The Question Not Asked

Here's a question that an unbiased moderator would have asked the candidates during the two-night Democratic debates:

You have said that you are in favor of decriminalizing immigration and giving free health care to illegal immigrants. Most of you have also signed on to the New Green Deal which promises $15+/hour jobs for everyone (presumably including immigrants). Beta even went to far as to make a statement in Spanish that seemed to promise allowing non-citizens to vote. All of this put together is guaranteed to lead to an influx of immigrants not seen since the 19th century. Do you welcome an influx of 10s of millions of new immigrants or do you have a plan for preventing this?

The First Night of the Democratic Debates

First, Elizabeth Warren lost the election last night. Even if she manages to be the candidate she came out on record as wanting to take away everyone's insurance. That's a problem for her for numerous reasons. The majority of Americans are happy with their insurance. Insurance is one of the biggest benefits to being in a union so she's piratically inviting unions to endorse Trump. And, eliminating insurance will throw at least a million people out of work and throw the stock market into a tailspin. Out of the ten candidates on stage, only one other came out in favor of Medicare for all which shows how out of step she is with even the far-left contingent of her party that was on stage.

But she won't be the candidate. Despite being given more than her share of airtime at the beginning she failed to establish a presence. The longer the debate went on the more she faded.

Booker did well, a lot better than I expected after his Spartacus moment last fall. Regardless, Trump would rip him to shreds in a real debate.

Beto's stunt of answering a question in Spanish was foolish and made him the subject of numerous hilarious memes.

Castro's insistence on "reproductive justice" was just puzzling. He didn't make it any better by talking about how trans-women need access to abortions, too News-flash, Castro, a trans-woman was born with male reproductive organs. You meant trans-men.

MSNBC came out looking terrible. The broadcast had several momentary blackouts, there were screw-ups with the microphones, one caused a long, unintended commercial break while they straightened it out. Rachel Maddow was a poor moderator, giving speeches and asking candidates to comment on them rather than asking questions. Most of the candidates were unknowns to the audience and they should have had name tags under them the entire time they were talking but the name tags came and went fast.

The set was meant to look high-tech and exciting but it had problems. The podiums were a cool blue but turned red at some point for some reason, possibly to show who was talking. This may have been nice for the live audience but TV audience only got brief glimpses of it as they pulled away after a candidate's time ended.The giant screens behind the candidates were distracting during close-ups.

All told, it made MCNBC look amateurish.

The first Democratic Debates

The first round of Democratic debates begins tonight. With 20 contenders, it was broken into two debates over two nights. Here's my quick take on the candidates:

Biden. As the front-runner he has little to gain and a lot to lose. He did poorly in his two previous runs for president. He's the front-runner now because of his association with Obama. So far he's largely stayed out of the public eye since entering the race. He runs a big risk of being the next Jeb!, a front-runner who fades as soon as he shares the stage with more dynamic candidates. His best hope is to emulate Trump. Trump got more speaking time than anyone else because all of the other candidates attacked him giving him a chance to respond. Duplicating Trump's performance will require Biden to be fast on his feet and avoid the slightest gaff.

Sanders. Four years ago Sanders entered the race to move Clinton to the left and to increase his own standing in the Senate (both worked). He knew he didn't have a chance so he could be gracious and declined from personal attacks. As the race progressed he began to think he had a real chance and he became a humorless scold. This time he's entering the race with a real shot at winning the nomination. At the same time, he has a pack of younger candidates snapping at his heels from the left. There's a real risk that voters will tire of him and turn to a younger, less grouchy candidate with similar ideals.

Warren. She's at a real disadvantage. She's the only major candidate in the first debate. Everyone else will be attacking her. She does have debate skills from her high school debate team but a presidential debate is vastly different from a high school one. Voters don't look for points. They see who connects with voters the best. Trump understood that and Clinton didn't in 2016. He spent his opening remarks saying what he would do for the voters while Clinton spent hers telling us what a bad person Trump was. Journalists gave the win to Clinton on points but Trump actually connected with the voters.  Political writers insist that Warren can be charming and authentic on the stump but the version most of us have seen was her stilted video where she announced "I'm gonna get a beer." She could be the break-out winner of the first debate, ready to take on Biden and Sanders or she could be seen as stilted and inauthentic.

