Netflix just released a new Dave Chappelle comedy special, Sticks and Stones. Guess who he takes aim at?
“Chappelle humorously critiques school mass shooting drills, Jussie Smollett, the excesses of the #MeToo movement, and LGBTQ activists—or “the alphabet people” as he calls them—for thinking they should be immune from mockery.”
The Margaret Dumonts of the Social Justice Warrior left are already condemning him for “misogyny” and “transphobia,” which instantly rocketed the special up my “must see” list.
— Mike Real-Last-Name-Unknown (@TheOtherMike_) August 26, 2019
I have no issue with people feeling however they feel about Dave Chappelle’s jokes. What I do take issue with is acting like he can’t joke about certain topics because they’re off limits.
As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.
Last month, Twitter changed the way it did account rounding. This month, I’ve found a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts. Since the methodology has changed twice in the last two months, consider this a rebasing post, from which we can track actual changes next month. Because of the change, change rates for those with over 1 million followers are taken from Social Blade’s Last 30 Days count. The changes for those with under one million followers hasn’t been so radical, so I can still give rough changes there from the last count.
The following are all the declared Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:
Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them.
Warren seems to be adding Twitter followers at a faster rate than Harris, and I actually expect her to pass Harris this week.
Warren seems to picking up new followers at the rate of about 5,000 a day. Bernie seems to be adding about 4,000 followers a day, while Biden adds just under 2,000 and Harris just under 3,000.
For all the eulogies for his campaign, O’Rourke is adding Twitter followers faster than Biden, and indeed slightly faster than Buttigieg.
Both Yang and Gabbard continue to show significant momentum, and I expect Yang to pass Klobuchar in September.
For all the money Tom Steyer is throwing into Twitter advertising (I see tons on my iPhone), I see no signs he’s picking up significant new followers.
Inslee and Moulton are Out, Sanders wants to bring U.S. Postal Service efficiency to powering your house and car, and there’s a rumor Grandma Death may arise from her crypt. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Ten have already hit that threshold: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang.
Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard are close. The outlook is currently pretty grim for Michael Bennet, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, John Delaney, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tim Ryan, and Marianne Williamson.
Gabbard’s campaign is complaining that the DNC has a limited list of “certified polls,” and she seems to have a point; her campaign counted 26 polls that had her at or above 2 percent, and some surveys, like ones commissioned by the Boston Globe and the Charleston Post and Courier, aren’t on the DNC’s “certified” list.
Among the most recent polls, the Economist/YouGov national poll has her at 2 percent, the CNN national poll has her at 2 percent, the Gravis poll of Nevada Democrats puts her at 2 percent, the Politico/Morning Consult national poll has her at 1 percent and the Fox News national poll has her at 1 percent.
That having been said . . . the threshold is 2 percent, people. If consistently getting 2 percent or more of members of your party to make you their first choice is too difficult . . . well, the presidency doesn’t have many easy days. You can picture some of the asterisk candidates muttering that the DNC rules have reduced the debate qualification process to a popularity contest. Well, yeah. A presidential primary is a competition to see who can get the most people to make a candidate their first choice. If Democrats really feel like Gabbard is getting screwed by an unfairly high threshold, they can inundate the DNC with messages of objection. But as is, when YouGov, or CNN, or Gravis, or Morning Consult or Fox News come calling, not enough Democrats are saying that their first choice is Tulsi Gabbard. The Hawaii congresswoman is a heck of a debater who basically vivisected Kamala Harris’s record as prosecutor in the second debate. But for whatever reason, that hasn’t translated into large numbers of Democrats saying, “yes, she’s my first choice.”
For a handful of Democratic candidates stuck at 1 percent (or lower) in the polls, a Wednesday afternoon in the dog days of August could be the moment when their lifelong dream of the presidency dies a quiet death.
August 28 is the deadline for candidates to meet the Democratic National Committee’s heightened threshold for entry into the September debate, and as much as half the field is expected to wind up on the sidelines. Those who don’t make the cut will, at a minimum, be forced to reassess the viability of their long-shot bids. Some of those also-rans may trudge on through the fall, in the hopes of rebounding for the next debate in October, or simply out of a commitment to stay in the race until the first votes are cast in Iowa next February.
But for all intents and purposes, next Wednesday will mark the first great winnowing of the 2020 White House race, when a field of more than 20 is cleaved into two divisions: those who still have a shot, and the rest who don’t.
Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, and the author Marianne Williamson are among the other hopefuls who could be on the outside looking in next month.
