LinkSwarm for March 22, 2019

March 22nd, 2019

Hope you’re enjoying the spring weather! This week: Jexodus, Clinton emails (yet again), and a fair amount about aircraft. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • President Donald Trump calls for recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Since Israeli has controlled the Golan Heights for more than half a century, this would not be a radical and surprising move were it not for much of the world’s (and the Democratic Party’s) antipathy to the Jewish state. Expect liberal Jewish Democrats (see below) to fiercely condemn the move…
  • “How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide.” Or so says those notorious pro-Trump shills at Politico. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • How dare Chelsea Clinton defend the Jews?

    For those of us who consider Chelsea Clinton a cringe-inducing banality, that she could be accused of anything so momentous, never mind a racist slaughter in the Antipodes, was puzzling indeed. And so it was with great curiosity that I read the Buzzfeed piece in which the pair explain their actions. In it, they accuse Clinton of having “stoked hatred against” all Muslims, everywhere, with a single tweet criticizing just a single one, Ilhan Omar. When the Democratic congresswoman complained about lawmakers being forced to pledge “allegiance to a foreign country,” she wasn’t repeating a hoary anti-Semitic trope which has instigated all manner of desecrations and violent attacks and pogroms. No, according to these NYU coeds, exemplars of American higher education as impressive as those Yale students who screamed at a distinguished professor for hours over Halloween costumes, Omar was “speaking the truth about the massive influence of the Israel lobby in this country.”

    It is Rep. Omar who is the victim here. “Chelsea hurt our fight against white supremacy when she stood by the petty weaponizers of antisemitism, showing no regard for Rep. Omar and the hatred being directed at her,” Asaf and Dweik declared. English translation: People who are left wing, Muslim or “of color” cannot be anti-Semites, and those who say otherwise will be condemned as handmaidens of Jim Crow. This is especially true if the person in question is, like IIhan Omar, all three.

    Reading the many progressive identity-based defenses of Omar, which repeatedly and pointlessly invoke the fact that she is a hijabi-wearing black refugee being criticized by a white native-born American woman, one gets the impression that this particular legislator can pretty much say whatever she wants and expect to be absolved for it: Her canonization as a left-wing hero is necessary, and irrevocable.

    Omar can’t be an anti-Semite because members of “marginalized” groups are inherently virtuous. This is the ultimate logic of identity politics. Jussie Smollett just had to be telling the truth; he is black and gay and progressive and his purported assailants were white and straight and wearing MAGA hats. But when Asaf and Dweik insist that she “did nothing wrong except challenge the status quo,” they are taking the side of anti-Semites over Jews. They are normalizing anti-Semitism.

    They are not the only ones. For a growing number of progressives, anti-Semitism has become an ideological obligation as central to their political identity as the Universal Basic Income, Green New Deal, a 70-percent marginal tax rate, and free higher education. These progressives, of course, cannot openly say this. Anti-Semitism is bad. Some of their best friends are Jews. The Holocaust happened. So they need to redefine anti-Semitism out of existence, while redistributing the valuable cultural capital of Jewish historical suffering to more deserving groups. Thus, the phenomena of “white Jews.”

    However, I think the author misses one obvious reason Democrats pander to Muslims: They’ve decided they need their votes more than they need Jewish votes, therefore Jews are expendable in order to keep the victimhood identity politics coalition together.

  • More of Jexodus:

    The negative Jexodus will be the aftermath of a radicalization that splits the Democrats, as it did Labour in the UK along dividing lines of militant socialism, Islamism, and anti-Semitism. These three ‘isms’ will split Jewish Democrats alone those same lines leaving the radicals on the inside and moderates outside. Those Jews who remain will be required to prove their loyalty by denouncing Jews and Israel. These demands will be put forward in the stridently anti-Semitic tones commonplace on the fringes of the Left.

    The 2020 season is just getting started and the Sanders campaign’s deputy press secretary, an illegal alien, already accused Jews of being disloyal, and Elizabeth Warren issued a statement in defense of Rep. Omar accusing Jews of inventing anti-Semitism accusations to silence criticism of Israel. It’s no coincidence that these overt shows of anti-Semitism are coming from the leftiest figures in the race.

    And it will only get worse.

    Jewish lefties have a high degree of tolerance for anti-Semitism. But ultimately the only Jews who will be able to remain in the Dem ranks will have very thick skins and career ambitions, like Chuck Schumer, harbor a complicated mix of shame and hatred for Jewishness, like Bernie Sanders, or have no connection to anything Jewish beyond their last names, like your average millennial Obama official.

    The Democrats have shown no ability to moderate their extremist drift. The movements pushing them leftward are, like the Democratic Socialists of America, openly supportive of anti-Semitism.

    That’s the easiest case to make for Jexodus because the Democrats will be the ones to make it.

    Jews will exit the Dems voluntarily or they will be forced out.

    Snip.

    Jewish Democrats have responded to the outbreak of anti-Semitism with the usual nebbish excuses, blaming Israel, Netanyahu, and the ‘politicization of anti-Semitism”. But socialist movements were anti-Semitic before Zionism and Jesse Jackson was slurring Jews as ‘hymies’ long before Netanyahu.

    Israel is a convenient excuse for anti-Semitism, not only by anti-Semites, but by their Jewish apologists who are eager to exercise a sense of control over a hatred that cannot be controlled, by taking the blame. And then placing it as far away as possible, on another country thousands of miles away.

    The anti-Semites blame the Jews. The Jews blame Israel. And nothing is learned from the experience.

  • Ukraine opens investigations of attempts to interfere in the U.S. Presidential elections in favor of Hillary Clinton. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Speaking of Clinton, in “newly revealed emails, [she] discussed classified foreign policy matters, secretive ‘private’ comms channel with Israel.” That is to say, emails from her secret, illegal, unsecured server, which means that back-channel might not have been so “private” after all. I might have to restart the Clinton Corruption Watch updates. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • A masterful takedown of Max Boot’s new book by Sohrab Ahmari:

    The liberal consensus, then, has emerged as a profoundly illiberal, repressive force—precisely because it grants the autonomous individual such wide berth to define what is good and true. If maximizing individual autonomy is the highest good and, indeed, the very purpose of political community, then for ­Chelsea Manning to exercise “her” autonomy requires the state to compel the rest of us to say that “she” wasn’t born male. And even absent state compulsion, as already exists in Canada and elsewhere, the institutions charged with upholding the consensus—corporations, big tech, universities, and elite media—can exact a high price for dissent.

    Snip.

    In Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the U.S., raising a peep about ­unrestricted mass migration was treated as phobic. Likewise, the guardians of the consensus drummed out of the public square those who questioned the wisdom of replicating the West’s political forms in ­societies shaped by history, and countless other factors, to favor order, community, and authority over individual autonomy. On the home front, economic growth, interconnectedness, and openness were treated as the only ideals worthy of the name.

  • Kurt Schilchter says we’re going to lose the coming war with China.

