Last night’s declaration that Trump was winning beyond the margin of fraud may have been optimistic.
Somehow, in the middle of the night, election officials in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, managed to find over 100,000 absentee votes that flipped the state from Trump to Biden, where Biden is now some 20,000 votes ahead.
Similarly, a large number of Michigan ballots have also narrowed Trump’s lead to a razor thin margin of just over 9,000 votes. It may all come down to Trump holding Michigan.
This year’s polls seemed even more off than they were in 2016.
Polling was off by almost 6 points nationally according to RCP
Trump still has something like a 600,000 vote lead in Pennsylvania, a 70,000 vote lead in North Carolina (with 99%+ of the votes in there), and over a 100,000 vote lead in Georgia (also with 99%+ of the vote in there).
Nevada was also called for Biden, but Trump is less than 8,000 votes behind there.
It looks like Republicans are going to hold the Senate, right now losing a net of one seat (Democrats pick up Colorado and Arizona, Republicans pick up Alabama), but if John James wins in Michigan, the mostly likely outcome is the exact same partisan split as today. Republican Susan Collins retained her senate seat in Maine.
Republicans are currently netting small gains in the House, but it looks like Democrats will maintain control. In Texas, Republican incumbent John Cornyn easily defeated M. J. Hegar, marking the second election in a row Hegar has lost.
Democrats did not pick up a single U.S. House seat in Texas. Republican Tony Gonzalez held Texas 23rd congressional district, defeating Gina Ortiz Jones. Republican incumbent Chip Roy beat Wendy Davis, despite national attention and fundraising for Davis. That’s two high profile races Davis has managed to lose.
Republican’s retain control of both Texas House and Senate.
Some tweets:
I thought a more multiracial conservatism could succeed despite Trump. I didn't understand it could happen because of him.
“To all the pollsters out there: You have no idea what you're doing. And to all the liberals in California and New York, you wasted a lot of money.” https://t.co/KcHxUdb09u
Another voter fraud scandal right here in Texas, uncovered by Project Veritas.
We keep hearing voter fraud is a myth and anyone who challenges that notion is simply creating hysteria,” said James O’Keefe, the founder and CEO of Project Veritas.
“I went to Texas to be part of the Project Veritas investigation into election fraud and to be on the ground here with our undercover journalists,” O’Keefe said.
“Our journalists discovered a voter fraud system positioned to swing Texas in 2020,”
he said.
“These so-called ‘ballot chasers’ use a mix of gifts and coercion to work down their list of targeted voters and make sure they vote for their paymasters,” he said. “The actions violate both federal and state law and constitute a direct threat to the integrity of our election-based republic.”
One of the capos in this ballot racketeering operation is Raquel Rodriguez, nominally a political consultant for GOP House candidate Mauro E. Garza, the owner of the San Antonio’s Pegasus Nightclub, which is located on the Main Avenue Strip, he said.
Raquel Rodriguez: “I can honestly say I’m bringing at least at least 7,000 votes to the polls.”
Journalist: “Seven thousand—and that’s for San Antonio for this area too. It’s a lot.”
Rodriguez: “That’s a lot. It’s a lot, period. Just so you know–have an idea–so this is what I do.”
Rodriguez pressures voter to change her vote from Cornyn to Hegar
Rodriguez said she develops personal relationships with senior citizens when she harvests their ballots and then uses different post offices, so that the bundles do not draw suspicion.
“So, if ya’ll are my seniors, I’m literally picking you up. I’m going to your house, you’re doing your ballot,” she said. “I go throughout the entire city. If I have a bunch of them, what I do if I have a bunch of them, I’ll take 20 [ballots] here, 30 [ballots] here, 40 [ballots] here.”
At one point during the investigation, one Project Veritas journalist paid $500 to accompany Rodriguez on her rounds to collect ballots.
In an exchange recorded with a hidden camera by a Project Veritas journalist, Rodriguez literally examined a woman’s ballot and convinced her to change her vote from Cornyn to Hegar.
Raquel Rodriguez: “You can do, you can vote for whoever you want, but our conversation that we had, you said you were voting for Hegar, ‘cause you were going straight Democrat. You said you’re voting straight Democrat per our conversation, so that when you’re voting for the straight Dem – ‘cause that’s what you want to do, correct?”
In the video, Rodriguez shows the woman how to correct the ballot so it looks like an accident, by crossing out the line for Cornyn and putting her initials next to the line. “You’re going to, you’re going to dot that in—and the line goes like this, and then your initials are going to be right there, so, that way they know it was done accidentally.”
Journalist: “So, John Cornyn, she voted for John Cornyn and then you made her—”
Raquel Rodriguez: “That’s my job.”
