The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 03.06.20

Posted on | March 6, 2020 | 2 Comments

– compiled by Wombat-socho


Apparently Ana Navarro is extremely sensitive about her weight and has friends at Twitter. Yup, suspended again. Meanwhile, deadlines for the FMJRA & Rule 5 Sunday are tomorrow at noon and midnight respectively. Please don’t forget to send in your links!


OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Socialism – The Dream Of Omnipotent Government
EBL: Jamestown
Twitchy: Conservative Woman Decimates #NeverTrump In Spectacular Thread
Louder With Crowder: MSNBC’s Brian Williams & Maya Gay Illustrate How Hard Simple Math Can Be
According To Hoyt: Knowledge & Culture
Monster Hunter Nation: House Of Assassins Now In Paperback
Vox Popoli: Immigration Is War, also, Modernity’s Frankenstein

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Family Court Hero Edition
American Conservative: JCS Chairman Retires, Immediately Becomes Paid Cheerleader For F-35
American Greatness: Without Consequences Or Penalties, FISA Should Expire, also, Progressive Liberalism As Death Cult
American Thinker: The Democratic Party Is Wounded & Dangerous
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Reboot Friday
Babalu Blog: Documents From Former USSR Show Soviets Regarded Sanders As A Stooge
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For March 6
Cafe Hayek: Masking Parasitism Doesn’t Make It Productive
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday, also, The Ghosts Of Gaddafi & Milosevic Haunt Syria
Da Tech Guy: The Difference Between Trump & Sanders, Explained Briefly
Don Surber: You Called Trump Hitler. Enjoy Biden & Sanders, also, Losers Demand A Woman VP Candidate
The Geller Report: Nazi Flag At Sanders Rally, also, American Taxpayers Pay $133,000 Per Refugee Resettled In U.S.
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, M58
Hollywood In Toto: Greed Isn’t Good – Fashion Satire Lacks Wit & Humanity, also, Why Swallow Is Indie Film’s New Cringe Classic
Legal Insurrection: NYT Editor & Brian Williams Fail At Math On Bloomberg Spending, also, February Jobs Report – 273,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment At 3.5% Despite Coronavirus Fears
The PanAm Post: Central Planning – The True Economic Chaos
Power Line: Joe Biden Is A Nasty Piece Of Work, also, Math Is Hard For Liberals
Shark Tank: FL Rep Val Demings Endorses Biden
Shot In The Dark: Sweet Sixteen
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – European Unity?
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, also, Sanders Supporter’s Animated Reaction To Biden’s Super Tuesday Gains
Victory Girls: Moms Are Throwing Period Parties For Girls
Volokh Conspiracy: Trump Campaign’s Libel Lawsuits Against NYT & Washington Post
Weasel Zippers: Biden Says He’s Open To Cash Payments For Slavery Reparations, also, FBI Dropped Ball On Terrorists Who Killed 70; Rand Paul Slams Comey
Mark Steyn: Pow Wow Ciao

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Category: Linkagery

Maryland Governor Declares State of Emergency Over Coronavirus Cases

Posted on | March 6, 2020 | 1 Comment

“Emergency” is not a synonym for “panic”:

The first three confirmed cases of coronavirus were reported in Maryland Thursday night. According to Gov. Larry Hogan the married couple in their 70s and an unrelated woman in her 50s from Montgomery County contracted COVID-19 while traveling abroad.
Hogan also declared a state of emergency in Maryland so that MEMA and the state health department can ramp up coordination between all state and local agencies and fast-track their response.
Although the governor said this news is “not a reason to panic,” he said residents should pay attention to information and be prepared. He also said Marylanders should go to work and schools like they normally do.
Here’s what else we know about the positive coronavirus cases in Maryland:

  • The state’s public health laboratory confirmed the first positive cases of coronavirus in the state.
  • The trio returned home from traveling abroad on Feb. 20. The state wasn’t notified until March 3.
  • On March 4, they brought themselves to a local hospital where they were tested. The results came back Thursday, March 5.
  • Officials would not say where they were traveling.
  • The three people are cooperating with authorities and are in “good condition” and not severely ill.
  • They are quarantined at home.
  • Maryland health officials are thoroughly investigating where the trio may have gone after they returned from international travel and who they may have interacted with.
  • Vice President Mike Pence and the CDC were notified of the cases as well as Montgomery County officials.

