The War Against Jihad in Africa in 2019

May 11th, 2019

Here’s an interesting look at Jihad in the Sahel, the transition zone between Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa, originally from The Economist:

Nigerian troops huddle around their captain for a briefing. Several rest their rifle muzzles in the sandy ground, which could block and damage them. During the assault on a terrorist training camp, many forget their training, firing wildly and running off their line of advance. After capturing it, they mill about and ignore the booms of incoming artillery. Finally they are brought up short by an angry Scotsman, who shouts: “Ibrahim, you’re dead!”

This less-than-successful mock attack took place near the town of Bobo-Dioulasso, in the west of Burkina Faso. It was part of an American-led training exercise earlier this year involving some 2,000 elite troops from more than 30 countries. These two-week war games are the most visible part of a big Western push to turn the tide in a bloody, forgotten war. Jihadists are sweeping across the Sahel, an arid swathe of scrubland on the southern edge of the Sahara that stretches most of the way across Africa. They are also causing mayhem in Somalia. America, Britain, France and other Western powers are trying to help local forces in at least 16 countries beat them back. It is not going well.

Since the collapse of the “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, Islamic State (is) has been looking for other places to raise its black flag. Africa, and especially the Sahel, is vulnerable. Governments are weak, unpopular and often have only a tenuous grip over remote parts of their territory. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of is, sees an opportunity. In a video released on April 29th, to prove that he is not dead (his first such appearance in five years), the bearded zealot waxed enthusiastic about Africa. “Your brothers in Burkina Faso and Mali…we congratulate them for their joining the convoy of the caliphate,” he said, according to the site Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist communications.

Major General Mark Hicks, who commands America’s special forces in Africa (and was in Burkina Faso for the war games) fears that is is not the only terrorist group extending its franchise into his patch. “Al-Qaeda has taken a very serious long-term view of expanding here in the Sahel, and they’re seeing real success,” he says. His intelligence officers reckon that the groups they track contain about 10,500 jihadist fighters.

Most jihadists in Africa are fighting their own governments. But some attack Western targets. “If we don’t fight them here we will have to fight them on the streets of Madrid or Paris,” says a European intelligence officer.

One cannot generalise easily about African jihadist groups. Some are strictly local, having taken up arms to fight over farmland or against corrupt local government. Some adopt the “jihadist” label only because they happen to be Muslim. Many young men who join such groups do so because they have been robbed by officials or beaten up by police, or seen their friends humiliated in this way.

Other groups, such as al-Shabab in Somalia, are steeped in the teachings of al-Qaeda, the group behind the attacks on America on September 11th 2001. They tend to focus on spectacular atrocities, such as a truck bomb in 2017 in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, that killed almost 600 people. The most worrying groups are adherents of is that seek to hold territory. An offshoot of Boko Haram, for example, is building a proto-caliphate in northern Nigeria.

Don’t forget that Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015, but has since splintered at least once.

Jihadist groups of all varieties are expanding their reach in the Sahel and around Lake Chad. Last year conflicts with jihadists in Africa claimed more than 9,300 lives, mostly civilian. This is almost as many as were killed in conflict with jihadists in Syria and Iraq combined. About two-fifths of those deaths were in Somalia, where al-Shabab frequently detonates car bombs in crowded streets. Many of the rest were in Nigeria, where the schoolgirl-kidnappers of Boko Haram and its odious offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province, shoot villagers and behead nurses.

However, the area that aid workers and Western spooks worry about most is the Sahel. In Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso the number of people killed in jihad-related violence has doubled for each of the past two years, to more than 1,100 in 2018. And the violence is spreading, spilling across borders and threatening to tear apart poor, fragile states with bad rulers and swelling populations.

Snip.

Fear of refugees is one of the main reasons why European military powers are trying to stabilise the region. France has 4,500 troops fighting jihadists there. Germany and Italy each have about 1,000 soldiers in Africa. Britain has set up two specialised infantry units dedicated to training African soldiers in Nigeria and Somalia. America, which is more concerned about terrorism than refugee flows in this part of the world, has more than 7,000 military personnel in Africa.

The majority of Western troops do not fight jihadists directly—except in Somalia, where drone-fired missiles have killed many of al-Shabab’s fighters. Most are training local forces. They often have to start with the basics. In Nigeria, for instance, jihadists often sneak up and overrun army bases because the bush around them has not been cleared. Or they start shooting at them with a small force to goad the defenders into using up their ammunition firing back, leaving them helpless when the main attack begins.

Efforts to contain the spread of jihadism by training local armies or killing insurgent leaders are not obviously working. Take Mali, where in 2012 Tuareg separatists and jihadists allied to al-Qaeda swept out of the desert and conquered the north of the country using weapons looted from the arsenals of Libya’s dead dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. The rebels seemed ready to march on the capital, Bamako, and the south, which contains 90% of the population and sustains most of the economy.

French troops pushed them back from the main cities. But not even their expertise and firepower could defeat the rebels, who simply melted back into the desert. There they have survived a seven-year-long counterinsurgency campaign. Pundits in Paris are calling Mali “France’s Afghanistan”. And with good reason. The UN now has more than 16,000 peacekeepers in Mali, of whom 195 have been killed, making it the blue helmets’ most dangerous mission since its start in 2013. Nonetheless, the jihadists have continued to spread south into Niger and Burkina Faso.

The French are doing a lot of heavy lifting in Africa as part of Operation Barkhane, operating out of Chad and focused on five Ex-French colonies in Africa: Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. (As colonial rulers, the French were worse than the British, but much better than the Belgians.) Four hostages were rescued from Jihadists in Burkina Faso in a raid that resulted in two dead French Special Forces troops, Cédric de Pierrepont and Alain Bertoncello. The hostages were originally seized in Benin, which is in political turmoil following a rigged election. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin.)

But U.S. forces are actively engaged across Africa, mostly in the Sahel and mostly in support missions, with at least 36 different code-named U.S. operations in Africa:

Between 2013 and 2017, U.S. special operations forces saw combat in at least 13 African countries, according to retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who served at U.S. Africa Command from 2013 to 2015 and then headed Special Operations Command Africa until 2017. Those countries, according to Bolduc, are Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan and Tunisia. He added that U.S. troops have been killed or wounded in action in at least six of them: Kenya, Libya, Niger, Somalia, South Sudan and Tunisia….

The code-named operations cover a variety of different military missions, ranging from psychological operations to counterterrorism. Eight of the named activities, including Obsidian Nomad, are so-called 127e programs, named for the budgetary authority that allows U.S. special operations forces to use certain host-nation military units as surrogates in counterterrorism missions.

Used extensively across Africa, 127e programs can be run either by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force and other special mission units, or by “theater special operations forces.” These programs are “specifically designed for us to work with our host nation partners to develop small — anywhere between 80 and 120 personnel— counterterrorism forces that we’re partnered with,” said Bolduc. “They are specially selected partner-nation forces that go through extensive training, with the same equipment we have, to specifically go after counterterrorism targets, especially high-value targets.”

Some of the more important include Juniper Micron (logistics support of French forces), Juniper Nimbus (supporting the Nigerian military against Boko Haram), and Juniper Shield, the umbrella operation for counterterrorism efforts in northwest Africa, aimed at Boko Haram, the Islamic State in West Africa, and al Qaeda.

See also: Islamic State Affiliated Groups And Their Current Status.

LinkSwarm for May 10, 2019

May 10th, 2019

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas we’re enjoying intermittant torrential rains, which means that walking your dog after one is like breathing warm soup.

