Joe Rogan Guest on Hillary Clinton/John McCain/Funding ISIS Dirt

September 10th, 2019

Here’s a bit from Joe Rogan interviewing Pat Miletich, a former MMA fighter who runs a podcast called The Conspiracy Farm. He talks about a lot of scandals and conspiracy theories, both domestic and foreign, involving the Obama and Bush43 administration.

The particular Obama scandal stuff they discuss (using regulatory arbitrage to enrich friends who buy depressed stock, who then benefit when the decision is reversed) I was unfamiliar with, but sounds entirely plausible.

The Hillary Clinton (and John and Tony Podesta) stuff is not just plausible, it’s stuff we already know. (Correction: Yellowcake is not depleted uranium, it’s mildly processed uranium oxide which can later be enriched into energy or weapons-grade uranium.)

Did the Obama Administration directly fund the Islamic State? I would like to think not, if only because, however much they hated Bashar Assad’s Syria, they were also trying to curry favor with Iran, and it seems like funding a radical Sunni fundamentalist Islamic State would be at odds with that goal. Certainly the Obama team was funding some Islamist Syrian radicals, but I had the impression that the Islamic State was primarily being bankrolled by Qatar and various Saudi royals. I could be wrong. If Obama Administration officials were knowingly funding the Islamic State, they deserve war crimes tribunals.

The John McCain stuff I find a little harder to believe, not because I hold McCain in particularly high regard, because he could be a real piece of work, but because there was no love lost between McCain and either the Bush43 or Obama Administrations, making him an unlikely insider conduit for arms sales.

I have not read Peter Schweitzer’s Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, but it sounds like something I should consider picking up.

Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for September 9, 2019

September 9th, 2019

Democrats want to ban cheeseburgers, Biden’s eye fills with blood, the third debates loom, and Williamson is shocked to find out that leftist activists are mean liars. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

Polls

  • ABC/Univision: Biden 27, Sanders 19, Warren 17, Harris 7, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Yang 3, Booker 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Klobuchar 1.
  • CBS battleground states: Let’s shotgun all these in one line. New Hampshire: Warren 27, Biden 26, Sanders 25, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7. Iowa: Biden 29, Sanders 26, Warren 17, Buttigieg 7, Harris 6. South Carolina: Biden 43, Sanders 18, Warren 14, Harris 7, Buttigieg 4. Nevada: Sanders 29, Biden 27, Warren 18, Harris 6, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3.
  • Texas Lyceum (Texas): Biden 24, O’Rourke 18, Warren 15, Sanders 13, Harris 4, Castro 4, Buttigieg 3, Klobuchar 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2, Gabbard 1, Ryan 1, Bennet 1, McAuliffe (lolwut) 1, Moulton 1, Williamson 1. Keep in mind that the Lyceum poll always oversamples Democrats, but their intra-Democratic poll numbers aren’t necessarily inaccurate. And Biden beating Beto in his home state, and Castro garnering a puny 4%, are both hilarious…
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets. Warren is now a 12 point favorite over Biden.
  • Pundits, etc.

  • The third round of Democratic presidential candidate debates happens in Houston this Thursday.
  • “CNN’s 7-Hour ‘Climate Change’ Town Hall was a man-made disaster for Democrat presidential candidates.”

    The presidential ambitions of the leading Democrat candidates may not survive CNN’s 7-Hour ‘Climate Change’ Townhall.

    It was a man-made disaster, created in the fevered swamps of CNN and fueled by pledges of allegiance to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

    The candidates came across as not-serious-people. Worse, they came across as nanny-state monsters who really do want to take away your plastic straws and cheeseburgers to save the planet. It was a self-parody of what woke totalitarianism sounds like, with an abnormal focus on meat.

    Republican attack-ad makers have hours of footage that can be sliced and diced to make any of the candidates who appeared at the Townhall look insane. And they wasted no time.

  • Ban all the things! “Here is a comprehensive list of everything the left wants to have banned for the sake of human survival:
    • Red Meat
    • Plastic Straws
    • Off Shore Drilling
    • Fracking
    • Incandescent Light Bulbs
    • Combustion Engines
    • Having Too Many Babies
    • Exporting Oil to Foreign Countries
    • Carbon Emissions
    • Nuclear Power
    • Coal and Coal Mining
    • Factory Farming
    • Common Sense”
  • In convenient video form:

  • More on the same theme. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Why the media dislike Andrew, Tulsi, Bernie and Marianne.”

    One of Yang’s supporters, Scott Santens, has been keeping track of the apparent slights via Twitter: an MSNBC graphic with other candidates polling at 2 percent but not Yang, oddly unbalanced graphics that seem to include just enough candidates to get in the media favorites but exclude Yang. As Axios recently pointed out, Yang is sixth in the polling average yet 14th in terms of the number of articles written about his candidacy.

    Clearly, something is going on here. But what I’ve noticed is that Yang is not alone in facing media contempt. Without fail, every candidate who has come from outside the Democratic establishment, or who has dared to question the Democratic establishment, has been smeared, dismissed or ignored by most media.

    Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who resigned from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in protest of its treatment of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and dares to challenge the bipartisan pro-war foreign policy consensus, has been smeared as “unpatriotic.” This despite the fact that she is an Iraq War veteran who, to this day, serves in the Hawaii Army National Guard. The Daily Beast published an absurd article titled “Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign is Being Boosted By Putin Apologists” about how three of her donors, among tens of thousands, had tangential connections to Russia. NBC News published a piece on how Russian bots were boosting Gabbard’s campaign. It cited one expert, a group that reportedly faked Russian bot activity in an Alabama election.

    Gabbard had the distinction of being the most-Googled candidate in both of the first two debates. The media, however, have shown little interest in understanding why her pro-peace message might hold appeal.

    I’ve talked quite a bit about media bias against Sanders. The latest, most egregious case involved a Washington Post “fact check” that found Sanders accurately cited academic research — but managed to give him three Pinocchios anyway.

    Marianne Williamson, an author and activist, is definitely off the beaten path for a candidate, but she is an incredibly accomplished woman, with seven New York Times bestsellers to her name and decades of activism under her belt. Perhaps it would be interesting to hear more of her thoughts on national healing and reconciliation rather than just casting her as a weirdo and mocking her for a tweet about the power of prayer, something to which many, if not most, Americans subscribe.

    These candidates occupy much different poll positions and have wildly different approaches, styles and philosophies. Yang, the cheerful prophet of doom; Williamson, the spiritual healer; Gabbard, the teller of hard truths about American imperialism; and Sanders, well, he’s just Bernie. But they have something important in common: They don’t fit the mold. They aren’t in the club. They defy the rules.

    Asian techies are supposed to develop the latest AI, not lead the revolution to put humanity first. Democratic female veterans are supposed to burnish the party’s hawkish cred, not doggedly pursue diplomacy and engagement and call out the American war machine. Spirituality is not supposed to be mixed with politics on the left, even though religion is fully weaponized by the right. And septuagenarian democratic socialists who are not fashionable in any way are not supposed to be rock stars with youths or be top-polling presidential contenders.

    Rather than deal with these contradictions — which, by the way, clearly fascinate the public, judging by Google and Twitter trends — it’s easier for many in the media to mock, smear or ignore.

  • Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida are four states likely to determine the 2020 presidential race, and Donald Trump won each by a percentage point or less. “Of course, we’re deprived of any painfully honest discussion of how much the Democrats need black voters in big cities to control the electoral votes of the swing states and why they’re having trouble getting these votes in the post-Obama era.”
  • 538 tells us that polls are far more important than crowd sizes in judging political popularity. Then again, they would, wouldn’t they?
  • Fox offers up Democratic Power Rankings:

    Biden: 28.6 points
    Warren: 17.4 points
    Sanders: 14.4 points
    Harris: 6.8 points
    Buttigieg: 4.6 points

  • The New Hampshire Democratic Convention was this week. The writers want us to believe they favor Warren over Biden.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gary Hart endorses Bennet in New Hampshire. That’s sure to be a hit with bitter liberals in their 50s who still say “Ronnie Raygun.” Speaking of nostalgia for the 1980s, here’s a look at why Bennet is running through the lens of mentor and former Ohio Democratic governor Dick Celeste.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Jim Goad thinks that Biden is, in fact, going nuts:

    Perhaps part of it is due to the pressure of being an old white man who’s posing as the standard-bearer of a political party whose sole agenda these days is the extermination and debasement of old white men. How taxing must it be to run on the premise of, “Well, sure, everything I represent sucks, but at least I acknowledge it, so vote for me, anyway”? I could see how that could take its toll on a fella.

    But most of it is due to the fact that he has always been a liar who jumbled the facts, compounded by a septuagenarian brain that is rapidly fermenting.

    Biden is often referred to as a “gaffe machine,” and although that’s accurate, it doesn’t tell the whole story. A gaffe, by definition, is an unintentional mistake. There was the time when, in front of a crowd, he told wheelchair-bound Missouri state senator Chuck Graham to stand up. There was the time he called Barack Obama the “first sorta mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Those are simply dumb, clumsy mistakes.

    But throughout his career, he has also blatantly lied about himself:

    • He claimed he finished in the top half of his law-school class; he actually finished 76th out of 85.
    • He has repeatedly claimed that both he and members of his family were coal miners. He even plagiarized sections of a speech from British politician Neil Kinnock about how his ancestors would work in the coal mines for 12 hours and then come up to play football for four hours. He was ultimately forced to admit he was lying.
    • He plagiarized portions of a law-school essay so extensively he had to beg administrators not to expel him.
    • He implied that Osama bin Laden’s men “forced down” his helicopter in Afghanistan, when the truth is that the pilot landed safely as a precaution to avoid a snowstorm.
    • He claims he was “shot at” in Iraq, when the truth is that a mortar landed several football fields away from where he was safely ensconced in a Baghdad motel.
    • He claims he participated in sit-ins and boycotts during the Civil Rights era and then was later forced to acknowledge that, no, he didn’t do any of that, although he did briefly work at a predominantly black swimming pool.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.) Biden wants to ban “magazines that hold multiple bullets” (which is to say all magazines). His eye filled with blood during the climate change pow-wow, but he claims a contact lens bruised his eye. Color me skeptical.

    He also coughed throughout his speech to the New Hampshire Democratic Convention. And here’s some silliness:

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Cory Booker Once Owned Stock In A Russian Tech Company, So Why Didn’t He Disclose It?”

    The returns, which Booker released in April as part of his presidential campaign, show that he donated more than $110,000 of stock in Yandex, a Russian search-engine firm, from April 5, 2013 to October 11, 2013. In the middle of that stretch, on May 16, 2013, Booker filed a financial disclosure report. Yet on the report, an accounting of Booker’s assets and liabilities, he did not list Yandex. How could Booker have given away stock in the company if he did not own it?

