sex acts in front of him, but he would just be pumping them full of drugs and he would be watching while furiously masturbating like a coked-out goblin.” Sounds like the MO of Democratic megadonor and convicted sex offender Ed Buck.
“He’d allegedly distribute cocaine, Oxy, Xanax, GHB, MDMA and Ketamine.”
“He was like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but drugs instead of candy.”
Oh, and he also had “Puffy Flavor Camp” for kids. I would really rather not imagine what went on there…
“They done caught the diddler.”
“50 Cent has been like, I would say, an elite level hater of P Diddy for quite a while.”
“In plain sight, right under everyone’s nose for years. Finally, though, they’re acting on all of this shit. Much like Epstein, it feels like everyone knew he was on some heinous shit, but no one came forward, cuz he’s so influential.”
“He had like a lot of dirt on everyone through throwing his Diddy parties, so I think that was a big piece of leverage for him and keeping people quiet for so long. But yeah, tons of people knew all about Diddy and the terrible shit.”
One young artist was told to perform sex on Diddy’s bodyguard in exchange for a record contract, only to be told it was a joke just before following through. “Which shows you how things have worked in Hollywood for literally ever. People use the impression of power and access in order to get people to do truly awful things with one another, and celebrities fall right into it, because when you’re a celebrity, they let you do what they want.”
Here’s a much longer Penguinz0 video on Diddy that goes into more details about the allegations, including the car bomb (you would think something like that would attract the attention of the authorities) and other women he’s abused. I haven’t watched all of it, but plunge on in if you need more details of Diddy’s Depravities.
Finally, a video from none other than Ben Shapiro:
“Here is my theory: everyone in Hollywood knew about all of it. And not only do they they know about all of it, they all participated in it. I don’t know what else to take away from many of the pictures of these so-called white parties.”
Video has surfaced of Diddy telling his guests to take their children home so the “real” party could begin.
“And the the pictures of the people who showed up to this thing are just amazing. I mean, he was dating, at one point, Jennifer Lopez from like 99 to 2001. But one picture alone at one white party was Kimora Lee Simmons, Russell Simmons, Damon Dash, Aaliyah, Diddy, Jennifer Lopez, Lisa Zane, Billy Zane, Victor Matthews, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, Andre Harell and Veronica Webb.”
“Photos of the gatherings are like a time capsule of the late 90s. Howard Stern, Kelly Osborne, Aretha Franklin, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martha Stewart, Jay-Z and Beyonce, Mariah Carey and husband Nick Cannon, Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, a young Kim Kardashian.”
“The parties were separated into tiers of access. There was general admission, then a series of tiers ending with entrance to the inner sanctum where the real partying went on.”
Khloe Kardashian tells a story on video about attending a party where “half the people were butt naked” and name checks Justin Bieber, “Quincy” (I’m assuming Jones), (Hannah?) Montana, etc. (I apologize. When I began this post, I didn’t realize it would have Kardashians in it…)
Bieber’s presence is not a shock because Diddy was “preying on young men.” There’s a supercringe video where Diddy brags about “hanging out” with Bieber for 48 hours. “We can’t really disclose, but it’s definitely a 15 year old’s dream.” He also talked about having legal guardianship of Usher. “It would be hard to imagine Justin Bieber was not abused by Diddy.”
“Free people of their morality and give them insane levels of power and wealth, and it turns out they do awful things with those things.”
“The story here, once again, is as it was with Jeffrey Epstein. The story about Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t really about Jeffrey Epstein, it was about who’s in the little black book. The story about Diddy here is not just about Diddy being abusive and awful, the story is who knew when and what did they do about it.”
“I don’t know when it became a de rigueur for powerful people in our society to simply go to random drug and sex parties as though this is the late Roman Empire, but that’s effectively what we have here, and again it’s not restricted to Hollywood.”
“We now know that [Dr. Jay Varma], the head of the New York City Health Commission was going to sex and drug parties in the middle of the pandemic in violation of covid protocols that he himself had written.”
The real Diddy story is that we have one of the worst “elite” classes in history.
Did Diddy contribute money to Democrats? Of course he did, but by the standards of celebrity music moguls, the amounts were rather paltry. $1,000 to Hillary Clinton in 1999 (remember how she became a New Yorker to run for the senate?), $2,000 to Al Sharpton in 2003, and $2,900 to Nina Turner (two ran two unsuccessful runs for Ohio’s 11th congressional district) in 2021. (I’m assuming the Sean Combs donations from Ohio, Arkansas and D.C. are from other people, as are the two donations from a Sean Combs in Los Angeles, 90048, because one is listed as “Sean L. Combs” and Diddy’s middle name is John. And I’m betting that Sean L. Combs is pretty pissed at his nomenganger’s crimes right now…)
Bonus from The Babylon Bee: “Justice Department Assures Americans Diddy Is Securely Locked Away In Epstein’s Old Cell.”