  • Obama took Hillary’s loss as a personal insult:

    Former President Barack Obama was unhappy with Hillary Clinton and her failed “soulless campaign” in 2016, saying he saw her loss as a “personal insult.”

    The new details come from a recently released update to New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker’s book Obama: The Call of History.

    The new edition, which includes Obama’s reaction to the 2016 election, said Obama compared himself to Michael Corleone, the titular character of “The Godfather.” Obama thought he “almost got out” of office untouched, like a mob boss avoiding a hit job.

    Obama found himself shocked by the election results, thinking before Nov. 8 there was “no way Americans would turn on him” and “[h]is legacy, he felt, was in safe hands.”

  • The Midwest’s broken blue wall:

    The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than when he nearly swept the region in 2016. Polling shows Trump’s job approval rating in the Midwest is in the mid-forties, and his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating in the region is roughly the same as Obama’s was during the same point in his presidency, according to Gallup tracking polls.

    The working class, the nearly 70 percent of Americans without a college degree who have been ignored and even ridiculed by both political parties, is flourishing. Five of the top ten cities enjoying the greatest job opportunities for lower-wage workers are in the Midwest. “A majority of the metro areas with the highest shares of opportunity employment are located in the Midwest . . . after adjusting for cost-of-living differences, median annual earnings tend to be relatively high in that region,” according to an April 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

    Finding enough workers “is a problem playing out in many parts of the Midwest, a region with lower unemployment and higher job-opening rates than the rest of the country,” according to an April 2018 Wall Street Journal report, citing hiring challenges by employers in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Southwestern Ohio, solid Trump country, is in the midst of a warehousing boom. The construction industry is thriving nationwide, but the Midwest is leading the pack.

    The administration’s attempts to secure the southern border are gaining popularity in the Midwest. According to a recent Washington Postpoll, 40 percent of Midwesterners say Trump’s approach to illegal immigration will make them more likely to support him in 2020, compared to 36 percent who say they are less likely. Further, 83 percent of Midwesterners called the situation at the Mexican border a crisis or a serious problem. It will take some smooth convincing by the Democratic presidential candidate to not only disabuse Midwesterners of their views, but to assure them that open borders are best for families in Racine and Grand Rapids.

  • After the Mueller report, former FBI Director James Comey knows he’s in trouble:

    Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.

    Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.

    The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.

    The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.

    The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.

    The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.

    Oh, should we use the word “bombshell” or the phrase “the walls are closing on?”

  • Luke Rosiak is on the case of corruption in Flint, Michigan:

    The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.

    And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.

    The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.

    Huge amounts of aid dollars — including $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency — have flowed to the small city of 90,000 residents to address lead in its water supply, even though it doesn’t have a chief financial officer and, until recently, its finance chair was a gun felon.

    The federal money “should be a good thing for the city,” Worthing told TheDCNF, “but given the mismanagement of the pipe replacement program, I am concerned that it’s not going to get used properly.”

    The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.

  • What part of No Collusion is hard to understand?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Democrat slips up, admits that “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this President, he will be reelected.”
  • Hey, remember when journalists reported on all the scandals among Virginia’s state leaders, until they noticed the (D)s after their names? “Northam, who largely won on anti-Trump anger, is now less popular than the president in the state.”
  • Alabama Democratic state representative John Rogers last week: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.” Rodgers this week: “I am now a candidate for United States Senate.” He’s primarying incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who only got in because of the Roy Moore fiasco.
  • Remember how sure all those economic “experts” were that Trump would tank the economy if he got elected? Good times, good times…
  • A lot of what you think you know about gun control in Australia, New Zealand and the UK is probably wrong.

    Recent data show that the U.K.’s gun control experiments are actually causing more harm than good. Like its Australian counterpart, which also implemented draconian gun control in the 1990s, negative criminal trends have started to surface since new gun control laws were enacted.

    Sexual assaults have seen an alarming rise from 1995 to 2006, specifically increasing by 76.5 percent according to Howard Nemerov’s book 400 Years of Gun Control. All the gun control in the world has not been able to save the U.K. from steadily increasing rates of violent crime.

  • The FBI’s New York office forms a squad dedicated to MS-13.
  • “The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”
  • Believe women…unless they’re raped by a homeless person. “Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes.”
  • New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy raids fund for fallen firefighters.
  • Followup:

  • New York: No new pipelines. Gas company: OK, that means no more gas hookups for new buildings because we’re at capacity.
  • Leaked Trump Peace Plan? I’d sort of like President Trump to stay away from all peace plans, as they all seem to be asking for trouble. This one is interesting. It calls for a two state solution, some Egyptian facilities for Gaza, incorporating settlements into Israel, a lot of non-U.S. countries picking up the bill, and penalties for rejecting the deal. It make so much sense that Palestinians will surely reject it out of hand…
  • U.S. Seizes North Korean Freighter Violating U.N. Sanctions.”
  • More on China’s play for technological dominance: “Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The New York Times had a story in which they breathlessly told us that Trump lost a billion dollars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know, just like Trump himself told us in his book The Art of the Comeback. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.” Better idea: Make all social media companies publish clear, defined reasons for suspending or banning users, and make the processes by which those decisions are made transparent. Nah, they’d never go for that, as that would keep them from arbitrarily banning conservatives… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Facebook Allows Terrorist Who Beheaded Canadian Tourist To Keep Account & Actively Post.” That would be Bhen Tatuh of the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin.)
  • Jim Goad says Facebook should leave Louis Farrakhan alone…because he’s hilarious. “This cat is one of the most accomplished mind-fuckers in American history, and I’m glad to call him a fellow citizen.”
  • “Facebook SWAT Team Arrests Man For Illegal Possession Of Conservative Views.”
  • “Man Whose Headless Body Was Found Floating in Fish Tank Was Murdered.” That’s some mighty fine forensic analysis there, Lou… (Hat tip: Mickey Kaus.)
  • “Nation’s Politicians Mock Trump For Only Wasting A Mere Billion Dollars.”
  • “That’s not a knife!” (Unleashes Hellfire missile with 100 pounds worth of blades.) “Now that, that’s a knife!”
  • Entire New Orleans Times-Picayune staff laid off after paper sold to competitor. Among other things, they did that fine story on the homeless Super Bowl player.
  • Speaking of football: “XFL Reaches Deal With Fox, Disney To Broadcast Games.”
  • How a World War II field kitchen worked.
  • The return of the giant knotweed.
  • The 106 greatest crime films of all time, as ranked by Otto Penzler (still in progress).
  • “Is that an alligator in your pants, or are you just happy to see me.” Bonus: Florida Woman.
  • “Ilhan Omar Blasts Israel For Refusing Palestine’s Generous Gift Of Rockets.”
  • Moving The Extending Arms of Christ: This probably won’t mean anything to you unless you grew up in Houston, but there was a large, striking mosaic above the emergency room entrance on Houston Methodist Hospital that had to be moved to an interior atrium under construction due to the hospital’s expansion.
  • Turmoil In The NRA

    May 9th, 2019

    A great deal of institutional turmoil has been roiling the National Rifle Association as of late:

    A long-simmering dispute between NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre and now-departing NRA president Oliver North exploded into the open Friday night, as the NRA’s Board of Directors suddenly forced to confront public accusations and counter-accusations of financial mismanagement, attempts at extortion, and unjustifiable expenditures by their primary public relations firm. By Saturday morning, it was clear who won.

