Democrats Against Democracy

Yet again, the Democratic Party has ejected the party's chosen nominee.  Graham Platner, whose Nazi tattoo did not discourage Maine voters from voting for him, has become even more toxic since the primary.  Or has he?  No, this, like the 2024 Presidential Election, is a reaction to polls.  When it was clear that Joe Biden was going to get creamed in the general election, the Democrats 'convinced' him to withdraw and then selected an equally flawed candidate to replace him.  Now Platner, the second notably Democrat candidate this year to be brought down by sexual assault accusations (i.e., Eric Swalwell), has been jettisoned by his party and the party will select a new candidate.  You know, democracy.

Bill Clinton had a lot of baggage in 1992, including serial infidelity and a rape accusation (i.e., Juanita Broaddrick), but the polls said he was a winner, which he was.  Bill Clinton's sex life was less of a threat than his smoking marijuana.  "I didn't inhale," is a more memorable line, perhaps because Billy Crystal riffed on it during the Oscars.  But then there was Barack Obama, who documented his membership in the weed-smoking Choom Gang in one of his biographies, and it was hardly a blip.  He had an America-hating pastor, ties to a Weather Underground terrorist, and questions about his citizenship.  Not a problem.  He polled well.

Democrats will toss losers over the side in a heartbeat but stick with seriously flawed candidates if the polls look good.  If Platner was still polling well, the excuses for his behavior would be flowing.

Juneteenth

Happy June 19th, the day that Democrats in Texas were finally forced to free their slaves.  Yes, the Republicans - the party begun to oppose slavery - accomplished the mission only a decade after the party's founding.  The Democrats spent the next century trying to prevent blacks from equality.  Not until LBJ did the Democrats change tactics and ''embrace" equality while simultaneously accusing Republicans of doing all the things they had done for a century.  Today, you will find many ill-educated people who think Jim Crow and segregation were Republican policies and Lincoln was a Democrat.  This miseducation is not accidental.

Juneteenth, brought to you by the Republican Party.

Bill Kristol, Conservative Turncoat

I'm pro-freedom, pro-law and order, pro-limited government, and pro-the Declaration and Constitution.

And so today I'm a Democrat.

Bill Kristol, X

As a news junkie, I saw a lot of Bill Kristol on various news shows in the 90s and 2000s.  He talked the talk and even co-founded a magazine - The Weekly Standard - to which I subscribed.  He wasn't my favorite conservative talking head, but he was a sober and reliable voice for the conservative view.  Then, Trump was elected.  Like so many sober and reliable conservatives, he lost his mind.  Suddenly, only the Democrats could save the country from destruction, the deep state was the last bastion to prevent America from becoming a fascist state.

Like George Will, Kristol has some irrational dislike of Trump.  So many former conservative stalwarts have become Chicken Little with cries of 'fascism is coming!' but never noticing the fascist tactics on the left.  Biden sent Steve Bannon to jail.  Which of Biden's advisers has Trump jailed?  Democrats piled on Trump with indictments in several states.  How many indictments have been leveled against Biden?  How was the border (law & order, don't you know) during the Biden Administration?  There are 300,000 fewer government employees since Trump returned to the presidency; gee, that sounds a lot like limiting government, but you wouldn't know it to hear Kristol.

Trump has plenty of faults but he has delivered more items on the conservative wish list than any president since Reagan, but the conservative cognoscenti from the pre-Trump era hate him nonetheless.  Either they have lost their minds or they were spouting principles they never really held.  The two-party system is Kabuki Theater.  I like neither possibility.  Perhaps there is another.

The Fall of Swalwell

Last month, Eric Swalwell was a leading Democrat contender for Governor of California and a sitting member of the House of Representatives.  Today, he is no longer in the race for governor, has resigned the House, and is under investigation for sexual assault.  In the wake of this tremendous fall, many members of the media have reported that his crude behavior with women was known.  One mentioned on Twitter/X how suspicions went back to his days on the city council of Dublin, CA (2010-2013).  Like Cesar Chavez, Swalwell had plenty of skeletons in the closet.  Of course, such is quite common among Democrats.  Bill Clinton had a checkered past when he ran for president in 1992 and it carried over into his presidency.  However, the party didn't need to get rid of him, so it mostly stayed in the closet or was brushed away as his private life.

