Posts Tagged ‘Pete Buttigieg’

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LinkSwarm for October 4, 2024

Friday, October 4th, 2024

A crippling dock strike gets the can kicked past election day, Hurricane Helene wrecks havoc on the highlands, illegal alien crime flourishes, two bombing plots aimed at “diversity” are thwarted, Texas A&M ditches woke classes, more Diddy dirt, and Japanese gamers aren’t onboard with Ubisoft’s “black samurai.”

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Striking Dockworkers Agree to Take a Measly 62 Percent Raise and Not Spoil the Election for Democrats.” How convenient.
  • “America Last: After Spending $640 Million On Migrants And Billions Abroad, FEMA Suddenly ‘Broke.'”

    The Biden-Harris administration’s ‘America Last’ policies have left the country vulnerable. Between draining the strategic petroleum reserve, sending hundreds of billions in cash and equipment to Ukraine (such as electrical transformers that are now needed for Hurricane Helene), and FEMA spending $640 million to help migrants, the agency tasked with emergency preparedness is now ‘broke,’ and doesn’t have enough money to get through hurricane season which typically lasts through November.

    The agency is being stretched as it works with states to assess damage from Hurricane Helene and delivers meals, water, generators and other critical supplies. The storm struck Florida last week, then plowed through several states in the Southeast, flooding towns and killing more than 160 people.

    Mayorkas was not specific about how much additional money the agency may need, but his remarks on Air Force One underscored concerns voiced by President Joe Biden and some lawmakers earlier this week that Congress may need to pass a supplemental spending bill this fall to help states with recovery efforts.

  • “This woman blasted Joe Biden live on NBC – she has family that has been trapped in NC for days and says FEMA is nowhere in sight. Why haven’t President Biden or Vice President Harris called a major press conference and/or landed on the ground in towns that were wiped off the map by last week’s flooding?”
  • Indeed, there are a lot of reports that some government agencies are actively hindering private rescue and relief efforts in North Carolina. “Let’s begin with this terrible report of a man who used his own helicopter to rescue stranded people above Asheville, N.C., and who was told if he continued, he would be placed under arrest.”

    Also: “We have medical teams trying to access Burnsville (elevation 2,700ft) and Black Mountain. Authorities are threatening arrest. I’m gonna keep this short & simple; something is very wrong here.”

    Also: “NEW – Federal Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has shut down aid flights into Western North Carolina. A NOTAM has been issued by the FAA that won’t allow anyone not approved by the state to fly aid missions.”

    Plus a slate of 18-wheeler tire slashings in multiple locations that’s hopefully not government sanctioned. Hopefully…

  • Trump announces that Elon Musk is providing free Starlink terminals to areas affected by hurricane Helene.
  • Musk will also be a Trump’s October 5 rally in Butler, PA, the same site as the attempted assassination attempt against Trump.
  • One pollster thinks Trump could win swing states by a landslide.

    The Trafalgar Group released a poll on Wednesday showing Trump has increased his lead in the vital swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin.

    The recent poll shows Trump beating Harris by 2.2 points in Michigan, with Trump scoring 47.5% of the votes to Harris’s 45.3%.

    On August 31, the Trafalgar Group had Trump beating Harris 47% to 46.6%, a lead of only 0.4%.

    Trump is winning in Wisconsin as well, topping the Kackler by 47.1% to 46%. The poll had Trump at 47.3% to Harris’s 46.2%.

    “These numbers are the best we’ve seen for Trump in this election cycle. If this momentum holds, he could easily win by a significant margin,” a polling source stated.

    In Pennsylvania, which many pundits believe Harris needs to win, Trump is up, with 47.5% of the vote, compared to Harris’s 45.3%.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Texas Congressman Confirms Thousands of Murderers, Rapists Entered the Country Illegally.”

    The Biden-Harris administration has allowed well over half a million illegal aliens with criminal histories to enter the United States.

    U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-23) published the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data on social media platform X.

    According to the newly released information, 662,566 noncitizens on ICE’s national docket have criminal histories. These numbers include 13,099 murder convicts, 15,811 sexual assault convicts, and 13,423 weapon offense convicts.

    “We’ve known for far too long that the Biden-Harris border crisis poses a direct threat to Americans,” Gonzales said in a press release. “The truth is clear—illegal immigrants with a criminal record are coming into our country.”

    The Texas congressman asserted that beyond the disturbing new data, it should also serve as a “wake-up call” for the federal government and cities across the United States that keep sanctuary policies in place.

    Gonzales first requested the data on March 13 when he penned a letter requesting answers to several illegal immigration questions to President Joe Biden and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

    Of the seven million reported cases on ICE’s docket, the letter requested information on how many noncitizens were charged with a crime by a municipality. Additionally, the letter asked how many were noncitizens convicted of a crime and released into U.S. communities.

    Over six months later, Gonzales has finally received a response.

    Sure seems like Gonzales has been a lot more active on this issue since Brandon Herrera primaried him…

  • Another side effect of Biden-Harris open borders policy: An explosion of illegal alien prostitution networks.

    As ‘Border Czar’ Kamala Harris visited the southern border for a photo-op on Friday, alarming new revelations also emerged showing that far-left Democrats in the White House rolled out the red carpet to 650,000 migrants with criminal records. This has already fueled chaos nationwide, including a new report of an “explosion in migrant prostitution” networks across America.

    A newly leaked law enforcement document obtained by New York Post journalists shows that the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua has exploited desperate migrant women into sex trafficking networks across eight states.

    At least eight states have seen an explosion in migrant prostitution since the gang laid down roots in the US, with authorities in Texas, Nevada, Illinois, California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey and New York now fighting to curtail the sex trade, the memo shows. -NYPost

    The Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has been linked to sex trafficking in eight states including New York.

    In New York City, police sources told the NYPost that Tren de Aragua gangsters are recruiting their members and victims straight out of city-run migrant shelters.

    In the Big Apple, Tren de Aragua is trying to recruit foot soldiers to force women into sex trafficking — in the hopes that it will become a main source of income for the gang, according to the leaked memo.

    Funny how we didn’t see or hear a single story about Tren de Aragua prior to the Biden Administration, and now they seem to be everywhere.

  • Speaking of sexual slavery, a Yazidi woman captured by the Islamic State was just rescued…in Gaza. From the river to the sea/No sex slave shall be free…
  • “A paralegal at a New York City district attorney’s office has been arrested after he attempted to make an explosive to bomb a migrant shelter located across from his apartment, according to a criminal complaint filed Thursday.” See, here in Texas, we just want to deport illegal aliens, not blow them up…
  • “Philadelphia: Muslim teen hoped to make bombs for terror group, planned LGBTQ parade jihad massacre….Muhyyee-ud-din Abdul-Rahman, 18, of West Philadelphia, not only had bomb-making materials, that were found in the trash at his home, he had tested bombs in the woods behind his home and had likely considered an attack on Philly’s LGBTQ community.” Funny how some of the Democratic Party’s vibrant diversity wants to blow up other parts of the Democratic Party’s vibrant diversity…
  • John Kerry admits that the First Amendment is a huge barrier to forcing leftist views down people’s throats. “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win…the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.” If anyone you know is committing #Wrongthink, be sure to report them to the Ministry of Love…
  • Iran hit mostly Jack and Squat in its missile attack on israel, though it did evidently hit one airbase hanger.
  • “Hamas Commander Killed in Israeli Strike Led U.N. Refugee Agency Teachers’ Union.” [Fateh Sherif] was responsible for coordinating Hamas’ terror activities in Lebanon with Hezbollah operatives, as well as Hamas’ efforts in Lebanon to recruit operatives and acquire weapons.”
  • MSM media outlets fell all over themselves to praise dead terrorist scumbag Hassan Nasrallah.
  • Israel hits a Russian airbase in Syria. One wonders what Russian’s adventures in Syria have gotten them other than some dead mercenaries and weapons sales.
  • “Russia Captures Vuhledar: After Over 800 Vehicle Losses and Over Two Years of Trying.”
  • “The Babylon Bee filed a lawsuit against the state of California on Monday after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of “deepfake” laws that target outlets that publish satire and parody.”
  • Virginia high school teacher fired for refusing to use tranny pronouns awarded $575,000. Make them pay.
  • Albania wants to createa microstate in their own capital for “Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order” for the moderate Sufi Muslim sect. “His hoped-for Muslim state in Tirana, the capital of Albania, will be a Vatican-style sovereign enclave that will control territory the size of five New York City blocks and will allow alcohol, allow women to wear what they want and not impose lifestyle rules.” Not the worst idea I’ve heard this year. At least they could sell postage stamps…
  • “A&M to Deactivate ‘LGBTQ’ Studies Minor and Social Justice Certificate.”

    A Texas A&M spokesperson has confirmed that the university will deactivate 38 certificates and 14 minors, including the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies minor.

    The A&M spokesperson told The Battalion that the official list of deactivated programs will not be public until it appears before the Faculty Senate on October 14. A university statement cited low enrollment as the reason for deactivating the programs.

    However, Theresa Morris, the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, said that the LGBTQ Studies minor was among those ending.

    An official in the Department of Communication & Journalism also confirmed that certificates for both Communication, Diversity and Social Justice and Communication & Global Media are being deactivated.

    Additionally, the director of Marketing and Communications in the College of Performance confirmed that the certificates for popular culture and performing social activism were also in the deactivation process.

    This comes after State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) repeatedly called DEI courses and the LGBTQ studies minor an “outrageous abuse of tax money” and examples of “taxpayer-funded indoctrination.”

    Good. Maybe students will be forced to choose a major that adds to the world rather than tearing it down with social justice.

  • “Lawsuit Accuses Democrat State House Candidate of Not Paying Vendors. House District 80 Democrat candidate Cecilia Castellano is already under investigation by Attorney General Ken Paxton in a separate voter fraud case.”

    A lawsuit filed in Tarrant County is accusing a Democrat running for the Texas House of Representatives of failing to pay her vendors and subcontractors in the business she operates.

    House District 80 candidate Cecilia Castellano, who operates Azteca Designs and Construction, allegedly failed to provide proper compensation for work done by one of Azteca’s subcontractors, the Glass Doctor of North Texas, according to the suit.

    Glass Doctor had entered an agreement to work on a project with Azteca in November 2023, where the subcontractor was slated to earn $49,643.36, according to the filing. Later, Glass Doctor was tasked with replacing damaged glass installed by another subcontractor for an additional $18,487.77.

    However, Glass Doctor says the payments never arrived.

    Plaintiffs instead painted a picture of Azteca going out of their way to avoid providing the payments, claiming the project was “not built pursuant to written plans” and back-charging Glass Doctor to fix work done by a third party.

  • “Fort Bend County Judge KP George Indicted Over Fake Racist Messages. Warrants indicate George may have attempted to conceal evidence.”

    Fort Bend County Judge KP George has been indicted on misdemeanor charges related to faked racist messages on social media but could face felony charges over an alleged attempt to hide evidence.

    A grand jury indicted George last Thursday in relation to a scheme in collaboration with Taral Patel, his former chief of staff and now Democratic candidate for county commissioner. Patel was indicted on four felony and four misdemeanor charges after investigators tied him to fake social media and email accounts used to make offensive posts and circulate falsified polls.

  • “Netflix Cancellations Skyrocketed After Founder Donated, Endorsed Harris. Netflix cancellations went through the roof after co-founder and chairman Reed Hastings endorsed and donated to VP Kamala Harris.”
  • Following up on last week’s Diddy arrest story, the accusations just keep piling on, with 120 more sexual abuse claims, including 25 from minors. If even 10% of these claims are true, how did he get away with such massive abuse for so long? Who does he have dirt on?
  • “[German] Green Party co-chairs Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour are stepping down. The move could make things even harder for Germany’s fractious coalition government. Germany’s Green Party is going from crisis to crisis. Three days after regional elections in the eastern state of Brandenburg delivered a stinging defeat to the party, its entire leadership has resigned. Now, the party will have to choose a replacement at its party conference in November.”
  • My my, hey hey/Disney cancels the movie about Rei.
  • Who could possibly be pissed off about a historical game starring a black samurai? Well, for starters, Japanese gamers.
  • “Kamala Announces Construction Of ‘Murderers Only’ Express Lane At Southern Border.”
  • “School Shooters Distance Themselves From Tim Walz.”
  • “Hezbollah Reaches Out To U.S. For Advice On How To Govern With A Dead Leader.”
  • “Young Hezbollah Recruit Can’t Believe He’s Already Made Regional Manager.”
  • OK, I’m awake!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’ve been unemployed for one year now, so feel free to hit the tip jar.





    Also, a hearty thanks to everyone who has already donated.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions | 2 Comments »

    How Are So Many Democrat Leaders The Spawn Of Marxist Professors?

    Monday, August 5th, 2024

    Anointed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris isn’t just the daughter of a Jamacian, she’s the daughter of a Marxist professor.

    If Kamala’s origin stories are truly critical in understanding who she is today, we ought to consider briefly the role of her father, Donald J. Harris, a Marxist economist and Stanford professor emeritus.

    Donald’s interesting take on economic theory is best laid out in his early foreword to a 1972 reprint of Nikolai Bukharin’s Economic Theory of the Leisure Class. It’s a kind of beginner’s guide to the orthodox left view of “bourgeois economics” as contrasted with the “science” of Marxist analysis.

    If the Jeopardy answer is “This thinker greatly influenced modern western economic thinking,” then “Who is Nikolai Bukharin?” is not going to put any points on the board.

    Bukharin’s Economic Theory is a classic of the oeuvre, in this instance, a Marxian angels-dancing-on-pinheads critique of the then-emerging economic notion of “marginal theory.” In classical (what Donald sometimes also calls “bourgeois”) economics, marginal theory examines how the addition or reduction of a single unit of a good or service affects consumer decisions: To a man dying of thirst, the first bottle of water is likely worth more than the second — and in that moment, to that man, both may be worth everything else he owns.

    But don’t worry overmuch about the details of marginal theory, Donald tells us: “They are matters of lesser importance. What is crucial is [and here he begins quoting Bukharin] ‘the point of departure of the . . . theory, its ignoring the social-historical character of economic phenomena.’”

    See, to your typical Marxist, free-market economic theory always obscures — it “ignores” — what’s really real, which is class conflict, Donald says.

    It wasn’t always this way with the bourgeois theorists, he says:

    In the early phase of capitalist development, bourgeois political economy, by championing the interests of the emerging bourgeoisie in its struggle against the pre-existing dominant class, performs a radical scientific role in exposing the nature of commodity-producing precapitalist society. In the later phase of capitalism, however, bourgeois political economy turns to justification of the system in which the bourgeoisie has become ascendant and is threatened by the growing workers’ movement. It thereby loses its scientific role, a role which is to be taken by Marxian political economy rooted in the interests of the working class.

    In that single passage, you’ve got a brief overview of Marxism — its sense that free-market theory, however right it was as a critique of feudalism, is mere propaganda designed not to clarify but to mask the oppression of working people. That free-market economic theory therefore helps justify the persistence of a vestigial/parasitic bourgeoisie, which, having created the industrial system that produces so much abundance, has generated a new problem — the “crisis of overproduction,” Marx and Engels called it — a problem that can be solved only by identifying new foreign markets, juicing consumer demand through advertising, and smoke-and-mirrors ideas like “marginal theory” that help in “the formation of demand.”

    You also get a sense of what Marxists mean by “science”: Not a system by which theories are tested to determine verifiable truths about the world, but a word that means “anything that furthers the goal of Marxist revolution.” Remember this anytime someone on the left declares that “the science is settled.”

    In a biographical note in the concluding paragraphs, Harris mentions briefly where Bukharin’s work led the once-prominent Soviet thinker: He worked closely with Lenin during the October Revolution, was a member of the Politburo by 1919, “assumed many high-profile offices in the Party,” and “came to exercise great influence within the Party and the Comintern,” Donald writes. Then, in a single, dry sentence, he accounts for Bukharin’s end. There’s no sense of irony here, no sense even that he shares the likely confusion of his readers: “Under Stalin’s regime, . . . he was among those who were arrested and brought to trial on charges of treason and he was executed on March 15, 1938.” Bukharin, 49 at the time of his murder, may have seemed old enough to Donald, just 34 at the time of his writing.

    Bukharin shared the same fate as fellow “old Bolshevik” comrades Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev: Confessing his sins in a show trial, then being lined up against a wall as a potential threat to Stalin. As Wikipedia puts it: “Before the trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev had agreed to plead guilty to the false charges on the condition that they not be executed, a condition that Stalin accepted, stating ‘that goes without saying’. A few hours after their conviction, Stalin ordered their execution that night” in 1936. The wages of communism are a bullet in the head.