After the voter “corrected” her ballot, Rodriguez presented her with a shawl as a gift.
Rodriguez said Garza gave her a gift budget of $2,500 for his campaign, and in addition to the shawls, she gives voters rosaries, diabetic socks and wallets.
Not only is bribing voters to change their votes in a U.S. Senate election illegal, it’s a federal felony, and Uncle Sam don’t play.
And here’s O’Keefe confronting her:
Since she also worked for a Republican, does this mean we have a voting fraud case the news media will finally report on?
A little-known super PAC seeded with Silicon Valley money plans to lead four other outside groups in a $28 million TV ad blitz to try to help Democrat MJ Hegar unseat Texas Sen. John Cornyn.
Future Forward’s own ads began airing Tuesday, according to ad-tracking service Advertising Analytics. Through Monday, it reserved nearly $2.4 million of time slots in 19 Texas TV markets as well as Shreveport, La.
The ads are part of a planned deluge of advertising for Hegar in the election’s final two weeks that’s being orchestrated by the super PAC’s leader, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, with assists from four other Democratic groups, the news site Recode first reported.
On Wednesday, Hegar’s campaign announced it began airing on Black radio stations across Texas a 60-second ad in which former President Barack Obama expounds on why he recently endorsed her.
In the ad, Obama extols Hegar’s record as a veteran who served in Afghanistan, a working mother who he said will defend the Affordable Care Act and a politician “firmly committed to making the reforms we need to address systemic racism and create a more fair and equitable America.” Hegar’s runoff opponent in the Democratic primary, Dallas state Sen. Royce West, an African American, has has not specifically retracted an Oct. 9 statement that he would not vote for Hegar in the general election.
The Obama spot will run in 14 cities, including Dallas, said Hegar spokeswoman Amanda Sherman.
Asked how much Hegar would spend on the ad, Sherman replied, “This is part of the seven-figure investment we announced to mobilize the Black vote.” She referred to buys that began Oct. 8.
Citing a confidential memo circulated to major donors last week, Recode said the $28 million of ad buys will include $10 million from New York Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC, which on Thursday announced an $8.6 million TV buy to help Hegar. The $8.6 million is part of the $28 million of late advertising being planned.
On the super PAC-led effort against Cornyn, Recode reported that the other groups assisting Future Forward in the push are Strategic Victory Fund, Way to Win, and Mind the Gap. Recode is a former technology news site that last year joined forces with Vox Media to probe Silicon Valley’s influence on politics.
A Cornyn spokesperson accused Hegar of hypocrisy, recalling that the Democrat has run on overturning a 2010 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. FEC, which said the First Amendment forbids restrictions of independent political expenditures by corporations.
“MJ has completely abandoned her principles, broken her promises and is selling out Texans to the highest bidder in California,” Cornyn press secretary Krista Piferrer said in a written statement. “This is a defining moment that shows exactly how untrustworthy her word really is, and how willing she is to look the other way so long as she personally benefits.”
Democrats whining about Cornyn snipped.
On Tuesday, Future Forward planned to report to the Federal Election Commission that it raised $66 million between Sept. 1 and Thursday, with big donations from Silicon Valley billionaires Jeff Lawson, founder of cloud platform Twilio; Eric Schmidt, veteran chief executive of Google; and Moskovitz, according to Recode.
I’m sure this news was not well-received at Cornyn headquarters, but I find it hard to work up any anxiety over the ad buy:
Hegar is a retread. She couldn’t beat the far more beatable John Carter in a U.S. congressional race in the Year of Beto, which gives me zero reason to believe she can step up and beat Cornyn in a presidential year.
Speaking of Beto, he had all the money and favorable press in the world and still couldn’t beat Ted Cruz, a politician measurably more controversial than John Cornyn.
Speaking of Cornyn’s measurable, the last time he was on the ballot he garnered the most votes of any statewide candidate, pulling in a hefty 2,855,068 votes, more than 1,200,000 more than hapless Democratic opponent David Alameel. That was the year Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis like a rented mule, and Cornyn did better than Abbott. This year will be closer, but Cornyn will almost certainly exceed the 4,260,553 votes Ted Cruz won in 2018, and will likely even top the 4,685,047 votes Donald Trump carried in Texas in 2016. (I fully expect Trump to top his 2016 total as well.)
One of the most persistent myths in politics is that big TV ad buys can magically swing races. Ask Jeb Bush, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg how well that strategy worked out for them. Last minute ad buys can swing extremely close races, but less than two weeks before election day, they certainly can’t conjure new voters out of thin air.
As in 2018, national Republicans have to be pleased that Democrats are once again dumping money into a Texas senate race rather than those in Iowa, Maine, North Carolina or Arizona. But those inside the liberal media bubble keep getting high on their own supply, and thus keep believing the “Texas is about to turn blue” myth.
