Ilhan Omar, 9/11, and the Great Coordinated Democratic Freakout

April 14th, 2019

Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota said something very stupid, and President Donald Trump made a video that called her on it:

What followed was not just the usual Democratic Party freakout, but a coordinated Democratic Party with the same absurd talking points:

It’s fascinating to watch Democrats step up to the plate and tell the exact same lie, one after another, in order to construct a false reality right before our very eyes. Omar said something stupid and President Trump merely called her out for it. There was absolutely no call to violence in the video, much less anything remotely resembling “white supremacy.” So why the uniform Democratic attempt to pretend otherwise, beyond their usual “Our violence is speech, your speech is violence” lie?

For one thing, social justice warrior “intersectionality” forbids white men from criticizing a black Muslim female Democratic representative. Why, that’s like an untouchable criticizing a Brahmin! Doesn’t Trump know his place?

But there’s a second, bigger reason at work: Because Omar’s stupid statement was about 9/11, President Trump’s response video included footage of the original attack, thus violating the Democratic media complex’s taboo on showing videos of 9/11. They know just how damaging those videos are to their vapid “Islam is a religion of peace” talking points, necessitated by both immigration (more Muslims equal more Democratic voters) and foreign policy (“Palestinians, good! Israel, bad!”). They know how powerful and damaging those images are to the Democratic brand, which is why they call footage of a hugely important historical event that happened 18 years ago “triggering.”

And in one very important sense they’re right. Those images are triggering: They trigger Americans to vote against Democrats.

That’s why they’re pushing back against President Trump so hard and calling such video “an incitement to violence,” because they’re desperate to reimpose that taboo.

This time I don’t think it’s going to work.

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Posted in Democrats, Jihad, Social Justice Warriors, video | No Comments »

Notes From The Continuing Decline of the Union/Democrat Complex

April 13th, 2019

Given the chances to escape from union clutches, workers do so in droves:

Given the choice of no longer paying to support unions they didn’t want to join in the first place, lots of public sector workers took it.

Two of the largest public sector unions in the country lost more than 210,000 so-called “agency fee members” in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court ruling that said unions could no longer force non-members to pay partial dues. That case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, effectively freed public workers from having to make “fair share” payments—usually totaling about 70 to 80 percent of full union dues—in lieu of joining a union as a full-fledged member.

Now, annual reports filed with the federal Department of Labor show that the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) lost 98 percent of it’s agency fee-paying members during the past year. Another large public sector union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), lost 94 percent of their agency fee-paying members.

Even though unions were preparing for a mass exodus in the wake of the Janus ruling, the numbers are staggering. In 2017, AFSCME reported having 112,233 agency fee payers (compared to 1.3 million dues-paying members), but that figure dropped to just 2,215 in the union’s 2018 report. The SEIU reported having 104,501 agency fee-payers in 2017 (compared to 1,919,358 dues-paying members), but just 5,812 of them at the end of 2018.

(Hat tip: Dwight.)

Unions have long provided a disproportionate share of Democratic fundraising, and their decline hasn’t been entirely offset by high tech billionaire money. This is why Democrats have kept trying to prop up unions through such measures as the failed attempt to ram “card check” through in 2009. It’s also why Democrats have introduced legislation to invalidate right to work laws in the 27 states that have them. Fortunately, this is yet another piece of proposed legislation that’s going nowhere fast…

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Posted in Democrats, unions | No Comments »

LinkSwarm for April 12, 2019

April 12th, 2019

At long last, the FISA abuse/FBI spying on the Trump campaign scandal is finally being dragged into the light again. At the same time, Wikileaks head honcho Julian Assange has been extracted from the Ecuadorian embassy arrested, pending extradition to the U.S. Coincidence? I report, you decide. “The US department of justice confirmed he has been charged with computer crimes, and added in a statement that if convicted he will face up to five years in prison.” Dang dude, if he had turned himself in when indicted, he’d already be out by now and working the talk show circuit.

Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm, and remember that you have to finish doing your taxes this weekend.

  • Stating the obvious: “Barr is right, spying on Trump campaign did occur.”

    The baffling thing was why they were baffled. Barr’s statement was accurate and supported by publicly known facts.

    First, what Barr said. “I think spying did occur,” he told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “But the question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting it was not adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”

    That is entirely accurate. It is a fact that in October 2016 the FBI wiretapped Carter Page, who had earlier been a short-term foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. The bureau’s application to a secret court for that wiretapping is public. It is heavily redacted but is clearly focused on Page and “the Russian government’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” Page was wiretapped because of his connection with the Trump campaign.