The site of this outbreak is probably not coincidental, as Montgomery County has one of the largest Asian-American communities on the East Coast, and notice that officials were reluctant to specify what foreign country these people had visited. Gov. Hogan is both (a) Republican and (b) very popular, despite (c) Maryland being an overwhelmingly Democrat state. He is efficient and businesslike, and declared a state of emergency not because the state is on the brink of a coronavirus pandemic, but simply so that he could use broader executive power to coordinate a statewide reponse. Everybody chill out.




 

Category: Health Care, Maryland

In The Mailbox: 03.05.20

Posted on | March 5, 2020 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.05.20

– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Never Underestimate The Power Of Human Stupidity
EBL: Elizabeth Warren’s Fever Dream
Twitchy: Kathy Griffin Dragged For Lecturing Rape Survivor About Her “Cruel Feed”
Louder With Crowder: Rashida Tlaib – If You’re Pro-Life, Stop Trying To Have Sex With Me

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: How Coptic Christianity Is Finding A Refuge In America
American Greatness: How a Soros Trojan Horse Took Down Chris Matthews And Is Poised To Bully Others Into Submission
American Thinker: The Democrat Descent Into Madness, Super Tuesday Edition
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Daffy Joe News
Babalu Blog: Russian Spy Ship Docks In Havana
BattleSwarm: Shotgun Texas Race Updates
Cafe Hayek: Toddler Brains
Camp Of The Saints: On Encouraging Entry Into The Trades…
CDR Salamander: Willing To Bet Your Life On The EU?
Da Tech Guy: Joe Biden Saved By The Mrs. Tessi Democrats, also, If We Could Stop Looking To The Federal Government To Solve All Our Problems, That Would Be Great
Don Surber: Jennifer Would Have Saved The Party
First Street Journal: Looks Like President Trump Is The Youth Candidate
Fred On Everything: Chuck Darwin & His Critters
The Geller Report: Iran Caught Hiding Nuclear Work, also, SCOTUS Refuses To Hear Appeal Of Jihadi Who Plotted To Behead Pamela Geller
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, The View From Curiosity
Hollywood In Toto: Burden Director – We Need More Racial Healing Movies Today
Legal Insurrection: Elizabeth Warren Drops Out, Won’t Endorse Anyone Yet, also, Norks’ Ballistic Bluster May Mask Major Epidemic
Megan McArdle: Elizabeth Warren Is Out, And Not Because Of Her Gender
Michelle Malkin: Missing Marizela – Nine Years
Power Line: Why Did MSNBC Sack Chris Matthews? also, Schuminations – Shame (2), (3), (4)
Shark Tank: FL Democrats Outpace Republicans, But Can They Beat Trump?
Shot In The Dark: The Right Profile
STUMP: Multi-Employer Pensions – Prior Bailout Plans’ Shortcomings & State Of Play
The Political Hat: Socially Just South Africa – Murder, Arson, & Forced Sterilization
This Ain’t Hell: Daryl Edwards – Phony SEAL & Fake Marine Barracks Survivor, also, Dems Go Full Retard At Supreme Court
Victory Girls: McConnell Calls Schumer SCOTUS Threats Dangerous & “Shameful”
Volokh Conspiracy: Tulsi Gabbard Loses “Free Speech” Lawsuit Against Google
Weasel Zippers: Dem Rep Ayanna Pressley Accuses Two SCOTUS Justices Of Being Sexual Predators, also, Schumer Spox States Senator Talking About Senate GOP, Not SCOTUS Justices

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Category: Linkagery

Ask Not for Whom the #MeToo Tolls: Beware of Soros-Funded Feminism

Posted on | March 5, 2020 | Comments Off on Ask Not for Whom the #MeToo Tolls: Beware of Soros-Funded Feminism

 

Because I never liked Chris Matthews, I enjoyed some schadenfreude at watching his partisan hack career ended by a #MeToo scandal. What I little suspected was the hidden hand behind that takedown:

