Handicapping the Candidates

Here's my take on the front-runners so far:

President Trump: Various Republicans are planning to challenge him in the primaries. He will smash them just as he did the other Republicans in 2016.

Joe Biden: It's common for a Vice President to run for the presidency but it's rare for them to win. George H. W. Bush is the only one to have done so (plus Nixon on his second try running against Vice President Humphrey). Biden is following Hillary Clinton's lead and running as the presumptive candidate. Like her, he teased his candidacy for months then announced that he'd be announcing before finally announcing with a video. Biden is already looking past the primaries. His announcement video's message was "Orange man bad, vote for me". Hillary's 2016 campaign showed that you have to do more than attack Trump if you want to win the White House. Also, like Hillary, Biden carries a lot of baggage. He was first elected in 1972. He's always supported mainstream Democrat positions but the party has drifted so far to the left that votes for tougher sentencing and the Defense of Marriage Act in the 90s, both of which were overwhelmingly supported by the Democratic Party, are now negatives. Biden has a reputation as a gaffe machine and his campaign is following his lead. On his announcement day he received criticism for misrepresenting what President Trump actually said about Charlottesville, using Charlottesville as a campaign prop, his treatment of Anita Hill in 1991, and releasing a picture with a big "N" on President Obama. Biden has name recognition and some reflected glory from Obama but little else. Binden's going to have difficulty securing the nomination but he's the Democrats' best chance at winning back the White House.

Bernie Sanders: In 2016 Bernie was the fresh face of the Democrats (and the oldest person running). He brought a far-left agenda which excited a lot of younger Democrats. He originally ran in an effort to move the party to the left. He was so successful that his positions are now accepted by early all the other candidates. That's going to cause problems for Bernie. In 2016 he pledged to run a positive campaign but once he realized that he might have a shot at winning his natural crankiness came out. He's going to have a huge advantage in fund-raising but he's ancient and crotchety and probably too far to the left to beat Trump.

Elizabeth Warren: Her time came and went six year ago. She seceded her role as far-left spokesperson to Bernie. She got a start on her career by claiming Indian heritage. She tried to put that behind her last Summer with a DNA test that not only flopped but angered real Indians. She's struggled to get traction with her proposals. He proposal for college loan forgiveness was criticized on all sided. Her live-cast last Winter seemed forced and unnatural. Her campaign manager resigned over her decision to reject corporate donations. She's also struggled to break into the double digits in polls. With neither cash nor wide-spread appeal and no message that resonates her candidacy is doomed.

Beto O'Rourke: His main attraction is that he attracted a record amount of out-of-state donations in a losing Senate race. For a while the press loved him but they've moved on to Pete Buttigieg.

Pete Buttigieg: The mayor of South Bend Indiana came from nowhere to vault into the top contenders. He's already secured a spot in the debated based on the number of people who have contributed to his campaign. Buttigieg's main claim to fame is that he's openly gay. He uses this as a bludgeon, constantly insisting the Vice President Pence hates him for being gay. This is an outright lie. Pence has always been cordial to him. I suspect that Buttigeig's current popularity comes mainly from gays and he's already reached his ceiling. His record as mayor of a mid-sized city isn't that strong and doesn't really qualify him to be President.

Launching with a Lie

After months of speculation, Joe Biden finally launched his presidential campaign with a video. I was going to point out how well the multiple launches worked for Hillary Clinton (I'm going to release a video launching my campaign, I released a video, I'm going to hold an official launch event, I'm going on a listening tour, etc.) but after watching Biden's video I'm too mad at Biden.

The video starts out OK with a quote from the Declaration of Independence and an admission that Thomas Jefferson was flawed but still relevant. But then it switches tone to the neo-Nazi tiki torch parade that ended with a woman's death.

It was less than two years ago but people have already forgotten how that event happened. It began as a protest against removal of Confederate statues. Then a bunch of Nazi and Klan wannabies from all over the country decided to turn it into a white supremacist rally. They had their tiki torch parade with their anti-semitic chants about "Jews will not replace us". The next day they were supposed to have a second demonstration with a counter-demonstration across the square. But the police screwed up and herded both groups together then, when the inevitable violence broke out, they stood and watched because they were not in riot gear. A kid from Ohio panicked and drove his car into an empty car, driving it forward and killing the woman in front of it.

President Trump condemned the Nazis basement-dwellers and the Klansmen wannabies but he also said that their were good people on both sides. He was referring to the people who were simply protesting against the removal of the statues. They had held peaceful protests before and they were not protesting in favor of white supremacy.

At least twice President Trump explicitly condemned the white supremacists. Not that you'd know if from the news.

BIden says that he's running because of that incident. It sure took him long enough to react. There are early two dozen announced candidates ahead of him.

He also claims that that rally was unlike anything that's happened in his lifetime. He was born in 1943, during the Japanese interment program. He was a teenager before segregation ended in the South.

Biden is also ignoring the antisemitism that's gnawing away at his own party. The Republicans have condemned racist and antisemitic groups but the Democrats turn a blind eye.

I believe that Biden is serious when he says that Charlottesville upset him but he's guilty of the same thing until he condemns Farakan and Al Sharpton for saying things just as bad as the tiki marchers. If you're going to base your campaign on Trump being too friendly to racists then you have to call it out on your own side or you are a hypocrite.

This is not BIden's only example of hypocrisy. After the release of the Access Hollywood tape of Trump talking about liking to touch women Biden talked about taking Trump out back and beating him up. But Biden has his own issues with women. There are dozens of pictures and videos of women looking uncomfortable as he touches them and plays or sniffs their hair. He was also known for making female Secret Service agents uncomfortable by swimming naked.

Instead of telling us what he'll do for America, Biden launched with an attack ad. Suddenly Bernie doesn't look so bad.

Annotating the Future Green New Deal

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a video looking back from sometime in the future at the Green New Deal. You can see it here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9uTH0iprVQ&feature=youtu.be

There's a lot here and she glosses over a lot pretty quickly. It's in the form of water colored paintings so I'll take each painting.

It opens with AOC on a the bullet train from DC to New York. She's on that, because air travel has been eliminated or drastically curtailed. The time scheme is unclear but she's older with some white streaks in her hair. I guess hair dye isn't carbon-neutral.