One of the purported ways that the Deep State runs the country is that it has blackmail on key people.  Such claims go back to J. Edgar Hoover, who served nearly 37 years as the director of the FBI.  Democrat or Republican, every president stuck with Hoover.  Why might that be?  True, the 10-year term wasn't passed until after his death, but it took his death to have a term limit for the director.

Back to Swalwell, the California jungle primary allows the two top performers - regardless of party - to proceed to the November election.  Because there are so many Democrat contenders, it looks like the two Republicans - Chad Bianco & Steve Hilton - might get the two top spots.  Thus, it is imperative that the Democrat field be culled to prevent such a disaster.  Swalwell was an easy target.  If the polls don't improve for the remaining Democrats, who might be the next to suffer an unforeseen fall from grace?

Gerrymander

Based on the 2024 election results, there are 21 blue states and 29 red states.  The blue states account for 206 seats in the House of Representatives.  The red states account for 229.  Of course, there are Republican Congressmen from blue states and Democratic Congressmen from red states.  How does that break down?

Now let's talk gerrymandering.  The idea is rather than let the voters pick their representative, the representative picks the voters.  This allows for safe seats or splitting strongholds of the other party into bite-size chunks that can be overwhelmed and digested by the ruling party.  Depending on how the districts are drawn, the dominant party can greatly weaken the opposition.  Let's look at some examples.

Illinois (blue) has 17 congressional districts.  In 2024, the state votes 43% for Trump and 54% for Harris.  How many Republican congressmen are there from Illinois?  Three.  That is 17% representation.

Texas (red) has 38 districts.  In 2024, the state went to Trump by 56% to 42% vote.  How many Democrat congressmen from Texas?  Thirteen.  That is 34%.

California (blue) has 52 districts and broke heavily for Harris: 58% to 38%.  Republicans hold 9 of the 52 seats, or 17%.

Many states are difficult to gerrymander.  Several only have 1 congressman (Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming).  The smaller states - 4 congressional districts or less - are mostly unremarkable.  That eliminates 21 states from the list, leaving 14 blue states and 15 red states.  Here is the new breakdown:

First thing to note is that there were no Republicans in the smaller blue states, but there were 5 Democrats in the smaller red states.  Interesting.  In a red state, representation is 71% Republican vs. 29% Democrat.  In a blue state, it is 73% Democrat to 27% Republican.  Not a big difference.

Harris carried blue states by an average of 55% to 43%.  Trump carried red states by an average of 58% to 41%.  Trump performed better in blue states than Harris in red states and yet, the House was on a razor's edge.  

The blue states have done a far better job of gerrymandering than the red states.  If the Republicans adopt the same strategy, they will gain seats.  Having already gerrymandered the blue states, there is little the Democrats can do to counter it, other than complain.  That 34% representation in Texas might soon drop to the level of an Illinois or California.

In the near future, perhaps an unbiased AI can draw districts that don't create ludicrous zigzag patterns that weave through various counties and cities to generate a safe seat for the dominant party.  For the time being, a party would be foolish not to gerrymander.

Maybe the Parties Did Flip?

Recently, someone noted that Trump, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk all used to be Democrats.  In fact, Ronald Reagan had been a Democrat in his younger days.  Reagan often said that the party left him rather than he left the party. Tulsi had run for president as a Democrat during the 2020 primaries, but she soon broke with her party on topics such as LGBTQ, the border, and foreign policy.  Her views on all of these would have been mainstream Democrat in 2008 when Obama won the presidency, but were now viewed as 'far right' positions.  RFK Jr. has been an environmentalist for all of his professional life and a vaccine skeptic for nearly 20 years.  He was a Democrat through all that time until last year, when he became an independent.  Then he supported the Republican to Make America Healthy Again.  Why didn't his message resonate with his old party?  Elon voted for Biden in 2020.  However, the censorship that followed led him to buy Twitter.  Like RFK Jr., he is clearly on the environmentalist side of the aisle - traditionally aligning with Democrats - but he too switched to the Republican candidate.  Elon has tweeted this image to show how he didn't leave the party, it left him:

Remember, Obama opposed same sex marriage in 2008, the trans issue was on the far fringe, and Democrats were the anti-war party.  Today, Trump is anti-war, has no issue with same sex marriage, and opposes transgenderism with regard to minors.

When the party flip story is told, it is always about racism.  Democrats grew into anti-racists and Republicans - the party created to oppose slavery - adopted racism to win votes.  No.  That is false.  However, it does seem that the parties have traded some policies over the years.