    We’re hanging our whole maritime strategy in the Pacific Ocean around a few of these big, super-expensive iron airfields. If a carrier battle group (a carrier rolls with a posse like an old school rapper) gets within aircraft flight range of an enemy, then the enemy will have a bad day. So, what’s the super-obvious counter to our carrier strategy? Well, how about a bunch of relatively cheap missiles with a longer range than the carrier’s aircraft? And – surprise – what are the Chinese doing? Building a bunch of hypersonic and ballistic anti-ship missiles to pummel our flattops long before the F-35s and F-18s can reach the Chinese mainland. We know this because the Chinese are telling us they intend to do it, with the intent of neutering our combat power and breaking our will to fight by causing thousands of casualties in one fell swoop.

    The vulnerability of our carriers is no surprise; the Navy has been warned about it for years. There are a number of ideas out there to address the issue, but the Navy resists. One good one is to replace the limited numbers of (again) super-expensive, short-range manned aircraft with a bunch more long range drones. Except that means the Naval aviation community would have to admit the Top Gun era is in the past, and that’s too hard. So they buy a bunch of pricy, shiny manned fighters that can’t get the job done.

  • Speaking of fighting the last war, the Air Force plans to buy more F-15Xs and less F-35s, supposedly because the non-stealthy F-15X can carry more weapons and work with F35s to deliver more ordinance. The F-35 has its issues, but this is probably the wrong decision. The Air Force still hasn’t figured out an optimal 21st century platform for carrying out close air support, a mission that institutionally has been among the least favored of its priorities.
  • Offutt Air Force Base sits near Omaha, the home of the Strategic Air Command and several vital aircraft, was affected by the recent flooding.
  • The compounding issues that led to the Boeing 737Max crashes.
  • Russia’s navy sucks:

    The Russian Navy is in trouble. After years of coasting on the largesse of the Cold War, Russia’s navy is set to tumble in size and relevance over the next two decades. Older ships and equipment produced for the once-mighty Soviet Navy are wearing out and the country can’t afford to replace them.

    Snip.

    Russia’s economy, flat on its back for more than a decade, started to claw back in the mid-2000s, thanks in large part to spiking oil prices. Today Russia is the fourth largest spender on defense worldwide. In 2017, the earliest year in which comparisons are possible, Russia’s gross domestic product amounted to $1.5 trillion dollars, of which it spent 4.3 percent on defense. That works out to $66.3 billion for Moscow’s war machine, trailing only the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia (yes, Saudi Arabia spends more on defense than Russia).

    Snip.

    Today, 28 years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia still relies mostly on Soviet-era ships. The country’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has suffered from repeated mechanical problems and should be, but probably won’t be, retired immediately. Russia has built no cruisers since 1991, relying on the five impressive-but-aging Kirov and Slava-class cruisers to act as the country’s major surface combatants. Russia has built only one destroyer since the Cold War, the Admiral Chabanenko. Chabanenko was laid down in 1989 and commissioned into service in 1999.

    Likewise, most of Russia’s submarine fleet still consists of Soviet-era submarines, including Delta-class ballistic missile submarines, Oscar-class cruise missile submarines, and Akula, Sierra, Victor, and Kilo-class attack submarines, which have been in service for so long they are still referred to by the code names they were given in Soviet service.

    (Hat tip: CDR Salamander via The Other McCain.)

  • Inside the Russian Collusion Industry:

    Key Democratic operatives and private investigators who tried to derail Donald Trump’s campaign by claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin have rebooted their operation since his election with a multimillion-dollar stealth campaign to persuade major media outlets and lawmakers that the president should be impeached.

    The effort has successfully placed a series of questionable stories alleging secret back channels and meetings between Trump associates and Russian spies, while influencing related investigations and reports from Congress.

    The operation’s nerve center is a Washington-based nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project, or TDIP. Among other activities, it pumps out daily “research” briefings to prominent Washington journalists, as well as congressional staffers, to keep the Russia “collusion” narrative alive.

    TDIP is led by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator, Clinton administration volunteer and top staffer to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. It employs the key opposition-research figures behind the salacious and unverified dossier: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Its financial backers include the actor/director Rob Reiner and billionaire activist George Soros.

  • Speaking of Soros, here’s a list of all the left-wing oprganizations Soros funds, over 200 of them. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brexit slightly delayed. Probably until April 12. At which time Theresa May and the EU will probably find some other excuse to delay it again…
  • The MSM continues to lie about president Trump’s Charlottesville remarks. Scott Adams has been noting this for a long time:

  • How Democrats are going to ensure President Trump’s reelection:

    Democrats have floated radical proposals designed only to appeal to the far-left progressive wing of the party. Those ideas include stacking the Supreme Court or, at the very least, implementing term limits for justices; pushing for a constitutional amendment to end the electoral college; reducing the voting age to 16; and ending the legislative filibuster.

    These do not represent the return to norms and values moderate Americans want.

    It’s not fringe Democratic candidates floating such ideas but prominent presidential candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand.

    Mind you, that’s in addition to the Democratic support for the Green New Deal, a massive government undertaking that one former Congressional Budget Office director estimated could cost as much as $93 trillion.

    Let’s be honest: Democrats wouldn’t have offered up such ideas if Hillary Clinton had won the election in 2016. This is all about Donald Trump and supposedly creating an environment to react to the Trump presidency which can prevent someone like Trump from winning again (via the electoral college).

  • Vietnam veteran finally wins two decade battle against his homeowner’s association to fly the American flag. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years.”
  • Speaking of Facebook, Joe Bob Briggs notes that the best way to suppress hate speech is not to suppress hate speech.

    I’ve seen Klan rallies that are so lame they don’t get noticed. Why don’t they get noticed? Because they chose some town that was wise enough not to care whether they gathered there or not. The Klan has no power until it goes into an area that hates it. Clarence Brandenburg knew this. He could have spoken down in the Appalachian part of Ohio, but he chose sophisticated urban Cincinnati instead. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison. It was a great Klan recruiting year.

  • More corrupt featherbedding from Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner:

    Tomorrow, a Houston taxpayer named Darryl Chapman will ask a judge to stop the new contract with Cigna, calling it an illegal procurement, rigged from the start to make sure they won. The court hearing is scheduled for 1:00 pm in Judge Steven Kirkland’s court.

    One of the allegations is that Cigna was given information about medical claims that another company United Healthcare wasn’t given.

    But why would city hall ever play favorites? Isn’t it supposed to be what’s in the best interest of taxpayers and of city employees and their families?

    It’s hard not to notice that the Mayor’s close friend Cindy Clifford was in the room during the vote. Clifford was the head of Mayor Turner’s Inaugural Committee. She’s been on the winning side of a curious number of big city contracts since then.

    City records show she’s the lobbyist for Cigna. The Mayor pushed through the Cigna deal today, even after learning the legal action had been filed.