    “I certainly would be interested in hearing the campaign’s explanation,” said Brendan Fischer, director of the federal reform program at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog group. “It’s not uncommon for candidates to divest financial holdings that could be controversial or pose a conflict of interest, but if a candidate does hold assets at the time the financial disclosure report is filed, they have to be reported. And it’s not clear that that’s what happened here.”

    Hey, remember all the way back to earlier this year when media companies told us that playing footsie with Russians was the worst thing in the world? Buzzfeed offers up a failure to launch piece.

    There’s a world you can imagine where a candidate like Booker would be running strong with younger voters, especially young black voters. Research, such as a recent report titled the Black Millennial Economic Perspectives Report, published just this month found 36% said criminal justice was their top domestic issue — a top Booker issue. (A similar study from two Democratic PACs found that “despite having every reason to be disenchanted with politics and the political process, unregistered black millennials remain aspirational and committed to protecting and empowering their families and communities.”)

    But Booker didn’t have strong black support in the race the moment he jumped in, and he can’t bank on it coming later. There is another leading black candidate in the primary, and that’s to say nothing of the high levels of support right now for Joe Biden, or the affinity for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders among some younger black activists and voters.

    I wouldn’t advise wasting a New York Times visit on this piece about Booker and Star Trek, but here it is.

  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. Another “drop out and run for the senate, you idiot” piece. Spoke at the New Hampshire Democratic Convention.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Kevin Williamson is not impressed with Buttigieg’s religious arguments.

    You can get a good sense of the intellectual vacuity (and religious sterility, if you’re interested in that) of this mode of politics from, e.g., Kirsten Powers’s banal and illiterate conversation with Buttigieg, written up for general amusement in USA Today. (You will not be surprised to read that Mayor Pete has “started a crucial conversation,” and has proceeded from cliché to cliché.) Powers, when she is not half-chiding her fellow Christian for showing what she considers excessive grace to people who have naughty political ideas (one wonders what she would consider insufficient grace), hits the reader with a few insights that are not exactly blistering in their originality: Jesus, she says, never mentioned abortion (but then, neither does the Constitution), while He did speak a great deal about looking after the poor. Powers writes this as though Christianity had been planted in a cultural vacuum and as though “feed my sheep” were synonymous with “vote for the party of the welfare state no matter what other horrifying business may be on their agenda” — and as though these kinds of issues had not been the subject of centuries of Christian inquiry. The New Testament is silent on the questions of, among other things, child pornography and cannibalism, but Christians are not expected to maintain a morally indifferent attitude toward these. Still less would Christians be expected to maintain such indifference in the face of the Supreme Court’s happening upon a right to cannibalism lurking in some unexplored constitutional penumbra and the subsequent establishment of a franchised chain of coast-to-coast cannibalism outlets enjoying public subsidies.

    Add Buttigieg to the list of Democrats who disapprove of your plastic straws and hamburgers.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. More on Hispanics preferring O’Rourke to Castro. He’s having a rally in Houston today.
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. He wants to tax robots. He may throw in the towel if he doesn’t make the October debates. “I’m going to go and try to get into the October debates, and if I can, I think that’s a good reason to keep going forward. And if I can’t, I think it’s really tough to conceive of continuing.” They add: “Should de Blasio make good on his promise and drop out of the campaign in October, he’ll be forced to head back to his day job in New York City—likely to both his and his constituents’ chagrin.” Along those same lines: “NYC Mayor De Blasio Logged Just 7 Hours At Work For Entire Month.” De Blasio is running for President because it gives him an excuse to stay away from the city that hates his guts.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. He spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations:

    We have an interest, obviously, in Hong Kong. There’s a lot of economic activity that flows through Hong Kong. Obviously, U.S. businesses have a lot of interest in Hong Kong. So we clearly have an interest in Hong Kong maintaining the autonomy that they were promised.

    But there’s also a bigger issue, and that is the role the United States has in providing some moral leadership, and standing up for people who are fighting for their rights and for their ability to have some self-governance, particularly self-governance that’s been assured to them, or at least was assured to them. So I think we not only have a direct interest in actually how things unfold in Hong Kong, particularly around their—the rule of law and their legal system that they have that’s very unique, and we have a lot of interest, but more broadly I think we have a leadership role around the world to stand up not only for human rights—which is another, obviously, issue related to China—but also for individuals who are fighting for their right to self-governance. And I think they have it, and I think we should be making our voice clear on this issue.

    Snip.

    I think it’s right to be a lot tougher on China. In my opinion, China’s acted in many ways like pirates across the last several decades, right? They’ve stolen things. They’ve stolen intellectual property. They haven’t played by the rules, particularly rules that they gave assurances that they would play by. You know, and they are taking islands in the South China Sea.

    I mean, so there is a response that’s necessary because China’s become our economic rival by doing, in my judgment, three things. They worked really hard. Good for them. They made very smart investments, in some ways smarter than we did. Good for them. But they didn’t play by the rules. And we can’t allow the next several decades for them to continue to not play by the rules because I think that’ll put us in a very, very significant kind of difficult economic position.

    So I think it’s appropriate to draw a hard line with China on a lot of these practices. And I think the president was actually right in raising this issue, but I think his diagnosis of the problem is entirely wrong and the way he’s approaching it is wrong.

    You could call it meaningless blather, and you’re not far from wrong, but it’s still more coherent than 99% of prominent Democrats have been on the challenge posed by China.

  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Opposes impeachment. It is “important for us to think about what is in the best interest of the country and the American people, and continuing to pursue impeachment is something that I think will only further tear our country apart.”

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Harris’ star has so dimmed that she gets her own failure to launch piece:

    Kamala Harris entered the presidential race with impressive credentials – a popular black woman with an inspiring story who hailed from a large Democratic state and drew accolades for her fiery questioning of President Donald Trump’s nominees.

    Yet despite a shot of adrenaline after confronting front-runner Joe Biden in the first debate, she has failed to catch fire with Democratic voters who are torn between a nostalgic fondness for Biden and a revolutionary desire for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

    Harris’ attempt to replicate her feat in the second debate backfired among Democrats who say she went too negative on Biden. The Californian also suffers from a perception that she lacks a deep ideological well to guide her policy ideas, in contrast to her three main rivals who are better-defined. And her past as a prosecutor has earned her supporters and detractors.

    Harris and Senator Cory Booker “really went after vice president Biden – it redounded to their detriment that they went after Biden so much. Because it also looked like they were not just going after Biden, but they were going after the Obama legacy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is neutral in the primaries.

    Weingarten said many Democrats left the June debate thinking, “Kamala seems really feisty and let’s look at her.” But in the July debate they were turned off by Harris and other aggressors because “it looked like they were burning the house down, as opposed to building on what Democrats believe in.”

    Harris surged from about 7% to 15% in averages of Democratic polls immediately after the first debate in late June, putting her in second or third place in the crowded field. But it was a sugar high – she’s back to the 7% she had when summer began.

    For Harris, the danger is that she’s another Marco Rubio. The Florida senator, too, had a potentially history-making candidacy during the Republican nomination battle in 2016 and was hailed by the party establishment as presidential timber, before he failed to translate that on the ground.

    Ouch! And like Rubio, Harris has a senate career to fall back on. “Kamala Harris claimed she ‘sued Exxon Mobil’ as California AG. She didn’t.” Ha ha! “Harris Only Three Points Ahead of Gabbard After Ridiculing Her Poll Numbers a Month Ago.”

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s for an “assault weapons” ban. She has one joke and it’s not very good.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s not wild about the process, which I can understand from someone stuck in very last place in a field this ridiculously large. But it’s not like he’s run even a minimally competent campaign:

    The mayor of Miramar, Florida, has not found much of an audience or appeared in any debates. He has raised a mere $93,812 and assembled a small campaign staff. And now, according to internal campaign documents and interviews with eight former Messam campaign staffers and contractors, his campaign appears to be in near-total disarray.

    The documents as well as staffers, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect future employment prospects, depicted a no-hope campaign that nonetheless was embroiled in bitter disputes over money and control — a “D-list version of The Sopranos,” in one description. In particular, staff members claim that Wayne and his wife, Angela Messam, have refused to pay them for their work. All of the staffers and vendors that BuzzFeed News spoke with said they were never fully compensated for their work on the campaign and, in some cases, weren’t paid at all for expenses they’d fronted from their own bank accounts, including business cards for the campaign and flights, hotel rooms, and security costs for a trip to the Middle East. In some instances, staffers were told by the Messams that the couple believed them to be “volunteering” for the campaign, despite emails from senior staff to the Messams telling them about start dates for employees, and what staff members say were verbal agreements and offer letters from the campaign for their positions.

  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently the Odessa shooter was not, in fact, a Beto backer, which I rather suspected when this made the rounds; never beleive something that seems too pat without verifying it. (And yeah, Snopes, but the piece cites some actual, non-risible sources.)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. He says that Biden is “delcining.” Well, somebody had to say it…
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Sanders/Thanos 2020.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) And just like with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, you can bet that all that population control is aimed firmly at “undesirable” black and brown kids.

  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. He was among those speaking in New Hampshire this week. And that’s your tiny morsal of Sestak news.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Mr. Moneybags qualified for the October debate. Which puts them at eleven candidates unless one drops out. Did you see Saturday’s story on ThinkProgress folding? Well a staffer there is pissed that Steyer sent her a job notice rather than funding ThinkProgress:

    A former ThinkProgress writer took to Twitter to condemn billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer after receiving a job notice for his campaign following news that the liberal news site is shutting down.

    Rebekah Entralgo, a writer who covered immigration policy and detention at ThinkProgress, said she received a LinkedIn message that attempted to recruit her after the activist group the Center for American Progress (CAP) said it could not find a new publisher for the site.

    “Sorry to learn about ThinkProgress,” the message said in a screenshot Entralgo posted. “Tom Steyer 2020 is hiring for digital and comms roles — we do pay a relocation fee…”

    There are plenty of jobs I’ve been solicited for that I didn’t apply for, but in none of the cases did I declare “Screw you, you should have funded my last job!”

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Very liberal voters are increasingly backing Warren. But not so much among women:

    Warren is not overwhelmingly popular among women right now, but she has had a small, consistent edge among women in recent polls. Our average of national polls1 taken between Aug. 1 and Sep. 1 do show Warren getting some extra support from women, though not to a huge degree. Women were 2.9 points more likely than men to support Warren on average, while both Biden’s and Harris’s backers were nearly identically split between men and women — with Biden getting the most backing from both groups. And according to Morning Consult’s weekly national primary poll, Biden’s support is particularly strong among black women, too.

    She says she wants to fight global warming but opposes nuclear power. “Warren smartly sneaking up on weak, bloodshot Biden from the left.”