[A]n obscure group called Ultraviolet just took down Chris Matthews—the former speechwriter for Tip O’Neill and Jimmy Carter who had successfully transformed himself into a professional talking head. Just like that, his 23 year run as an MSNBC staple on “Hardball” came to an abrupt end this week.
Founded in 2012, Ultraviolet did not achieve this awesome feat on its own. On the contrary, a sophisticated and well-funded progressive machine and media echo-chamber created, amplified, and executed the plan to take out Matthews — and many more individuals, companies, and organizations before him.
With hundreds of millions of dollars from billionaire financier George Soros and dozens of his comrades-in-arms at the “Democracy Alliance,” the progressive network of labor unions, activist investment firms, social justice organizations, and ideological media outlets is the tip of the spear in “cancel” culture.
Matthews was accused of sexually inappropriate comments by Laura Bassett in a GQ column. The “Hardball” host’s precise crime? Boorish and slightly creepy comments about her appearance and his penchant for “falling in love” with her. Matthews did not touch her or proposition her. Inappropriate? Probably. But Matthews is no Matt Lauer or Harvey Weinstein.
Nevertheless, Bassett persisted. After writing in vague terms about her awkward encounters with the cable talk show host in 2017, she unleashed a fresh volley in February 2020 after Matthews criticized progressive heroes Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It was Matthews’ attack on Warren, in particular, that sent Bassett over the edge. The problem, evidently, is that the boorish Matthews gave Mike Bloomberg the benefit of the doubt over his secret nondisclosure agreements.
Questioning Warren’s dogmatic insistence that an accusation equals guilt was a bridge too far for Bassett. Soros, of course, had announced in October 2019 that he was backing Warren, calling her “the most qualified person to be president.” Soros and numerous Democracy Alliance supporters have put big bucks behind Warren’s campaigns. The Alliance’s treasurer is a high-dollar bundler for the Massachusetts senator.
Bassett, a long-time Huffington Post writer who went all in with the anti-Kavanaugh mob, repeatedly called the then-Supreme Court nominee a “rapist” and compared him to convicted sex predator and pedophile R. Kelly for expressing indignation at the accusations leveled against him.
Huffington Post, of course, is part of the Democracy Alliance’s stable of media outlets that also includes The Nation, The Guardian, ProPublica, and Media Matters for America.
These groups and outlets, working in concert, orchestrated the downfall of Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, targeted Breitbart, and attempted to knock Laura Ingraham off the air through advertiser boycotts. Ultraviolet, in particular, led the anti-Kavanaugh protests — projecting “Kavanaugh is a sexual predator” onto the D.C. Court of Appeals where he sat before joining the highest court, running TV ads, and having their paid staff confront then-Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) in a Senate elevator to convince him to oppose Kavanaugh.
Armed with unending funds from the Democracy Alliance donors, Ultraviolet’s press releases are often re-packaged and published as “news” by Huffington Post writers, including Bassett. Bassett also received awards from the neo-Malthusian and Democracy Alliance-funded Population Institute and Planned Parenthood for her pro-abortion reporting.
Their system works with extreme effectiveness. . . .

Read the whole thing. While I do not wish to encourage paranoia, whenever you find Soros’ money, you’ll always find connections — this think tank is connected to that media operation, which is in cahoots with this PAC, which is linked to that 501(c)3 and on and on and on. When Hungary’s nationalist government banned Soros-funded agencies from operating in that country, all the usual suspects cried “fascism!” Why? Because all the usual suspects are on Soros’ payroll. That the wicked schemer is now funding feminist organizations should inspire suspicion as to his motives, and cause us to monitor closely the messages that “feminists” are promoting. Are they really about “women’s rights,” or are they just following orders to advance their sugar daddy’s agenda?

(Hat-tip: J.J. Sefton at AOSHQ.)