And the Rest. Everyone else is struggling for name recognition. Even political junkies like me can't put a name to half of their faces. This is their chance to be see on a equal footing with the front-runners. For many, possibly most of them, this is their last chance. If they don't break out of the pack now then they will have difficulty meeting the standards for the next debate. They will all be trying to explain why they are different from the 19 other Democrats with the same platform and to convince people that they have the best chance against Trump. This will be exceedingly difficult for them.

Sleepy Joe and the Segregationists

A few days ago Joe Biden was trying to make a point about working with people he disagreed with and recalled working with some prominent segregationists when he was first elected to the Senate. Naturally it went badly. Joe has real problems keeping from putting his foot in his mouth. Regardless, here's some thoughts on it:

First of all, the point he was trying to make is a good one. Even if you strongly disagree with someone on a major issue that shouldn't mean that you disagree with them on everything. That's not something the modern Democratic Party wants to hear, though. To them, it's all or nothing. As recently as the wave election of 2006, President Bush was still able to assemble a working coalition of Republicans and Democrats to pass legislation. That changed with the election of Obama and the Democrats gaining a super-majority in 2008. Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote through some legislative slight-of-hand and Republicans were not even able to offer amendments to the legislation. That happened with most other legislation during that period. When the Republicans took the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014 they treated the Democrats much the same as they had treated the Republicans. With the election of Trump in 2016, the rallying cry of the Democrats was "Resist" which means denying the president a win, even if it's in the country's best interests. Biden's goal of backing away from such partisan politics is both admirable and out of step with his party.

Biden reminded us of how different the party was when he was first elected in 1972. The segregationists he mentioned were powerful Democrats. It's an uncomfortable reminder that he was rubbing shoulders with actual white supremacists at a time when they held real power in the Democratic Party.

Biden's lack of message control ruined his point. He said that one of them called him "son" instead of "boy". It's puzzling why he would think this was relevant since "boy" is regarded as a put-down for backs rather than white. This gave Corey Booker an opening to denounce Biden's comments and make the case for the current super-partisanship. Ever tone-deaf, when asked about apologizing to Booker, Biden suggested that Booker owed him an apology instead.

Biden's lack of message control and tone-deafness are why he never got very far in his previous runs for President. Despite his status as front-runner, he still struggles with this.

AOC and Concentration Camps

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put out this tweet:

This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.

This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentration-camps-southern-border-migrant-detention-facilities-trump/ …

The expert she's quoting is from Esquire which is not my first choice as a scientific or historic authority. Regardless, it's pushing the idea that the term "concentration camp" predates Nazi Germany. This may be true but today the term is exclusively used in relation to the Holocaust. No one uses of "concentration camp" and "Boer War" in the same sentence. AOC gave it away when she used the term "Never again" in a back and forth about her tweet. That's another term from the Holocaust.

But regardless of how you frame it, the detention facilities used for immigrants fail the definition of concentration camp several ways.

The argument that they are concentration camps comes from the fact that immigrants are being confined for long periods without having broken any laws. While this is true, it's also a voluntary confinement. They can be released if they want to go back to Mexico (since they crossed at the Mexican border) or elsewhere.

The Democrats are largely to blame for the conditions the migrants are housed in. They refused to even begin negotiations with President Trump in the name of #Resist. So no money has been allocated to expand facilities or to hire more caseworkers.

The vast majority (90+%) of these migrants will have their application as a refugee turned down and will be sent back. What AOC and other Democrats want is for anyone who presents themselves at the border to be given a green card and a court date and released into the country, possibly with a path to citizenship.  We're already seeing a surge in migrant applying at the border. We're beginning to see Africans and others trying to enter the US through the Mexican border. If we allow anyone who presents themselves at the border legal residency then the current surge will be nothing compared to the flood we'll see.

Exaggerated outrage like AOC's serves two purposes. One is yet another attack on President Trump. The other is to force open borders. She's said before that anyone from the Americas should be allowed into the US. Now she's trying to force it.

Why Biden will be 2020's version of Hillary

Watching the Biden campaign is like watching history repeating itself. Consciously or unconsciously, he's using the same strategies that Hillary Clinton used and making the same mistakes.

First a couple of little things - everyone knew that Hillary was going to run in 2016 but she kept insisting that she was still making up her mind and teasing the press for weeks before announcing with a video. Biden did the same thing. He was the last major candidate to announce and he did it with a video.