She reflects back on being a freshman in the "most diverse Congress ever". This begins an interesting theme - the video is supposed to represent "diversity" but it does so in a very un-diverse way. Nearly every face represented is brown. There are some blacks represented but virtually no whites or Asians.

She moves on to the Green New Deal, assuring us that we already have all the technology needed to implement it (we don't).

In 1977 a scientist made a presentation about CO2 causing warming. She seems surprised that the world didn't immediately jump of and take notice but this was one of dozens of doomsday predictions that had been going on for a decade. And yes, there were predictions of a new ice age at the same time.

She then claims that Exon-Mobile was doing research to confirm this within two years. Exon is represented by the first white man we've seen - a fat guy with an evil look on his face. Plus there's another white guy representing politicians who "knew all along and did nothing". This launches into a long-standing conspiracy theory on the left: that the oil companies knew that global warming was real and suppressed the information

Onto James Hansen's presentation to Congress in 1988. She tells us that Hansen was a top NASA scientist but fails to mention that he spent decades saying "we only have 4-5 years to save the planet". Hansen is the only white guy who doesn't look evil in the video. She tells us that Hansen was 99% certain that global warming was already happening. That's a meaningless figure since it just tells us that Hansen was certain, not that he was right.

Back to Exon and how terrible they are. She doubles down on the conspiracy theory that Exon is behind any doubt about global warming.

She talks about the time lost because of the evil Exon and the animals that have gone extinct. The graphic shows a pair of rhinos. This is an outright lie. Rhinos aren't threatened because of global warming. They are threatened because of poachers who kill them for their horns.

She talks about the hurricane that hit "the place where her family is from, Puerto Rico". She calls the hurricane a "climate bomb" and compares it to 9/11. Technically, her family isn't exactly from Puerto Rico. She's decided from Spanish who colonized the island before moving to New York. The damage the hurricane caused was because the country's electrical system was already failing because of governmental corruption. The estimated death toll used highly questionable methodology.

And she threw out the "12 years to cut emissions in half" warning. That's just the latest in three decades of "act now or else" predictions. They are not based on science, they are propaganda. If these predictions were based on science then we'd have been past the tipping point years ago. But, AOC is young and hasn't learned to be skeptical. Instead she's calling on us to change EVERYTHING.

Now we hit the meat of the video. Socialism. The economy's broken, too much money goes to the people at the top. The Great Depression! World War Two (with Rosie the Riveter as a black woman).

Then she moves on to her future history with the Democrats taking the Senate and the White House in 2020 and launching the "Decade of the Green New Deal" which includes Medicare for All and nationalization of wages.  Look, even if the Democrats gain complete control of Congress and the White House, the rest just isn't going to happen.

According to AOC, the biggest problem at the beginning was that there was a labor shortage. This is a nod to illegal immigration. We need to import all the workers we can get to rebuild everything.

Then she personalizes it with a girl from AOC's old neighborhood, Iliana (I may have gotten the spelling wrong). Iliana's first job after graduating from college (at government expense?) is to restore wetlands in Louisiana. They are shown planting mangroves and removing pipelines BY HAND. No polluting earth movers here. This answers why there's a labor shortage.It takes a lot of people to replace machines. By the way, they had to get "generational knowledge" from native Americans on how to plant mangroves and remove pipelines.

Ileana soon realizes that digging by hand in Louisiana is hellish work and moves on to being a solar plant engineer before getting a job at a child care center. Since everyone seems to get the same wages no matter what the work, there was probably a waiting list years long to get one of those easy child care jobs. We never do get a hint of what Ileana's degree is in.

But not everything is perfect and Hurricane Sheldon put parts of Miami underwater "for the last time". That's not how hurricanes work. They cause a storm surge which recedes.

There were still hurricanes and droughts and other problems but making universal health care and government jobs a human right made everything just swell.

Eventually Ileana runs for Congress and wins AOC's seat in a publicly funded election. I'm not sure how digging in the swamps or minding kids qualifies you for Congress but if they let a waitress in, I guess they'll let anyone in.

AOC closes by thinking back to riding the old school Amtrak train in 2019. This is another lie. It implies that she used the train to travel between DC and NYC but she always takes the plane.

So that's AOC's vision for the future - a socialist paradise where everyone has brown skin, college graduates go on to dig in the swamps, and everyone seems to work for the government. It's framed as a kids story so all of the hard stuff is glossed over and everyone lives happily everafter.

What Really Happened

The Meuller Report is due out in a few hours. In advance of it, here's what really happened that led up to it.

Let's start with Putin. He misses the old USSR and has been trying to reassert Russian as a dominant world power since the Bush administration. But Putin was afraid of Hillary Clinton. It was no secret that she was the hawk in the Obama administration. She was the one who talked Obama into carrying out the raid that killed bin Ladin and into overthrowing Libya. Putin worried that without Obama to restrain her, he'd be the next one she toppled. So, when Bernie Sanders emerged as Hillary's chief rival, he took some actions to help Bernie. Specifically, he had the DNC's mail server and Clinton's campaign chief's email account hacked.

Julian Assage, founder of Wikileaks has been praised as a truth-teller and a journalist. Actually he's nothing but an anti-American crank who delights in publishing anything that will embarrass the US, regardless of who gets hurt. He wasn't working for the Russians but he was all too happy to publish any dirt they could dig up. Most of it was published early in the campaign and did more to help Bernie than anything else.

But the game was rigged from the beginning. The Clintons owned the DNC. In exchange for bailing them out from potential bankruptcy, the Clintons got control of the party. Poor Bernie never had a chance.

Enter Donald Trump. He was one of a gaggle of candidates. When Putin said something complimentary about him, Trump refused to disown it. And Trump had done some business before in Russia. Since Russia is corrupt, you can't do any business there without working with people who have ties to the Kremlin. Plus, Trump wasn't expected to win so he continued to pursue business deals including some already in progress in Russia (which fell through in part because they didn't have any direct ties to the Kremlin).

That was enough for the Clinton campaign. They started floating rumors about Trump and Russia. Then they used a shell company to hire Fusion GPS to find some Russian connections. They subcontracted an ex-British spy named Steele who subcontracted the work to some contacts in Russia. They collected a bunch of salacious stories which became the Steele Dossier. This was shopped around to members of Congress including Sen. John McCain who passed it on to the FBI and to several newsrooms. The Justice Department already had a copy of the Dossier because a top Fusion officer was married to a top DOJ official and she passed it to him.