    This morning, at the NRA’s public meeting of members, member Richard Childress read a letter from North announcing he would not seek another term as the NRA’s president. His term ends Monday.

    The NRA is currently suing their public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen, over access to documents detailing how the firm spent the NRA’s money. In recent years, NRA board members grew increasingly concerned about whether they were getting their money’s worth from their long time advertising and PR firm; according to financial documents cited in The New Yorker, the NRA paid Ackerman McQueen just under $41 million in 2017.

    Further complicating the matter is that North has a contract with Ackerman McQueen to produce a television series “Oliver North’s American Heroes.” LaPierre accuses North of attempting to oust him in order to protect Ackerman McQueen.

    The New Yorker piece displays an obvious disdain for gun owners and the NRA, but that doesn’t mean their central details about the nature of the relationship between the NRA and Ackerman McQueen are wrong. After noting that it is actually Ackerman McQueen that pays the salaries of high profile spokesmen Dana Loesch and Colion Noir, it goes on:

    The N.R.A. and Ackerman have become so intertwined that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Top officials and staff move freely between the two organizations; Oliver North, the former Iran-Contra operative, who now serves as the N.R.A.’s president, is paid roughly a million dollars a year through Ackerman, according to two N.R.A. sources. But this relationship, which in many ways has built the contemporary N.R.A., seems also to be largely responsible for the N.R.A.’s dire financial state. According to interviews and to documents that I obtained—federal tax forms, charity records, contracts, corporate filings, and internal communications—a small group of N.R.A. executives, contractors, and venders has extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from the nonprofit’s budget, through gratuitous payments, sweetheart deals, and opaque financial arrangements. Memos created by a senior N.R.A. employee describe a workplace distinguished by secrecy, self-dealing, and greed, whose leaders have encouraged disastrous business ventures and questionable partnerships, and have marginalized those who object. “Management has subordinated its judgment to the vendors,” the documents allege. “Trust in the top has eroded.”

    One prominent longtime NRA member told me “If keeping Wayne on for another few years is the price we have to pay to get rid of Ack-Mac, it’s worth it. Wayne can be a problem, but Ack-Mac is unsurvivable. They’ve very nearly killed their host organism. Go to their homepage and look at their client list and ask yourself where this podunk ad agency gets off billing the NRA $40M/yr.”

    Similar thoughts from Shall Not Be Questioned:

    Wayne’s extravagance is the new story in the media after the Board members who had dealings with the PR firm were ousted. I don’t feel sorry for Wayne. He invited this on himself by doing stuff like this in the first place. Why were expenses being funneled through Ack-Mac? I can’t see any legit reason for that other than keeping them off NRA’s books. Lie with dogs and don’t be surprised when you get fleas.

    But my overriding goal is getting through New York State’s assault on the NRA and excising the parasite PR firm. Everything else is small potatoes. If Wayne wants to say ten Hail Marys and agree to sin no more that’s fine.

    The New Yorker piece also mentions the controversy over Carry Guard:

    In 2017, visitors to the N.R.A.’s annual meeting, at a convention center in Atlanta, noted a huge banner that ran nearly the full length of the building. It was there to promote a newly launched program called Carry Guard, for members who wanted to protect themselves with firearms. The program offered military-style training, overseen by former Special Forces members, and liability insurance to cover policyholders who had shot people in self-defense. The banner featured an image of Dana Loesch, holding an insurance card and announcing, “I will never carry a gun without carrying this.” On the showroom floor was a Carry Guard virtual-reality exhibit, where participants, equipped with electronic handguns and V.R. goggles, were encouraged to fire away at an armed robber.

    Ackerman had been deeply involved in developing Carry Guard, and it marketed the insurance aggressively, through e-mail campaigns and an NRATV program called “Carry Guard Daily.” The promotional literature included a guide called “Surviving the Aftermath of a Self-Defense Shooting,” which advised prospective buyers that it was important to “establish for police that you were in fear for your life and did what you felt was necessary.”

    According to sources familiar with the N.R.A.’s business decisions, Carry Guard was intended to secure the organization’s long-term prosperity. The N.R.A. had spent more than fifty million dollars on the 2016 elections, mostly in support of Donald Trump, and it badly needed revenue. Brian Mittendorf, the chair of the accounting department at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, has analyzed eleven years’ worth of the organization’s public financial statements, starting in 2007. In seven of those years, he told me, “the N.R.A. owed more money to others than it had at its discretion to spend.” A financial audit from 2017 revealed that it had nearly reached the limit of a twenty-five-million-dollar line of credit. Additionally, it had been forced to liquidate more than two million dollars from an investment fund, borrow almost four million from its officers’ life-insurance policies, and tap another five million from its affiliated charitable foundation.

    Carry Guard pissed off a lot of longtime NRA trainers, who had gone through all the NRA teaching and certification courses, only to have Carry Guard instituted from outside as a high profile alternate program they had no input into, and which cut them out in favor of newcomers without their experience training civilians in proper gun use techniques. Ordinary members were also miffed that 1911s and revolvers were not allowed in the new Carry Guard classes. In addition, the consensus seems to be that USCCA insurance is better than Carry Guard’s insurance (plus many people were pissed off that, after Carry Guard was introduced, USCCA was disinvited from the annual NRA meeting). (There are also other programs out there; John Daub had insurance through Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network when he had his home invasion.)

    Carry Guard was supposed to be a source of revenue for the NRA, but it’s turned into a black hole, and no one if sure if it’s even continuing at this point.

    The New Yorker published a new piece on the NRA yesterday:

    The N.R.A.’s relationship with Ackerman seems to be the most prominent example of an organizational culture that is marked by secrecy, self-dealing, and greed, and has cost the N.R.A. hundreds of millions of dollars through bloated payments, lavish deals, and opaque financial arrangements. The memo to the audit committee appears to show that the N.R.A.’s troubles stretch beyond its dealings with Ackerman. It suggests new examples of unexplained spending, weak oversight, mismanagement, and conflicts of interest among members of the N.R.A.’s senior management.

    Snip.

    One of the senior N.R.A. executives mentioned in the audit-committee memo is Woody Phillips, who served as the organization’s treasurer and chief financial officer for twenty-six years before retiring, in 2018. The document states, without explanation, that the N.R.A. had made “payments” to Phillips’s “significant other.” Brewer challenged the accuracy of the assertion. “Payments were not made to any ‘significant other’ of the N.R.A.’s former C.F.O.,” Brewer wrote. “The N.R.A. hired an I.T. consulting firm with links to a social friend of Mr. Phillips. That firm was interviewed and vetted by the N.R. A.’s I.T. department, and its engagement was reviewed and approved by the audit committee.”

    The accountants described invoices submitted by several venders [sic] and paid by the N.R.A. as “vague and deceptive.” One questionable arrangement involved Associated Television International, a television-production company. From 1998 to 2014, A.T.I. produced a crime-reënactment [sic] show called “Crime Strike,” which featured the N.R.A.’s executive vice-president and C.E.O., Wayne LaPierre. According to the accountants, the N.R.A. paid A.T.I. “$1.8M for rental of a house” belonging to David McKenzie, A.T.I.’s president. The accountants do not say who rented the home, why the N.R.A. covered the rental at such an enormous cost, nor what, if anything, was “deceptive” about the bill.

