Lies of the Year 2020

We can't trust the fact-checkers to give us an honest accounting of the worst lies of the year. They hate Trump and are proud of it. So I'll do it for them.

Here are my runner-up choices in generally chronological order:

The Impeachment.

This is a hold-over from 2019. There was no quid pro quo. Trump suggested that the President of Ukraine bring back the prosecutor that Joe Biden bragged about having fired and that they look into Burisma which employed Hunter Biden. It was buried in the middle of some suggestions. The top one was asking for cooperation with Trump's lawyer, Rudy Guliani.

Calling COVID a hoax.

Trump said that the next hoax would be the Democrats saying that he did not take COVID seriously. He was right.

Drinking bleach.

During a daily briefing on COVID, a doctor from DHS talked about the disinfecting properties of sunlight. After he finished, Trump commented on how powerful a disinfectant light is and asked if it could be injected into the lungs where the virus is strongest. An ABC News VP was only half-listening, picked up on the words "disinfectant" and "bleach" and sent out a tweet accusing Trump of suggesting that people inject themselves with a disinfectant like bleach. That is not what Trump said but since it came from a high-ranking news chief, the networks ran with it and spent the next two weeks warning people against drinking bleach.

Gassing protestors so that Trump could cross the street

Protestors were ordered cleared from the streets surrounding the White House. Shortly after that, Trump walked across the street to talk about the damage to the historic church there. Everyone in charge said that the order to clear the streets came separately from the White House. It was reported that tear gas was used but footage showed that the police were not wearing gas masks therefore no tear gas was used.

Destroying the Postal Service to affect the election.

This was an out-and-out conspiracy theory. Several postal boxes were removed and a number of high-speed sorters were taken out of service. It was covered as a plot to slow the mail in order to prevent absentee voting. Actually, the postal boxes were removed as part of a long-standing policy of removing seldom-used boxes. The sorters had been slated to be decommissioned well before Trump's appointee took office. Both of these happened because mail volume is falling.

Disrespecting war dead

The Atlantic published a hit-piece claiming that Trump missed the commemoration of D-Day because it was raining and he didn't want to get his hair wet and that he called the war dead "losers". Everyone present denied that. The Atlantic refused to name their sources which suggests that none of them had first hand knowledge and that they were just repeating rumors.

Downplaying COVID.

In early February Trump told Bob Woodward that he knew that the virus was transmittable and deadly before the WHO announced it but he downplayed the threat to keep from panicking the nation. Trump-haters insisted that meant Trump did not take proper action. Actually, anyone who paid any attention to the news from China knew that the virus was transmittable and deadly. This was no secret. The real scandal here was the WHO continuing to downplay the virus through January.

And the winner is:

Trump called neo-Nazis "good people".

This is a call-back from 2017. Trump made it very clear that the "good people" he was talking about were the people protesting the removal of statues. He went further, predicting, correctly, that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be next. Despite this not being true, Joe Biden repeated the lie multiple times. It was in his 2019 speech announcing his candidacy, his 2020 DNC acceptance speech and one of the debates. That's what makes it the lie of the year.

One final note: Politifact chickened out on several of these lies. Rather than coming out and saying they are lies, Politifact has "in context" sections with the quotes. These are very long and the operative phrase is buried several paragraphs down making it unlikely that casual readers will dig down so far. That's how the "fact-checkers" avoid taking Trump's side.

How to Heal

In a recent speech, Joe Biden claimed victory in the presidential election (before the ballots were all counted) and said "let the healing begin".

Let's examine that. For the last four years the left has broken all norms in the way they treated a legally-elected president. They called him a racist and a dictator, both claims without merit. They tried to keep him from taking office and, once he was inaugurated, they tried to remove him from office. He was impeached based on unsubstantiated rumors on the personal authority of the Speaker of the House.

Now that his successor has claimed victory we are supposed to forget all that and return to normal. The right is supposed to pretend that the last four years never happened and show the new President all the respect that the left denied President Trump.

Forget it. That's not going to just happen. If you want healing then there are some specific actions that Mr. Biden needs to take:

1. No criminal charges against Donald Trump of his family. There are prosecutors in New York who have been making it clear that they  desperately want to send the Trump family to jail. It doesn't matter if any laws were broken. As Bernie Sanders once said, "An inventive prosecutor can always find something to charge you with."

This is a terrible idea. It would make us look like a banana republic and the election look like a coup. More important, it breaks another norm and says that partisan hatred is sufficient cause to punish a former office-holder. That norm is vital. Like the one about showing respect for the President, once you break it you can't expect the other side to abide by the old rules. If the Trump family is charged then I guarantee that eventually Hunter Biden will go to jail, too.

Joe Biden needs to issue orders and twist arms to be certain that no one charges Donald Trump with anything.

2. No repercussions for supporting Trump. AOC, the Lincoln Project and others want lists made of all people who worked for the Trump administration or donated money to the Trump campaign so that they can be blacklisted. Keith Olbermann wants these people "removed from polite society". While it is true that Olbermann is a crank, he's a crank who used to be an MSNBC news anchor and he still has a large following.

Purging the government of anyone associated with the previous administration and ensuring they never work again is another broken norm and another page from the Banana Republic playbook. Biden must denounce this movement if there is to be any healing.

3. Biden needs to admit that he lied during the campaign. This would be the hardest thing for him. He likes to tell stories and he hates to admit that they are not true. He started his campaign on a lie, that Trump called Klansmen and neo-nazis good people. He repeated it constantly. But the transcripts clearly show that Trump denounced those groups and that the good people he was talking about were the ones who were protesting the removal of a statue. Trump then went on to accurately predict that Washington and Jefferson would be next.

71 million people voted for Donald Trump. They know what he actually said. Biden needs their respect if he wants the country to rally around him. The same is true for the claim that Trump called honored war dead "losers". No one who was with him will verify that story. John Bolton said that he'd have devoted a chapter in his book to it if it had happened. All of the sources for this claim are anonymous. We've been assured that these were people close to the President but the NYT said the same thing about their anonymous columnist and he turned out to have been a low-level consultant. Despite the dubiousness of this story, Biden repeated it again and again.

I know that right now Biden sees himself as the winner with no need to apologize for anything. He was running for "the soul of the nation" and he got more votes than any candidate in history. But Trump got more votes than anyone in history except Biden and Biden's winning margin was razor-thin in multiple states. The Republicans are on track to keep the Senate and have picked up multiple seats in the House. This was not a Blue Wave mandate and Biden should not act like it was.

I don't believe for a moment that Biden will do any of the things I've listed here. He has nothing but contempt for Donald Trump and Trump's supporters. He talks a lot about being willing to back down when he's wrong but he won't do that here. He's full of malarkey.

An Open Letter to John Kaisch

Governor,

Now that you made your address to the Democratic National Convention endorsing Joe Biden over Donald Trump you might be feeling proud of yourself. You have an illustrious career. But, in many ways, your career is built on illusions.

You won election to Congress in 1982. That was a Democratic wave year. You were the only new Republican. That seems impressive but it isn't. You beat Bob Shamansky, a 1st-term Democrat who was so irritating that the Ohio Democrats were willing to sacrifice him when reapportioning the state.

You made your name by being a pro-defense budget hawk. Within a few months of you arriving in Congress you made headlines after finding $100 hammers in the budget. Most of these weren't really over-prices items. They were a side-effect of cost-plus contracts. With those, the price of everything is added together, the allowed markup is figured, divided by the number of items and that is added to each item. If there's two items, one costing $1 and one costing $99 and the mark-up is 6% then the $1 item will be charged $3 and the expensive one $102. That looks bad for the cheap item but the whole contract is $106.

You eventually topped out in Congress, retired then reentered politics and ran for Governor. You had another stroke of luck. The incumbent was Ted Strictland who had won during another Democratic wave. He turned out to be a very poor governor and you ran during a Republican wave. You got even luckier when you ran for reelection. You opponent self-destructed during the Summer and you essentially ran unopposed.

I suppose that every governor pictures himself running for president but that reelection gave you a lot of buzz. A governor from a swing-state who was reelected by a landslide. Most people outside the state didn't understand how weak your opposition was.

Then came your run for president. And it all fell apart. Your strategy was to enter the race late and take advantage of the polling bump from declaring, going into the primaries. You planned to win New Hampshire, try to hold on until Ohio then leverage a win there to take Michigan and other midwest states, giving you momentum.

None of that worked. Everyone knew you were running months before you formally announced so there was no bounce. A lot of the big-money donors were already committed. You did well in New Hampshire but didn't win. You did win Ohio but that was your only win. Regardless, you hung on until the bitter end. A lot of people think that you acted as a spoiler, splitting the anti-Trump vote with Ted Cruize and allowing Trump to win the nomination.