 

Category: Feminism, George Soros

‘Cognitive Partitioning’: The Real Reason Elizabeth Warren Never Had a Chance

Posted on | March 5, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

The news broke this morning that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren will quit the presidential campaign. I’m sure everybody is sad about this, and by “everybody,” of course I mean Jessica Valenti:

 

I knew going into Super Tuesday that Elizabeth Warren was unlikely to win big. I had prepared myself for that. What did take me by surprise, though, was just how poorly she fared: Even in her home state of Massachusetts, she finished third. . . .
It’s enough to make me feel, well, despairing: that we had the candidate of a lifetime — someone with the energy, vision, and follow-through to lead the country out of our nightmarish era — and that the media and voters basically outright erased and ignored her. . . .
Whoever the nominee is, their campaign is going to have to come to terms with the intense misogyny so many female voters have dealt with — and understand that it’s an issue we care deeply about. And their supporters are going to have to let us be sad — depressed, even — that once again we’re going to watch a race to leadership between old white men.

Never bet against the patriarchy, sweetheart.

Notice that it’s not just men that Valenti singles out for contempt, but rather specifically old white men. One gets the impression that Valenti has been nursing hurt feelings ever since Hillary lost the 2008 nomination to Obama, but she couldn’t complain too loudly about that, because hating Obama would be racist. Conveniently, this time around, there were no black male political rising stars contending for the Democratic nomination — Corey Booker is a joke — and so Valenti invested completely in Warren as “the candidate of a lifetime,” ignoring her idol’s flaws that were so glaringly obvious to the rest of us.

Was it really “misogyny” that sank Warren’s campaign? Is it true that sexism among Democratic primary voters explains Warren’s defeat? Matthew Yglesias offers an alternative explanation:

Her supporters feel somewhat baffled: How did she evaporate from the top tier of contention, especially since so many of the people they know also like her? . . .
[I]f you, like many of my friends, find the situation puzzling, that is probably because you know a lot of people who are demographically similar to yourself. I’m a highly educated white person, and most of my friends and acquaintances are also highly educated white people. Elizabeth Warren is very popular with people like us.
The reality is that there aren’t that many people like us — and there’s a valuable lesson in that, not just about the Warren campaign specifically but about some of the larger dynamics in American politics. . . .
Even at a time when Warren had, in its estimate, fallen to fourth place in national polling, she was first with white college graduates and first with Democrats who have advanced degrees. . . .
The problem is that politics is a numbers game, and we are not in the majority. . . .
Validated data from the 2016 election, for example, suggests that only about one-third of 2016 voters had college degrees. The share among Hillary Clinton voters was higher, at 43 percent, but even among the more educated in the party, most people haven’t graduated college. And among college graduates, about 75 percent attend schools that accept more than half of applicants, rather than the kind of state university flagships or elite private universities whose graduates dominate the media. In my friend group, it’s not unusual for someone to be a lawyer or a doctor or to have a master’s degree in something or other. As a policy journalist, I speak to a lot of experts in academia or the think tank world who have advanced degrees.
But in the actual American population distribution, there are more high school dropouts than people with master’s degrees. The median American under the age of 30 has $0 in student loan debt, not because the median young person is superrich but because most people didn’t attend expensive higher education institutions in the first place. . . .
If you feel like Warren is very impressive and lots of people you know feel the same way, you’re not imagining it — lots of people just like you all across the country feel the same way.
It’s just that most Democrats aren’t all that much like you.

What Yglesias is describing here is a phenomenon that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein described in their book The Bell Curve as “cognitive partitioning.” One tragic consequence of the controversy over the alleged racism of The Bell Curve is that it obscured what was, to me, the most valuable part of Murray and Herrnstein’s book. “The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite” (pp. 25-125) describes how, since World War II, the prevalence of standardized testing and the expansion of access to higher education has operated as a vast sorting machine. Brainy young people are identified at early ages, put onto an academic fast-track (“gifted” programs in elementary school, “honors” classes in high school) that leads them toward prestigious “selective” universities.