    Donald Harris’s entire opus innocently ascribes to Marxian economics a success it would never achieve and is blind to the terror his work implied. In 1966, even as he was wrapping up his dissertation, he made time to review a University of California Press book on Brazil’s 1960s troubles with central planning. It’s a book that “deserves far greater attention than it has apparently received to date,” he writes, and it’s good because it brings “to the problem a perspective sufficiently broad to include its sociopolitical and historical as well as economic dimensions” — which is to say that he approves of the author’s method of inquiry — “its Hegelian origins, and the relevance of its Marxian adaptation to the analysis of development in advanced as well as in underdeveloped economies.” It’s “a useful ‘simplifying hypothesis,’” he calls it, “useful” presumably because it helps explain away the failure of central planners as a feature of the international revolutionary class struggle. Let’s underscore “simplifying” as a theme running through the rest of his life’s work. In his 1972 essay “Feasible Growth with Specificity of Capital and Surplus Labor,” Donald promises (no kidding) to help central planners in emerging economies draw best practices from “certain aspects of Soviet experience during the period of the First Five-Year Plan”). He’s like this all the way through 2022’s “Capital, Technology, and Time” — committed to a fantasy and, even here, just two years ago, at age 82, still celebrating the superpower that allows him to (in his words) “expose a fundamental lacuna in the traditional neoclassical narrative and supporting theory related to the dual problems of agency and dynamics of the transition process involved in analysis of capital accumulation and technological change.”

    * * *

    Donald’s ability to turn this theology into a marketable product — a Stanford career! — is a fascinating feature of postmodern capitalism as it applies to academia. Born in Jamaica in 1938, Donald earned his bachelor’s degree from London University in 1960 and went immediately to work on a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. There, at a civil-rights protest, he met Indian-born Shyamala Gopalan, a graduate student of nutrition and endocrinology. They married in 1963, and Kamala was born the next year.

    This radical couple’s acting out bourgeois rituals — marriage, housekeeping, a child, graduate degrees — might seem remarkably ironic. But Berkeley was just warming to its reputation for campus chaos. The year of Kamala’s birth was also the year of Mario Savio’s stirring, brief address to protesters gathered outside Berkeley’s Sproul Hall. That speech now is rightly considered pivotal to the campus radicalism that would follow. And it remains timely: In just a few words, Savio characterized the academic project in ways that anyone today might instantly grasp with both hands. A university is a kind of factory, Savio declared, a mass-production system in which “the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material!”

    But we’re a bunch of raw material that don’t mean to have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!

    And then came the lines remembered by some of us who grew up with Savio’s voice still echoing across our California campuses more than a decade later:

    There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

    That’s where Kamala Harris was born.

    For Marxists, the real crime isn’t the operation of the machine, but the fact that they’re not the ones controlling the gears and levers of the machine.

    But remember that Kamala Harris isn’t the only 2020 Democratic presidential contender/high profile member of the Biden Administration whose father delved into the intellectual arcania of prominent 20th century communist theorists: The father of incompetent Biden Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was America’s foremost scholar of Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci.

    The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.

    Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January at the age of 71, immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s from Malta and in 1980 joined the University of Notre Dame faculty, where he taught modern European literature and literary theory. He supported an updated version of Marxism that jettisoned some of Marx and Engel’s more doctrinaire theories, though he was undoubtedly Marxist.

    He was an adviser to Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that published articles “that seek to discuss, elaborate, and/or extend Marxian theory,” and a member of the editorial collective of Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern theory, literature, and culture. He spoke at many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other gatherings of prominent Marxists.

    In a 2000 paper for Rethinking Marxism critical of the approach of Human Rights Watch, Buttigieg, along with two other authors, refers to “the Marxist project to which we subscribe.”

    In 1998, he wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about an event in New York City celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto. He also participated in the event.

    “If The Communist Manifesto was meant to liberate the proletariat, the Manifesto itself in recent years needed liberating from Marxism’s narrow post-Cold War orthodoxies and exclusive cadres. It has been freed,” he wrote.

    “After a musical interlude, seven people read different portions of the Manifesto. Listening to it read, one could not help but be struck by the poignancy of its prose,” he wrote. The readers “had implicitly warned even us faithful to guard against conferring upon it the status of Scripture, a repository of doctrinal verities.”

    “Equity, environmental consciousness, and racial justice are surely some of the ingredients of a healthy Marxism. Indeed, Marxism’s greatest appeal — undiminished by the collapse of Communist edifices — is the imbalances produced by other sociopolitical governing structures,” Buttigieg wrote.

    Paul Kengor, a professor at Grove City College and an expert in communism and progressivism, said Buttigieg was among a group of leftist professors who focused on injecting Marxism into the wider culture.

    “They’re part of a wider international community of Marxist theorists and academicians with a particular devotion to the writings of the late Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who died over 80 years ago. Gramsci was all about applying Marxist theory to culture and cultural institutions — what is often referred to as a ‘long march through the institutions,’ such as film, media, and especially education,” Kengor told the Washington Examiner.

    Pete Buttigieg, an only child, shared a close relationship with his father.

    Snip

    The elder Buttigieg was best known as one of the world’s leading scholars of Gramsci.

    Gramsci thought cultural change was critical to dismantling capitalism. Nevertheless, although critical of certain aspects of Bolshevism, Gramsci endorsed Vladimir Lenin’s “maximalist” politics and identified within the Leninist faction of the Italian communists. He went to Moscow in 1922 as the official representative of the Italian Communist Party and returned home to lead the resistance against Italy’s Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, on the orders of Lenin, while his new wife and children stayed in the USSR.

    Those efforts landed Gramsci in an Italian prison, where he lived much of his brief life, which ended in 1937 at the age of 46. Yet his time behind bars was also some of his most prolific, leading to a collection of essays called the Prison Notebooks. Buttigieg completed the authoritative English translation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and his articles on Gramsci have been translated into five languages.

    Buttigieg was a founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society, an organization that aims to “facilitate communication and the exchange of information among the very large number of individuals from all over the world who are interested in Antonio Gramsci’s life and work and in the presence of his thought in contemporary culture.”

    Democrats swear up and down they’re not communists, yet the odds against two high members of the Biden Administration both being red diaper babies sired by communist professors who dedicated their life to prominent 20th century communist theorists seems astronomically high. How many hardcore Marxist professors can there be at American universities? How do two of their offspring get serious financial backing as presidential candidates and end up in the same Administration?

    Of course, the odds seem a lot more understandable when you remember the “dreams” Barack Obama inherited from his father. “In 1965, Obama [Sr.] published a paper entitled ‘Problems Facing Our Socialism’ in the East Africa Journal, harshly criticizing the blueprint for national planning, ‘African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya’, developed by Tom Mboya’s Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. Obama considered the document to be not adequately socialist and African.”

    Indeed.

    Clearly the modern, social justice-infected, race-conscious, socialist friendly Democratic Party has been recast in Barack Obama (Jr.)’s image.

    The engineered ascension of red diaper baby Kamala Harris to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States of America without a single vote being cast in her favor is no accident.

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors | 12 Comments »

    Poll: Trump Wallops Every Other Dem Even Worse Than Biden

    Thursday, July 11th, 2024

    A whole lot of Democrats still seem hot for dumping Slow Joe after his disasterous debate showed his obvious cognitive decline. There’s just one tiny problem: Every polled Democrat loses to Trump by even more.

    A series of prominent Democrats were tested in a head-to-head ballot against Donald Trump:

  • Vice President Kamala Harris: 49% Trump, 43% Harris, 8% undecided
  • Senator Bernie Sanders: 48% Trump, 42% Sanders, 10% undecided
  • California Governor Gavin Newsom: 48% Trump, 40% Newsom, 12% undecided
  • Former Vice President Al Gore: 47% Trump, 42% Gore, 11% undecided
  • Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: 48% Trump, 41% Clinton, 11% undecided
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren: 49% Trump, 39% Warren, 13% undecided
  • Secretary of State* Pete Buttigieg: 49% Trump, 39% Buttigieg, 12% undecided
  • Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro: 46% Trump, 38% Shapiro, 16% undecided
  • Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer: 48% Trump, 38% Whitmer, 15% undecided

    • The usual poll caveats apply, and the sample size of 1,370 is a bit low for a nationwide poll. But the crosstabs do show more Democrats than Republicans sampled, which makes things look even worse for Biden’s chances.

    The other caveat: The Sacred Spouse of Lightbringer McLegTingle wasn’t polled. She’s denied she’s interested in running, though swathes of media types are slavering over a potential candidacy, so I’ll have both of the the Bill Burr rants cued up.

    Finally, the DNC would never, ever, ever let Bernie Sanders get nominated, because that would mean an entirely new set of grifters kicking the current snouts out of the trough and inserting their own.

    If this poll is to be believed, then Democrats might as well roll with Biden, despite his brain being mush, because he still has the best chance to beat Trump.

    And that’s all that matters to them.

    *Yes, that was still up today. Last time I checked, Buttigieg was Secretary of Transportation (and doing a lousy job).

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections | 4 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for November 19, 2021

    Friday, November 19th, 2021

    Kyle Rittenhouse found innocent, vaccine mandates are halted, Kamala is sinking, and the media continues stinking. Plus two scoops of Joe Rogan. It’s the Friday #LinkSwarm!
    

  • Kyle Rittenhouse found not guilty on all counts. Self defense is still legal in the United States. Now let the lawsuits against everyone who called Rittenhouse a “murderer” and/or “white supremacist” begin.
  • If you got your facts about the Rittenhouse case from the mainstream media, then just about everything you know is a lie.

    Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.

    It turns out that account was mostly wrong.

    Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.

    This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.

    CNN and Rep. Ayanna Pressley examples snipped.

    But just as in the cases of Covington Catholic’s Nick Sandmann or Jussie Smollet or the “Russia-collusion” narrative, almost none of the details holding up that politically convenient position (boys in MAGA hats are bigoted; racism is as much a blight as it has always been; Trump conspired with Putin) were true.

    Take each in turn:

    First, the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist.

    There was zero evidence that Rittenhouse was connected to white supremacist groups at the time of the shooting. He was a Trump supporter, yes, though he wasn’t old enough to vote. He was an admirer of police and firefighters, also true. He was a lifeguard. He’d been part of a “police explorer” program, and was also a firefighter/EMT cadet with the fire department in Antioch, Illinois, where he lived with his mom and two sisters.

    That Rittenhouse had no connection to Kenosha.

    In addition to having a job in Kenosha, Rittenhouse testified that much of his family lived there: his father, his grandma, his aunt and uncle, and his cousins. He also testified that on the morning of the shootings, he went downtown with his sister and friends to see the damage done by rioting the night before, and spent about two hours cleaning graffiti off of the local high school.

    That Rittenhouse drove across state lines with a gun that night to oppose the protests.

    This was a line that we heard constantly—never mind that Antioch, Illinois, is about 20 miles from Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the trial has shown, Kyle Rittenhouse did not travel to Kenosha to oppose protesters. He testified under oath that he had traveled to Kenosha for his job the night before the shootings, and was staying at a friend’s house.

    So what about the gun?

    Rittenhouse didn’t bring the gun to Kenosha. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse months earlier by a friend and stored in Kenosha at the home of that friend’s stepfather, as then-17-year-old Rittenhouse was too young to purchase it.

    But it was illegal for him to even have the gun given that he wasn’t yet 18 years old, right?

    That is not true. Under Wisconsin law, 17-year-olds are prohibited from carrying rifles only if they are short-barreled. The weapon Rittenhouse was carrying was not short-barreled. Which is why, during closing arguments, the court threw out the charge.

    He was out there looking for a fight, and he got one: He killed two people and severely wounded a third.

    Unless there’s evidence we haven’t seen, there’s no clear indication that Rittenhouse sought to kill anyone. What we know is that he showed up with a first aid kit and an AR-15-style rifle. Video evidence, and Rittenhouse’s own testimony, indicates that he offered medical assistance to protestors and ran with a fire extinguisher to try to put out fires—and that later, after being pursued, he killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and severely wounded a third. Both video evidence and the only living person that Rittenhouse shot that night, Gaige Grosskreutz, undermined the idea that Rittenhouse was simply an aggressor looking for a fight. During cross examination Grosskreutz acknowledged that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz had pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse. Here’s how it went down:

    Defense attorney: When you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?

    Grosskreutz: Correct.

    Defense attorney: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun—now your hand’s down pointed at him—that he fired, right?

    Grosskreutz: Correct.

  • The left is taking the Rittenhouse acquittal with their usual grace and restraint.
  • “Media Found Guilty On All Counts.”
  • “Antifa Forced To Postpone Riot As Brick Supply Still Stuck On Cargo Ship.”
  • “Rittenhouse, Sandmann Agree To Share Joint Custody Of CNN.”
  • The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals enjoined OSHA from carrying out Joe Biden’s unconstitutional vaccine mandate.

    The Court ordered that “Enforcement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s ‘COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing; Emergency Temporary Standard’ remain[] stayed pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction.” It further ordered that “OSHA take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.”

    Behind this language lies a forceful critique of the Biden mandate. The opinion is here.

    One of the factors a court considers in deciding whether to issue a stay is the likelihood that the party seeking it will prevail on the merits. The petitioner must make a strong showing of likelihood of success.

    The Fifth Circuit found that the petitioners in this case made that showing. This finding means that the Biden administration almost surely will lose in the Fifth Circuit when the court makes its definitive ruling on the merits.

    The court cited a “multitude of reasons” why those challenging the mandate will likely succeed on the merits. The first one, which it described as “obvious,” is this:

    The Occupational Safety and Health Act, which created OSHA, was enacted by Congress to assure Americans “safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.” See 29 U.S.C. § 651 (statement of findings and declaration of purpose and policy). It was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.

    Furthermore, the “sweeping pronouncements” implicit in OSHA’s order are badly flawed. For example, the court noted that the mandate is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. On one hand, it covers employees in nearly every industry regardless of their risk of exposure (there is “little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night
    shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse”) and “doesn’t exempt those with natural immunity.” On the other hand, it arbitrarily excludes employers with fewer than 100 workers.

    Fatally to the mandate, the court found that its promulgation “grossly exceeds OSHA’s authority.” It noted that OSHA’s statutory authority to establish emergency temporary standards “is an ‘extraordinary power’ that is to be ‘delicately exercised’ in only certain ‘limited situations.’”

  • And, miracle of miracles, OSHA announced that they will actually heed the court’s opinion and suspend vaccine mandate enforcement. A federal agency heeding a rational federal court decision shouldn’t be a surprise, yet here we are.
  • How unpopular is Kamala Harris? Democratic Media Complex house organ CNN published a scathing hit piece on her.

    Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.

    The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically.

    Wait, the warm bucket of spit feels “constrained”? Do tell…

    And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.

    Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.

    The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.

    Social justice “first woman of color” blather snipped. But lets skip down to where Team Harris gets all snippy over a potential rival:

    Last month, White House aides leapt to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was being hammered with outrage by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and like-minded online pundits for taking paternity leave after the adoption of his twins in September. Harris loyalists tell CNN they see in that yet another example of an unfair standard at play, wondering why she didn’t get similar cover any of the times she’s been attacked by the right.

    “It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a White man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” said a former Harris aide, reflecting conversations last month among several former aides and current allies.

    (Imagine there’s an animated hissing cat gif here.)

    Anyway, it’s worth reading the whole thing to read how incompetent she and her staff seem at just about everything, and to tote up all the petty slights to Harris, who was only there to bring in black votes in (and didn’t do a great job of that), and now she’s completely disposable.

  • Alexandra DeSanctis is even less charitable:

    Despite ending her lackluster campaign for president with a mere 3 percent support among the Democratic electorate, Harris was nevertheless the most obvious pick within the narrow bucket to which Biden had been confined. (Never mind that the apex of her support during the primary campaign came when she savagely attacked Biden on the debate stage, essentially calling him a racist for opposing busing during his time in the Senate, and that she repeatedly said she believed women who had accused Biden of sexual misconduct.)

    The simple fact is that Harris is not a good national politician. She is ineffective and unlikeable at best, and, at worst, so unpopular that she’s actively damaging to the administration, likely why Psaki has had to turn to absurdities in an effort to defend her. (Democrats have developed a nasty habit of responding to voters who don’t like them by accusing said voters of racism.)

    In Harris’s case, these excuses are because the truth hurts. She has little to no sway with key votes in Congress. She has next to no relevant policy or diplomatic expertise. These facts shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing that she holds her office not because of her popularity or any relevant skillset but primarily because of her identity.