The Fictional Party Flip

Democrats are always eager to explain away the past dark periods of their party by explaining how the parties flipped.  Post Civil War, blacks supported the Party of Lincoln, the Republican Party.  Democrats may have been forced to surrender slavery, but they imposed Jim Crow as soon as Reconstruction ended.  This continued for decades, especially since the Republicans held dominance in the government from 1861 until 1913.  In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated president and reintroduced segregation in federal workplaces.  He was an apologist for the South and screened Birth of a Nation at the White House.  However, when FDR was elected in 1932, he retained segregation.  In 1948, Harry Truman desegrated the military.  In 1954, during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Court overturned the policy of 'separate but equal.'  Eisenhower set about enforcing this with the National Guard and pushing both the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts.

By the time JFK arrived in office, the writing was on the wall for segregation.  It was doomed and any Democrat with sense was going to abandon it.  Where Republicans had argued to just treat blacks like everyone else, Democrats embraced a strategy of one-upmanship.  Not only would they pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act (with strong bipartisan support), but they would also implement affirmative action.  Though a noble goal, it assumed employers were guilty of discrimination if the pool of employees did not match local demographics.  So, the Democrats went from discriminating against blacks to now discriminating in their favor.  Low grade reparations?  Though Republicans continued with the same old policy of just treat everyone the same, that now meant repealing quotas.  That's anti-black!  Sigh.

The Democrats have spent decades claiming that Republicans are holding blacks back and yet, most blacks live in cities that have been governed by Democrats for all those decades.  For instance, Detroit hasn't had a Republican mayor since 1962.  Whose fault is the decline of that city?  What about St. Louis?  Last Republican mayor left in 1949.  Philadelphia?  Last Republican mayor left in 1952.  The modern Democrats are the same as the old Democrats, they have just changed their tactics.  The Democrats have trapped blacks in a new kind of plantation - harvesting their votes during election season by blaming the Republicans for their misery.

Ahead of My Time

Four years ago, I asked if Biden would bow out.  Why?  Because it was obvious that he was going senile.  What is interesting is what I supposed might happen:

Having won the nomination, he could admit to his mental decline and gracefully bow out. The Democratic Convention has a floor fight to pick the nominee. That could generate a lot of excitement though it does have the problem of nixing the primary results. ...  If Biden does bow out, Democrats will angle for a black woman. Then, any criticism of her - or her policies - will be either racist or sexist, possibly both.

Thanks to the Democrat-aligned media, Joe's dementia was kept under wraps for nearly his entire term.  Not until his ill-advised June debate - carefully timed to take place after the nomination was secured but still leaving plenty of time to boost his replacement - did the country have clear evidence of his mental decline.  The Democrats did not bother with a floor fight and simply elevated Kamala Harris - a black woman - to the top spot.

There is a new wrinkle though.  Joe was replaced because he was mentally impaired (and should be removed by the 25th amendment), but his replacement has adopted his 2020 campaign strategy: avoid the press.  Kamala Harris has not had an unscripted event since being named the nominee.  The basement strategy won last time; let's try it again. 

Who's Going to Tell Joe?

Richard Nixon announced his resignation live.  LBJ announced his decision not to run for re-election in a presidential address.  Joe Biden posted a letter.  Really?  Supposedly, some of the White House staff learned that the president was withdrawing via X (Twitter).  The obvious decline of Joe Biden could no longer be hidden or excused after his trouncing in the June debate.  The move in his party to remove Biden grew until he finally agreed that he should step aside.  Or did he?  If he agreed, one would expect him to have given a national address.  But now, it's a fait accompli.  The speech writers are working on his eventual public address.

Cynics hold that this was always in the cards.  Vivek Ramaswamy argued in the early primaries that Joe Biden would not be the nominee.  Lucky guess?  Doubtful.  Joe Biden stayed on the ballot and hid in the basement just long enough to secure the nomination.  Now, the party elites can pick his successor.  It has long been clear that the party doesn't trust its voters, which is why superdelegates exist.  Had Biden not been in the primaries, RFK Jr. might have won the nomination.  That was so unacceptable that the party has driven him to run as an Independent.

Will it be VP Harris?  Seeing as she was the first candidate to be eliminated in the 2020 primaries, she looks to be a weak choice.  But the Biden-Harris campaign war chest can only be spent if she is the nominee.  Will the Democratic Convention select her?  With Biden out, his delegates are probably free to pick whomever they like.  Gavin Newsom?  Gretchen Whitmer?  Josh Shapiro?  Pete Buttigieg?  Will these politicians try to sway the nation, or will they just shake hands in the smoke-filled rooms?  Just like old times.