For good measure, Fusion had some Russians offer information to the Trump campaign.

During his presidency, Obama had staffed the DOJ, the FBI and the CIA with people who were personally loyal to him. They didn't care much for Hillary Clinton but they recognized her as Obama's chosen successor so they moved against the Trump campaign. They chose a low-level staffer and used the Steele Dossier to get a FISA warrant to spy electronically eavesdrop on the Trump campaign.

None of this was used because Trump was expected to lose the election. A few rumors were floated but no serious charges were made.

At the same time they conducted a show-investigation of Hillary's use of a private email server. This was difficult because they found several actual felonies. In order to keep from discrediting the Clinton campaign they were generous in granting immunity in exchange for testimony. They also had to rewrite the laws concerning handling confidential information to include intent. And they had a last-minute problem when an unrelated investigation into Anthony Weiner for  child-porn discovered that Clinton and her assistant had been forwarding emails to Weiner to print. After putting off the field agents for weeks, James Comey, the head of the FBI, made a show of reopening the investigation. It was all a show and Comey lied about the results, hiding the fact that Hillary had forwarded confidential emails to someone who didn't even work for the government so he could print them off at home.

Besides their involvement with Wikileaks, the Russians bought some targeted ads through social media. They spent less than $1 million. More than half the ads were anti-Clinton but they also ran anti-Trump ads, too. The purpose was not to swing the election. It was to create divisiveness. If you will remember, Putin hated Hillary, and she was projected to win anyway so they ran more anti-Hillary ads than anti-Trump ones but they an both. This is what the Russians do - they run ads to try to disrupt elections and weaken their rivals.

Unexpectedly Trump won. The Clintons couldn't just let it go that she lost a race that was hers to lose. So the day after the election they invented an excuse - it wasn't her fault, it was Comey and the Russians. You heard Hillary say variations of that again and again.

The Russians continued to push divisiveness. The weekend after the election they were pushing pro and anti Trump rallies.

This left FBI Director Comey with a dilemma.He now worked for a man he hated. So he started undermining Trump. He knew that all the major newsrooms had the Steele dossier but that it was too unsubstantial to print without a hook. So he had a private briefing with the president-elect and informed him that the Russians claimed to have a tape of him hiring prostitutes to pee in a bed that Obama had slept in. Then he told the press that he had informed Trump that the Russians had possible blackmail material on him. This would have totally undercut Trump's presidency except Buzzfeed got carried away and printed the entire Steele Dossier. Once it became public, it was easily disproved.

Regardless, the FBI went after Trump's security advisor, Ret. General Flynn and engaged in possible entrapment. Trump made a comment to Comey about hoping that they went easy on Flynn. Comey later claimed that this was obstruction of justice..

Comey was playing a double game. The FBI revived their investigation into Russia and began investigating Trump personally. They leaked that to the press while repeatedly telling the White House that Trump was not being investigated. Eventually Trump got fed up and fired Comey.

But Comey had one last shot. He took some confidential memos with him and leaked them to a friend who in turn leaked them to the press. The goal of all of this was to get a special prosecutor appointed. Comey must have known that there was no Russian collusion but once a special prosecutor starts, he seldom wraps up his investigation without finding something.

And yes, Meuller did find some things. None of them were related to the Trump campaign but he did get some people indicted.

Which brings us to the upcoming release of the Meuller report.

Ilhan Omar and 9/11

US Representative Ilhan Omar addressed a meeting of CAIR in March. During her 20-minute speech she included this:

"Here's the truth. For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen and, frankly, I'm tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,"

Lots of people have picked up on her reducing the worst terrorist attack on American soil to "some people did something". This was outrageous but it has been remarked on elsewhere by people far more prominent than I am. I'm going to comment on the total ignorance shown in the rest of that passage.

According to Wikipedia, CAIR was founded in 1994 after Arabs were portrayed as terrorists in the movie True Lies. It only took me a minute to look that up but Omar got it wrong while addressing over 500 members of that organization. She's old enough to remember the event. She was already living in America at the time. She should remember that CAIR immediately jumped in and predicted that a wave of Islamophobia was about to blanket the country. Which didn't happen because Americans can tell the difference between Muslims living peacefully here and extremists living in caves in Afghanistan.

She it probably referring to the Patriot Act when she talked about losing access to civil liberties but that had nothing to do with Muslims, either. So she described a attack my radical Muslims as "some people" then implied that American Muslims started losing their civil rights.

When challenged on this, she responded with a quote from President G. W. Bush who promised to get the people who caused the destruction and claimed it was comparable. Again, she's old enough to remember the circumstances of Bush's quote. He was standing in front of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. It was just a few days after the attack and the CIA was still determining who the attackers were. Bush wasn't trying to minimize the attack, he was promising vengeance for it.

The common thread here is that Rep. Omar keeps misrepresenting history. The big question is if she is doing this deliberately or if she is oblivious to her own ignorance. Either way it's scary coming from a member of Congress.

How the Democrats are Going to Lose in 2020

I've written before about the advantages President Trump has going into the 2020 election. Now I'll talk about what the Democrats are doing wrong.

First a note on strategy. There are three things a campaign can do. It can try to turn out the base, depress the other side's base, and convince swing voters to vote for their candidate. Most campaigns use two of these and some use all three. Hillary Clinton entered the race so well-known that it was difficult for her to appeal to swing voters so she concentrated on appealing to the Obama coalition and to trying to depress the rump vote. In fact, 90% of her ads were meant to depress Trump voters. They were direct attacks on Trump without bothering to offer herself as an alternative. Trump's campaign went after swing voters including many blue-collar workers who had been considered safely Democrat. Obviously Trump's strategy worked and Clinton's didn't. She got fewer votes than Obama and only did well in states that were safely blue.

So, onto 2020.