    Had she not been picked as Biden’s running mate, she would’ve remained in a far more advantageous position, keeping a comfortable position in the Senate that would be nearly impossible for her to lose. She was already a media darling, popular among progressives for her supposed ability to “own” conservative nominees during hearings. Rather than winding up in a position with little chance to showboat or collect media accolades, she might’ve remained right there, where her lack of popularity with the national electorate was essentially irrelevant.

    In a backwards way, Harris finds herself holding a position in which she’s ill-equipped to succeed precisely because of identity politics, which motivated Biden to pick a running mate so ill-suited to the job.

  • How unpopular? 28% approval. Usual poll caveats apply. So her numbers might not even be that high!
  • More from Charles Cooke:

    That America’s voters disdain Harris as much as they obviously do gives me an extraordinary amount of hope for our future. In December of 2019, I celebrated Harris’s departure from the presidential primary with a “good riddance” that turned out to be woefully premature: “May Harris’s failed attempt,” I hoped, serve to “destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.” Alas, the first part did not happen; on the contrary, Harris was springboarded up to within a heartbeat of the most potent office in the land. But the second part? Well, I got that in abundance. We are now ten months into this baleful presidency, and already Harris is the most unpopular vice president in history. And they say Christmas doesn’t come early!

    Harris’s apologists like to insist that she is as unpopular as she is because she’s a non-white woman. But this explanation gets the cause of the disapproval backwards. Kamala Harris isn’t disliked because she’s a non-white woman; Kamala Harris was chosen as vice president because she’s a non-white woman, and she’s disliked because she has nothing to recommend her beyond those facts. In the highest of high dudgeon, her defenders will propose that this is Joe Biden’s fault, for not “using” Harris correctly in her role. But this too is unjust. In truth, there is no good way to “use” Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris is a talentless mediocrity whose only political flair is for making things worse than they were before she arrived.

  • And her staff knows it. “Kamala Harris’s communications director Ashley Etienne is leaving the vice president’s office after reports staff are in-fighting and her boss is being sidelined.”
  • Kurt Schlichter celebrates the fact that Democrats want to restore tax deductions for rich swells like himself.

    want to thank the Democrats for giving me, a trial lawyer living in Los Angeles, exactly what I need – a big, heaping tax cut. In their reconciliation bill, there are plenty of giveaways for lay-abouts, losers, and grifters, but also for us living by the beach getting hit with huge state taxes rendered un-deductible by that evil Donald Trump, notorious friend to the rich who he…shafted. Anyway, the Dems are going to wrong this right and fix this manifest justice, though – they are going to make essentially all the money I hand over to the socialist clique that runs the formerly Golden State (and it is a lot) deductible once again.

    Cool. Well, for me and other lawyers and similar blue state swells.

    People often ask me why I stay in California, to which I reply, “I don’t explain myself to people – buzz off.” But if I were to explain myself to people, I would point out that despite being awash with Californians, California has beautiful weather, my family is nearby, and here I get to be part of the feudal aristocracy sucking the life from working people to fuel my extravagant lifestyle.

    See, California was designed for lawyers and similar high-status low-lifes, and the beachside communities where the petty royals dwell do not experience a fraction of the hellish nightmare you see on TV. Oh, what you see is real, just not for those in the Birkenstock nobility. You see videos of hordes of hobos leaving their junkie spoor on the sidewalks and that happens, just not to the people that Prince Gavin of Newsom cares about. I don’t think he cares about me personally mind you, but he cares a lot about my ZIP code.

    You can drive ten minutes from my castle and be worried about someone stealing your hubcaps. Once you start heading east over the 405 (That’s I-405 to people who don’t live in LA) real life comes and bites you hard, and the farther east you go, the harder it bites. The roads are trash – gee, I sure expect the infrastructure bill will totally make them nice again – and the schools are cesspits of violence and commie indoctrination, but the peasants just need to accept their lot in life and not complain. Their bitching would ruin our wine tasting.

    Of course, I might have more sympathy for these poor devils if they had not lobbied so hard for the role of “Serf #3” in California’s production of “Game of Bums.” They voted for this. They got this. It’s all theirs.

    

  • “It’s Not Just White People: Democrats Are Losing Normal Voters of All Races.” Results from a focus group of Virginia voters “who voted Democrat, Democrat, Republican in the last three elections.”

    When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.

    The biggest disconnect came on education. Barefoot found that school closures were likely a big part of their votes for Youngkin and that frustration at school leadership over those closures bled into the controversy, pushed by Republicans, around the injection of “critical race theory” into the public school setting, along with the question of what say parents should have in schools. One Latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents, yet later Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee and former governor, would insist that parents should have no input in their children’s education. (That’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how it played.) As she put it: “They asked us to do all this work for months and then he says it’s none of our business now.”

    The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped: Enrollment in Fairfax County schools dropped 5 percent, and fell by 3.9 percent and 3.4 percent in Arlington and Loudoun counties, respectively. Those who were left behind organized parent groups to pressure the schools to reopen. Though the groups tended to be nonpartisan or bipartisan at the start, Republican donors and conservative groups poured money and manpower into them, converting them into potent political weapons that blended anger at the closures with complaints about Democratic board members prioritizing trendy social justice issues — all of it aimed at the November elections.

    “They keep saying ‘a strong return to school,’ but there’s no details,” said Saundra Davis on Fox News over the summer, co-founder of one large group, called the Open Fairfax Public Schools Coalition. “Their attention is on other things, like their pet projects and social justice issues, and the kids have been left to flounder and there’s still no plan for fall.”

    “You’ll be surprised to know I’m a Democrat,” she said. “I’ve tried to warn them that there’s a bipartisan tidal wave coming their way. They don’t look us in the eye, they don’t write us back. If we can’t recall them one by one, there’s an election in November.”

    Ignore the parts where the writer regurgitates Democratic Party talking points (“for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice,” “Few people read the full 1619 Project put out by the New York Times in 2019, which is a rich tapestry of thoughtful essays and reporting about the role of slavery in the development of the United States.”) and pay attention to what the focus group members of all races are saying. “The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.”

  • Evidently one American sport is willing to stand up to China: Women’s tennis.

    The head of the Women’s Tennis Association Steve Simon has said he is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business in China if tennis player Peng Shuai’s safety is not fully accounted for and her allegations are not properly investigated.

    “We’re definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it,” Simon said in an interview Thursday with CNN. “Because this is certainly, this is bigger than the business,” added Simon.

    “Women need to be respected and not censored,” said Simon.

    Peng, who is one of China’s most recognizable sports stars, has not been seen in public since she accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of coercing her into sex at his home, according to screenshots of a since-deleted social media post dated November 2.

    Her post on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, was deleted within 30 minutes of publication, with Chinese censors moving swiftly to wipe out any mention of the accusation online. Her Weibo account, which has more than half a million followers, is still blocked from searchers on the platform.

  • Speaking of victims being pressured not to speak of rape, “Mom of Loudon County rape victim says family was told to keep quiet.”

    The mother of a Virginia girl who was raped by a classmate inside a school bathroom reportedly said that she and her husband had been pressured to keep quiet about the incident — and had no clue the 15-year-old boy was then transferred to another school until last month.

    “We were silenced for many months,” Jessica Smith told the Daily Mail in her first interview since her daughter was raped at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County in May. “We were told not to say a word that could jeopardize our daughter’s case.”

    The boy was found guilty last month of the sexual attack, which sparked a heated confrontation between the victim’s father and school board members.

    There seem to be no crimes the left wing won’t condone in their quest to impose “Social Justice” on resisting Americans.

  • “Missouri Mom Banned From School Board Meeting For Showing Board Members ‘Porn’ Allegedly Available To Students.”
  • Now that Flu Manchu is striking blue northern states much harder than red southern ones, the media seems suddenly disinterested in accusing governors of being merchants of death.
    

  • “Joe Rogan savages critics calling black Republicans ‘black white supremacists’: ‘They’re out of their f***ing mind.”
  • Unbelievable:

  • “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed Thursday that Democrats’ $2 trillion reconciliation bill will force American taxpayers to fund abortions.”
  • Heh: “DeSantis Signs Anti-Vaccine Mandate Package in Brandon, Fla.” “The new law will require employers to allow vaccine exemptions over health, religion, pregnancy, and expected pregnancies in the future, as well as recovery from a previous case of the China flu.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “A Virginia university has placed an assistant professor on administrative leave after the educator sparked heated backlash for saying it isn’t necessarily immoral for adults to be sexually attracted to children.” Allyn Walker, step right up, you’re the next contestant on The Perv is Wrong!
  • St. Paul passes rent control legislation. Result: Developers start pulling the plug on projects.
  • This week marked the 50th anniversary of the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. There have been a lot of milestones on the road to the high tech world we live in today, but that was one of the biggest.
  • The rare good kind of irony: A team of firefighters was practicing water rescue when a car drove into the water and they had to perform a real water rescue.
  • Bill introduced to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
  • Elke Kahr, an actual communist elected mayor of Graz, Austria. That country really does seem to be going to hell lately…
  • After exposure from Texas gubernatorial candidate Don Huffines, Department of Family and Protective Services backs down on requiring employees to take a Critical Race Theory class.
  • The red-pilling of Bill Maher continues apace:

    “I get it! Your ideas are stupid!” Though his “I’m going to pause here for the applause” delivery here is still annoying.

  • You may be macho, but you’ll never be swim out to pull a 400 pound drowning bear back to shore macho. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • The German islands linked by tiny railroads.
  • “Oh No! 85,000 Trump Ballots Found Inside Biden’s Colon.”
  • Boom! “USNS Harvey Milk To Be Manned Entirely By Crew Of Underage Boys.”
  • Cute dog video:

    • I had another dozen or two links I didn’t get to because the Rittenhouse news dropped. Maybe I’ll do another mini-swarm Thanksgiving week…

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    Posted in Border Control, Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 2 Comments »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 30, 2020

    Monday, March 30th, 2020

    The no campaigning campaign continues, Biden gets #MeTooed, a rare Bernie victory, and A New Challenger Appears! It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

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

    *Both these counts have dropped since last week. Do we blame these shenanigans on the media or the DNC?

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

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

    • Pundits, etc.

  • “13 Presidential Primaries Have Now Been Delayed Over The Coronavirus”: Connecticut, Indiana, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Delaware have all delayed primaries, and Pennsylvania is about to, while Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and Mississippi have all delayed runoffs. California, Maryland, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming are all changing various aspects of their respective voting processes.
  • Remember how all those Democrats swore off SuperPacs?

    The anti-super PAC frenzy reached new heights in this year’s Democratic primary. Candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and others effectively told their supporters to stay on the sidelines, either explicitly requesting that super PACs not support them, or blasting the groups at every turn.

    As things got desperate, many of these candidates appeared to realize their mistake. They scrambled to get a new message out: I’ll take any help I can get. Joe Biden was the first to reverse his opposition to super PACs, doing so by late October. A month later, as California senator Kamala Harris’s campaign was falling apart, she, too, dropped her rejection of independent support.

    The party’s backtracking on super PACs came full circle in February when Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren reversed course. Her early and forceful rejections of super PACs had set the tone for the field, and she went even further by making corruption and money-in-politics the top themes of her campaign. But that was when her campaign was a powerful front-runner — after poor showings in the early primary states, Warren needed a Hail Mary, and so changed her tune.

    For every candidate except Biden, the reversal was too late, and the campaign could not be saved.

    Warren claims she only dropped her opposition to super PACs because her opponents were accepting their help. But she surely knew that not every candidate would play by her rules. The pledges to reject super PAC support were an electoral ploy by candidates to brand themselves as cleaner than the other guy. It simply didn’t pay off.

    Instead, with independent speakers on the sidelines, the candidates who entered the primary with the biggest advantages coasted.

  • Interested in what Pete Buttigieg has to say about his presidential run? Me neither, but here it is.

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

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Former congressional staffer accuses Biden of penetrative sexual assault. What do you bet those thousands of Democratic media figures who parroted “credibly accused of sexual assault” for the nonsense Kavanaugh charges won’t be using that phrase this time around? Let’s see what Biden previously said about the issue:

    When it comes to #MeToo sexual misconduct issues, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive 2020 presidential nominee, has made it no secret where he stands: automatically believe women.

    “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real,” said Biden during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations that as a teenager he had assaulted a woman at a party.

    As vice president, Biden played an important role in the Obama administration’s efforts to compel colleges and universities to take sexual violence more seriously—and to adopt policies that limited the due process rights and presumption of innocence for the accused. In recent years, his rhetoric on these issues has been in lockstep with #MeToo activists.

    Despite his public pronunciations on the subject of never touching women without their explicit verbal consent, Biden has previously faced accusations that he was too handsy with people. But now the former vice president is facing a much more serious accusation of sexual assault, from an alleged former staffer named Tara Reade.

    No, not that one.

    It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media will assign Reade’s story as much credibility and importance as that of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh; they certainly have not done so yet. In any case, supporters of Biden—as well as the candidate himself—should take this opportunity to reflect on whether automatic belief is a useful or practical approach for handling decades’ old claims of misconduct.

    What has the mainstream media had to say about these accusations? You know as well as I: virtually nothing. What is the main things Democrats expect of Joe Biden? A pulse:

    For the foreseeable future, there will be no more speeches in front of hundreds, or lines of people waiting to shake Biden’s hand. There may not even be the glossy fanfare of a convention with a prime-time address. But, truthfully, all those things were always sort of beside the point. Like on that morning in McClellandville, and countless other ones besides, Biden was never really convincing anyone on the stump—his political power at this point is an idea, held collectively, about how to defeat Trump. The work now is to keep that idea convincing enough, for long enough, among as many people as possible, for the corporeal man to actually win.

    Biden backed Pelosi’s obstructionism while millions lost their jobs:

    Amid this partisan wrangling, Biden released a video condemning Trump and McConnell for putting a “corporate bailout ahead of millions of families,” echoing the arguments Pelosi and others used for their obstruction.

    “President Trump and Mitch McConnell are trying to put a corporate bailout ahead of millions of families. You know, it’s families. It’s simply wrong. We should be focusing on families, but the White House and the United States Senate Republicans have proposed a $500 billion slush-fund for corporations,” Biden says in the video. “Republicans refused to increase social security at the same time, to forgive student loans, to take the necessary steps to stop evictions, ensure food and nutrition for vulnerable families.”

    Joe Biden called on McConnell to hold a vote on Democratic priorities, rather than voting on the compromise bill that had been worked out ahead of time. He suggested the compromise bill would not help small businesses, workers, and communities — even though it includes cash pay-outs to most Americans, an increase in unemployment benefits, and more.

    Pelosi’s busted power play hurts Biden:

    Unlike the 2008 financial crisis or any other burst bubble, the coronavirus is an outside force, a threat forcing the government to ask that all nonessential workers either work from home or forgo their paychecks. The nation has proved willing to take the immediate economic hit without any promises, but if the government wants to maintain the status quo for weeks or even months, workers and small businesses need immediate cash relief. This is a conclusion that has united the political spectrum from Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders and manifested itself in the Senate Republicans’ imperfect but necessarily broad relief package.

    But after a week of bipartisan discussions, congressional Democrats have tried to nuke the bill, denying direct cash payments to the overwhelming majority of the nation and small businesses. And now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is out with her own bill, a Trojan Horse of a socialist Christmas list disguised as an emergency aid package.

    As businesses shutter around the country and workers struggle to make their final paycheck for the foreseeable future last long enough to feed their children, Pelosi produced her own crisis bill that would bail out the U.S. Postal Service, provide $10,000 student loan bailouts, and demand that companies accepting federal aid offer $15 minimum wage and permanent paid leave.

    The entire thesis of the Biden campaign goes something as follows: Trump is a uniquely partisan president who engages in trollery and trickery unbecoming of the White House. Joe Biden, contrarily, is a respected statesman with a documented history of working across the aisle. If you want a president who doesn’t tank the stock market with vile tweets, or even one who doesn’t force the nation to obsess over the federal government, vote for Barack Obama’s (former) BFF.

    Biden can sell that message, and as his primary proved, he does so effectively. But the rest of his caucus cannot. It’s one thing for Democrats to try and tank openly bipartisan bills like Trump’s criminal justice reform legislation or even impeach him during a time of peace and prosperity. It’s entirely another to sabotage a week of negotiations in the hopes of passing the discount Green New Deal while laid-off workers wonder how they’ll pay their water bill next month.

    Joe Biden may value bipartisanship, and we already saw the Obama administration rise to the occasion and work with Republicans when crises arose. But the rest of the Democratic Party isn’t playing Uncle Joe’s game, and the voters who gave Democrats the House in 2018 are seeing the evidence in a horrifying, real-time display.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) “Biden’s First Coronavirus Shadow-Briefing Was a Disaster:”

    Biden’s first attempt at appearing presidential and ready to handle a crisis was another gaffe-prone disaster that his campaign most certainly regrets doing.