As of this morning, 10 of the roughly two dozen Democratic hopefuls have secured spots by receiving donations from at least 130,000 individual contributors and registering 2 percent support or higher in four qualifying polls. The billionaire Tom Steyer is close to the marker, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has bought more than $1 million in television ads in Iowa and New Hampshire as part of an aggressive late push to get her to 2 percent in the three additional polls she needs to qualify. (She said this week she has just over 110,000 donors, putting her within reach of that threshold.)
But with a week to go before the deadline, a handful of campaigns have all but conceded they aren’t going to make it, and some have directed their ire on the Democratic National Committee instead.
Hispanic Democrats don’t seem to have a favorite yet.
A lot of polls of the 2020 race don’t include a large enough number of Latino respondents to break out the group’s results. But in its newly released survey, the Pew Research Center interviewed 237 Hispanic respondents who either identify as Democrats or lean towards the party. Biden had the support of 27 percent of Latino Democrats, with Bernie Sanders (15 percent) and Elizabeth Warren (14) the only other candidates in double-digits. Morning Consult found fairly different results among Hispanic voters: Sanders at 29 percent, Biden 22 and Warren 10.
In short, exactly where Hispanic voters stand is somewhat unclear. While basically every poll shows Biden well ahead among blacks, Hispanic voters as a bloc seem more up for grabs.
Perhaps Hispanic voters won’t unify behind a single candidate — unlike black Democrats, they haven’t historically. But if they do, or even if they partially do, that could substantially alter the race — Hispanic adults represent about 12 percent of registered Democrats and will likely be particularly pivotal in Nevada, which votes third in the 2020 primary process, and in California and Texas, which both vote on Super Tuesday.
And Hispanic voters could be especially important to Warren, whose support comes predominantly from white Democrats. If Warren struggles to get traction with black and Hispanic Democrats, that complicates her path to the nomination — both in terms of raw votes and perceptions. White liberal Democrats are increasingly conscious of race, and I suspect that they will be hesitant to coalesce around Warren if her coalition is almost exclusively white. But the Pew poll, for example, found Warren doing better among Hispanic than black respondents (though she still did best among whites), so Hispanic voters represent both a challenge for Warren and an opportunity to diversify her coalition.
According to the Pew Research Center, 2020 marks the first year Hispanic voters will overtake black voters as the largest bloc of eligible minority voters.
Among the national front-runners, Bernie Sanders was the favorite among Democratic Hispanic voters — topping out as the first choice among 40 percent — before Joe Biden declared his candidacy. Since then, Sanders and Biden have been in a dead heat for this group’s vote, with neither breaking away from the scuffle through two Democratic debates.
Black voters still like Biden and Sanders but prefer Harris to Warren.
Also: “Buttigieg overtakes O’Rourke on oldest, richest and whitest voters; both do poorly with black voters.” So much for all that skateboarding…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s whining over the DNC debate thresholds: “Bennet said the debate rules reward ‘celebrity candidates’ with millions of Twitter followers, billionaires who ‘buy their way onto the debate stage’ and candidates who have been running for president for years.” He’s not entirely wrong, but it’s hard to work up much sympathy for someone’s whose campaign was stillborn.
On Sunday, Warren stood on the biggest stage of her presidential campaign for a rally here that drew an estimated 15,000 people — eclipsing an estimated 12,000-person event she held in Minnesota earlier in the week, according to her campaign. Across the country, Biden presided over a series of intimate, subdued events in New Hampshire and Iowa, hosting crowds that numbered in the low hundreds.
Snip.
In June, Warren raised $7.8 million from 320,000 donations, compared to Biden’s $2.2 million from 111,000 donations, according to data from ActBlue, the online fundraising tool. (That is the most recent information available from the site.) Their small-dollar performances have been going in opposite directions, with Biden’s best days coming the week of his launch and Warren gaining steam over time.
But while Biden, for now, has the centrist, establishment path largely to himself, Warren still has Bernie Sanders in her progressive lane. Sanders has an even bigger small-dollar army, and also drew big crowds this week in Sacramento, Calif. and Louisville, Ky. The two are projecting similar messages, railing against the ultra-wealthy, asking people to join a broader movement, and subtly hitting Biden by warning against incrementalism.
Sanders isn’t viewed by Biden’s campaign as having as much room to grow as Warren. But Biden’s camp does see the continued strength of both Warren and Sanders as an advantage, each limiting the other’s ability to expand their base of support. Sanders’ campaign thinks he can eat into Biden’s support because of demographic overlap between their voters.
The two African-American candidates in the race, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have so far been unable to chip away at Biden’s solid lead among black voters, who give Biden a huge advantage especially in South Carolina and other Southern states.