Right off the bat, the Democrats have a problem. In fact they have a dozen problems and growing. There are too many candidates. There are 18 or 19 with more expected including Joe Biden. That will get winnowed down pretty fast when the primaries start but it's going to cause enormous problems in the meantime. A related problem is that the candidates are all so similar. The party has a list of litmus tests that each candidate must pass to even be considered. With so many candidates running on nearly the same platform it's difficult for any one of them to stand out. There are multiple women and multiple blacks. There's only one openly gay candidate so far and he's managed to push into the upper tier, probably because of support from gays, but he's the major of a medium-sized city. That's not much to run on.

It takes a lot of money to run a presidential campaign. I order to have any chance of getting the nomination you have to have campaign headquarters in multiple states, preferably all of them plus a few territories. Clinton didn't do that in 2008 and it cost her the nomination. But there's only so much money to go around and with so many candidates, each running on nearly the same platform, it will be difficult for any of them to set up a national primary challenge. On the right side, this will make it easier for one or two to break free of the pack early on. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the two most likely to break free of the pack are Biden and Saunders. Both have significant name recognition and they consistently lead in the polls. I say unfortunate because they are both too old for the job. Trump set a record for the oldest candidate but these two are just shy of 80 and look it. Biden already floated the idea of running for a single term with a black female running mate who would take over from him in 2024 (She turned it down and is considering her own run).

Biden and Sanders have other problems. Biden is unexciting and has a problematic history. He was always a solid Democrat but the party has moved so far to the left that mainstream Deocratic positions he supported in the 1990s are now anathema to a candidate. He may be able to attract swing voters back but the base will not turn out for him. Sanders has the opposite problem. He's not even a Democrat, he's a Democratic-Socialist. He excites the base but union workers with good healthcare aren't going to swing back to vote for him.

The rest of the field has to contend with a party that is very different than it seems on social media. According to the New York Times, the Democrats engaged in social media are far whiter and further left than the majority of the party. The entire slate except for Biden is playing for the social media crowd. That will fire up the base but won't attract swing voters. There is little they can do to depress the Trump vote, either. Clinton already played that card.

So the party is caught between three choices. Biden is a safe choice but, between his age, his past positions and being an old, white man who's been around forever, he's not going to fire up the base. Saunders is old and radical and Trump would probably come out way ahead in debates. No one else has the stature to defeat a sitting president. They might excite the base but they are all too radical to attract swing voters.

Elizabeth Warren deserves special mention. Had she run in 2016 then she'd be in the top tier instead of Saunders. She was widely quoted and respected 8 years ago but she chose not to run in 2016. She probably calculated that Clinton was unstoppable and has a reputation of being unforgiving. The prospect of being senator under a hostile President Hillary was too daunting. When she decided not to run, her supporters moved over to Saunders and enthusiasm for Warren cooled. Then she released her DNA results and tried being relatable by live-streaming getting a beer. All of this pushed her from a contender to the middle of the pack.

Finally, on top of everything else, Trump is on the right side of the issues. A solid majority thinks that illegal immigration is a problem and a super majority is against open borders. Most people are satisfied with their insurance (which is why Obamacare only affected people who did not have insurance through their employer) and most people are skeptical of the Green New Deal. The issues that excite the Democratic base turn off the general electorate and are not even overwhelmingly popular among the greater Democratic Party.

So, baring an economic collapse or a miraculous U-turn on issues by the Democrats, Trump is likely to be reelected.

Saving the Electoral College

A ballot measure has been approved in Ohio to direct that the state's electors from the presidential election will vote for the winner of the popular vote rather than the winner in Ohio. This is part of a national movement to circumvent the Electoral College through state initiatives. So far, although it has passed in several states, it has been limited to states that Hillary Clinton carried. The proposed Ohio amendment is an effort to change the way a large swing state is counted. This is a very bad idea.

The Electoral Collage is part of the Constitution. There is a well-known mechanism for amending the Constitution but it requires super-majorities of Congress to pass followed by ratification by a super-majority of state legislatures. The supporters of this know that their chances of passing these hurdles are small and the chance of doing this before the election is non-existent so they have chosen to make an end-run around the Constitution at the state level. The Constitution explicitly forbids agreements between states without the consent of Congress so even if this succeeds it is likely to be overturned in the courts.

There is a twisted irony that supporters want to amend the Ohio Constitution as an end run around the Ohio Legislature in order to circumvent the US Constitution.

While supporters of the measure talk about making every vote count, the initiative is really aimed at helping Democrats in the wake of the 2000 and 2016 elections where the victor of the Electoral College did not win the popular vote. It's worth remembering that Democrats were supportive of the Electoral College when a swing of less than 2% in Ohio would have given John Kerry an Electoral College win. The Electoral was a big factor in Hillary Clinton's "blue wall" that was supposed to deny Donald Trump a path to victory.

Of course the United States is not a direct republic where every vote counts. It is a federation of states and was designed to assure that states with smaller populations have a louder voice so as not to be dominated by a handful of large states. This is even more true today when the population is polarized between the cities and the rest of the country. A map of election results by state is misleading. It's only when you look at it by county or precinct that you see how support for Democrats is limited to high-density areas.

So, a vote is a vote, right? So should it shouldn't matter where the voters are, right? Not exactly. According to the book, Shattered, during the 2016 campaign Bill Clinton wanted to campaign in the suburbs and rural areas but was overridden by Hillary's campaign staff which felt that it wasn't cost-effective. They had calculated that there were enough voters in the cities to give Hillary the win so there was no reason to court rural voters. Even when Hillary did leave the cities, she was still playing for them. At one point she told a group in South-Eastern Ohio that she was going to put a lot of coal miners out of work. She went on to talk about training them for new jobs but everyone listening knew that when the major employer in a small community is eliminated then there are jobs regardless of your training. They knew this, Hillary knew this and they knew that Hillary knew it. She was sending a message to the cities that she was serious about global warming and uttering platitudes about caring for displaced workers so the city people wouldn't feel guilty. Because of this, neighboring West Virginia voted for Trump by a wide margin.

Consider Columbus, Ohio. The population inside the city limits is larger than the three least populated states. The population of the Columbus Metro area (which includes Delaware and Zanesville) is larger than the 15 least populated states and larger than the three smallest states combined. And Columbus is the 32nd largest metro district out of 383. It costs significantly more to campaign in those smaller states than in Columbus so why would any candidate bother? President Trump confirmed this in a tweet talking about the difference between an Electoral campaign and a popular vote one. When all that counts is the popular vote then mostly-rural states will never see a presidential candidate and will have no one representing them.