A lot of people are still angry with you for that. Many of them are Democrats.

Then you positioned yourself, trying to somehow keep Trump's delegated from voting from voting for him and settling on you as a compromise candidate. That never got off the ground but it showed that you placed yourself ahead of your party.

You spent your last two years as Governor semi-retired. You were on talk-shows every week and only in the state part-time. And yes, we noticed.

Then came your retirement to the Sunday-morning talk shows. You have a niche with them as a Republican who hates Trump. That puts you in demand and your short speech to the DNC burnished your credentials.

But you are trying to get Joe Biden elected! I get that you hate Trump personally but do you have any principles? You stood there and told us that Biden will not lurch to the left. Shortly after that Bernie Sanders came on and assured us that BIden would indeed move to the left. Even the Washington Post commented on the cognitive disconnect between what you said and what Sanders said. You're both probably engaging in wishful thinking but I've read Biden's platform. It's very far left.

So, someone is lying. Either you are lying to us, Governor, or the Biden campaign lied to you. Or maybe you lied to yourself. It doesn't matter. Biden has always been left-of-center and the center has moved far to the left.

There's something you should know about your new friends, Governor. I'm sure they shook your hand and told you how courageous you are and how you are helping your country. But they never voted for you. And they never will vote for you. They don't even like you. Some of them absolutely hate you. AOC complained about your stance on abortion. Others blame you personally for not dropping out of the race early and allowing Trump to win.

Here's something else that you should know: they don't really hate Donald Trump, at least not the way you think they do. They hate him because he's a Republican president. They hated George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon the same way. They hated Romney when he ran (remember Biden saying that he'd put blacks back in chains). They love McCain now and have his daughter telling us hw terrible Trump is but they hated him when he ran (he was going to turn society back 60 years and reintroduce segregation and Jim Crow). Since Ike there have only been two Republican president that the Demcrats didn't hate with a passion: Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. Both of them were defeated.

If you had run a better campaign and managed to win in 2016 then that's how they'd feel about you. You would be the divider-in-chief and the most divisive president ever. That's because it's not the person they hate, it's the office when occupied by a Republican. Heck, if you were president then they might have even gotten Donald Trump to tell the nation about how divisive you are.

Look at how the Democrats have acted. Trump isn't the one telling people to harass members of the other party if they dare to go into a restaurant. It's nancy Pelosi who refuses to negotiate, not Trump or the Republicans. It's irrational to blame Trump when it's the Democrats who are acting so childish.

That's who you've thrown your lot in with, Governor - a party that detests you now and would hate you if you were president. I certainly hope you failed in your efforts to put them in power.

Just a Reminder

For two months people have been protesting and rioting over the treatment of blacks in this country. One of the chief complaints is the incarceration rate for blacks sometimes described as the "School-to-prison-pipeline".

All of the crime bills responsible for this have Joe Biden's name on them. Every last one. He even bragged about this back in the 1990s.

Now Biden is the Democratic presidential candidate. His likely pick for running mate made her reputation as a prosecutor who was tough on drug crimes (and who also giggled about her own drug use in college).

When challenged about his crime bills by Charlamagne tha God, Biden said, "You've got more questions? Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black.

I just thought people needed to be reminded about that.

From a gun owner to the protestors

I don't have any "assault weapons" and at the age of 65 I'm not going to try taking on the police or military but I still think I'm qualified to answer the question a lot of protestors have been asking: "Why aren't you guys helping us?"

Let's start with a counter-question: "Do you guys really want to go there? To start an actual civil war to be fought in the streets instead of just 'peaceful' protests?" And the follow-up, "If you want ar armed civil war then why aren't you armed?"

It's true that a big defence of the 2nd Amendment is to preserve the option to overthrow a government that has become oppressive. But if you ask a "gun nut" what an oppressive government looks like, he'll probably tell you it would be Marxist with an overbearing centralized government that did not respect individual rights starting with the right to bear arms.

Guess what? If you protestors had your way that's exactly what you'd set up. You've said so. It's in BLM's charter (the organization). Among other things they want to abolish capitalism and the nuclear family. Once you do that you won't want any competition so you'll confiscate guns and we won't have things like the 4th Amendment to protect against house-to-house searches.

So the gun-nuts are going to sit this one out and cheer on the government.

The Democrats' Biden Problem - July Edition

Joe Biden was supposed to have been the official candidate as of this week. The Democratic National Convention has been postponed and moved to virtual. That's a problem since the convention always gives a candidate a big boost in popularity and serves to define his campaign. Instead of that, we will have several more weeks of Uncle Joe trying to campaign from his basement or to small, select groups. That may work out for the better for the Biden campaign.

Biden didn't really win the primaries. Not in the sense that he was people's first choice. He did terrible in the first few primaries/caucuses and was similarly behind in fundraising, coming in a distant 5th. He was not really able to compete. He didn't even have a campaign headquarters in most states.

Joe won because Bernie Sanders scared people. He placed first of a very close second enough for people to worry that he was going to get the nomination. Left-leaning columnists began warning that the Democrats were going to suffer a 1972-style defeat by nominating a candidate who was so far-left that he'd scare voters to Trump. So arms were twisted and the other "moderates" were convinced to drop out of the race so that Biden could capture the "anyone-but-Bernie" vote. That strategy worked great. Biden even won states he'd never campaigned in. People voted for Biden, not because they liked him but because he was the "moderate" and the "centrist". Plus he was Obama's uncle or something like that.

But, the big question is if the "anyone-but-Bernie" candidate can win the presidency by being the "anybody-but-Trump" candidate? The problem with "anyone but Trump" is that it sounds good until you see who that "anyone" actually is. Then many voters do a double-take and decide that Trump isn't so bad after all.

And Biden is not a moderate or centrist. He never was. He's always been well-left of center and as the Democrats' center has moved left, he's moved with it. Biden has been around for decades and people mistake positions he held in the 1990s for his current positions. He's made that clear by signing unity positions with Bernie Sanders. Sanders has praised Biden for having one of the most progressive platforms in the history of the Democratic Party.

That's why it might be to Biden's advantage that the Democrats will not have a standard convention. The better he hides his positions the longer he can claim to be a moderate. But eventually Joe's going to have to start a real campaign and that means running on something.

Biden has other problems, too. His positions may have shifted but his name is still on a bunch of crime bills that are responsible for mass incarceration of black men.

The Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police protests put Biden in a quandary. He needs black support but it's unlikely that moderates will support any meaningful police cutbacks. Trump has already staked out the pro-police side so Biden is likely to alienate some potential voters no matter what he does.

Currently Biden is ahead in the polls but his lead shrunk to a margin-of-error between June and July.

The question really comes down to "Is Joe Biden a strong enough candidate to defeat an incumbent?" For the last three years Democrats have insisted that President Trump was "historically unpopular" and that anyone could beat him. They revised that opinion when it looked like Bernie Sanders might be the candidate. That's why they went for Biden. They realized that he was the most electable out of a historically large pool of candidates.

Think of candidates who have defeated an incumbent since the end of World War II. It's a short list: Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Both were far stronger candidates than Biden. Reagan in particular transformed the Republican Party and is still considered one of it's greatest figures. Clinton was popular enough that his wife got more votes than Trump in 2016.

Biden does not have the presence of either of these men. He dropped out quickly the two previous times he ran and, as I pointed out above, he did poorly in the first few primaries. These were the states he spent the most time campaigning in but, until South Carolina, they preferred other candidates.

Finally, there is Biden's age. Trump already set a record for oldest president but Biden is older now than Trump will be in 4 years. Is that too old? Joe has always been known for "gaffs" but they seem to be getting worse. He has frequent memory loss, even referring to Obama as "President my boss" once. Are people willing to take a chance on a president who will turn 80 his first term?

Biden's pick for running-mate will be a bigger factor than usual. There is an excellent chance that person will either finish his term or be the candidate in four years. This is also a weakness for Biden. He already promised that his running mate will be a woman. There is a lot of pressure for her to be a woman of color but he's having problems finding one who is qualified to be President who does not have some baggage of her own. The rumored establishment candidate, Elizabeth Warren, would ruin any pretense Biden has as a moderate. Kamala Harris did poorly in the primaries. None of the other rumored candidates have had national exposure.

This does not mean that Trump is guaranteed to win reelection but the race is probably his to lose.

You Say You Want A Revolution

It's been over a month since George Floyd died while being subdued by four police officers, one of them kneeling on Floyd's back, apparently suffocating him. Since then there have been daily protests, sometimes erupting into full-scale riots with burnings and looting. Statues have been defaced or pulled down. Demand have been issues.