There’s a growing sense that Biden is something of a starter nominee, a candidate that voters can glom onto while they search for someone who better suits their values. “I did not meet one Biden voter who was in any way, shape or form excited about voting for Biden,” Patrick Murray, who heads the Monmouth University Polling Institute (which recently released a poll giving Biden a significant lead in Iowa) told The New York Times. “They feel that they have to vote for Joe Biden as the centrist candidate, to keep somebody from the left who they feel is unelectable from getting the nomination.” JoAnn Hardy, who heads the Cerro Gordo County Democrats, concurred, telling the Times, “He’s doing OK, but I think a lot of his initial strength was name recognition. As the voters get to meet the other candidates, he may be surpassed soon. I would not be surprised.”
“I was the one who taught him the Torah he knows” and what I always emphasized to him is that Judaism’s highest value is protection and preservation of life. This is something that Cory unfortunately violated in the extreme when he betrayed the American Jewish community by voting for the Iran nuclear deal for political gain.
Jewish values are about having core convictions that do not change based on any external benefits, especially when genocide is at stake. While I absolutely agree that President Trump’s words – and not only actions – should be consistent with Jewish values, there can be no question that in action he has been the most supportive President for Israel for security and legitimacy in the history of the United States.
Cory, sadly, has gone in the opposite direction, catering to left-wing extremists who sadly despise Israel and the Jewish people for no legitimate reason. Cory has condemned the moving of the American embassy to Jerusalem, voted against the Taylor Force Act in committee, which would simply have stopped Palestinian terrorists from being payed to murder Jews, and most famously he voted for the Iran deal and refused to even once condemn Iran’s genocidal promises to annihilate Israel.
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Buttigieg’s Event in Chicago Black Neighborhood Drew in Mostly White Voters.” He says his campaign isn’t dead, it’s merely resting. Beautiful plumage on the Norwegian Buttigieg. “Buttigieg’s attempts to rally religious voters may not sway evangelicals.” Ya think? His party spent the last few decades telling everyone how much it hated each and every one of them.
In my foreign policy speech earlier this year at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, I called for launching Plan Central America with the same holistic approach that the U.S. brought to Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia, which ran from 2000 to 2015, was successful in helping the Colombian government counter FARC and other extremist groups with a whole-of-government focus on counternarcotics, counterterrorism, sustainable development, human rights, regional security, and trade. Violence was reduced, which encouraged investment to return and the economy to flourish.
It is time to bring that same approach to improve the conditions giving rise to the violence and instability that is sending so many Central Americans to our border.
Plan Columbia is a good model, but applying it to multiple central American countries seems daunting. Because competing drug cartels make taking out one all but inconsequential, and because the immense profits of the drug trade make it far more capable for the apolitical cartels to buy off politicians than FARC (or Shining Path), the problem seems far more intractable. Plus Delaney’s plan is very vague on specifics. Finally, he’s never going to be president, which does rather put a damper on the plan’s chances. Another candidate whose campaign is complaining about the debate rules:
Michael Hopkins, a spokesman for former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, says the DNC had “learned nothing from 2016,” when it was criticized for purportedly favoring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the primaries.“By requiring campaigns to hit this arbitrary donor goal it forces campaigns to talk about more divisive issues and not be on the ground and instead go on Facebook and Twitter,” Hopkins says.
He’s not wrong, but Delaney has the money to do social media ad buys to meet the debate criteria, and either he hasn’t done it or his attempts have been ineffective. Almost reasonable moderation doesn’t seem to sell to the Democratic base…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She complained about the DNC’s poll criteria, mainly that Gabbard has broken the 2% threshold in 26 polls, but the DNC says only two are the right polls. More Gabbard attacks on Harris, including the charge Harris put “over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”
“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,” said a former senior staffer in Gillibrand’s Senate office.
“She comes across as an opportunist to the public. I think that’s the biggest problem,” said the staffer, who criticized the candidate’s flip-flopping on guns and immigration. “I think she’ll have to seriously evaluate her campaign and her candidacy if she doesn’t make this debate.”
“She’s not going to make it,” said another longtime friend and supporter. “What is Kirsten’s reason to stay in? She should find some gracious way that enhances her . . . as she gracefully exits and throws her conditional support to whoever does get [the nomination].”
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Big hit piece on Harris from Conor Friedersdorf. I’m going to omit the lengthy details of the Daniel Larsen case and jump to the conclusions:
Harris’s office didn’t merely fight to keep a man in prison after he’d demonstrated his innocence to the satisfaction of the Innocence Project, a judge, and an appeals court. After losing, it fought to keep the newly released man from being compensated for the decade that he spent wrongfully imprisoned.