And let's not even think about the nightmare of a national recount in case of a lose election.

Heartbreak and the Mueller Report

It's been over a week since Special Council Mueller announced that he was not making any further indictments and it's been nearly a week since Attorney General Barr released a four-page summary of Mueller's report with the conclusion that no one in the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to win the election or obstructed justice to end the investigation. This came as no surprise to Trump supporters who always viewed the investigation as an attempt at a coup. On the other hand, the left greeted the news that there would be no indictment of President Trump or his family with literal tears. In the days since Barr's summary was released they have fixated on the idea that there must be something hidden in the full report. I've seen speculation that there's a road map for Congress to use to impeach the President and remove him from office.

This is highly unlikely. If Barr had mis-characterized the report then certainly Mueller would have said so publicly. So why is the left so reluctant to believe that the legally-elected president of the United States won his office legally?

Part of the answer is the irrational hatred that the left has for Republican presidents in general and Trump in particular. They can't stand to see him in office and had been counting on the report to remove him. Moreover, a lot of people on the left wanted the accusations to be true. Thank about what it would mean if Trump needed Russian assistance to win the election.

Had Trump actually colluded with the Russians then it would have been the end of the Republican Party. Not only would Trump be removed but there would be demands that Vice-President Pence appoint a Democrat as his replacement then resign himself along with all of the Republicans in Congress. The Republican Party would be reduced to a smoldering heap with the Democrats accusing any of them who won an election of having been helped by Russians.

That's what the left was really hoping for - a result that made them the only party in the United States. From then on, the only races would be between moderate-left and far-left.

Those soaring hopes went crashing to the earth with the announcement of Trump's innocence but so strong was the desire that they have now convinced themselves that the full report has evidence that was somehow hidden from Barr but will still serve to bring down Trump and the Republicans.

Conspiracy Theories That Aren't True

The Clintons didn't have associates assassinated.

George W. Bush didn't have advanced knowledge about 9/11, the World Trade Center wasn't blown up with explosives and Bush didn't order the levees in New Orleans destroyed in order to flood out the black populous.

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, not Kenya.

There was no abort order for a rescue mission at Bengazi.

Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to hack the 2016 election nor do the Russians have blackmail material on him.

Are the Democratic Candidates Going Too Far?

Back in 2008, candidate Barack Obama said that marriage was "one man, one woman", that "no one's coming for your guns" and "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your insurance plan, you can keep your insurance plan.". By the end of his administration he had reversed all of these promises.

So what are we to make of the current crop of candidates? Various candidates have come out in favor of abolishing insurance companies entirely, making gun ownership difficult to impossible, "reforming capitalism" by partially taking control of all large corporations, abolishing ICE and presumably allowing open borders, incorporating illegal immigrants into Social Security, abolishing the Electoral Collage, reparations for slavery, and the Green New Deal which makes Mao's Great Leap Forward seem modest.

There are two possibilities. One is that they are in a bidding war to win the support of the activist wing of the Democratic Party and they will moderate their platform for the general election. The other is that they really are as radical as they sound and, while they might fail at their major goals, they will still push to fundamentally transform America far beyond anything President Obama imagined.

Is this electable? The assumption has been that President Trump is so far outside the norms and anyone can beat him. Since anyone can win, they reason, then they might as well shoot for the moon.

This will probably backfire. By pushing the limits of society so far, the Democrats are making Trump seem like the safe candidate. The current slate of candidates seems like they are auditioning for the reboot of the George McGovern campaign.

The Democrats Come Out as Hating Hate

So here's where we're at: newly-minted Representative Ilhan Omar made a number of public statements that came across as highly antisemitic. She claimed that the only reason Congress supports Israel is because a Jewish lobby bribes them to and accused Jewish members of Congress of putting their loyalty to Israel ahead of their loyalty to the US. Her statements were bad enough to win the approval of former KKK member David Duke.

Rep, Omar is brand new to Congress but she has experience as a elected official so she should know that you don't start insulting minorities in public. Apparently she's so much in the antisemitic bubble that she ca't help herself.

Speaker Pelosi attempted a mild rebuke by introducing a blanket resolution condemning antisemitism. It didn't mention Omar by name but we all know why she proposed it. But then Omar's supporters rallied to her defense. Rater than pushing ahead, Pelosi sent the resolution to the Foreign Relations Committee for "editing". Omar is a member of that committee meaning that she got to rewrite the document that was meant as a rebuke for her antisemitism. The new version still condemned antisemitism but added in anti-Muslim and white supremacy in, too. It passed, of course, and Omar claimed victory for getting the first pro-Muslim resolution passed by the House.

So, instead of rebuking Omar, they made her a hero. And, faced with increasing charges of antisemitism within their ranks, the Democrats could not straight-out say it's bad.

About the New Green Deal

'If you don't like the #GreenNewDeal, then come up with your own ambitious, on-scale proposal to address the global climate crisis. Until then, we're in charge—and you're just shouting from the cheap seats.'  - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The Green New Deal is not a proposal. It's a wish list and issuing it doesn't put AOC in charge any more than a kid making out a list for Santa. The GND doesn't even have the level of detail that the now-retracted FAQ had and it barely scratched the surface. Here's a few questions to be answered before AOC gets to be in charge:

What do you envision for the electrical grid? If it's a mix of wind and solar then how will you store energy during the day for use at night? How will you cope with fluctuations in the wind? In February the wind died in Minnesota during a Polar Vortex. Do you anticipate allowing gas-fired generators for emergencies such as this or do you intend to build enough surplus generation elsewhere along with additional transmission lines or do you expect people to shiver in the cold until the wind starts again?

Under current laws and regulations, it will take most of the ten years you envision to implement your plan just to do environmental impact studies and acquire right-of-way. Do you intend to give the federal government unlimited control to seize property and ignore environmental concerns?

Exactly what are you planning for transportation? Airplanes are a major source of CO2 so becoming carbon-neutral has to include major cutbacks on flights. How will it be decided which flights are still allowable? What about cars? Will you simply outlaw internal combustion passenger cars and expect people to replace them with electrical vehicles? Do you envision a one-for-one replacement or will the number of vehicles be drastically reduced? If so then how will people move from place to place?