This goes way beyond George Floyd. The police involved were fired and charged with murder almost immediately. It is reminiscent of the Arab Spring where one person burned himself to death in protest and that led to massive regional protests. Some governments fell during the Arab Spring. This is what many of the protestors are hoping for - a revolution.

The strange thing is that this is a fight between the establishment left and the far-left. Conservatives are off on the sidelines.

The establishment left is represented by big-city mayors and city council members. This also includes Democrats in Congress and the last two Democratic presidents.

The far-left demonstrators wants to "defund the police" which, depending on who you ask, either means slightly reducing the police department budget to completely replacing them. Demonstrators in several cities have also called for the resignation of the mayor, the police chief, and other officials.

This dove-tails with other demand from the AOC left. That includes abolishing ICE, ending detention of illegal immigrants and eliminating bail (already done in California and New York). AOC herself has also voiced support for defunding the police.

The protests have caught the establishment left completely by surprise. Many of the policies they supported are now considered the problem. For decades, Democratic mayors have promised to put more police on the street to improve public safety. That and crack-downs on drug trade are at the top of the protestors' lists.

The last two Democratic presidencies have also featured strong police support. One of Clinton's signature achievements was to put 100,000 cops on the street (actually this was funding for 33,000 for three years and the money didn't have to go for beat cops but he billed it as 100,000). Drug laws were strengthened under Clinton, too.

Obama presided over militarizing the police. Under his administration, police were given surplus military equipment. This is expensive to maintain and gives the police departments an incentive to use it in order to justify the maintenance costs. Police were also given para-military training under Obama. This led to a drastic increase of no-knock raids.

There's also the support for qualified immunity and review boards that tend to take a police officer's side in a shooting investigation. The establishment left has a close relationship with public service unions including the police unions.

When the protests first began the big-city mayors were marching in the street alongside the protestors. That didn't last long.

The problem for conservatives is that the mayors are still trying to convince the mob that they are on the same side. That means that they are acceding to demands for things like tearing down statues. This has added fuel to the already-nasty Cancel Culture where anything not considered to represent the values of the mob is judged to be racist. Our history is being rewritten by the establishment left in the conviction that if they just give the mob one more thing, they will be satisfied. That's not how mobs work.

What Actually Needs to Change

Forget defunding the police, unconscious bias training and the other things that are being suggested in the wake of the death of George Floyd. What needs to change is the culture within police departments across the nation. It's not racism that's the problem although the way it manifests itself may seem like racism at times.

Let me start by going back nearly four years to the Pulse Nightclub shooting. The police stood by for 45 minutes until armored SWAT members arrived and the officers who were not in armor were not allowed to participate. Why did they take so long to respond to an active shooter? The police chief explained it as "We're not like the military. We don't have acceptable casualties."

That's the big problem and I've seen it expressed similar ways from police across the country. There are no acceptable casualties for police officers. That means that they are justified in taking whatever measures they feel necessary to protect themselves, even if it means shooting a stopped motorist who was reaching for his driver's license because there was a chance he was reaching for a gun. Or telling a kid with a pellet gun to drop his weapon then shooting him before he could respond. Or putting a knee in someone's back until he asphyxiated. It's all part of a "take no chances" mentality that excuses police for fatal over-reactions because there are no  acceptable casualties.

This attitude means that police lives matter more than civilians. It's accepted within the police community and defended by the unions. It's argued in the courts in the few cases that make it there and enshrined in the legal principle of qualified immunity.

This is not inherently racist. Police can and do kill whites and non-black minorities with impunity, also. But the news media pays more attention when a black man is killed and that skews our perception. Yes, black men are killed out of proportion with whites but blacks also commit way more violent crimes leading to police shootings. Once that's figured in, blacks are killed at a slightly lower rate than white violent offenders. Regardless, too many people of all races are killed by police out of an abundance of caution.

So the culture has to change. Police need to be less cautious about shooting anything that moves. There should be an implicit contract - we give you a gun and we trust you to wait until you see an actual threat before using it rather than reacting to a possible threat.

But no one is talking about this so nothing will change.

The Democrat's Biden Problem

This year's Democratic primaries were bizarre beyond belief. Normally someone who had served as Vice President would be a shoe-in for the nomination but this is the same party that disowned their 2000 Vice Presidential candidate. Biden began the race at the top then slid. By the Iowa caucus, he was behind in polling and in donations. Just from memory, I think he was 5th in both. He didn't do any better in New Hampshire. These two early contests are considered important because no candidate had won the presidency without winning one of these states. Some people write that off to coincidence but there's probably more to it than that. These are the states where the candidates spend months campaigning. The voters know the candidates better than those of any other state. So, regardless of these states having the wrong demographics, they are in a better position to judge the candidates. And they didn't care at all for Joe.

But after Bernie Sanders did well in several races, the party came together behind Biden. The more centrist candidates were pressured to drop out while Elizabeth Warren whose platform was nearly identical to Bernie's was left in the race. Super Tuesday came and Biden was suddenly the winning candidate. He even won in states where he hadn't been able to open a campaign headquarters (remember what I said about him placing 5th in fund-raising?).

Why did he win? Did a win in South Carolina suddenly wake the country to this dusty jewel in its midst? Hardly. People voted for him as the moderate alternative to Sanders. The reasoning was that anyone to the right of Sanders could win and Joe was a reliable moderate guy.

So, Joe Biden is the candidate and the Democrats are in a lot of trouble.

First, Biden only seems like a moderate because the party moved so far to the left. When it passed, Obamacare was seen as a huge step to the left and Biden's "moderate" position calls for expanding it. It's only moderate because the other candidates want to nationalize health care.

Obama was the furthest left president since FDR but he's now dismissed as a moderate by the party and Biden is seen as a moderate by association. Never mind that Joe was always to Barack's left. Joe is also seen as being moderate because he's been around for decades and the positions he championed in the 70s and 80s seem conservative today. But Biden has no fixed principles. He's always been to the left of the party. As the Democrats moved to the left, Joe moved with them.

Look at what he's done since effectively winning the nomination. He's named Beto (I'm comming for your guns) O'Rourke as point man on gun policy and appointed AOC to his panel on environmental policy.

Democrats are supposed to run to the left during the primaries and to the center for the general election. Hillary Clinton forgot that rule and lost the working-class white votes she needed to win.

In addition, the Democrats are already putting together plans for reshaping America when they take over both houses of Congress and the Presidency. And they're nor bothering to do it in secret.

All of this would be a hard sell in normal times but we are not in normal times. We just shut down the economy for months and are facing the highest unemployment numbers since the Great Depression. Voters tend to be more conservative during depressions. Yes, they will turn out a president if they believe that he caused the downturn but they are not in the mood for wrenching societal changes.

The Democrats are going to have a hard time blaming Trump for the economic downturn. That's because he's been a big cheerleader for reopening the economy. It's the Democrats who want to keep everything closed.

There is a gamble here. The Democrats are in the position of hoping that the COVID-19 virus continues to kill thousands and that there's a second spike in the Fall. You are in a bad place when you are hoping for thousands to die so you can win an election.

The Democrats may well lose this gamble. The states that opened first did not see a spike in infections and the more we learn about the virus the less scary it is. There's a natural curve that nearly all viruses take where they spike then vanish on their own without stay-at-home orders or vaccines. If COVID-19 follows that curve then we will see the states that opened first recovering first with no ill effects from the virus. This is still a big "if" but the Democrats have already committed themselves to COVID-19 being different from other viruses.

Then there's Joe Biden himself. He's old. He gets confused. He makes really terrible gaffes. Just last week a popular black talk-show host said that he had more questions for Biden and Joe shot back that anyone who still has questions "ain't really black". Joe is also really old. If he wins he'd start his first term older than Trump will be when he ends his second term.

But the biggest problem for the Democrats is that Biden was the "not Bernie" candidate. He didn't win the primaries because people wanted him. He won because he was the safe choice. Look at the fund-raising. Joe was way behind. Most of his support comes from his being "anyone but Trump". Trump on the other hand is very popular with his base. He's had a 90% approval rating among Republicans for years. And there's a 20% enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden. Trump voters are eager to go vote for him. He already set records for votes for an encumbrance in the primaries. Democrats are much less excited by Biden and many Bernie supporters are outraged at the way the primaries were manipulated to steal the nomination from Sanders.

This makes a big difference in who actually shows up to vote. The more motivated a voter is the more likely he will turn out to vote.

A final word about polls. Biden is currently way ahead of Trump. So was Clinton at this point. So was Romney in 2012. So was Kerry in 2004. And Trump is running strong in the states he needs to carry. States like California and New York muddy the polls because of the Electoral College.