    Some critics have noted that the wiretap authorization came after Page left the campaign. But the surveillance order allowed authorities to intercept Page’s electronic communications both going forward from the day of the order and backward, as well. Investigators could see Page’s emails and texts going back to his time in the campaign.

    So there is simply no doubt that the FBI wiretapped a Trump campaign figure. Is a wiretap “spying”? It is hard to imagine a practice, whether approved by a court or not, more associated with spying.

    Anyone reading this blog (or any non-MSM news source) knew that Obama’s Justice Department was spying on Trump over two years ago. At this point it’s about as surprising as hearing that James Harden is good at basketball…

  • “Barr Confirms Multiple Intel Agencies Implicated In Anti-Trump Spy Operation.” (Hat tip: J.J. Sefton at Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • In the same vein:

    Democrats seem both angry and frightened, and their kneejerk and perhaps even somewhat panicked response right now is to try to destroy Barr.

    You can feel the frisson of fear they emanate. They waited two years for the blow of the Mueller report to fall on Trump, and now other investigative blows may fall on them. The Mueller report combined with Barr’s appointment could end up being a sort of ironic boomerang (whether or not boomerangs can be ironic I leave to you to decide).

    How could this have happened? they must be thinking. How could the worm have turned? But they are spinning in the usual manner, hoping that—as so often has happened in the past—their confederates in the press will work their magic to make all of it go away and boomerang back to Republicans instead.

    But whatever comes of it all, if anything, Democrats cannot believe that at least right now their dreams have turned to dust and they taste, instead of the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.

    That’s from Neo, formerly NeoNeocon. I can see why she’d want to change the name, given how many neocons became #NeverTrump lunatics. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Newly released email from Platte River Networks, the firm that serviced the Emailgate server used by Hillary Clinton: “Its all part of the Hillary coverup operation.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Who’s Worse – Julian Assange or the NY Times and Washington Post?”

    Deeply sourced? What a laugh. As we now know post-Mueller Report, these “respected” journalists were simply trafficking in collusion lies whispered to them by biased informants. In other words, they were a bunch of gullible, over-zealous propagandists. For that they received their Pulitzers, as yet unreturned, needless to say (just as the Pulitzer for Walter Duranty still hangs on the NY Times’ wall despite decades of pleas from Ukrainians whose countrymen’s mass murder by Stalin was bowdlerized by Duranty).

    So, in other words, these mainstream media reporters have gotten off with nary a slap on the wrist (indeed received fame and fortune) for lying while Julian Assange may be headed for prison for telling the truth. There’s a bit of irony in that, no?

  • Iraqi special forces launch an operation against islamic State remnants in the Hamrin Mountains. If you looked at the livemap, the Hamrin Mountains were the tiny sliver of ISIS-held territory between Tikrit and Kirkuk. No population centers, just some remote mountainous caves.
  • “Avenatti indicted on 36 charges of tax dodging, perjury, theft from clients.”

    Avenatti stole millions of dollars from five clients and used a tangled web of shell companies and bank accounts to cover up the theft, the Santa Ana grand jury alleged in an indictment that prosecutors made public Thursday.

    One of the clients, Geoffrey Ernest Johnson, was a mentally ill paraplegic on disability who won a $4-million settlement of a suit against Los Angeles County. The money was wired to Avenatti in January 2015, but he hid it from Johnson for years, according to the indictment.

    In 2017, Avenatti received $2.75 million in proceeds from another client’s legal settlement, but concealed that too, the indictment says. The next day, he put $2.5 million of that money into the purchase of a private jet for Passport 420, LLC, a company he effectively owned, according to prosecutors.

    You can read the indictment itself here. Hey, remember the MSM treating Creepy Porn Lawyer like a rock star? Pepperidge Farm remembers:

  • When California Democratic Representative Ted Lieu went after Candace Owens, he probably had no idea he’d just make her star shine brighter. “She was a liberal, but during the #GamerGate controversy, she was ‘doxxed’ by the Left, and had a road-to-Damascus awakening: ‘I became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls.'”
  • Wendy Davis is going to run for congress against Rep. Chip Roy. In one way this makes sense, as Roy narrowly won over Joseph Kopser by 2% in 2018. However, Kopser was (by Democratic standards) a well-heeled businessman moderate. I don’t actually see Abortion Barbie being nearly as competitive after the walloping she took in 2014. Also of interest is her running for an Austin-to-San Antonio district rather than somewhere near her previous base of Fort Worth. (I emailed the Kopser for Congress address to ask if he’s running again, but the contact address is no longer valid.)
  • Fritz Hollings, RIP. Hollings was one of the last conservative southern Democrats, and co-sponsor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act, which temporarily limited spending growth until congress gutted it in 1990.
  • West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin supports the reelection of Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins.
  • Georgia Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath lives in Tennessee.
  • “Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has warned China that his soldiers [are] occupying the island of Thitu in the South China Sea, which is currently surrounded by some 275 Chinese fishing militia and Coast Guard vessels.”
  • Why we need the electoral college:

    he core function of the Electoral College is to require presidential candidates to appeal to the voters of a sufficient number of large and smaller states, rather than just try to run up big margins in a handful of the biggest states, cities, or regions. Critics ignore the important value served by having a president whose base of support is spread over a broad, diverse array of regions of the country (even a president as polarizing as Donald Trump won seven of the ten largest states and places as diverse as Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, West Virginia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas).

    In a nation as wide and varied as ours, it would be destabilizing to have a president elected over the objections of most of the states. Our American system as a whole — both by design and by experience — demands the patient building of broad, diverse political coalitions over time to effect significant change. The presidency works together with the Senate and House to make that a necessity. The Senate, of course, is also a target of the Electoral College’s critics, but eliminating the equal suffrage of states requires the support of every single state. A president elected without regard to state support is more likely to face a dysfunctional level of opposition in the Senate.

    Consider an illustrative example. Most of us, I think, would agree that 54 percent of the vote is a pretty good benchmark for a decisive election victory — not a landslide, but a no-questions-asked comfortable majority. That’s bigger than Donald Trump’s victory in Texas in 2016; Trump won 18 states with 54 percent or more of the vote in 2016, Hillary Clinton won 10 plus D.C., and the other 22 states were closer than that. Nationally, just 16 elections since 1824 have been won by a candidate who cleared 54 percent of the vote — the last was Ronald Reagan in 1984 — and all of them were regarded as decisive wins at the time.

    Picture a two-candidate election with 2016’s turnout. The Republican wins 54 percent of the vote in 48 states, losing only California, New York, and D.C. That’s a landslide victory, right? But then imagine that the Republican nominee who managed this feat was so unpopular in California, New York, and D.C. that he or she loses all three by a 75 percent–to–25 percent margin. That 451–87 landslide in the Electoral College, built on eight-point wins in 48 states, would also be a popular-vote defeat, with 50.7 percent of the vote for the Democrat to 49.3 percent for the Republican. Out of a total of about 137 million votes, that’s a popular-vote margin of victory of 1.95 million votes for a candidate who was decisively rejected in 48 of the 50 states.

    Who should win that election? This is not just a matter of coloring in a lot of empty red land on a map: each of these 48 states is an independent entity that has its own governor, legislature, laws, and courts, and sends two senators to Washington. The whole idea of a country called the United States is that those individual communities are supposed to matter.

  • “Can Jewish Exodus from Democratic Party keep Florida red in 2020?”
  • Five debunked feminist myths. Including that hoary 77¢ canard.
  • “On Thursday, Google canceled its AI ethics board after 2,476 employees signed a petition urging the company to remove Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James for opposing transgender activism. An anonymous Google employee told PJ Media the corporate culture resembles the stifling of debate on college campuses, and warned that Google’s caving to pressure on this issue will only embolden activists.”
  • Eurocrats issue absurd takedown commands under a new “terrorist content” law. Include all of Project Gutenberg.
  • A follow-up to last week’s LinkSwarm piece about Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh’s bribes-via-bulk-children’s book-orders scam: Critical Carlos reviews Healthy Holly. And don’t miss the video.
  • Via regular blog reader Howard comes this handy map of fake hate crimes.
  • That “far right extremist crimes are on the rise” talking point is absolute bunk.
  • More than 60 groups are considering suing SPLC. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Antifa gonna antifa:

  • “Man In Critical Condition After Hearing Slightly Differing Viewpoint.”
  • “Casino Profits Collapse In Atlantic City.”
  • Pollen haboob. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • The word for the color orange didn’t exist in English until the introduction of the fruit.
  • “Oh no, not the bees! They’re in my eyes!”
  • You just missed the 50th anniversary of the Japanese Penis Festival. (Hat tip: Ordy Packard on Twitter.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Jihad, Media Watch, Obama Scandals, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    Sudan Coup Update

    April 11th, 2019

    The good news is that Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, a man implicated in genocide in Darfur, has indeed been deposed after 30 years in power and is under arrest.