Edited to add: Please note that a photo being circulated of Kamala Harris standing with Sean Combs at an awards event is fake, as the original image showed her standing with Montel Williams.
The Democratic Party may not be any good at cultivating a healthy economy, governing, or protecting the rights of average Americans, but they excel in all forms of election cheating.
But don’t think Democrats are content with merely sucking up illegal American contributions. No, Democrats have also mastered the art of illegally sucking up illegal campaign contributions from foreigners abroad.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio took the stand and testified in the federal trial of Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, founder of the hip hop band Fugees, and his alleged involvement in a money laundering scheme that included a huge — and illegal — donation to Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
DiCaprio recalled a conversation with Malaysian financier Jho Low, who mentioned that he was looking to donate millions of dollars to the Obama campaign by giving the money to Michel and having him pass it to Obama’s people.
Fast Facts:
Low was sentenced — in absentia — to a 10-year sentence in a Kuwaiti court for his role in laundering roughly $1 billion of the almost $4.5 billion worth of Chinese currency he allegedly swindled in what’s known as the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal.
Low claimed he wanted to donate between $20-$30 million dollars to Obama.
It is illegal for American presidential candidates to accept donations from foreigners.
The DOJ charged Low for trying to donate money to lobby the Trump administration, hoping to have the charges against him relating to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal dropped.
Low is on the lam and is believed to be hiding in China or Macau. China denies harboring him.
“It was a significant sum, something to the tune of $20-30 million,” DiCaprio testified in court. “I said, ‘Wow that’s a lot of money!’”
Additional witnesses testified that they were wired money from Low and asked to forward it to the Obama campaign.
Michel allegedly took the mad stacks from Low and used them to lobby Obama’s government on behalf of Low and the Chinese Communist Party.
He distributed $21.6 million to American straw donors who would then donate it to the Obama campaign, concealing the fact that the money came from Low.
But just because Democrats seem to love sucking up money with people connected to communist China, don’t think that they’re not looking at other foreign Sugar Daddys.
The Berger Action Fund is a nondescript name for a group with a rather specific purpose: steering the wealth of Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire, into the world of American politics and policy.
As a foreign national, Wyss is prohibited from donating to candidates or political committees. But his influence is still broadly felt through millions of dollars routed through a network of nonprofit groups that invest heavily in the Democratic ecosystem. Such groups don’t have to disclose the source of their funding — or many details about how they spend it.
Newly available tax documents show that his giving through the Berger Action Fund, which describes itself as advocating for “solutions to some of our world’s biggest problems,” swelled in 2021 to $72 million, cementing Wyss’ status as a Democratic-aligned megadonor.
Representatives for Wyss insist they comply with laws governing the giving of foreign nationals and have put in place strict policies limiting the use of donations to “issue advocacy” — not partisan electoral activities. But the fact that the money cannot be publicly traced highlights the difficulty of putting such assertions to the test.
Those same groups have helped to bankroll efforts to lift President Joe Biden’s agenda and paid for TV ads promoting Democratic congressional candidates ahead of last year’s midterm elections.
Iran news, analysis, etc. dominates today’s LinkSwarm!
“The targeting of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force and arguably the second most powerful man in Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a major blow to the Islamic Republic of Iran. His death will likely result in a devastating chain of suspicion and insecurity in Iran’s nodes of power.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
This week, President Donald Trump launched a global round of teeth gnashing when he ordered the killing of the greatest terrorist leader in the modern Middle East, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani was unquestionably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in Iraq and thousands of others throughout the Middle East — mostly Muslim. His global terror network ran from South America to Europe to Africa to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Soleimani was an unparalleled organizer and a pitiless murderer. His death was richly earned.
But for many in the media and on the domestic and international left, Trump’s action was precipitously “provocative.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Soleimani’s killing — which came directly after a Soleimani-approved terror assault on America’s embassy in Baghdad and amidst reported further plans for escalated terror against American targets — “disproportionate.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., suggested that Trump, not the Iranians, had “escalated” the situation. Former Vice President Joe Biden said that Trump had “just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox.”
This reaction has been magnified by the media, many of whom have been speculating about the possibility of all-out war between the United States and Iran. Think pieces have been written about whether the United States will reactivate the draft (spoiler alert: No, we won’t). Musings have filled the newspapers about the supposed conflagration prompted not by Iranian evil but by Trumpian reactivity.
All of this smacks less of legitimate concern about what comes next than it does of sheer panic that Trump has overturned a decade of American and European appeasement of the Iranian regime. Ben Rhodes, former President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, architect of the Iran deal and an overt liar who told the American public that Iran was on its way to moderation if only the United States would loosen economic restrictions on the terror state, has placed blame for volatility squarely before Trump. Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser during the Iran deal and another overt liar who told the American public that Islamic terror against our Benghazi embassy was rooted in anger over a YouTube video, soberly informed Americans that “Americans would be wise to brace for war.” Biden suggested that in throwing out the Iran deal, Trump had paved the way for war — and, oh, by the way, the Iran deal was “airtight.”