    In the middle of his Monday briefing, Biden apparently lost his train of thought while explaining what he thinks Trump should do during the crisis.

    “I’m glad the president has finally activated the National Guard. Now we need the armed forces and the National Guard to help with hospital capacity, supplies, and logistics. We need to activate the reserve corps of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with this crush of cases,” he said, before shuffling papers and then gesturing to someone off-camera that there was a problem. “And, uh, in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that, we are… Well, let me go to the second thing.”

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Like Obama, Biden only sounds smart and together when his TelePrompTer is working. A low-energy campaign for a low energy candidate:

    Sidelined and confined to his house by the dictates of coronavirus social distancing, the former vice president has been limited to intermittent appearances from a makeshift studio in his basement. They have been awkward and low-energy, but that doesn’t really set them apart from most other Joe Biden appearances.

    If there’s any candidate who could thrive by having very limited public exposure and existing mostly as a line of a ballot, it’s the longtime presidential aspirant who hadn’t won a primary until a couple of weeks ago.

    Biden is winning the Democratic nomination on the basis of not being Bernie Sanders and wants to get elected president on the basis of not being Donald Trump. He’s as purely a negative candidate as we’ve seen in a very long time, running largely on who he isn’t and what he won’t do.

    He’s the presidential candidate as cipher.

    Biden’s pitch to young progressives: Hey babe, talk a walk on the mild side. Is Biden launching a podcast? I look forward to listening to that in the same sense I look forward to watching the Cats movie: in joyous anticipation of an epic train-wreck. The Decline of Sundown Joe:

    Joe Biden on China: A triptych:

    This one, though, hey, we’ve all been there:

  • Update: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Convention Substitute? With more than half the possible delegates already allocated, it would be impossible for Cuomo to jump into the race and win an outright delegate victory, but there’s been a lot of chatter about him being a brokered convention substitute for Biden. Meet “Mr. Contingency Plan“:

    Democrats are publicly talking about “contingency options” for their July convention in Milwaukee in case the coronavirus persists in being a public-health threat. But privately, some are also talking about needing a Plan B if Joe Biden, their nominee apparent, continues to flounder.

    Some Democrats are openly talking up New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has soared during the crisis, as a Biden stand-in. Yesterday, a Draft Cuomo 2020 account on Twitter announced that “Times have changed & we need Gov. Cuomo to be the nominee. Our next POTUS must be one w/an ability to lead thru this crisis.”

    Snip.

    Democrats are increasingly worried that Joe Biden will have trouble being relevant and compelling in the long four months between now and when he is nominated in July. Lloyd Constantine, who was a senior policy adviser to New York governor Eliot Spitzer from 2007 to 2008, puts it bluntly: “Biden is a melting ice cube. Those of us who have closely watched as time ravaged the once sharp or even brilliant minds of loved ones and colleagues, recognize what is happening to the good soldier Joe.”

    Indeed, Biden seemed to disappear when the virus began dominating the news cycle early in March. Biden’s media presence “abruptly shriveled,” writes Kalev Leetaru, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. In contrast, daily mentions of Cuomo as of last Sunday “accounted for 1.4 percent of online news coverage compared with 2.9 percent for Trump.”

    Of course, if that actually came to pass, it would bring up two questions: What do Bernie Sanders fans think about the party deciding second place means bupkis when the DNC can just anoint a replacement? And how would millions of Biden’s black supporters feel upon finding out that their votes don’t matter compared to the will of a tiny clique of party insiders? How about Cuomo as Veep pick? Well, aside from the problem that Biden promised to pick a woman, there are other problems:

    Party poobahs would be against it: Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez tends hard left; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has no love for Cuomo, and African-American leaders, ­arguably the organization’s single most powerful bloc, see the governor as an impediment to party diversity and thus to their own interests.

    Certainly, Cuomo’s 10-year tenure itself bodes caution. Yes, he has been a reliable progressive, especially on guns, trendy egalitarian economic legislation and the various woke social causes. But he has also been aggressively pro-charter schools and thus a poison pill to teachers unions, an often thuggish and influential special interest; this alone could kill his candidacy.

    Moreover, Cuomo’s various ­upstate economic-development schemes — most disastrous in execution and each scandal-plagued along the way — are in the background now. But they’d move center-stage if he was on the ticket, so why would Biden want that to happen?

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He won the Democrats abroad primary, netting an estimated nine delegates to Biden’s four. Is he staying in the race until June? More on that theme:

    James Zogby, a Democratic National Committee member who is on the board of “Our Revolution,” said in an interview that he saw no reason for Sanders to give up his national platform now.

    “We don’t know what will befall us,” he said. “I mean, who knew two months ago that we’d be where we are with the virus. Who knows where we’ll be two months from now? Who knows what Bernie does, what Biden does, what else happens that will change the dynamics, so it would be irresponsible to leave the race, as some have suggested.”

    Zogby said Sanders should not exit the race unless Biden becomes the presumptive nominee — which he could do by hitting the necessary threshold of 1,991 pledged delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot at the convention.

    “But even then, don’t forget, Bernie Sanders is not just a candidate,” Zogby said, pointing to Sanders’ place atop the progressive movement. “He has every reason to stay in for that reason.”

    “Bernie’s supporters say that the coronavirus provides an opportunity for him to get back in the race, but of course they would. Bernie didn’t feel a need to vote on the stimulus package, preferring to livestream with members of the squad. 15% of Sanders supporters say they’ll vote for Trump if Biden is the nominee. Speaking of which:

    • Out of the Running

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

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

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    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 9, 2020

    Monday, March 9th, 2020

    EVERYBODY DROPPED OUT, except Grandpa Simpson, Grandpa Commie, and…Hot Surfer Girl? It’s Clinton-Sanders II, except Biden isn’t as widely loathed and Hillary was only physically decrepit. It’s no longer a clown car, but I’m going to keep the name because, you know, tradition. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Joe Biden 664
    2. Bernie Sanders 573
    3. Elizabeth Warren 64
    4. Michael Bloomberg 61
    5. Pete Buttigieg 26
    6. Amy Klobuchar 7
    7. Tulsi Gabbard 2

    Polls

    Only one from Sunday:

  • Data for Progress (Washington): Biden 47, Sanders 44, Warren 5, Gabbard 3.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. Biden’s at a bracing 85.8%.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • 538 covers the obvious: “After Super Tuesday, Joe Biden Is A Clear Favorite To Win The Nomination.”

    After a huge night on Super Tuesday — and with all his major opponents except Sen. Bernie Sanders having dropped out — former Vice President Joe Biden is a strong favorite to win the Democratic nomination, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast.

    Snip.

    Things don’t look good for Sanders. He has several compounding problems:

  • First, he’s already behind by around 70 delegates, according to our estimates, based on returns in each state as currently reported. That deficit could get worse because there are some signs that late-returned mail ballots in California will help Biden — a reflection of the fact that Biden surged in the race in the final few days before Super Tuesday.
  • As mentioned, Biden will probably get a bounce in the polls as a result of his Super Tuesday wins. The model’s guess (accounting for its projected Super Tuesday bounce for Biden and the effects of Bloomberg and Warren dropping out) is that he’s currently ahead by the equivalent of 6 or 7 points in national polls. So although momentum could shift back toward Sanders later on, it may get worse for him in the short run.
  • Some of Sanders’s best states (California, Nevada) have already voted, and the upcoming states generally either aren’t good for him or have relatively few delegates. In fact, given how broadly Sanders lost on Super Tuesday — including in northern states such as Minnesota, Massachusetts and Maine — it’s hard to know where his strengths lie, other than among young progressives and Hispanics, who are not large enough groups to constitute a winning coalition in most states. Conversely, it’s easy to identify places where Sanders will likely lose badly to Biden. Our model has Biden winning a net of about 85 delegates over Sanders in Florida on March 17, where Sanders’s polling has been terrible, and a net of about 35 delegates in Georgia, which votes on March 24.
  • There aren’t that many delegates left after March. Some 38 percent of delegates have already been selected. And by the time Georgia votes in two-and-a-half weeks, 61 percent of delegates will already have been chosen. So even if Sanders did get a big, massive momentum swing late in the race, it might not be enough to allow him to come back, with only about a third of delegates still to be chosen.
  • Finally, even if Sanders does come back, it might merely be enough to win a plurality rather than a majority of delegates. We project that roughly 150 delegates — or about 4 percent of the total of 3,979 pledged delegates available — belong to candidates who have since dropped out or to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, even after accounting for the fact that statewide delegates are reallocated to other candidates once a candidate drops out.2 That creates an additional buffer that will make it harder for Sanders to win a majority.

    • So basically, Sanders has to come back quickly when the momentum is currently against him in a bunch of states that are not very good for him — or it will be too late. It’s not impossible. But the chances are low. The model gives Biden an 88 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates, with most of the remaining outcomes being “no majority” rather than a Sanders majority. It also gives Biden a 94 percent chance of winning a plurality of pledged delegates, and Sanders a 6 percent chance.

  • Is the great liberal freakout over?

    After a month-long panic driven by fears of an unstoppable Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party establishment breathed a sigh of relief last night. Joe Biden scored wins in nine of the 15 contests on Super Tuesday, capping a crucial four-day turnaround in which victory in his “firewall” state of South Carolina was quickly followed by withdrawals by three of his rivals, two of whom immediately endorsed his presidential bid. With the news Wednesday morning that billionaire Mike Bloomberg will quit the race and endorse Biden, it now appears that the man President Trump calls “Sleepy Joe” has a clear path to the Democratic nomination.

    Biden’s rapid revival seems to have ended what I described, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, as “The Great Liberal Freakout.” Anyone who watched CNN or MSNBC after the February 3 Iowa caucus could see that Biden’s dismal fourth-place finish in the Hawkeye State had inspired abject despair among the liberal pundits. The prospect that Sanders might win the Democratic nomination on a socialist platform was an omen of doom — guaranteed defeat in November — a scenario that longtime Clinton adviser James Carville called “the end of days.”

    Democrats were experiencing a political Murphy’s law, in which everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. The Senate voted to acquit Trump of impeachment charges, Democrats botched the vote count in Iowa, and the only “mainstream” candidate who seemed capable of challenging Sanders’ momentum was Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old homosexual mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Because African American voters are such a crucial demographic for Democrats, and because pundits believed black voters would never support a gay candidate, the chance that Buttigieg could win the nomination was dismissed out of hand. If Biden could not regain the lead, the “Anybody but Bernie” crowd seemed to calculate, the best hope of stopping Sanders was Bloomberg.

    An ex-Republican and former three-term mayor of New York City, Bloomberg had entered the campaign too late to be on the ballot in any of the first four states but was spending lavishly on Super Tuesday states. While the Bloomberg alternative was being explored, establishment Democrats experienced another shock in New Hampshire, where Biden placed fifth — zero delegates — behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. With Sanders leading the polls ahead of the February 22 Nevada caucus, the Democratic apocalypse was clearly at hand, and if the cable-news pundits had been worried after Iowa, they became utterly unhinged after New Hampshire.

    But the Great Liberal Freakout had not yet reached rock bottom. That nadir of panic came on February 19, when Bloomberg completely bombed his first debate appearance. Having become the default Plan B for “mainstream” Democrats, Bloomberg blew it so badly in his Las Vegas debate debut that the pundits suddenly found themselves searching for Plan C. Was it possible Klobuchar could contend for the nomination? Did Buttigieg deserve a second look? Or maybe Warren, whose debate attacks had inflicted the most damage on Bloomberg, might be capable of a resurgence? After Sanders scored another victory in Nevada, however, establishment Democrats evidently decided to go back to Plan A.

    Key to this desperate last-ditch strategy was the fact that black voters are a majority of Democrats in South Carolina. Four days after the Nevada primary, Rep. James Clyburn — known as the “godfather” of the South Carolina Democratic Party — delivered his endorsement of Biden, making an emotional appeal to unite behind the former vice president. Coming on the heels of a February 25 debate in Charleston, which many observers called Biden’s best performance of the campaign, Clyburn’s endorsement proved to be the turning point. Biden racked up nearly half the vote Saturday in South Carolina, more than doubling Sanders’ total, which immediately brought the capitulation of billionaire Tom Steyer. This was followed Sunday by Buttigieg’s announcement that he would suspend his campaign, and on Monday, both Buttigieg and Klobuchar endorsed Biden.

  • Kurt Schlichter says that the race just got even more hilarious:

    The battle is really for the shriveled heart of the Democrat Party, and no one better represents the yin and the yang of that dying collection of power-hungry elitists and grasping greedos than the doddering socialist Sanders and that Biden guy who should by all rights be chasing that damn know-it-all squirrel around the park.

    Biden reps the establishment, with his last fifty years of failure in Washington tracking exactly his party’s last fifty years of failure in Washington. And Sanders represents the fresh face of a 150-year-old murder cult that only people as dumb as Hollywood stars, college kids, and kale-gobbling hipsters would be stupid enough to let near power. If you’re not seeing anything for you between them, there’s a reason why – whichever loser they choose, you can be sure that you’ll be the enemy. With Sanders, you’ll be a Kulak, and with Biden, you’ll be a Kulak Lite. So, basically, you’ll be Ted Lieu-ed either way, but under Joe, your end might come a little slower, as is his won’t.

    The establishment is probably right about Sanders when they heed the injunction to “Never go full Red Guard.” A lot of people try to draw an analogy between Sanders’ anti-establishment populist insurgency and Donald Trump’s anti-establishment populist insurgency and warn that we’re likely to feel a third-degree Bern in November. And while the nominee of a major party always has a theoretical chance to win, the fact that Trump beat the odds does not mean the weirdo from Burlington is destined for victory. If you are normal, he wants to take your money, your guns, your doctor, your border, and even job if you are one of the American heroes who helped make us energy independent. Trump wanted to do the opposite. A better analogy is Sanders’s fellow garbage commie jerk, Jeremy Corbyn, who all the best people on Twitter told me was going to win and instead ended up taking the Labor Party down into the figurative Pulp Fiction pawn shop basement to channel Ving Rhames.

    Snip.

    Now, Biden is an inanimate object and everyone can see that he’s the Trojan donkey the establishment hopes to use to sneak back into power. That means he can’t very well capture the change zeitgeist. Sanders is a danger to the establishment because he actually believes the nonsense he’s spewing. He’d provide genuine change, but the problem is that with him, it would be changing us into his beloved Cuba.

  • “Lifelong Democrat Says Biden, Sanders Can’t Convince Him to Not Vote for Trump.”
  • The master at work:

  • “Nation Optimistic About Future Now That All Presidential Candidates Projected To Die Of Old Age Before Election.”

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

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden just had the best week for a politician running for President possibly ever. First he wins South Carolina, then two of his biggest rivals drop out and endorse him, then he wins most of the Super Tuesday states, takes the lead in delegates, and has still another deep-pocketed rival drop out and endorse him. (Long-vanquished rivals Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke also endorsed him.) Edward-Isaac Dovere has the long-winded, flattering, fed-to-my-by-Biden-insiders “comeback kid” version:

    Ducklo sidled up to the reporters, one by one, with the same mischievous smile. “Have you seen the video?” he’d say. “You gotta watch the video.” And then he’d stand and wait for each reporter to pull it up on his or her phone: a one-minute-and-40-second-long ad that snarkily compared Biden’s record with Pete Buttigieg’s. “Both Vice President Biden and former Mayor Buttigieg have taken on tough fights: Under threat of a nuclear Iran, Joe Biden helped to negotiate the Iran deal,” the narrator says. “Under threat of disappearing pets, Buttigieg negotiated lighter licensing regulations on pet-chip scanners.”

    The ad was harsh and petty, and the Biden campaign didn’t have money to put it anywhere except on Twitter—and thus on reporters’ phones. But that was enough. By the time Buttigieg did his rounds on the Sunday shows the next morning, he was getting asked about his experience at every turn.

    To survive long enough to become the unity candidate, Biden first had to be persuaded to rip into his rivals. Between his disappointing finishes in the first three states and his blockbuster victories that followed, the campaign made tweaks like this one. It didn’t overhaul its strategy or upend its structure. What his team did was try to redirect, in specific, targeted ways, a 77-year-old candidate who doesn’t take direction particularly well—and hope the electorate would notice.

    Note the classic “Oh, my oh-so-high-minded candidate needed to be convinced to go negative” spin.