Harris failed the innocent-man test.
Snip.
In 2010, the crime lab run by the San Francisco Police Department was rocked by a scandal when one of its three technicians was caught taking evidence––cocaine––home from work, raising the prospect of unreliable analysis and testimony in many hundreds of drug cases. It was later discovered that, even prior to the scandal, an assistant district attorney had emailed Harris’ deputy at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office complaining that the technician was “increasingly UNDEPENDABLE for testimony.”
But even after the technician was caught taking home cocaine, neither Harris nor anyone in her office notified defense attorneys in cases in which she had examined evidence.
“A review of the case, based on court records and interviews with key players, presents a portrait of Harris scrambling to manage a crisis that her staff saw coming but for which she was unprepared,” The Washington Post reported in March. “It also shows how Harris, after six years as district attorney, had failed to put in place written guidelines for ensuring that defendants were informed about potentially tainted evidence and testimony that could lead to unfair convictions.”
In fact, her office initially blamed the San Francisco police for failing to tell defense attorneys about the matter. A judge was incredulous, telling one of the assistant district attorneys, “But it is the district attorney’s office affirmative obligation. It’s not the police department who has the affirmative obligation. It’s the district attorney. That’s who the courts look to. That’s who the community looks to, to make sure all of that information constitutionally required is provided to the defense.”
Harris claimed that her staffers didn’t tell her about the matter for several months.
The Wall Street Journal reported in June that years earlier, her aides had sent her a memo urging her to adopt a policy of disclosing police misconduct to defense attorneys to safeguard the right to a fair trial. Police unions, however, were opposed to the policy, and Harris failed to act on it until after the 2010 scandal.
Had she chosen otherwise, she would not have woken up to this San Francisco Chronicle story: “Kamala Harris’ office violated defendants’ rights by hiding damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings, a judge declared Thursday … In a scathing ruling, the judge concluded that prosecutors had failed to fulfill their constitutional duty to tell defense attorneys about problems surrounding Deborah Madden, the now-retired technician at the heart of the cocaine-skimming scandal that led police to shut down the drug analysis section of their crime lab.”
Meanwhile, Jeff Adachi, then head of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, declared at the time, “Anytime I’ve asked the district attorney for a meeting, I’ve been told the district attorney is out of town or not available. We need a district attorney who will give this the attention it deserves.”
Busing policies were abandoned because they were wildly unpopular, and there’s no reason to think they’ve magically become popular. So Harris equivocated and then backtracked.
That attacking Biden on busing would paint the attacker into a corner was predictable. It was in fact predicted. See, for example, the end of this article from March in National Review. (Democratic strategists: Subscribe today!)
Going on the offensive and then retreating on busing made Harris seem inauthentic. And the candidate had been dogged by questions of inauthenticity since the start of her campaign because of her waffling on the issue of Medicare for All, the policy at the center of the 2020 Democratic primary.
First Harris indicated at a CNN town hall that she supported abolishing private insurance, as Medicare for All proposes. Then Harris said she didn’t support abolishing private insurance: She tried to hide behind the fig leaf that Medicare for All allows “supplemental insurance,” while obscuring the fact that “supplemental coverage” would be legal for only a very small number of treatments not covered by Medicare for All, such as cosmetic surgery. And cosmetic-surgery insurance doesn’t even exist.
Harris thought she’d finally figured a way out of the Medicare for All mess in July: She introduced her own plan shortly before the Democratic debates. It tried to split the difference: She promised to transition to a single-payer plan in 10 years (as opposed to Sanders’s four-year deadline). This was meant to reassure progressives that they’ll get there eventually while also reassuring moderates that there will be at least two more presidential elections before the country goes through with anything crazy.
Harris’s provision of Medicare Advantage–type plans was also supposed to reassure moderates, but the second debate demonstrated that she still wasn’t ready to respond to the fact that her plan would eventually abolish existing private health plans for everyone, and she has no serious plan for how to pay for single-payer.
Then there were Joe Biden’s and Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s devastating attacks on Harris’s record as a prosecutor at the second Democratic debate. “Biden alluded to a crime lab scandal that involved her office and resulted in more than 1,000 drug cases being dismissed. Gabbard claimed Harris ‘blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until she was forced to do so.’ Both of these statements are accurate,” the Sacramento Bee reported after the debate.