All that said, as in 2018, all that up-ballot money could make it harder for Republicans to recapture some of the down-ballot seats that flipped in 2018. But late TV ad money is a lot less effective than early organizing money.
Would you be shocked to learn that a big hunk of the citizenry is absolutely convinced that Donald Trump will not only be re-elected but re-elected in a landslide? It’s true, and it’s not an ironic or performative belief, but rather one drawn from a perspective that the mainstream media utterly ignores. This means you probably have no idea it even exists, and that could lead to an unpleasant surprise in November.
Well, unpleasant for you.
Remember that apocryphal anecdote about how Pauline Kael moaned that she did not know anyone voting for Dick Nixon? If you’re here, then that’s very likely you.
You can dismiss these people as stupid – many of them really believe that Jesus stuff, deny systemic racism, and have no fear of civilization being destroyed by the weather in a decade or so.
After all, President Hillary Clinton did.
Didn’t there arise in your mind, that agonizing Wednesday morning after Mrs. Clinton’s ruination, just the faintest notion that you had been lied to? You tracked the polls, and you reviewed the percentages – most hovering above 90% – that assured you that the glass ceiling was in for an epic shattering. And yet, no shattering was forthcoming. Whether expressly or by omission, you were lied to.
And it is happening again.
“Trump Admin Tells Minnesota Governor To Get Bent Over $16 Million Aid Request Following Riots.” If Democratic officials refuse to defund their own cities from hard-left rioters and thugs, how is that the rest of the nation’s problem?
President Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech was great.
First, let’s be clear on who is waging the “culture war” for which the media blames Trump. Trump did indeed blast the “cancel culture” that is “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees” so that “in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”
Trump here is just speaking the truth. There has long been an established, deeply admirable civic culture in this nation; it is the radical left who now wages war against it. All over the country, people are being fired for the mere utterance of inconvenient or unwanted thoughts, even anodyne thoughts. People are being physically (and dangerously) hounded from public forums. And it is an utter assault on the rule of law itself to deface or destroy public art, as opposed to removing it through legitimate representative processes. To defend the civic culture against such assaults is not an affront, but a duty.
Moreover, as Trump said, it is a duty rooted not in suppression but in a commitment to continued expression of the values and virtues that have “rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.”
Democrat M. J. Hegar won her runoff with Royce West to face incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn in November. Cahnmann thinks Hegar is a much better candidate than West, but she’s not going to get the mountains of money and fawning media Beto O’Rourke got in 2018, nor are the demographic voting dynamics of a presidential election year going to be nearly as friendly to her.
Speaking of which: “Ilhan Omar’s Payments To Husband’s Firm Top $1 Million.” She’s certainly adapted quickly to the Washington Way…
Former Auburn football coach and Donald trump-endorsement recipient Tommy Tuberville wins Alabama senate primary over Jeff Sessions. I fully expect Tuberville to crush fluke democratic incumbent Dough Jones in the fall.
Perhaps no phenomenon is more studied, marveled, and desired in the world of high tech and science than the mystery of serendipity. In seemingly every industry, CEOs pay millions in consulting, design, and architectural costs to multiply and optimize the number of chance encounters between their most creative employees — and hopefully profit from the blockbuster new products that might result. If only they could engineer the cubicles just so, or the indoor waterfall at the right angle, they might orchestrate providential encounters, or at least load the dice in their favor.
No place on the planet generates more such interest than Silicon Valley. For decades, cities everywhere have tried to replicate the Valley’s record of producing one trend-setting tech giant after another, but none has quite measured up. Like history’s other hubs of outsized accomplishment — Athens in 450 B.C., Hangzhou in the 12th century, and Florence in the 16th century — Silicon Valley has entrenched itself as the world’s centrifugal force for the biggest thing of its age, tech.
But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge — the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley’s leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work. In May, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told his employees they were no longer required to turn up in the office. Slack said more or less the same to its workers, and the trend was made official by industry colossus Zuckerberg, who announced that he expected up to half his employees would become permanently remote.
In the years before the pandemic, talent in San Francisco and the Valley were already conflicted about whether to stay, increasingly exasperated by the cost of living. The concentration of highly motivated creators has produced enticing jobs, but also driven up prices. In Palo Alto, the median home now costs $3.2 million. In nearby Mountain View, it’s $1.7 million, and in San Francisco $1.8 million. In other words, the Valley has priced out almost anyone not making high six-figures, and even many of them. The temptation has been to flee elsewhere, and some tech talent had already been doing so.