    Biden at first resisted going negative, aides say—he doesn’t like attacking fellow Democrats. But after a fourth-place finish in Iowa, he went after Bernie Sanders, whom he genuinely likes and had resisted taking on in the debates, by smacking down socialism every chance he got. And although he’d been touched by Buttigieg’s defense of his family during the impeachment fight—and had come to see shades of his late son in the young mayor—he started attacking his moderate rival. He had no choice, his closest aides told him. This was a Do you actually want to be president? moment.

    “He did not love taking a sharp swing at another Democrat,” Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, told me on Wednesday, recalling the conversation she’d had with him after the campaign decided to release the Buttigieg video. “He did not love taking it at Pete, whom he likes and respects. But he also understood and knew it was necessary to interrupt the narrative and shift some of the dynamic in the race, which he knew desperately needed to happen.”

    The Biden campaign wasn’t just broken. It was broke. Biden had no money for ads or internal polling, leaving his team to rely on publicly available numbers in order to get a feel for his performance. But it didn’t take a grand master to see that they were about to get checkmated. So, after denying rumors that the campaign planned to leave New Hampshire early, the morning of the primary it did just that. Aides rushed Biden to South Carolina and shoved talking points in front of him about how minority voters—including the black voters who form the backbone of his support—hadn’t been heard from yet. The move helped the speech get prominent TV coverage, which aides thought wouldn’t have been possible if he’d stayed in New Hampshire.

    What followed Biden’s early finishes—including a second-place spot in Nevada—was the fastest turnaround from flub to front-runner in modern Democratic politics.

    The basics of Biden’s campaign didn’t change. He kept a schedule with only a few events each day. He made new gaffes and generated new questions about whether he can consistently tell the truth.

    But he stepped up his rhetoric on health care and guns, and at every moment he could, his team urged him to repeat one word: Obama. “This guy’s not a Barack Obama!” he said of Buttigieg. Sanders, he said repeatedly, had wanted to primary the former president in 2012.

    Decisions about campaign spending and Biden’s schedule were handed over to Anita Dunn, an experienced Democratic operative (and former communications director in the Obama White House), who was pulled off the road to help run the show out of the Philadelphia headquarters. Greg Schultz, the campaign manager, was dispatched around the country to lean on donors not to jump to other campaigns—or start leaking to reporters about how much trouble Biden was in.

    They needed to get to the South Carolina electorate—the black and more moderate voters who weren’t well represented earlier in the primary. And in order to make the most of it, the campaign needed to change how the rest of the country was thinking of him too.

    At first, as Biden campaigned in South Carolina, he appeared to be feeling down, as though he thought the race was over. “There were times when you could feel his spirit a little diminished,” said Eric Garcetti, the former Los Angeles mayor. Garcetti had helped gin up Latino support ahead of an important second-place finish in Nevada, even as his allies teased him for throwing himself into a campaign that, at the time, looked like a lost cause. Biden, Garcetti said, “didn’t wallow in it. He kept on plugging.” Eric Ortner, a Biden friend and bundler, described Biden this way: The former vice president has “faced real darkness in his life,” and “it’s hard for anyone [who] hasn’t been on his journey to know the spectrum that he measures light on.”

    However, Biden, who is one of the most extroverted politicians around, was soon feeding off the largely African American crowds in Charleston and Orangeburg—crowds that hadn’t shown up in Cedar Rapids or Ottumwa during the long Iowa days. He started smiling more. Fletcher Smith Jr., a former state representative who introduced Biden at his final event in South Carolina last Friday, was optimistic about what the crowds meant for his candidate. “When you connect as a white guy with black people, it convinces white people too,” he told me after the rally at a college gym in Spartanburg.

    “All over America, this same kind of conversation is going to help him punch through,” he predicted, a comment that seemed, at the time, more wistful than realistic.

    By the time Biden showed up for a quick stop at a Greenville polling location the morning of the South Carolina primary, he and his staff knew that they’d win, aides told me, though they didn’t know by how much. Public polls showed a tight race, and they had no other data to go on. The endorsement of Representative Jim Clyburn had been key, earning Biden the kind of media attention he couldn’t afford to buy. (“If we had been before South Carolina, then Alabama would have delivered the big victory, and I would be the kingmaker,” Representative Terri Sewell, an enthusiastic Biden backer from Selma, told me Wednesday. Biden would go on to sweep her district on Super Tuesday.)

    Before the polls closed, his aides settled on the opening line for his victory speech: “To all those who have been knocked down, counted out, left behind: This is your campaign.”

    It wasn’t a coronation, but a rebound—the kind of story Biden himself tells on the stump, about a man who is beaten down but refuses to give up and scratches his way back. “Fighting as an underdog is comfortable for him, and it’s also comfortable for a lot of Americans,” Ducklo said. “The message resonates because of the message and also because of the messenger.”

    Biden won South Carolina by 30 points. He raised $400,000 in the 20 minutes after the polls closed, before the campaign had sent any texts or emails asking for support. This was almost as much as the team had raised online in the week leading up to the Iowa caucuses. It raised more money in the subsequent three days than it had in the entire third quarter of 2019.

    Left out of this praise is how clearly the DNC must have orchestrated significant portions of the narrative to boost Biden. Getting Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop out and keep Warren in to siphon votes from Sanders and having Bloomberg drop out having dropped tons of money into running negative ads against Sanders reeks of at least some degree of orchestration by the “anyone but Bernie” DNC. Indeed, it would not shock me if this was Buttigieg’s assigned role from the very start. Biden is now the prohibitive favorite if he can avoid full onset senior dementia. “Stop. Pause. He can’t be President.”

    More:

    Never forget Biden’s long history as a proven liar:

    Not sure if tacking left is a good move if it alienates so many potential voters:

    Then again, California already cast its votes, so Biden can afford to alienate Uber users to curry favor with unions. Joe claims he loves ObamaCare but structures his taxes to avoid ObamaCare taxes. Weekend at Joe’s:

  • Update: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Dropped Out. Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden. Bloomberg got in late and spent over half a billion dollars to garner 64 delegates. At some $7.8 million per delegate, it isn’t as bad as Steyer ($200 million+ for no delegates) or John Connally ($11 million for one delegate), but it isn’t good. (It is, however, slightly more efficient than the $8.75 per delegate Jeb! spent in 2016.) His relentless ad bombardment seemed to drive away more people than it convinced:

    But he’ll always have American Samoa:

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? At this point it’s clear that she’s not going to jump into the race proper, so I’m going to move her back to the also rans, despite widespread speculation that she’ll replace Biden at the top of the ticket due to Slow Joe’s obvious mental deterioration.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Yep, she’s still running:

    Tulsi Gabbard is still running for president.

    The congresswoman from Hawaii hasn’t garnered much support in primary elections and she’s falling short of winning enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. She has two so far.

    But Gabbard appears set on continuing.

    Gabbard won her first pledged delegates on Super Tuesday, when 14 states and the territory of American Samoa voted. Gabbard, who was born in Leloaloa, American Samoa, came in second in the U.S. territory to former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

    She campaigned in Super Tuesday states including Colorado, California and Utah. And she spoke at a town hall in Detroit on Tuesday, ahead of the March 10 primary in Michigan. But she had not been traveling nearly as much as other candidates. Her campaign has not responded to multiple requests for comment over several days.

    She has remained in the race as numerous candidates with far more support nationally — including most recently Bloomberg and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — have dropped out. Now former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are contending for the nomination.

    Snip.

    Her home state of Hawaii will hold its primary April 4.

    Gabbard remains the only prominent person of color and woman left in the race.

    This would theoretically be inconvenient for Democrats mouthing social justice platitudes, were it not for the fact they’re hypocrites. But since Gabbard is widely loathed by Democratic Party activists, the “woman of color” bit is simply irrelevant to them.

    And in visual form:

    She asked for Biden and Sanders to help get her on the debate stage, since the DNC’s new thresholds (of course!) exclude her. Well, people in Hell want ice-water, too. Is Gabbard the John Kaisch of 2020? Maybe, except for the fact that she’s actually much more interesting than the candidates still running, and she has issues that seem orthogonal to DNC gospel. Does she have any chance whatsoever? Maybe…if both Biden and Sanders dropped dead in the next couple of weeks (a non-zero possibility). Plus she evidently still has $2 million cash on hand, which is enough to run an insurgent campaign all the way to the convention. Jerry Brown ran an effective (albeit losing) insurgent campaign in 1992. (Granted, even then he was a much more important political figure than Gabbard is now.)

  • Update: Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Dropped Out. She dropped out and endorsed Biden on March 2. Her primary achievement was pushing Biden down to fifth in Iowa and outlasting Gillibrand and Harris, and the biggest impression she made was mistreating staffers.

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Tough week for the old commie. One minute everything’s coming up Bernie then BOOM!, the DNC yanks the chains hard enough to make the stars align just right for Biden to all but run the table on Super Tuesday. A look at Bernie’s problem:

    The campaign released an ad featuring an audio clip of former president Barack Obama praising Sanders, a clear attempt to undercut the benefit that has accrued to Biden, particularly among black voters, as the loyal lieutenant to the country’s first African American president.

    The flurry of activity amounted to the clearest acknowledgment yet that the coalition Sanders has built — which is composed largely of young people, liberals, working-class voters and Latino voters — has failed to expand since Sanders’s upstart 2016 bid, all as the rest of the party has coalesced behind Biden.

    The Tuesday results, in which Sanders led in California while winning Colorado, Utah and Vermont, offered a reminder that he retains a forceful position in the party — win or lose the nomination — with support from a quarter to a third of the base.

    But much of his team’s focus Wednesday was on the need for improvement.

    Exit polls showed that the struggles Sanders experienced among black voters four years ago against Clinton were largely unchanged. Black voters boosted Biden across Southern states on Super Tuesday, with exit polling showing that he won the votes of roughly 7 in 10 black voters in Virginia and Alabama, and did nearly as well in North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, getting roughly 60 percent of the black vote.

    Sanders’s push to broaden the electorate with scores of new voters rallying behind him hasn’t been realized. And he has struggled to persuade voters that a leftist political revolution is the best way to beat President Trump.

    Now, Sanders is confronting a radically different political landscape from 11 days ago, when he was flying high after a decisive win in Nevada seemed to put him in the driver’s seat in the Democratic race. Divisions in the moderate wing of the party that enabled him to succeed with a limited, if loyal, base have been resolved.

    He picked up an endorsement from Jesse Jackson, which might indeed help with old black people, but is it enough to overcome Biden? Probably not.

  • Update: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: Dropped Out. She dropped out March 5, 2020, having failed to win a single state Super Tuesday. “Voters didn’t reject the Massachusetts senator because of her policy positions; they rejected her because of her penchant for lying about herself.”

    How did Warren, flush with cash from a wildly successful grassroots-fundraising operation and atop all the national polls in mid October, fail to translate that lead into actual votes? Why didn’t her string of successful debate performances make a difference? And most importantly, why is her very like-minded socialist colleague, Senator Bernie Sanders, still standing while she’s finished?

    Unlike others who’ve failed in their bid for the nomination this cycle — Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, Cory Booker — Warren was not undone by a lack of funds, campaign infrastructure, social-media following, or work ethic. She had all of those things, plus a campaign team stocked with high-level talent from past Clinton and Obama campaigns, yet she lost anyway.

    And in the end, she has no one to blame but herself.

    Snip.

    Warren fell apart not because of her agenda but because her utter dishonesty about her personal life eroded her credibility as policy wonk. Her decision to double-down when called on lying about her Native American ancestry, her debunked allegation that she’d been fired from a school job for being pregnant, and her false claims that her kids had never attended private schools all shattered her persona as a thought leader and ideologue. Her personal opportunism, as well, made it easier to argue that her platform was opportunistic. So when voters got to pick between Sanders’s socialism and Warren’s, the choice became very easy.

    Warren’s embarrassing performance in her home-state primary — third place, behind Biden and Sanders — suggested that the public airing of her iniquities had even taken its toll with her own constituents. The relative popularity of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal in select far-left enclaves of Massachusetts did not boost her, despite her convictions on those issues and her reasonably articulate (if economically and logically lackluster) advocacy for them. Warren was able to rise to the top of the field, even when it had more talented candidates still in it, with her entire policy portfolio on the table. But once she became the most visible candidate, her penchant for lying about herself became impossible to ignore.

    She was sincere only in wanting bigger government, higher taxes and herself in charge, but she backtracked and hemmed and hawed on the details, plus went full Social Justice Warrior. Warren: The final days:

    “Warren Returns To Tribe In Shame After Failing To Take Land Back From The Pale Faces.”

    • Out of the Running

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

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

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    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 2, 2020

    Monday, March 2nd, 2020

    Biden’s back, Bernie’s coronation is postponed, Buttigieg and Steyer are Out, Bloomberg sucks up to China, Super Tuesday looms, and Biden seeks help from the Holy Roman Empire. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Delegates
    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Bernie Sanders 58
    2. Joe Biden 50
    3. Pete Buttigieg 26
    4. Elizabeth Warren 8
    5. Amy Klobuchar 7

    Polls

    Omitting anything older than Sunday:

  • Emerson College (Texas): Sanders 31, Biden 26, Bloomberg 16, Warren 14, Buttigieg 5, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 3, Steyer 2.
  • Emerson College (California): Sanders 38, Biden 21, Warren 16, Bloomberg 11, Buttigieg 7, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1.
  • USA Today (California): Sanders 35, Bloomberg 16, Biden 14, Warren 12, Buttigieg 8, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 3, Gabbard 3.
  • CBS (Texas): Sanders 30, Biden 26, Warren 17, Bloomberg 13, Klobuchar 6, Buttigieg 6, Steyer 1, Gabbard 0.
  • Dallas Morning News (Texas): Sanders 29, Bloomberg 21, Biden 19, Warren 10, Buttigieg 8, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1.
  • East Carolina University (North Carolina): Biden 29, Sanders 25, Bloomberg 14, Warren 11, Klobuchar 5, Buttigieg 4, Gabbard 1. Evidently both the Carolinas love them some Biden…
  • Boston Globe (Massachusetts): Sanders 24.2, Warren 22.2, Bloomberg 13, Buttigieg 12.4, Biden 11, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 2.4, Gabbard .8.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. Biden back above 30% this morning.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • Sanders is cracking the Democratic Party the way Trump cracked the Republican Party in 2016:

    But from a broader perspective, the emergence of Sanders as the Democratic frontrunner mirrors the rise of Trump and the crackup of the Republican Party in 2016, and for many of the same reasons. In both cases, a significant swath of each party’s voter base rejected the party establishment after years of being pandered to or ignored altogether.

    Populism cuts both ways, right and left, and the impending takeover of the Democratic Party by a left-wing populist should have been anticipated by party leaders four years ago—and maybe it would have been, if they hadn’t been busy gloating over the GOP’s apparent misfortune of being taken over by Trump.

    But Trump’s triumph was a necessary corrective to a party that had lost its way. When Trump cinched the nomination in 2016, it was the end of the Republican Party as we knew it. Gone was the mild-mannered GOP of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and John Boehner. Gone were the empty platitudes, repeated ad nauseum for decades, about comprehensive immigration reform and defunding Planned Parenthood. Gone was the slavish devotion to global free trade deals regardless of the toll it took on American workers. Gone, too, was the subtle deference toward the liberal media that belied the Republican establishment’s ambivalence about the issues rank-and-file Republicans really cared about.

    Trump swept all of that away. Before he went to war with Democrats and the media, his candidacy was an all-out assault on the Republican establishment, which had drifted so far from its base that GOP leaders didn’t take him seriously until it was too late. They couldn’t see what he saw: Republican voters—and not a few independents and moderate Democrats—were tired of being ignored by their leaders, whom they had grown to despise. Trump was able to topple the edifice of the GOP because he saw it was rotten underneath.

    Now, Sanders is poised to do the same to the Democratic Party. The media is aware of this, but only vaguely, tending to frame Sanders’s rise as a contest between a radically leftist base and a more moderate Democratic electorate at large. That’s one reason the press has so quickly glommed on to the candidacy of Bloomberg, treating him as a viable contender for the nomination and a real rival to Sanders.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • It’s your weekly “Democrats are freaking over having Sanders at the top of the ticket” piece:

    “If [Sanders] is the nominee, we lose,” said one Democrat.

    That lawmaker indicated that a Sanders primary win would cost Democrats their state in the fall. The lawmaker suggested that many voters could leave the top of the ticket blank. Two other vulnerable Democrats indicated that a Sanders nomination would almost certainly cede their states to President Trump, to say nothing of the impact on races down the ballot for Democratic House and Senate candidates. One Democrat said they would try to hyper-focus on local issues to serve as a counterbalance. But the lawmaker conceded it’s hard to compete with the Sanders narrative and the reverberations of impeachment.