There are rumors about the Democrats recognizing that Biden is an uninspiring candidate who can't beat Trump but they're stuck. Short of Biden having to withdraw for health concerns, there's no way to replace him without alienating even more voters.

The Political Divide on COVID-19

In the early days of the pandemic there was widespread panic but a general agreement on the measures needed to "flatten the curve". Since then the consensus has shattered with people breaking into two camps: one calling for restrictions to be lifted and the other calling for an indefinite extension to the shut-down orders. This illustrates a general divide in how the two groups view reality. Here's where the main differences are:

Appeal to Authority. The pro-shutdown people insist that we have to "believe the doctors". I'll address one major problem with that next but they are also selective in which doctors they want us to believe. This was obvious from an exchange between Senator and Doctor Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci in a Senate hearing. Sen. Paul has had the virus and since then has spent his spare time volunteering in hospitals, treating COVID-19 patients. That gives him first-hand experience with the virus that Dr. Fauci does not have. The exchange was fairly mild but the reporting on it made it seem outrageous that a Senator would question anything that Dr. Fauci says. One Blue-Check columnist made a joke about Paul acting like he's a doctor until someone pointed out Paul's medical degree.

Appeal to the Models: Shut-down orders were justified on models that predicted millions dead. Hospitals were predicted to be overflowing with shortages of doctors, beds, and ventilators. While this happened in a few cities, most notably New York City, it has not happened elsewhere. Even NYC was never totally overwhelmed. The hospital ship Comfort was sent to NYC to take overflow non-COVID-19 patients in order to free up more beds for the virus patients. It was barely used. Once supplies of ventilators were redistributed there were no shortages.

The models have been adjusted several times. The original Imperial University model predicted 2 million dead in the US. It was later adjusted down twice then back up some. The other models have been similarly wrong. In all, they have shown almost no relationship to actual cases or deaths. Regardless, the pro-shutdown people continue to point to the models in arguing for extending the lock-downs.

Disregard for Rights: The shut-down orders have been random and haphazard. In some cases they were based on relative risk. In others they were based on the idea that leaving home is so inherently dangerous that sales of any non-essential products should be forbidden. People have been arrested or ticketed for driving in their car or walking alone in a park. This is one of the biggest divides. On one side we have civil libertarians who cringe at such arbitrary infringement of basic rights and on the other side we have the scolds and the Karens who want to see crushed anyone who flouts authority.

There have been movements to require that the unelected health officials who have ordered shut-downs to answer to the elected officials. A bill to do this in Ohio was quickly shot down. The Wisconsin Supreme Court went the other way declaring that the state health official had overstepped his authority by extending the shutdown.

This has implications for the future. Once it's been accepted than an official can abridge civil rights in an emergency then the definition of emergencies will quickly become elastic. Franklin County, Ohio declared a civil rights emergency because blacks are disproportionately affected by the virus. This was attributed to systemic racism but it could be as simple as relative amounts of vitamin D in the system. It is unknown at this point what emergency powers, if any, Franklin County will use.

Stereotyping of Opponents: As the divide increases each side spends more and more time denigrating and mocking the other. Governors are called Nazis. The pro-open side is mocked as privileged people who don't care if people die as long as they can get a haircut. A recent column in the Columbus Dispatch pointed to disreputable elements in the pro-open demonstrations including one person who once fire-bombed abortion clinics and said that everyone demonstrating was complicit in his actions. Late-night hosts have similarly denigrated any pro-open protestors in a classic example of punching down.

Moving the Goalposts: The original goal was to "flatten the curve". This assumed that a major percentage of the population will contract the virus and that we can minimize deaths by spreading that number out over a longer period. Since the top of the curve turned out to be much lower than predicted, there is no reason to continue such extreme measures. But the goalposts have moved. Now we are trying to minimize infections until there is more testing or until a vaccine is developed or other amorphous goals. Flattening the curve is no longer a goal. A Washington Post columnist seemed to think it's a revelation that we are trying to live with the virus instead of eradicating it. That was never a realistic goal.

False Choices: The argument against reopening quickly devolves into "You want grandmothers to die!" Governor Cuomo has expressed the opinion that saving lives is all that matters. This is a false choice for several reasons. We put convenience above lives lost all the time. Every time someone gets in a car or crosses the street or climbs a ladder the take a risk of accidental death. The difference is if the chance of death is low enough that we as a society can tolerate it. That's where the problem with the models comes in. The original models made the virus look like an unacceptable risk. Actual statistics makes the virus seem unfortunate but still within the risk level that we are comfortable with.

There are deaths that can be attributed to the lock-down. Suicides are up. People are dying at home from things like heart attacks because they have been told to stay away from the hospitals. Cancer treatments and transplant surgeries have been delayed. There is also the measure of "quality years of life". The lock-down is reducing the quality of life in nursing homes (and years of life by forbidding outside contact. It is also robbing children of their childhood. Normally we devote a bit over a decade to schooling our young. Schools have been closed for months and there is a debate about opening them again this year. That means that we either give up on a year's worth of education for a generation of kids or that we take an extra year before we declare them adults.

Finally, there is evidence that the extreme shutdowns do not affect the fatality rate appreciably. Countries such as Sweden did not lock-down to the same extent as other countries but did not see a statistical difference in cases.

New Superstition: Social distancing and wearing a mask are the new talismans to protect people from the virus. The six-feet rule is based on studies that indicate that you will be infected if you spend at least ten minutes talking with someone who is less than 2 meters away in still air. This is a generic estimate about viruses, not once specific to the coronavirus. Other studies show that there ae few if any infections from casual exposure outside. That's what science says. Also, it's been known for decades that having medical staff wear a mask while conducting a procedure reduces the chances of the patient catching anything from the staff. That's what science says.

People have built on those factoids to believe that you are in danger of contracting the virus any time you are less than 6 feet from them and one of you is not wearing a mask. Stores have one-way aisles so you don't pass someone while shopping. People have been ticketed for walking on the wrong side of the street and sidewalks have been made one-way. Some parks in Ohio were closed because the trails are too narrow to allow "social distancing" when passing someone going the other way. There is no science behind this. It's superstition built on a tiny nugget of actual truth and ignoring any science that contradicts it.

Sunlight, fresh air, high humidity and salt water are all harmful to the virus, causing it to break down faster than normal. Sunlight in particular will disinfect surfaces within 1-4 minutes depending on the brightness. So, logically, beaches should be the safest place to go for exercise. But people went crazy when Florida reopened its beaches. This was fed by news services using telephoto lenses to make it appear that people were packed close together instead of spread out. The predictions of a spike in cases after the Jacksonville Beach reopened never happened.

A word about reality. I described the positions of both sides. The actual responses to the virus are more moderate than what either side is proposing. Things are reopening. It's happening slower than the open crowd wants and much, much faster than the stay-closed side wants but it is happening. This is increasing the volume instead of reducing it since neither side is happy and both sides are trying to affect policiy.

We are also in the position where a significant portion of the country is hoping for a second wave of deaths. In fact they need it because otherwise the extreme policies they advocated will have been unnecessary.

Trump and Disinfectants

During one of the White House Press Briefings, a doctor with Homeland Security was discussing the effectiveness of different disinfectants. He went on to discuss what happens "when you inject light into the mix" and talked about how quickly the virus breaks down in sunlight. After he finished talking, President Trump took the podium and began his remarks with a question. He went on to talk about the anti-viral properties of light as a disinfectant and wondered if it could be injected into the human body. The first doctor he asked didn't respond so he repeated the question to Dr. Brix who said no. That should have been that. But it wasn't. A reporter immediately claimed that the President had suggested that people inject themselves with a disinfectant like bleach. That's the story that was picked up by the press which, days later, keeps warning people "not to inject or drink bleach as the President suggested."

Here's Trump's original question:

"Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too," he said to Bryan. "Then I see the disinfectant knocks it out in a minute, one minute. Is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?"

Here's what he asked Dr. Brix:

"Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m not a doctor. I’m like a person who has a good you-know-what," Trump said. "Deborah, have you ever heard of that? The heat and the light, relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?"

Even if you assume that Trump switched gears from talking about light to talking about other disinfectants, there's no way to get around this being a question rather that a suggestion. What's certain is that the words, "What people need to do is inject disinfectant into themselves" did not pass the President's lips.

So how did the press get this so wrong? This is the problem with an adversarial press. The quote all comes from one White House pool reporter's statement about what Trump said. Probably this is someone who was only half-listening because he figures that nothing the President says is worth listening to. He heard the words "inject" and "disinfectant" out of context and jumped to the conclusion that the President was talking about bleach and reported that. The rest of the world's press wants to believe that the President is an idiot whose advice will kill people and repeated the misinformation.

Why keep repeating this misinformation? It's been fact-checked.