    Michael Donaldson, A.T.I.’s outside counsel, confirmed that the company sent the N.R.A. “seven invoices” concerning the house, which added up to “almost $1.8 million.” He went on, “The invoices in question were all for refurbishing episodes after completion of the original episodes of ‘Crime Strike,’ ” adding, “the invoiced amounts include not only the house but also various production-related items such as lights, props, and some crew.” Donaldson told me that A.T.I. has “stopped rendering services for the N.R.A. for some time.”

    There’s more in that vein, including the people at the center of the controversies:

    In addition, the memo drew attention to “senior management override of internal controls,” which led to violations of “accounts payable procedures” and “HR policy,” including “hiring of staff without HR knowledge.” It names four executives who, at the time, were receiving “reimbursement of expenses relating to apartments and living expenses beyond HR Policy Manual stipulations and on a permanent basis.” The N.R.A.’s accountants added that there was “no contract to support the reimbursement request,” which the four individuals continued to claim as a “relocation expense.” The executives named include Doug Hamlin, the N.R.A.’s executive director of publications; Eric Frohardt, the director of education and training; Joe DeBergalis, the executive director of general operations; and Josh Powell, LaPierre’s chief of staff.

    Says John Richardson at No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money:

    Powell is the person responsible for bringing in CarryGuard while Eric Frohardt is the former Navy SEAL whom Powell installed as director of education and training and director of training for CarryGuard. Frohardt still lives in Colorado where he owns a range and other businesses according to his LinkedIn page. It is my understanding from those who would know that Frohardt is flown in at the NRA’s expense to work 3-7 days a month. While I have the utmost respect for Frohardt’s service to the nation, 12 years as a Navy SEAL does not make one an expert in training civilians in the legal use of a firearm.

    As to Josh Powell, the memo to the Audit Committee mentions his multiple conflicts of interest including the hiring of his dad to do photography for the NRA and his wife, Colleen Gallagher, was hired by a top NRA fund-raising vendor McKenna and Associates. It gets worse.

    The N.R.A.’s accountants completed their memo in mid-July. Around this period, the N.R.A.’s new C.F.O., Craig Spray, had to temporarily step away from his role at the organization to deal with a health matter. Someone would need to take his place as the organization’s chief manager of financial activities. According to an internal N.R.A. communication, in July, 2018, Powell was appointed acting C.F.O. for about three weeks, placing him in charge of the accountants who documented his conflicts of interest.

    I won’t get into the other issues with regard to Powell other than to say his departure from the NRA would help the organization. Placing him as the senior strategist to work with outside counsel William Brewer on New York litigation is a disaster in the making.

    The fact that the New Yorker is hostile to gun rights and the NRA shouldn’t blind us to the fact that there are very real financial oversight issues that need to be addressed, and the NRA audit committee isn’t far enough away from those problems to address them. The NRA board should bring an outside audit team from one of the big five accounting forms with expertise in nonprofits to do a full, forensic audit of NRA finances going back at least five years.

    There are some that claim cleaning up the NRA would offer too much succor to the gun-grabbers. But the organizational dysfunction and self-dealing is already out in the open, and is already hurting the NRA’s effectiveness (and has been for several years). If not now, when? Better to do it now, the year before a Presidential election, with Republicans holding the White House and the Senate able to block gun-grabbing initiatives, than during it.

    Other than being a member, I am very far indeed from the center of NRA power. For all the grumbling over the NRA caving over bump-stocks, there’s no other organization with the size, scope and political power of the NRA to protect Second Amendment rights in America. But to do that, the NRA has to be on solid organizational and financial footing, and right now it does not appear to be on either. The NRA has to get its own house in order, this year, or expect forces hostile to it and its goals to do it for them.

    Similar thoughts from Richardson:

    One way or another the NRA will get its house in order. It can be done either by the Board of Directors or it will be done for them by the State of New York, the Internal Revenue Service, and other outside agencies. Far better that the changes come from within than from without. It can be controlled and managed to make the organization stronger, bigger, and more diverse.

    My fear is that new officers of the NRA – Carolyn Meadows, Charles Cotton, and Willes Lee – and much of the Board are such stalwart Wayne LaPierre supporters that they will go along with the status quo (ante bellum) to the NRA’s detriment. Ignoring it is not going to make it go away and will only make matters worse. That, however, is the most probable outcome as things stand now.

    More Tesla Troubles

    May 8th, 2019

    I’ve reported on the problems of Tesla Motors before. Elon Musk’s California-based electric car company has a slavishly-devoted fanbase quick to attack critics, but thus far Tesla has produced more hype than profits. “The more cars it sells the more cash it burns.”

    Now Coyote Blog has offered an extensive roundup of just how dire the economic straits that Tesla is in are:

    • The first quarter of 2019 was a disaster, with deliveries down despite initiation of Model 3 sales in Europe. Worse, since the Model 3 seems to be cannibalizing Model S and X sales, Tesla was not only selling fewer cars but its mix shifted to lower priced less profitable cars. It lost an enormous amount of money, and only after the conference call with analysts about first quarter results did Tesla reveal that this loss would have been far worse without a huge sale of government EV credits
    • Tesla burned a staggering amount of cash in the first quarter, and was forced to pay off nearly a billion dollars in debt when the stock price did not remain high enough for the debt to convert. While Tesla’s cash balance at the end of the quarter looked OK, there were two huge red flags. First, the cash barely covered a huge hole Tesla had in its net working capital. Second, given the large number of vehicles Tesla sold in its end of quarter push in the last 2 weeks of the quarter, it appears that Tesla was nearly out of cash in Mid-March and perhaps days away from a default (analysis below).
    • The Tesla financial statements still include a number of unexplained oddities, including a billion dollars of accounts receivable, or about 20% of quarterly revenues. How does a company that demands payment in advance before delivery have 20% of its quarterly revenues tied up in receivables?
    • Tesla announced, out of the blue, that it was closing all its retail stores and going online only. Given the drop in demand for the quarter, it was a head-scratcher as to why eliminating the sales force was going to help. The decision seemed to be almost off the cuff, as Tesla seemed surprised that they would still have to continue paying their expensive long-term mall leases. After this was revealed, Tesla partially reversed the closure decision, but no one — including their own retail folks — seems to know what the plan is now.
    • Tesla constantly fiddled with its prices and model lineup. It cut prices several times, but also announced a small raise as well. It eliminated certain options for cars, added new ones, and then reintroduced eliminated ones. Even long-time Tesla watchers are confused about the model lineup today.
      Tesla continued to see an outflow of executive talent, including the exit of their very well-respected new General Counsel after just over one month on the job (Mr. Buttswinkas returned to his old law firm and purged Tesla from his resume). This seemed to parallel the rapid exit of an outside chief accounting officer last year who gave up millions of dollars to exit in just 60 days.

    • April car deliveries stayed on the same pace as the first quarter — ie, way worse than Tesla’s guidance
    • Elon Musk continued to get in trouble with the SEC, firing off production and sales guidance on Twitter that was different from Tesla’s official published guidance. Mr. Musk and Tesla are still guiding to a total delivery number for the next year that is well in excess of what most anyone else looking at the first four months believes is possible
    • Tesla announced a reveal of their Model Y crossover that will not go on sale until at least the end of 2020. Unlike past Tesla reveals, this one seemed hastily set up and the prototypes shown were weird. They looked more like the existing Model 3 with a few modifications than a promised crossover that could incorporate a third row of seats. Tesla asked customers to start making deposits (skeptics will argue that the whole point of the reveal was just to get some free financing from Tesla fanboys) but unlike past reveals, this one fell flat. There was apparently little interest in making deposits, though Tesla (unlike with past products) has not revealed the deposit numbers.