    Biden will once again be the ­piñata at Thursday’s debate because the best way for any of his nine rivals to gain ground is to beat up on him, as Sen. Kamala Harris proved in the first debate.

    But Warren is the one to watch this time. Most national polls have her second, with two recent ones showing her trailing the former vice president by just four points.

    She is drawing by far the largest crowds and is focused, energized and organized. Biden, on the other hand, had a terrible week, with a growing realization in the party that his flubs and memory lapses are not passing problems.

    Both his blood-filled eye and his gibberish remarks about climate change added to doubts he can go the distance. His team wants to cut back on his schedule and lowered expectations for Iowa and New Hampshire, moves that smell like panic.

    Warren is evidently getting campaign advice from Hillary Clinton. Presumably not about Wisconsin. Warren hates venture capitalists. Columnist wants Warren to drop out and back Sanders. It’s every bit as unconvincing as you would expect it to be.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Williamson is shocked to find out the left is filled with mean people who lie:

    “I know this sounds naive. I didn’t think the left was so mean. I didn’t think the left lied like this,” Williamson told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in an interview. “I thought the right did that. I thought we were better.”

    Williamson accused the left of lying about her use of crystals and “crystal gazing,” telling Remnick that there has “never been a crystal on stage” at any of her events and “there is no crystal” in her home.

    She accused those on the left of also falsely accusing her of having told AIDS patients not to take their medicines or implying that “lovelessness” causes diseases and “love” is “enough to cure their diseases.”

    “I’m Jewish, I go to the doctor,” Williamson said, ripping those on the left for labeling her as an anti-science candidate who does not believe in modern medicine.

  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a New York Times profile:

    Mr. Yang has attracted an ideologically eclectic coalition that includes progressives, libertarians, disaffected voters and Trump supporters who have swapped their red MAGA hats for blue ones that say MATH — “Make America Think Harder.” Those who have come into his camp say his presence on YouTube, on podcasts and in the nationally televised debates helped them begin to see the logic behind giving people free money.

    His performance in Houston could be crucial to sustaining his campaign’s newfound momentum. In the days immediately after the July debates, Mr. Yang’s campaign raked in about $1 million — more than a third of what his team had raised during the entirety of the second quarter. About 90 percent of the people who gave were new donors.

    The campaign is now on track to raise more than $5.5 million in the third quarter of the year, according to Yang advisers — more than the total amount Mr. Yang had raised during the previous 20 months that he spent as a candidate. While his operation does not rival the size or scale of his more established rivals’ campaigns, his team has ballooned to over 50 staff members from around 10 initially, as new offices have opened in Nashua and Portsmouth, N.H., and Des Moines and Davenport, Iowa. At the New York headquarters, the campaign has leased additional office space and is building an in-house digital team.

    He too spoke in New Hampshire. Crowdsurfing.

  • 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.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 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)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    MIT Media Lab Epstein Scandal Prompts Director Resignation

    September 8th, 2019

    Instapundit likes to note that America has the worst elites in its history, and the scandal engulfing MIT’s Media Lab is an example of the systematic rot.

    On Friday, a Ronan Farrow piece in The New Yorker revealed that not only was MIT’s Media Lab accepting money from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but was also systematically hiding the source of those donations so it could continue accepting them:

    The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”

    The financial entanglement revealed in the documents goes well beyond what has been described in public statements by M.I.T. and by Ito. The University has said that it received eight hundred thousand dollars from Epstein’s foundations, in the course of twenty years, and has apologized for accepting that amount. In a statement last month, M.I.T.’s president, L. Rafael Reif, wrote, “with hindsight, we recognize with shame and distress that we allowed MIT to contribute to the elevation of his reputation, which in turn served to distract from his horrifying acts. No apology can undo that.” Reif pledged to donate the funds to a charity to help victims of sexual abuse. On Wednesday, Ito disclosed that he had separately received $1.2 million from Epstein for investment funds under his control, in addition to five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars that he acknowledged Epstein had donated to the lab. A spokesperson for M.I.T. said that the university “is looking at the facts surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s gifts to the institute.”

    The documents and sources suggest that there was more to the story. They show that the lab was aware of Epstein’s history—in 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution—and of his disqualified status as a donor. They also show that Ito and other lab employees took numerous steps to keep Epstein’s name from being associated with the donations he made or solicited.

    The piece goes on to cite numerous instances of donations being received from Epstein, or solicited by Epstein from others, and of Epstein’s name being kept out of official records by various stratagems, including marking his donations as “anonymous.”

    In the wake of the revelations, Ito not only resigned as Director of the Media Lab, but of numerous other foundations:

    Almost immediately, the M.I.T. official, Joichi Ito, left the boards of three other organizations: the MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The New York Times Company, where he had been a board member since 2012. He also left a visiting professorship at Harvard.

    How is it that everyone in America’s elite institutions seems only two hops away from a convicted pedophile? And what the hell is Bill Gates doing letting Jeffrey Epstein direct his donations? (Spokesmen for Gates have strenuously denied the charge, but the Farrow piece suggests otherwise.)

    Speaking of our elites, Ito donated money to Beto O’Rourke’s Texas senate campaign campaign, as well as Lawrence Lessig’s abortive presidential run.

    Elites still gobsmacked that American voters would choose Donald Trump to be President should take a good, hard look at those sacred, venerable institutions they revere. When even a respected, ostensibly non-political, technocratic institution like MIT feels that it’s perfectly acceptable to not only play footsie with a convicted pedophile, but to falsify records to hide that fact, in order to keep the money flowing, then maybe the rot is too pervasive for voters to worry about the lesser character flaws of the man we’ve hired to muck out the Augean stables.

    ThinkProgress Shuts Down

    September 7th, 2019

    The hard lefty site that warned us about the scourge of breasterants is now no more:

    Left-wing website ThinkProgress is shutting down after failing to find a buyer, according to the Daily Beast.

    Launched by the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress (CAP) which had been hemorrhaging cash to keep the site afloat, ThinkProgress came under severe financial strain after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 US election – and not one liberal billionaire was willing to step in with what would be relative pocket change to keep it afloat.

    I’m quickly depleting my Strategic Nelson Reserve.

    Also this:

    “The staff unionized in 2015 as a result of editorial friction and they proceeded to try to wrestle editorial control away from the top people at CAP.”

    I’m surprised it took them this long to shut it down…

    LinkSwarm for September 6, 2019

    September 6th, 2019

    For all this talk of hurricanes, it’s rained like five minutes in the last eight weeks here in Austin…

  • Imagine that there’s a long, informative paragraph here explaining the latest twists and turns of the Brexit saga, because I have no friging clue what’s going on as of today. The House of Commons narrowly ruled out a no-deal Brexit, but the House of Lords vows to block it, Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed to call an early election, but evidently the votes don’t exist for that either, so who knows? Maybe this Jim Geraghty piece will do the trick, but it’s already two days old, so…
  • The American economy looks an awful lot like full employment.
  • “Defense secretary greenlights $3.6 billion for 175 miles of border wall.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Trump’s gonna win in a landslide.” Here’s why.
  • Robert Mugabe, the brutal, incompetent ex-dictator of Zimbabwe, has died, but not before he destroyed his country’s economy through Marxist policies, land confiscation and hyperinflation. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Remember when Democrats swore up and down they weren’t going to take our guns? They’ve stopped pretending:

    The media should stop using absurdly lazy phrases like “mandatory gun buybacks.” Unless the politician they’re talking about is in the business of selling firearms, it’s impossible for him to “buy back” anything. No government official—not Joe Biden, not Beto O’Rourke, not any of the candidates who now support “buyback” programs—has ever sold firearms.

    What Democrats propose can be more accurately described as “the first American gun confiscation effort since Lexington and Concord,” or some variation on that theme. Although tax dollars will be meted out in an effort to incentivize volunteers, the policy is to confiscate AR-15s, the vast majority of which have been legally purchased by Americans who have undergone background checks and never used a gun for a criminal purpose.

    The “mandatory gun buyback” exemplifies the impracticality and absurdity of do-somethingism (although Biden’s proposal to ban “magazines that hold bullets”—so most guns—is also a contender!). Democrats want to turn millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals overnight for refusing to adhere to a law that retroactively transforms the exercise of a constitutional right into a crime.

    And they do it without any evidence that it would curtail rare mass shootings or save lives.

  • Indeed, Democratic plans for gun control aren’t about reducing crime, they’re about complete civilian disarmament:

    emocrats are going after guns for two reasons. First, since the advent of the big-government Democrat Party under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they have increasingly opposed people having arms with which they might most easily defend themselves against government overreach.

    After imposing the NFA and GCA, primarily to restrict guns particularly useful for defensive purposes, Democrats in the late 1970s and 1980s supported campaigns to get handguns banned. In 1986, when most members of the House of Representatives were not present, Democrats snuck into the otherwise favorable Firearms Owners’ Protection Act an amendment banning newly manufactured fully-automatic firearms. In 1989, they began campaigning to ban various semi-automatic firearms. Democrats also signed amicus briefs supporting the District of Columbia’s handgun ban in Heller.

    Second, midway through the Obama administration, “progressives” decided to use “guns” as a core issue around which to rally their voter base.

    Also:

    Democrats claim that the Supreme Court never considered the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to arms before Heller. To the contrary, the court did so in U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), Presser v. Illinois (1886), Miller v. Texas (1894), U.S. v. Miller (1939), and U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990). Heller was only the first case in which the court was asked specifically to state whose right the amendment protects.

    (Hat tip: Karl Rehn.)

  • Kurt Schlichter makes the same argument in more pungent form:

    No gun bans, ever. You feel us?

    But you can argue about gun rights if you want to – here are some suggestions how – but I prefer the threat of the total political destruction of those who would betray us. That’s not because our arguments are weak – our arguments are ironclad – but because arguments mean nothing anymore, since the goal of the gun grabbers is not enacting good policy. If it were, they wouldn’t be targeting law-abiding citizens like us. Nor would they have tolerated decades of bloodbaths in every Democrat big city. They would have unleashed the cops to bust the drug-dealing, gang-banging scumbags who wander about loose today because the liberals in charge simply do not care about scores of dead inner-city citizens.

    There’s no good faith argument to be had because our gooey elite, supported by the Ahoy Division of Fredocon submissives eager to once again receive their ration of establishment table scraps, don’t care about facts or reason. They already have their objective and they aren’t going to let bourgeois conceits like “evidence” and “rights” get in their way.

    They want power, and they want to demonstrate their power over those knuckle-dragging cisgender Jesus people who work for a living, like you, by taking away a right that is central to your conception of yourself as an American citizen. Guns represent your power to protect yourself and your family, and your power to remove a tyrannical government. Taking that from you allows them the delightful opportunity to rub your face in your own submission, and it puts you in your place. Oh, and there’s also the practical value of depriving you of the power to remove a tyrannical government, since that’s what the elite aspires to enact. Disarmed, you are at their mercy and, as the history of left-wing governments teaches, they have none for such as you.