Two factors are at work here. The main fact-check was from the Daily Caller. It presented the entire quote in context and made it clear that the President did not suggest injecting bleach. But the Daily-Caller leans right. Many people dismiss their fact-checks and others don't even bother to check them. Snopes failed miserably at fact-checking the President's statement. Politifact accurately represents the exchange but only as a fact-check on using bleach to cure the virus. They completely side-stepped the question of whether the President suggested it or not. So fact-checkers are pretty useless on this.

The other factor is that the news media would have to admit that one of their own made a mistake and that President Trump did not say something dangerous. They would rather drink bleach themselves than do that. And that's the problem with an adversarial press. They won't admit when they made a mistake. Possibly most of them aren't even aware of it since most of them seem to consider listening to the President's daily briefing a waste of time.

Did Michigan Ban Selling Seeds?

For the last few weeks people all over the country have been upset by Governor Gretchen Whitmer's Stay Home, Stay Safe executive order because, among other things, it bans selling plants and seeds. According to Politifact, that's false. But is it?

Politifact is splitting hairs here. Stores larger than 50,000 square feet are required to cordon off sections that the Governor declared non-essential. This specifically includes the garden department. Stores smaller than 50,000 sf are still allowed to keep their garden departments open.

But..., and here's he flaw in Politifact's reasoning, garden centers and nurseries by themselves are not allowed to be open. There's a fairly narrow list of what is allowed and they are not on it.

So, that still leaves stores less than 50,000 sf that are allowed to keep their garden departments open, right? Just try to find one. I was at my local hardware today. It's a small establishment that's been around for decades. They sell a bit of everything. Their garden department consisted of one aisle that's maybe 20 feet long that was all weed killer and fertilizer plus 1/4 of the next aisle that was grass seed. That's all they have room for.

This is a process of elimination. Garden centers are closed. Big box stores that are big enough to have a decent garden center are not allowed to sell anything from them. Smaller stores are too small to carry seeds or plants. So there's no place left to buy them.

Politifact is being obtuse by claiming that there is nothing banning the sale of certain products, just the sections of the stores where those products are kept. How, in heaven's name can you buy seeds if you are not allowed into the garden department where seeds are kept? Do they expect people to buy seeds from the dairy aisle?

I rate Politifact's ruling Pants-on-Fire.

The Biden Allegations and Selective Judgement

A woman has accused former vice president Joe Biden of sexual assault.

In an interview with the AP, she detailed a 1993 encounter that she says occurred when she was asked by a supervisor to bring Biden his gym bag as he was on his way down to the Senate gymnasium. She says Biden pushed her against a wall in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building, groped her and penetrated her with his fingers.

"He was whispering to me and trying to kiss me at the same time, and he was saying, 'Do you want to go somewhere else?''' she said. "I remember wanting to say stop, but I don't know if I said it out loud or if I just thought it. I was kind of frozen up."

Reade said that she pulled away and Biden looked "shocked and surprised," and replied, "Come on, man, I heard you liked me."

Reade was one of a group of women who complained had at the beginning of the campaign about Biden touching and kissing them in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. This was the first time she included details about him penetrating her with his finger.

The story has been dismissed by most mainstream news sources on the basis that no other women have made similar allegations. That's a valid way to determine who to believe in a "he said/she said" situation. A man who imposes himself like this on someone he barely knows normally does the same thing with others.

This is why Bill Clinton's perjury was important in the 1990s. He was being sued by a woman who claimed that he had an employee escort her into his presence where her was waiting with his pants down. This was while he was governor of Arkansas. He did exactly the same thing early in his presidency when he had a White House intern brought into his office. When asked about the White House affair under oath, Clinton lied.

There is no history of Biden fingering other women so I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But here's the thing. That still leaves all of his other misconduct. The New York Times alluded to this in their first release of a story exonerating Biden. They had this paragraph:

"No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade's allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable."

The story was quickly edited to remove references to Biden's other practices. But these are important.

Consider the two confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. These took place decades apart but both nominees were almost rejected because a single woman made an accusation. With Kavanaugh the accusation was that he had tried to make out with a girl while drunk in high school. In Thomas's case the accusation was that he made some off-color jokes in front of a woman. There was no touching. In both cases, women who had worked with the nominees came forward and said that they had never seen him act like that. There was no corroborating testimony at all but both men are still plagued by the accusations. A year and a half later, Democrats continue to talk about impeaching Kavanaugh for denying the accusation. (Remember, of the four people who were alleged to have been present, three have denied it and Kavanaugh produced a calendar showing that he was elsewhere nearly every night that Summer.)

Then there's President Trump and the Billy Bush tapes. Shortly before the 2016 election a "hot mic tape" surfaced of Trump saying that he liked to kiss and touch women and they let him because he's rich and famous. Hillary Clinton immediately called on Trump to drop out of the race. Women's groups organized a huge march the day after the inauguration to protest that such a man could be president.

These same women support Joe Biden, even though multiple women have accused him of doing exactly the same thing.

This is selective judgement. If our guy does it, it's just Joe being Joe. If someone from the other side is accused of something, it renders him unfit for office regardless of the lack of proof.

The NYT realized they had been to explicit about forgiving Biden so they swept the proven claims under the rug. Regardless, it's hypocrisy at its worst.

Why Liz Lost

In the week since Elizabeth Warren suspended her campaign I've seen numerous columnists insisting that the reason she lost is sexism or even misogyny. This is silly. The party that nominated Hillary Clinton in 2016 didn't turn anti-woman in four years. So what did go wrong with Warren's campaign? Lots of things.

She missed her window. Teddy Kennedy told Barack Obama not to wait to run for president because you don't get a second chance on your popularity. Warren's popularity peaked by the 2016 election. When she announced that she wasn't running, her supporters turned to Bernie Sanders. Their positions are nearly identical (free medical coverage, college and preschool financed by a wealth tax) but by 2020, Sanders is seen as the progressive leader and Warren a pale shadow.

Fauxcahontas. Early in her career Warren claimed to be Native American. She insisted that wasn't why she was hired as a law instructor at Harvard but her degree was from a 2nd tier law school and she was the only person from that law school to ever teach at Harvard. She also claimed to be Indian on at least one other job application. The blond, blue-eyed Warren is not part-Indian and her earlier claims continued to haunt her candidacy to the end. What she should have done was confess and apologize when it first came out. At the time she was running for the Senate and favored to win. If she had simply released a statement saying, "When I was much younger I felt that I needed an edge to advance my career so I used unverified family stories to claim Native American heritage. I'm sorry and I apologize for doing that." Such a statement might have hurt her a bit at the time but it would be ancient history now. Instead she tried proving her Indian heritage through a DNA test that proved she was as little as 1/1024th NA. She also released a recording of herself and her brothers, all indignant that anyone would question their family story. It all flopped and she spent years trying to mollify tribes.

Problems with her honesty. Other details have popped up about Warren's biography. Most notably, her story about being fired form a teaching job for being pregnant is contradicted by a video where she says that her teaching while pregnant "just wasn't working" for her and she decided to take some time off to raise her baby.

Conflicting narratives. A candidate has to choose what parts of her biography to emphasize her candidacy. Talking about growing up in Oklahoma and being a school teacher takes away from her image as a policy wonk Harvard law professor. She needed to choose the parts of her biography that reinforced her having a plan for everything.

Bad planes.. Her battle cry was, "I've got a plan for that" but when she presented her healthcare plan, critics poked so many holes in it that Warren withdrew it.

Playing the woman/victim card. The story about being fired for being pregnant is irrelevant. If it happened, it happened decades ago. It would not be allowed today so what is the point of telling it? She even told it at her last debate. No one is going to choose their candidate because she was discriminated against decades ago. It's also annoying to listen to a rich, privileged, white woman complaining about how hard life is. This was a problem with Hillary Clinton's campaign, also.In contrast, the main time that Barack Obama talked about race and discrimination was when he threw his grandmother under the bus.

Warren has terrible political instincts. There's just no way around it - Elizabeth Warren has terrible political instincts. In addition to the examples I listed above there are ones like her podcast which she started with, "I'm gonna get me a beer." I can't imagine a more forced and artificial start to a podcast.

She's just plain unlikable. She has an annoying voice and she always sounds like she cares so much about her causes that she's about to break down in tears. Does anyone really want to listen to this for the next 4-8 years?

Democrats Scare Me

I am really worried about what will happen when the Democrats eventually get control of the White House and both houses of Congress. American politics being what they are, this will happen eventually, probably in 2024. What they are currently proposing makes me very nervous. The Left in general and Democrats in particular have proposed a number of changes to be sure that they remain in control for a generation of more.