  • The end of SXSW plus St. Patrick’s Day equals a police shootout and a dead body in a Masarati. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Shut up and be funny.
  • Is Qatar staffing up a couple of foreign mercenary tank battalions?

    Qatar faces an ongoing and immediate threat of destruction by revolution [by] its population of foreign workers. Qatari citizens make up only 12% of the actual population of Qatar. 88% of the populace are imported labor, and Qatar treats them horribly. It is a case that the UK Independent rightly describes as “modern slavery,” and there are far more slaves being abused than there are citizens abusing them.

    For every Qatari citizen — male, female, adult, child, elderly — there are seven working age foreigners walking around who have legitimate reasons to hate them…. [this] explains Qatar’s sudden decision to purchase many new tanks and mobile artillery, allegedly to prepare itself against soccer riots in the 2022 World Cup. You don’t need tanks to stop a soccer riot. However, the Leopard tank variation they are purchasing is optimized for urban warfare; and the mobile artillery can be used to fire canister, while providing the gunners with cover from improvised weapons like Molotov Cocktails, or rifles seized from the police.

  • “Brazilian Nuclear Fuel Convoy Attacked By Heavily Armed Gangsters.”
  • Oklahoma sheriff and staff quit rather than return prisoners to unsafe jail. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Here’s a long (too long) essay about how the need for social media positivity is killing honest book reviewing. But it also displays that insular “only high literature talked about by inner circles of New York cognoscente is worth talking about” attitude that’s a contributing factor to most readers tuning out.
  • The shocking truth about Trump’s America:

  • The Who lead singer Roger Daltry is not impressed with Remainers having cases of the vapors:

  • Justice Brett Busby sworn in on the Texas Supreme Court.
  • Like a Netflix show? Good luck, because Netflix is never going to review it, because long show runs are not part of their business models.
  • “When the Dominatrix Moved In Next Door.” Neighbors go all NIMBY on a “kink collective.” That’s what you get for moving into such a backward, sex-hating location as [checks notes] Brooklyn. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Is this a great state or what?

  • And you thought American sports fans were crazy.
  • Happy National Puppy Day!

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    Caliphate Caput: Take Three

    March 21st, 2019

    This time for sure!

    The very last bit of the Baghuz pocket (formerly the Hajin pocket), the very last defended territory of the Islamic State, AKA Zeno’s Caliphate, appears to have finally been cleared. By the end of battle yesterday, the Islamic State had been reduced to a tiny sliver, and today that sliver was conquered.

    Here’s what the Livemap looked like on March 2, 2019:

    Here’s what it looked like yesterday:

    Livemap finally shows it completely cleared today:

    Syrian Democratic Forces are now searching tunnels to capture or kill any remaining Islamic State members.

    Why did it take so long to clear the pocket? (I first thought the end was a matter of days a month ago.) For one thing, 60,000 civilians were trapped in the pocket, and there have been pauses as a steady stream of them exited over the last two months. For another, the terrain was more daunting than I realized; the last of the Berghuz pocket was smack dab right up against an escarpment that’s too steep to use armor in an attack from the west. Here’s a few tweets that may give you an idea of the geography:

    What all that adds up to is the “Stalingrad” problem: as the front narrows the density of fighters facing you increases.

    Anyway, it seems that the Islamic State, at least as a land-holding caliphate, is finally well and truly crushed. Here’s the same conclusion I used the first time I erroneously declared it dead:

    The media, which seemed to avoid reporting success after hard-won success in the war against the Islamic State, not only ignored the final destruction of the Hajin pocket, is now writing articles about how the Islamic State continues as a transnational terrorist organization. This is both true and largely irrelevant. There are plenty of Islamist terrorist groups to worry about, but the Islamic State’s primary claim to legitimacy, the thing that drew foreign fighters from around the world, was its presumed legitimacy as an Islamic caliphate:

    To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law—being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority. This last criterion, Cerantonio said, is the hardest to fulfill, and requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce Islamic law. Baghdadi’s Islamic State achieved that long before June 29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a Western convert within the group’s ranks—Cerantonio described him as “something of a leader”—began murmuring about the religious obligation to declare a caliphate.

    In late 2014, the Islamic State controlled some 40,000 square miles of territory. Now it controls nothing. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is no longer a credible caliph, capable of claiming the allegiance of all Sunnis worldwide, but a loser and a failure, assuming he’s even still alive. Ambitious worldwide jihadists no longer have any incentive to pledge bayʿah to al-Baghdadi, and it’s entirely possible that the ones who previously had will drift away or declare their support to another transnational Islamic terrorist group like al Qaeda.

    For this we can thank cost-effective strategy by the U.S.-led coalition to arm and support the Syrian Democratic Forces against the Islamic State, greatly aided by the Trump Administration’s decision to loosen the rules of engagement from what they were under Obama.

    The Islamic State wasn’t completely destroyed today, but the last shred of it’s claim to a caliphate was.

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    Posted in Jihad, Military | No Comments »

    Why Renewables Can’t Save The Planet

    March 20th, 2019

    Here’s an ecoweenie and climate change believer on why renewables can’t provide enough energy to save the earth.

    Nuclear is the only way to meet demand.

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    Posted in video | No Comments »

    Betopalooza

    March 19th, 2019

    So many Beto O’Rourke links popping up that they can’t wait for the Clown Car update:

  • After O’Rourke entered the race, he saw a four point jump…in Biden’s numbers, up to a field-leading 35%. Bernie Sanders remained steady at 27%, while O’Rourke was up one point to 8%, tied with Kamala Harris (who dropped two points). (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Powerline sucked up this great Jimmy Fallon parody:

  • “Reuters Admits They Sat On Bombshell Beto O’Rourke Story For 2 Years.” Because it’s OK to kill stories if they might hurt Democrats’ chances to beat a Republican. The media has only been doing this for three decades. Remember how The Village Voice spiked “Gerry and the Mob,” their expose of Geraldine Ferraro’s husband’s extensive mob ties because they didn’t want to hurt the Mondale-Ferraro campaign?
  • Tucker Carlson on the Betomania sweeping the press corps (at least the ones not in the tank for Kamala Harris), complete with Jesus Christ Superstar reference:

    (Hat tip: Julie Hardy.)

  • Jim Geraghty offers up every fawning profile of Beto ever.

    “You do realize that every bit of O’Rourke’s persona, image, and message is designed to get you to write glowing profile pieces like this one, right?” the political consultant, an irredeemable cynic, tells me. “It’s as if he had been grown in a lab to make middle-aged magazine journalists feel they’re youthful rebels again, that they’re sticking it to The Man like they’re teenagers, so you can avoid the thought that you’ve become The Man and are in fact at least partially responsible for a political culture and electorate that evaluates presidential candidates on shallow charisma and appearances instead of their policy agendas and records of accomplishment. The man wants to be commander in chief, but you’re covering him like he’s the leading man of the next big Hollywood blockbuster. He’s the Aaron Sorkin protagonist right out of your dreams.”