    On top of all this, it announced out of the blue that it’s going to be make itself into an “autonomous taxi company”:

    Musk has a demonstrated pattern that whenever he needs the stock price to be higher, or he needs to sell stock, or he needs some other kind of favorable financial outcome, he will do a new product demo. It worked for battery swap and the solar shingle and the model 3 and the semi, so it would work again. The model 3 reveal had collected hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in the form of deposits. That’s what he needed now. The problem is, they didn’t have a prototype to show. I believe Musk had the company hastily create a Model Y prototype built on top of a model 3. It did not really have to work, it just had to be something he could talk about. Interestingly, his VP of engineering quit at exactly this time, for reasons unknown — was their some internal dissention about this Y prototype?

    Anyway, the Model Y reveal was essentially a flop, and likely garnered few deposits. Certainly not enough to fill in Tesla’s growing cash hole. And by Mid-March, Tesla may have been almost out of cash. Tesla says it delivered half its vehicles for the quarter in the last 10 days of March, so about 31,500 were delivered in those hectic days. At an average price of $50,000 each that would mean Tesla brought in nearly $1.6 billion in cash those last 10 days (this is conservative, may have been more if the average price was higher). But they only had $2.2 billion at the end of the quarter, meaning Tesla was scraping bottom in mid-March, particularly since hundreds of millions of that cash is restricted and not supposed to be spent.

    Somewhere in this period of March-April, after his usual product reveal trick with the Y did not work, I think Musk came to the conclusion that the Tesla car business as currently defined was not going to work. Or, more accurately, it was never going to make enough money to support its sky-high stock valuation. I have always said that Tesla would make a fine $10 billion niche car company, but nothing about it justifies a $50 or $60 billion valuation. But at this point Musk can’t accept a $10 billion company, even though that would ostensibly still leave him a very rich man. But like Ken Lay at Enron, Musk has borrowed against at least half his Tesla stock and a falling stock price could lead to financial death by margin call (Musk, for some reason, also mortgaged all his multi-million dollar homes last December). His other investments are also struggling — SpaceX has been unable to attract the capital it needs of late and Musk has poured a lot of money into the Boring company, an absolute embarrassment of a company that helps refute, in my mind, his “smartest guy in the world” rep.

    As Musk looked around for a way to save the stock valuation, the Lyft and Uber IPO’s must have had an influence. Uber is losing as much money as Tesla and folks are talking about it IPO-ing at a market cap of $70 billion. What if Tesla could call itself a ride-sharing company, only better. Wouldn’t that garner Tesla an even higher valuation?

    Having not read The Smartest Guys in the Room, I am at something of a disadvantage when it comes to the collapse of Enron, but it seems to me that Enron was a profitable venture before wild over-expansion, shady regulatory arbitrage and outright accounting fraud brought it to bankruptcy. By contrast, Q4 2018 was the first time Telsa ever posted back-to-back profitable quarters.

    Tesla could be a profitable company if it concentrated on manufacturing luxury cars and selling them through a traditional dealer network, just like Mercedes and BMW do today. Instead, Musk continues to chase the Next Big Thing in order to keep the overinflated stock prices high. (And it wouldn’t hurt if they did their manufacturing in a state with much saner cost, tax and regulatory structures than California.)

    As the author notes: “This is the company that is going to spawn a thousand business school case studies.”

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

    Library Additions: Three Political First Editions, Two Signed

    May 7th, 2019

    I usually catalog books purchased on my other blog, but here are some politics-related books I picked up recently:

  • Bush, George W. Decision Points. Crown Publishers, 2010. First edition hardback, a Near Fine copy with a faint red stain at heel, in a Fine- dust jacket with just bit of wrinkling at top and bottom edges. Signed by Bush. Autobiography of his time as President. Bought at a Half Price Books in Houston for $7.99, picked out of several unsigned copies (obviously they failed to check it for signatures when it came in; having known Bush signed in Houston, I took care to check every copy). This is the second presidential signature I own, as I also have President Trump’s signature on a novelty million dollar bill.

    (Note for book hunters: The signature at the top of the title page of George H. W. Bush’s All the Best is printed in all copies of the first edition.)

  • Caro, Robert A. Working. Knopf, 2019. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, new and unread, signed by Caro. Book of essays from this multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer. Tells stories from Caro’s research about the lengths to which he went to get the story right, such as finding out how Brown & Root made LBJ, and how Caro actually sat down to interview Ladybird Johnson about her husband’s longtime lover. Bought at Caro’s signing at Bookpeople for cover price.
  • Rosiak, Luke. Obstruction of Justice: How the Deep State Risked National Security to Protect the Democrats. Regnery Publishing, 2019. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. The story of how the Awan spy ring hacked the computers of congressional Democrats, and how Democrats and the Obama Justice Department covered up for them. Bought from Amazon for $19.24.
  • Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for May 6, 2019

    May 6th, 2019

    Biden is up big, Bennet is In, Beto is down and de Blasio is about to unite all of America together in ridicule against him. Plus the raw sex appeal of Walter Mondale. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Polls

  • In a Harvard-Harris poll, Biden leads his Democratic opponents by a whopping 30 points. Biden 44, Sanders 14, Harris 9, Warren 5, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 3. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • CNN–SRSS: Biden 39, Sanders 24, Warren 8, Buttigieg 7.
  • Morning Consult: Biden 36, Sanders 22, Warren 9, Buttigieg 8, Harris 7, O’Rourke 5, Booker 4, Klobucher 2, Yang 2.
  • Quinnipiac: Biden 38, Warren 12, Sanders 11, Buttigieg 10, Harris 8, O’Rourke 5. First poll I’ve seen Warren edge Sanders. Maybe all that “free everything for everybody” pandering is paying off for her…
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls.
  • Election betting markets. Warren (5.7%) is now up over Yang (5.3%) who is now up over O’Rourke (5.1%).
  • The Eight Tiers In This Race

    People usually sort candidates into “First Tier, Second Tier, Third Tier,” but that’s not applicable to a race this crowded:

    1. Right now Biden is alone in the first tier, and…
    2. Sanders is alone in the second.
    3. The third tier is Warren, Buttigieg and Harris all bunched up together (Warren is enjoying a little bounce, Buttigieg’s bounce faded as soon as Biden joined, and Harris is just barely hanging on as the media-boosted SJW darling).
    4. O’Rouke has probably free-fallen alone into the fourth tier, his telegenic hype long over and people scratching their heads as to why people ever thought he was exciting when not running against Ted Cruz.
    5. The fifth tier consists of Booker and Klobucher, who seem to be running competent, unexciting campaigns awaiting their turn to catch fire in a hype cycle.
    6. The sixth tier is Interesting Weirdos, lead by a rising Yang and a hasn’t-showed-us-anything-yet Williamson. Let’s also stick Gabbard here, since she generates tons of buzz only because the Democratic base seems to actively hate her, and she seems to have more followers than the lower tiers.
    7. The seventh tier is Dead in the Water, people who have resumes that suggest they should be credible Presidential candidates (mostly senators and governors), but somehow aren’t: Castro, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Inslee, and probably the newly-joined Bennet.
    8. The eighth and lowest tier (sorry Dante) is Wasting Our Time, including all the representatives other than Gabbard: Moulton, Ryan, Swalwell, Delany, Messam. Maybe one could break out, but I rather doubt it.

    Pundits, etc.

