Posts Tagged ‘Rahm Emanuel’

BidenWatch for July 27, 2020

Monday, July 27th, 2020

Biden’s Florida campaign is miffed, everything is racist, and a rundown on Biden advisors. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Biden’s campaign in Florida sucks so badly that his own team is accusing him of suppressing the Hispanic vote.

    Over 90 field organizers for the Florida Democratic Party signed a scathing letter Friday to the party’s leadership, claiming among other things that the campaign is “suppressing the Hispanic vote” in Central Florida.

    The seven-page internal letter, obtained by the Miami Herald, contains eight allegations from field organizers about what they say is a lack of a “fully actionable field plan” from the Biden campaign as it transitions into the Florida party to coordinate voter outreach efforts.

    This letter comes 100 days out from the general election and as recent polls show enthusiasm about voting among Latinos in battleground states like Florida could be waning in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Among the claims: mistreatment of field organizers, relocating trained staff members without explanation, lack of organizing resources and taking on volunteers who are then left in limbo.

    In a battleground state where elections are historically won by thin margins — and as presidential campaigns ramp up outreach efforts in Florida’s Hispanic communities — organizers claim that the Coordinated Campaign lacks key infrastructure and perpetuates a “toxic” work culture that is hurting morale among on-the-ground staffers.

    One big issue is that at least a handful of organizers were recently transferred from a heavily-Puerto Rican part of the state to counties with a small percentage of Hispanics.

    “Four of five Spanish-speaking organizers along the I-4 corridor who were moved to North Florida were Puerto Rican,” the letter says.

    Field organizers add that input from staffers connected to Puerto Ricans living in Central Florida is often dismissed.

    “The [Coordinated Campaign of Florida] is suppressing the Hispanic vote by removing Spanish-speaking organizers from Central Florida without explanation, which fails to confront a system of white-dominated politics we are supposed to be working against as organizers of a progressive party,” the letter adds.

    A Democratic official familiar with internal discussions who asked not to be named said the letter comes amid negotiations between the Coordinated Campaign in Florida and the field organizers’ union, the IBEW Local 824.

    So the Biden campaign is plagued by internal dissension thanks to Social Justice pandering, ethnic identity groups, and unions.

  • “Trump neck and neck with Biden, 45%-47%, approval equal with Obama’s in 2012.” The usual “polls are meaningless” caveats apply, along with the perception that Rasmussen favors Republicans. As opposed to all the other polls, which favor Democrats by about 3% in a good year… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • So where are all these invisible Biden voters we keep hearing about?

    We’ve all heard the rumors. Joe Biden is running for president. Joe Biden has a huge lead in the polls. Joe Biden can tie his own shoes.

    All are difficult to prove or understand.

    I know that Joe Biden’s Twitter account is running for president. It’s a horrible candidate, by the way, maybe worse than he is in person. As for the shoe-tying thing, I’d wager good money that, if you asked Joe to tie his shoes he would try to shove a peanut butter and jelly sandwich up his nose.

    The lead in the polls is the most mystifying, however. It’s true that many of us have a well-founded distrust of pollsters. In the past, however, when they’ve been deliberately skewing things one could at least find the occasional supporter of the candidate they were trying to prop up. They were ridiculously off about Granny Maojackets in 2016, but most of us at least met some Hillary voters.

    Joe Biden is a different thing altogether. Last week, a friend of mine who is well-placed on Capitol Hill remarked that no one in D.C. is talking about Joe Biden. In the ensuing four days, three other friends whose opinions I also respect mentioned that nobody ever meets a Biden supporter in person.

    I live in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the most liberal city in Arizona. It’s left-wing bumper sticker (Coexist!) and yard sign hell here. None of them mention Joe Biden. Bernie bumper stickers abound, however. Heck, I have a neighbor up the street who still has a Bernie 2016 sign up, so it’s not like the local folk aren’t dedicated.

    This is all anecdotal, of course, but so were the rumors about flyover country support for Trump in 2016.

    Snip.

    What we’re looking at now is a candidate who is, according to polling, a juggernaut but one whose real world support is nigh on invisible. It hasn’t been that long since the national pollsters were really, really wrong, of course. However, this disconnect between Biden’s poll numbers and the nonexistent enthusiasm for his candidacy is weird even when you factor in the plague year and Trump Derangement Syndrome.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • The leftist loons that run the New York Times editorial board wonder who Biden listens to. It’s pretty tiresome, but it does let us capture the names of some of Biden’s advisors.

    The Democratic Party’s activist base, especially its younger members, harbors grave doubts about Mr. Biden and has vowed to keep the pressure on as he charts a path forward. One big, basic question on many people’s minds is, Just how far left will Joe go?

    Snip.

    Skepticism about Mr. Biden runs deep on the left. During more than four decades in public office, he earned a reputation as a pragmatic centrist (sorry!) — the guy President Obama sent to negotiate deals with congressional Republicans that no one else wanted to be in the room with. Some progressives regard him as just the sort of compromised, compromising, politics-as-usual establishment tool standing in the way of meaningful change, and they fear that he has surrounded himself with other establishment tools who see the activist base as a threat to the existing power structure that must be neutralized.