Once you carefully consider what Murray and Herrnstein demonstrate in that 100-page section of their book, a lot of things about our society that might otherwise be mysterious suddenly make perfect sense. Once upon a time — in my father’s youth — college education was almost exclusively for the children of the rich. There were no federally guaranteed student loans and no Pell Grants, and so if your parents couldn’t afford to send you to college, you might be able to work your way through, or maybe get a scholarship, but in general, college education was a status marker of the upper classes. However, beginning with the G.I. Bill (which sent my dad to the University of Alabama), college education became more widely available, and the postwar expansion of the middle class — the widespread prosperity of the Eisenhower/JFK era — made it possible for a much larger segment of young people to aspire to a college education. Thus the SAT and ACT gained greater importance as tools to separate the academic wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Yglesias takes note of the important distinction between merely “college educated” people — your Southwest/Northeast State University diploma — and those who attended “the kind of state university flagships or elite private universities whose graduates dominate the media.”

This distinction is not entirely about test scores. The average graduate of Georgia State or Georgia Southern has a lower SAT than the average graduate of Emory (or Yale or Stanford), but the real distinction is still largely one of socio-economic class. Yglesias attended an expensive private prep school and then went to Harvard ($69,607 a year, including room and board), and if your parents can’t afford to spend that kind of money (U.S. median household income is $61,937) you shouldn’t even bother applying to Harvard. Better you should go to your nearest state university, and graduate as close to debt-free as possible, than to mortgage your future for the experience of hanging around a bunch of “elite” snobs at Harvard for four years.

I was shocked the other day to learn that one of the Chapo Trap House podcasters, who goes by the pseudonym “Virgil Texas,” went $100,000 in debt to attend Cornell University. Dude, how stupid can an allegedly “smart” person be? You don’t even need a college degree to become podcaster, much less an Ivy League degree and, having visited Ithaca, N.Y., I can’t understand why anyone would borrow money to go to school there. If a young man with good SAT scores just wanted to spend a lot of money to go to college, what about surfing your way through Pepperdine or partying your way through Tulane? Like, you could actually live for four years — palm trees and sunshine and girls wearing short-shorts — instead of enduring those grim winters in upstate New York.

What the hell gets into the minds of these kids who borrow ridiculous sums of money to attend expensive private liberal arts colleges? Why don’t parents stop their kids from making these foolish decisions? Have we, as a society, become so over-awed by educational “prestige” that we are willing to sell our souls to obtain it? Why does it seem common sense has become so rare? But I digress . . .

While I almost never agree with Matthew Yglesias about anything, I think his analysis of the Elizabeth Warren phenomenon is correct. A Harvard professor ran a campaign that appealed to the kind of people who are impressed by Harvard professors. Such people are very numerous among the media elite, but not so much among the rank-and-file Democratic primary voters. So now Elizabeth Warren is packing it in, and the presidential campaign becomes a choice between old white guys.

Cosmic equilibrium has been restored. The patriarchy wins again.




 

Category: Elizabeth Warren, Intellectuals

Clown Car Campaign Nears Its Sad End

Posted on | March 5, 2020 | Comments Off on Clown Car Campaign Nears Its Sad End

 

Early last year, Lawrence Person dubbed the Democratic presidential campaign a “clown car,” and by summer 2019, there were so many candidates it was difficult for the DNC to narrow the TV debate field down to 20. Does anyone remember anything Tim Ryan, John Hickenlooper or John Delaney said during their brief sojourns on the campaign trail? At least my favorite candidate, Marianne Williamson, had a memorable message. Crazy? Perhaps, but memorable.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and when Michael Bloomberg dropped out Wednesday morning, endorsing Joe Biden, the prospects of a “brokered convention” (which pundits had been jabbering about for the past month) dwindled to nearly zero. Jim Treacher mourns:

Bloomberg spent all that money to upend the establishment, more dough than most of us would ever see in a hundred lifetimes, and now he ends up standing on his tippy-toes to kiss the establishment’s butt. It really is terrific to watch. . . .
Mike Bloomberg provided a lot of high-paying jobs to soulless, unprincipled campaign hacks. So that’s not nothing. Unscrupulous drones need to put food on the table too.

As recently as Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren was saying she was still “in this fight,” but by Wednesday afternoon she was reportedly under pressure to drop out and support Bernie Sanders. Warren “had a plan for everything — except winning,” and even Ilhan Omar stuck the knife in her back:

Moral of the story? Never turn your back on Ilhan Omar.