As Harris’s backtracking on busing made clear, no one is seriously considering resurrecting the deeply unpopular policies of the 1970s. But criminal justice is very much a live issue in Democratic politics, and that’s why the attack on Harris’s record as a prosecutor has had such a greater impact than the attack on Biden’s record on busing. Biden continues to do very well among African-American voters, while Harris continues to struggle.
And stunts like this aren’t helping:
They really think that this is cool and that they're making a difference by acting like 12 year olds. https://t.co/1jNswL9Jmb
Update: Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out. Twitter. Facebook. Mr. Climate Change dropped out August 21, indicating that either he was a really bad candidate, or that Democrats are lying when they say how important climate change is to them.
He also announced he’s running for a third term as Washington governor.
The Minnesota senator has been mired in single digits in national polls and those in Iowa and New Hampshire, which vote first next year.
Two candidates with better ratings are making moves to challenge the three-term senator in Minnesota. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren drew thousands of people to a town hall in St. Paul, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will be at the State Fair on Saturday. He won the 2016 presidential caucuses in the state.
Some people run for president to raise their national profile. In Rep. Seth Moulton’s case, his campaign didn’t even do that. Only 28 percent of Democrats could form an opinion of Moulton in an average of polls conducted between Aug. 1 and 20. This was lower name recognition than any of the other major presidential candidates in that time period and was a big part of the reason why Moulton never reached 2 percent in any poll — let alone one that counted toward debate qualification.
Moulton found himself stuck in a vicious cycle: Without higher polling numbers, he couldn’t qualify for the primary debates … and without being in the debates, he lacked a platform from which to improve his polling numbers. So on Friday, the Massachusetts congressman dropped out of the Democratic primary for president in a speech to the Democratic National Committee. He is the fifth candidate to drop out this summer and the third in just the past nine days. His departure leaves us with 20 major Democratic candidates for president, by FiveThirtyEight’s definition.
A Marine veteran who served four tours in Iraq, Moulton focused his campaign on national security and veterans’ issues; the most memorable moment of his campaign was probably his poignant admission that he had sought treatment for post-traumatic stress. But polls showed that foreign policy is not a top priority for voters (and hasn’t been for the past several cycles), and our research last year suggested that candidates who are veterans don’t win Democratic primaries at higher rates.
Moulton’s path was also blocked by higher-profile candidates who appealed to the same constituencies. If voters were looking for a Harvard-educated veteran around 40 years of age, they already had South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose polling surge came just before Moulton entered the race. Indeed, Moulton admitted to The New York Times that he had made a mistake with his late announcement date, which gave him just seven weeks to collect the necessary polls or donors to qualify for the first debate. And if voters were looking for someone “electable” or who didn’t hail from the progressive wing of the party, there was former Vice President Joe Biden, who has dominated polls among those whose first priority is defeating President Trump and among moderate and conservative Democrats.
Left out of this analysis is the fact he always looked vaguely constipated.
Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an ABC profile that’s like all the other O’Rourke profiles. Prep school? Check. Punk rock? Check. Check. Skateboarding? Check. Cult of the Dead Cow? Check. All it’s missing from the checklist is “Kennedy-esque good looks” and “copious sweating.”
Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. He agrees with Harry Reid that Democratic Presidential candidates have gone too far left. “I think going for taking people’s private health insurance away as part of our health care plan is a stone-cold political loser for us.”
When Warren was in her mid-30s, and a law professor, she for the first time asserted that she was Native American. She didn’t do it by joining Native American groups, by bringing lawsuits to help Native Americans, or by helping Native American students. Never in her life did she do any of those things.
Instead, beginning in the mid-1980s, Warren asserted her Native American claim in the information provided to a law professor directory widely used for hiring purposes. That claim to be Native American landed Warren on a short list of “Minority Law Teachers.” Warren’s supposed Native American status was not disclosed in the directory, only that she was a minority.
It was a particularly devious maneuver, enabling Warren to seek the benefit of being a minority at a time when there was an intense push to diversify faculty, without having to justify her claim to be Native American. Warren would maintain that stealth status in the law directory when she was hired as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in the early 1990s, and it was noticed. The Harvard Women’s Law Journal listed Warren on its short list of “Women of Color in Legal Academia.”
Warren stopped filling out the law professor directory as Native American when she gained a full-time tenured job at Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s. At that point, being Native American and a supposed-minority no longer was needed, Warren had reached the top rung of the law professor ladder. While Warren asserts that she never actually gained an advantage from claiming to be Native American and a minority, there is no doubt that she tried to gain an advantage. When that need for advantage was over, she dropped the designation.
he “stretches across a broad spectrum of Democrats,” said Don Fowler, a DNC chair in the 1990s, a longtime Clinton-family loyalist, and someone who’s been to more DNC meetings over more election cycles than most people in Democratic politics today. Explaining what he thinks her appeal is to establishment Democrats, Fowler told me that for all of Warren’s talk of “big, structural change”—by fundamentally reworking the economy—“she does not include in her presentation the implication of being against things, except the current president.”