When the Party Cracked

In 1848, President Polk could claim success on all four of his campaign promises.  He had reduced tariffs, reestablished an independent treasury, settled the Oregon boundary with Great Britain, and acquired California from Mexico.  Promises made and promises delivered.  This should have been a boon to his party.  Instead, his success broke his party.  That vast stretch of land was now up for grabs between the free states and the slave states.  Many northern Democrats weren't keen on the extension of slavery.  These voters split from the Democratic Party to join the Free Soil Party.  Former President Martin Van Buren (1837-1841) was chosen as the presidential nominee and Charles Francis Adams - son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of President John Adams - as the VP nominee.  Though the Free Soil Party didn't earn a single electoral vote, it did manage to accumulate 10% of the popular vote.  The Free Soil Party out-performed the Democrats in three states.

Of course, Vermont and Massachusetts had voted for Henry Clay (Whig) in 1844, so Van Buren did little damage to the Democrats there. The important state was New York with 36 electoral votes.  In 1844, President Polk carried the state by a margin of 5,100 votes.  Native New Yorker Van Buren took all those votes and much more.  General Taylor, the Whig candidate, defeated Lewis Cass by an electoral vote of 163 to 127.  If Cass had carried New York, that would have been exactly reversed.  Van Buren knew full well that he had no chance of winning and that he was almost certainly handing the presidency to the Whigs, but he had moved toward the abolitionist camp over the years.

This was the second - and final - time that the Whigs won the presidency.  Like the previous time, the president died during his term: Harrison had only served a month as president and Taylor died after 16 months.  By the next presidential election, it was the Whig Party that unraveled.  By the mid 1850s, the disaffected Democrats, the Free Soil Party, the American Party, and various other splinter groups formed the Republican Party.

Primaries Over

Though it is unclear as of this writing if Nikki Haley will end her campaign for president, it is clear that she has no traction.  Her home state of South Carolina, where she served as governor for 6 years, has chosen Donald Trump by a 60-40 margin in today's primary.  If you cannot carry your home state, what chance is there anywhere else?  Trump is 5-0 in the contests so far.

On the Democratic side, Joe Biden is 3-0 vs. the only remaining opponent, Dean Phillips.  As only two states have awarded delegates for the Democrats so far, I won't call this one over yet but Phillips better have a good showing in the next 2 outings or he's also done.

RFK Jr. withdrew from the Democratic nomination even before voting began and is now running an independent campaign.  Independent candidacies rarely achieve anything.  Without a party to do ground work, he'll needed to create his own party apparatus to get the vote out.  Unlikely to achieve even the impact of the Green Party or the Libertarian Party.

It does look like we are headed for a rematch from 2020.  Both candidates now have presidential records that can be compared.  Which one looks better?  Does it matter?  Of course, a lot can happen in the next 8 1/2 months.

Uncle Tom

Here is a movie that explores right-leaning blacks in America.  Many of them have been called an Uncle Tom or worse for not siding with the Democratic Party.  These are their stories.  What struck me most was when it was noted that they all knew who Jay-Z was (a self-admitted drug dealer) but not Thomas Sowell, a Harvard graduate and noted cultural commentator.  The media highlights left-leaning blacks but attacks right-leaning ones.  When Kanye met with Trump, he was said to be off his meds.  Candace Owens has been linked to white supremacy despite being black.  The theme is that blacks who don't toe the liberal line will be ostracized and attacked by those who do.  Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Larry Elder have spent decades countering the idea that blacks can't advance because of racism in America.  The most successful blacks in America today are Nigerians.  Why?  Because they haven't been told since birth that racism in America will never let them succeed.  It is not by chance that black Americans are marinated in the racist America myth.  Those who embrace the myth will vote Democrat and those who don't will be called Uncle Toms and race traitors.  Not an accident.  Herman Cain, an extremely successful business man and one-time presidential nominee, talks about his life and rise to success.  He says that hard work pays.  Ben Carson, a famous brain surgeon and also a presidential nominee, has been regularly mocked by late night comics.  If you are black and on the left, it is racist to mock you.  If you are black and on the right, you are fair game.

This is an excellent film that shines a light on the other side of this conversation, a side that is mostly hidden.  See this movie!