What are your plans for trucks and farm tractors? There are currently no electrical replacements for these. Similarly, current technology cannot replace container ships with electrical ones. Do you intend for us to return to the days of the clipper ship?

How do you expect to pay for the GND? Estimates have put it above $90 trillion. That's literally more than all the money in the world. The CIA estimates that the world gold reserves are $8 trillion and the world currencies amount to $80 trillion. What do you expect the effects on the world currencies will be if the US doubles it, all by ourselves?

Do you anticipate needing changes to the Constitution in order to implement the GND? If so, then what do you propose?

Given the magnitude of the unanswered issues above, you are not the boss, you are just a kid with a list for Santa.

The Problem with Hoax Crimes

First there were the MAGA-hat-wearing Covington Kids who were accused of surrounding a native American elder and mocking him. Then Jussie Smollett claimed that two Trump supporters beat him, put a noose around his neck and poured bleach on him. Both turned out to be hoaxes but not until they had gotten sustained national attention. There have been numerous other, similar hoax crimes - hate crimes that turned out to be hoaxes. The purpose of the majority of these hoxes is to discredit Trump voters.

These always play out the same way, First someone announces that a hate crime was committed and that it was inspired by President Trump. People who hate Trump spread the word and point to this as an example of how the President empowers hate crimes. Then, when it comes out as a hoax, Trump-haters complain that it distracts from actual hate crimes which are increasing.

What never, ever happens is Trump-haters reevaluating why they were so ready to believe so many false claims. Instead, each false claim seems to reinforce their belief in violent, hateful Trump supporters. A few, such as an editor for the Washington Post, have come out and said that they need such crime to be true and that they would prefer that then to know that Trump supporters are not roaming wealthy sections of Chicago in sub-freezing temperatures looking for black gays to attack.

They need incidents like this as a way of bludgeoning Trump supporters. "You see?" they say, "You are associated with terrible people. If you don't repent then you are complicit in everything done in Trump's name." Even hoaxes are somehow evidence of Trump's malign influence.

All of this has a cumulative effect. After the two widely-publicized MAGA incidents this year people have proclaimed that the red MAGA cap is the new Klan hood. And no one announced that MAGA caps are OK after all when the crimes turned out to be hoaxes. There's also danger in this. At least a few real hate crimes have been perpetrated against people in MAGA caps and conservatives in general. A clerk in a store shouted at a 14-year old because of his MAGA cap, someone else actually pointed a gun at someone because of his MAGA cap and someone at a Turning Points USA table at a college was punched in the face for spreading hate. These incidents are barely publicized, even though all of them are worse than what the college kids were accused of doing. And all have been confirmed by police reports or unedited video.

It also has the effect of dividing the country further politically. We are currently at the point where the Democrats are basing their positions on opposing President Trump rather than on what's best for the nation.

I should mention that real hate crimes do exist and the number of reported incidents is up. This does not mean that hate crimes are up. The number of bodies reporting has increased and it's entirely possible that people are quicker to take offense and report an incident as a hate crime. Also, and this is really important, the largest increase by capita is hate crimes against Jews. It's likely that a large portion of this is coming from the left instead of from the right. The New York Times has reported that in the last 22 months, none of the antisemitic acts in NYC have been traced to anyone associated with right-wing politics.

Hate Crimes and Hoaxes

The Mainstream Media love to report on hate crimes. This is nothing new although its gone into high gear since the election of President Trump and the certainty that he is using dog signals to his supporters encouraging hate crimes. But a lot of events reported as hate crimes often turn out to be nothing of the sort.

One example is from the 1990s when the media reported on a string of black churches being burned. The FBI did extensive investigation and discovered that there was nothing to this. It turned out that since there are tens of thousands of churches in the country, several have fires every year. Many churches have electrical problems and their steeples make them susceptible to lightening strikes. These accounted for most of the church fires. The few remaining ones were set by disgruntled members of the parish or by someone to disguise a robbery. None of the fires could be attributed to hate crimes.

So, how to tell if a reported story is a hate crime or not? There are some red flags to make people skeptical.

First, how deeply was the story investigated? Hoaxes and false reports are normally rushed to print before any formal investigation. A recent example is the Covington Catholic High School kids taunting a Native American elder. No one bothered contacting the school to hear the kids' side of it nor did anyone ask for a copy of the full video. They went with a short, edited clip with narration rather than sound. Independent investigators watched dozens of hours of video and interviewed hundreds of people before deciding that it was a hoax.

Listen to the details the presumed victim gives. If they can't describe their attacker beyond race or if major details change then these are red flags that we are getting an incomplete or inaccurate story. Nathan Phillips, the so-called Native American elder, changed his story constantly. First he claimed that he was leading a protest and the kids walked up to him and surrounded him, blocking his way. Then he claimed that he was breaking up a potential fight between the kids and a separate group. Jussie Smollett claimed that he couldn't even tell the race of his attackers and his story changed several times.

Right now the biggest red flag that a story is a hoax is if the attacker proclaims that he is motivated by President Trump or is wearing a MAGA cap. There have been dozens of reported incidents Since Trump was elected and most of the ones that have been solved turned out to be hoaxes. The "victims" have admitted that they want to be part of the resistance by polarizing opinion against the president. The hoax attacks always get much more publicity than the follow-up. One local incident made the front page of the local section of the paper shortly after the 2016 election when a college student said that she was attacked by MAGA-cap wearing men who said that Trump's election meant that it was OK to assault women. The eventual follow-up was at the bottom of page 6 and only said that a student admitted to filing a false report. You had to look up her name to see what that false report had been.

There is also a tendency to leap to conclusions when an actual hate crime occurs. Reported incidents of antisemitism are way up and the mainstream media usually cites Trump's election as the cause. But antisemitism is climbing among the left and incidents of antisemitism are highest on college campuses that have strong support for the anti-Israel BDS movement. Unless perpetrators are caught, it's just as likely that antisemitism hate crimes are coming from the left as from the right. But, because most members of the media support the left and think of themselves as decent people, the leap to the conclusion that all antisemitism comes from the right.