    “There’s a whole wing of the Democratic Party establishment that doesn’t simply want an electoral victory,” they want it on terms that let them “weave a narrative” to discredit the left, said Mr. Mitchell. “They want to defeat Trump and progressives in one fell swoop.”

    Conversely, the Social Justice Warriors in the party’s insane wing are just as willing to lose this election if it means getting to control the party’s levers of power.

    As the saying goes: Personnel is policy. But the campaign has been cagey about who is advising it and how the policy sausage gets made. Members of its extended economics team, for instance, were ordered to keep quiet about their campaign work. They can tell friends and colleagues, according to a memo acquired by The Times, but should not mention their affiliation “on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn or in your professional bio.” And they should steer clear of the news media. Period.

    Some names have trickled out. Progressives are not happy that Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff/congressman/mayor of Chicago is advising the campaign on economic policy and political strategy. (The left’s grievance list against this former Clintonite is long, and his mayoral tenure was marred by serious police scandals, including the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, which prompted protests and an investigation by the Justice Department.) “Not the sign we want to see,” said Rahna Epting, the executive director of the grass roots group MoveOn.

    Even more explosive was the April news that Lawrence Summers has been offering his economic insights. A veteran of the Clinton and Obama White Houses, Mr. Summers is viewed as a neoliberal, business-cozy monster by the left, his name invoked with a level of distaste normally reserved for child predators.

    In early May, more than two dozen progressive groups sent an open letter to Mr. Biden, demanding that he remove Mr. Summers from any campaign advisory role and “exclude him from a future Biden administration.” Charging that Mr. Summers had “put the interests of large corporations ahead of working families in the United States and around the world, fueled the climate crisis, and undermined efforts to ensure gender equality,” they declared it “hard to imagine a worse person than Larry Summers to guide the next President toward an economy that works for all.”

    The Biden campaign has met such criticisms with assurances that it is listening to a wide range of voices.

    Translation: “Run along, little girl, the adults are trying to speak.”

    With Mr. Biden having spent the last half-century collecting friends, aides and advisers, not to mention this campaign’s fast-growing official staff, the org chart for Team Biden can be hard to decipher. His inner circle is defined differently depending on whom you ask, and even reasonably senior staffers aren’t always clear about who does what. But whether you think in terms of concentric circles or Venn diagrams or pyramids of power, there are legions of people offering counsel.

    For instance, the campaign is consulting with more than 100 left-leaning experts on economic policy. The nominee’s regular briefings are conducted by a smaller core of liberal economists, former Obama officials and advisers to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

    Former Clinton 2016 advisors: There’s a surefire recipe for victory!

    On foreign policy, the nominee has a large network of working groups subdivided according to specialty: nuclear proliferation, the Middle East, China, etc. Who is running these groups, and how much real influence they have, is hard to pin down. For all Mr. Trump’s ravings about China, international matters typically receive less play in presidential races than do domestic issues such as jobs or health care — meaning the Biden campaign is facing relatively little leftward pressure. When Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders formed a collection of working groups in the spring to hammer out joint proposals on various policy issues, foreign policy was not even among the topics tackled.

    This likely suits Mr. Biden just fine. Foreign policy is kind of his thing. His expertise runs deep. He knows the players and the issues. As vice president, his instincts were more cautious and minimalist than those of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Times once described the two as representing “the yin and the yang of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy.”

    But, in this as in so many areas, Mr. Biden is a solidly establishment player, and he relies on a clutch of trusted hands, including Julie Smith, Tom Donilon and Tony Blinken, who sits atop the campaign’s foreign policy shop. Mr. Blinken has been with Mr. Biden for nearly two decades and served as his national security adviser in the Obama White House.

    Don’t expect his team to be taking on the military-industrial complex or taking up calls to slash funding for the Pentagon. The nominee’s message thus far has been mainstream and soothing, with talk of rebuilding frayed alliances and restoring American leadership on issues ranging from nuclear arms to the Middle East to global warming.

    Other top policy dogs: Stef Feldman is the campaign’s official policy director, while Jake Sullivan serves as a combination gatekeeper and air traffic controller, gathering input, coordinating info and bringing order to the chaos across fields and working groups. Bruce Reed, one of Mr. Biden’s chiefs of staff in the Obama White House and a former head of the now-defunct centrist Democratic Leadership Council, also plays a central advisory role. (He used to brief Mr. Biden on campaign trips — in the pre-Covid days when people could still travel.)

    Many of those with the most influence operate outside any official lines of authority. Mr. Biden’s inner circle includes longtime loyalists like Mr. Klain; Mike Donilon (brother of the aforementioned Tom), Mr. Biden’s political guru; Steve Ricchetti, who was another of his chiefs of staff in the Obama administration, and Ted Kaufman, who has been with Mr. Biden since his 1972 Senate race. These are the kitchen cabinet folks who make progressives super nervous. They are considered establishment fogies unlikely to challenge the nominee or push him to think big.