  • “Rivals pounce as Beto O’Rourke stumbles out of the gate.” Wearing my horserace hat, there’s actually not a lot of pouncing or stumbling here… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • A better roundup of Dem attacks from Stephen Green. Including…
  • “Beto O’Rourke Is the Candidate For Vapid Morons.” “Get ready for a nightmarish year of watching this candidate attract the most superficial, issue-ignorant, aesthetically inclined simpletons disguised as thoughtful voters. Watch them flock to him like moths to a flame.”
  • Beto, standing on counters.
  • I’ve seen tweets suggesting O’Rourke’s fundraising haul included money transferred from his senate campaign. This Paste piece says those reports are false.
  • Nothing says “serious presidential candidate” like having ice cream for breakfast:

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, video | 1 Comment »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 18, 2019

    March 18th, 2019

    It’s Betomania time among certain media outlets after Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke announced he was running last week. So there’s a ton of Beto news below. Also, two names I had pegged as Out are now making noises about (possibly) getting In.

    National Review‘s Dan Maclaughlin offers up a lengthy essay on the five lanes of the Democratic Presidential race. There’s lots of interesting analysis to chew on in terms of demographic and age trends and preferences among Democratic voters. I don’t agree with all his conclusions, but it’s well worth reading the whole thing. His summary:

    My own ranking, for now, of the likeliest nominee:

    1. Kamala Harris
    2. Beto O’Rourke
    3. Joe Biden
    4. Amy Klobuchar
    5. Cory Booker
    6. Bernie Sanders
    7. Elizabeth Warren
    8. [Field]
    9. Kirsten Gillibrand

    538 Presidential roundup.

    538 polls.

    Democratic Party presidential primary schedule.

    Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Now she’s saying a 2020 presidential run is “on the table.” Upgrade from Out.
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning Toward In. Not seeing any presidential run news on Bennet this week.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: Leaning Towards Running. He keeps dropping hints. Obama’s Vice President seems like he’s going to run against the “new left.” God help us all. He’s also rich:

    “Middle-Class Joe” Biden has a $2.7 million vacation home. He charges more than $100,000 per speaking gig and has inked a book deal likely worth seven figures.

    Since leaving office in 2017, the 76-year-old former vice president has watched his bank account swell as he continues to cultivate the image of a regular, Amtrak-riding guy. He’s repeatedly referred to himself as “Middle-Class Joe” on the campaign trail and in speaking engagements as he publicly mulls whether to run for president.

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Out.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “After months of speculation, actress Rosario Dawson confirmed Thursday that she and presidential candidate Senator Cory Booker are dating.” Evidently Booker is on the Dennis Kucinich Presidential dating plan. That should help quiet the “Booker is gay” whispering campaign.
  • 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. Bullock announced he’s not running…for the senate.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Chicago Tribune profile. He also raised $600,000 after a CNN townhall where he slammed Mike Pence.
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. Castro “dropped a list of 30 high-profile endorsement from Lone Star State politicians shortly after fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke announced his own bid for the presidency. The list includes San Antonio’s political powerhouse, Henry Cisneros; six current San Antonio city council members, including Rey Saldana and Rebecca Viagran; and multiple Bexar County officials, including Nelson Wolff.” That’s great…if you’re running for the president of Texas. Castro was always going to pick up San Antonio endorsements. How well can he run nationwide? He also visited Charleston.
  • 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. “Iowa has zero interest in de Blasio as presidential candidate: poll.” Much like the rest of the union…
  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Delany is asking for donations to meet the official DNC “65,000 donors from 20 states” threshold to appear in debates.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She .
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gillibrand did that “Oh, I was already running, but now I’m officially running” thing.
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Maybe? Thought he was out, but now he has an announcement on Wednesday. May be a Presidential run, maybe an endorsement, maybe a 2022 senate run, maybe a teamup with Stacey Abrams to form Sore Loser PAC 2020. Who knows? Upgrade from Out.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Evidently all is not sunshine and roses for the Harris campaign, since Chelsea Janes in the Washington Post dinged her for “verbal miscues.” To wit: “In the first weeks of Harris’s campaign, the 54-year-old has fielded criticism for equivocal and imprecise answers to questions about her stances on specific policies and her record as a prosecutor.” She also had to return money from foreign lobbyists: “Three days after she announced her White House bid in January, Harris received $2,700 from Arthur R. Collins, a lobbyist for the government of Bermuda. Sometime in January or February, Harris also received $2,700 from Vinca LaFleur, a speechwriter for the royal family of Jordan.” But only, of course, after the media asked about them…
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Twenty-Two Things You Didn’t Know about John Hickenlooper. Including the fact he’s Kurt Vonnegut’s fake son and watched Deep Throat with his mother.
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Out.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. He got a Gaurdian profile. In his capacity as Washington Governor, Inselee signed a new law that shifts the election date from late May to the second Tuesday in March.” How convenient.
  • 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. She talked about taxing big tech. There’s no problem so thorny government intervention can’t make worse…
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Probably Out.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Leaning toward a run? Progressive blog Blue Virginia notes that McAuliffe sucks in all the polls. In one he was behind Andrew Yang…
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Maybe? “He’ll spend much of next week’s congressional recess in key presidential primary states, starting in New Hampshire on Saturday and then moving on to South Carolina and Iowa during the week.” He also wants to end the filibuster and the electoral college. There’s no think like groupthink…
  • 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. There’s so much O’Rorurke news it needs its own section:
    • After O’Rourke’s announcement, Reuters dropped the news of “Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group,” The Cult of the Dead Cow. Having been part of the Austin BBS scene way back in the pre-Internet days, I can tell you that all of this amounts to a whole lot less than meets the eye. The Cult of the Dead Cow were no Legion of Doom, and O’Rourke’s “hacking” seemed to consist mainly of trading warez (copied computer programs, sometimes hacked to remove the copy protection). Illegal, but just about everyone in the BBS scene did it; think of it as a very low-bandwidth version of Napster back when programs fit on a single floppy disk and had to been downloaded on 2400 baud modems. Though the fact this is coming out now does suggest lapses on both the media and Ted Cruz’s opposition research department.
    • Related: Tripmaster Beto, Psychedelic Warlord.
    • O’Rourke raised $6.1 million in his first 24 hours, edging out Bernie Sanders’ haul.
    • Matt Welch at Reason wonders if phony Betomania has already bitten the dust. He also digs up this preemptive Club for Growth video hitpiece:

      The problem, of course, is that it believes Democrats actually care about the ideas Democrats claim they care about.

    • David French roots for Beto against the Social Justice Warriors.
    • Beto O’Rourke, Weirdo:

      The former El Paso congressman’s spastic “Hey, I’m still figuring out these new hands” presidential-kickoff video, in which his upper limbs appeared to be subject to mad random yanks by an angry puppeteer, was merely the latest odd detail in the saga of Weirdo O’Rourke. It was even weirder than Elizabeth Warren’s “Greetings fellow earthlings, I too enjoy fermented malt beverages!” video. Robert/Beto is a man so apart from other human beings that he recently thought nothing of ditching his wife and three kids so he could drive around the country, alone, accosting unsuspecting dentists to help him apply Novocaine to his aching soul. He might be the first person ever to run for the White House on a platform of asking the nation to help him figure out who he is.