But now, if engineers, designers, and venture capitalists are geographically disbanding, working via the cloud instead of walking Google’s halls, surfacing at Buck’s Restaurant, or the cafes on University Avenue, how will future serendipity happen?
Lincoln Project co-founder is literally a registered agent for Russia. “The media can keep calling you ‘Republicans,’ but if you support Democrats, take Democratic Party positions, make voting for Democrats all the way down the ticket a binary choice and moral imperative, and then take most of your money from big Democratic Party donors, you’re a Democrat.”
Body Cam Released of a Eaton County deputy fatally shooting a suspect who stabbed a 77yo man, and attacked her with 2 knives and a screwdriver pic.twitter.com/KdJKv4RllQ
— Breaking News, USA (@currentnewsUSoA) July 15, 2020
The City would cut the number of cops despite increasing response times for emergency calls and increased violent crime in the city. I suspect other cities will be facing similar budget decisions under similar circumstances.
I don’t know anyone who thinks we shouldn’t improve officer training and use of force guidelines to minimize harm to citizens. I know a number of cops who have been saying such things for years. I fail to see how decreasing the number of cops will enhance public safety.
The Republican senator asked NBA Commissioner Adam Silver last week if he would allow players to wear jerseys with the message: “Free Hong Kong.” Hawley was criticizing the league after officials announced “pre-approved phrases” would be allowed on the back of jerseys while “censoring support” for law enforcement and criticism of China, according to Fox News.
Wojnarowski responded to Hawley with the two-word email, which Hawley shared on social media. The columnist soon issued an apology for the message.
Wojnarowski (or “Woj” as NBA followers call him) still hasn’t clarified which was offensive to him: Supporting American law enforcement officers or supporting freedom for Hong Kong.
This is the poll that purports to show Joe Biden beating Donald Trump by five points and Senator John Cornyn under 50% against either M.J. Hegar or Royce West.
The nice thing about this Dallas Morning News/UT Tyler poll is that it tells you how the poll weighting is skewed right up front:
Democrat 39%
Republican 42%
So it oversamples Democrats by at least 7% compared to the 2016 Presidential election. I assume that they’re using Beto O’Rourke’s narrow loss in a semi-blue-wave year against Ted Cruz in the 2018 U.S. Senate race as the baseline, not Lupe Valdez’s twelve point pasting by Greg Abbott in the Governor’s race. Neither Hegar are West are going to be awash in money and fawning media coverage the way O’Rourke was.
Presidential year voter turnout has distinctly different patterns than off-year election turnout. The 2020 general election is more likely to resemble the 2016 election, when Trump beat Clinton by nine points in Texas, than the 2018 election.
Even money says that the next Texas Tribune and Texas Lyceum polls you see will be just as skewed.
There are plenty of things to worry about in November. Trump and Cornyn losing Texas should not be among them.
The two far-left candidates backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lost their primary elections in Texas on Tuesday.
Ocasio-Cortez announced last month that she would be supporting the primary contests of several democratic socialists running against establishment candidates. The New York Democrat endorsed Texas hopefuls Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez, a candidate for Senate, and Jessica Cisneros, a primary challenger to Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar.
Ramirez lost to the establishment-backed Senate candidate M.J. Hegar. Hegar, an Air Force veteran, was endorsed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to take on Republican Sen. John Cornyn. Ramirez came in third place in the primary with 13.3% of the vote. The divisive primary featured seven candidates who all received 5% or more of the vote.
Cisneros, a 26-year-old attorney, was gunning for the seat held by Cuellar, one of the moderate Democrats Ocasio-Cortez targeted for his pro-gun policy preferences and “A” rating from the National Rifle Association. Cuellar defeated Cisneros by 4 percentage points, carrying 52% of the vote compared to her 48%.
Evidently Hegar is going to face state senator Royce West in the runoff. I got half that bracket right, predicting West to make the runoff, but I was badly wrong on Hegar’s chances. I didn’t realize that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would endorse Hegar just five days after my roundup. Why the DSCC choose a candidate whose biggest achievement was losing a congressional race to John Carter in the Year of Beto is a mystery to me, but she’s in the runoff, albeit with only 22% of the vote.
Pierce Bush lost. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you run a carpetbagger bid in a Republican primary but go out of your way to alienate Republican voters. Instead Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls and conservative Kathaleen Wall will meet in the runoff for the retiring Pete Olson’s seat.
I know I’ve lavished a lot of time and attention to the clown car updates, but there are several other 2020 races worth looking at, some of them right here in Texas.
A bunch of Democrats are lining up to challenge Republican incumbent John Cornyn for the U.S. Senate. Now that the filing deadline has passed, let’s take a look:
Bell, a former Houston City Council member, represented a district in Congress from 2003-05 that included part of the city. In the 2006 gubernatorial race, he got 30% of the vote against then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, and two well-known independent candidates. He has since attempted a number of political comebacks.