  • A counterpoint from Andrew Malcolm: Beware of wishing for Bernie to be the nominee:

    Here’s what’s dangerous about enjoying Bernie’s early success and Dems’ early troubles: Most people say he can’t win and he’ll hand four more years to the other party. Many of those people include the alleged elites of his own party.

    Sanders has a cadre of hardcore nobodies who feel alienated from both parties, especially the establishment types who inhabit the once uninhabitable swamp that Maryland so generously donated to the new nation back in 1790.

    Those cadres, many of them young, ignorant and inspired, get excited at the mere mention of the name of the man who’s lived off taxpayers virtually his entire career and still managed to acquire three homes.

    He’s grumpy, often angry but he is what he is, an authentic, angry grump. His disciples pack the rallies to the rafters or the farthest street corner, cheer everything he says, especially the angry stuff.

    The candidate talks about implementing a most ambitious program of reforms that no one thinks can get through Congress. Many fellow party officeholders are already running for fear he’ll drag them down to defeat.

    Any of this sound familiar? It’s a parallel phenomenon to the Trump Train of 2015-16. A rich guy from Queens (Bernie is a Brooklyn native) who instinctively tapped into the anger and frustrations of millions of overlooked Americans he has nothing in common with and harnessed that power to a surprise upset ticket into the White House.

    The parallel is, of course, imperfect. Sanders is older, Jewish, no friend of Israel. He doesn’t know from tax cuts. There’s hardly anyone safe from the many trillions in new taxes the lifelong politician promises.

    There’s a very long way to go in this process. But winning has a way of adorning anyone with campaign credibility and more admirers. You can smell it already.

  • Joe Scarborough says “Hey, you broads should totally drop out so we can beat Bernie.”
  • Gmail seems to block an awful lot of mail from Presidential mailing lists. “We signed up to receive emails from Donaldjtrump.com but didn’t receive any.” 🤔
  • Heh:

  • Charlie Kirk has some thoughts:

  • “Russians Declare Election Too Chaotic For Them To Successfully Interfere.” “‘In our wildest ambitions, we never would have tried to get a straight out Communist to win the nomination in a major U.S. party,’ Putin said. ‘I don’t know how we’re supposed to interfere and add to that.’ Putin hung his head sadly. ‘It’s like people don’t even need a Russia anymore.'”

    • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 examines the Biden South Carolina win, offering hypotheses ranging from “Dead Cat Bounce” to he’s the only one standing between Bernie and the nomination. His South Carolina win scrambles the race:

    Joe Biden thumped all the competition in South Carolina. The scale of his victory there scrambles the Democratic race. And Biden’s victory takes more steam out of the candidacies of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. But it is not easy to imagine Biden having the stamina to take on Sanders in a long race.

    The result should worry Democrats who wanted unity. There had been some evidence in the polls that black voters were warming up to Sanders. They did not do so in sufficient numbers in South Carolina to begin making Sanders into a consensus candidate.

    Can Biden sustain the momentum? It’s hard to imagine that he can. This is a Saturday-night victory just days before Super Tuesday. Biden cannot mount much new campaign organization in the upcoming states or process any surge of donations into a surge of advertising. If Sanders wins the preponderance of delegates available next Tuesday, then Biden will just be another non-Sanders candidate, like Pete Buttigieg, who was given a strong look by a particular subset of voters within the Democratic Party. Meanwhile Sanders continues to put points on the board.

    Biden’s biggest difficulty is the media. Biden is now depending on an avalanche of earned media gushing about his “comeback” in the race in South Carolina. But, unlike John McCain in 2008, Biden is a candidate uniquely disliked and distrusted by the liberal media apparatus that would provide him such a narrative. They are very likely not to give it to him.

    Although much has been made about the continuing importance of black voters and black turnout to Democratic general-election victories, I expect to see stories in the next 48 hours about the unique nature of South Carolina’s Democratic electorate. There may be an undercurrent of internal Democratic class warfare in these accounts, emphasizing that South Carolina’s Democrats are much less educated, less Latino, and less progressive than the party as a whole. Sandersistas will emphasize that Sanders polls better with blacks in the North.

    Biden’s victory raises serious questions about the role that liberal-leaning media play in the Democratic process. Black voters overwhelmingly rejected the liberal-media-approved alternatives to Bernie — Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. That media class has been whispering about Biden’s unfitness for office.

    Hey, give some credit to those of us in the Vast right Wing Conspiracy: We’ve been shouting about Biden’s unfitness for office! He works with dead people. Hey, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping, they’re both Chinese leaders with Xs in their name. More worrying is the fact that there were two different Chinese leaders between the two that Biden’s mind skipped right over. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) What?

    What words ordinary people associate with Hunter Biden: corruption, Ukraine, sleaze, cocaine, strippers. What word New York Times associates with Hunter Biden: “art”:

    “Biden Wishes Some Country, Any Country, Would Try To Influence Election For Him.” “Seriously, anyone! Prussia! Czechoslovakia! The Holy Roman Empire! They’re still around, right?”

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He said that bankers are his “peeps” and that the left is ready to set up guillotines.

    “Anytime we’ve had this before, society blows up and they do set up the guillotines and the guillotines don’t have to be chop your head off. They could be confiscatory taxes, they could be seizing the endowments of uh, educational institutions and um, philanthropic organizations, all of which those proposals are out there. You know, you’re going to have to do something about this income inequality and a lot of it comes from zero interest rates.”

    Moneybags isn’t necessarily wrong. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Bloomberg’s China Network:

    The business of the New York City billionaire (yes, another one) gets significant revenue from its financial and data services in China. He is deeply enmeshed with that country’s business and government networks, and it shows.

    Snip.

    If Bloomberg wins, he would arguably be the most pro-China president since an avalanche of such presidents following Richard Nixon, who fatefully opened the American economy to the country in 1972….loomberg generally ignores China’s growing military and diplomatic power, instead focusing his claims on how benefit can be derived from China’s growing economy. In a 2008 Newsweek article, he wrote that a “growing Chinese economy is good for America”. He continued, “we have a stake in working together to solve common problems, rather than trying to browbeat or intimidate the other into action.”

    Here he broadcasts China’s “win-win” rhetoric against “zero-sum” thinking. But in his many comments on China, Bloomberg does not adequately address the zero-sum thinking of China’s own leaders who argue that the Chinese autocratic system is superior to liberal democracy. Neither does he adequately address how China’s growing economy fuels its global military power projection, or the ongoing praxis of Maoist ideology that lauds the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as growing from the barrel of a gun.

    (Caveat: Really not wild about how this website’s bandwidth-and-gimmick heavy idea of webdesign.) (Hat tip: Instapundit.) “Bloomberg’s $400 million bet looks increasingly likely to flop as he lags in Super Tuesday states.” But he’s not out of it yet:

    The sub-tweeters and thumb-twitchers are writing Michael Bloomberg’s political obituary after his admittedly less than thrilling turn in Las Vegas, but the pundits were always coming not to praise him, but to bury him. Who does this rich amateur think he is? What year does this out-of-touch oligarch think we’re in, 2016?

    The elites of the Democratic party and their baggage train in the media have, like an earlier elite in search of a restoration, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They remember only the humiliation of Trump’s victory in 2016. They refuse to consider the reasons for their repudiation by the voters, or the arrogance that led Hillary Clinton and her team to assume that the Blue Wall was theirs by hereditary right. And they refuse to accept another lesson of 2016: it’s still possible to fix a party conference, but the party no longer controls the primaries and the debates.

    Remember how Democrats and Republicans alike mocked Donald Trump for even entering the Republican nomination race? Remember how the pontificators decreed that Trump’s lack of political experience disbarred him from the high office of crashing the biggest economy in the world, as the professional politicians managed to do in 2007 and 2008?

    Snip.

    The truth is, Bloomberg is in the Democratic nomination race for as long as he wants to be. The longer he stays in the race, the greater the amount of money he’ll spread around. The more he spends, the more the party managers and the senators and the governors and, though they’re far too high-minded to admit it, the media will come to see his candidacy as a fact that’s going to go the distance, and a reality to which the smart money should accommodate itself in case Bloomberg’s candidacy becomes a payday.

    Bloomberg understands the lessons of 2016 because, like Donald Trump, he understood them long before and was prepared to act accordingly. Trump and Bloomberg know what the rest of the Democratic field know but, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, lack the integrity to say. The politicians of America are for sale to their highest donor.

    Bloomberg also shares with Trump a businessman’s awareness of the price of morals and the cost of moralizing. Elizabeth Warren affected outrage about Bloomberg’s alleged jokes about ‘horse-faced lesbians’ and transvestites, but Trump has already proven that these attitudes, fatal though they may be in the politically correct kingdom of the campus, are an inverse form of recommendation: the kind of candidate who refuses to bow to the puritans might also be the kind of president who could refuse the bribes of the donors.

    Heeeeeere’s Bloomy!

  • Update: South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: Dropped out. Twitter. Facebook. Dropped out last night, so no in-depth analysis from me this week. 538 thinks this actually hurts Sanders:

    At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. How does a candidate dropping out increase the likelihood of no majority? Shouldn’t it clear the field up and make it easier to achieve a majority?

    The key is in how the Democrats’ delegate math works. The rules require candidates to receive at least 15 percent of the vote, typically, to win delegates statewide or at the district-level.

    Buttigieg was projected to get under 15 percent in the vast majority of states and districts on Super Tuesday. Thus, his votes were essentially wasted. Redistributing his votes to other candidates will help them to meet the 15 percent threshold, however. In particular, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were both close to the 15 percent line in many states or districts. So even an extra percentage point or two would help them get over that line in more places. For instance, both Bloomberg and Warren were projected to finish with an average of 14 percent of the vote in California before Buttigieg’s dropout. Now, they’re forecasted for 16 percent instead.

    Biden was also projected to finish under 15 percent in some states and districts — so Buttigieg’s dropout helps him out also in a few places. Biden went from a projected 14 percent of the vote to 16 percent in Minnesota, for example.

    Conversely, Sanders was already projected to get 15 percent almost everywhere. So although he will pick up a few Buttigieg voters, they don’t necessarily translate to more delegates.

    Beyond mere imitation:

    “Scandal: Buttigieg Forced To Drop Out After Being Outed As A White Male.”

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? Everybody who wanted a Hillary Clinton podcast, raise your hand. (pause) OK, that’s Ben Rhodes, Huma Abedin, and Bill Clinton (gets her out of the house). Also: “We Need to Talk About Hillary Clinton’s Disturbing Harvey Weinstein Ties.”
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. While others are campaiging, she’s surfing. At this point I don’t think it makes any measurable difference…
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She might not even win her home state on Super Tuesday, but she’ll probably pick up delegates there. Has a speech interrupted by #BlackLivesMatter, so evidently George Soros and company are still paying those idiots. Editorial on the case for Klobuchar, which is all narrowcasting on mental health and addiction.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. A look at Bernie’s record:

    Sanders gained steady employment for the first time when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., by ten votes in 1981, at the head of a coalition of leftist civic-action groups against a five-term Democrat who was tacitly endorsed by the Republicans as well. Sanders accused him of being a patronage-tainted stooge of local developers. As mayor, Sanders balanced the municipal budget, attracted a minor-league baseball team (it was called the Vermont Reds not because of Sanders, but because it was a farm team of the Cincinnati Reds). He was a pioneer in community-trust housing, sued to reduce local cable-television rates, and championed an imaginative multi-use redevelopment plan for the city’s Lake Champlain waterfront; his slogan was “Burlington is not for sale.” He worked well with all groups (except some developers) and showed no signs of the authoritarianism of the doctrinaire Left, though he admired some of their most odious exemplars, such as Fidel Castro, whom he unsuccessfully tried to visit. He was reelected three times as a declared socialist, with his vote inching up above 55 percent in 1987, and he had another try at the governor’s chair in 1986, but got only 14 percent of the vote. By this time Sanders was already focused on national government and had invited leftist professor and eminent linguist Noam Chomsky to give a speech in 1985 denouncing American foreign policy. He retired as mayor in 1989 and became a lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1989 and at Hamilton College in 1991.

    In 1988, Sanders ran again as an independent for statewide office, as congressman at large for Vermont, and gained 38 percent of the vote, double the vote for the Democratic candidate, and within three points of the winner, Republican Peter Smith. Two years later, he ran again as an independent, but without a Democrat in the race, and this time he entered Congress, aged 50, as a Democratic-left independent fusion candidate. He served eight consecutive terms as a congressman and then in 2006 won the first of three terms (so far) as U.S. senator. It was unjust for Michael Bloomberg to suggest that Sanders was a Communist, as he does believe in free elections. He has stuck to his platform and doggedly fought out his career at the polls through 20 elections between 1972 and 2018, 16 of them statewide, albeit in a small state. It is correct, but unsurprising given that he sat as a socialist in the Senate, to say that he has introduced 364 bills as a senator, of which only three have passed, and two of them were to name post offices.

    Bernie Sanders believes in mobilizing the less advantaged 50.1 percent of the voters in America, as in Vermont and in Burlington, by promising them a sufficient share of the wealth and status of the upper 49.9 percent of society, while assuaging any reservations about confiscating the wealth and income of others by denouncing the system and representing such redistribution as fairness. He wants an environmental revolution, no doubt to reduce pollution as a side benefit, but more importantly as a planet-saving cover for his assault on capitalism and his acquisition of the votes of the relatively disadvantaged. He is making a direct appeal to a majority of Americans by promising them economic benefits wrenched from the hands of the greedy 49.9 percent, or benignly showered upon them by a kindly state, as if the state got its money from anyone but its constituents.

    Sanders keeps saying he’ll attract new voters. New York Times: Yeah, not so much. Here are 55 facts about Bernie Sanders. Nothing says “reasonable centrist” like hanging a Soviet flag in your office. Also: “Throughout his adult life he has denigrated Democrats, calling the party ‘ideologically bankrupt.'” Even Sweden’s Democratic Socialists find Bernie Sanders too far left. More media double standards:

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Man of the people:

    WaPo: “Wow, Bernie sure loves him some communist dictators. Who knew?” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) “Hey there, Mr. SuperDelegate! How do you feel about Bernie as the nominee?” “Aw, HELLS NO!” Bernie bros show up in the middle of the night with bullhorns outside the homes of DNC members Wow, that’s sure to bring them over to your side! There’s at least one outlet that’s all the way in the tank for Bernie: The Onion. Thou Shalt Not Make Funny Of Thy Holy Socialist.

  • Update: Billionaire Tom Steyer: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 29, 2020. The shade of John Connally can rest a little easier tonight: No longer is his spending $11 million to garner one delegate the most embarrassing waste of money in presidential campaign history. Through January 1, Steyer spent $253,718,074 to get zero delegates. Steyer’s campaign never made any sense:

    Even relative to the other longshots, Tom Steyer, who dropped out of the race on Saturday night after a disappointing finish in the South Carolina primary, was a longshot. Nor was it entirely clear why he was running.

    Steyer, a billionaire from his previous career as a hedge fund manager, spent the years before his presidential run pushing two causes in particular: efforts to mitigate climate change and the impeachment of President Trump. But Steyer’s presidential campaign wasn’t particularly focused on either issue — or anything else. He embraced some more liberal ideas (a wealth tax) and opposed others (Medicare for All). He cast himself as a populist while also emphasizing his business experience. He touted his electability and his commitment to fighting climate change, but not in ways that were particularly unique compared to the other candidates.

    Steyer’s broader electoral strategy, skipping Iowa and New Hampshire while using his fortune to pump ads into states later in the calendar that the other candidates were not focused on yet, was fairly novel at first. And it halfway worked. According to our polling averages, Steyer eked just into the double digits in Nevada and South Carolina. He finished with 5 percent of county convention delegates in Nevada and 11 percent of the vote in South Carolina. That’s more than a lot of candidates managed.

    But it’s not good. And in national polls, Steyer’s support never escaped the low single digits.

    That’s why I always cheered on Steyer’s campaign: The money he spent on it was money he couldn’t spend against Republicans in races where it might have helped viable Democratic candidates win.

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren has flip-flopped, fibbed, and pandered her way out of the race:

    Warren was clearly the favorite candidate of academics and journalists — the intelligentsia. Why? Because she was the quintessential “front row” candidate, to borrow a term from author and photographer Chris Arnade. The image of her campaign will be her on a debate stage, hand raised, ready with an answer — but losing support roughly every minute she speaks.

    After her dismal showing in South Carolina, there is no chance of Warren becoming the electoral alternative to Bernie Sanders. The first three states tried Pete Buttigieg in that role. South Carolina resoundingly chose Joe Biden. Her campaign fell between two stools: the young, somewhat nervous Left, and an older, aspirational center.