      The source of the angst is evident: Beto is a brainless rich kid who yearned to be cool and wasn’t very good at it. He flunked out of punk. He failed as a fiction writer. He belly-flopped as an alternative-newspaper publisher. And he’s so clueless that his apartment was once robbed while he was sitting in it. At his pricey Virginia prep school (Woodberry Forest School these days carries a sticker price of $48,000 a year), he thought he “just stuck out so badly” because of the “monoculture” there, which the Dallas Morning News called “white, wealthy and southern.” O’Rourke was and is white, wealthy, and southern, so he couldn’t have stuck out much more than Miracle Whip at the mayonnaise convention, yet he was wounded and alienated. Or maybe not. He put this in his high school yearbook: “I’m the angry son. I’m the angry son.” Below that: “I owe you everything, Mom, Dad . . .” You have to pick one, though, don’t you? You can’t be a seething rebel and a dutiful child. You can’t be Kurt Cobain and Kenny G. One pose nullifies the other. Or maybe O’Rourke was even then trying to position himself as acceptable to all constituencies.

      Snip.

      What’s the deal with his net worth, which is estimated at $9 million? I came across this line, on Heavy.com: “Peppertree Square Ltd. Imperial Arms is a real estate company, and Peppertree Square is a shopping center in El Paso, which was a gift from his mother.” Jeez, I remember when I thought my mom was sweet for buying me a blazer. I want Beto’s mom. When Beto’s dad died, he left the boy an apartment complex worth $5 million. Also his father-in-law William D. Sanders is worth a packet. Bloomberg once estimated he was worth $20 billion.

      So far, then, O’Rourke’s life story does not look like a fable about rising to meet fate’s challenge, but more like privilege and dilettantism.

    • Over at the New York Times, Gail “Team Kamala” Collins offers up a takedown of O’Rourke. Now I’m no O’Rourke fan, I’m happy to cheer on blue-on-blue attacks, and that Vanity Fair piece is eminently mockworthy, but this is a thuddingly bad piece of writing. It’s one long, smug, graceless sneer. You could have thrown a rock into a random crowd at CPAC and likely found someone capable of writing a better takedown of O’Rourke.
    • Scott Adams on the Beto dance.
    • “Beto O’Rourke Announces He Starting Obama Cover Campaign.”
    • Finally, an observation: In addition to the contact harvesting splash screen, O’Rourke’s website only has four links: Shop, Jobs, Donate, Contact. No room for such trivia as “issues” or even a candidate biography. I guess the figure a three-term congressman is such a “rock star” that he doesn’t need to be introduced…
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Democratic Representative Tim Ryan: Leaning Toward In? Gets an Atlantic profile that starts off with him doing yoga.

    Tim Ryan is a man containing multitudes. He is, as his contortions would suggest, a dedicated practitioner of hot power yoga and a meditation evangelist, but he sells himself as a champion of the American worker, and he speaks with the plain, sometimes brusque language of his mostly blue-collar constituents. In Congress, he has endorsed tax cuts for corporations, but he also supports progressive goals such as Medicare for all. And he’s a congressional backbencher—a relatively unknown Democrat from a rapidly reddening state. But he says he’s “very much looking” at running for president.

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Bernie Sanders Pledges To Do A Better Job Of Explaining Socialism.” Wait, I thought we wanted to win the race! Also:

  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: Leaning Toward In. Biggest Swalwell news: he shared a yearbook photo:

    I’m now imagining a an 80s teen comedy in which teenage jock Swalwell beats up teenage nerd O’Rourke…

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren campaigns in Memphis, kicking off three-state tour.” She also wants to break up big tech.
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. She gets a “click through these 12 photos so we can display ads” bullshit listicle minibio from the Houston Chronicle that’s not worth your time and is only included here because other news about her is thin on the ground. Oh, she also has that world peace thing all figured out in a simple 4-step program: “expand economic opportunities for women around the world; expand educational opportunities for children globally; reduce violence against women; improve unnecessary human suffering wherever possible.” It’s so simple! I’m sure this would instantly end the fighting in Yemen and Syria. That same piece also compares and contrasts her ideas with Andrew Yang’s. I guess they’re both competing in the Weirdo Lunatic Outsiders lane.
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Running but no one cares. Twitter. Facebook. OK, Yang is a fucking idiot.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, video | 1 Comment »

    The Unbearable Whiteness of Beto

    March 17th, 2019

    It’s Sunday and I’m not for any weighty posts, so enjoy this video of Tucker Carlson and Mark Steyn having fun at the expense of Beto O’Rourke’s juvenile poetry:

    To be fair, what little poetry I wrote in high school and college was pretty much crap. Not as bad as this crap, but crap none the less. (I would later sell a tiny bit of poetry once I stopped sucking at it.) But Steyn is right: If a white Republican candidate had written this garbage in his youth, the MSM would never stop talking about it or his “white privilege.”

    And don’t worry, we’ll be covering more of O’Rourke’s membership in The Cult of the Dead Cow tomorrow…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, video | No Comments »

    Historic Floods Hit Nebraska, Midwest

    March 16th, 2019

    This is a big story that doesn’t seem to be getting the news coverage it deserves: Nebraska and other parts of the Midwest are suffering through their worst floods in half a century. Multiple levees have breached, and the city of Freemont, the sixth largest in the state, is is completely cut off by floodwater. The Cooper Nuclear Power Station near Brownville is preparing for a possible shutdown if the floodwaters overtop a levee on the Missouri river.

    The flooding even got so bad that “the National Weather Service office in Omaha, Nebraska, was forced to evacuate due to river flooding.”

    Given it’s still winter in much of the Midwest, a lot of those floodwaters carried along bolder-sized icebergs, making the damage that much more extensive.

    Here are some videos:

    Multiple bridges and dams have been washed away:

    Some Tweets:

    It would be nice if our national media could to pay attention to historic flooding…

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    Posted in Uncategorized, video | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for March 15, 2019

    March 15th, 2019

    In one of the more important but confusing stories this week, UK’s Parliament rejected PM Theresa May’s Brexit deal, rejected a no-deal Brexit, and rejected a second referendum, but voted to delay Brexit until June. Whether the EU will consent to this delay or not remains to be seen. Borepatch thinks not, mainly due to EU elections coming up.