Warren’s insider-outsider routine is one reason Democratic operatives and analysts told me—and one another, in private conversations—that they’ve begun to see her as the odds-on favorite to win her party’s nomination. However, a few of the Democrats I spoke with noted that her positioning could become a trap: With Sanders and Warren expected to battle even more intensely in the coming months, the change-hungry part of the Democratic base might begin to ask why establishment insiders seem so comfortable with her.
And of course DNC insiders prefer her to Sanders, who had the audacity to attempt derailing Queen Hillary’s coronation…
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Andrew Yang is … surging? It sounds crazy, and who knows how long it lasts? But for now he is one of 10 candidates who have qualified through sufficiently robust polling and fundraising for this fall’s third and fourth debates. The exhausting cluster of Oval Office aspirants, at least for these purposes, has been whittled to this: the aforementioned top four, two more senators, a mayor, a former member of Congress and … this guy. Yang is a 44-year-old entrepreneur from New York and a father of two young sons who’s never run for any office of any kind before this, and whose campaign is fueled by a deeply dystopian view of the near future (trucker riots, anybody?), a pillar of a platform that can come off as a gimmick (a thousand bucks a month for every American adult!), and a zeitgeisty swirl of podcasts, GIFs, tweets and memes. Last week, as a successful governor from a major state dropped out and the bottom half of the bloated field continued to flounder, Yang passed the 200,000 mark for unique donors—outpacing an array of name-known pols. He’s gotten contributions, on average $24 a pop, from 88 percent of the ZIP codes in the country, and he’s on track, he says, to raise twice as much money this quarter as he did last quarter.
It’s a phenomenon hard to figure—until you get up close and take in some strange political alchemy. At the heart of Yang’s appeal is a paradox. In delivering his alarming, existentially unsettling message of automation and artificial intelligence wreaking havoc on America’s economic, emotional and social well-being, he … cracks jokes. He laughs easily, and those around him, and who come to see him, end up laughing a lot, too. It’s not that Yang’s doing stump-speech stand-up. It’s more a certain nonchalant whimsy that leavens what he says and does. Sometimes his jokes fall flat. He can be awkward, but he also pointedly doesn’t appear to care. It’s weird, and it’s hard to describe, but I suspect that if Yang ever said something cringeworthy, as Jeb Bush did that time in 2016—“Please clap”—the audience probably would respond with mirth, not pity. Critics ding his ambit of proposals as fanciful or zany (getting rid of the penny, empowering MMA fighters, lowering the voting age to 16) and question the viability of his “Freedom Dividend,” considering its sky-high price tag (“exciting but not realistic,” Hillary Clinton decided when she considered the general notion in the 2016 cycle). And his campaign coffers are chock-full ofsmall-number contributors and even $1 donors. Still, at this angry, fractious time, and in this primary that’s already an edgy, anxious slog, Yang and his campaign somehow radiate an ambient joviality. Of his party’s presidential contestants, he’s the cheerful doomsayer.
His most foolproof laugh line—“the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math”—suggests that his candidacy is premised on distinguishing himself from the president the same way as his fellow challengers. But it’s not quite that simple. He’s attracting support from an unorthodox jumble of citizens, from a host of top technologists, but from penitent Trump voters, too. He’s one of only two Democrats (along with Sanders) who ticks 10 percent or higherwhen Trump voters are asked which of the Democrats they might go for—a factoid Yang uses as evidence that he’ll win “easy” if he’s the nominee come November of next year. Trump, of course, is the president, and Yang (let’s not get carried away) remains a very long long shot to succeed him.
It’s not that Yang is right about anything, it’s just that he’s offering more novel wrong ideas than the rest of the field. His campaign is selling weed-themed merchandise. With pot-friendly governors Hickenlooper and Inslee out of the race, maybe Yang has an opportunity to be the weed candidate (though Gabbard also seems to be playing in that space). That won’t get you the nomination, but it can carry you into the early primary season.
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:
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Wait, do I hear rumbling in the distance?