After dropping the announcement video, both candidates vanished for a while, preferring small, controlled events to large, spontaneous ones. Biden just skipped a big event in Iowa that the other 19 candidates attended. Binden's excuse was that he wanted to attend a grad-daughter's graduation. While that's noble of him, it also leads into the important similarity with Clinton...

Neither one took the primaries seriously enough. Hillary was the front-runner in 2008. The race was hers to lose. She assumed that she'd have the nomination seed up by Super Tuesday and didn't keep any cash reserves on hand in case the campaign lasted longer than that. In contrast, Obama planned a 50-state campaign from the beginning and seized the nomination from under her nose.

In 2016 Hillary again assumed that both the nomination and the presidency were hers. She was surprised by the strength of Bernie Sanders then surprised again by Donald Trump.

Biden seems to assume that he only needs to show up to secure the nomination. He sees himself above the fray and is trying to start his campaign against President Trump. That's a mistake. After a strong start, he's dropped in the polls. He's going to have to work for the nomination, especially since the party reduced the role of the super-delegates in enforcing party orthodoxy.

Hillary counted on the Obama coalition to turn out for her and made no effort to woo swing-voters. Her plan was to suppress Trump voters by on-stop negative advertising while appealing to the Obama coalition as his rightful successor. This was unlikely to happen. Obama was a special case. Blacks turned out for him in record numbers because he was black. Immigrants and their recent decedents saw Obama as one of them because of his African father and foreign up-bringing. Obama was a youthful candidate running on a blank slate of hope and change. Groups across the political spectrum from Progressives to Libertarians were convinced that Obama was really one of them.

Hillary failed to motivate a lot of Obama voters. She saw herself as a pioneer because of her gender but many voters simply saw an old, rich, white woman and stayed home. Trump was able to appeal to working-class voters who felt left behind by Obama and ignored by Clinton.

Biden will have a worse time trying to motivate the Obama Coalition. As a rich, old, white guy who has been in politics since before most of the electorate was born, he has nothing exciting to offer. He does have a history of working class appeal but that was with a different generation. His last Senate run was 2002 and his 2008 Presidential run folded in 2007.

Biden ha an additional problem that Hillary didn't have. He'll have to run against an incumbent. In 2016, Trump was a complete unknown. Given that he is from New York and has switched parties a few times, the best conservatives could hope for was a RHINO. Instead his administration has been the most conservative since Ronald Reagan. Voters seldom if ever turn out an incumbent president during good economic times. Trump is not the madman, ready to launch a nuclear war that some painted him as. Neither is he the totalitarian that many claimed. It's impossible to define a sitting president the way you can a candidate so there's one more tool denied to Biden.

There is one final similarity between the two - voters like the idea of them better than the candidate. Hillary always polled highest when she was out of public sight. The more she was seen the lower her poll numbers. It's too early to say for sure but Biden seems to be suffering from the same problem.

The Intolerance of the Democratic Party

A couple of days ago Democrat presidential front-runner Joe Biden expressed his continuing support for the Hyde Amendment. After heavy criticism from his party he reversed his position the following day. This is important because it shows how the Democratic Party has become intolerant of opposing opinions.

The Hyde Amendment says that federal funds cannot be used to pay for abortions. If was passed because even abortion supporters like Biden realized how unfair it is to ask people to pay for abortions (through taxes) when they believe that it's murder. That received bipartisan support because back the Democrats recognized that other people could have a different opinion without being an evil person.

That's changed in the current Democratic Party. The official position is that abortion is always the woman's choice, even when the fetus is well past the point if can survive on it's own. Bernie Sanders reflects the party line when he says "It's up to the women. I trust them to make the right choice." 

The Democrats used to brag of their Big Tent meaning that they embraced a variety of opinions. This is no longer true. There is a party line and anyone who doesn't follow it is denounced and possibly excommunicated.

Biden is an old-school Democrat with an accent on old. While he sees himself as a progressive, at one point or another he's held positions that are anti-ethical to today's Democrats. He's also from a time when politicians recognized that well-meaning people had different positions and it was permissible to make accommodations with them. He just ran smack into today's intolerant party.

Why Trump's Wall is Not the Berlin Wall

I saw a legal blog comparing President Trump's wall across the Mexican border with the Berlin Wall. This was in the Volokh Conspiracy and framed as Trump's Plan to Force the Mexicans to Lock in Their Own People. So, why is this comparison wrong?