This is a deliberate misreading of history designed to absolve the Obama administration of its Iran policy debacle. The administration pursued a policy of strengthening Iran economically — and did so while openly acknowledging that Iran would use that newly gained economic strength to pursue terrorism and ballistic missile testing. In speaking of the sanctions relief given to Iran, then-Secretary of State John Kerry explained in January 2016, “I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.”
Snip.
Then Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani. Suddenly, we have been informed by dishonest Democrats and their media allies, Iran has gone rogue.
Nonsense. Iran has been rogue for decades. The Iran deal was simply an attempt to whistle past the graveyard with the terror regime — to pay it off long enough so that President Barack Obama could declare the problem handled. This was, after all, the Obama strategy in Crimea and Syria: Declare a red line; run away from it; pretend that pusillanimous inaction is bravery and deterrence provocation.
Besides Rosenstein, the other defendants named in the complaint are Shawn Henry, Sean Wesley Bridges, Robert Clarke, and Ryan White.
In 2010, then FBI Director Robert Mueller named Shawn Henry as the executive assistant director (EAD) of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch (CCRSB).
Henry left the FBI in 2012 and now is president of CrowdStrike Services, the cybersecurity firm hired by Democratic National Committee to examine its computer network in 2016 after it had been hacked. Crowdstrike ultimately determined Russia had hacked the DNC emails.
Shaun Wesley Bridges served as a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service for approximately six years, according to the complaint.
Between 2012 and 2014, he was assigned to the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, a multi-agency group investigating illegal activity on the Silk Road, a covert online marketplace for illicit goods, including drugs.
In 2015 and 2017, Bridges was convicted of corruption related to his government work, and is now serving a prison sentence.
Defendant Robert Clarke was also a member of the Silk Road Task Force and Ryan White worked as an undercover informant for the DOJ.
White also worked as a contractor operating out of the Baltimore office under a group supervised by Rosenstein, according to the complaint.
Lots of interesting information here, especially the Crowstrike connection. Funny how the same names just keep coming up again and again when it comes to Justice Department abuse of power under Obama… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Hey look, it’s another Democratic Party dark money group! “Mind the Gap, the secretive group quietly reshaping big-money politics in Silicon Valley, is aiming to spend as much as $140 million to boost Democrats in the 2020 election.”
Waiting for President Donald Trump in Toledo:
JAW-DROPPING:
Look at how massive the line is for the #TrumpRally in Toledo tonight!
No longer news: Mexicans kill four other Mexican. Why it should be news: In Kansas City.
Some places in the United States have a long history of Latino settlement, with communities stretching back for generations, even centuries. One is not surprised by the large Mexican-American populations in California, Arizona or Texas, and we’re accustomed to Cubans in Miami, Puerto Ricans in New York, etc. However, on does not think of Kansas City this way, so when the headlines inform us that three guys named Villanueva-Morales, Alatorre and Caballero are charged with killing a combined total of seven people named Meza, Calderon, Anaya, Rodriguez-Gonzalez, Rodriguez and Rodriguez-Santilla in Wyandotte County, Kansas — well, what the heck is going on here? It appears, for example, that two gunmen can open fire in a Kansas City bar without risk that any of their bullets will hit someone who was actually born in America.
As evidence that our immigration problem is absolutely out of control, this situation in Kansas City is rather conclusive, but notice that this criminal mayhem in Kansas is just “local news.” If some deranged “alt-right” white guy had shot four Mexicans in Kansas City, CNN would be providing around-the-clock updates, but because it’s Mexicans killing Mexicans, nobody at the networks seems to care.
Hickenlooper is Out, Sanders slams the press, Gabbard comes out for legal pot and serves joint duty, and Biden just keeps chug-chug-chuging along. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Gravis Marketing (New Hampshire): Sanders 21, Biden 15, Warren 12, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7, Gabbard 5, Yang 4, Steyer 4, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2. First for Sanders to top Biden, first recent poll with Buttigieg over Harris, and first poll with Gabbard or Steyer that high.
Politico has an analysis of candidate fundraising cycles, based on ActBlue data. It’s interesting data, but it’s not the whole story, as candidates have non-ActBlue avenues for fundraising.
Are Democrats jumping off the cliff? “I’ve been doing political consulting for over 30 years, and I can tell you that if the 2020 campaign is viewed as Freedom vs. Socialism, we Democrats are in deep trouble. Furthermore, giveaways vs personal responsibility is not a winning argument either.” A lot of the writer’s proposals are less popular than he thinks they are, but they’re clearly less insane than those most of the clown car has been putting forth. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
It’s another “drop out of the race and run for the senate” piece. “Senate bids by Hickenlooper, O’Rourke or Bullock are no guarantee that Democrats would win either those specific states or the broader majority come November 2020. But it would sure improve their chances.” As you can see below, Hickenlooper took the advice.