    The inner ranks are not entirely closed to newcomers. Anita Dunn, a veteran of Obamaworld, effectively took control of Mr. Biden’s primary campaign in the shake-up following his loss in Iowa, and continues to wield serious clout. But Ms. Dunn is herself a Washington fixture and an object of suspicion for some on the left.

    “He’s not listening to the folks he needs to listen to,” said Yvette Simpson, who leads the political action committee Democracy for America.

    “Wah! He’s not listening to the right leftwing lunatics! Wah!”

    It’s all tedious inside baseball stuff, but I’m harvesting and tagging those names so I can track them for future reference if, say, one of them testifies at a future congressional hearing on illegal Chinese contributions to the Biden campaign, just to pluck a random hypothetical out of thin air.

    Also mentioned: Sister Valerie Biden Owens and wife Jill Biden.

  • Bush43 speechwriter thinks President Trump should stop making fun of Slow Joe.

    Instead of telling people Biden is not competent, let Biden continue to show it. The former vice president will misspeak a lot in the coming weeks and months. Let the American people see by his words and actions that he’s not all there. Leave it to surrogates to draw attention to his gaffes. They should do so with sadness rather than ridicule. The message should be: We’ve all seen loved ones struggle with memory loss as they age. No one likes to see it, or point it out. But in Biden’s case, it can’t be ignored. Because our loved ones aren’t asking to be given the nuclear codes. Biden is.

  • “Joe Biden’s worst campaign moment, revisited.”

    It all started when, after about 40 minutes of an almost-continuous Biden monologue at an April event, Frank Fahey, a Claremont, N.H., teacher, asked Biden: “What law school did you attend and where did you place in that class?”

    Here’s Biden full answer:

    “I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”

    Biden didn’t even mention where he went to law school, but it was at Syracuse University. The problem was, as Newsweek revealed:

    • Biden did not go to Syracuse Law School on a “full academic scholarship.” It was a half scholarship based on financial need.
    • He didn’t finish in the “top half” of his class. He was 76th out of 85.
    • He did not win the award given to the outstanding political science student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware.
    • He didn’t graduate from Delaware with “three degrees,” but with a single B.A. in political science and history.
  • Gallup says there’s little reason Biden will appeal more or less to Catholics, being the first Catholic Vice President and supporting abortion. Maybe. But it’s pretty obvious that Social Justice is the only allowed religion of the Democratic Party…
  • “Senate Republicans secure impeachment witness who flagged concern about Hunter Biden.” That would be George Kent. Remember that the Burisma scandal never went away…
  • YOUR BRAIN ASPLODE!*

  • President Trump was willing to sit down and answer hard questions from Chris Wallace. Joe Biden? Not so much. He’s “not available.”
  • Biden says President Trump is more racist than actual slave-owning Presidents.
  • Speaking of racism:

  • The difference in enthusiasm for Trump vs. Biden:

    

  • I wonder what odds you could get in Vegas:

  • Tara Reade would still like to look at Biden’s records at the University of Delaware. So would Judicial Watch:

    Judicial Watch announced today it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of itself and the Daily Caller News Foundation against the University of Delaware for former Vice President Joe Biden’s Senate records, which are housed at the university’s library (Daily Caller News Foundation v. University of Delaware (N20A-07-001 CEB)). The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware.

    The university said it will not release the records until two years after Biden has retired from public life.

    The Daily Caller and Judicial Watch filed requests on April 30 for all of Biden’s records and for records about the preservation and any proposed release of the records, including communications with Mr. Biden or his representatives.

  • “Protesters Pull Down Joe Biden After Mistaking Him For Old Racist Statue.”
  • “Biggest Idiot Democrats Ever Nominated.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Ricky Bobbyed:

  • Predictions:

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    *Yes, that is a Homestar Runner reference. Welcome to the coolest in-jokes of 2009…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, unions | No Comments »

    AOC Immanentizes The Eschaton

    Sunday, July 14th, 2019

    New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, deeply enmeshed in her “politics is personality” worldview, awakens from her slumbers to notice that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez threatens the very core of the Democratic Party:

    Pelosi told me, after the A.O.C. Squad voted against the House’s version of the border bill and trashed the moderates — the very people who provided the Democrats the majority — that the Squad was four people with four votes. She was talking about a legislative reality. If it was a knock, it was for abandoning the party.

    That did not merit A.O.C.’s outrageous accusation that Pelosi was targeting “newly elected women of color.” She slimed the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden and who was instrumental in getting the first African-American president elected and passing his agenda against all odds, as a sexist and a racist.

    A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.

    Why on earth would she do that? For years, if not decades, accusing random people of racism has been the social justice warrior finishing move for every occasion, the magic incantation that makes people back down and give in. Every person and problem in the world is a nail, and accusations of racism (or sexism, or gay bashing, or Islamophobia, or whateverphobia) is the hammer to be used on everything. You expect her to stop now, just because her far left lunacy is endangering the key hold on power absolutely vital to keeping the insane and corrupt wings of the Democratic Party together?