Yesterday marked the 80th Anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, AKA The Hitler-Stalin Pact, AKA The Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The evil that men do tends to live on long after they’re gone, and such is the case with Hitler, Stalin, Molotov and Ribbentrop. The anti-Israeli left is constantly demanding that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders (which ain’t gonna happen), but seems distinctly disinclined to protest the territorial expansion engendered by a treaty between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s National Socialist Germany (you know, the real Hitler, not the imaginary simulacrum of same that seems to dwell in so many left-wing heads). Not only did the Soviets get to carve up Poland with Hitler without suffering postwar consequences, but many of the territorial changes wrought by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact continued to live on after World War II:
Given Stalin’s greenlight, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union itself invaded Poland September 17. The land Poland lost to Nazi Germany was restored to it (plus additional formerly German territory such as Danzing/Gdansk and land east of the Oder–Neisse line) at the Potsdam conference. Not only did Poland not receive the land the Soviet Union conquered, it had to cede additional land to Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Poland lost over 28,000 square miles of territory.
Assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence by the pact, the free Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union against their will. The nations would spend half a century suffering under communist domination before declaring themselves independent once again just ahead of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Finland, assigned to the Soviet sphere by the pact, would find itself invaded by the Soviet Union on November 30, 1939. Unlike the overwhelmed Poles, the Finns tore the Soviets a new asshole in the Winter War, and after three and half months of fighting in this frozen hell, and losing over 100,000 men (500 at the hands of legendary Finnish sniper Simo Hayha alone), the Soviets agreed to a Finnish peace proposal that left them with about 10% of Finland’s prewar territory.
Romania would be forced to cede various territory to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. (Romania would ally with Nazi Germany against the Soviets, then switch sides in 1944.)
One of the tragedies of World War II was that Stalin got to keep the ill-gotten gains of his alliance with Hitler because the other allies were in no position to push the Red Army out of central and eastern Europe in 1945.
The Houston Police narcotics officer at the center of the deadly botched raid has been charged with murder:
A former Houston Police Department narcotics officer has been charged with first-degree murder, nearly seven months after a botched drug raid that left a couple dead and unleashed a sprawling police scandal.
Ex-case agent Gerald Goines on Friday was hit with two counts of felony murder and is still under investigation over claims he stole guns, drugs and money, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced at a news conference downtown. His partner, Steven Bryant, was also charged with one count of tampering.
The two former officers both turned themselves in Friday in court, where a judge set Goines’ bond at $300,000 and Bryant’s at $50,000. Aside from the arrests, prosecutors said a review of more than 14,000 cases and a broader investigation into the rest of the squad is still underway.
“We have not seen a case like this in Houston,” Ogg said. “I have not seen a case like this in my 30-plus years of practicing law.”
Snip.
On Jan. 28, Houston narcotics officers burst into the house at 7815 Harding Street looking for heroin.
The raid went awry almost immediately, with gunfire erupting moments after an undercover narcotics team broke down the door to the Pecan Park home. Dennis Tuttle and his wife, Rhogena Nicholas, were killed and five officers were injured, including Goines.
Police said they were looking for heroin dealers, but the raid only turned up small, user-level amounts of cocaine and marijuana. In the days that followed, an internal investigation sparked questions about the officers’ justification for the search warrant. Though a sworn affidavit – signed by case Goines – recounted a controlled buy made by a confidential informant, police quickly realized they could not verify that claim or find the alleged informant.
When questioned about it, Goines eventually admitted there wasn’t one, Ogg told reporters Friday. Instead, he allegedly said he made the buy himself before conceding that he couldn’t confirm Tuttle was the same man he’d bought the drugs from.
If the charges against Goines are true, he’s going to rank pretty highly on the “infamous rouge cops” list.
Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”
That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.
Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.
Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.
Snip.
Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.
Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.
Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.
Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.
First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.
He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.
Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.
Well, it’s about time!
It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.
Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.
Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.
No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.
“It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.
He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”
If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.
The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.
The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:
Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.
We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.
Snip.
In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.
They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.
Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.
If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.
Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.
Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.
WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.
And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.
Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.
With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.
“Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.
But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.
This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.
To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.
And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.
Malice.
Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
“When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”
I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.
As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.
Chinese MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong (known as “Mad Dog”) is winning martial matches across his country. Result? The Communist Chinese government hates him because he’s beating traditional Chinese martial arts masters:
MMA was so named in 1993. It is a veritable postmodern pastiche of combat styles—including Brazilian jiu jitsu, Israeli krav maga, Thai kickboxing, and more. This no-holds-barred whatever works form of fighting is immensely popular worldwide. In China, however, where traditional martial arts like tai chi and kung fu are practiced by young and old alike, champions of MMA may beat old-school masters in matches, but they can’t win a cultural battle that has been raging for years.