  • How much a candidate’s announcement coverage boosts them in polls. Caveat: They relied on cable news coverage, which leaves out a lot of things, like legacy MSM outlets slathering fawning coverage on Harris like ketchup on french fries.
  • “If you have an appetite for schadenfreude, one of the pleasures of the ongoing 2020 Democratic primary will be watching once-highly-touted politicians realize just how limited their appeal is, as they struggle to reach 5 percent in a crowded field.” Special mention of Castro, Gabbard and Gillibrand.
  • Stephen Green on electability. “If the economy is still booming in November 2020, maybe none of this year’s massive crop of Dems is electable. Maybe they’re all Mondales, albeit with far less of Walt’s raw sexual magnetism.”
  • Democrats desperately need their dark money sugar daddies.
  • 538 on what the candidates are saying and doing.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? She’s not running for the senate. Maybe she’s regretting turning down that Biden VP trial balloon. She also got a voter suppression pander from O’Rourke.
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. Still nothing since that now four-week old tweet. But his estimated net worth is $85 million, and he was “a political science major at George Washington University (where he ran for student body president and lost).” Baldwin could probably talk himself into a run if he really wanted to…
  • Update: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. “Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., announced he will run in the Democratic primary to seek his party’s nomination to go up against President Trump in the 2020 election.” More: “Bennet has built a reputation as a bipartisan, policy-focused senator on Capitol Hill, trending toward the center of the Democratic spectrum. He opposes a single-payer health care system, instead hoping to expand Obamacare.” Oh yeah, that’s just what the Democratic base in crying out for: bipartisanship. Data point: The guy’s a U.S. senator, and I have exactly one entry for him before I started doing the Clown Car update, and that was just a mention in the 2016 election. If you stuck guns to the heads of Democratic voters and said “Pick Michael Bennet out of these photos of all 21 declared Democratic Presidential candidates or die,” then you just killed a greater percentage of Democratic voters than Thanos.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “A $1.5 billion sweetheart deal Hunter Biden’s private equity firm secured from the state-owned Bank of China is ‘looming on the horizon’ as a potential line of attack against his father’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen.” It’s going to be fun hearing Democrats claim that random contacts by low-level staffers constituted collusion with Russia for Trump, but that $1.5 billion from China to the Vice President’s son was just no big deal. Why Biden is not Jeb Bush. Four of these points I agree with, but the fifth (“unlike Jeb, who was weakened by the presence of his one-time protege Marco Rubio in the field, Biden has no immediate competitor in his primary ‘lane'”) is probably untrue, as Buttigieg, Moulton, Hickenlooper, Ryan and Bennet could all plausibly fill the “white moderate” lane. He appeared on ABC’s The View, where he promised to be less creepy. Biden picked up a very early endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters, another example of his strong play for union support. He appeals to forgotten blue collar Democrats. Flashback: In 1998, Joe Biden said Anita Hill was lying. (Right the first time.) Biden the liar. Speaking of which, the Washington Post gave him four Pinocchios for stating that the Trump tax cuts applied only to the rich. Biden’s campaign may be a well-oiled machine. Biden himself? Not so much:

    How far will the left wing of the Democratic Party go to drag Biden? Here’s a Newsweek piece dinging him for opposing forced busing in 1974. Here’s a hint: everyone hated forced busing. “We’re going to take your daughter and ship her across town to a school in the ghetto because that’s a whole hell of a lot easier than spending more money to improve ghetto schools or take on teachers unions.” Democrats gave up on forced busing because it was a horrible idea that didn’t actually address the problem and they didn’t want be wiped out in elections.

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Maybe? I didn’t think he was going to run if Biden got in, but what the hell is this? It came up as an ad when I Googled “Michael Bloomberg President.” That sure as hell looks like the website of someone who is thinking of running for President. Upgraded from “Probably not” after I stumbled across it.
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s trying to split the difference on the full socialized “Medicare for all” pipe dream. Talks to Jake Tapper. He also refused to say whether he would jail American gun owners who refused to comply with his unconstitutional gun confiscation plan.
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Out.
  • Update: Montana Governor Steve Bullock: All But In. “Montana Gov. Steve Bullock will announce his bid for the presidency in two weeks, MTN News has learned — adding to the 20 Democrats already running for the 2020 nomination to challenge President Trump.” Upgrade over Leaning Toward In.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. NBC profile brings “fawning” to entirely new levels. Speaking of “fawning,” he also gets a Time profile, sure to boost him among the coveted “stuck alone at a dentist’s office without a smart phone” demographic. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) He attends sunday school with Jimmy Carter (AKA history’s greatest monster).
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Julian Castro hits 65,000-donor threshold to secure spot in first presidential debate.” That’s probably a great relief to him. He’s making a play for Nevada, which falls right after New Hampshire and has a large Hispanic population. That’s a strategically sound decision, and even if it fails, it can’t fail worse than anything else he’s tried…
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out. But she says the 2016 election was “stolen” from her.

  • Update: New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: All But In. “It’s Now A Clown Bus: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Expected To Announce 2020 Run Next Week.” De Blasio unites all of America in contempt against him. “76 percent of New Yorkers say he shouldn’t run. Politico New York surveyed 30-odd members of Team de Blasio, and all but two said it was a bad idea, with one calling it ‘fucking insane.'” Also this: “He may have a shot if every Democratic candidate is caught sending racy selfies to minors.” Upgrade from Leaning Toward In.
  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Interviewed on WBUR radio. He says Democrats need to talk more about mental health. Obviously true, but who is going to tell most of his fellow presidential candidates they’re crazy to keep running?
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She got an interview on Fox News, where she got a case of the vapors over Venezuela. A Counterpunch writer suggests that Gabbard will be arbitrarily excluded from the Democratic debates:

    According to the DNC, the max number of candidates participating will be a total of twenty even if all 21 announced candidates qualify as it threatens to eliminate candidates who had already made the cut – so much for “transparent, fair and inclusive.” Ten will appear on June 26 with the next ten on June 27th and selection will be determined by drawing lots. Conceivably, the Main Show of Bernie and Biden may occur on June 26th, or they may be split, appearing on two different nights. In any case, it may be difficult for the public to determine a clear ‘winner’ by virtue of candidate separation from the total field.

    Snip.

    Given her almost totally hostile reception by every MSM outlet who deigned to interview her, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has experienced, as an opponent of regime change wars, more bad manners and outright personal antagonism than any other candidate. While Gabbard easily qualified for the debates via the $65,000 requirement and continues to attract SRO audiences in NH, Iowa, California and elsewhere, yet until the newest CNN poll, she failed to register any % of public support. Something here does not compute given the ‘favored’ polls past history of favoritism. If the Dems continue to put a brick wall around her, Jill Stein has already opened the Green Party door as a more welcoming venue for a Tulsi candidacy. The Dems, who tend to be unprincipled and vindictive, better be careful what they wish for.

    Caveat: Counterpunch, so grains of salt time. On the other hand, the author can smell the stench of the Russiagate corpse, so maybe actual clues are involved here…

  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s getting a Fox town hall June 2. She wants the government to give people money so they can give it to politicians. Hmm, sounds just like the sort of lame-brained scheme someone lagging badly in the donation race would dream up…
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. Don’t think he’s running, but it’s interesting that he’s disagreeing with Biden about China. “I don’t think it’s smart to underestimate the role China plays on the global stage.”
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden is eating Harris’ lunch, and probably her dinner:

    Senator Kamala Harris was supposed to be a frontrunner. According to the rules of “the invisible primary,” in which donors and party activists coalesce around their chosen nominees, sending signals about candidate quality that primary voters, more often that not, eventually validate, Harris seemed to check all the boxes of a frontrunner. Her campaign team is full of veterans of the campaign of the last Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. She led the large donor fundraising race, with most of her big donors also being former donors to Clinton. Seth Masket, a political scientist and expert on the party system, conducted an informal poll last December of precisely the sort of party activists who are said to decide these things, and a healthy majority leaned toward supporting Harris. And in FiveThirtyEight’s weighted listing of endorsements, Harris ranked second among the declared candidates, losing out only to Senator Cory Booker (before Joe Biden formally entered the race last week).