    The bad news is his replacement, Defense Minister Awad Mohamed Ahmed bin Awaf, was also sanctioned for his role in Darfur. Ibn Auf is also the former head of military intelligence, which is the sort of background that lets someone stick around power for a while, no matter that the military has said they’ll only rule for two years.

    Protest leaders are already saying that military rule is not good enough, they want actual democracy:

    Omar al-Bashir is a scumbag dictator who tried to impose Sharia law on Sudan. I’m cautiously optimistic that his replacements will be an improvement, though how much remains to be seen.

    The BBC has a timeline of al-Bashir reign.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »

    Coup in Sudan

    April 11th, 2019

    I’m about to go off to bed, but here are numerous reports that a coup against the unpopular dictator Omar al-Bashir, who has ruled Sudan for 30 years, has succeeded and forced him to step down after weeks of massive protests against him:

    Al-Bashir is a corrupt scumbag who has played footsie with jihadists and is responsible for the genocide in Darfur. Usually instability like this makes a country ripe for takeover by jihadists, but the nature of al-Bashir’s regime (which discriminated against all Sudanese who weren’t Arab) suggests that whatever follows him probably won’t be Islamists (knock on wood).

    Developing…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »

    Netanyahu Wins Israeli Election Yet Again

    April 10th, 2019

    Benjamin Netanyahu was effectively reelected to a fourth term as Israeli Prime Minister:

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won Tuesday’s election and will be able to form a governing coalition that will enable to withstand a bribery indictment by Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit, according to the results with 97% of the vote counted.

    Mandelblit indicted Netanyahu pending a hearing on February 28, details of the indictment that were not permitted to be released during the election could be leaked as early as Wednesday. The hearing is expected to take place in July and the decision on the final indictment some six months later.

    The parties that said clearly ahead of the election that Netanyahu would not have to quit following a final indictment were Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism, the Union of Right-wing Parties and Yisrael Beytenu, which won 61 seats, according to preliminary results.

    Likud won 35 seats, Shas and UTJ eight each and URP and Yisrael Beytenu five. Kulanu, whose leader Moshe Kahlon said he would join a Netanyahu-led government but leave following a final indictment, won four seats.

    Blue and White won 35 seats, Labor and Hadash-Ta’al six each and Meretz and the United Arab List-Balad four each. The New Right, Zehut and Gesher did not cross the 3.25% electoral threshold. However as this dramatic election has shown, anything could change as the final votes from IDF soldiers, prisoners and diplomats are counted.

    Exit polling had the two blocs neck and neck, but actual votes had Likud’s bloc pulling ahead, reminding us yet again that you can’t trust exit polling.

    Netanyahu is one of President Trump’s most important allies abroad (arguably the most important), and has long been a hate object for the American left, which even sent Obama’s Democratic operative Jeremy Byrd in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat him in the 2015 election.

    Also interesting is the continued decline of Israeli’s Labor Party, which continues to shrink and has not had a prime minister since Ehud Barak left office in 2001. Labor had 44 seats in 1992, and is now down to 6, a victim of its insistence on adhering to a broken “peace process” with untrustworthy, terrorism-minded Palestinian partners.

    Expect more vicious Israel-bashing from American liberals following the election, guaranteeing still more Jewish Americans will flee the Democratic Party.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy | No Comments »

    The Inevitability Of Autonomous Drone Swarms In Combat

    April 9th, 2019

    Borepatch thinks it’s going to be a while until we get autonomous drones in combat. I think he’s probably mistaken, as he seems to be thinking about using them to pilot big, expensive things like tanks.

    I think we’re going to see autonomous drone swarms used in combat a lot sooner.

    Soldiers are expensive (at least for first world armies). Drones are cheap and getting cheaper. Imagine inserting a drone delivery system behind enemy lines and let them wreck havoc in bases and depots. Make some exploding, some small caliber anti-personnel, some with top-down anti-vehicle shaped charges. They don’t have to be perfect, they only have to be more discriminating than artillery barrages or cluster bombs. Give them a one-time encrypted activation code and some 30-60 minutes of juice. Make them low cost enough and no one cares if you lose them all; picking up depleted drones to be sent back and reworked after you take the objective is just gravy.