Now that Creepy Uncle Joe appears to have the nomination within his grasp, we have passed a crucial phase of the election campaign:

After a month-long panic driven by fears of an unstoppable Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party establishment breathed a sigh of relief last night. Joe Biden scored wins in nine of the 15 contests on Super Tuesday, capping a crucial four-day turnaround in which victory in his “firewall” state of South Carolina was quickly followed by withdrawals by three of his rivals, two of whom immediately endorsed his presidential bid. With the news Wednesday morning that billionaire Mike Bloomberg will quit the race and endorse Biden, it now appears that the man President Trump calls “Sleepy Joe” has a clear path to the Democratic nomination.
Biden’s rapid revival seems to have ended what I described, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, as “The Great Liberal Freakout.” Anyone who watched CNN or MSNBC after the February 3 Iowa caucus could see that Biden’s dismal fourth-place finish in the Hawkeye State had inspired abject despair among the liberal pundits. The prospect that Sanders might win the Democratic nomination on a socialist platform was an omen of doom — guaranteed defeat in November — a scenario that longtime Clinton adviser James Carville called “the end of days.” . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: Democrats, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden

In The Mailbox: 03.04.20

Posted on | March 4, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho


Six more hours until I can freely Tweet again. If you don’t share this on Twitter, that pinche gordita Ana Navarro will have won.


OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #915
357 Magnum: Just So You Know Where You Stand
Ammo.com: How The BATF Became Corrupt & Abusive
EBL: Joementum Is Happening – Sanders Gets Schlonged
Twitchy: Nation Correpsondent Tries To “But Trump!” Chief Justice Roberts After Statement On Chuck U. Schumer, Takes Rake To The Face Instead
Louder With Crowder: TYT’s Cenk Uygur Loses His Mind Over Biden’s Super Tuesday Victory

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: It Turns Out That Women Can Have It All
American Conservative: How Trump Could Still Lose
American Greatness: Sen. Schumer Threatens Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch & Kavanaugh, also, Man Released Under Chicago’s “Sanctuary City” Rules Attempts To Rape Three-Year-Old
American Thinker: The Canadian Health Care Myth
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Sanders Picks Up Another Prominent Endorsement  – Venezuelan Dictator Maduro
BattleSwarm: Super Tuesday Results – Two And A Half Men
Cafe Hayek: Quotation Of The Day
Camp Of The Saints: Election 2020 – And The Plot Twisted From Side To Side
Da Tech Guy: Da Tech Guy’s Midnight Court Podcast Is Back – Mondays & Fridays 12:35 AM EST
Don Surber: Barbra Streisand’s Trump Obsession
The Geller Report: Mother Of San Bernardino Terrorist Pleads Guilty To Destroying Evidence, also, DOD Linguist Charged With Passing Highly Classified Intel To Hezbollah Operative
Hogewash: The Fireworks Galaxy, also, The Morning After Stupor Tuesday
Hollywood In Toto: Blacklist 2.0 – Hollywood Cancels Pro-Trump Sabato
JustOneMinute: Mulligan!
Legal Insurrection: Schumer Goes To War With SCOTUS Over Abortion, also, Warren’s Embarrassing Loss Exposes Her Fawning Media Fans
Megan McArdle: Elizabeth Warren Focused On Her Core Voters; There Weren’t Enough Of Them
Power Line: After Last Night, also, Chief Justice Roberts Throws Down On Chuck Schumer
Shark Tank: SolarTogether Gets Green Light In Florida, also, Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Scalped, Canoe Sinks
Shot In The Dark: “So What, Precisely, Is 2+2?”
STUMP: Pandemic – Current Stats On COVID-19, Spanish Flu, & WASH YOUR HANDS
The Political Hat: All The News That Fits For Justin Trudeau
This Ain’t Hell: News From the Nork Missile Range, also, Gladys Mae West & The GPS
Victory Girls: Mike Bloomberg Finds Out He Can’t Buy The Presidency
Volokh Conspiracy: The CFPB Needed Better Friends
Weasel Zippers: MSNBC Shocked To Find Support For Trump Among California Latinos, also, Dem Rep Tammy Duckworth Claims VP Pence Will “Just Pray” About Coronavirus
Mark Steyn: The Plugs Are On But Nobody’s Home