    And then there’s the real instigator, Saikat Chakrabarti, A.O.C.’s 33-year-old chief of staff, who co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, both of which recruited progressives — including A.O.C. — to run against moderates in Democratic primaries. The former Silicon Valley Bernie Bro assumed he could apply Facebook’s mantra, “Move fast and break things,” to one of the oldest institutions in the country.

    But Congress is not a place where you achieve radical progress — certainly not in divided government. It’s a place where you work at it and work at it and don’t get everything you want.

    The progressives act as though anyone who dares disagree with them is bad. Not wrong, but bad, guilty of some human failing, some impurity that is a moral evil that justifies their venom.

    You mean they consider their opponents deplorable? Or irredeemable?

    Wow, are you just now noticing this trend, Ms. Dowd? Just now? Social justice warriors have been dragging opponents for decades with false accusations of racism for daring to depart from the victimhood identity politics line, but it’s just now, just now that it’s aimed at the sacred Democratic Party institution of Nancy Pelosi that you finally deign to notice? That’s like living in the penthouse of a 20 story building, watching a raging fire consume the first 18 floors, and then, only when it’s reached the 19th floor, do you finally perceive that the building is on fire. Not in the 1980s, when people first started to use the phrase “political correctness,” not the thousands of false accusations of racism hurled against decent, non-racist people who happened to be Republicans over the decades, no it’s just now that you finally recognize the viper Democrats have clasped to their bosom all these years.

    And it’s only just now that you recognize the horrific threat it holds to Democrats clinging to any sort of nationwide political power.

    She goes on to quote Rahm Emanuel:

    We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”

    I think Emanuel’s wrong, I think they have decided. To the hard left, gaining control of the party levers of power is far more important than winning elections. It is moderate Democrats who must be defeated, as they’re the ones preventing the SJW ranks of the righteous from immanentizing the eschaton. We saw this in Texas, where the hard left pushed moderates out of the state Democratic Party as means of seizing control, with the result that they haven’t elected a statewide office-holder since 1994.

    The SJW left didn’t undertake their long march through the Democratic Party merely to bow to moderates from unfashionable hinterlands like Georgia and Kentucky, no matter how necessary they might be to forge an actual House majority. Without those moderates, 2006 doesn’t happen and 2018 doesn’t happen, and Pelosi is never Speaker. AOC’s cadres don’t care. Pelosi is just another obstacle that stands between them and control of the party. And if you disagree with them, if you stand in their way, you are a racist, QED.

    Compounding the problem for Pelosi and Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has become the face of the Democratic Party for independents, and they don’t like what they see:

    Top Democrats are circulating a poll showing that one of the House’s most progressive members — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — has become a definitional face for the party with a crucial group of swing voters.

  • Why it matters: These Democrats are sounding the alarm that swing voters know and dislike socialism, warning it could cost them the House and the presidency. The poll is making the rounds of some of the most influential Democrats in America.
  • “If all voters hear about is AOC, it could put the [House] majority at risk,” said a top Democrat who is involved in 2020 congressional races. “[S]he’s getting all the news and defining everyone else’s races.”

    • The poll — taken in May, before Speaker Pelosi’s latest run-in with AOC and the three other liberal House freshmen known as “The Squad” — included 1,003 likely general-election voters who are white and have two years or less of college education.

  • These are the “white, non-college voters” who embraced Donald Trump in 2016 but are needed by Democrats in swing House districts.
  • The group that took the poll shared the results with Axios on the condition that it not be named, because the group has to work with all parts of the party.

    • The findings:

  • Ocasio-Cortez was recognized by 74% of voters in the poll; 22% had a favorable view.
  • Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — another member of The Squad — was recognized by 53% of the voters; 9% (not a typo) had a favorable view.

    • Socialism was viewed favorably by 18% of the voters and unfavorably by 69%.

  • Capitalism was 56% favorable; 32% unfavorable.
  • “Socialism is toxic to these voters,” said the top Democrat.

    • The genius of Trump is that his unorthodox, street-brawler style has goaded Democratic activists into letting their masks of moderation slip. They seem to believe that a majority of Americans share their absolute instinctual aesthetic loathing of Trump, and this delusion has lead them into foolishly telling Americans what they actually want: completely socialize medicine, open borders for a new flood of illegal aliens, transsexuals as the latest unchallenged victim class, etc. Trapped in their self-enforced media bubble, they don’t see how ordinary Americans recoil in horror at their vision, and AOC’s hardcore activists don’t care.

    Who worries about the petty concerns of the racist petite bourgeoisie when there’s a revolution to conduct?

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    House: Awan Gang Rampaged Through Dem Servers

    Thursday, January 18th, 2018

    Here’s some breaking news from the other, other, other Democratic scandal in Washington, D.C.:

    House investigators concluded that Democratic IT aides made unauthorized access to congressional servers in 2016, allegedly accessing the data of members for whom they did not work, logging in as members of Congress themselves, and covering their tracks, according to a presentation summarizing the findings of a four-month internal probe.