    Judging by all available polling, though, Harris is not even close to the frontrunner. (And Cory Booker’s campaign seems to be utterly foundering, suggesting that counting up endorsements may not be the best way to measure the viability of a candidate from a state, like New Jersey, with a powerful, old-fashioned party machine.) Most national polls put her in a distant third or fourth place, frequently trailing South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a relative neophyte who was polling at basically zero a month ago.

    This doesn’t render “the invisible primary” obsolete as an explanatory factor. The seemingly overnight rise of Buttigieg is in fact evidence of the concept’s durability: People have heard of him, and tell pollsters they support him, because his press is managed by Lis Smith, a well-connected Democratic operative who formerly worked for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, and Politico’s big donor analysis shows he is extremely popular among former Obama and Clinton bundlers. The energy around Mayor Pete is partly a reflection of the political press translating its knowledge of his advisers’ records and his popularity with the donor class into stories about his candidacy that create a sort of aura of “viability.” The new frontrunner, the former vice president, has, as you’d expect, even more institutional support behind him, especially among Democratic mega-donors and longtime elected officials.

    So, what has, thus far (there is a lot of election left to go), prevented Harris’s campaign from breaking out? And for that matter, how is Elizabeth Warren receiving so much glowing press for her transformative policy agenda, but still polling just as poorly as Harris?

    As the horserace quants at FiveThirtyEight explained, both are victims of the Democratic electorate’s fixation on “electability.” Polling broadly shows Democratic voters thinking Joe Biden has the best chance at winning the general election. That is exactly what Biden would like everyone to think, and that belief practically constitutes the sole argument for his candidacy.

    Wait, primary voters focus on electability? Do tell. The New Republic writer is pouting because he wanted Harris. That’s why he says “‘Electability’ is a crock of shit,” because he wants hard-left candidates and the majority of Democratic primary voters aren’t having any. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) There’s a ton of “Oh yeah, she went after AG Barr! She’s my hero!” schoolgirl crush media pieces I’m omitting here, since the default setting on Harris coverage is “Fawning.”

  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a “can he make another underdog comeback” WaPo thumbsucker that makes him sound about as appealing as lukewarm water. Also unveiled a trade plan that includes adding (wait for it) “climate change goals into trade agreements.” Because there’s no trade problem that can’t be made worse by adding more job-killing government regulation…
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Out.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Climate Change Guy offers a pie-in-the-sky “carbon neutral by 2030” that also promises to destroy the coal industry. I guess he figures “Hey, everyone else is offering impossible bullshit! Why not me?”
  • 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 too unveiled a mental health plan. Funny how people who hang out with Democrats all the time naturally assume that large numbers of Americans are crazy…
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Probably Out.
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Out.
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Made his first appearance in Iowa…in front of 20 people.
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. He visited all four early primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina) and got a WGBH profile. “Moulton is a centrist among more aggressively liberal candidates. The progressive base fawns over Bernie Sanders’s calls for economic revolution, and Elizabeth Warren’s lengthening list of plans, but it’s unclear that the majority of primary voters, let alone general-election voters, will opt for radically upending an economy that seems to be humming along pretty well.”
  • 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. O’Roruke’s staff is still in flux. (Hat tip: Jonathon McClellan.) The media notices that (surprise, surprise) O’Rourke has huge flaws as a candidate. “Where Was All of This Skepticism about Beto Last Year?” He’s paying for Facebook ads…in Mexico. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.) He visited flood-struck communities in Iowa, which of course required him to natter on about climate change.
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Ryan also criticized Biden’s comments on China as “stunningly out of touch.” “They’re putting billions of dollars behind these projects, and they have a 100-year plan. We’re in a 24-hour news cycle.”
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. Team Sanders is throwing a lot more sharp elbows at his Democratic rivals this time around. “Donations to Sanders cut in half after Biden entry.” He sat down ABC’s This Week for an interview, where he said he approved of President Trump’s approach on North Korea. “Inside Bernie Sanders’s 1988 10-day ‘honeymoon’ in the Soviet Union.” (“Throughout the trip, local officials took aside members of Sanders’s entourage, telling them that the Soviet system was near collapse…’Yes, they may have had low-cost apartments, but things were very out of whack, there were food shortages, no political freedom.'”)(Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Out.
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. He appeared on Face the Nation, and spent his time nattering about the Russian Collusion Fantasy, which is far too precious for liberals to give up on despite being complete bunk.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. She seems to have a plan for everything. “Warren nerds out and the crowds go crazy.” She blasted Biden over the 2005 bankruptcy bill.

    The bill made it harder for individuals to file for bankruptcy and get out of debt, a legal change that credit card companies and many major retailers had championed for years. The bill passed Congress with large majorities, but most Democratic senators, including Barack Obama, voted no. Biden voted yes and was widely seen at the time as one of the bill’s major Democratic champions.

    As Hillary Clinton did in 2016, Warren greatly benefits from having an actor much younger than her play her on Saturday Night Live. At 35, Kate McKinnon is half Warren’s age of 70.

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. 538’s “How Marianne Williamson Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary” is one of those pieces where the headline is at war with the conclusion:

    So far, her efforts haven’t yet translated into much success. Despite her Hollywood connections, she managed to raise just $1.5 million as of the end of the first quarter — not chump change, but it does put her toward the bottom of the list of serious contenders. Nor has she yet managed to clear the 65,000-donor threshold that would qualify her to participate in the first two Democratic primary debates, although according to her campaign website, she’s about 90 percent of the way there.

    And although her books have sold 3 million copies, her name recognition is among the lowest in the field. In a national poll conducted by Change Research in mid-April, 66 percent of likely Democratic voters had never heard of her; the same was true of 53 percent of likely Democratic caucusgoers in an early-April Monmouth poll of Iowa. Candidates with low name recognition can still have a shot at the nomination if they’re backed by a decent percentage of the people who have heard of them, but Williamson gets almost no support in horse-race surveys: She has gotten 0 percent support in 27 of the 35 polls in our database that have asked about her. And she is unlikely to become better known as long as cable news networks and newspapers continue to cover her far less often than the candidates with more traditional credentials.

    She visited Iowa, where she spoke to about 60 people, and Nevada, where she got interviewed by Politics Now, where it looks like they’re using cameras and a set from 1979.

  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. He visited Michigan to flog his $1,000 a month basic income pipe dream some more.
  • Point And Laugh, Children

    May 5th, 2019

    Point and Laugh:

    Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.

    Update: The poll went so badly for them that the DSCC actually deleted it.