1) The Berlin Wall separated Germans from Germans. In the wake of World War II, Germany was divided into four sections managed by the US, England, France and the USSR. The first three were merged into a single government but the USSR-controlled region was kept separate. The Berlin Wall was built 12 years after the founding of East Germany. So it was separating Germans from Germans. Mexico and the US are separate countries with very different histories and cultures. Even the parts of the US that were previously owned by Mexico have been states for over a century.

2) The East Germans were prisoners in their own country. The Berlin Wall actually surrounded West Berlin which was deep in East Germany. Prior to the wall, Germans had escaped to the West by crossing into West Berlin then traveling to West Germany. The border between East and West Germanies was also closed. In contrast, Trump is insisting that Mexicans and South American refugees be prevented from crossing the US Mexican border but he in not insisting that Mexico's other borders or coast be closed.

3) It was death to cross the Berlin Wall. There were actually two walls with a killing ground in-between. Anyone seen in the killing ground was shot on sight. That's very different from the US/Mexican border.

This comes down to the question, does the US have the power to determine who enters it? If the answer is yes then the President is justified in taking steps to secure the border.

There is a substantial group who does not believe in borders and believes that anyone should be able to go anywhere with no attempt at assimilation. This will ultimately be self-destructive. Allowing multitudes of an-assimilated immigrants will eventually over-tax the country and destroy the institutions that made it desirable in the first place.

Talk of Impeachment Should Be Disqualifying

Despite the Mueller Report failing to find that President Trump actually committed high crimes or misdemeanors, there is still talk of impeachment. This is rather silly. Impeachment requires the the House of Representatives pass Articles of Impeachment. This takes a simple majority but to date less than 1/10th of the House has come out in favor of impeachment. But that's the easy part. The process moves on to the Senate where it takes a super majority of 67 votes to remove the President from office. Given that Republicans control the Senate and the lack of actual crimes, this is doomed to failure.

Even the Washington Post is admitting that people knew what they were voting for when they elected Trump. Simply disliking a President is not enough nor can you impeach a President for wanting to do something but not following through. It's "high crimes and misdemeanors", not "thought crimes".

Plus there's a presidential election coming. It's just a year and a half away. That's the proper way to remove a president, through the ballot box.

But there is one group that is dad-set on impeachment - Democrats running for President. I'm sure that they have to restrain themselves from promising that their first act as president would be impeaching Trump.

I can understand why these people want Trump weakened or removed from office. They expected that Trump would be so unpopular that whoever won the game of Democrat Survivor would win the White House in a landslide. But Trump's popularity is growing, he has the advantage of being an incumbent during an economic boom, and he showed in 2016 that he's a shrewd campaigner. The best chance that the passengers in the Democratic Clown Car have is eliminating Trump and running against Pence.

But every one of thee clown who are calling for impeachment should be disqualified from running for the presidency. They are unfit to hold that office.

Trump is often accused of breaking norms. There is a double or even a triple standard here since President Obama broke all sorts of norms as have Trump's detractors. Obama's Attorney General established the president for ignoring a Congressional subpoena and being found in contempt of Congress. The Nuclear Option was triggered under Obama. Both of these came back to bite the Democrats. I could give other examples but you get the idea.

There are two rationals for impeaching President Trump. One is to impeach on the grounds of obstruction of justice in the Russian investigation. This is difficult to prove since there was no collusion and Trump knew it. The other rational is to start impeachment proceedings on general principle in order to open sealed Grand Jury records in the hope that something would turn up. The satire site the Babylon Bee ran this as "Congress files Articles of Impeachment with the reasons to be filled in later".

So, let's imagine that they succeed in impeaching Trump on these grounds and get as far as passing the articles in the House before the measure fails in the Senate. This will be yet one more broken norm. Democrats are still angry about Clinton being impeached but at least there he was actually proven to have committed perjury. Nothing has been proven against Trump so imagine how angry Republicans will be.

And this will establish the new norm - from now on, any time the opposition party controls the House then it will stat impeachment proceedings against the President.

None of these presidential-wannabies have realized that if Trump is impeached and they win they will be facing impeachment themselves. It doesn't matter if they actually do anything wrong. Simply hating the President is enough to justify impeachment. They are proving that with Trump right now. And that's why none of them should be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.