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Category: Linkagery

Sanders Wins California, Biden Wins Texas, Brokered Convention Looms

Posted on | March 4, 2020 | Comments Off on Sanders Wins California, Biden Wins Texas, Brokered Convention Looms

 

As of 8 a.m., Maine remains “too close to call” — Joe Biden leads by about 2,200 votes with 83% of precincts reporting — but what matters more is the delegate count, and it will take another day or two before we have a complete total from Super Tuesday. Biden won 9 of 15 contests, including two states (Minnesota and Massachusetts) that had been considered a lock for Bernie Sanders, so you could say the “Joementum” is real:

Get ready for a long and grueling road ahead as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders battle for the Democratic presidential nomination in a race that could possibly result in the country’s first contested major-party nominating convention in well over a half-century.
The former vice president, surging to victory in the five southern Super Tuesday states and beyond, crowed to supporters at a primary celebration speech in Los Angeles after most of the results were in.
“I’m here to report that we are very much alive,” Biden told a cheering crowd. “This campaign is taking off.”
Hours later, the Associated Press projected Biden the winner in Texas – which had the second-largest cache of delegates on Super Tuesday.
But Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont who’s making his second straight White House run, won California — the biggest prize on a day when one-third of all Democratic presidential convention delegates were up for grabs.
“Tonight I tell you with absolute confidence we’re going to win the Democratic nomination,” Sanders, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist lawmaker, predicted as he spoke to supporters in his home state of Vermont. . . .
Biden . . . was wounded after a lackluster fourth-place finish in Iowa’s caucuses and a disappointing fifth-place showing in New Hampshire’s primary. But a slight rebound in Nevada’s caucuses — where he came in a distant second to Sanders — was followed this past weekend with a landslide victory in South Carolina’s primary. . . .
Fox News contributor and former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile termed Biden’s comeback “the most impressive 72 hours I’ve ever seen in U.S. politics.”
That comeback was fuled by a tidal wave of establishment consolidation behind Biden over the past three days, which included rival moderate candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg dropping out of the race and endorsing the former vice president.

On MSNBC last night, James Carville credited Rep. James Clyburn — the black South Carolina Democrat who gave an emotional endorsement to Biden last week — with saving the Democratic Party. This salvation is purely for the party establishment, and anyone who’s seen Biden’s public appearances lately knows that the doddering old fool is unlikely to be a formidable opponent to Trump in November.

We may not have seen the last plot twist in this story. What happened so far? Until Feb. 3, the campaign was about fundraising, TV debates and polls. Then you had the disastrous clusterfark of the Iowa caucus and eight days later, Biden placed fifth in New Hampshire. So by Feb. 12, everything that the pundits had been telling America during the debates-and-polls phase of the campaign was wiped out by the actual results. A three-week scramble ensued — “The Great Liberal Freakout” — during which there were two more debates, Feb. 19 in Las Vegas and Feb. 26 in Charleston, the first of which saw Mike Bloomberg get destroyed as an establishment alternative, and the second of which was a gang beatdown of Sanders. The next debate is March 15 in Phoenix, but by then we will have had another round of primaries (Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Washington State, and the North Dakota caucus) on March 10.

The next big prizes are Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Arizona on March 17, with a total of 577 delegates at stake. The questions are whether Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren will stay in the race. Bloomberg’s team said they would “reassess” after Tuesday, when the billionaire’s big spending netted him 46 delegates. As long as a brokered convention scenario is possible, Bloomberg will probably decide to stay in it, but what about Warren? So far she’s done no better than third place in any state, and how much money does she have left? There’s no way she can compete statewide in big states like Florida or Ohio, so her only real incentive for continuing her campaign is the prospect that she could struggle on, gather a comparative handful of delegates (maybe 200 total by June) and have some influence in a brokered convention.

UPDATE: Feminists are butt-hurt:

(Hat-tip: Boris Badenoff on Twitter.)




 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden
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