In his filing with the FEC, Bell named former Galveston Mayor Joe Jaworski as his campaign treasurer. Bell said the Jaworski name “stands for integrity and the highest ethical standards in the eyes of many Texans – things that are sorely missing in today’s Washington and that I plan to talk about a lot on the campaign trail.”
Wait, did he just use “Galveston Mayor” and “integrity and the highest ethical standards” in the same sentence? Outside the Rio Grande Valley, Galveston has a reputation as the most corrupt locale in Texas, dating back to when the Maceo brothers ran Galveston for the mob and the Balinese Room had gambling tables that folded back into the wall whenever Johnny Law came walking down the long pier. My late uncle used to run a Galveston restaurant, and he said the entire political establishment was on the take.
Having run a high profile state race previously, and with a strong fundraising base in Houston, I see Bell as one of the favorites to make the runoff.
Michael Cooper: Not the basketball player. There’s squat in the way of useful information on his website as of this writing, but Ballotpedia says “Michael Cooper earned a bachelor’s degree in business and social studies from Lamar University Beaumont. Cooper’s career experience includes working as a pastor at his local church, president of the South East Texas Toyota Dealers and in executive management with Kinsel Motors.” He came in second in a two man race for the Democratic nomination for Lt. Governor in 2018, but only lost by 5 points to oil executive Mike Collier (who lost to incumbent Dan Patrick in the general). Got to say that, objectively, Cooper looks damn good in that cowboy hat and bolo tie:
Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards. Seems like a relatively mainstream liberal, at least compared to way too many presidential candidates. City Council to U.S. Senator is a big jump. She’s fighting with Bell for backers and West, Cooper, Lee, Foster and Love for the black base. Going to be hard to make the runoff, but if West or Bell stumble, she seems best positioned to take one of their slots.
Jack Daniel Foster, Jr. Appears to be a political neophyte in a race that already has several black candidates. Plus his big issue (which seems to boil down to “more money for community colleges”) strikes me as a county- or state-level issue, not the purview of a U.S. Senator. But I think he gets to 1% based solely on “Jack Daniel” in his name.
Annie “Mama” Garcia. Neophyte that seems to be running on Trump Derangement Syndrome, socialized medicine and gun control. 3% of the primary vote will be a challenge.
Victor Hugo Harris: A cipher, with no website I could find. I suspect that reminding Texas votes of a 19th century French novelist is an inferior election gambit to reminding them of whisky.
M.J. Hegar: A retread candidate who lost to incumbent John Crater in the Texas 31st congressional district race in 2018, albeit by less than 3%. Usually stepping up in weight class after a losing run isn’t a recipe for electoral success. Air Force vet. Seems better funded than other Democrats in the race. Policy positions are all polished liberal platitudes, which may not play to the Democratic base in an election year. An outside chance to make the runoff if white suburban women turn out for her in March rather than Chris Bell and all the black candidates split the black urban vote, but I still doubt it. Probably destined to fall somewhere between third and fifth place.
Sema Hernandez: Hard left/Social Justice Warrior/Democratic Socialist of America candidate. DSA had some successes at U.S. House races in 2018, but not in a senate race, and not in a state like Texas. Absent a huge out-of-state funding push for her, I don’t even think she even sniffs the runoff.
D. R. Hunter: Another cipher without a webpage. Unless he has a Samoan attorney and writes for Rolling Stone, I wouldn’t expect him to make much of an impression.
Midland City Councilman John B. Love III. Midland City Council is a stepping stone for a state House race, not the U.S. Senate. Not seeing signs of a serious campaign, and I don’t see him making any headway with Edwards and West in the race.
Financial advisor Adrian Ocegueda: Twitter. Came in sixth of nine Democratic candidate for Governor in 2018. His one issue is campaign finance reform, but I can’t make hide nor hair of what he actually wants to implement. Oh, and he wants West to drop out of the race. I’m sure that will happen any day now…
Leftwing activist Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez: Seems to be running as the hard-left Hispanic identity candidate. Don’t see her sniffing the runoff, and “Tzintzún” sounds like a lost South American city populated by the degenerate remnants of an eldritch people who worshiped some blasphemous Cthulhu Mythos god deep in the primordial past…
Dallas State Senator Royce West. The state senate is a pretty good stepping stone to higher office, and I don’t see any other big names from the Metroplex in the race. His issue stands are largely midleft boilerplate. He’s been in office since 2009, and in 2018 he ran completely unopposed, with no primary or general election opponant (not even a Libertarian or a Green), which suggests both political strength and the possibility that he’ll be rusty in a competitive race. A favorite to make the runoff.