The first thing they are likely to do is the nuclear option: abolish the filibuster in the Senate. That only takes a majority vote and it allows them to proceed with their agenda with a 50-49 majority. They can even manage on a 50-50 majority and a Democrat Vice President to break ties.

Once they eliminate the filibuster they will start changing the rules to give themselves an advantage across all of the branches of government. Here are the things they have suggested:

Eliminating the Electoral College. The proper way to do this is to amend the Constitution but they will not do that. Instead they will make an end run around it by passing an law authorizing the Interstate Popular Vote Compact. This grants a state's electors to the winner of the popular vote rather than to the winner of the state. It will be a long fight to get enough states to pass this for it to take effect but Congress can smooth over the biggest obstacle - the Constitution forbids states from making compacts between themselves without Congressional approval.

Packing the Supreme Court. Currently the number of seats on the court is fixed by law at nine and the court leans conservative 5-4. There have been numerous suggestions for adding seats to the court with 15 being the most common suggestion. That would give the liberals a 10-5 advantage.

Packing the Senate. This is fairly simple. They will admit Washington DC and Puerto Rico as states. Both of these lean heavily to the left so they will get four more Democrats in the Senate. This will also give them a couple of seats in the House.

Packing the House. This one is a stretch but it's been proposed in the Washington Post. The 14th amendment has a clause that allows for a state to be punished for disenfranchising by reducing their representation in Congress. The theory here is that voter ID and purges of inactive voters only exist to keep minorities from voting so any state that has done this will lose representatives. The legal justification for this is very shaky and they would have to finish their court-packing before this hit the Supreme Court. I don't really think they will try this one but I included it since it has been brought up.

All of these are possibilities. I fully expect one or more of them to be attempted in the foreseeable future. The Interstate Popular Vote Compact has already passed a few states.

None of these are ends to themselves. They are just ways of changing the rules so that they will have a permanent majority. Once that happens then the changes will really start. More on that later.

Can Identity Politics Be Liberal?

A recent piece in Vox maintains that liberalism needs identity politics. A close examination of the piece shows the opposite.

It begins with a reference to a 30-year-old piece by the late University of Chicago philosopher Iris Marion Young :

In 1990, Young published a classic book titled Justice and the Politics of Difference. At the time, political philosophy was dominated by internal debates among liberals who focused heavily on the question of wealth distribution. Young, both a philosopher and a left activist, found this narrow discourse unsatisfying.

In her view, mainstream American liberalism had assumed a particular account of what social equality means: "that equal social status for all persons requires treating everyone according to the same principles, rules, and standards." Securing "equality" on this view means things like desegregation and passing nondiscrimination laws, efforts to end overt discrimination against marginalized groups.

This is an important start, Young argues, but not nearly enough. The push for formally equal treatment can't eliminate all sources of structural inequality; in fact, it can serve to mask and even deepen them. Judging a poor black kid and a rich white one by the same allegedly meritocratic college admissions standards, for example, will likely lead to the rich white one's admission — perpetuating a punishing form of inequality that started at birth.

In this example, Young very cleverly conflated two attributes then ignored one of them. Let's assume that the premise is correct, that a rich white kid would be admitted before a poor black one but why bring wealth into it at all if this is about race? What about a rich black kid and a poor white one? Or two rich kids, one black and one white? Or a black and white kid who are both poor? Or two middle class kids? The assumption is really that rich kids will be admitted before poor ones coupled with the implication that black kids are always poor.

There's a word for assuming that someone who is black must be poor: "prejudice". It's a harmful one, also. 40% of black families are middle class compared with 42% of all families. It's the largest income group for blacks. Yes, twice as many blacks are below the poverty line as the general population (21% and 11%) but that's still half as many black families as are middle class. Even if you add in working poor (25% of black families) you still have the majority (56%) of black families middle class or above.  So Vox is justifying identity politics by perpetuating a racial slur - that backs are automatically poor.

Identity politics also eliminates any discussion of why more blacks are poor than whites. It looks at the percentages by race and assumes institutional racism is the sole cause. That creates a helplessness among minorities. "The system is stacked against you and there's nothing you can do to fight it."

But, it's been well-established that two-parent families are wealthier than single-parent families. And black families are much more likely to be single-parent. What if the two are connected? What if the prevalence of black poverty has more to do with the destruction of the black two-parent family? There's no room for that in identity politics.

So how is this liberal?

The Vox article goes on to name other disparities:

• The median black family's wealth is one-tenth that of the median white family.
• The average American woman spends over 11 more hours per week doing unpaid home labor than the average man.
• LGBTQ youth are about five times more likely to attempt suicide than (respectively) straight and cisgender peers.

These are all misleading on one way or the other.

The first bullet point is because of a handful of billionaires at the top end of wealth are disproportionately white. If you discount them then the wealth gap closes significantly.

The second point is grossly misleading. According to their source, the reason women do more of the housework is because men are spending much more time at work.

As for the third point, it's been well-documented that 50% of youth on hormone treatments for gender transitioning try to commit suicide. If, as the statistics imply, it's the drugs that cause suicidal urges then no amount of identity politics will help these people. It's a medical issue, not a societal one.

So Vox is misrepresenting the world as an excuse for more identity politics. I already mentioned the problem with assuming that blacks are poor. There are other problems with grouping people into easily-identifiable groups and treating them differently. Once you decide that this is acceptable then it's inevitable that you start having disparate treatment. Identity politics advocates assume that they will always be in control of this and that it will always work in their favor. That is not always the case.

Look at Mayor Bloomberg's Stop and Frisk policy. It's a perfect example of identity politics gone wrong. As Bloomberg himself explained, the biggest cause of murder in New York City was minorities. So he advocated treating all of them as potential suspects and checking them for weapons as often as possible (up to a million times a year at its height). The justification for this is that it helped the minority communities since the most common victim was also a minority.

Identity politics institutionalizes racism disguised as helping "marginalized" groups. If convinces members that all of their problems come from a system designed to crush them and teaches them to see racism/sexism/etc. where none exists. None of this is liberal and it only helps the liberals by creating a mob mentality intent on change that they hope to channel.

Joe, Liz and Bernie's Bad Night

The 2020 New Hampshire primaries were last night and the front-runners from last Summer all had terrible nights.

First there is Joe Biden. En ended up losing a fight for 4th pace with Liz Warren. His support is in the single digits. He's trailing in fund-raising. He looks old and sounds confused. The impeachment was aimed at Trump but hit Biden, informing a lot of people about how his family got rich from their association with Joe. He's never been a good candidate. In three runs for president he's never finished above 4th place. He's counting on South Carolina to save him but Super Tuesday is less than a month away and brings Bloomberg and his billions. Joe will probably be out of the race within the next month.

Then there's Liz Warren. She managed to beat Biden for 4th place but her support is still in the single-digits. She had to cancel a half-million dollar ad buy in Nevada after her poor showing in Iowa failed to produce the expected donations bounce. Her slogan "I've got a plan for that" evaporated after she released her plan for universal health care. It was too expensive and the funding had too many rosy projections. She withdrew it promising to come up with something by 2024 if Congress doesn't deliver a plan before then. She's also been caught in too many lies. Her voice grates. She's been basing her appeal on "I was discriminated against decades ago for being a woman so I deserve to be president." That appeal coming from a rich, privileged white woman didn't work for Hillary Clinton and it's not working for Warren. Warren should have placed second in New Hampshire just from being a fellow New Englander. That she didn't shows that she has limited appeal and will soon be out of the race.

It may seem strange to include Bernie Sanders on this list. He won the New Hampshire primary but it was an ugly win. He got half the votes in 2020 as he got in 2016. In 2016 he finished 22 points ahead of Hillary Clinton. In 2020 he beat Pete Buttigieg by 1.3%. Everyone knew that Bernie would win this primary but it was far closer than anyone expected. Still, it's enough that a Stop Bernie movement has formed in the Democratic Party. Bernie is far enough ahead to alarm the party but he's not so far as to be unstoppable. Had Bernie repeated his 2016 win then the party might be coming to terms with him as front-runner. Instead his narrow victory has them looking for alternatives to support. Regardless, I expect Bernie to be in the race until the bitter end.

Could Trump Have Been Stopped in 2016?

Writing in the National Review, Never-Trumper Jim Geraghty is warning that the Democrats have to stop Bernie Sanders by uniting under a single candidate. While this is written as a warning for the Democrats, it's mainly an examination of how a candidate he hates managed to win the primaries.

As Geraghty sees it, good and decent Republicans could have saved the party if only the huge pool of candidates had stepped aside and allowed support to coalesce around a single acceptable candidate, probably Ted Cruz. While it's true that Trump won the nomination with only 46% of the vote, it's a stretch to think that another candidate could have beaten him.

