Friday, June 28, 2019

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?

Thursday, June 27, 2019

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.

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

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.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

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.

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

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.

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

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.

Saturday, June 08, 2019

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.

Thursday, June 06, 2019

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.

Tuesday, June 04, 2019

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.

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Why Rep. Rashida Tlaib needs to apologize

On a recent podcast, Rep. Tlaib said this:
There's always kind of a calming feeling, I tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people's passports. And just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, and it was forced on them.

She was quickly criticized by President Trump among others. Then House Speaker Pelosi claimed that her statement was taken out of context and that the President should be the one to apologize. Pelosi is wrong.

It's true that, taken out of context, the first part of this gives the false impression that Tlaib said that the murder of Jews gives her a calming feeling. But Trump didn't repeat the quote in part or in all. He simply referenced it.

Tlaib was engaging in Holocaust revisionism. She was claiming that the Palestinians welcomed the Jews into Israel to escape the Holocaust. Lots of groups and countries do that to escape the guilt of having done nothing. The entire world including the US stood by and did nothing to help the millions who were murdered. In fact, the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular never welcomed the Jews.

But then Tlaib goes a step further and frames it as "we invited the Jews in and they took our land, our jobs, our dignity and our existence". So Holocaust Remembrance became an excuse to vilify Israel. And that's why Tlaib needs to apologize.

Friday, April 26, 2019

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.

Thursday, April 25, 2019

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.

Friday, April 19, 2019

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.


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.
























Thursday, April 18, 2019

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.

Saturday, April 13, 2019

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.

Thursday, April 11, 2019

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.

Thursday, April 04, 2019

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.



Sunday, March 31, 2019

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.

Saturday, March 30, 2019

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.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

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.