Guy polls his family BBQ to see who black voters prefer.
Here’s sort of a tedious thumbsucker exploring the shocking idea that some Democratic voters actually consider electability.
Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Threatening To Get In. Lots of Avenatti news, but its all about his impending trials. (Avenatti appears to be a slimy, dishonest creep, but it wouldn’t bother me at all to see him take the NAACP and Nike down with him.) Now it’s been two weeks since his “I might get in” outburst. Unless I see something this week I’ll drop him back down to the Out of the Running list.
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Get’s a WBUR profile. “I don’t think banning private insurance and putting a $23 trillion tax on the American people is going to be something that people are going to want to sustain as the price for getting universal health care coverage, which we desperately need.”
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Cory Booker’s plan to fight intergenerational poverty, a cornerstone of his presidential bid, includes a novel proposal: a trust fund for every American child seeded by the federal government that could eventually provide up to nearly $50,000 for college tuition, buying a home or starting a business.” This just in: There’s no shortage of ways for Democrats to spend federal money we don’t have. Oh, and he wants a White House office to fight “white supremacy.” “Social Justice Warrior Powers Activate!”
Pete Buttigieg burst into the 2020 presidential race by building national excitement on social media and cable news shows. Now, pork chop in hand, he’s playing catch-up in the all-important first caucus state.
The 37-year-old mayor has yet to snag a single in-state endorsement in Iowa, and while his campaign has 57 staffers on the ground, it expanded to that number only recently. It’s a sharp contrast to other top Democratic candidates, who made investments in Iowa last winter to try to identify supporters and build a foundation for 2020, knowing the results here will shape the rest of the fight for the Democratic nomination.
All Buttigieg’s money will buy a lot of campaign infrastructure there. He doesn’t like Trump’s China tariffs.
The night before Julián Castro delivered the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention for President Barack Obama’s re-election, he had eaten by himself at the T.G.I. Friday’s not far from the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C.
No one recognized the 37-year-old mayor of San Antonio. As the other delegates party-hopped around Charlotte, Mr. Castro studied his notes over dinner and went to bed by 9 p.m. He wanted to be well-rested before giving the biggest speech of his political career — a speech that he and his family now remember as transforming everything.
“The next morning, when we walked down the street, he was just mobbed,” said Mr. Castro’s twin brother, Joaquin, who is a United States congressman. “It was this instantaneous example of how things can change so quickly.”
Mr. Castro’s speech, in a prime-time slot, burst him onto the national stage, just like the one that had catapulted Mr. Obama to superstardom in 2004. Mr. Castro symbolized a new moment in American politics: The grandson of a Mexican immigrant with a fourth-grade education, the young mayor talked about his family’s story, one so common for millions of Latinos and yet almost nonexistent at the highest level of national politics. “My family’s story isn’t special,” Mr. Castro said. “What’s special is the America that makes our story possible.”
The applause was raucous. The reviews were overwhelmingly glowing (“A Political Star is Born” and “A Latino Obama?” the headlines read). People started to recognize Mr. Castro, even if they often confused him for Joaquin. On the way back to San Antonio, a fan stopped him in a men’s room at the Atlanta airport to shake his hand. (“He wanted to shake my hand in a men’s room!” Mr. Castro said. “I couldn’t believe it.”) Political pundits declared the Castro brothers the future of the party.
“He was this kind of phenom and, you know, was this symbol of the growing diverse country,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist, said of Julián.
Party leaders waited for him to seize on his “Obama Moment.” And waited. And waited. And waited.
The keynote, as it turned out, became a turning point that didn’t quite turn him.
Falsehood No. 1: “I’m proud to say in New York, we’ve divested $5 billion” in pension-fund assets “from the fossil-fuel industry,” Hizzoner bragged in Iowa.
Uh, no. As Politico noted, the city’s pension funds have divested exactly zero from fossil-fuel companies.
Yes, there are plans to study the idea, but no such study has even begun. And even if, at some point, the pension funds do divest, de Blasio won’t be able to take credit because he doesn’t control their boards.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. On the next two weeks, Gabbard is on active military duty, but before she went she came out for an end on federal marijuana prohibition. “The Hawaii Democrat announced in a news release earlier this week that she will be joining the joint military exercise.”
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Want to know which celebrities are supporting Harris? Me neither, but here it is: “Eva Longoria, Elizabeth Banks and Empire director, Lee Daniels…Jane Fonda, Leonardo DiCaprio, Barbra Streisand, Halle Berry, Reese Witherspoon, Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Charlize Theron and a long roster of studio executives.” Also Spike Lee, who held a fundraiser for her. She launched a Spanish-language organizational push.