  • San Francisco’s government goes full retard, declares the NRA a “terrorist organization.” You can probably smell the lawsuits from here, assuming that’s not just homeless feces…
  • Former General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis says that Obama and Biden really screwed up Iraq.
  • Liberals embrace the Thanos option:

    No idea should be as discredited as the irrational fear of too many people, yet this Malthusian temptation has somehow managed to avoid the stigma it deserves. The belief popularized by [Paul] Ehrlich, that the planet has a finite “carrying capacity” and that we’re currently running up against it, has justified some of the most abhorrent episodes of state-sponsored bigotry and eugenics since the end of World War II. The United States, in cooperation with groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, justified the sterilization of low-income Native American and Puerto Rican women through population control hysteria. In the developing world, the goal of ensuring “sustainable” population levels led organizations like the World Bank to create incentives for voluntary sterilization and punishments for larger families. The campaign went so far as to include the USAID-backed dissemination of untested and potentially hazardous contraceptive devices in 60 developing countries.

    Ehrlich has a habit of being wrong. He claimed that the average American lifespan would decline to just 42-years-old by 1980. In 1970, he predicted that “the death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” That same year, he warned that “all important animal life in the sea will be extinct” by 1980. At least 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in what he dubbed “the great die-off” between 1980 and 1989. “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people,” Ehrlich said in 1971. The Stanford Professor evinces no contrition about his errors. “As I’ve said many times,” he warned as recently as last year, “‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell.’”

    Though the population controllers have not altered their diagnosis or recommendations in the last 40 years, the world around them has changed dramatically. Between 1981 and 2008, 700 million people emerged from extreme poverty even as the world’s population increased by 48 percent. The elimination of subsistence living is no longer a utopian prospect but an attainable goal. Global life expectancy grew by 5.5 years between 2000 and 2016, with the gap between the sexes remaining stable. Global food production has risen to meet demand, and the number of people suffering from undernourishment declined by half between 1960 and 2008. Deaths attributable to global conflict have declined to proportional rates almost unknown in human history. This revolution in human existence is a product of two conditions: the triumph of the market over its socialistic alternatives in the last decades of the 20th century and the increasing number of people who participate in that market, augmenting the incentives associated with innovation and growth.

  • “A Very Fast, Very Safe, Very SLIMM Nuclear Reactor.” Thorium molten salt design. Would like to see how a working prototype of this compares to comparable prototypes of fast integral reactions and pebble bed designs. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)
  • Thanks to Venezuela, FARC is back. Because why feed your people when you can back a fellow communist terrorist organization instead? You submitted this to FARK with a funnier headline. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Has actor Jared Leto formed a cult? Sure seems so. I was unaware he was in a band called 30 Seconds to Mars, I only know him (by reputation) as the Joker in Suicide Squad. Since I just saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I’d rather keep cult leaders away from Margot Robbie…
  • Hey hey, my my. Rock and roll is gonna die:

    Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).

    A few of these legends might manage to live into their 90s, despite all the … wear and tear to which they’ve subjected their bodies over the decades. But most of them will not.

  • Ed Driscoll thinks Hollywood may be heading the same way:

    Music concerts and the film industry are really the last media institutions that still require an audience to turn up en masse in a single location to consume its product. No wonder Hollywood relies on the fumes of Marvel and DC comic books, plus midcentury franchises such as James Bond, Star Trek, Star Wars, Mission: Impossible and Brit-lit such as the Lord of the Rings, the Narnia franchise and Paddington to keep itself alive. No wonder rock music as a whole already has one foot in the grave.

    In other words, the last remaining universally known products of mass media are getting very old and their freshness sell-by dates have long expired. And there’s no mass media left to create something that strikes a sufficiently universal chord in either rock music and Hollywood to influence the zeitgeist any longer. Rock music has arguably already given way to rap as the most popular genre of American teenagers. Hollywood could be in deep trouble if the public turns away from superhero and sci-fi franchises the same way that moviegoers abandoned the musical as a genre in the late 1960s. It’s not like either industry hadn’t seen these trends coming, and they will each be “riding the gravy train” for as long as possible, as Roger Waters (age 75) would say. But for both, the end of the line may be in sight.

  • A teapot tempest example of Our Stupid Media’s incompetent mendacity. Appellate lawyer Leif Olson resigned from the Labor Department on August 30, less than four hours after Bloomberg Law asked the department for comment on a Facebook conversation that referenced anti-Semitic tropes. The posts Bloomberg Law referenced had been making fun of anti-semites, which was clear from context, but Bloomberg Law spun them as antisemitic, Because Trump. Now Olson has rejoined the agency, but Bloomberg Law still hasn’t apologized for a lying smear job.
  • Secrets of a 911 dispatcher.
  • Game developer who thought people were trying to drive him to suicide commits suicide.
  • Hong Kong on Hold

    September 5th, 2019

    Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam formally withdrew the mainland extradition bill that sparked months of protests.

    Did this quell all protests against communist Chinese rule?

    It did not.

    The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong continue against the wishes of those in charge. High school students began the school year in gas masks and joining hands to form human chains. College students held a strike, waved flags, and chanted protest slogans.

    After a summer of demonstrating in the streets, outside municipal offices and in the airport, students refuted the government’s wishful assertion that once they returned to school the months of pro-democracy protests that have roiled the city would come to an end.

    “The government thinks it can quell the movement when students return to school, because we can only come out during the summer,” said Owen Lo, 16, a high school student. “But that’s not true.”

    He said he was afraid of the repercussions he and other students might face but “seeing so many students selflessly gambling their future to express their demands to the government, it is infectious, and makes me want to come out and do something for Hong Kong.”

    One of the challenges the protesters have faced has been Chinese censoring of the internet. It appears they have found a new system to use, Mesh messaging.

    How do you communicate when the government censors the internet? With a peer-to-peer mesh broadcasting network that doesn’t use the internet.

    That’s exactly what Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters are doing now, thanks to San Fransisco startup Bridgefy’s Bluetooth-based messaging app. The protesters can communicate with each other — and the public — using no persistent managed network.

    And it’s led to swift growth for Bridgefy: downloads are up almost 4,000% over the past 60 days, according to Apptopia estimates (Apptopia is an app metrics company).

    The app can connect people via standard Bluetooth across an entire city, thanks to a mesh network. Chatting is speediest with people who are close, of course, within a hundred meters (330 feet), but you can also chat with people who are farther away. Your messages will simply “hop” via other Bridgefy users’ phones until they find your intended target.

    Others not satisfied with the extradition bill’s demise? Hong Kong Christians.

    The withdrawal of an extradition bill that threatened religious freedom in Hong Kong is not enough to satisfy Christians and others amid protests there, a Christian advocate told Baptist Press Wednesday (Sept. 4).

    “Their anger lies with the excessive use of police/force, police brutality, and prosecution of protestors or activists in the past few months,” International Christian Concern’s (ICC) Gina Goh told BP.

    “These are the direct results of (Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie) Lam’s refusal to withdraw the bill in the first place,” noted Goh, ICC’s regional manager for Southeast Asia.

    “Eight lives perished for this cause,” she said, “and the demonstrators want to continue to pursue justice and democracy so their fellows did not die in vain.” Goh referenced suicides since June, which climbed to nine Wednesday, of Hong Kong residents who expressed frustration and anger with current events in Hong Kong.

    All of this may remind you of another incident where Chinese citizens stood up to their government and demanded democracy. That didn’t turn out so well.

    Though Hong Kongers had rebelled against the authorities before, the Tiananmen protests were what awakened their political consciousness, and their sense of the difference between popular sovereignty and state sovereignty became acute. The CCP drew the opposite lesson, becoming so fearful of popular political mobilization that it insisted that Hong Kong’s laws be effectively unchanged from 1984, when the Sino-British Declaration on the city’s handover was agreed, through to the official transfer in 1997, unless reforms were authorized by the Party itself. It even demanded that a labor law passed in early 1997 guaranteeing the rights of collective bargaining be scrapped, which it was soon after the handover.

    Since then, Beijing has sought to pass an antisedition law, attempted to promulgate “patriotic education” in Hong Kong, and restricted the territory’s ability to choose its chief executive. The heavy-handed, unyielding stance Beijing has taken against this summer’s protests has only served to “pour oil on the flames,” as a Chinese proverb says, pushing Hong Kongers into a corner: They must fight for their freedom once more, or become slaves to Beijing’s imperial rule.

    How much can the ongoing demonstrations in Hong Kong be compared to Tiananmen? On the protesters’ side are plenty of similarities. For one thing, the “silent majority” of the population did not always remain passive or follow party orders in 1989. Ordinary Beijing residents were the ones who risked their lives to brave the fire as tanks and machine guns made their way to the square. Much of the same is happening in Hong Kong today: Students and young people have been at the forefront of the rallies, but a wide array of residents have joined them, including civil servants, accountants, medical personnel, the elderly, and others.

    Yet the differences are also significant. The regime in Beijing has changed a lot in 30 years. The Chinese economy today is far larger, and Hong Kong’s proportion of it substantially smaller. The tools available to the state are also much greater than they were in 1989, with a more powerful security apparatus and myriad economic levers at its disposal. At the same time, Hong Kong’s institutional infrastructure is far more advanced than any other Chinese city in its ability to serve Beijing’s global ambitions. Hong Kong still operates a U.S.-dollar-denominated currency market that is part of the global financial system, the only one in China, and is key to Beijing’s many projects worldwide, not least the Belt and Road Initiative. So Beijing would be loath to go too far in eroding these institutions. Donald Trump has also linked the CCP’s response to the protests to his ongoing trade war with China.

    Beijing has done well to grant Hong Kong’s protesters some of what they want in withdrawing the extradition bill. Yet China must also investigate police abuse, give amnesty to arrested protesters, and reopen political reform toward comprehensive universal suffrage in the territory.

    Of course, it may not, reckoning it can wear down Hong Kong’s protesters. Given the city’s history and its rapidly politicized population, that would be a miscalculation.

    I would not expect Beijing to acquiesce to additional democratization demands. Then again, I wouldn’t expect them to allow the extradition bill to be withdrawn, either. This suggests that China’s economic position, already battered by the President Donald Trump’s trade war, is more precarious than most realize. I suspect that as much as 40% of China’s “economic miracle” is smoke and mirrors, built on an unrecorded mountain of bad debt that’s been siphoned off into untold millions of private pockets. Maybe that’s the calculation that’s prevented China from Tiananmening the Hong Kong protestors en masse, lest they send the entire house of cards tumbling down. But as I’ve stated before, if push comes to shove, I doubt China’s ruling communist party will hesitate to slaughter thousands (if not more) if it feels its grip on power is even remotely in danger of slipping.