    Damn Sneaky May 4 Election Today

    May 4th, 2019

    Another one of those sneaky May elections is upon us. In particular:

    • Cedar Park – City Council
    • Eanes ISD – Board of Trustees, Bond
    • Georgetown – Mayor, City Council
    • Georgetown ISD – Board of Trustees
    • Hutto – Mayor, City Council
    • Hutto – ISD – Board of Trustees, Bond
    • Leander – City Council
    • Lakeway – Mayor, City Council
    • Pflugerville ISD – Board of Trustees
    • Round Rock – City Council
    • Taylor – City Council
    • Village of Briarcliff – Mayor, Aldermen
    • Village of Webberville – Sales Tax Proposition

    In fact, none of those elections applies to me, so I can’t offer you any advice on who or what to vote for or against (though if I did live in Pflugerville ISD, I would definitely vote against the union organizer), but I did want to make you aware of them.

    Also, Empower Texans has a roundup of various Texas ISD bond elections.

    Check your local League of Women Voter guides/media/etc. to see if there’s an election you weren’t aware of today. These things have a way of sneaking up on you…

    LinkSwarm for May 3, 2019

    May 3rd, 2019

    Lot’s of rage by Democrats in this week’s LinkSwarm over Attorney General William Barr over, well, something.

  • The U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs in April, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, the lowest since 1969.
  • Followup: Baltimore’s Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh resigns following FBI/IRS raids on home and workplace following the “Healthy Holly” bribery scandal. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Poll: Percentage of Democrats who see border ‘crisis’ jumps 17 points since January.”
  • Old and Busted: “Trump is guilty of treason!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of collusion!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of obstruction!” Revised: “Trump is guilty of something! Release the report!” (Report released.) “Ummm…Barr’s summary was slightly off on one point! Impeach!” Trump Derangement Syndrome is a helluva drug…
  • Indeed, they’re just pissed that Barr’s summary of the report was accurate, meaning the Democrats had three weeks they couldn’t lie about the report. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Checkmate. How President Trump’s legal team outfoxed Mueller.” From the newly resurrected Human Events, this is a detailed legal analysis of how a memo written by William Barr before he became Attorney General laid the groundwork for curtailed Robert Mueller using an overly-expansive definition of “obstruction.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti pleads not guilty to federal wire fraud and tax evasion charges. (Hat tip: Roger Simon.)
  • “F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016.” You know, a spy. Here’s a handy decoder for the “covering for Democrats” speak:

  • “Ukrainian embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016.”
  • More Democratic compassion:

  • Deputy shot in Caldwell County. However, unlike most cases, there are some really stupid decisions on both sides.
  • Facebook banned Milo Yannopoulos, Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan for “extremism,” and the Washington Post headline initially called them all “far right” before a ton of criticism forced them to correct the headline. Because Louis Farrakhan is so well-known for palling around with conservatives. (Facebook is a private entity and can do what it wants, but I don’t want any of those people banned. Let them speak and let people debate their ideas/lunacy/etc. or not as they feel).
  • Even CNN is starting to get a clue:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Speaking of CNN: “CNN Poll: Overwhelming Majority Want Investigation into Obama DOJ Spying on Trump.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The members of the Flint, Michigan City Council sound like real winners.
  • “Norwegian fisherman have discovered a beluga whale wearing a tight harness with a camera attachment – sparking speculation the animal belongs to the Russian Navy.” I wouldn’t be surprised, especially since we have our own dolphin program… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The new “Supermajority” organization is just another stalking horse for Planned Parenthood.
  • “Israeli ambassador calls NYT ‘cesspool of hostility.'” Correct, though that’s really two more words than necessary…
  • The latest counterculture icon to be found guilty of WrongThink by Social Justice Warriors is (rolls dice)…cartoonist Robert Crumb.
  • “Covington kid sues NBC for $275 million.” Good. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Lance Morrow reviews Robert Caro’s Working. “If I were teaching journalism or nonfiction writing, especially the writing of history and biography, I would build a course around Caro, with Working as my primary text and scenes from his Johnson books as case studies.”
  • In the “trouble in places you may not have heard of” department, clashes broke out on the African nation of Benin (between Nigeria and Togo on the Ivory Coast) when the ruling party held a parliamentary election from which opposition parties were excluded.
  • Dispatches from Social Justice Warrior land: “Trinity College professor tweets ‘whiteness is terrorism,’ refers to Barack and Michelle Obama as ‘white kneegrows.’”
  • Japan’s Emperor Akihito abdicated, Emperor Naruhito mounting the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1, marking the end of the Heisei era and inaugurating the Reiwa era.
  • Actor James Woods is still in the Twitter Gulag:

  • Woman awakens after 27 year coma. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Unhappy meals. Now if only every one came with mopping teenage Goth girl figurines…
  • “‘Mortal Kombat’ Introduces Brutal New Fatality Where Your Character Just States An Opposing Viewpoint…One character says, ‘There are only two genders,’ and his opponent instantly melts into nothing, being unable to handle the opposing viewpoint. Another character suggests that capitalism isn’t all bad, and his opponent’s head instantly falls off.”
  • Legging it.
  • Scientology, Measles, and Sea Org

    May 2nd, 2019

    A cruise ship owned by the Church of Scientology has been quarantined over a measles outbreak:

    A crew member aboard a cruise ship used by the Church of Scientology tested positive for measles, causing the vessel’s occupants to be quarantined in the Caribbean since Monday, a report said.

    The vessel and its roughly 300 passengers and crew members have been stuck on the “Freewinds” ship in the Caribbean port of St. Lucia after the confirmed case of the highly contagious disease, according to NBC News.

    The infected female patient has been isolated and is in stable condition, according to St. Lucia’s chief medical officer Dr. Marlene Fredericks-James.

    St. Lucia Coast Guard Sgt. Victor Theodore confirmed to the network that the cruise ship was the same as the one listed on the Church of Scientology’s website.

    The ship is described on the church’s website as being used as a floating “religious retreat ministering the most advanced level of spiritual counseling in the Scientology religion.”

    What most people reading this story might not know is that Freewinds isn’t just a Scientology ship, it’s the Scientology ship. “The Freewinds is the exclusive training center for OT VIII (Operating Thetan Level 8), the highest level of Scientology and the last of the published OT levels. Members of the Church of Scientology who have reached the highest levels must receive their training on the Freewinds, as the Church does not deliver this service anywhere else.”

    It’s also the likely current location of the Church of Scientology’s infamous “Sea Org” that formed the command and control nexus of the church while founder L. Ron Hubbard was alive, under which some of the Scientology’s most shocking human rights abuses were committed, including the mysterious death of Susan Meister.

    The Sea Organization is the actual nexus that controls the scientology empire. Sea Organization personnel are authorized to take over and control scientology organizations and to demote personnel, move bank accounts and run the corporation as if the SO personnel were employees or representatives of that corporation but they are not.

    Snip.

    Crew were put into a chain-locker as punishment. A chain-locker is “a dark hole where the anchor chains are stored; cold, wet and rats,” to quote one ex-Sea Org officer. A crew member that was put on ethics could spend up to two weeks in the tiny hole. Former Scientologists who served as crew together with Hubbard in the early years remember a five years old deaf and mute child being locked up in the chain-locker. Hubbard said she was not to leave the chain locker until she completed the formula by writing her name. Another witness claims that a three-year-old was once put in the locker.

    In 2011, The New Yorker published an expose of Scientology that accused the Church of using child labor on the ship.

    Oh, and the people who work on the Sea Org ship have to sign a billion year contract.

    I am very far indeed from the heart of Scientology leadership, but by all accounts Sea Org still exists, and Freewinds is the only cruise liner still used by Scientology. Maybe St. Lucia authorities can use the quarantine to determine just what else might be going down on Freewinds…

    (There’s a lot more on Scientology’s lunacy at the Operation Clambake site.)