Update: Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Dropped Out. Says he’s mulling a senate run instead. A successful moderate governor of a purple state would be enough to be considered a contender in previous election cycles, but he’s old, white and male, and only Biden is evidently able to overcome those disadvantages in the age of the Democratic Party’s hyperpartisan wokescold hysteria.
The Washington state Three Strikes You’re Out law holds that felons who have been convicted of two serious violent offenses in the past — such as murder, rape, or child molestation — must go for jail for life with no chance of parole after a third such conviction.
At that point, the only way for the offender to walk free would be with a pardon from the Clemency and Pardons Board, along with the governor.
Tracy Hoggatt, 59, had a long list of offenses — first-degree robbery, second-degree assault, second-degree theft, and on and on.
How is he on the loose today, you might wonder?
In January of 2017, Governor Jay Inslee and the Clemency Board approved Hoggatt’s request. Inslee wrote that Hoggatt had “taken steps to turn his life around and developed a strong sense of empathy.” So after being put in prison for life without parole, he was granted clemency.
Three months later, he went back to jail for violating the terms of his release. He had consumed alcohol, he was living at an unapproved address, and he was hanging out with known criminals. So they picked him up again and put him back in prison for life without the possibility of parole.
Guess what happened then?
This past Tuesday, Inslee let Hoggatt out on clemency for a second time, with the condition that he go to a halfway house in Kelso.
However, he got off the bus in Seattle without going all the way to Kelso. He told the Department of Corrections that he missed the bus, but that his fiancée would drive him to Kelso.
That was Tuesday. This is Friday, and nobody knows where he is. This Three Strikes offender is still on the loose.
Man, that decision would surely haunt him in the general election he won’t be the nominee for…
Six months ahead of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, that centrist message of electability at the heart of Klobuchar’s long-shot presidential bid has yet to pay off in the polls, adding urgency to her pleas to a Democratic base that has lurched markedly to the left.
With much ground to make up, and the days of summer growing shorter, Klobuchar’s path to the party’s nomination is dotted with Iowa road signs, each town a stop in a long game to outlast a field of bigger names with more fulsome campaign coffers.
Over four days in early August, in a state crucial to her presidential hopes, Klobuchar courted Iowa Democrats in cafes and private homes, union halls and farms, at fundraising dinners and the Iowa State Fair. She asked them to look past her low poll numbers and support a fellow Midwesterner as their best hope against Trump in 2020.
“I think it is pretty important, Iowa, to have a candidate from the Midwest,” Klobuchar told hundreds at the State Fair in Des Moines. “And someone that just doesn’t have a bunch of policies written down on a piece of paper but has a track record of looking out for rural America.”
Her “I’m the most Midwest of the Midwest” campaign strategy hinges on Iowa Democrats being less insane than national Democrats. Probably, but are they less insane enough? Speaking of less insane: “On judicial nominations, Klobuchar’s bipartisan votes put her out of step with the Democratic field…Apart from Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Klobuchar has voted with Republicans to confirm many of President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, more than the other Senate Democrats running for president.”
Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Onion: “‘And Then There Were 23,’ Says Wayne Messam Crossing Out Hickenlooper Photo In Elaborate Grid Of Rivals…’Another foe vanquished, and another step taken toward Messam’s glorious ascent…My plan is continuing apace. First Swalwell, now you, and soon all these fools who stand before me will begin dropping like flies, and then the era of Messam will be nigh.'”
The North Shore congressman has been crisscrossing the early presidential-primary states like any of the viable candidates. Just last week, he hit Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, before heading to Weare, Exeter, and Hillsborough in New Hampshire. He ate corn dogs and ice cream.
And America ignored him — as it has, resolutely, since he announced his candidacy in April.
In poll after poll after poll, Moulton has registered at zero percent. Yes, zero. The same number your dog or cat would poll. Yet the Harvard-educated US Marine Corps veteran soldiers on. He has not approached any of the benchmarks for getting onto the overcrowded Democratic debate stage.
Snip.
Why not pack it in? Or, rather, when does he pack it in?
“My experience working with candidates is that they’re the last ones to know,” said Democratic strategist and pollster Brad Bannon. “They’ve invested all their time and energy and money into running for president, and they have a hard time admitting that they’ve failed.”
Moulton is frustrated there hasn’t been more conversation about national security in the presidential primary. “The Democratic Party is failing to have a clear national security strategy. We’ve got to show America how we will make our country strong and safe. How we will stand up for patriotism, for our values. We’ve got to stop letting conservative Republicans own the flag,” he said.
With his campaign barely registering in the polls, Moulton wasn’t on any of the debate stages to make this case. Barring an unprecedented upheaval in the race, Moulton won’t be the Democratic presidential nominee. So what is he doing?