    South Dakota Democratic Party Gives Up

    September 4th, 2019

    You know who’s not benefiting from the Trump economic boom? The South Dakota Democratic Party:

    The South Dakota Democratic Party will no longer have a physical presence in the state.

    The state party is closing its offices in Sioux Falls and Rapid City at the end of September, and party staff will begin working remotely due to the party’s dwindling finances, according to SDDP Chair Paula Hawks. The party is also canceling a Black Hills fundraising event scheduled for next month. No layoffs related to the party’s financial situation have taken place, Hawks said.

    Snip.

    The SDDP started the month of July, the most recent reporting period, with $31,267 in the bank and ended the month with $3,181, according to the Federal Elections Commission. The party’s finances have been on a downward trend this year from $88,127 in cash on hand at the start of the year. The party also receives at least $10,000 monthly from the Democratic National Party, according to FEC reports.

    Republicans hold all statewide elected offices, and have done so since the 2014 election. In the statehouse, Republicans hold 30 state senate seats to the Democrats 5, and 59 House seats to the Democrats 11.

    For all of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign flameout, his stint as chairman of the DNC featured a 50 state strategy, which helped Democrats lay the groundwork for taking both the House and Senate in 2006. By contrast, first Obama (with Organizing for America) and then Hillary Clinton (who gutted the DNC to secretly launder money to her own campaign) starved the DNC grass roots.

    Do you think it’s possible that the Democratic Party’s penchant for graft and corruption have finally impacted some state parties to the point they can no longer function? The fact that the SDDP can’t even afford an office suggests either extraordinary unpopularity, or actual embezzlement (or both).

    I even checked into office space rental costs in Sioux Falls. I found things in the range of 75¢ a square foot for 750 square feet. My advanced calculator-based math skills tells me that works out to a grand total of $562.50 a month. Let’s call it $1,000 a month with phone, electricity, Internet, etc. The national party is sending them ten grand a month and they can’t even spend a tenth of that to keep the lights on?

    Something doesn’t add up.

    Dave Chappelle on Jussie Smollett

    September 3rd, 2019

    From his latest Netflix special, Dave Chappelle says what all of us already know about Jussie Smollett’s “hate crime,” with a bit more profanity.

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for September 2, 2019

    September 2nd, 2019

    Gillibrand is Out, CNN is going to subject America to 7 hours of climate change blather because they hate America (and ratings), Biden suffers imaginary flashbacks, and the next debates loom. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Polls

  • Quinnipiac: Biden 30, Warren 19, Sanders 15, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, Yang 3, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, de Blasio 1.
  • USA Today/Suffolk University: Biden 32, Warren 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Yang 3, O’Rourke 2, Booker 2, Castro 1, Ryan 1. “The contenders who did not receive the support of a single one of the 424 likely Democratic voters surveyed included Montana Governor Steve Bullock, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maryland Rep. John Delaney, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Miramar (Florida) Mayor Wayne Messam and former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak.”
  • Economist/YouGov (page 166): Biden 24, Warren 20, Sanders 14, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, Yang 2, Gabbard 2, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2, Bennet 1, Booker 1, Bullock 1, de Blasio 1, Gillibrand 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1.
  • Emerson: Biden 31, Sanders 24. Warren 15, Harris 10, Yang 4, Buttigieg 3, Booker 3, Gabbard 3, O’Rourke 2, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1.
  • Politico/Morning Consult: Biden 33, Sanders 20, Warren 15, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5. Booker 3, Yang 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1.
  • The Hill/Harris X: Biden 30, Sanders 17, Warren 14, Harris 4, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2. Sample size: 465, 190 males, 275 females. That’s a pretty small samples and a pretty strong sex skew.
  • Monmouth: Sanders 20, Warren 20, Biden 19, Harris 8, Booker 4, Buttigieg 4, Yang 3, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2, Williamson 2. This is the poll that launched a thousand “Biden is toast!” pieces last week, only for every other poll to come out and go “Yeah, not so much.”
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets. Warren is now a 10 point favorite over Biden…
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Ten Democrats qualified for the next round of debates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, Warren and Yang. 538 staffers debate the debate. “Isn’t Biden presented with the most downside risk now that the focus gets tightened to 10 candidates? Instead of having to worry about mainly one top-tier challenge (Harris or Bernie or whomever), he now risks getting outshone by any or all of them.”
  • Believe it or not, the criteria to make the October debates is actually easier.

    Here’s the catch: To qualify for the fourth round of debates in October, the candidates must meet the same requirements as those for September. In other words, candidates can raise money or improve in polling with a much longer deadline; for this reason, at least a few candidates will stick around until October.

    Of the candidates who failed to qualify, only Gabbard, Steyer, and Williamson came close, so it’s unlikely any of them will call it quits over the next month. (Steyer fell short only one point from qualifying for September’s debates.)

    After failing to qualify, both Delaney and Ryan have reiterated their commitment to their campaigns. “We’re moving forward,” Ryan said on Morning Joe on Thursday. “This is not going to stop us at all … we’re picking up endorsements left and right.” And in a story published yesterday over at the Atlantic, Benett has already stated his commitment to stay in the race until the 2020 Iowa caucuses in February.

    All of this leaves us with Bullock and de Blasio, our predictions for the next candidates to drop out of the race.

  • “CNN to host live 7-hour climate change town hall with 2020 Democrats.” I’m pretty sure this is outlawed by the Geneva Convention…
  • Nation Begs Jesus To Return Before Democrats’ 7-Hour Town Hall On Climate Change.”
  • All the Democrats except Biden (who’s staying mum) support union efforts to unionize big tech.
  • “2020 Democrats Back Funding Abortion Overseas With Taxpayer Dollars.” Of course they do.
  • “Cory Booker meditates. Kamala Harris does SoulCycle. Beto O’Rourke eats dirt.” Pretty much posting it just for the headline.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s staying in the race despite not making the debate. “Bennet says he plans to do well in the 2020 Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.” In other news, I plan to date lots of hot supermodels this fall…
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden managed to mangle three different war stories into one. (Heh: “Biden Claims He Was There 3,000 Years Ago When Isildur Took The Ring And The Strength Of Men Failed.”) Chances are good that Biden’s gaffes are not going to get better:

    Biden is probably mentally and physically fine — or within the parameters of fine for a man who turns 77 in November and who never had the greatest verbal discipline at the height of his career.

    When Biden tells a story where he gets just about all of the details wrong, when he mixes up New Hampshire and Vermont, or calls former British prime minister Theresa May “Margaret Thatcher,” or when he says, “those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president” or when he mangles the address of his campaign web site at the end of a debate, it’s probably just a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s behaving like a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s.

    I believe that if Biden were genuinely mentally or physically unwell and incapable of handling the duties of the presidency, his family and friends would sit him down and make him withdraw from the race. No one would want their loved one to go out into the national spotlight and stumble and be embarrassed. Watching a loved one succumb to age and gradually lose their mental acuity and memory from Alzheimer’s is an extremely painful process.

    (In a strange way, “I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts,” is kind of a cute and charming unofficial slogan. With the news being what it is these days, Mr. Vice President, we’ve all felt the need to reassure others and ourselves of that fact.)

    But even assuming that these are just normal septuagenarian memory lapses, it’s more than a little uncomfortable to watch Biden appear to forget Barack Obama’s name, saying during a recent appearance, “he’s saying it was president . . . (pause) My boss’s, it’s his fault.” If part of the reason to vote for Biden is his superior experience and knowledge in foreign policy, it’s a little unnerving to hear Biden say, “I don’t know the new prime minister of England. He looks like Donald Trump, I know that.” Really? Does the former veep need glasses?

    The problem for Biden and his campaign is that nothing gets easier from here. Running for president consists almost entirely of long days of extemporaneous speaking in front of cameras and getting asked difficult questions from both reporters and voters. It is physically and mentally grueling marathon even to the healthiest and youngest candidates. Sure, the Biden campaign can rely on ads where Biden barely speaks and try to get him to stick to a prepared script as much as possible. But we know this man. Biden likes to talk. He likes to tell stories. He will tell stories where he doesn’t really remember the details, fills in the blanks with how he wanted it to have happened, and insist, “this is the God’s honest truth.”

    Kevin Williamson doesn’t think Biden is senile, he thinks he’s just a liar:

    In the most recent example, detailed by the Washington Post, Biden made up a story in which he as vice president displayed personal courage and heroism in traveling to a dangerous war zone in order to recognize the service of an American soldier who had distinguished himself in a particularly dramatic way. It was a moving story. “This is the God’s truth,” he concluded. “My word as a Biden.”

    But his word as a Biden isn’t worth squat, as the Post showed, reporting that “Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.” Which is a nice way of saying: Biden lied about an act of military heroism in order to aggrandize his own role in the story.

    Like Hillary Rodham Clinton under fictitious sniper fire, Biden highlighted his own supposed courage in the face of physical danger: “We can lose a vice president. We can’t lose many more of these kids.”

    If Biden here is lying with malice aforethought, then he ought to be considered morally disqualified for the office. If he is senescent, then he obviously is unable to perform the duties associated with the presidency, and asking him to do so would be indecent, dangerous, and unpatriotic.

    The evidence points more toward moral disability than mental disability, inasmuch as Biden has a long career of lying about precisely this sort of thing.

    The most dramatic instance of that is Biden’s continued insistence on lying about the circumstances surrounding the horrifying deaths of his wife and daughter in a terrible car accident. It is not the case, as Biden has said on many occasions, that they were killed by a drunk driver, an irresponsible trucker who “drank his lunch,” as Biden put it. That is a pure fabrication, and a slander on the man who was behind the wheel of that truck and who was haunted by the episode until the end of his days. Imagine yourself in the position of that man’s family, whose natural sympathy for Biden’s loss must be complicated by outrage at his persistent lying about the relevant events.

    Why would Biden lie about the death of his wife and daughter? Why would he lie about the already-heroic efforts of American soldiers? In both cases, to make the story more dramatic, to give himself a bigger and more impressive narrative arc. That he would subordinate other people — real people, living and dead — to his own political ambition in such a callous and demeaning way counsels strongly against entrusting him with any more political power than that which he already has wielded.

    Jonah Goldberg thinks Biden should run a front porch campaign:

    Biden is crushing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he is a known quantity, having been on the public stage for decades, most notably as vice president for eight years under Barack Obama. Biden’s lead in matchups between Trump and various Democratic candidates is his single greatest advantage in the Democratic primaries.