    Enjoy a complimentary LinkSwarm:

  • Democrats have a race problem:

    In the Trump era, Democrats are so intent on appealing to immigrants and minority voters they will tolerate insults to Jews, a constituency that voted for Clinton by better than a 3-to-1 margin in 2016. This is not inconsequential, as Jewish conservative Jeff Dunetz pointed out last week: “According to the FBI, almost 60% of the hate crimes in 2017 based on religion were against Jews.” Liberals would like us to believe that Trump supporters are responsible for this, but who is to blame when, for example, Somali immigrant Mohamed Mohamed Abdi is charged with attempted murder for allegedly trying to run over two men outside a Los Angeles synagogue? How can liberals claim Trump is responsible for three black men attacking Jews in Brooklyn? Police are alarmed by increasing anti-Semitic violence in New York City, which probably has a lot more to do with the “progressive” politics of that Democrat-run fiefdom than it does with who’s occupying the White House. Meanwhile, 11 white people were attacked in New York over the weekend, and a black transgender suspect has been arrested in what police say was an apparent hate-crime spree. Such is the toxic racial climate in the city that sends to Congress such Democrats as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spent her weekend trashing Ronald Reagan for a capacity crowd of liberals in Austin, Texas.

    Democrats and their media allies have spent years building this bonfire of racial resentment. CNN devoted hour upon hour of coverage to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that provoked riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and by the time of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, anti-Trump protesters were marching with Communist posters advocating revolution. Barely six weeks before Election Day 2016, a “Black Lives Matter” riot erupted in downtown Charlotte, N.C., and does anyone still wonder why Hillary lost North Carolina, a state that Obama had carried twice? Trump got 63 percent of the white vote in North Carolina, carrying the state by a margin of more than 170,000 votes. Is it likely that Democrats can reverse that verdict by doubling-down on identity politics? Yet liberals continue intensifying their incendiary rhetoric that has sparked incidents like the smearing of the Covington Catholic boys, the Jussie Smollett hoax, and a spree of attacks on Trump supporters across the country. Democrats and their media allies have done everything in their power to demonize the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, and what does that foreshadow for November 2020?

    Certainly by now, working-class white voters must be tired of deranged Trump-haters getting in their faces and shouting, “RAAAAACIST!” Perhaps that’s why the latest Iowa poll shows Democrat primary voters favoring two old white guys, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. However, the crowded field of Democrats contending for the 2020 presidential nomination, cheered on by their Greek chorus of left-wing journalists, will probably make it easier for Trump to get re-elected. The more white voters become alienated from the Democrats, the more extreme the Democrats become, and the media are so out of touch with voters in places like Iowa that Democrats are caught in a sort of feedback loop of extremism.

  • The left-wing crackup:

    The constituent elements of the American left have radicalized and they are tearing the Democratic Party apart. Meanwhile Donald Trump has delivered on a growing economy, deregulation, strong borders, the rule of law, and he is apparently going to leave the cows and their diapers for later.

    The radicalized Democrats are now running as socialists. In the middle of a growing economy they are casting their lot with Venezuela. They expect to win in 2020. Call it the left-wing crack-up.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Is Corbynism coming to America?

    Less than four years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was an obscure backbencher in the British Parliament. In his 30 years as a member of the Labour Party, his greatest legislative accomplishment was paradoxically the lack of any: From 1997 to 2010, when Labour was last in government, Corbyn was the MP who voted against his own party more than any other. Despite his perpetual insubordinations, successive Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown declined to expel Corbyn from their party. “There was no threat,” a deputy Labour chief whip told the Financial Times about Corbyn and his small band of hard-left rebels in 2016. “These people were tolerated because no one had ever heard of them.”

    Today, everyone in British politics has heard of Jeremy Corbyn, who, as leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, has utterly transformed the Labour Party. Once a broad-based movement that could command large parliamentary majorities, today it is a sectarian personality cult, offering meager resistance to a shambolic Conservative government. Once the party whose leaders created NATO and stood stalwart against the threat of international communism, today Labour is led by people who sing the praises of anti-Western despots and terrorists. And once the natural political home of British Jewry, Labour today is mired in an anti-Semitic morass, to the point where 40 percent of Jews say they would “seriously consider” leaving the country were Corbyn to become prime minister. Indeed, Labour has become so toxic that, last month, nine MPs quit the party, calling it “sickeningly, institutionally racist,” “a threat to national security” and “a danger to the cohesion of our society, the safety of our citizens, and the health of our democracy.”

    How Labour reached this deplorable condition is one that should seriously concern liberals in the United States, where a similar dynamic is playing out in the Democratic Party. An insurgent progressivism favorably disposed to socialism, hostile to Jews and openly admiring of Jeremy Corbyn and all that he represents is steadily making inroads against an aging, centrist Democratic establishment. Here, a constellation of elected officials, media personalities, and activists are mimicking the tactics of their ideological comrades in Britain to take over and transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle for their extreme agenda.

  • Related: Jexodus.
  • “Migrants Use Almost Twice The Welfare Benefits As Native-Born Americans.”

    According to a report by Breitbart, in recently released research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), analysts discovered that about 63 percent of non-citizen households, those who live legally and illegally in the U.S., use some form of public welfare while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.

  • “Five adults arrested at compound in Taos County indicted on terrorism charges.”
  • “Twice-Deported Illegal Alien Charged With Raping 12-Year-Old Girl.”
  • Illegal alien arrested for murder of 59-year old woman. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said agents tried to deport Carranza nine times before, but their detainer requests were not honored in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties, both so-called ‘sanctuary cities.’ In every occasion, local authorities declined to cooperate with a federal request to hold Carranza in jail due to his immigration status — as is often the policy with “sanctuary cities” and counties — and he was released back on the street.”
  • “At a 10-year high, wage growth for American workers likely to keep accelerating.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Meanwhile, some manufacturers can’t fill open jobs. (Hat tip: TPPF’s Cannon.)
  • Never Trump Bulwark writer attempts to take down Victor Davis Hanson. The attempt goes very, very badly for him.

    [Gabriel] Schoenfeld only fuels the popular perception of The Bulwark Never Trumpers as an angry, coastal elite who are anguished that their warnings about Trump were ignored by both hoi polloi and their conservative “grifters and trolls.” In careerist fury, he now damns others for his own self-immolation — as if the country must suffer for the sins of not listening to his own genius, which would probably have given the country a 16-year Obama-Clinton regnum.

    That Never Trumpers at The Bulwark were wrong about the Trump nomination, the general election, and the first two years of the Trump administration seems only to have fueled their spitefulness. If Schoenfeld is representative of this rump movement, then they are engaging in projection.

    Read the whole thing for a detailed, comprehensive takedown.