Let's start with polls. RealClearPolitics has a list of polls for Trump, Cruz and Kasich during the primaries. As of this point (early February) four years ago they stood with Trump at 39%, Cruz at 18% and Kasich at 8%. So, if Kasich had dropped out and thrown all of his support to Cruz, Trump would still be ahead. That's how it was for all of January and February. Of course there were other candidates in the race and it was not clear that Cruz and Kasich would be the last hold-outs.

Things got more interesting in March. For a lot of March, Cruz and Kasich combined did have more support than Trump. By April Trump was right about equal to Cruz and Kasich combined and that's how the race ended. So if one of them had dropped out and thrown all of his support to the other and none of his supporters voted for Trump instead, then Trump might have been defeated. But that's a lot of "ifs". A big one is assuming that Cruz would prefer to see Kasich as president over Trump. I do think it's a given that Kasich would prefer anyone to Trump including Hillary Clinton but he was convinced that the RNC would somehow fix things so Trump was not nominated and, as the last candidate standing, he'd get the nomination. I suspect he didn't care much for Cruz, either. For that matter, I really wonder if Geraghty would have been any happier with President Cruz than with President Trump?

Any idea that Trump could have been stopped vanishes when you look at the statistics. Trump won 41 primaries and 1,441 delegates. Cruz won 11 primaries and 551 delegates. Rubio (who dropped out early and endorsed Trump) won three primaries and 173 delegates. Kasich only won Ohio and only had 161 delegates. The anti-Trump would have had to win a whole lot of primaries to beat Trump.

And it should be pointed out that most Republicans did not share Geraghty's hatred from Trump. Of the 2016 Republican clown car, Only Jeb! and Kasich didn't endorse Trump when they dropped out (Cruz waited until after the convention. The idea that they would all drop out early in order to stop Trump founders on those endorsements.

So, is the Democratic Party in danger of having the same thing happen with Bernie? It's too early to tell but there are crucial differences. Bernie is currently the front-runner but that's been fairly fluid. All of the candidates are below 30% which leaves a lot of room for them to grow. In contrast, Trump was a clear front-runner in nearly every poll for months before the first primary. He began 2016 around 35% while everyone else was below 15%. So, where Trump was the clear front-runner in 2016, there is no such front-runner in 2020, only the candidate who is slightly ahead.

A Bad Week to be a Democrat

Democrats started the week on a bad note - the Senate vote against calling further witnesses for the impeachment trial of President Trump. Then things got worse.

Monday was supposed to be the BIG DAY when the primaries finally started. All 144 candidates had been hitting the state for months. Sanders and Warren had private jets to fly them back and forth from Iowa to the Senate impeachment trial and back (Warren was caught getting off of a private jet and hid behind a campaign staffer). This was going to be the moment that added some clarity to the race and defined who really was winning and losing. Iowa was ready with new rules that called for three separate counts to make the process more transparent and and app that would relay the results to the state headquarters. The press and pundits eagerly waited for the first results to come in. And waited and waited and waited. Press time came and went. People gave up and went to bed. As of Wednesday morning exactly 0% of the vote had been counted. Both Sanders and Buttigieg released incomplete counts showing that they were the winners.

It seems that the new app hadn't been tested and had failed. The party had counted on the app and didn't have a phone bank large enough to act as a reliable fail-over. Communications were confused and garbled. Eventually they told people to bring pictures of the vote count to the headquarters to be counted by hand. By 5 pm they only had 70% of the vote counted.

Tuesday was the State of the Union Speech. It had been carefully timed so that the President would be in the middle of the impeachment trial when he gave the speech in hopes that he would have a melt-down. It didn't work. President Trump gave a high-energy positive speech. He did miss a handshake with Speaker Pelosi after he handed her the official State of the Union document but that was fair - she'd slighted him in her introduction. While Trump was recounting accomplishments she was looking anywhere but at him. At the end of the speech she pointedly tore it up then was pictured waving the halves with a smile on her face.

By Wednesday it was clear that Pelosi had partially stolen the show from the President but not in a good way. She came across as the one who had a melt-down. Three House members, including a Democrat, filed complaints. The most serious was the one filed by the Democrat. There is a statue against destroying or mutilating government documents. Remember, the State of the Union is the signed report that the President is constitutionally mandated to send to Congress. That's what she tore up. The speech itself is a theatrical event appended to the report in the early 20th century.

Sharp-eyed people watching a replay of the speech noticed that Pelosi had done a test-tear of the document while people were distracted. That's when she divided the document into three piles so it was a planned action rather than a spontaneous reaction to a "dirty speech" as she had claimed.

And on Wednesday the Senate voted to acquit the President. It was no surprise that Mitt Romney voted with the Democrats on the first count, abuse of power. It was more surprising that he voted with the other Republicans to acquit on the charge of contempt of Congress.

And Iowa finally released some more vote counts. Then they issued corrections.

On Thursday Iowa finally released 99% of the vote but admitted problems in the count that may lead to recanvassing the entire state. Both Sanders and Buttigieg claimed victory. Bernie supporters are claiming that the whole mess was caused purposely to distract from Sanders's win. Some have blamed Buttigieg's campaign, pointing to an unrelated financial relationship between them and Shadow, the company that wrote the app. What is sure is that the prestige that usually comes from winning Iowa has evaporating in the long-drawn out count. Candidates and reporters have moved on to New Hampshire. This hurt both Sanders who got the most votes and Buttigieg who got the most delegates. Both can claim victory but no one cares. Warren, who placed third in a primary no one cares about, had to cancel a half-million dollar ad buy after she failed to get an expected bounce in fund-raising from Iowa.

As of Thursday, the Democratic Party continues to be fractured while President Trump looks stronger than ever. The House has announced further investigations but after Pelosi's document-tearing she can no longer claim that this is anything but partisan bickering. At the same time the Senate has announced its own investigation into the Bidens. If they should turn up anything incriminating at all then President Trump will claim total vindication.

The Democrats must be wondering what bad news Friday will bring?

Liz and the Tea Party

In February, 2009, President Obama announced a program to help home owners who were over-extended. This included potentially forgiving part of their mortgage debt. The following day CNBC news editor Rick Santelli complained that this was subsidizing bad behavior and that we needed a new Boston Tea Party. The following weekend the Tea Party was born as a political movement. People were outraged that President Obama would reward people who had borrowed irresponsibly while doing nothing for people who lived within their means.

A few days ago Senator Elizabeth Warren hit her own version of this outrage. Someone approached her and said that he had worked two jobs to pay for his daughter's college while his neighbor had taken out student loans. Since Warren was planning on paying off his neighbor's loans, was she going to pay him back for the money he had spent on his daughter's college. "Of course not," Warren told him.

A video of this exchange went viral forcing Warren to respond. She explained that she is "looking forward" and that all programs have a starting point where only people going forward were rewarded. Warren didn't really help herself much with her explanation. This is not only a matter of going forward, it is also a matter of perceived fairness.

As with Obama's mortgage program, Warren is proposing to reward bad behavior. People who planned ahead and managed their debt get no benefit from her proposal while people who assumed more debt than they could afford are rewarded.

Remember the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant? The grasshopper spent his Summer enjoying life and doing nothing while the ant stored food for the Winter. When the Winter comes, the ant is comfortable but the grasshopper starves. In Warren's version, when Winter comes the government takes half of the ant's stores and gives them to the grasshopper.

Warren's problem is that debt forgiveness is not a forward-looking program. It is backward-looking. The people with the student debt agreed to it. They also got something for it - a college degree or at least some college. This was a voluntary exchange where the student agreed on future debt in exchange for increased future earnings. They were not required to assume this debt. They could have gone into another field.

This also rewards people who assumed a large student debt while pursuing a degree with no value whatsoever (a masters in puppetry comes to mind).

This is also totally separate from Warren's proposal for government funding for college. That is forward-looking. The government already funds K-12 so a case can be made for funding post-high school education. A better case can be made if the funding only includes employable fields. You can make the argument that we have to start somewhere going forward because it affects everyone the same. People who already saved will have a windfall. People who did not save will be spared a future burden. The important thing is that it would not reward bad behavior.

But Warren has a poor feel for politics. She also seems to think that people have a right to be debt-free regardless of how they accumulated the debt in the first place. This overrides any sense of fairness she has towards people who manage their finances responsibly.

Should Warren get elected and try to implement her debt forgiveness plan she will be met with a new version of the Tea Party.

Liz Plays Hardball

Before the campaign began Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders agreed to be polite to each other. Liz lied and it came to a head last week.