    Their behavior mirrored a “classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization,” and they continued even after orders to stop, the briefing materials allege. There are indications that numerous members’ data may have been secretly residing not on their designated servers, but instead aggregated onto one server, according to the briefing and other sources. Authorities said that the entire server was then physically stolen.

    When acting on the findings, Democratic leadership appear to have misrepresented the issue to their own members as solely a matter of theft, a comparison of the investigators’ findings with Democrats’ recollections and a committee’s public statement shows, leading 44 Democrats to not conduct protective measures typically taken after a breach — including informing constituents whose personal information may have been exposed. (A list of the involved members is below.)

    The presentation, written by the House’s Office of the Inspector General, reported under the bold heading “UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS” that “5 shared employee system administrators have collectively logged into 15 member offices and the Democratic Caucus although they were not employed by the offices they accessed.”

    It found indications that a House “server is being used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information” and “could be used to store documents taken from other offices.” The server was that of the House Democratic Caucus, a sister group of the DNC that was run at the time by then-Rep. Xavier Becerra.

    The aides named are Imran Awan, his wife Hina Alvi, his brothers Abid and Jamal, and his friend Rao Abbas, Pakistani-born aides whose lives are filled with reason for concern. Abid’s Ukranian wife Natalia Sova and Haseeb Rana were also involved in the Awans’ activities but departed the House payroll prior to the investigation.

    One systems administrator “logged into a member’s office two months after he was terminated from that office,” the investigative summary says.

    While the rules could have been violated for some innocuous purpose, the presentation indicates that is unlikely: “This pattern of login activity suggests steps are being taken to conceal their activity.”

    The list of affected Democratic Representatives (many of whom have been forcibly retired by voters or otherwise left office), alphabetized for your convenience:

  • Pete Aguilar (D-CA)
  • Brad Ashford (D-NE)
  • Ron Barber (D-AZ)
  • Karen Bass (D-CA)
  • Melissa Bean (D-IL)
  • Xavier Becerra (D-CA)
  • Chris Bell (D-TX)
  • Joyce Birdson Beatty (D-OH)
  • Julia Brownley (D-CA)
  • Tony Cardenas (D-CA)
  • John Carney (D-DE)
  • Andre Carson (D-IN)
  • Joaquin Castro (D-TX)
  • Ben Chandler (D-KY)
  • Katherine Clark (D-MA)
  • Yvette Clarke (D-NY)
  • Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO)
  • Jim Costa (D-CA)
  • Charlie Crist (D-FL)
  • Joe Crowley (D-NY)
  • Diana DeGette (D-CO)
  • Ted Deutch (D-FL)
  • Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
  • Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
  • Rahm Emanuel (D-IL)
  • Lois Frankel (D-FL)
  • Marcia Fudge (D-OH)
  • Joe Garcia (D-FL)
  • Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ)
  • Gwen Graham (D-FL)
  • Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM)
  • Debbie Halvorson (D-IL)
  • Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
  • Baron Hill (D-IN)
  • Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)
  • Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH)
  • Robin Kelly (D-IL)
  • Dan Kildee (D-MI)
  • Ron Klein (D-FL)
  • Sandy Levin (D-MI)
  • Ted Lieu (D-CA)
  • Dave Loebsack (D-IA)
  • Donald McEachin (D-VA)
  • Kendrick Meek (D-FL)
  • Gregory Meeks (D-NY)
  • Seth Moulton (D-MA)
  • Patrick Murphy (D-FL)
  • Stephanie Murphy (D-FL)
  • Cedric Richmond (D-LA)
  • Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE)
  • Jacky Rosen (D-NV)
  • Tim Ryan (D-OH)
  • John Sarbanes (D-MD)
  • Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ)
  • Hilda Solis (D-CA)
  • Darren Michael Soto (D-FL)
  • Jackie Speier (D-CA)
  • Mark Takano (D-CA)
  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)
  • Henry Waxman (D-CA)
  • Robert Wexler (D-FL)
  • Frederica Wilson (D-FL)

    • Plus the House Democratic Caucus server.

    Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine a Republican had broken into one Democratic congressional servers. That would be front page news for weeks. Now imagine a Republican had broken into the servers of 44 Democratic congressmen, plus the DNC. There would be congressional hearings televised by every major network and calls to disband the RNC. But let five Pakistani nationals do the same thing and the MSM just can’t be arsed to even investigate it.

    It’s a huge scandal.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for August 12, 2016

    Friday, August 12th, 2016

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas it’s been hitting 104°F during the day. That’s bad enough, but worse is trying to walk your dog at night when it’s still 93° with no wind.