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s proposing a massive criminal justice system overhaul. “The plan calls for banning cash bail, solitary confinement and civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to seize people’s homes and other property even if they are not convicted of a crime. The plan also looks to legalize marijuana and abolish the death penalty, a practice Sanders has long opposed.” Ending civil asset forfeiture and ending federal marijuana prohibition I can get behind. (And why is it that only this week are Democratic candidates coming out for legal marijuana legalization? Hickenlooper and Inslee should have made that their themes week one.) The rest don’t seem like federal jurisdiction. “Bernie Sanders South Carolina crowd size one-third of Elizabeth Warren’s.” (300 vs. 900) Sanders also slammed his treatment in the press:
Bernie Sanders Monday gave a speech in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. He took shots at the press, mentioning coverage of his campaign against Amazon:
I talk about (Amazon’s taxes) all of the time… And then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why.
Employees of the Post were put out by Sanders’s comments. They insisted they hold no ill will against him for regularly bashing the man who writes their checks as one of earth’s most obnoxious plutocrats, and moreover that Sanders is wrong to make the media a “boogeyman” the way he’s turned “billionaires and corporations” into boogeymen. This “doesn’t add up,” noted the Post, going so far as to put the term “corporate media” in quotation marks, as if it were a mythical creature.
Perhaps the negativity toward Sanders isn’t over Amazon. After all, Sanders gets similar treatment from the New York Times, CNN, the Atlantic and other outlets. Still, the Post’s Bernie fixation stands out. The paper humorously once wrote 16 negative pieces about Sanders in the space of 16 hours (e.g. “Clinton Is Running for President. Sanders Is Doing Something Else,” “Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals,”etc).
The Post in 2017 asked readers how Democrats would “cope” with the Kremlin backing Bernie Sanders with “dirty tricks” in 2020. In April of this year it described the Sanders campaign as a Russian plot to help elect Donald Trump. They’ve run multiple stories about his “$575,000 lake house,” ripping his “socialist hankering” for real estate. “From each according to his ability,” the paper quipped, “to each according to his need for lakefront property…
Apart from being described as a faux-Leninist Russian stooge who wants to elect Trump and mass-release dangerous criminals, what does Sanders have to complain about?
It’s not just about Sanders.
The public is not stupid. It sees that companies like CNN and NBC are billion-dollar properties, pushing shows anchored by big-city millionaires. A Vanderbilt like Anderson Cooper or a half-wit legacy pledge like Chris Cuomo shoveling coal for Comcast, Amazon, AT&T, or Rupert Murdoch is the standard setup.
This is why the White House Correspondents’ dinner is increasingly seen as an unfunny obscenity. The national press at the upper levels really is a black-tie party for bourgeois stiffs who weren’t smart enough for med school, and make their living repeating each other’s ideas and using Trump to sell Cadillacs and BMWs. Michelle Wolf was on the money when she ripped us for only covering “like three topics”:
Every hour it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel of four people who remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving… You guys are obsessed with Trump… He couldn’t sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric. [But] he has helped you sell your papers, books, and TV.
That was too much truth for Correspondents’ Association, who decried Wolf’s lack of “commitment” to a “vigorous and free press” and “civility.” They scrapped the comedy idea, and this year brought in a self-described “boring” speaker, who made light of Trump’s complaints about the press by reading from Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People.”
“I don’t want to be president if I have to win by outrage,” he explained. “I don’t want to just win. I want to govern, and not just by executive order. I understand the outrage people feel right now. But real leadership is taking two different needs and elevating them to one single want.”
Arguably, Sestak knows a thing or two about this topic. He commanded an aircraft carrier battle group conducting combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq with 30 US and allied ships and more than 15,000 sailors and 100 aircraft. He’s also considered the qualities of a good leader while teaching ethical leadership courses at the historically black college Cheyney University and at Carnegie Mellon.
It’s sort of like the Jim Geraghty piece on Sestak in last week’s Clown Car roundup.
The latest round of polling shows Elizabeth Warren gaining ground in the presidential race, but she still faces some critical obstacles to winning the Democratic nomination. She’s dominating among white progressive voters and, relatedly, is building support among white college-educated Democrats. But she continues to lag among working-class voters and has demonstrated minimal appeal to African-Americans.
Unless she builds appeal outside her core constituencies, it will be challenging for her to pull ahead of front-running Joe Biden, who has built his own beachhead of support among moderates, working-class whites, and African-American voters.
Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Marianne Williamson says ‘powerful forces’ on the left out to end presidential campaign.” Mainly over her questioning various medical orthodoxies. “Marianne Williamson is a danger to feminism — and her ideas could get Americans killed.” Eh, it’s just calling out her New Age power of positive thinking as bullshit and pouting because she’s not Warren or Harris. She spoke to some 350 people in California’s mission district.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
“The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) reported that in the last six years around 220,000 criminal aliens have been booked in Texas jails. DHS confirmed to DPS that at least 148,000 or 66% of those criminal aliens had entered the U.S. illegally.”