Republicans
Cornyn has a few challengers on his side of the aisle as well:
Incumbent Senator John Cornyn. Cornyn won reelection in 2014 with the largest vote total and percentage of any statewide candidate, winning with 61.6% of the vote, which was two points better than Greg Abbott walloped Wendy Davis by. He’s been in office a long time, and sometimes longtime incumbents get complacent and lose. I don’t see that happening here. He’s going to win the primary and the general.
Bridge construction company owner Dwyane Stovall. He took a run at Cornyn in 2014, where he won lots of Tea Party straw votes, but came in third in actual primary voting with 10.7%. Made an abortive run at TX36 in 2016. A higher level of gadfly than Bierschwale, but just as doomed.
Former Dallas Wings owner Mark Yancey. More money than any of Cornyn’s other competitors, but WNBA owner money is not U.S. senate race money. He might come in second and still only garner 15% of the vote.
Now, it’s not really fair to imply that the Never Trumpers hate Trump solely because he’s vulgar and crude – or, as normal people see it, unwilling to meekly take the guff the Never Trumpers’ country club class pals dish out like a proper gentleman should. They do find him aesthetically displeasing, but it also gnaws at them because every time he stands up to the garbage Democrats, the garbage press, or the garbage jerks and pervs of Hollywood, his refusal to knuckle-under reminds Team Fail that they don’t have the stones to do the same. He shames their cowardly weakness.
It’s clear, in retrospect, that George W. Bush’s supine acceptance of the abuse the elite heaped upon him was not because he was too classy and too decent to respond in kind. Since Obama left office and he rediscovered his vocal cords, Bush has had zero problem trashing Trump and Trump supporters who, like many of us, stood by Bush in the ’00s while Bush was treading water in a sea of mediocrity. No, it’s clear that W was afraid to fight back against fellow members of the ruling class. He cared about being part of the club. Not The Donald. Trump, by fighting, demonstrates that the establishment GOPers are weak. And it eats at them.
But besides providing a manly contrast to their own gimp-like submission to the leftist establishment, Trump infuriates the Never Trumpers for another reason. He’s kicked them out of their comfy sinecures. One of Trump’s magical powers is to make his enemies reveal their own grift complicity, and boy, have they ever. As a result, while once the mandarins of Conservative, Inc., traded on their insider influence and privilege, under Trump they are outsiders. Copies of the Weekly Standard used to be all over the Bush White House. Now, if its inept crew had not slammed it into an iceberg, you would be lucky to find a few pages at the bottom of Barron’s pet iguana’s cage.
Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and all the rest are nobodies, relegated to occasionally joining CNN panels and fighting with Ana Navarro over the doughnuts in the green room. Where’s Bob Corker now? Jeff Flake hasn’t even got an MSNBC gig; I think last week he was the dude who offered to supersize my order.
it is not the abstract logic of liberalism that is flawed, but rather the attempt to apply it to fallible humans. Like communism, liberalism conflicts with immutable human characteristics. However, unlike communism, certain kinds of liberalism (the industrial liberalism of the 1900s, for example) work because they are moderated by the material conditions of society. But as those moderating conditions are obliterated by technology, the problems of post-industrial liberalism have become clearer. The ultimate problem is this: Humans desire unfettered freedom, but need the discipline that constraint provides. Without such discipline, they risk slumping into an empty and unsatisfying hedonism that is ruinous to communities and to society more broadly.
Those who are intelligent and self-controlled often create their own constraints and can therefore thrive in post-industrial societies that are radically unlike the societies in which humans evolved. Those who are less intelligent or self-controlled, however, often fail to create successful constraints and therefore suffer when once powerful cultural guardrails (such as religion, strict norms, civic groups, and so on) are destroyed by accelerating innovation and secularism. The result is a growing cultural and economic gap between segments of the population which, when coupled with the declining outcomes for a once thriving middle class, fuels growing bitterness and discontent. Combine this with a trend toward cosmopolitanism that increases ethnic and religious diversity and therefore potential sources of faction and conflict, and liberalism’s immediate prospects look bleak.
The authors also posit technological change as one of the biggest drivers of challenge to the old liberal order.
Hauling out boxes of “Healthy Holly” books and documents, dozens of federal law enforcement agents Thursday struck homes, businesses and government buildings across Baltimore as an investigation into Mayor Catherine Pugh’s business dealings widened.
FBI agents and IRS officials executed search warrants at her City Hall office, Pugh’s two houses, and offices of the mayor’s allies, as the growing scandal consumed the city’s attention, generated national headlines and provoked fresh calls for the embattled Democratic mayor’s resignation.