  • Hillary’s lead over Trump isn’t quite as wide as Dukkakis’ lead over Bush.
  • Trump raised $80 million in July.
  • DNC email hack a whole lot bigger than previously thought.
  • ObamaCare premiums set to explode again in 2017.
  • Ace of Spades HQ contends we’re in this mess because the GOP establishment is secretly all-in on illegal alien amnesty and think the base is racist for opposing their Olympian insight, but has steadfastly refused to tell voters what they actually think:

    The Establishment and establishment-aligned commentators are guilty of the Yeah Yeah Evasion I spoke of above with respect to amnesty.

    Oh, sure, in 2014, they’ll run on a super-border-hawk national platform, and vow to oppose, unto their dying breath, Obama’s executive amnesties.

    And sure, they’ll trot out a field of 17 candidates, fifteen of whom who have been coached to give the corporate/donor class evasive answer on the border.

    Snip.

    Now, the Trumpkins come along — I’ll use the Establishment’s slur for them — and the Trumpkins believe that it is standard GOP doctrine that we should have a border wall and be tough on border security, up to and including deportations.

    They think there’s broad support for this in the party. They don’t think this position is controversial — they think it’s just a base plank of the platform.

    Gee — I wonder where they could have gotten that idea, Establishment, huh?

    I guess those stupid Trumpkins did something crazy — the believed the lies pouring out of your mouths every election eve.

    So once again we have a political calamity brewing– the Establishment types, the college educated set who has no fear of being displaced by a cheaper foreign worker, misled the white working class into thinking they agreed with them on immigration, while secretly — silently — holding the opinion that anything short of open borders was kinda-sorta (or definitely) racist.

  • Rahm Emmanuel steals from the poor (Chicago utility users) to give to the rich (union pension funds). (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • New Jersey teacher’s union wants to write its pension gravy train into the state constitution, vows revenge on Democrat who blocked it.
  • Rotherham is still a center for Muslim child rape gangs. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Alumni have started to decide that if college administrators insist on preemptively surrendering to Social Justice Warriors, then their donations can go elsewhere. (Hat tip: Hot Air.)
  • “State Sen. Judith Zaffirini and her associates have agreed to pay roughly $38 million to settle a lawsuit in which they were accused of seizing control of a massive real estate inheritance for their own enrichment. The Laredo Democrat still has a chance to get richer. She and her crew will walk away owning 444 acres of prime Laredo real estate that nobody bequeathed to them. They’ll need to continue developing the land to come up with the $38 million, but everything they clear above that will be profit. That’s not including, of course, the millions that the Zaffirini crew has already paid itself in legal and management fees out of the inheritance, including roughly $1.5 million paid to Carlos Zaffirini’s law firm.”
  • My friend Karl Rehn’s study on just what the best aiming system (red dot vs. laser vs. iron sights) gets a nice writeup by Massad Ayoob. (Hat tip: Stuff from Hsoi.)
  • Title IX is killing men’s teams at historically black colleges and universities.
  • British MPs facing a booze ban due to having to move to a Muslim-owned building while Westminster is refurbished (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Hungary says no to more “Syrian refugees.” EU to shove more of them down Hungary’s throat, because joining the EU means signing your national sovereignty away
  • Wal-Mart acquires Jet.com (which is an online retailer, not an airline).
  • Facebook to users using Adblock: “Shut up and eat some ads.
  • “Fisking the Latest Diversity in Sci-Fi Freak Out.”
  • Buy your own Sherman Tank. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “It’s ridiculous for anyone to worry that the new Ghostbusters will ruin their childhoods retroactively. We should worry about this piece of shit ruining childhoods in real time.”‘
  • Heh. The Ghostbusters reboot to gross “almost exactly $.78 for every $1 the first one earned.”
  • In another sign of 2016’s impending apocalypse, corpse flowers are blooming across America.
  • Crime scene dioramas. Or, as the creator calls them, “dieoramas.” (More here.)
  • Cat-like typing detected.

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Guns, Jihad, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for December 18, 2015

    Friday, December 18th, 2015

    It’s a week before Christmas, and I hope everyone is having a better week than I am (I’m sick and my dog’s sick).

  • Former FBI counterterrorism agent says that we haven’t gotten squat in terrorism leads from “moderate Muslims,” and we probably won’t as long as we keep using Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR as our only go-to groups for them. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Swedes are stocking up on guns.
  • Given that the French political establishment continues to ignore widespread French desire to stem Islamic immigration, is it any wonder Marine Le Pen’s National Front did so well in early voting?
  • DNC cuts off voter info access to Bernie Sanders campaign over data breach?
  • “Environmentalists are a much more serious threat to human well being than climate change—even catastrophic climate change.”
  • The Fall of Rahm Emmanual.
  • Media Matters mouthpiece David Brock says that Ted Cruz is the biggest threat to a Hillary coronation.
  • “FitzGibbon Media, a prominent progressive public relations firm, abruptly shut down on Thursday amid allegations of sexual harassment and assault by the company’s president. Trevor FitzGibbon and his team worked with some of the biggest progressive organizations, including NARAL, MoveOn, the Center for American Progress and the AFL-CIO, as well as Wikileaks, Chelsea [i.e., Bradley] Manning and The Intercept.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • How The New York Times continually revised a story to help Obama look better.
  • Remember that ACLU board member that called for murdering Trump supporters? Turns out that calling for the assassination of political opponents is just a tad too extreme for the ACLU.
  • So we saved Kuwait’s bacon, and they can’t even be arsed to pretend they don’t hate Jews?
  • How Obama celebrated a deserter in the Rose Garden.
  • The cocked fist culture.
  • Nothing says “rational” and “reasonable” quite like calling Ted Cruz Satan incarnate. Thanks for proving that Hollywood celebrities aren’t overwrought drama queens, Cher…
  • The 25 most Florida things that happened in 2015.