  • Another big money Democratic donor caught up in the college admissions scandal.
  • The CDC’s “gun violence” numbers are useless, says that well-known pro-gun outlet, 538.
  • How China is screwing Vietnam out of energy opportunities.
  • Another week, another UK Muslim rape gang.
  • SPLC founder Morris Dees fired, though evidently for sexual harassment rather than smearing innocent conservatives.
  • “California Veterans Home Threatens to Eject 84-Year-Old Widow for Bible Study Group.”
  • Some of the power has been restored, but Venezuela’s water runs black.
  • Venezuela’s premier university destroyed by socialism. A sad photo essay. (Hat tip: Wretchardthecat on Twitter.)
  • Related tweet:

  • “Son defends parents caught in college admissions scandal while smoking blunt.” Can’t imagine why such a fine specimen of academic scholarship would need a leg up in their college admissions. (Had tip: IowaHawk via Andrew Wimsatt.)
  • “Media Matters President Wrote Blog Posts About ‘Japs,’ ‘Jewry’ And ‘Trannies.’” Political correctness for thee, but not for me. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Democratic Governor of overtaxed New Jersey wants to hike taxes even more.
  • What if Ayn Rand was right?
  • “The Army’s Next-Generation Combat Helmet Has Arrived.”
  • “To Avoid Confusing Words, Ilhan Omar Will Now Respond To All Questions With ‘I Am Groot.'”
  • You know, Hayek’s Nobel Prize would look good on my mantle.
  • Random tweet:

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Military, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

    O’Rourke O’Running

    March 14th, 2019

    Now we know what Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke was waiting for to jump into the Presidential race: a fawning Vanity Fair profile complete with Annie Leibovitz photographs.

    How fawning?

    Behind the door, in the O’Rourke living room, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf contains a section for rock memoirs (Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, a favorite) and a stack of LPs (the Clash, Nina Simone) but also a sizable collection of presidential biographies, including Robert Caro’s work on Lyndon B. Johnson. Arranged in historical order, the biographies suggest there’s been some reflection on the gravity of the presidency. But there’s also some political poetry to it, a sense that O’Rourke might be destined for this shelf. He has an aura. Most places he goes in El Paso, he’s dogged by cries of “Beto! Beto!” Oprah Winfrey, who helped anoint Barack Obama in 2008, practically begged him to run at an event in New York City at the beginning of February.

    More fawning:

    Settling into an armchair in his living room, he tries to make sense of his rise. “I honestly don’t know how much of it was me,” he says. “But there is something abnormal, super-normal, or I don’t know what the hell to call it, that we both experience when we’re out on the campaign trail.”

    O’Rourke and his wife, Amy, an educator nine years his junior, both describe the moment they first witnessed the power of O’Rourke’s gift. It was in Houston, the third stop on O’Rourke’s two-year Senate campaign against Ted Cruz. “Every seat was taken, every wall, every space in the room was filled with probably a thousand people,” recalls Amy O’Rourke. “You could feel the floor moving almost. It was not totally clear that Beto was what everybody was looking for, but just like that people were so ready for something. So that was totally shocking. I mean, like, took-my-breath-away shocking.”

    For O’Rourke, what followed was a near-mystical experience. “I don’t ever prepare a speech,” he says. “I don’t write out what I’m going to say. I remember driving to that, I was, like, ‘What do I say? Maybe I’ll just introduce myself. I’ll take questions.’ I got in there, and I don’t know if it’s a speech or not, but it felt amazing. Because every word was pulled out of me. Like, by some greater force, which was just the people there. Everything that I said, I was, like, watching myself, being like, How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from?

    Generational fawning:

    At 46, O’Rourke is only a couple of years younger than former rival Ted Cruz. But part of the excitement, and the content of his potential candidacy, is generational. Whereas Obama is from the tail end of the baby boom, Beto O’Rourke is quintessentially Generation X, weaned on Star Wars and punk rock and priding himself on authenticity over showmanship and a healthy skepticism of the mainstream.

    The word “honesty” gets thrown around. “O’Rourke came off as free of political calculation, as if his charisma were a mere side effect of Beto just being Beto.”

    Tonstant weader fwowed up.

    The tone is so hagiographic it’s a mild surprise that by the end of it Beto’s not wandering the streets of El Paso curing the sick with the laying of hands.

    They do address the intersectional elephant in the room:

    O’Rourke is acutely aware, too, of perhaps his biggest vulnerability—being a white man in a Democratic Party yearning for a woman or a person of color, a Kamala Harris or a Cory Booker. “The government at all levels is overly represented by white men,” he says. “That’s part of the problem, and I’m a white man. So if I were to run, I think it’s just so important that those who would comprise my team looked like this country. If I were to run, if I were to win, that my administration looks like this country. It’s the only way I know to meet that challenge.”

    Expect the MSM backers of Kamala Harris to hit these points hard, while Beto backers magically ignore them. Being a rich, privileged white male is a sin, unless you’re a rich, privileged, dreamy white Democratic male with fawning media coverage.

    Jim Geraghty thinks we’re in for a repeat of Obamamania:

    The insufferable tidal wave of Betomania is coming…

    Here we go again.

    The magazine covers and posters . . .

    . . . the graffiti murals . . .

    . . . the gushing media profiles, the adoring interviews with late-night hosts, the hagiographic documentary, the t-shirts, the celebrity endorsements and appearances, the social-media mania, the volunteers creating their own designs for posters and logos and campaign imagery . . . we’ll probably get the flash mobs from 2018 restarted, too.

    Except the last time we did this, all of the hype and hoopla was for a once-obscure slender guy in his mid-to-late 40s who had been in the legislature for a while, hadn’t been able to get many pieces of legislation passed whether his party was in the majority or minority, who boasted about his across-the-aisle friendships but who had never really defied his party’s orthodoxy, who had little or no executive experience, who could do mundane tasks such as driving or sweating and have them described by political reporters like he was completing the 12 labors of Hercules, who was full of charisma but vague enough in his answers and agenda to be a blank slate to everyone looking for an ideal candidate. Same script, slightly different leading man.

    We’re doing all of the Obamamania stuff again, except this time with a white guy from Texas. It’s all starting up again: the retro hipster t-shirts, the bracelets on Etsy, the votive candles.

    Snip.

    If Beto O’Rourke had an “R” after his name instead of a “D,” the world would know a lot more about the less-appealing aspects of his life story. Not just the DUI, but his private-sector development career that used eminent domain and gentrified poor Latino neighborhoods, and marrying into a billionaire’s family. The image celebrated in these gushing profiles doesn’t match the reality. He was never in the military but talked about veterans’ issues so much that some people think he was. He’s not Latino, but his “rise fuels hope for Latino Democrats.” He’s the outsider who was in elected office from 2005 to 2018. He’s the modest everyman with a net worth of $9 million. He’s a boarding-school-attending son of a judge who escaped serious consequence for not just the DUI but also burglary charges.

    This Obamamania parallel is true, up to a point. But O’Rourke isn’t going to get the huge boost provided by a lifetime of liberal white guilt.

    O’Rourke clearly brings strengths to the race, including personal wealth, notable fundraising prowess, and a pretty young-ish face that liberal women seem to swoon over. But the truth is that O’Rourke has never won a race outside his hometown of El Paso, and polls show him in single digits, behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. There’s a world of difference between scooping up Democratic dollars when you’re running against Ted Cruz as opposed to running against other high-profile Democrats with their own fan clubs.