This rush to judgement is a general problem. The left-leaning media wants reasons to discredit the president so, when a too-good-to-check story comes along, they report first and either issues retractions or ignore things when the true story gets out.

AOC and Amazon

After a nationwide search for a new headquarters, Amazon finally announced that it would build two, one in New York City and one in the DC area. This meant 25,000 jobs for each city along will billions in new tax revenue. To get their headquarters, New York agreed to several conditions including waving 10% of the taxes. $3 billion out of a expected $30 billion. Alexandria Acasio-Cortez had a fix over this and fought to kill the deal and eventually succeeded. She then suggested that NYC spent the $3 billion on teachers' salaries.

Excuse me while I bang my head on the wall for a few minutes...

Ok. Now, I'm going to make an amazing admission, AOC was right about the tax incentives that cities give large employers. They are unfair. Smaller companies can't get similar concessions so this means that government policy favors large companies over smaller ones. Government should provide an even playing field instead of one that gives advantages to large companies. Also, in many cases the companies would move there anyway, they just want the most advantageous deal they can get.

That's the theory. The practice is that companies can and do give tax breaks and other incentives to attract large employers. The rewards are great - more tax revenues to pay for expanded city services and more people employed. So the practice is not going to stop unless the federal government steps in and forbids it nationwide. That's the reality.

Given that reality, NYC got a good deal. In addition to bringing new jobs and tax revenue, Amazon was going to invest in the area. I can understand people objecting because of the disruption it would cause to their neighborhood to have a giant headquarters move in. And some of the objections came from people with those concerns. But AOC seemed to be morally offended by the tax breaks. To her it's better to forego 25,000 jobs than to give a large, powerful corporation any incentives.

Of course, Amazon still needs those workers so they will just enlarge their other headquarters included the one being built in DC. Other areas will benefit at NYC's expense. Way to go AOC.

But there is still the matte of the $3 billion that she claims NYC was going to pay Amazon. She has that backwards and sideways. Imagine buying a car. You tell the salesman (yes, salesman. I've never had a woman try to sell me a car) that you will buy the top of the line car but only if they will knock 10% off of the price. The salesman goes to his manager who agrees but then the salesman thinks better of it and says full-price or nothing. The customer proceeds to buy the car from a different dealer who will give the 10% off. Now imagine what the manager will say when the salesman says "I just saved you 10% on that car, can I have the money?" That's what AOC did.

And she celebrated that she did it.

AOC and the GND

I've seen pundits question if conservatives are obsessing over Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez (AOC) (with implications that it's somehow because she's a brown woman). No, we're not obsessing over her but we are taking her very seriously. Certainly we like to share when she makes dumb remarks (nearly every time she opens her mouth) but it's not because of her gender or ethnicity. It's because the left takes her so seriously. She's been anointed the "Socialist It GIrl". Micheal Moore says she's the head of the Democratic Party. She's got more people paying attention to her on social media than any other member of Congress. And, in only her second month, she introduced a resolution that most of the Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed. So, we'd be fools not to take her seriously. She's a major force. She's also scary.

The rollout for the Green New Deal is an excellent example of why she's scary. It calls for a massive change in the relationship of the government and the governed. It does away with entire sectors of government and calls on the government to be the employer of last resort (or possibly first resort). It commits the government to spending many times the entire national income (GDP) with no funding source except loans and printing money. It would profoundly affect the life of nearly every citizen in the country. And when asked about the scope of this, she says that she's fine with it.

Then there's the rollout itself. The Green New Deal (GND) was rolled out in two parts. The official resolution had several co-sponsors. It's a general document. That's what the candidates have endorsed. There was also a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file that her office released at the same time. This went into a lot more detail about how the general resolution would be implemented. It also had some snarky sections which where immediately seized on. When asked about these parts, her staff originally claimed that they were fakes from conservative sites. After it was shown that the metadata listed AOC's chief of staff as the author they backtracked and said it was a draft document that was released by mistake.

It's far more likely that the FAQ is exactly what it was originally described as: details about how the GND would be implemented. Things like eliminating internal combustion vehicles are consistent with other public statements that AOC has made. One phrase, " economic security to all those who are unable or unwilling to work" got a lot of criticism. The actual text of the GND calls for economic security for all Americans". There is no exception for those unwilling to work so the two statements say the same thing.

So the FAQ represents AOC's vision for the GND. But she didn't bother to run it past any of her cosponsors or any of the candidates who endorsed it. So she left them hanging in the wind.

I can see two futures for AOC. Either the party will quickly tire of her and quash her or she will be President within a decade and the US as we know it will be gone by the end of her administration.

And that's why I take her seriously and find her scary.

Kavanaugh and Fairfax

During the Kavanaugh Hearings, a parade of women came forth accusing the Judge of sexual assault. None of the accounts were credible and most were proven to be outright lies. Regardless, the Democrats on the Senate Judicial Committee used this as an excuse to vote against the judge and there's talk of impeaching him. Considering that Judge Kavanaugh's sterling reputation was one reason he was nominated, it was a sorry spectacle. All semblance of due process was thrown out the window and we were told to believe all women, no matter how tenuous the accusation.

Now Virginia Lt. Governor Fairfax has been accused of sexual assault and/or rape by two women. The first accusation was known for a year but was uncorroborated, a nicety that was ignored with Kavanaugh. But now that the first accuser has gone public, a second one has come forward and she has contemporary documentation that the assault happened. Based on the Kavanaugh standards, Democrats are already demanding that he resign and impeachment is being discussed.

While there is some satisfaction in seeing a Democrat run afoul of the new standards, this is a terrible precedent. It's also terrible on college campuses where a man can be expelled without being able to confront his accuser. We must respect due process if we are to have a civil society.

The Democrats need to temper their demands for Fairfax to resign until the claims have been investigated. It's way too soon to talk of impeachment. That should come after a conviction or at least after Fairfax has actually been charged.

Why Trump Will Win in 2020

I've predicted Donald Trump's reelection victory before but not that the election is soaping up I'm even more sure of it. Here's why.