Snip.
Dave Fitz, an FBI spokesman, confirmed that agents from the Baltimore FBI office and the Washington IRS office searched at least six addresses. The U.S. attorney’s office confirmed the location of a seventh search. The actions were the first confirmation that federal authorities, as well as state officials, were investigating the mayor’s activities.
Snip.
Shortly after the raids began, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan called on Pugh, who has taken a paid leave of absence as mayor, to resign. The Republican governor had asked the Maryland Office of the State Prosecutor on April 1 to investigate Pugh’s sales of her self-published “Healthy Holly” children’s book series to the University of Maryland Medical System while she was on its unpaid board of directors.
“Today, agents for the FBI and the IRS executed search warrants at the mayor’s homes and offices,” Hogan said. “Now, more than ever, Baltimore city needs strong and responsible leadership. Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust. She is clearly not fit to lead. For the good of the city, Mayor Pugh must resign.”
When a raid involves both the FBI and the IRS, usually that’s a bad sign.
At times appearing unfazed by the severity of his circumstances, Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina was guided into a Pharr courtroom Thursday morning after he and his wife surrendered themselves to law enforcement to face multiple election fraud charges. The scene was notably different from when Molina entered a state of the city address just one year ago, shadowboxing and wielding a championship belt.
Now, allegations from a Texas Attorney General’s office investigation into the city’s 2017 municipal election have cast Molina as allegedly cheating his way into the mayoral seat by having people who live outside of the city vote for him.
An hour after he turned himself in at the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Edinburg office, Molina stood before Precinct 2 Justice of the Peace Jaime “Jerry” Muñoz, who presides out of Pharr, and was charged with two counts of illegal voting and one count of engaging in organized election fraud — second- and first-degree felonies, respectively.
Molina, 40, was then escorted to Hidalgo County jail where he was quickly booked in and out on a combined $20,000 cash surety bond, and promptly headed to a city workshop to discuss the future of a city golf course.
It was business as usual for a mayor who has faced scrutiny since he unseated Edinburg’s longtime mayor, Richard Garcia, in November 2017 by 1,240 votes. Such scrutiny has only increased over the past year as the AG’s office arrested more than a dozen people on illegal voting charges tied to the election.
And the voting fraud, sadly, seems business as usual in both the Rio Grande Valley in general and Hidalgo County specifically… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
You know what was fake news? Most of the Russiagate story. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, that thing we just spent three years chasing. The Mueller Report is crystal clear on this.
He didn’t just “fail to establish” evidence of crime. His report is full of incredibly damning passages, like one about Russian officialdom’s efforts to reach the Trump campaign after the election: “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”
Not only was there no “collusion,” the two camps didn’t even have each others’ phone numbers!
In March of 2017, in one of the first of what would become a mountain of mafia-hierarchy-style “Trump-Russia contacts” graphics in major newspapers, the Washington Post described an email Trump lawyer Michael Cohen sent to Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov. They called it “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government.”
The report shows the whole episode was a joke. In order to further the Trump Tower project-that-never-was, Cohen literally cold-emailed the Kremlin. More than that, he entered the email incorrectly, so the letter initially didn’t even arrive. When he finally fixed the mistake, Peskov didn’t answer back.
That was “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government”!
As outlined in his initial mandate, Mueller explored “any links” between the Russian government and the campaign of Donald Trump. His conclusion spoke directly to the question of whether there was any kind of quid pro quo between the two sides:
“The investigation examined whether these contacts involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump Campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the Campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future.”
In other words, all those fancy org charts were meaningless. Because there was no conspiracy, all those “walls are closing in” reports — and there were a ton of them — were wrong. We were told we’d hit “turning point” after “turning point” leading to the “the beginning of the end,” with Trump certain, soon, to either resign in shame, Nixon-style, or be impeached.
The “RNC platform” change story was a canard, according to Mueller. The exchanges Trump figures had with ambassador Sergei Kislyak were “brief, public, and non-substantive.” The conversations Jeff Sessions had with Kislyak at the convention didn’t “include any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.” Mueller added “investigators did not establish that [Carter] Page conspired with the Russian government.”
There was no blackmail, no secret bribe from Rosneft, no five-year cultivation plan, no evidence of any kind of any relationship that ever existed between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Michael Cohen “never traveled to Prague.”
The whole Steele dossier appears to have been bunk, with even Bob Woodward now saying the “highly questionable” document “needs to be investigated.” The Times similarly is reporting, two-plus years late, that “people familiar” with Steele’s work began to have “misgivings about [the report’s] reliability arose not long after the document became public.”