The outspoken Chinese MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong—also known as “Mad Dog”—was recently ordered by a Chinese court to pay 400,000 yuan (nearly $58,000) in fines and publicly apologize on social media—seven days consecutively—for insulting tai chi grandmaster Chen Xiaowang. His social credit score has been lowered, and the South China Morning Post reports that Xu also faces travel restrictions for accusing Chen of being a fake master. As a result, Xu can’t ride in second class or above on planes or sleeper trains, and cannot ride high-speed trains at all (and if he had kids they’d face prohibitions, too).
Despite the legal smackdown and accompanying constraints, however, Xu is fighting for his fight style, and winning. It took him 36 hours to travel from Beijing to his latest bout in Karamay on May 21—thanks to the travel restrictions—yet he still managed to destroy traditional wing chun master Lu Gang.
Yeah, that fight is a lopsided slaughter. Fast-forward to 5:45 in to see the actual start of the fight:
The Tai Chi Master fight is even briefer:
And here’s Joe Rogan commenting on that fight:
There’s an old Chinese proverb that says that “the nail which stands up must be hammered down.” It doesn’t matter if your martial art is demonstrably superior if the Party has already decided otherwise. Do you have any doubt that the Social Justice Warrior “cancel culture” hellbent on deplatforming and demonetizing conservatives would hesitate for a second if they could also keep you from buying plane tickets for exhibiting wrongthink by owning guns or thinking there are only two biologically determined sexes?
Since I don’t have cable, I was unaware that reality TV show LivePD had a contract with Williamson County to be one of the departments featured. (I’ve heard LivePD described as “NFL Red Zone TV for Cops.”) Now comes word that the Williamson County Commissioner’s Court just voted unanimously to terminate the LivePD contract, saying “it did not accurately portray life in the county.”
On the one hand, yeah, he shouldn’t have done that. On the other hand, slamming Deaton for personal Facebook posts that mock “The Elf on The Shelf” is a lot closer to PC run amuck, like saying this:
is “an Elf dismembering a black football player at the knees with a chainsaw.” As opposed to an action figure attacking a plastic football player.
And the fact that the original complaint came from those dishonest radicals at the Southern Poverty Law Center makes me even more inclined to cut Deaton some slack, and believe that Williamson County Sheriff Robert Chody made the right decision in not taking further action.
Early on August 16, a total of 23 local government organizations in Texas were hit by a coordinated ransomware attack. The type of ransomware has not been revealed, and Texas officials asserted that no state networks were compromised in the attack.
A spokesman for the Texas Department of Information Resources (TDIR) told Ars that authorities are not ready to reveal the names of the entities affected, nor other details of the attack. State and federal agencies are in the midst of a response, and TDIR did not have information on whether any of the affected governmental organizations had chosen to pay the ransom.
But the TDIR did reveal that the ransomware came from a single source. “At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor,” a spokesperson said. “Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.”
On the morning of August 16, 2019, more than 20 entities in Texas reported a ransomware attack. The majority of these entities were smaller local governments.
Later that morning, the State Operations Center (SOC) was activated with a day and night shift.
At this time, the evidence gathered indicates the attacks came from one single threat actor.
Investigations into the origin of this attack are ongoing; however, response and recovery are the priority at this time.
It appears all entities that were actually or potentially impacted have been identified and notified.
Twenty-three entities have been confirmed as impacted.
Responders are actively working with these entities to bring their systems back online.
The State of Texas systems and networks have not been impacted.
The following agencies are supporting this incident:
Texas Department of Information Resources
Texas Division of Emergency Management
Texas Military Department
The Texas A&M University System’s Security Operations Center/Critical Incident Response Team
Texas Department of Public Safety
Computer Information Technology and Electronic Crime (CITEC) Unit
Cybersecurity
Intelligence and Counter Terrorism
Texas Public Utility Commission
Department of Homeland Security
Federal Bureau of Investigation – Cyber
Federal Emergency Management Agency
Other Federal cybersecurity partners
And in convenient retweetable form:
We are leading the response to a ransomware attack on at least 20 Texas local government entities. For more information, including #ransomware facts and cybersecurity tips see our attached guides and visit our website at https://t.co/FmjRaiKKgIpic.twitter.com/1Dq88cv6XW
Consider this yet another reminder to use strong passwords you can remember, to backup all your files (especially all your important files) regularly, update your virus definitions and security patches regularly (between starting and publishing this piece, I updated both Firefox and macOS), and to never open an email attachment or click on a link unless you’re absolutely sure you know who it’s from.