    The risk for Biden is that he’s not a good presidential campaigner, as his two prior attempts demonstrated. While he may be showing signs of age, the truth is that he’s always been prone to gaffes, malapropisms, exaggerations, and misstatements. Every time Biden opens his mouth in an unscripted situation, there’s a chance he’ll say something goofy that undercuts his elder-statesman status.

    So why play the game the way the others are playing it? In most sports, when you’re ahead by double digits, the smart (though boring) strategy is to play it safe and sit on your lead. Getting into arguments with political Lilliputians such as Senator Cory Booker and Andrew Yang elevates their profile while lowering Biden’s. And if Biden loses his cool and starts shouting, “And you can take those ducks to the bank!” or “My pants are made of iron!” the game is over.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Booker ally pressured Newark water contractors to donate to mayor’s campaign, jailed official told FBI.” (Insert raised Spock eyebrow.) “Why I vote ‘Hell, no!’ on a vegan president.”
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. He visited Muscatine, Iowa. Maybe he got a chance to visit the National Pearl Button Museum
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hey, remember all the way back to a few months ago to when Mayor Pete was The Next Big Thing? Then it turned out that Mayor Pete wasn’t so good at the mayoring part:

    Reports of violent crime increased nearly 18 percent during the first seven months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018. The number of people being shot has also risen markedly this year, after dropping last year. The city’s violent crime rate is double the average for American cities its size.

    Policing problems in South Bend came to national attention on June 16, when a white sergeant fatally shot a 54-year-old black resident, Eric Logan. The officer’s body camera was not turned on, which was widely seen as a sign of lax standards in the department. Mr. Buttigieg found himself flying home again, regularly, to face the fury of some black citizens and the frustrations of many others.

    It is the great paradox of Mr. Buttigieg’s presidential candidacy: His record on public safety and policing, once largely a footnote in his political biography, has overshadowed his economic record in South Bend, which he had spent years developing as a calling card for higher office.

    “When he came in, the goal was to help turn the city around. That had nothing to do with the police department,” said Kareemah Fowler, until recently the South Bend city clerk.

    Mr. Buttigieg’s image as a young, results-oriented executive continues to make him popular with many upper-income white liberals. They have delivered an overflowing war chest to his campaign: He had the best recent fund-raising quarter of any Democrat in the race, pulling in $24.8 million.

    But criticism of Mr. Buttigieg’s oversight of the police has damaged his viability as a Democratic presidential candidate, given the huge influence of black voters in choosing the party’s nominee. He has slipped in the polls in recent months, from double-digit poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire in the spring to the single digits more recently. In a recent Fox News poll, he earned less than 1 percent support from black Democratic primary voters.

    So what’s a guy that’s suddenly not-so-hot but still have lots of campaign money to spend do? Obviously beef up his campaign staff. Especially in Iowa and New Hampshire. Buttigieg is in better shape than the also rans, or, for that matter, Harris, who wasn’t able to translate her brief turn in the sun into a fundraising haul the way the Buttigieg campaign did. If Biden does flame out, Buttigieg is still best positioned to pick up the mantle of “Well, he’s not as crazy as the rest,” and a lot of DNC money seems to be hedging that way.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. This time it’s Politico offering up the Castro failure-to-launch piece:

    The audience laughs and cheers and there is time for one more question, and it is the big one: How are you going to beat Trump?

    Just as Castro begins to answer, an airplane, landing at nearby Manchester airport, flies low over the party. No one can hear anything over the plane’s growling engines. But Castro keeps talking, smiling, jabbing the air in front of him, uttering words only he understands or can hear.

    This should be Julián Castro’s moment. At a time when issues of immigration and family separation, race and the border are front and center in the national consciousness, the story of a third-generation Mexican-American would seem tailor-made to resonate emotionally with voters.

    Snip.

    And yet, as he spoke to Democratic voters in New Hampshire, Castro’s campaign seemed to be on the cusp of ending. Despite being pegged as the future of the Democratic Party almost as soon as he arrived on the scene as San Antonio mayor in 2009, and as the “Latino Obama” after he delivered a memorable keynote to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, here he was, stuck in the third tier of a sprawling field, polling around the 1 percent mark. And most crucially, he had not yet qualified for the third Democratic debate in September, which required polling at 2 percent to make it on the stage.

    Snip.

    And yet Elizabeth Warren is the “policy candidate.” And Pete Buttigieg, seven years younger than Castro, is the Millennial Mayor candidate. Joe Biden is the one with better ties to the Obama administration. And even though Castro proposes taxing inheritances of $2 million or more, raising the capital gains tax rate, providing a $3,000 per child tax credit, paid family and medical leave and a $15 nationwide minimum wage, Bernie Sanders is the candidate known for fighting income inequality. And somehow, despite being able to trace his lineage to the American colonies of the 18th century, Beto O’Rourke, a son of El Paso and fluent in Spanish, has become the candidate of immigration and the new Texas.

    Snip.

    Although Castro had been considering a statewide run in Texas for years, probably for governor, before O’Rourke’s 2018 run against Ted Cruz it was widely thought that the state wasn’t ready to elect a Democrat yet. After losing the veepstakes, he had planned to remain in Washington, angle for a job in the Hillary Clinton administration, possibly as secretary of Education or Transportation or in the Office of Management and Budget, or at some politically influential think tank.

    Instead he moved back to San Antonio in 2017 and signaled his interest in running for president almost immediately. He started a PAC, Opportunity First, which raised a half-million dollars and supported “young, progressive leaders” around the country. He wrote a pre-campaign memoir, An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up From My American Dream, which details his rise from the barrios of West San Antonio through Stanford, Harvard Law, San Antonio’s political scene and to the Obama administration, with his twin, Joaquin, younger by one minute, with him all the way.

    But other than the book and the PAC, Castro really wasn’t a major figure in the “Invisible Primary” period after the 2016 election. He wasn’t a regular on “Pod Save America,” there weren’t glossy magazine profiles or stories of him stumping for down-ballot candidates in the early primary states. It is hard to go from Housing secretary to presidential front-runner, and much harder when you are last seen in the public eye as being not picked for your party’s presidential ticket. It is telling that few of the most sought-after political operatives in Democratic circles rushed to join Castro’s campaign even though he had signaled he was in the race for a long time. Instead of veterans of the Obama and Clinton or Sanders campaigns, the Castro team is filled with many longtime loyalists from San Antonio and his Housing secretary days.

    The most likely and most obvious political path for Castro would be to consolidate the Latino vote, a population which comprises an increasingly growing share of the population but one that, frustratingly for Democratic strategists, doesn’t vote in nearly the numbers that it could. Latinos are the now the largest minority group in the country and account for about 10 percent to 20 percent of the Democratic Party electorate. 2020 polling on Latinos is scant, but the polling that does exist shows that immigration isn’t the big concern among Latinos that many analysts assume it to be. Jobs and health care rank above immigration, and polling shows that Latinos tend to favor the candidates who are preferred by the rest of the Democratic electorate like Warren, Sanders and Biden. A recent open-ended Pew survey put Castro below even Buttigieg in a poll of Latino Democrats.

    Castro mouths the words, but he doesn’t hear the music.

  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Not in the debates. And he might finish destroying New York City’s public schools:

    Picture the Pacific Ocean after an underwater nuclear catastrophe, and you’ll have some idea of what Bill de Blasio’s public-school system is like.

    There would be a few safe islands scattered around, but they would be separated by thousands of square miles of radioactive seawater — patrolled by mutant sharks, fire-breathing giant squids and unnecessarily rude sea turtles.

    And what does de Blasio think when he surveys this immense realm of inequality?

    “Hey, why not blow up the islands? That way everyone is equal. Problem solved!”

    The mayor sent his own kids to be educated on those rare, precious islands. Chiara de Blasio, now 24, attended the selective Beacon School, a public high school that has tough admissions standards, in Hell’s Kitchen. Dante de Blasio, 21, graduated from the even more selective Brooklyn Tech, admission to which is granted entirely based on performance on a famously difficult test.

    Yet de Blasio, the longtime Iowa resident who owes New Yorkers a large salary refund for all the days we’ve been paying him to wander the Midwest sucking on corn dogs, set up a commission to investigate the problem of de-facto segregation at New York City schools.

    The city has a lot of underperforming high schools, these schools are filled with black children, and de Blasio is doing zilch to help them.

    That’s because the teachers union won’t allow any solution that even whispers a hint of a rumor about the main problem at these schools, which is the large number of radioactive sharks: the lousy teachers who work there.

    As de Blasio knew it would, the commission he stocked with his ideological cronies recommended this past week to get rid of the Department of Education’s selective schools and ax the Gifted & Talented (G &T) programs.

    These programs operate within schools — sometimes effectively setting up a good school within an otherwise mediocre or bad one. That amounts to creating islands of safety away from the tired, lazy, inept, ambition-destroying teachers whose only goal is to kill time until their pensions kick in.

    I know this story is only barely relevant to the 2020 Democrat Presidential Race. Much like de Blasio’s campaign…

  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still running, despite missing the debate. Complains that the DNC is kind of like Thanos, except Thanos didn’t kill half the universe based on under-performing poll numbers.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s not dropping out. More than any other candidate, Gabbard seems to be screwed by the DNC debate rules. “Rep. Gabbard has exceeded 2% support in 26 national and early state polls, but only two of them are on the DNC’s ‘certified’ list. Many of the uncertified polls, including those conducted by highly reputable organizations such as The Economist and the Boston Globe, are ranked by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight as more accurate than some DNC ‘certified’ polls.” 538 on the same topic, noting Gabbard and Steyer might be in under different criteria.
  • Update: New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Dropped Out. She dropped out August 29:

    Go back to Gillibrand’s biography. If you had a daughter who was accepted to Dartmouth and studied two semesters abroad in Beijing and Taiwan, you would probably be pretty proud. If she got into UCLA law school, and then was accepted for internships in her senator’s office and at the United Nations in Vienna, Austria, you would be proud of that, too. If, after law school, she got hired by one of Manhattan’s oldest and most distinguished law firms, and went on to get selected for coveted law clerk positions, you would probably be bragging to the neighbors.

    By a lot of standards, Gillibrand did what a bright and ambitious woman is supposed to do. In fact, by the standards of America’s self-labeled meritocratic elite, Gillibrand’s path to success is exactly what a young person is supposed to pursue. This comparison hasn’t been made much, but in this way she’s like Pete Buttigieg — the bright young son of professors at Notre Dame who is accepted to Harvard, moves on to Oxford, and immediately gets hired by McKinsey consulting. They’re both Type-A personalities with grades to match, carrying around golden resumes and heads full of answers that wow teachers, professors, and potential employers. Quite a few parents look at standout young people like this and wish their kids could be more like that.