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    Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, Military | No Comments »

    This Week in Democratic Party Corruption

    Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015

    It’s been a big week for Democratic Party corruption.

    First, Democratic Speaker of New York’s Sheldon Silver was convicted of all the corruption charges against him:

    “The Democratic speaker of the state Assembly for more than 20 years, Mr. Silver was found guilty by a 12-person federal jury in Manhattan of four counts of honest-services fraud, two counts of extortion and one count of money laundering.”

    More on Silver from Steve Malanga of City Journal:

    For years, New York State has ranked among the most litigation-friendly places in America. (Those unlucky enough to get caught up in the state’s civil justice system call it “Sue” York.) Lawsuit reform has bypassed New York largely because one of the state’s most powerful politicians, former assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, was himself a plaintiff’s attorney who benefited from the system he helped create. Over the years, Silver not only blocked attempts to change unique features of New York’s civil justice system, but he also appointed other trial lawyers to key legislative positions, including on the crucial Assembly Judiciary Committee. So it’s not shocking that when Silver himself finally fell from grace, the case revolved around state grants Silver arranged to a cancer researcher, who then referred mesothelioma patients back to the former speaker’s law firm so that they could become clients in the lucrative asbestos-litigation business.

    Snip.

    Silver thought the people’s money was his money. For years, he helped lead a regime in which legislators from both parties received millions of dollars to distribute as “earmarks”—money handed out directly by elected officials to favored organizations outside of the state’s regular contracting or granting process. The New York Times dubbed Silver the “king of earmarks” because he used them as a way of exercising power over members of his political caucus. In doing so, Silver was accountable to no one. He handed out millions of dollars of state money, for instance, to the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, an organization run by William Rapfogel, the husband of Silver’s longtime chief of staff. Judy Rapfogel sat in on meetings about funding for her husband’s group, according to press accounts. In 2013, William pled guilty to stealing some $3 million over a nearly 20-year period from the largely government-funded Met Council. He served 14 months of a 3- to 10-year sentence in an upstate prison and recently entered a supervised work-release program.

    In New York, the earmark process is so corrupt that politicians can create their own nonprofits and then finance them with taxpayer money—a remarkably blatant display of conflict-of-interest.

    Meanwhile, in Rahm Emmanual’s Chicago:

    THERE’S been a cover-up in Chicago. The city’s leaders have now brought charges against a police officer, Jason Van Dyke, for the first-degree murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. But for more than a year, Chicago officials delayed the criminal process, and might well have postponed prosecution indefinitely, had it not been for a state court forcing their hand.

    They prevented the public from viewing crucial incriminating evidence — first one police car’s dashboard camera video; now, we learn, five such videos in total. And these senior officials turned a blind eye to the fact that 86 minutes of other video surveillance footage of the crime scene was unaccountably missing.

    Snip.

    The video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel’s chances for re-election. And it would likely have ended the career of the police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy.

    And so the wheels of justice virtually ground to a halt. Mayor Emanuel refused to make the dash-cam video public, going to court to prevent its release. The city argued that releasing the video would taint the investigation of the case, but even the attorney general of Illinois urged the city to make it available.

    Then the city waited until April 15 — one week after Mr. Emanuel was re-elected — to get final approval of a pre-emptive $5 million settlement with Mr. McDonald’s family, a settlement that had been substantially agreed upon weeks earlier. Still, the city’s lawyers made sure to include a clause that kept the dash-cam video confidential.

    Compared to those scandals, allegations of garden variety marital infidelity with a lobbyist by Texas Democratic State Senator Carlos Uresti is relatively small peanuts… (Hat tip: Push Junction.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for April 20, 2015

    Monday, April 20th, 2015

    Last week was incredibly busy for sundry reasons. It would be nice to get the Friday LinkSwarm back to Friday, but in the meantime, enjoy the Monday version:

  • “One of the reasons why Obamacare remains stubbornly unpopular is because most Americans don’t like to think of themselves as being the sort of people who would punch nuns.”
  • The idea that the tea-party movement is animated or motivated by racism is pure fiction.
  • Wait a minute, an actual useful article from Vox on the assumptions underlying the Iran deal, and the case against those assumptions? I’m as shocked as anyone.