ObamaCare is failing. “Not one Republican voted for Obamacare. A Democratic Congress passed and a Democratic president signed the legislation over the loud objections of the GOP. Conservative activists and legal groups fought tooth and nail to prevent its roll-out, and when that failed, they repeatedly warned it was doomed to failure.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
More of those peaceful Democrats: “FBI Investigates Package With ‘White Powdery Substance’ Sent to GOP Candidate in GA-6.”
This piece on the current state of the Democratic Party comes with caveats, namely: a.) Rolling Stone, b.) Obviously hostile to Republicans, Trump, etc., and c.) Lots of “Ra-ra isn’t Tom Perez great” flacking. But look beyond that and there’s a cold-eyed assessment of just how badly off Obama left the Democratic Party:
The Democratic Party is in the worst shape of its modern history. The presidency of Barack Obama papered over the fact that the party was being hollowed out from below. Over Obama’s two terms, Democrats ceded 13 governorships to the GOP and stumbled from controlling six in 10 state legislatures to now barely one in three. Across federal and state government, Democrats have lost close to 1,000 seats. There are only six states where Democrats control both the legislature and the governor’s mansion.
More troubling: Even amid the great upwelling of anti-Trump resistance, Democratic favorability ratings have continued to tumble since Election Day – to just 40 percent in a May Gallup poll. “Our negatives are almost as high as Trump’s, as far as party goes,” says Rep. Tim Ryan, a rugged Ohio Democrat serving Youngstown. Ryan led an unsuccessful 63-vote insurgency against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in November because, he says, “We weren’t winning.”
There is no official accounting for this erosion of power and popularity. Unlike the GOP in the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, Democrats have not published post-mortems. But get party insiders talking – with anonymity exchanged for candor – and there’s little debate about how the party went sideways.
Responsibility rests foremost at the feet of former President Barack Obama. As a candidate, Obama sidestepped the party’s next-in-line culture, riding into the White House on the strength of a then-revolutionary digital-and-grassroots machinery of his own creation. “Obama was almost like the anti-Democrat,” a former DNC chair tells Rolling Stone. “The president didn’t care about the Democratic Party.”
Once in office, Obama had the weight of the world to bear. He staved off financial collapse and secured health insurance for an estimated 20 million Americans, leveraging the party’s infrastructure for these fights. “When you’re at the head of the DNC and you have the White House,” says Sen. Tim Kaine, who chaired the party from 2009 to 2011, “a lot of the job is about promoting the president’s agenda.” But Obama and his team neglected a far less heroic duty: the care and feeding of the national party, which Democrats had rebuilt during the Bush years with a “50-state strategy” that had empowered Obama with dominant Democratic majorities in Congress.
The GOP took full advantage of the president’s disregard for party politics. The Tea Party vaulted Republicans to control of the U.S. House and statehouses across the country in 2010 – putting the party in the driver’s seat for the once-a-decade redrawing of legislative boundaries known as redistricting. The White House mounted no resistance. “The Obama team, David Axelrod, had no organized structural redistricting [game plan],” says a longtime Democratic strategist. “The Republicans just ran up the fucking score everywhere. They got two or three extra congressional seats in state after state after state, creating lasting struggles to get back to a majority.” Case in point: Democratic House candidates netted 1.3 million more votes than Republicans in 2012, but secured 33 fewer seats.
The 50-state strategy devolved under Obama into a presidential-battleground strategy, leaving state parties starved for cash and leadership. “Obama didn’t put resources into local parties unless it was for his re-election effort,” says the former party chair. Making matters worse: Obama tapped ambitious Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz – a favorite of White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett – to run the DNC in 2011. “That congresswoman had no idea what she was doing,” adds the former chair.
Wasserman Schultz went rogue. In a rift with the White House that spilled into a story on Politico, she was criticized for using the DNC as a vehicle for self-promotion, hoping the office would serve as a springboard into House leadership. The White House made overtures to oust Wasserman Schultz, but she dug in, promising an ugly fight that could tar the president as both anti-woman and anti-Semitic. (Wasserman Schultz, who was forced to resign in the aftermath of the Russian hack of the DNC, declined to participate in this story.)
Obama dodged that fight, and instead fostered Organizing for Action, the grassroots group born of his campaigns. “They had a mirror organization that did just their politics, and it weakened the DNC,” says a source in House leadership. “It directed money elsewhere and was not in the interest of the long-term stability [of the party]. It was a selfish strategy.”
The hobbled DNC’s chief remaining value was as a fundraising vehicle. For Obama, it “was like his ATM – and Clinton was the same,” says the former chair. Clinton pioneered a strategy that allowed her largest donors to give $10,000 to each of 32 state parties participating in her Victory Fund. But that money didn’t stay in the states. Instead, nearly every penny was hoovered up to the DNC for the benefit of Clinton’s election.