    Or use Mischief Reef as a concrete example. Have a stealthy submersible surface just long enough to unleash a thousand autonomous drones designed to attack personnel, ships or aircraft. It’s quite possibly you could destroy half a billion dollars worth of expensive combat aircraft and facilities using $500,000 worth of drones.

    Borepatch brings up the problem of hacking. It doesn’t matter if the enemy can hack one or two if you’re deploying a hundred at a time at a cost comparable to one M829 round.

    Done right, a drone swarm can be plenty dumb and plenty cheap and still be lethal. You don’t need to make them smart enough to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants if you limit their use cases to combatant areas.

    There are dozens of other use cases for drones in combat. Heavy refueling drones, each of which carry enough diesel to top off an M1A2 tank during a prolonged armor push. Small swarms of small drones that perform automated sweeps of restricted areas, sending up alerts (and possibly deploying non-lethal weapons) after detecting intruders. Automatic long-range search drones deployed for sea rescue operations.

    All this is coming sooner rather than later.

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    Posted in Military | 1 Comment »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for April 8, 2019

    April 8th, 2019

    Tim Ryan and Eric Swalwell are In, Biden’s still Hamleting, Bloomberg is suddenly back in the picture, and a certain anti-Trump celebrity is making noises about running.

    Fundraising

    More fundraising numbers are trickling out: “Final fundraising tallies from January through March won’t come out until April 15 when candidates officially file their numbers with the FEC. That didn’t stop several triumphant Democratic contenders from releasing their estimated fundraising tallies early.”

    From Open Secrets and elsewhere:

    1. Bernie Sanders: $18.2 million from 525,000 donors
    2. Kamala Harris: $12 million from 138,000 donors
    3. Beto O’Rourke: $9.4 million from 218,000 contributions (number of donors not specified)
    4. Pete Buttigieg: $7 million from 158,550 donors
    5. Cory Booker: $5 million (number of donors not specified)
    6. Andrew Yang: $1.7 million from 80,000 donors

    This comment had some of the usual types in a tizzy:

    But he’s right. Harris has all sorts of structural advantages (sitting senator from an extremely wealthy state and a media darling), but she’s barely outpacing a guy who was considered an unlikely longshot a month ago.

    Polls

    Morning Consult has it Biden 33, Sanders 25, O’Rourke and Harris tied at 8, and Warren at 7.

    Change Research poll of South Carolina voters has Biden at 32, Sanders at 12, Harris at 10, Booker and O’Rourke at 9, Adams and Buttigieg at 7, and Warren at 6.

    It turns out that the home states of the various candidates are not super-wild about them, as none got majorities in their own states.

    538 Presidential roundup. (You know this gets updated with new info and a new URL every week, right?)

    538 polls.

    Democratic Party presidential primary schedule.

    Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? “Stacey Abrams torn between running for president, Senate.” She’s even making noises that she could wait until the fall to decide. Uh, not really. If you launch that late I think you start running into ballot access issues.
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Addition: Actor Alec Baldwin: Maybe? I wouldn’t necessarily put much stock into it, but the actor and SNL Trump-impersonator asked his Twitter followers if they would vote for him if he ran for President. Two weeks ago I said that the race could be ripe for a disruptive outsider celebrity candidate, and despite his career decline, Baldwin fits that description. And having noted rageholic Baldwin run would certainly shake things up. Though his Twitter account (which he’s blocked me on) seems to have been mostly moribund the last year. And his opponents already have a anti-Baldwin meme song ready to go:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Maybe? Bennet announced he has prostate cancer…but is still interested in running for President after surgery. Sounds like the sort of event that causes people to decide not to run for President…
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning Towards Running. Biden says he wants to be the last person to announce he’s running for President. So far, so good! But he’s running into more creeper questions, as well as flak for his son’s shady deals in Ukraine. Nine reasons to vote for Joe Biden. 95% sarcasm by weight. And this took Twitter by storm:

  • Update: Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Maybe. Remember how Bloomberg said he was out? Well now people close to him are saying he might still run if Biden doesn’t. Upgrade from Out.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Says he raised more than $5 million in Q1. The National Catholic Reporter wonders why he’s not doing better. “Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey should be one of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. He checks so many different boxes that other candidates leave unchecked, it is hard to see why he has not catapulted to the top of the polls, but he hasn’t.”
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Out.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Leaning Toward In, but is reportedly going to wait until Montana’s legislative session finishes, which would be May 1. New York magazine did a little mini-roundup of who hasn’t announced yet. “There are those who consider Bullock, who’s delaying his decision on a possible race until his legislature adjourns, a quite viable candidate.”
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Says he like the Green New Deal and nuclear power. Jim Geraghty dissects the Buttigieg moment:

    I see a common thread between the current moment of Buttigieg-mania, and 2018’s Beto-mania. A once-obscure political figure suddenly is the subject of one glossy profile after another, with the general gist of “You’ve never heard of this officeholder, but he’s (or less often, she’s) amazing, and about to shake up politics.” You hear about how the figure is wowing people on the stump, some quote from some audience members selected to represent the “average voter,” declaring that the figure “restores my hope” and “really cares about people like me,” followed by a recitation of their legislative or governing accomplishments. The profile hits all the familiar notes: the humble beginnings, the mischievous hijinks of youth, the happy home life, the vague but positive vision for America’s future. (It’s like this Beto profile, but less exaggerated.)

    And maybe in the back of your mind, you’re thinking . . . wait, if this guy is so terrific, why have I never heard of him until now? I follow the news. I’m reasonably well-informed. If he was the driving force behind such big and consequential accomplishments, why have I not noticed them or heard other people talking about them? The accounts of the audiences left in rapturous awe ought to raise some red flags for us, too. Sure, the figure seems charismatic and likable enough, but the allegedly ordinary voters who show up to the rallies are already predisposed to like him — otherwise, they wouldn’t show up to the rally!

    Almost everybody’s resume looks good — it represents putting your best foot forward. Very few figures who run for office begin by announcing, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, had a lot of proposals that never worked out, I’ve had my share of ethical lapses, and I have no idea how I would hold up under the pressure of the presidency.”

    Sure, there are under-covered, little-noticed mayors, House members, and even governors and senators who are accomplishing things under the radar of the national media. But when it comes to Democrats, there are some painfully familiar templates: the “here’s the Democrat who’s leading his party to a comeback in the South” and the variation, “Texas Democrats are ready for a comeback.” And when it comes to presidential politics, maybe the easiest way to pick out the candidate who will get the early buzz is to ask which one reminds the national press corps the most of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama — young, charismatic, handsome, talking about better days ahead and unleashing all of America’s untapped potential. We can argue about whether it’s still accurate, but for a long time, the line “Republicans fall in line, Democrats want to fall in love” was a reasonable assessment of each party’s presidential-primary process.

    Buttigieg is that guy right now. But history has examples of young Democrats who ultimately stumbled for one reason or another — John Edwards, Howard Dean, Jerry Brown, Gary Hart, the 1988 edition of Al Gore.

  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He promised to release 10 years of tax returns and campaigned in California.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out.
  • New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Leaning toward In. “De Blasio Stubbornly Moves Toward Presidential Race That Could Humiliate New York.”

    His first two recent trips to Iowa have been, in a word, fiascoes (his first, last December, was marked by NYPD protests, and during the second, in February, he was stranded in a blizzard at a Super 8 motel and dined on a gas-station burrito). He hasn’t been listed in most 2020 polls, and his peak performance in any has been a booming one percent.

    It’s hard to discern any path to the White House for Hizzoner.

  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Business Insider profile. The Root talks about his “commitment to black America.”
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Tulsi Gabbard Accuses CNN’s Fareed Zakaria of Goading Donald Trump Into War With Russia.”
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She too gets a Business Insider profile.
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. All quiet on the Gillum front.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. She racked up more South Carolina endorsements. “When the Senate took contentious votes this week on a disaster aid package to help California rebuild after wildfires, Sen. Kamala Harris was in Sacramento — courting the support of labor unions for her presidential campaign.”
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Hickenlooper this week addressed the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.”
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Out.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Get’s a CNN quick facts profile.
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. “Amy Klobuchar’s Hazy ‘Heartland Economics’“: “Amy Klobuchar is counting on “heartland economics” to win Iowa and make her the candidate of the Midwest—though she’s still working through what precisely she means by that, and how it would actually lead her to the Democratic presidential nomination.” She also released 12 years of tax returns.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Probably Out.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run? “Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe said Monday that he’s “very close” to a decision on whether he’ll seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.” Also says he’ll have the funniest campaign if he runs, which is pretty tough talk given how hilarious both Baldwin’s and de Blasio’s campaigns would be.
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s not even going to get to New Hampshire until May. So far I’m not seeing any Messamentum. But he did put a viral ad with his daughters, and they seem really, really…normal:

  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Maybe? Get’s a New Hampshire public radio profile.
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama: Out.
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Out.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “It’s been Bernie versus Beto all weekend in Iowa.” Heh: “Iowa student asks Beto O’Rourke ‘Are you here to see Beto?'”
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Update. Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. He announced last week. Five facts about Ryan, including the tidbit that he’s never run for statewide office, and his district went for Trump in 2016.
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Sanders thinks convicted felons should be able to vote from prison. But he says he doesn’t want open borders:

    Maybe he wants to try “Socialism in One Country” first…

  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • Update: California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. He announced he’s running on gun control on Colbert. Never mind my well-known opposition to gun control, as an observer I just don’t see that moving the needle in such a crowded field. Just about all of them are gun grabbers.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. Warren is polling in third place… in Massachusetts. She’s also dropped a lot of radical policy proposals down the well, most of which haven’t made a splash, and she hasn’t released any preliminary Q1 fundraising numbers.
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets a Des Moines Register profile. She’s going to do a CNN town hall April 14.
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He raised $1.7 million, so obviously someone cares, even if it’s conservatives trying to jam the Democrats. He got an ABC News profile and was interviewed by Ben Shapiro:

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, video | 1 Comment »

    MS-13 Threatens Middle School

    April 7th, 2019

    Democrats and their media allies have resurrected the year-old fake talking point that President Donald Trump called asylum seekers “animals” when he was actually referring to members of the violent illegal alien MS-13 gang. Now Democratic Presidential candidates like Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker are busy keeping the story alive by dinging President Trump over the word “animals.”

    They just can’t help themselves.

    It just so happens that a major MSM story just dropped about MS-13’s increasing hold over a middle school:

    The boys had once been friends before MS-13 began recruiting one of them. Now, as other students streamed to class one April morning at William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale, Maryland, the two teens squared off in the third-story bathroom – a fight captured by another student on his cellphone.

    The MS-13 recruit threw a punch at his former friend’s head. His opponent ducked and tackled the 15-year-old, their sneakers squealing as they tumbled to the green tile floor.

    “I like that,” someone shouted off-camera as the recruit tried to cover his head.

    “That look like it hurt,” someone wrote under the video, which was uploaded to Instagram on April 19 and has been viewed more than 400 times.

    Gang-related fights are now a near-daily occurrence at Wirt, where a small group of suspected MS-13 members at the overwhelmingly Hispanic school throw gang signs, sell drugs, draw gang graffiti and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America, according to more than two dozen teachers, parents and students. Most of those interviewed asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by MS-13.

    Although administrators deny Wirt has a gang problem, the situation inside the aging, overcrowded building has left some teachers so afraid that they refuse to be alone with their students. Many said they had repeatedly reported incidents involving suspected gang members to administrators, only to be ignored – claims supported by documents obtained by The Washington Post.

    “Teachers feel threatened but aren’t backed up. Students feel threatened but aren’t protected,” one educator said. “The school is a ticking time bomb.”

    The gang’s presence at Wirt comes at a time when the Trump administration has declared war on MS-13, and communities throughout the country are confronting a surge in MS-13-related violence.

    Nearly a dozen parents told The Post they were worried about gang activity at the school, which is located 10 miles from the White House. Many said they were intent on transferring their kids. Several said they were scared their children would be killed.

    One eighth-grader said she had been raped in the fall by a schoolmate in MS-13 – an attack that took place off school property and that she reported to police, but then recanted out of fear of the gang. Prince George’s investigators concluded the report was unfounded, but the girl said she now lives in fear the gang will stab her as she leaves school.

    “MS dominates the school,” she said. “But I don’t even tell the security guards what goes on anymore because they don’t seem to care.”

    Read the whole thing.

    When Democrats started defending the “human dignity” of MS-13 last year, Marc Thiessen noted it was a really stupid idea:

    Through their dishonesty, Democrats such as Pelosi have handed the president a winning issue. A Harvard/Harris poll finds that 56 percent of Americans agree with Trump that it is fair to call MS-13 “animals” (including 47 percent of Hispanics, and 41 percent of Democrats). Millions of Americans can’t understand why Democrats seem more hostile toward Trump than a vicious gang that carries out savage killings…When the president has you defending the “dignity and worth” of MS-13 members, you’re doing something wrong.