First, President Trump has history on his side. Incumbents seldom lose. Since World War Two, an incumbent has only lost twice (I'm not count Gerald Ford's 1976 loss since he wasn't even on the ballot in 1972). Also, polarizing presidents have done better when running for reelection than non-polarizing ones. Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush were all hated by the Democrats with a passion that rivals their hatred for Trump and all won handily. Nixon and Reagan each won 49 states. Nixon and Bush also had close elections on their initial run and increased their margin of victory in their reelection. The two presidents who lost reelection, Carter and G. W. H. Bush, didn't inspire strong feelings from either side. I could also make a case that Reagan's influence distorted both elections. He beat Carter and Bush won as Reagan's 3rd term but lost when he was running as his own man for reelection.

Second there's the candidates. None of them has any name recognition or presence. Joe Biden leads the pack, mainly because people know who he is. But he'll never get the nomination. He's too old and moderate. Bernie lost his charm half-way through the 2016 primary and is now nothing more than an aging scold. Warren isn't much better. She's at her best when a quote of hers goes viral. When she opens her mouth she sounds like the law professor that she was. And, unlike Obama, she doesn't manage to give the impression of deep insight. Plus she's already crippled herself with her attempts at damage-control over her claims to be an Indian. Others like Harris and Booker have no presence. Contrast all of these with Trump's State of the Union Address. Trump inspires, the rest scold.

Finally, there are the issues. Currently it looks like any candidate who wants to win the primary will need to be a socialist and will have to support a laundry list of issues. These include:

Medicare for all. For the last decade 60%-0% of voters say they are happy with their insurance. Obama's "if you like your insurance you can keep your insurance" lie of the year will be a millstone around their necks. Plus there's all the people who will be thrown out of work if we outlaw private insurance as Kamala Harris proposed. 2.5 million people work in the insurance industry. That means at least a million will lose their jobs. Plus the stock market will crater as insurance companies are put out of business which will destroy retirement funds. All of this alone is enough to sink a candidate.

Open borders. The more Trump cracks down on illegal immigrants, the more the Democrats want open borders. Eliminating ICE has become a battle cry. Arguably, Trump's call for a wall and his promise to crack down on illegal immigration is what won him blue-collar swing states where pressure from illegal immigrants depressed wages. Running on open borders will only appeal to people who were already going to vote against Trump.

Guns. For years common wisdom held that Al Gore lost in 2000 because he was anti-gun so Democrats stayed neutral on them. No more. These days Democrats are in a bidding war to see who's the most anti-gun. That will run up votes in New York and California, states that Trump will never win anyway, but there are a lot of single-issue voters in swing states that Democrats need and the are scaring those voters away.

Abortion. This is a case where the Democrats have taken a winning issue and turned it into a losing one through overreach. The last couple of weeks Democrats have pushed to expand abortions well past the point of viability. The Governor of Virginia is in favor of allowing abortion when a woman is in labor, or even after the baby is born. This will mobilize the Right-to-Life voters and convince a lot of people who are generally in favor of abortion that the Democrats have gone too far.

The Green New Deal. This is being pushed by AOC as a way of saving the Earth. It is also such an authoritarian proposal that it would mean the end of democracy as we know it in the US. It calls for replacing all carbon-based power with renewables, outlawing gas-powered cars (no grandfathering, either) and limiting private ownership of vehicles in general. And that's just the start. It also calls for outright socialism and wealth redistribution. Calling this radical is an understatement and outside think tanks have pointed out that such a huge societal upheaval is not compatible with a representational democracy.

So summarize, Democrats are fighting historic trends with lack-luster candidates and a slate of unpopular issues. Barring a 2008-style financial melt-down, they don't have a chance.

The 2019 SotU

Pundits have been predicting that President Trump would use his State of the Union speech to bash Democrats and declare a state of emergency. Neither happened, Instead he gave a true state of the union, ticking off his accomplishments and setting some reasonable goals. It was a far cry from the standard shopping list of things the president wants but will never happen that we've heard for the last several decades. Trump's speech was both uplifting and fun.

Best parts

• His guests. Most of them were special people. The list included two ex-convicts, some survivors of D-Day, one of whom also was par of the liberation of Holocaust victims and, beside him, a survivor of the Holocaust and of the Tree of Life shooting. He also had Buzz Aldrin, a young cancer survivor, and others. All of them deserved the applause they got.
• The spontaneous rendition of Happy Birthday for the Holocaust survivor with Trump conducting a few seconds. That was an amazing moment and shows American exceptionalism.
• Trump getting the women in white to stand and applaud. There were supposed to be there in white to protest him but he got them to applaud then joked that they weren't supposed to do that.
• Trump denouncing Socialism.
  

The worst parts

• The Democrats, particularly the women in white refusing to applaud things like record low minority unemployment.
• Speaker Pelosi constantly looking through a stack of papers. As far as I can tell, she had marked where in the speech she was supposed to send pre-written tweets and was having trouble keeping her place. This was an amazingly disrespectful performance.

Other observations

• The hard core women in white were all in the front. They refused to applaud for much of anything. The women behind them were much looser and more likely to applaud.
• The Democratic response was largely wasted. Stacy Abrams spent too much time on her own biography and attributing her election loss to voter suppression.
• The Democrats had to use the loser of an election for give the response because nearly everyone else is running or expected to run and the party would erupt in civil war if one of the candidates got the national exposure that the response gives.
• Bernie Saunders spent almost a half hour, three times as long as Abrams, on his own response. I watched most of it. I think that this marks the end of his chances at the presidency. He sounded like a humorless old scold.
• Saunders argued that wages aren't as high as they were in 1972. This is irrelevant to nearly everyone since you have to be in your late 60s to have worked then. Earning power dropped precipitously in 1979 and has been growing ever since. There was a drop in 2008 but it has been more that regained and current earning power is about as high as it has been in 40 years. Bernie went back to 1972 because that was a historic high point. The rest of his speech was similarly weighted.

When Everyone's a White Nationalist

According to the Daily Beast, the New England Patriots are the team of white nationalists. Why? Because their owner, their coach and their quarterback all supported Trump. Plus they're from Boston and, apparently, Boston is a hotbed of racism.

And, by the way, if you root for the Patriots then you must be a white nationalist, too. Presumably, even if you're black. It doesn't matter if you actually believe in white nationalism or not. Just by rooting for a team with a tenuous connection to the president you are a white nationalist.

Some days it sucks to be a sport fan. Or a resident of Boston.