    Her campaign persona had a funny way of playing to each. To the Left, she offered her ambition: her plans to end private health insurance, institute a wealth tax, make day care universal and free. Her promise was to give them security. To the center, she gave her ability to do homework. Every issue had an elaborate plan. Every plan was drawn up in dollars and cents. Sometimes the figures weren’t quite right. To them, she offered her competence and attention to detail.

    Well, sort of. Her Medicare for All plan would send the federal budget into a new stratosphere, and she didn’t even include the cost of her plan to cover illegal aliens as well. Not to mention that her proposal includes tax increases that are unconstitutional and politically infeasible.

    Both she and Gabbard are evidently flying to Michigan before either knows how badly they lost on Super Tuesday.

    • Out of the Running

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

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

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    South Carolina: Biden Wins First Primary…Ever

    Sunday, March 1st, 2020

    Onetime frontrunner Joe Biden has now won his first primary. Biden won with 48.4% of the votes, with Bernie Sanders getting 19.9%, the only two above the 15% threshold for delegates. Biden is predicted to get 34 delegates, and Bernie Sanders 11. Here’s a detailed breakdown of how delegates are earned at the state, congressional district, and state convention level.

    Biden’s victory means we might actually have a real race rather than a Sanders coronation.

    Tom Steyer placed third with 11.3% and withdrew from the race. More on his spectacular flameout in the Clown Car Update tomorrow.

    Pete Buttigieg placed fourth with 8.2%, Elizabeth Warren fifth with 7.1%, Amy Klobuchar sixth with 3.1% and Tulsi Gabbard coming up the rear with 1.4%. Michael Bloomberg wasn’t on the ballot in South Carolina, but he will be on the ballot in most (all?) Super Tuesday states.

    People may not realize is that this isn’t just Joe Biden’s first primary victory of 2020, it’s his first presidential primary victory anywhere, ever.

    Biden withdrew from the 1988 presidential race after admitting that he plagiarized a speech from UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, which is rather like a UK politician plagiarizing Walter Mondale. That incident brought other cases of Biden plagiarism to light.

    In 2008, Biden withdrew after finishing fifth in Iowa. (After eight years as Obama’s Vice President, he would improve his Iowa caucuses finish all the way to fourth this year.)

    Fortunately for Biden, Sanders wasn’t able to appeal to black Democratic voters nearly as well as white voters. In fact, black voters favored Biden four to one over Sanders in South Carolina. Indeed, according to the Washington Post, Biden won the following groups in South Carolina by six percentage points or more:

  • Ages 65 and older:+52
  • Black:+44
  • Oppose changing to single government health plan:+43
  • Attend religious services weekly:+41
  • Top issue: Race relations:+40
  • Democrats:+36
  • Prefer candidate who can beat Donald Trump:+35
  • Military:+35
  • Ages 45 to 64:+35
  • Decided in last few days:+32
  • Economic system needs minor changes:+32
  • Women:+32
  • Decided before the last few days:+31
  • Top issue: Health care:+28
  • Attend religious services occasionally:+28
  • No college degree:+28
  • College graduates:+28
  • Economic system needs overhaul:+27
  • Not military:+27
  • Men:+24
  • Top issue: Climate change:+23
  • Top issue: Income inequality:+22
  • Prefer candidate who agrees with you on issues:+19
  • Somewhat liberal:+19
  • Support changing to single government health plan:+15
  • Very liberal:+13
  • Independents or something else:+12
  • White:+10

    • Wow, how does Bernie lose the socialized medicine and “very liberal” vote? By contrast, the only two groups he won were 17-29 year olds and those who never go to church.

    Now the same media figure who penned “Biden is doomed” pieces are now penning “Biden comeback juggernaut” pieces. But there’s a lot of the race still to run. Biden has the chance to rack up a lot of southern state delegates on Super Tuesday, but Sanders likely cleans up in California, Maine, his native Vermont, Utah, and possibly Colorado and Oklahoma (both of which he won in 2016), while Warren still has a chance to get a “favorite daughter” victory in Massachusetts, and even otherwise-hopeless Klobuchar might get a few delegates in her native Minnesota. Bloomberg’s saturation money bombing campaign is likely to produce some delegates, but where? Buttigieg might pick up a few California delegates, but otherwise I don’t see where he can even sniff a victory on Super Tuesday; if Biden’s viable, then he isn’t.

    A brokered convention is still very much in play.

    Stay tuned…

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    The Twitter Primary for February 2020

    Tuesday, February 25th, 2020

    As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.

    Six months ago I started using a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts.

    I do this Twitter Primary update the last Tuesday of each month, following Monday’s Clown Car Update.

    The following are all the declared Democratic Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:

    1. Bernie Sanders: 10,760,318 (up 372,344)
    2. Joe Biden: 4,189,581 (up 53,012)
    3. Elizabeth Warren: 3,782,699 (up 126,668)
    4. Michael Bloomberg: 2,699,760 (up 299,036)
    5. Pete Buttigieg: 1,737,232 (up 136,279)
    6. Amy Klobuchar: 972,648 (up 96,239)
    7. Tulsi Gabbard: 789,081 (up 14,911)
    8. Tom Steyer: 296,335 (up 17,542)

    Removed from the last update: Andrew Yang, Deval Patrick, Michael Bennet, John Delaney

    For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 72,989,096 followers, up 1,258,269 since the last roundup, so once again Trump gained more Twitter followers this month than all the Democratic presidential contenders combined. The official presidential @POTUS account has 28,262,527 followers, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.

    A few notes:

  • As expected for a frontrunner, Sanders gained the most followers this month.
  • Bloomberg also did very well. We’re finally seeing twitter results for all the megabucks he’s been throwing around.
  • Biden only gained about 1/7th what Sanders gained. Super Tuesday will tell us whether he has enough non-Twitter using voters to overcome his apparent lack of momentum.
  • Gabbard and Steyer have zero momentum.

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    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for February 24, 2020

    Monday, February 24th, 2020

    Bernie’s the frontrunner, Bloomberg battered over fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, more slams against #NeverTrump, plus a gratuitous Slashdot joke. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Delegates
    They’re still not through counting in Nevada, but right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Sanders 34
    2. Buttigieg 23
    3. Joe Biden 8
    4. Elizabeth Warren 8
    5. Amy Klobuchar 7

    Polls

    Omitting anything older than Sunday:

  • CBS News: Sanders 28, Warren 19, Biden 17, Bloomberg 13, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 5, Steyer 2, Gabbard 1. 10,000 registered voters should be enough, but I don’t buy Warren in second place.
  • CBS News (South Carolina): Biden 28, Sanders 23, Steyer 18, Warren 12, Buttigieg 10, Klobuchar 4, Gabbard 1.
  • Minneapolis Star Tribune (Minnesota): Klobuchar 29, Sanders 23, Warren 11, Biden 8, Bloomberg 3, Gabbard 1, Steyer 1.
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison battleground states: Michigan: Sanders 25, Biden 16, Bloomberg 13, Warren 13, Buttigieg 11, Klobuchar 8.
  • Pennsylvania: Sanders 25, Biden 20, Bloomberg 19, Buttigieg 12, Warren 9, Klobuchar 5.
  • Wisconsin: Sanders 30, Biden 13, Bloomberg 13, Warren 12, Buttigieg 12, Klobuchar 9.
  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets. 52.5% Bernie, 18.9% Bloomberg, 7.5% Buttigieg, 5.8% Biden.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • Full blown panic among the Democratic establishment as Sanders takes a firm lead:

    “In 30-plus years of politics, I’ve never seen this level of doom. I’ve never had a day with so many people texting, emailing, calling me with so much doom and gloom,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way after Sanders’ win in Nevada.

    Bennett said moderates firmly believe a Sanders primary win would seal Donald Trump’s reelection. “It’s this incredible sense that we’re hurtling to the abyss. I also think we could lose the House. And if we do, there would be absolutely no way to stop [Trump]. Today is the most depressed I’ve ever been in politics.”

    A renewed sense of urgency washed over establishment Democrats, who fear it’s quickly becoming too late to stop Sanders.

    Biden supporters moved to persuade the party to coalesce around him as the best hope of blunting Sanders’ momentum. A super PAC for Biden renewed discussions with jittery donors who had frozen their financial support for the former vice president as they awaited signs of whether billionaire Mike Bloomberg would emerge as the strongest moderate candidate, according to two donors with knowledge of the talks.

    Among the pitches from pro-Biden forces to donors: Bloomberg could not overcome past policies that alienated minorities, most prominently the stop-and-frisk policing tactic he embraced as New York City mayor. They argued that if Bloomberg stays in the race, Sanders will clean up on Super Tuesday, then it’s game over.

    “For the establishment, I think it’s Joe or bust,” said Simon Rosenberg, New Democrat Network president, who served as a senior strategist for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018.

  • Welcome to the Bernie and Bloomberg show:

    Good heavens. The Democratic presidential primary just took a giant leap beyond pass-the-popcorn stage. (We were doing that from the moment Beto O’Rourke learned the media wasn’t willing to treat him like he had magical powers anymore because he wasn’t running against Ted Cruz.) We were at hit-record on-your-DVRs when it became clear on Iowa caucus night that no one was going to win. No, the Democratic presidential primary has reached a point few of us outside it ever thought it would reach: They’re having a conversation they actually need to have.

    Mike Bloomberg’s campaign just unveiled a web ad making the obvious point that almost everyone else in the Democratic Party would prefer to ignore: There’s a thuggish mentality to Bernie Sanders’s online supporters. After Sanders charged that Bloomberg didn’t have the kind of energy that would be needed to defeat Trump, Bloomberg came back with an ad pointing out that Sanders supporters regularly tweet and offer memes with comments such as “vote Bernie or bad things will happen.” Supporters of Bloomberg are “going on lists.” The 53-second Bloomberg ad calls out Sanders for a seemingly disingenuous or powerless and pointless call for “civil discourse” while his grassroots supporters speak as if they can’t wait to get started on the liquidation of the Kulaks after Election Day.

    Throughout his career, Sanders talked about the value of bread lines in Socialist countries, cheered on the Marxist Sandinistas, honeymooned in the Soviet Union, praised Communist China’s progress in “addressing extreme poverty,” talked about his admiration for Fidel Castro, warmly welcomed the Irish Republican Army, saluted Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan regime, and almost never criticized Nicholas Maduro.

    And now he’s got a lot a slew of people who want to volunteer to serve as his personal KGB and NVKD.

    For a guy who keeps insisting he only wants non-authoritarian socialism, Bernie Sanders has gone out of his way to praise authoritarian socialists. As Jeff Blehar pointed out: “Why honeymoon in Moscow when you can just as easily visit Stockholm instead? C’mon now.” It’s not like Westerners didn’t know about the secret police and show trials and forced labor and the Holomodor and gulags and being sent to Siberia. Praising the Soviet system meant, at minimum, excusing all of that, if not de facto justifying it.

    Meanwhile, the New York Times — that allegedly always failing New York Times — pulls back the curtain on the Bloomberg campaign and reveals that some of the biggest and most influential activist groups on the Left just averted their eyes when it came to Bloomberg, because either they wanted or had grown dependent upon his generous contributions.

    In the fall of 2018, Emily’s List had a dilemma. With congressional elections approaching and the Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh underway, the Democratic women’s group was hosting a major fund-raising luncheon in New York. Among the scheduled headline speakers was Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, who had donated nearly $6 million to Emily’s List over the years.

    Days before the event, Mr. Bloomberg made blunt comments in an interview with The New York Times, expressing skepticism about the #MeToo movement and questioning sexual misconduct allegations against Charlie Rose, the disgraced news anchor. Senior Emily’s List officials seriously debated withdrawing Mr. Bloomberg’s invitation, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

    In the end, the group concluded it could not risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg.

    Remember, kids, bias in law enforcement is bad, unless it’s happening in the jurisdiction of a wealthy donor, and then it — presto-change-o! — turns into something not important enough to mention

  • Robert Stacy McCain on how “experts” who were horribly wrong are still trying to predict how the race will unfold:

    One of the most amazing things about American journalism is the continued employment of political pundits whose penchant for failure would disqualify them from being hired in any other field. All the experts who were wrong about the 2016 election are now confidently making predictions about the 2020 election, as if their credibility were undiminished by their previous mistakes.

    Max Boot bashing snipped. Aw, who am I kidding? Bring it!

    Last week, for example, ex-Republican pundit Max Boot — panicked by the sudden meltdown of Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, which he had failed to anticipate — issued a desperate appeal to prevent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination. “Please, Democrats, do the smart thing and coalesce quickly around one of the three moderates — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, or Michael Bloomberg — who are still standing after the first two contests,” Boot begged on Twitter in the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary, adding, “The future of our democracy may depend on it.”

    Really? Is “our democracy” in such dire peril that it can only be preserved by one of the three Democrats whom Max Boot has named? Or is it rather the case, as I suspect, that Boot is chiefly concerned about rescuing his own damaged reputation? Boot has squandered his credibility by betting on losing horses for nearly two decades. During the Bush era, Boot left the Wall Street Journal to join the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and was among the most sanguine cheerleaders for the Iraq War, failing to anticipate the brutal terrorist insurgency that ultimately destroyed the neoconservative fantasy of turning Mesopotamia into a Western-style liberal democracy.

    It would be difficult to list everything Max Boot has been wrong about over the years, and perhaps it’s easier to just say “everything,” but certainly the Yale-educated CFR senior fellow is not alone in his propensity for false prophecy. He was part of the Never Trump crowd that tried to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 GOP nomination and then, confident that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump, yelled “all in,” shoving their entire pile of chips onto a losing bet.

    Any experienced poker player can perhaps sympathize with the plight of Never Trump Republicans; I once went all-in with a full house and lost when the other guy turned over four of a kind. But I’ve never claimed to be an “expert” on poker, the way Boot and his cohort assert their expertise about politics and policy. The whole crowd — including former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Bush-era campaign operative Rick Wilson, and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, to name a few — simply could not believe that Trump might actually be elected, and they have never forgiven him (or the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him) for proving them wrong. None of Trump’s policy successes — crushing ISIS, promoting a robust economy, appointing two conservative Supreme Court justices and numerous other federal judges, and more — can ever redeem him in the eyes of the self-appointed political “experts” whose credibility is further diminished every time Trump wins again.

    Having lost any ability to influence Republicans, the Never Trump crowd has now begun offering advice to Democrats, and it’s tempting to hope Democrats will listen to these “experts.” If Max Boot has always been wrong about everything, then what should we conclude about his claim that “the smart thing” for Democrats would be to nominate a moderate candidate to oppose Trump in November?

  • Highlights of the Nevada debate, mainly the times the knives went in deepest.
  • “Warren, Biden and Buttigieg dangerously close to going broke. Apart from Bernie and the billionaires, the Democratic presidential field is hurting for cash.”

    Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren each started the month scraping perilously close to the bottom of their campaign bank accounts, posing an existential threat to their candidacies as the Democratic primary goes national.

    They’re up against well-funded machines threatening to dominate the Democratic race: Bernie Sanders, whose recent rise in the polls has come during a major spending streak fueled by his online donors, and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose fortune has vaulted him into the middle of the campaign to take on President Donald Trump.

    While Sanders started February with nearly $17 million in the bank, according to campaign finance disclosures filed Thursday night, his next closest rival (nonbillionaire class) was Biden, at $7.1 million. Warren was closest to the red, with just $2.3 million left in her account, while Buttigieg ($6.6 million) and Klobuchar ($2.9 million) were in between.

    The cash crunch comes at a critical time in the race, with nearly one-third of the delegates available in the primary up for grabs on Super Tuesday on March 3 — and only a handful of candidates able to marshal resources to advertise to voters in those 14 states. It’s why super PACs, demonized at the beginning of the 2020 primary, are suddenly jumping in to assist most Democratic candidates, and it’s why the campaigns are now making ever more urgent pleas for financial help.

  • Democrats are dying from exposure:

    The Democrat Party has turned hard left. By doing so, the party has unintentionally exposed itself.

    Ambiguity and obfuscation are the Democrats’ stock in trade. They distort words, and they abuse the English language. They use words and phrases that sound good but are impossible to define — for example, environmental justice, intergenerational justice, climate change, and sustainability.

    Such deception is crucial for the party’s survival. But the deception has become harder to sustain.

    More than anyone else, Donald Trump is responsible for exposing the Democrats. They detest him and his achievements so much that their judgment has been annihilated. With new clarity, their reactions say far more about themselves than him. He is causing them to take leave of their sanity.

    They hate Trump so much that they can’t celebrate his accomplishments. They even demeaned the killing of an evil and savage terrorist, Qassem Soleimani. But their insane hatred has put them in a bind.