    A huge reason for the conservative revival after Barry Goldwater’s 1964 electoral wipeout was the increasing, visible disorder in American high schools. (In one infamous instant, students set a new York high school teacher on fire.) Now, thanks to Democrats needing a steady influx of illegal aliens to help their electoral chances, a new wave of violence and disorder is striking not just high schools, but middle schools.

    How long do you think middle Americans will stand by the Democratic Party when their pre-teen children are being stabbed, raped and murdered by illegal alien gangs?

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats | No Comments »

    Video Gaming As A Career

    April 6th, 2019

    Ann Althouse posted a link to this story about a 14-year old who earns a six-figure income playing video games:

    Griffin Spikoski spends as much as 18 hours a day glued to his computer screen playing the wildly popular, multi-player video game Fortnite.

    His YouTube channel — where he regularly uploads videos of himself playing the online game — has nearly 1.2 million subscribers and more than 71 million views; figures that have netted him advertisers, sponsorships and a steady stream of income.

    Last year, that income totaled nearly $200,000.

    The healthy sum — more than enough to comfortably raise a family in most American cities — is all the more impressive considering Spikoski is 14 years old.

    Still, he approaches video games the way an elite student athlete would approach a sport like football or basketball: when he’s not playing, Spikoski, who goes by the name “Sceptic” on YouTube, completes school work online.

    But video games remain his focus, according to family members.

    “It’s kind of like my job,” Griffin told ABC affiliate WABC-TV, noting he plays about eight hours a day in his Long Island home.

    Snip

    The reality is that electronic sports (known as “esports”) have become big business, so much so that the biggest esports tournaments are now providing payouts of nearly $25 million, according to Gamespot, offering salaries that rival or surpass many professional athletes.

    Last year, the video game and software company Epic Games announced that the company would provide $100 million to fund prize pools for Fortnite competitions for the upcoming season. The audience, which spans the globe and flocks to popular gamers on YouTube and streaming platforms like Twitch, is in the tens of millions. More than 67 million people from around the world play League of Legends each month, according to Riot Games.

    “Esports mimic traditional sports leagues principles: Exciting content, likeable stars, catchy team names, slow motion highlights, intense competition and an uncertain outcome,” according to the Conversation.

    “These video games attract audiences as they are no longer simply designed to be played, but increasingly to be visually pleasing for audiences,” the outlet added.

    Like ESPN athlete profiles that air on game day, video game companies are even producing their own short videos highlighting the personality and drive of their most popular players.

    For years now, Spikoski’s family said, the teenager’s entree into professional esports has seemed inevitable.

    His big break came last year when the Spikoski beat a well-known Fortnite player and uploaded a video of the battle to YouTube, quickly resulting in 7.5 million views, according to WABC-TV. It didn’t take long, the station reported, for the teenager to make his first $100 from Twitch. Not long after, his father, Chris said, everything changed.

    “Two months went by and we were like, ‘Alright, we’re going to need to get an accountant and get a financial adviser,’” he said.

    Spikoski’s parents told filmmakers that they decided to remove their son from high school as his dedication to gaming deepened. With his notoriety increasing, Connolly said, Spikoski struggled to manage two worlds — and two personalities — that felt increasingly divergent. In person, Spikoski is shy and anxious. In the virtual world, he is confident, playful and mischievous.

    “I think he made it through three days of high school and he had issues every day that he was there — either being distracted in class because people wanted his attention or feeling like he had to be Sceptic at school,” Connolly said.

    Spikoski’s parents said their son had been pushing them to allow him to pursue online schooling. With his success growing, they eventually relented.

    There’s a lot of debate over whether this is a good idea, which I think is fairly irrelevant. If I could have made $200,000 doing what I loved when I was 14 (say, science fiction writer or actor), there’s no question I would have gone for it in an instant. It’s just the economically logical thing to do. Even if the careerspan of professional esports players is brief (judging from Korean StarCraft players, you’re out by 20), that’s still enough money (even post-tax) to graduate from an elite college debt-free or start your own business. And there’s no guarantee that this moment when you can make a living off YouTube video and live-streaming will last particularly long, so it’s best to get while the getting is good.

    Will it screw up his life long-term? Maybe. Fame and fortune screw up the loves of a lot of child actors. But not all. And high school is pretty much 75% bunk by weight. There’s nothing to prevent you from learning things like “making friends” and ‘dating” in college. And if you don’t have the test scores to get into college, that money will also buy you a year-round tutor until you do.

    And maybe eports are one of the few areas robots can’t replace…

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    Posted in Media Watch | 1 Comment »

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