Clinton today says she found the DNC to be a liability. In an onstage interview at a Recode tech conference in May, Clinton recalled, “I get the nomination. . . . I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party. It was bankrupt. . . . I had to inject money into it – the DNC – to keep it going.” Clinton then raised eyebrows by indicting the DNC’s data, which the party had inherited from the Obama re-election campaign. “Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong,” Clinton said. (The DNC’s former data chief hit back, tweeting that Clinton’s broadside was “fucking bullshit,” but declined to be interviewed.)
Under Obama, the party infrastructure was honed to elect a president. And being a presidential party is a powerful thing – until you lose the White House. The Clinton campaign lost significantly on its own merits, though the party is loath to admit it. The same candidate who was caught flat-footed by the rise of Obama in 2008 found herself stunned by the grassroots surge behind Sen. Bernie Sanders. “And she was really surprised by how strong Trump was – and part of it was she just sucked,” says the Democratic strategist, who criticizes Clinton despite being entrenched in her center-left, pro-trade wing of the party. “At a really fundamental level we gotta get people to acknowledge what a fucking piece of shit her campaign was.”
A profile of radical Islamist and left-wing media darling Linda Sarsour. “Her rise, and the celebration of her by progressives as one of their own, demonstrates how clearly and phenomenally Jews and Jewish concerns are being written out of the progressive movement.”
“DOJ Moves To Seize DiCaprio’s Picasso, Rights To ‘Dumb and Dumber To’ As Part Of 1MDB Case.” Or “Hollywood accounting meets a Malaysian dictator, and hilarity ensues!”
For many Democrats, President Trump’s joint address was the first time they actual heard and saw him unfiltered. “He just crushed the Drive-By [Media] last night. He just crushed them. He just blew up every narrative they’ve established on the guy. And they don’t even realize it.”
“As one might imagine given the Democrats’ breathtaking electoral collapse, there is basically nothing but bad news for Democrats across the board. The data showed that the voting patterns of key demographic groups shifted dramatically downward from 2008 through 2016.” More: “Contrary to the emerging Democratic majority thesis, there does not seem to be any demographic category with which Democrats are progressively improving.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Congressional Review Act of 1996 is a ‘sleeper statute’ (aka, a secret weapon) in that its practical application took 20 years to enter the realm of viable possibility. The CRA allows Congress to overturn executive regulations by a simple majority—and this is the moment it’s been waiting for.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Members of an elite Baltimore Police Department squad charged with getting guns off the streets gets hit with federal racketeering charges and held for trial without bail. More: “In one case, four of the officers are alleged to have stolen $200,000 from a safe and bags and a watch valued at $4,000. In July 2016, three officers conspired to impersonate a federal officer in order to steal $20,000 in cash.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The NYT and the Washington Post have a motivation to ally with the Democratic Party in its last-ditch effort to Watergatize Trump after Trump’s endless criticisms of them. And this anti-Trump approach may get them a spike in readership, even as it repels some readers like me.
I’m missing the sense that I’m getting the normal news. It seems unfair and shoddy not to cover the President the way you’d cover any President. What looks like an effort to stigmatize Trump as not normal has — to my eyes — made the media abnormal.
Snip.
The more seemingly normal Trump becomes — as with his speech to Congress the other day — the more the anti-Trump approach of the news media feels like a hackish alliance with the Democratic Party in its sad, negative, backward-looking effort to disrupt the President the people elected.
Austin police have charged Matthew Bartlett, 21, and Catronn Hewitt, 36, with felony possession of marijuana, police said in a news release.
Ja’Quan Johnson, 25, was charged with federal charges in connection with the thefts. Johnson is a contract baggage handler at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and is believed to have been behind the thefts, according to police and the Justice Department.
Buying pot? Likely misdemeanor charge. But stealing guns from airport luggage is likely an interstate federal gun trafficking felony. Also: Our airport security is in the best of hands!
Houston Chronicle to move its call center from the Philippines to Dallas. 1. Who thought it was a good idea to move it to the Philippines in the first place? 2. “The move will result in 130 new jobs for Texas.” Why does the Chronicle need 130 people in its call center? 3. Dallas? Really? Because it’s evidently impossible to locate a call center in the 4th largest city in America…
SEC charges against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dismissed. A state felony trail is pending, but given that the state charges are based on the same issue as the SEC case just dismissed, chances of a conviction would appear to be very slim. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
NYT repeated as truth Claire McCaskill's lie that she never met or spoke to Russia's ambassador, then stealth deleted it w/o any note. pic.twitter.com/1adhWZdksE
Indeed, “Russia!” is now the go-to move for the media the same way a bad video game player will just use the same button combination over and over again:
Trump has an AMAZING well-received speech, the Market breaks 21,000, so the Media and #morningjoe CLOWNS return to RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA!😂 pic.twitter.com/Xw0VJnZxGi