    Expect more fawning media coverage to boost him, but also strong pushback from Kamala Harris partisans, and possibly Julian Castro, who has to miffed at the fake Texas Hispanic getting ten times the attention of the real one. In addition to Harris and Castro, O’Rourke’s entry in the race probably hurts Biden and John Delaney (same “lane”), Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar (I bet “dreamy” is going to beat out “feminist duty” for a long of 20- and 30-something women), and Pete Buttigieg (“look at me I’m young”). Maybe he doesn’t hurt Warren, whose supporters I think skew older.

    You know who he probably doesn’t hurt at all? Bernie Sanders. His fans don’t seem to be into “dreamy” or “young.”

    It’s gonna be a hell of a race…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

    Admissions Scandal Followup

    March 13th, 2019

    The reverberations from yesterday’s admissions scandal continue to sound.

    First, it turns out that a major “ethical investment” venture capitalist was caught up in the scandal:

    One of Silicon Valley’s most prominent private equity investors — and one of the tech sector’s leading proponents of how to invest ethically and for social impact — has been charged in an explosive college admissions scandal that was revealed Tuesday, March 12.

    Prosecutors charged Bill McGlashan, a founder and managing partner at TPG Growth — which has made landmark investments in companies like Uber and Airbnb — on fraud allegations for trying to engineer the admission of his son to the University of Southern California.

    What is particularly damaging for TPG is that McGlashan has positioned himself as a leading voice in Silicon Valley for social responsibility. In addition to overseeing TPG’s late-stage growth investing arm, McGlashan has partnered with other conscious leaders like Bono and Laurene Powell Jobs at The Rise Fund, a TPG investing arm that tries to make the world a better place through investments in things like dairy farms in India.

    Want to guess what political party McGlashan donates to? That’s right: Democrats. He gave the maximum amount to Obama in 2007, as well as various other Democratic candidates nationwide.

    Pretty much the same giving pattern as indicted actress Felicity Huffman:

    Bill Clinton once said that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to get ahead. It turns out that there are certain people who, having already gotten ahead, no longer feel a need to play by the rules anymore. These people seem to think that all else is secondary to merely getting their spawn into the strata of the elite by any means necessary.

    Jim Geragthy:

    In 2014, former director of the California labor department Michael Bernick wrote in Time magazine, “whether your degree, for example, is from UCLA or from less prestigious Sonoma State matters far less than your academic performance and the skills you can show employers.”

    Whether or not Bernick’s assessment is accurate, many Americans parents believe otherwise, as demonstrated by yesterday’s terrifically bizarre scandal involving a couple of Hollywood celebrities and a slew of lesser-known wealthy parents who bought their children admission to schools like Yale, Stanford, Wake Forest, Georgetown, and others — Including UCLA, the example of prestige Bernick selected.

    As many suspected, just about every part of the college admissions process can be rigged to provide a leg up to those who are wealthy and unethical: bribing athletics coaches, faked learning disabilities, sending students copies of the SAT or ACT ahead of time, proctors correcting answers for students before submitting them for scoring, made-up honors and awards, “staged photographs of their children engaged in athletic activity” and falsifying students’ ethnicities and other biographical details to take advantage of affirmative action. (Elizabeth Warren was just ahead of her time, apparently.) This has been going on since at least 2011. Every single one of these students who had their admission obtained through bribes took away an opportunity that could have gone to better, harder-working student with more honest but poorer parents.

    The full description is an epic portrait of graft, corruption, elitism, and sleaze that will leave you wanting to burn down the Ivory Tower. The cherry on top? The whole enterprise was granted tax-exempt nonprofit status by the Internal Revenue Status since 2013. Those Tea Party groups couldn’t get nonprofit status, but these crooks could.

    If you wanted to pour gasoline onto the fires of populism, this is how you do it!

    Were those parents crazy? Or were they just astute about the risk-reward analysis and long-term benefits of getting into one of the top 25 schools, instead of one of the top 50 or top 100?

    We’ve heard all the stories about the “Harvard mafia.” A few years ago, Ross Douthat wrote “elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.”

    New York Times writer Amy Chozick shared yesterday, “I was literally told early in my career – by a top magazine editor – ‘Your clips are great, but we really want someone who went to Harvard.’” The replies to her indicate her story is not all that rare. Lots of folks have observed that many big-name journalism institutions run unpaid internship programs that are considered “How to get your foot in the door” — which automatically rules out anyone who can’t afford to provide anywhere from 15 to 40 hours of free labor each week.

    Said one mom I know: “I’d get pilloried for saying publicly, but my kids are at a serious disadvantage- straight, white males, middle class income. Colleges want ‘diversity.’ Scholarships for everything but us. Admissions for better schools are limited. It’s so frustrating. Admissions scandal really hits home.”

    Part of the realignment that helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016 had to do with ordinary Americans who felt they were being left behind by a game rigged against them. How do you think this scandal plays among average voters?

    Reason‘s Robby Soave suggests that the whole system should be scraped:

    The best remedy to this problem might be to admit that college is, to some degree, a scam. Note that these parents were evidently unconcerned that their kids—who were often coached to fake learning disabilities so they could get more time on the ACT and SAT—might struggle with their course loads. It’s because college is a joke, and it’s easy enough for an academically disinclined grifter—an Olivia Jade, if you will—to get by studying nonsense subjects. They’re paying for the experience and the diploma, not the actual education.

    This is a point that Bryan Caplan raises in his excellent book The Case Against Education. Caplan argues that most of the value of a college education is signaling rather than skills. Students don’t learn very much that will be useful to them in the job world, and even if they do, they quickly forget it. But a diploma signals to employers that the diploma-holder is competent in some abstract way—they jumped through a bunch of impressive-looking hoops, and are thus more worthy of a job than people who didn’t. The implication of Caplan’s research is that public funding of higher education is therefore a waste: It doesn’t actually benefit society to subsidize a signaling mechanism if there’s little relevant skill-gaining along the way. It just punishes everybody who, for whatever reason, doesn’t have access to the right hoops.

    If we are going to continue to publicly fund higher education, taxpayers might rightly ask whether institutions that receive federal dollars should be permitted to privilege the wealthy, the donor class, the athletes (both faux and actual), and certain racial groups (resulting in abject discrimination against Asians) over applicants who might actually be interested in checking a book out of the library. But if higher education is really just about celebrity scions pretending to play water polo in order to gain admittance to an exclusive partying club, maybe it’s long past time to hit the defund button.

    Now some related tweets:

    Finally, Rolling Stone offers nine WTF details about the scandal. My favorite:

    The fake profiles were so extreme that CW-1 would literally alter applicants’ height. In one case, CW-1 asked an employee to create a basketball profile for a boy who wanted to be admitted to USC. Although the boy was 5’5″ (a fact he referenced in an original draft of his personal statement), his final athletic profile stated that he was 6’1″. Though it’s unclear how, exactly, the young man was expected to justify the discrepancy between his stated height and his actual height when he arrived on campus, he was admitted to USC nonetheless.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

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