First there were two stories leaked to the press. One was that Sanders's campaign staff were presenting her as the candidate who mainly appealed to elitists and could not expand the party while Bernie was attracting first-time voters. The story may or may not be true. It sounds like how Bernie's supporters think. I did not see any attribution for the story but I'm betting it came from the Warren campaign as a way of signaling that Bernie attacked first so any counter-attacks by Liz are fair.

The second story is that at a private dinner in 2018 Bernie told Liz that a woman could not win the 2020 election. This was the same dinner that Warren told Sanders that she was running. CNN broke the story and, by coincidence, they also hosted the February debate.

Part-way through the debate Sanders was asked why he told Warren that a woman could not win in 2020. He denied saying it and pointed to his long record of supporting women candidates. He was asked again if he denied saying it and he stated that he uncategorically denied it. The moderator then asked Warren how she felt when Sanders asked that question. That caused a stir in the audience since the moderator just called Sanders a liar. CNN piled on by asking Amy Klobuchar what she thought when someone said that a woman could not win in 2020.

At the end of the debate Warren walked over to Sanders. He reached out to shake her hand and she pulled her hand back, making a fist then holding it with the other hand. She was caught on a hot mic saying that Sanders had called her a liar on nation-wide TV. He was incredulous so she repeated it. He threw up his hands, said something about "Don't do this" followed by "Do you want to do this?" and ended up walking away.

I'm sure that Warren orchestrated all of this with the help of CNN. Or maybe CNN orchestrated it with Warren's help. Either way, Warren realized that her support was shrinking and Bernie's was growing and she had to do something. CNN has a record of being establishment Democrat and Warren is much closer to the establishment than Sanders. There's no doubt that the moderators set Bernie up, asking him something they knew he would deny then asking follow-up questions in a way to show that they did not believe Bernie's denials.

Later CNN tried to insist that this was not a he said/she said situation because it had been reported on. But the only confirmation for the story came from four of Warren's staff who said that she told them about it. We don't really know if Bernie said it, if Warren made it up, or if Bernie said something about how difficult it would be for a woman to run against Trump and she took it the wrong way. What we do know is that CNN took sides, believing Warren's version and rejecting anything Bernie said.

Warren's reaction was interesting. CNN called Sanders a liar but she attacked him for calling HER a liar. Yes, if he'd thought about it he'd have realized the original story came from her but CNN never expressed it that way. They never said, "Elizabeth Warren says you told her this, how do you respond?" So was Warren's outrage rehearsed? And why was CNN still recording what was said? Why hadn't they cut the mics when the debate ended? Did a director say, "Look, Warren's going over to Sanders. Turn the mic back on?" or did Warren know ahead of time that the conversation would be recorded and was the whole thing staged?

We don't know. We do know that CNN was fanning the flames by releasing the post-debate conversation.

This would not be the first time something was staged during a presidential debate. Remember, in 2016 Hillary Clinton walked across the stage and stood in front of Donald Trump then complained that he was following her around. And CNN fed at least one question to Hillary Clinton before one of her debates with Sanders.

Chances are that all of this will be wasted effort on CNN's part to revive Warren's candidacy and may be a factor in Trump's reelection. Sanders' supporters were correct that he brings in new voters to the Democratic party but they are there for him. If they feel that he was treated badly by the party then they will stay home on election day or vote for the Green candidate in protest.

The Candidates and the Iran Nuclear Deal

During the final Democratic debate before the primaries, the candidates were asked about President Trump's statement that he will not allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons. Each of the candidates praised the nuclear deal that was negotiated under President Obama and condemned President Trump for pulling out if it. That shows that either a) they are stupid, b) they think that everyone else is stupid or c) they have no idea what was in the agreement but they are sure it must have been good if Trump opposed it.

The agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or the JCPOA did not stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. It did just the opposite - it allowed Iran to be a nuclear power as long as they did it slowly. Validated in 2015, the JCPOA required Iran to wait 15 years before finishing nuclear weapons. The hope was that after 15 years the Iranian theocracy would give up its desire to spread it's version of Islam and become a more moderate country. Five years into the agreement, that looks like a bad bet. Iran used the funds freed up by Obama and the lifting of sanctions to organize militias in multiple countries, carving out whole sections that functioned as Iranian-controlled mini-states. It also continued the civil war in Syria.

Iran started cheating on the treaty before it was even signed. It did not disclose all of it's enrichment facilities as required. It also violated agreements on developing nuclear-capable missiles.

So why did the candidates support the treaty and act as if it was stopping Iran from having nuclear weapons? Even Obama's Vice President, Joe Biden, acted as if the JCPOA was keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

I suspect that they don't want to come out and say that they would allow Iran to become a nuclear power by 2030. That would admit that Trump is right which is the worst thing a candidate could say on that stage. So they had to pretend that the JCPOA was keeping Iran from making nuclear weapons.

World War III?

Last week the US Embassy in Iraq was attacked. In response President Trump ordered a drone attack on a high-ranking Iranian who was implicated in organizing the attack. Now the Left is going crazy insisting that World War III is about to start. This is beyond silly. Iran is no superpower with allies across the world ready to declare war on the US in retaliation for us threatening Iran. At most it is a regional power with militias in several neighboring countries forming states within a state.

Is war even likely? No. Neither side wants it.

Let's be honest about war between the US and Iran. We'd win. There's no question about that. We overthrew the Taliban in days. Iraq only lasted a few weeks. And when we fought those wars we hadn't been in a real war in decades (Desert Storm barely counts). Since then we've been in constant warfare. Our troops are battle-hardened. Our equipment is battle-tested. Iran wouldn't stand a chance.

Iran isn't united, either. They had major protests a few months ago. They were brutality put down. The entire country was cut off from the Internet for weeks to keep images of the protests from getting out. In suppressing the protests, nearly 150 were killed and thousands detained. In addition, Iran's economy is collapsing because of American sanctions. This is not a united country ready to take on a super-power.

But, as Afghanistan and Iraq proved, occupying a country after you overthrow the leadership is difficult. If we overthrew Iran, we would be stuck with another unpopular occupation but the Iranian leaders would probably be dead. There are no winners there.

Of course Trump could follow Obama's example in Libya and overthrow the government then let it turn into a failed state and blame the "international community" for not doing more. But Iran isn't Libya and Trump would get a lot worse press than Obama.

So neither side has anything to gain from war. In fact it was Iran's desire to avoid war that led us to this place. Iran wants nuclear weapons and a delivery system capable of reaching all of Europe. Once they are a nuclear power then they will be safe from attack. No one wants to risk a nuclear exchange. But no one wants a Nuclear Iran, either. They want to be a regional power and were building their empire until Trump hit them with sanctions over their violations of the treaty Obama signed with them.

So Iran will stall for time, hoping they can survive the sanctions until they can build some working nuclear weapons or a more favorable president is in the White House. Trump will continue the sanctions hoping for some real concessions instead of the weak treaty Obama signed (and which Iran had violated before it was even written).

In the meantime Iran is testing Trump to see what they can get away with and he's projecting strength in an effort to get them to back down. But it won't lead to war because neither side wants it.

The Impeachment Game-Changer (but not the one you think)

Earlier this week the New York Times reported that the hold on funds for Ukraine began much earlier than previously reported and was opposed by high-ranking officials including the Secretary of State and the Chief of Staff. Democrats immediately pounced (yes, they can pounce, too) and announced that this was a "game changer" and proved the need for additional witnesses to testify before the Senate. It is a game-changer but not the way they think.

First, this proves that they rushed the impeachment. If the New York Times can uncover this information then how did the House miss it? After all, the House has the power of subpoena. What else have they missed in their rush to impeach?

But what is more important is what this does to their case. The original whistle-blower report claimed that President Trump demanded that Ukraine open an investigation into the Bidens and withheld an aid package that was meant to pay for armaments in order to force compliance. The main proof was that Trump did suggest that the investigation be reopened and there was a hold placed on the aid.

Here's how their new timeline looks:

President Trump is obsessed with Joe Biden. In April the President learned about the aid package for Ukraine and saw an opening to embarrass Biden so he ordered a hold put on the aid. Then he waited the rest of April. And May. And June. Finally, 84 days later he had his phone call with the Ukraine. But he didn't mention the Bidens until half-way through the call and he never mentioned the hold. In fact, according to witnesses sworn testimony and statements from Ukraine, no one told them about it. The hold was released in mid-September with no investigation started.

The fact that Ukraine was never told about the hold was always a problem for the impeachment but now we have a second problem - the 84 day gap between Trump's order to hold the aid package and his suggestion that Ukraine look into the Bidens. It's really hard to reconcile the claim that Trump was obsessed with Biden with the leisurely pace. In fact, give the nearly three-month gap between the two actions and the low priority that Trump gave the Bidens in the phone call, it's not very likely the two events were connected at all.