    One of the greatest advantages of sanctions as a coercive tool is their effect over time. Dismantling this thing, which in a way is what we’re doing, is kind of like taking money out of your retirement account early. As we let these sanctions work over time, by the time we got to 2012, they were really in dire straits. If a deal is signed this year and then in 2017 they cheat, it would take years and years and years of penalizing them before we could ever get back to the situation we had in 2012.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Women expelled from Calgary Expo due to thoughtcrimes.
  • Ten takeaways from Rolling Stone‘s UVA rape hoax.
  • “On the Internet, when all the social context is stripped away and you don’t even have to look at the face of the person you’re being mean to, shame loses its social, restorative function. Shame-storming isn’t punishment. It’s a weapon.”
  • Old and Busted: Getting Montazuma’s Revenge in Mexico. The New Hotness: Thanks to Obama’s illegal alien amnesty, now it’s coming to you! (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Tsarnaev is, literally, a traitorous, child-murdering cop killer.”
  • The Kurds are kicking ISIS’s ass: “Picking a fight with the Kurds is a little like going to war against Lebanon’s Druze or the Israelis. It’s like trying to invade and occupy Texas.”
  • Islamic State beheads man for witchcraft.
  • People are burning and looting immigrant shops in South Africa. “South Africa, with a population of about 50 million, is home to an estimated 5 million immigrants….South Africa’s unemployment stood at 24 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014.” Doesn’t seem like a recipe for social harmony…
  • Parenting Protip: Although I’m unmarried and childless, I’m pretty sure the answer to “Mom, will you buy booze and weed for my naked Twister orgy, then have sex with my underage boyfriends?” should be “No.”
  • It doesn’t take six months to repair plumbing problems at a Wal-Mart. What gives? (Hat tip: Zero Hedge)
  • A blind person with a stick would be better than Hillary Clinton at reading people around her.”
  • De Blasio brings class warfare to Iowa.
  • Now that Rahm Emanuel has been reelected, he no longer needs to pretend to obey your puny peasant laws. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Here’s what’s roiling the Whacko American community these days.
  • Buzzfeed has outdone itself. You will be staggered by their amazing psychic powers…

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

    The Black Citiziens of Chicago Are Mad As Hell; Are They Going To Take It Anymore?

    Monday, December 23rd, 2013

    Saw this over on Ace of Spades, and thought it worthy of much wider distribution. Essentially, black voters in Chicago are tired of a political machine (including black aldermen and preachers ) that does nothing but screw them over.

    Caveat: These are obviously excerpts, so we don’t know what the rest of the meeting was like.

    But certainly black Americans in most American cities have real complaints about a welfare state that’s left them behind and made their lives worse rather than better, and those in Chicago, with one of the heaviest Democratic machines and the highest murder count in the country, have more cause for complaint than most. And it’s absolutely true that the Democratic Party takes them for granted, and will continue to do so as long as they blindly vote 9-1 straight ticket Democrat in every election. Why shouldn’t Democrats take them for granted if they continue to reap lockstep votes without having to exert any effort. (And whenever it waivers, they seem to feel they need only shout “Trayvon!” or some other race card distraction to continue their grip.) And the Great Obama Recession has consistently been worse for black America than white America.

    (It also needs to be noted that at the state level, many Illinois Republicans are just guilty of ignoring voter needs as part of the corrupt bipartisan Combine that runs the state.)

    But at least Chicago’s black community has made the first step of speaking out about how the Democratic machine has been harvesting their votes and handing out welfare, but otherwise neglecting them and taking them for granted. There’s no guarantee they’ll take the next step, be it actually talking to Republicans, consider abandoning the failed liberal welfare state model that’s destroyed their community, or even form a new political party (maybe The Urban Party) rather than demanding a bigger share of the corruption (as so many black politicians have). But at least the recognize there’s a problem.

    Finally, I still think Al Sharpton is among the lowest of race-hustling poverty pimps, but let’s give him one cheer here for setting this up and actually letting people speak.

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    Posted in Democrats, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »

    Ted Cruz Lays a Glorious Smackdown on Rahm Emanuel

    Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

    Senator Ted Cruz is already doing a bangup job bringing the conservative message to Washington. Today’s example: laying a glorious smackdown on Chicago mayor (and former Obama chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel over the latter’s trying to pressure banks into not doing business with gun manufacturers.

    Take, for example, this:

    We do not accept the notion that government officials should behave as bullies, trying to harass or pressure private companies into enlisting in a political lobbying campaign. And we subscribe to the notion, quaint in some quarters, that private companies don’t work for elected officials; elected officials work for private citizens.

    And this:

    In light of the reception you have received in the Windy City, please know that Texas would certainly welcome more of your business and jobs you create.

    And this:

    Should Mayor Emanuel’s bullying campaign prove successful, I am confident that there are numerous financial institutions in Texas that would be eager to earn your business. And in the event that it might prove helpful, I would be happy to introduce you to their leaders.

    And…well, just read the whole thing:

    Letter from Senator Ted Cruz to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Bank of America, TD Bank Group, Smith & Wes… by Senator Ted Cruz

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    Posted in Guns, Texas | No Comments »