    America’s self-labeled meritocracy (please avert your eyes from all the nepotism, bourgeoisie readers, it’s gauche to bring it up) unsubtly turns all aspects of life into a competition. You want to get the best grades, get into the best school, study under the best professors, get the best internships, get the best jobs, get the highest salary, move into the best house, drive the best car, have the biggest portfolio . . . This isn’t new; America has long had a competitive sense of “keeping up with the Joneses.” It’s easy to understand why many Americans would grow to find this rarely openly expressed but almost omnipresent mindset unappealing. People sigh about “the rat race.” Seemingly high-achieving workers hit burnout. People dream of winning the lottery and moving to some sparsely populated island somewhere and “leaving it all behind.” People crave a sense of being valued for who they are, not just for their big salary, prestigious job, or fancy car. A seemingly endless stream of nonfiction and fiction works explore “the cost of the American dream.”

    When you have a competition, there are usually going to be a few winners and a lot of people who “lose.” We conservatives have grumbled about “class envy” for a long time, but maybe some resentment is natural. People who have thrived in America’s “meritocracy” include Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Eric Schneiderman, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, Elizabeth Holmes. We’ve seen plenty of millionaires and self-proclaimed billionaires who turned out to be terrible human beings. We’ve seen plenty of celebrities demonstrate every repugnant behavior under the sun, to the point of self-destruction. Lots of people who are in the middle or bottom have reason to doubt the notion that the best really do rise to the top in America.

    When Kirsten Gillibrand — super accomplished, $500,000-per-year lawyer — turned her attention and ambitions to the political world, the best opportunity to run for office was a purple district in the middle of New York state. The top-tier Manhattan lawyer might not seem like the perfect fit, but she adapted, her opponent got caught in a scandal, and she won.

    There’s a particular circle of elite New York Democratic party and media voices who found Gillibrand to be exactly what they wanted; she had risen to the top, and other people at the top found her to be as close to perfect as they could imagine. Their swoon spurred those ridiculous-in-retrospect overestimations of her appeal as a presidential candidate: Politico (“Her moment has arrived”), GQ (“the most fearsome contender”), The New Yorker (“the new face of moral reform”), and Vogue (“she’s got newfound street cred among lefties and progressives”).

    The swoon started soon after her appointment to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. I love making fun of Vogue’s 2017 profile of Gillibrand, but the gushing in the 2010 profile — entitled, “In Hillary’s Footsteps” — is pretty over-the-top, too:

    “Gillibrand is nothing if not genuine, and through sheer force of personality she bends the occasion to suit her style, which is essentially folksy and earnest. She radiates kindness. But she is also direct and no-nonsense. Despite the fact that she is a Democrat (and a fairly progressive one, at that) and worked for fifteen years as a hotshot Manhattan lawyer, she seems utterly at ease among this crowd of mostly Republican farmers, with their rough hands and weathered faces.”

    For some reason, Iowa and New Hampshire farmers did not find her as appealing.

    Gillibrand kept getting compared to the character of Tracey Flick from Election, and perhaps that is indeed sexist. But let’s reexamine that character and that movie. On paper, the villain of the story is Matthew Broderick’s high school social studies teacher, who grows so infuriated and antagonistic to Reese Witherspoon’s Flick that he’s willing to try to cheat to ensure she doesn’t win the election for student body election. Technically, Flick is the victim in the story. But we, the audience, relate to Broderick. Flick is a fascinating but thoroughly unlikeable character, and she’s supposed to be one. At one point she declares, “I feel sorry for Mr. McAllister. I mean, anyone who’s stuck in the same little room, wearing the same stupid clothes, saying the exact same things year after year for all of his life, while his students go on to good colleges and move to big cities and do great things and make loads of money — he’s gotta be at least a little jealous. It’s like my mom says, the weak are always trying to sabotage the strong.” Tracey Flick doesn’t have much beyond her all-consuming ambition and determination, and probably the single most important characteristic is that we never see her actually caring about anyone besides herself, and perhaps the desire to make her mother proud. Why was Election a hit that is remembered and still referred to, two decades later? Because a lot of people knew high school class presidents who reminded them of Tracey Flick.

    I have two minor quibbles with this analysis, both related to the same facet of Gillibrand. One, Gillibrand’s rise strikes me as less meritocracy at work than credentialism (a point Geraghty implies without actually stating). In truth, nothing I’ve seen from Gillibrand suggests that she’s actually bright. It seems like liberal female New York political writers bestowed that unearned distinction on Gillibrand because she came across as one of them, someone with the right pedigree who held all the right fashionably liberal opinions. Gillibrand’s one-woman show of The Wokeist Sorority Girl is finally over. Good riddance:

    From the beginning, her upstart campaign was characterized by an enormous amount of virtue-mongering, insisting not only that her progressive bona fides made her superior to you, but that only she could help you comprehend exactly how backwards you are. In the last debate, for instance, she promised to traverse the suburbs explaining “institutional racism” and white privilege to white women.

    It was an interesting tactic from a candidate attempting to distinguish herself as a female candidate running for women, and it’s easy to see why the effort failed to gain much traction. The major policy centerpiece of her campaign was called “Fighting for women and families” and focused exclusively on issues like unlimited abortion rights, universal paid family leave, public education, and sexual harassment. Perhaps the most news attention she got all campaign came when she compared being pro-life to being racist. Light on substance, she needed a forum to peddle her platitudes, and without the debate stage, she had little hope of convincing Democrats to listen to her at all.

    The news that she had terminated her campaign came just a few days after a former Gillibrand staffer told the New York Post, “I don’t know that anyone even wants to see her on the debate stage. Everyone I have talked to finds her performative and obnoxious.”

    Because this is the last chance we’ll get to flog this dead equine, here’s 538 on how Gillibrand couldn’t get it done:

    On paper, though, Gillibrand’s campaign didn’t seem especially quixotic. She was on the national stage for more than a decade before throwing her hat in the ring, and established herself as a strong advocate for women’s rights issues such as paid family leave and sexual assault in the military. She was also explicitly pitching her candidacy toward groups like white college-educated suburban women, whose political enthusiasm had just helped sweep a record-breaking number of women into office in the 2018 midterms.

    So Gillibrand’s biggest problem may have simply been that there wasn’t a clear base for her in the Democratic electorate — at least not one for which there wasn’t also fierce competition in the rest of the primary field. After all, she was running against a number of other women who are also strong on issues like abortion rights and equal pay. Without another signature issue to help her stand out, she often got lost in the melee of the primary.

    Snip.

    In some ways, Gillibrand’s campaign may have also shown just how tricky outreach to women voters can be, even in a year where issues such as abortion and the #MeToo movement are prominent. Women make up about 60 percent of the Democratic base, but there isn’t a lot of evidence that they gravitate automatically toward female candidates because of their shared identity, or even because of shared priorities. In that Politico/Morning Consult poll, for instance, only 5 percent of Democratic women voters said that gender equality was a top voting priority. And Warren and Harris appear to be polling only very slightly better with women than men; that gap is actually bigger for Biden.

    She was truly the No One Cares candidate.

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Can she come back?

    Harris’ tumble in the Democratic primary race has worried donors and supporters after her launch attracted huge crowds amid high expectations. A rising charismatic and accomplished star, they did think she couldn’t go wrong. They also figured she could ride her early summer ascent to a face-off with the front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. After all, her decision to jolt her campaign by attacking Biden at the first candidate debate had initially proven successful — Harris had left him wobbly-kneed and doubted. New endorsements came in from the Congressional Black Caucus, along with a surge in donations, and media accounts of voters and insiders talking about her unique ability to “prosecute the case” against Donald Trump, as the former California attorney general likes to say.

    But last week a CNN national poll that had her at 17% support — in second place — in June now showed her in fourth place with only 5%. In the new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll out Wednesday, Harris is at 6% but now in fifth place, behind Pete Buttigieg.

    I’m going to go with “no.” Harris’ stumbles revealed that, like Gillibrand, her “charisma” was more media creation that real, and that she’s actually unpopular with black voters, a huge problem if the media positions you as ‘the black candidate.” “Five times prosecutor Kamala Harris got the wrong guy.”

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s one thing when randos say your presidential campaign is all-but-dead. It’s another thing when Walter Mondale says it.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. There’s no Messam news this week. His Twitter timeline is discussing preperations for Hurricane Dorian, so he’s evidently doing the job he actually has now, and will presumably continue having once he stops pretending he’s running for President. Maybe Mayor Pete could take notes…
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Far-left Democratic presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke announced over the weekend that if he is elected president, he intends to confiscate tens of millions of semi-automatic firearms from law-abiding Americans.” Wants to end President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China.
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Missed the debate, still running, but he’s also fundraising for his congressional campaign. Hardly burning his boats. Says there’s no shot of him dropping out of the Presidential race. So I’m guessing he’s out in about five weeks or so…
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. In the latest case of Bernie spending taxpayer money he doesn’t have, he promises to cancel all medical debts. At this rate, Democrats will be promising to cancel all debts on everything, credit cards and mortgages included, so why pay any bills any more ever? The Magic Power of Socialism™ will take care of it all! A California restaurant owner says that Brnie is a rude asshole. “It was all very nice, except for rude and cranky Bernie…He didn’t want to shake hands, he didn’t want a picture. No campaign face…He wasn’t nice to any of the staff.” Campaigned in Porland, Maine.
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an ABC profile.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Why Steyer couldn’t buy his way onto the debate stage:

    Tom Steyer’s campaign was confident he would make it into the September debate. With the help of a nearly $5 million online advertising blitz, the billionaire presidential candidate had scooped up the necessary 130,000 unique donors in just over a month, meeting the Democratic National Committee’s donor threshold to qualify.

    But he also had to meet the polling requirement. As the party’s deadline approached, Steyer had notched the necessary 2% in three qualifying polls, meaning he needed just one more to make it into the debate. The campaign hoped for another in an early primary state, where Steyer had spent more than $8 million on TV ads in six weeks, according to Advertising Analytics — more than any candidate, including President Donald Trump.

    That poll never materialized.

    The campaign vented that there hadn’t been a qualifying poll in Nevada, where Steyer spent $1.7 million and finished fifth in one survey that wasn’t approved by the DNC. But several political strategists offered another possible reason Steyer’s strategy came up short: No amount of paid media can match the influence of actual coverage, referred to in media parlance as “earned media.”

    “Advertising you pay for can increase your name recognition, but unless people are hearing about you from third parties like earned media that are reinforcing a real narrative, then it’s not really going to go anywhere,” said Robby Mook, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.

    And if there’s anyone who knows about tremendous campaign failures, its Robby Mook. Steyer’s only been in the race for two months and we already have our first failure-to-launch piece:

    Even before liberal billionaire Tom Steyer was shut out of the next Democratic debate, there were tell-tale signs his rocket-fueled six-week presidential bid was failing to launch.