Reporters are going to insist all they did was accurately report the developments of a real investigation. They didn’t imply vast criminality that wasn’t there, or hoodwink audiences into thinking a Watergate-style ending was just around the corner, or routinely blow meaningless episodes like the Sessions-Kislyak meeting out of proportion, or regularly smear people who not only weren’t part of a conspiracy but had no connection to anything (see here for an example).
They’ll also claim they didn’t spend years openly rooting for indictment and impeachment via wish-casted predictions disguised as reporting and commentary, or denouncing people who doubted the conspiracy as spies and Putin apologists, or clearing their broadcast panels and op-ed pages of skeptics while giving big stages to craven conspiracy-spinners like Malcolm Nance and Luke Harding.
Mark Steyn notes that between the Notre Dame fire and the bombing of Christian churches in Sri Lanka, our journalists have reached new levels in truth avoidance:
It used to be said that ninety per cent of news is announcing Lord Jones is dead to people who were entirely unaware that Lord Jones was ever alive. Now the trick is to announce Lord Jones is dead and ensure that people remain entirely unaware of why he is no longer alive. One senses that a line was crossed in yesterday’s coverage. As one of our Oz Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, put it, the media have advanced from dhimmitude to full-blown taqiyya.
The lights are going out on the most basic of journalistic instincts: Who, what, when, where, why. All are subordinate to the Narrative – or Official Lie. All day yesterday and into today, if you had glanced at the telly, switched on the radio or surfed the big news sites of the Internet, you would have thought the Tamil Tigers were back “with a vengeance”, as The Economist put it – even though with one exception (the 1990 police massacre) the death toll was higher than any individual attack the Tigers had ever pulled off.
This seems like big news: “The National Security Agency has recommended that the White House abandon a U.S. surveillance program that collects information about Americans’ phone calls and text messages.”
Interesting thread on Gregory Craig, Obama’s White House Counsel who was recently indicted for crimes in his Ukraine work with Paul Manafort, and also Ted kennedy’s top foreign policy guy back when he was secretly asking for the Soviets to help him against Reagan.
“The partisan warfare over the Mueller report will rage, but one thing cannot be denied: Former President Barack Obama looks just plain bad. On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it.”
Russia launches world’s largest submarine. “The six hundred foot long submarine displaces more water than a World War I battleship and can dive to a depth of 1,700 feet.” More: “The nuclear-powered Belgorod is neither an attack submarine nor a ballistic missile sub. A special mission submarine, Belgorod will be a mothership to other undersea vessels. The sub can carry a payload on its back, behind the sail, or a Losharik class mini-submarine that attaches and detaches to the bottom of the hull.”
M. J. Hegar, the Democrat who unsuccessfully challenged Rep. John Carter for the Texas 31st congressional district last year, announced that she’s running against John Cornyn. If she couldn’t take Carter in the Betomania midterm of 2018, she stands approximately no chance against Cornyn in the Presidential year of 2020.
“Sarah Wickline Hull was 20 weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.”
According to the affidavit in support of the complaint and arrest warrant, which was unsealed today, Claiborne began working as an Office Management Specialist for the Department of State in 1999. She has served overseas at a number of posts, including embassies and consulates in Baghdad, Iraq, Khartoum, Sudan, and Beijing and Shanghai, China. As a condition of her employment, Claiborne maintains a Top Secret security clearance. Claiborne also is required to report any contacts with persons suspected of affiliation with a foreign intelligence agency.
Despite such a requirement, the affidavit alleges, Claiborne failed to report repeated contacts with two intelligence agents of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), even though these agents provided tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and benefits to Claiborne and her family over five years. According to the affidavit, the gifts and benefits included cash wired to Claiborne’s USAA account, an Apple iPhone and laptop computer, Chinese New Year’s gifts, meals, international travel and vacations, tuition at a Chinese fashion school, a fully furnished apartment, and a monthly stipend. Some of these gifts and benefits were provided directly to Claiborne, the affidavit alleges, while others were provided through a co-conspirator.
Notable is how cheaply her allegiance was bought: “Claiborne noted in her journal that she could “Generate 20k in 1 year” working with one of the PRC agents, who, shortly after wiring $2,480 to Claiborne.”
Senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander reportedly defects. “Brigadier General Ali Nasiri, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Protection Bureau, is said to have fled to the West after a fallout with the representative of the Supreme Leader in the IRGC….General Nasiri was said to have fled with hundreds of classified documents, which could be of great value to the United States.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“The Bail Project is an unprecedented effort to combat mass incarceration at the front end of the system…We pay bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence.” Like Samuel Scott. “Just hours after a nonprofit group posted bail for a man accused of assaulting his wife, the suspect went to the woman’s home and brutally murdered her.”