    Donald Trump has set up camp inside their brains. They should not have let him do that. They will live to regret it.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “Democrats Take Gamble That America Is Finally Ready For A Rich, White President.”

    • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He actually won delegates in Nevada, so he’s got that going for him. Remember how Biden was the “electable” one? Without that imaginary halo, black voters may not stick around. Another Biden senior moment. “Struggling Biden Campaign Now Offering One Month Of Free AOL For Rally Attendance.”
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: In. Twitter. Facebook. The reviews of Bloomberg’s debate performance are not good. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) More on Bloomberg’s debate awfulness, including these comments from departed-candidate-now-CNN-commentator Andrew Yang:

    I think three things happened to Mike tonight. Number one, he just found out he’d make the debate yesterday. There were two times when I wasn’t sure I was going to make the debate and my team got me together to prepare. And you’re really not sure if you’re preparing because you’re not sure if you’re going to be in the debate. So Mike, even though he was I’m sure getting coached and prepared, he’s like, “I don’t know if I’m going to be in this debate.” And so, I don’t think he was coached hard enough.

    Number two, he was clearly instructed to keep his cool no matter what. But that ended up presenting as lethargic and uninterested for a big chunk of the debate. And the third most telling thing is that if I’m his team, you know he’s going to get a stop and frisk question, like a gender discrimination or mistreatment question. So, you coach him and you have him give you 60, 75-second answers over and over again until he can do it in his sleep. And the fact that he did not have those answers at his fingertips lets me know categorically he was not properly prepared for this debate.

    “I watched 185 Mike Bloomberg Ads.” May God have mercy on his soul.

    Over the course of the past two weeks I sat down and attempted to watch every single ad and ad-adjacent piece of video content that the Bloomberg campaign has released on its official YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter account. (I only dipped my toes into Instagram, because I had to draw the line somewhere.) Then, after rejecting a few for redundancy, I ranked them from best to worst, based solely on my own idiosyncratic criteria. (I surely missed some, and I stopped trying to find new ones a few days ago, for sanity’s sake.) Why did I do this? Because I wanted to mainline the means by which a late primary entrant with unimaginable sums of money has become a possible Democratic frontrunner.

    Here’s what I learned: For one thing, that watching nearly 200 campaign ads in a short period is sort of like being brainwashed, which I suppose is the goal of all advertising. At this point, I wouldn’t say I’m aboard the Bloomberg train, but I think I would feel a little less uncomfortable buying a ticket. Many of the ads are very good. Many more of them are not. The quality of any individual ad, though, is ultimately less important than the breadth of the entire corpus. It’s not that Bloomberg doesn’t have some good ideas—he does—or that he would not be a more competent executive than our current president. The point is that the campaign’s goal is to very quickly achieve messaging saturation in lieu of the monthslong ground game Bloomberg didn’t bother to run. I hate to say it, but it’s working!

    Being from a slate writer, it’s not at all surprising that the ones he likes best are all of the “Orange Man Bad!” variety. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Tried of all the Bloomberg bashing? Me neither.

    What a catastrophe Wednesday night was for Mike Bloomberg. The New York plutocrat was kicked in the teeth by Elizabeth Warren in the first minutes — she denounced him as a Trump-like “arrogant billionaire” who called women “horse-faced lesbians” — and never made it back to his feet.

    Bloomberg stood in mute fury as his $400 million campaign investment went up in smoke. His contempt for democracy and sense of entitlement surpass even Donald Trump, who at least likes crowds — Bloomberg’s joyless imperiousness makes Trump seem like Robin Williams.

    That Bloomberg has been touted as a potential Democratic Party savior across the top ranks of politics and media is an extraordinary indictment of that group of people.

    Some endorsements were straight cash transactions, in which politicians who owe their careers to Bloomberg’s largess repaid him with whatever compliments they could muster. How much does a man who radiates impatience with the idea of having to pretend to equal status with anyone have to spend to get someone to say something nice?

    California Congressman Harley Rouda called him a “legendary businessman”: Bloomie gave her more than $4 million. New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill got more than $2 million from Bloomberg’s Independence USA Super PAC, and in return the Navy vet said Bloomberg embodies “the integrity we need.”

    Georgia’s Lucy McBath, a member of the congressional black caucus, got $4 million from Bloomberg PACs, and she endorsed him just as an audio clip was coming out of the ex-mayor talking about putting black men up “against the wall” in stop-and-frisk. News accounts of the endorsement frequently left out the financial ties.

    That’s fine. If you give a politician $2 million or $4 million, it must be expected that he or she will say you approximate a human being.

    But how does New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman excuse writing “Paging Michael Bloomberg”? (Well, Bloomberg philanthropies donated to Planet Word, “the museum my wife is building,” says Friedman, so there’s that.) How about Jonathan Chait at New York, who wrote, “Winning the election is starting to look hard. How about buying it instead?” Or John Ellis in The Washington Post, who declared Bloomberg the “dream candidate”?

    These pundits clung to a triumvirate of delusions: Bloomberg “gets things done,” he’s more electable than a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren because he can spend unlimited amounts, and he has the “toughness” to take on Trump.

    Far from showing “toughness,” Bloomberg on Wednesday wilted under attacks from his five Democratic opponents.

    Snip.

    Trump has clear authoritarian tendencies and has wrapped his hands around autocrats, but for all the fretting about him perhaps not leaving office in 2020 if voted out, it’s Bloomberg who has already tossed term limits aside, and it’s Bloomberg who is openly trying to buy an election. There is zero evidence he will be any less of a threat to democracy or an agent for rapacious corporate interests than Trump.

    Even assuming one could cross into believing that Bloomberg is somehow less revolting or dangerous than the current president — I don’t, but let’s say — Wednesday exploded the idea that he would have a superior chance at beating him than Sanders or a conventional, non-plutocrat politician like Warren or Pete Buttigieg. Bloomberg was a total zero charisma-wise, had trouble thinking on his feet, and failed to find even one issue where he sounded confident and convincing. His only distinguishing characteristic is his money, and fuck his money.

    William Jacobson agrees he had a bad night, but disagrees that he’s done as a candidate.

    Bloomberg’s reason to be in this contest is to be the last non-Bernie non-Warren candidate standing. Biden doesn’t have it in him. While he had some good lines, he was a sideshow and a sad figure. If anyone is done after last night, it’s Amy Klobuchar. Her performance was whiny and weak — please Mayor Pete and Elizabeth, stop criticizing me!

    Bloomberg didn’t help himself last night, but I don’t see that he ended his campaign provided he’s still willing to finance it.

    “When Bloomberg News’s Reporting on China Was Challenged, Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out.”

    I am one of the many women Mike Bloomberg’s company tried to silence through nondisclosure agreements. The funny thing is, I never even worked for Bloomberg.

    But my story shows the lengths that the Bloomberg machine will go to in order to avoid offending Beijing. Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg LP, is so dependent on the vast China market for its business that its lawyers threatened to devastate my family financially if I didn’t sign an NDA silencing me about how Bloomberg News killed a story critical of Chinese Communist Party leaders. It was only when I hired Edward Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong that Bloomberg LP eventually called off their hounds after many attempts to intimidate me.

    In 2012, I was working toward a Ph.D. in sociology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and my husband, Michael Forsythe, was a lead writer on a Bloomberg News article about the vast accumulation of wealth by relatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping, part of an award-winning “Revolution to Riches” series about Chinese leaders.

    Soon after Bloomberg published the article on Xi’s family wealth in June 2012, my husband received death threats conveyed by a woman who told him she represented a relative of Xi. The woman conveying the threats specifically mentioned the danger to our whole family; our two children were 6 and 8 years old at the time. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos reports a similar encounter in his award-winning book, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China,” when the same woman told Osnos’s wife: “He [Forsythe] and his family can’t stay in China. It’s no longer safe,” she said. “Something will happen. It will look like an accident. Nobody will know what happened. He’ll just be found dead.”

    Snip.

    My husband had been working for many months on another investigative report for Bloomberg about financial ties between one of China’s richest men, Wang Jianlin, and the families of senior Communist Party officials, including relatives of Xi. Bloomberg editors had thus far backed the story. A Bloomberg managing editor, Jonathan Kaufman, said in an email in late September 2013, “I am in awe of the way you tracked down and deciphered the financial holdings and the players. … It’s a real revelation. Looking forward to pushing it up the line,” according to an account published by the Financial Times.

    Then Bloomberg killed the story at the last minute, and the company fired my husband in November after comments by Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matt Winkler were leaked. “If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,” Winkler reportedly said on a company call.

    Mike Bloomberg, then New York City mayor and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, was asked on November 12, 2013, about reports that his company had self-censored out of fear of offending the Chinese government and he dismissed the question.

    “Nobody thinks that we’re wusses and not willing to stand up and write stories that are of interest to the public and that are factually correct,” Bloomberg told a press conference.

    Yet, days after Bloomberg made those comments to reporters in New York, Bloomberg lawyers in Hong Kong threatened to devastate my family financially by forcing us to repay the company for our relocation fees to Hong Kong from Beijing and the advance on my husband’s salary that we took out, leave us with no health insurance or income, and take me to court if I did not sign a nondisclosure agreement — even though I had never been a Bloomberg employee.

    Snip.

    On December 20, they sent a letter to my husband demanding that I sign a nondisclosure agreement. If I didn’t agree, we might owe the company thousands of dollars. I might even have had to pay Bloomberg’s legal bills. The thought of Bloomberg possibly ruining our family financially if I didn’t give in to their threats made me sick, but I was also infuriated that they had kept us in harm’s way after we received threats, forbidden me from speaking publicly about the death threats we received in Beijing, and now were trying to take away my freedom of speech forever.

    It was only when I hired Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong — Albert Ho and Jonathan Man offered me a low rate because it was a “good cause” — that Bloomberg finally backed off. In the meantime, they had sent me several more threatening letters. One letter from Mayer Brown JSM on January 8, 2014, spelled out that “by virtue of the knowledge that she retains (in her head) of our client’s [Bloomberg’s] Confidential Information she has an ongoing duty of confidentiality to our client.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Vox writer falls in line with the amazing new “Gosh, billionaires are actually great and awesome!” consensus among Democrats. More Bloomberg quotes: “Black And Latino Males Don’t Know How To Behave In The Workplace.” Sure, we could give that some context to make it sound less racist, but we also know that courtesy is never extended to someone with an (R) after their name.

    Bloomy slams Bernie bros:

    Ann Althouse was not impressed with Bloomberg in the debate. “He’s dull and he looks like death.” Bloomberg racks up three congressional endorsements: “Reps. Nita Lowey of New York, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Pete Aguilar of California.” Daily Caller laughably calls them “major” endorsements, but Aguilar is the only one I already had a tag for. “After Taking Brutal Beating In Debate, Bloomberg Rushed To Tiny Hospital In Tiny Ambulance.” “He’s recovering nicely in a matchbox.” “We are all individuals!”

  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “South Bend Residents Have a Message for America: Don’t Elect Pete Buttigieg.”

    Another West Side resident, Cornish Miller, 62, said of Buttigieg, “Rating him 1 to 10, I’d give him a 2.”

    “Buttigieg talked about all the improvements he made, but he hardly made a dent,” said Miller, who works for a military supply company.

    “The West Side is the most neglected part of town. The street I live on is the only street around here that has lights. That’s because we’re a gateway to Notre Dame.”

    Not coming in second place, Mayo Pete thinks the results must be wrong and wants Nevada Democrats to count votes again until he’s on top:

    Pete Buttigieg’s campaign is claiming there are inconsistencies in the reported results in Nevada, as the former South Bend, Ind., mayor tries to claw his way to second place in Saturday’s caucuses.

    In a letter sent to Nevada Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II and obtained by POLITICO, Buttigieg’s campaign is calling for the state party to publicly release a tranche of data and recalculate some precincts, a call the state party largely rebuffed.

    “In light of material irregularities pertaining to the process of integrating early votes into the in-person precinct caucus results, we request that you” release early and in-person votes, correct “errors identified by presidential campaigns” and “explain anomalies in the data,” Buttigieg’s national ballot access and delegate director Michael Gaffney wrote in the letter sent late Saturday.

    Buttigieg’s campaign is not challenging Bernie Sanders’ runaway win in the state. Instead, the Buttigieg camp is pointing to the battle further down the standings.

    “Given how close the race is between second and third place, we ask that you take these steps before releasing any final data,” Gaffney wrote.

    Those “close second” finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire already seem like ancient news…

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? But: “Ex-Bill Clinton adviser: Bloomberg and Hillary cooking up ‘scheme’ for her to become Democratic nominee.” Not buying it, but enjoy another week in the clown car, Grandma Death.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Why I’m voting for Tulsi Gabbard.” Enjoy that tiny little breadcrumb, Gabbard fans. Campaigned in Colorado. Campaigned in Utah.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s mired in single digits but the few news stories I’m finding focued on her are like “Watch Amy Klobuchar’s full speech after Nevada caucus defeat” (No), “Video: Senator Amy Klobuchar speaks with the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board” (No), and “President Amy Klobuchar: Here’s what it would mean for California” (Yes, we know weed is legal there.) Ah, this promises some blue-on-blue action: “How Amy Klobuchar’s Signature Bill Became a Disaster for Her Own Party.” Alas, no, it’s just another “she treats her staff like shit” piece, this time by throwing them under the bus for some technical abortion language in a bill the writer doesn’t bother to detail.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538 confirms it: BSD is dying Sanders is the frontrunner. “His chances of winning a majority of pledged delegates are up 6 points, to 46 percent.” “Bernie Sanders Wins Nevada Caucus; MSNBC, #NeverTrump Hardest Hit“:

    This is a decisive victory for Sanders, who more than doubled Biden’s total, and a major setback for Warren and Klobuchar, both of whom needed to show some kind of momentum to keep their campaigns viable. While it is possible that Biden could still bounce back with a win next Saturday in the South Carolina primary, even the most enthusiastic supporters of Warren and Klobuchar must see they now have no path to the nomination. Their money is running out, whereas Buttigieg (who at least got a narrow win in Iowa) could continue if he does well on Super Tuesday. Unless two or three of the non-Sanders candidates drops out before Super Tuesday, however, there will still be multiple candidates splitting the “Anybody But Bernie” vote with billionaire Mike Bloomberg, and that means Sanders could emerge with an insurmountable delegate lead after March 3. And this means . . . panic time!

    James Carville and Chris Matthrews meltdown bits snipped.

    Why are the MSNBC talking heads so despondent? Because they are convinced that if Democrats nominate Sanders, they’ll alienate middle-class moderate voters and thereby guarantee Trump’s re-election. I wish I believed this as much as they do, but can we trust the conventional wisdom dispensed by cable-news “experts”? These are the same people who thought Trump could never win the GOP nomination, and then believed Hillary Clinton could easily defeat Trump, so when they start predicting future political events, my hunch is they’re wrong again.

    Glenn Reynolds seems to share my concern: “You can assume that Trump would crush Bernie, and you’re probably right. But any major-party nominee, however lame, has a nonzero chance of becoming President, and that’s bad when we’re talking about a commie.”

    As much as I want to believe Trump would score a slam-dunk victory over Sanders in November, I’m disturbed by the fact that MSNBC talking-heads have the same opinion. Maybe I’m just being a worry-wart about this, though. In an all-out battle between a socialist Democrat and a capitalist Republican, Trump wins — if the American people are still the American people. If Bernie were to win, we might as well call ourselves “Southern Canada.” Meanwhile, Bill Kristol and the cruise-ship contingent of #NeverTrump ex-Republicans have reached a fatal reckoning; having committed to 100% opposition to Trump, they must now find a way to make the “principled conservative” argument for Bernie Sanders. They didn’t have much credibility left to lose, but once you sell your soul to Pierre Omidyar, you must pay that debt in full.

    Heh:

    Bloomy connects on a blow against Sanders:

    More tweets:

  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s qualified for the next debate…which is tomorrow. Steyer’s spending is cutting into Biden’s black support. “The economy sucks! Who are you going to believe, me, or those lying statistics?”
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. In a shocking and completely unexpected turnabout, Warren now says that SuperPAC money is just fine and dandy! She calls Bloomberg “ a big threat — not a tall one, but a big one.” I’m sure the media that’s Margaret Dumonted an endless stream of “Well I never!”s over Trump tweets will quickly chastise Warren for this vicious personal attack.

    🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗 🦗

    • Out of the Running

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

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped Out. He dropped out February 11, 2020. One of the more interesting and least pandering of the candidates, Yang ran much better than anyone (myself included) expected, but never broke out of single digits. He gets an exit interview in the New York Times. Might run for New York City mayor. It would be nearly impossible for him to do a worse job than Di Blasio…

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