    At last weekend’s Democratic National Committee summer confab in San Francisco, Steyer’s home turf, his campaign had a fancy booth complete with a snazzy “Tom2020” photo backdrop, but only a handful of supporters were happily snapping pics and there were no sign-waving foot soldiers to compete with Kamala Harris’ k-hive entourage.

    Still, just before his remarks to the gathering, there was a slight buzz in the ballroom from Democrats eager to hear from the familiar activist in person.

    To put it bluntly, Steyer underwhelmed. The wooden speech fell especially flat when he lectured his DNC hosts to stop accepting corporate cash.

    “We can’t be chasing corporate money. … We should only be chasing people’s votes,” he said. “As president, I would insist that the DNC not take one single penny from any corporation.”

    Overall, the party faithful assembled there offered tepid applause even after Steyer reminded them that his NextGen group organized and paid for the “largest youth mobilization in American history” in 2018, helping to flip 33 GOP House seats to the Democratic column.

    Strangely, with the notable exception of slamming Donald Trump as the “biggest swamp rat of them all,” Steyer didn’t focus much on the president despite the months he spent demanding Democrats in Congress move to impeach him.

    Steyer’s speech left some DNC delegates scratching their heads, though no one wanted to go public berating a billionaire who has invested so many dollars in liberal causes. Steyer was the single largest individual donor to Democratic-aligned groups in 2016 and his voter registration drives in California and Arizona helped fuel the 2018 blue wave.

    The spending largesse aside, many Democrats privately say Steyer, an Exeter/Yale/Stanford graduate and a former Goldman Sachs associate who made his fortune running a $26 billion hedge fund, is simply the wrong person to pitch the party’s anti-corporate message to voters.

    Ya think?

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “‘Pocahontas’ Could Still Be Elizabeth Warren’s Biggest Vulnerability.”

    Elizabeth Warren came to last week’s Native American presidential forum in Sioux City, Iowa, with, as you might expect, a plan. And she executed it perfectly.

    First, the Massachusetts senator expressed sorrow for the “harm I caused,” referencing her attempt to prove she had Native American ancestry through a DNA test. Then she pivoted to her literal plan, her sweeping and detailed set of ideas to expand tribal nation sovereignty and invest in social programs benefiting Native American communities. The long list of proposals was repeatedly praised by the forum’s attendees, several of whom excitedly predicted that they were speaking to the next president of the United States.

    While Warren’s campaign staff might have breathed easier coming out of the forum, her Republican antagonists have made it clear they have no intention of forgetting the episode. Shortly before Warren’s appearance at the forum, the Republican National Committee released an opposition research memo titled, “1/1024th Native American, 100% Liar,” which quoted its deputy chief of staff Mike Reed as saying, Warren “lied about being [Native American] to gain minority status at a time when Ivy League law schools were desperate to add diversity to their ranks.” A few days earlier, President Donald Trump, after lamenting that “Pocahontas is rising” in the polls, assured his supporters at a New Hampshire rally that he still has the ability to derail her: “I did the Pocahontas thing. I hit her really hard, and it looked like she was down and out. But that was too long ago. I should’ve waited. But don’t worry, we will revive it.”

    Has Warren effectively addressed the controversy? In conversations I had with Democratic and Republican political strategists, unaffiliated with any presidential campaign, there was no bipartisan consensus. The Democrats believed Warren’s rise in the polls is evidence she has weathered the storm. The Republicans argued Warren remains vulnerable to charges of dishonest opportunism.

    They’re both right. Warren is enjoying a comeback because she has convinced many skittish progressives that she won’t let Trump disrupt her relentless focus on policy solutions. And she has convinced many Native American leaders that her policy proposals for indigenous communities are more important than what she has said in the past about her ancestry.

    But because Warren’s comeback has relied on restoring her standing on the left, she has not done anything to address concerns potentially percolating among swing voters. A detailed white paper on Native American policy has no bearing on whether a moderate white suburbanite believes Warren is of good character. And since Warren has apologized for her past claims, she remains open to the charge she was dishonest when, during her academic career, she relied on nothing more than family lore to identify herself as Native American.

    That means if she becomes the Democratic nominee for president, Warren would still face a “Pocahontas” problem, one that threatens the core of her candidacy.

    Native Americans are not particularly quick to forgive her, either. The media’s is slavishly boosting Warren:

    It used to be that the Boston Globe practically had a monopoly on slobbering, unctuous flattery of the erstwhile Native American, the first woman of color at Harvard, emeritus.

    It wasn’t enough for the Boring Broadsheet to pretend that the New England Historical and Genealogical Society hadn’t busted her melanin-impaired grift, or to peddle fake statistics about her scam DNA test. No, the bow-tied bumkissers also penned hagiographies of her dead dog (Otis), her new dog (Bailey) and her campaign headquarters in Charlestown (complete with a cameo appearance by Bailey).

    But the Globe is one busy Democrat fanzine these days, what with having to break out the pom-poms for, among others, Ed Markey (he may be a doddering old fool, but he’s our doddering old fool), JoJoJo Kennedy (look, a Kennedy! And he has red hair!), and of course Seth Moulton (America’s loss is Essex County’s gain, or something).

    So when it comes to open and gross cheerleading for Lieawatha, there’s an open lane, and boy, are the Democrat operatives with press passes rushing to fill the void.

    The thesis is that Fauxcahontas is, well, thoughtful and substantive, plus you always have to mention, as the New Republic gushed, “her passion, her intellect and her lack of artifice.”

    Here’s how Lieawatha’s thoughtful, substantive policies work: Bernie Sanders goes in front of some whining group of self-proclaimed victims demanding handouts, and promises them, say, $10 trillion.

    So the fake Indian follows and says, I’ll raise you, Bernie – how’s $20 trillion in handouts sound?

    Scott Adams thinks Warren has gotten much better as a candidate but Biden is done (political portion starts about 34 minutes in):

    He also thinks Warren is vulnerable on making the healthcare of everyone who already has it worse. Also thinks Harris is the worst candidate of all time. “Even worse than Beto, and he’s terrible.”

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Williamson would like you to know she’s not an antivaxxer and she doesn’t own any crystals. Hey, don’t go changing on us, babe. She visited Greenville, South Carolina and Atlanta.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a thread on the many ways MSNBC and CNN have blatantly kept Andrew Yang out of newsgraphics describing all the candidates, even those polling lower than him. It’s pretty egregious. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) “Yang climate plan heavily relies on entrepreneurship, nuclear.” If you’re going to do something incredibly stupid like the Paris Climate Accords or the Green New Deal, then Yang’s approach is indeed the one that does the least collateral damage, and a pro-nucelar voice is a breath of fresh air among Democrats.
  • 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.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 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)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Nice First-Person Defensive Gun Use Piece

    September 1st, 2019

    This is a nice long, sympathetic account of a man who used his gun defensively against two people robbing a convenience store:

    When he arrived, the 37-year-old headed to the fountain drink machine, paying little attention to the din of chatter inside the South Newtown Road store. After pouring his favorite strawberry-melon flavored iced tea into a cup, he walked toward the cash register on the other side of the counter.

    “I’m sipping on my Big Gulp, and this red beam cuts into my drink,” said the man, who agreed to tell The Virginian-Pilot what happened July 25 on the condition he not be identified.

    “I look down and I’ve got a pink drink with something orangish-red in there. Then I look up and there are two guys pretty much standing on top of each other with two guns pointed in my face.”

    The gunmen, on what police say was the last stop of a spate of robberies around 2 a.m. that Thursday, had hoods pulled over their heads and bandannas covering their faces. The red spot in the man’s drink was a laser light from one of the guns aimed in his direction.

    Still clutching his Big Gulp, the man followed orders to raise his hands and move to the side. Two other customers, a woman and a man, stood frozen in front of the cash register.

    While one robber stuffed his pockets with money, the other leaned over the counter with his gun fixed on the store clerk.

    “The clerk was arguing with them, saying, ‘You don’t have to do this. Just leave,’” the man said. “The situation just started to escalate, and I was worried he was going to shoot the clerk.”

    While the robbers focused on the cash and the clerk, the man touched the 9 mm handgun hidden in a holster under his T-shirt with his pinkie. No one noticed. He knew he had about 10 rounds in the clip.

    As he stood there, still clutching his Big Gulp and occasionally taking a sip, the man now found himself facing a tough decision: Should he draw the gun?

    He ran through the possible consequences: Will I go to jail? Do I have a clear enough shot that no one else will get hurt? Is anyone else in the store? Will someone else pop in? If I don’t do it, is the clerk or someone else going to get shot?

    “I’m thinking about all of that and at the same time thinking, you’re supposed to have the right to bear arms, the right to protect yourself, the right to protect others if need be,” he said.

    “I’m like ‘Man, you say you believe in the Second Amendment. You say you believe in America. You know God’s got you.’”

    Still holding his drink in one hand, he fired first at the robber behind the counter. He aimed for his shoulder, he said, but ended up hitting him in the neck.

    “He hollered, and I think that distracted (the other gunman) because he wasn’t thinking that was going to happen,” the man said. “Nobody thought that was going to happen. He’s probably emotional and distraught because he was in control up to that point.”

    The robber behind the counter fell. The one who’d had his gun pointed at the clerk turned to see where the shot had come from. With that weapon now turned in his direction, the man fired two more shots. Both hit the second robber in his torso, killing him.

    After kicking the gun away from the dead robber, the man told the clerk to call police, then checked on the one behind the counter to take his gun away and see if he needed first aid.

    “He was like, ‘How’s my brother?’” the man said. “I remember answering him pretty coldly. I told him, ‘You don’t got a brother no more.’

    “He looked at me like he wanted to do something and I immediately lost it. I was like, ‘(Expletive), no one points a gun at me and gets away with it.’”

    The woman at the register had dropped to the floor after the first shot was fired. She was still on the ground shaking uncontrollably, with her hands covering her head, when he went to help her up.

    The man, a divorced father of a teenage son and an employee of a medical transport business, was also shaken but tried to remain calm.

    He’d never shot anyone before.

    He is, however, experienced with guns and has had a concealed handgun permit since he was 21. He enjoys going to a shooting range a couple of times a week and believes all gun owners should be properly trained.

    As he waited for police to arrive that night, the man began to worry about how the officers would react.

    “You just shot and killed somebody in 7-Eleven. You just told these people to call the cops and they’re coming. You got to stand here and wait for them. Of course, you can’t be standing here with a gun in your hand. You’re a black man with a gun. You’ll probably get shot.”

    Keep in mind that a lawyer or carry instructor would probably advise you to avoid saying some of the things the many in the article does in the aftermath of the shooting.

    Read the whole thing. And if you haven’t already, read the terrific follow-up piece on Stephen Willeford, the man who stopped the Sutherland Springs shooter with his own AR-15 I linked to a while back.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)