Brandon Straka

Just watched a YouTube video of Brandon Straka, founder of the #WalkAway movement.  I had blogged about the movement shortly before the 2018 midterms and, based on the results, figured it was more hype than grassroots movement.  What was interesting about the video was Brandon's backstory.  He had been a Democrat voter all his life and voted for Hillary in 2016.  He loathed Trump, especially for Trump's mocking of a disabled reporter.  Check it out here.  Brandon blasted Trump supporters with this incident, asking how they could support such a person.  One of those Trump supporters asked him to view this.  It turns out that this is something Trump does when criticizing people and had nothing to do with the disability.  This was Brandon's epiphany.  This was the moment when Brandon asked if the media was lying to him?  A long time fan of MSNBC, he now questioned what the network reported.  His belief system collapsed and #WalkAway was born.

That this small event should be the keystone to Brandon's politics is strange.  Trust, once broken, is hard to restore.  Once he questioned the reporting, he had to confirm the accuracy.  Of course, the Very Fine People Hoax only confirmed that the media lied about Trump, a lie that is still being told in the current presidential campaign.  Glenn Reynolds suggests that if you view the mainstream media as Democrats with bylines, you won't go far wrong.

Is #WalkAway a real movement now?  Maybe.  It didn't make a difference in 2018.  Will it in 2020?  Maybe.  There is also Blexit (Black Exit), the movement launched by Candace Owens to convince African-Americans to leave the Democratic Party.  Is it a real thing or just hype?  These and more questions to be answered in November.

Will Biden Bow Out?

Joe Biden is clearly going senile.  Zogby, not a Republican polling firm, found that a majority of Americans think Biden is in the early stages of dementia.  It should be noted that Biden had multiple brain surgeries in 1988 because he had two brain aneurysms.  He was given less than a 50% chance of a full recovery.  Did he fully recover?  Let's consider some of the following quotes:

“A man I’m proud to call my friend. A man who will be the next president of the United States—Barack America!”

“Look, John [McCain’s] last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the No. 1 job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs.”

“If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.”

"Every single morning since I've been 27 years old, I've got up and someone's handed me a card like the one I have in my pocket with the schedule on it, of all the things I'm gonna do. I don't know what to do if I didn't have that card."

I want to know who's preparing that card.

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed.”

Let's see.  Hoover was president in 1929 and the radio was the medium of the day.

"If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black!"

Dan Quayle misspelled 'potatoe' and that is the story of his career.  Or maybe his tiff with Murphy Brown.  He has since been proven right; single motherhood is a terrible thing to intentionally do to a child.  By contrast, Biden has an endless collection of gaffes.  However, I do like that Joe is able to be politically incorrect with almost no consequences.  Compliment segregationist senators?  That's just Joe.  Say something vaguely racist about 7-11 owners?  Good old Joe.  You ain't black?  He didn't mean anything by it.  Anyone else would apologize or be cancelled.  Not Joe.

Covfefe showed Trump was a dummy.  Let's check out Biden's use of "expodentially."  Hasn't anyone on his staff corrected him?  I bet they have and yet...  Joe's losing his marbles and everyone around him knows it.  There is talk of not having debates.  Gee, I wonder why.  If he doesn't bow out and somehow wins, his VP pick will be elevated to president shortly after January 20, 2021.  That's a long, long shot.

Having won the nomination, he could admit to his mental decline and gracefully bow out.  The Democratic Convention has a floor fight to pick the nominee.  That could generate a lot of excitement though it does have the problem of nixing the primary results.  Then again, COVID had already nixed a lot of the primaries.  If Biden does bow out, Democrats will angle for a black woman.  Then, any criticism of her - or her policies - will be either racist or sexist, possibly both.

Ban Democrats?

Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) has proposed banning the Democratic Party.  Why?  The Democrats were the party of the Confederacy, slavery, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan.  If all those Confederate statues have to go, how about the party that represented it?

My initial reaction was to see this as a gag.  However, if Democrats and their supporters are so eager to tear down Jefferson, Jackson, and Wilson - all Democrats - then they should abolish the party that those men represented.  The Republican party was founded as an anti-slavery party.  Even after the Civil War, the Democrats didn't embrace the anti-slavery platform.  No, they instituted poll taxes, established the KKK, and enacted Jim Crow laws.  When Woodrow Wilson was elected to the presidency in 1912, he brought segregation to federal workplaces.  Huh.  So it wasn't segregated during the Taft (R), Roosevelt (R), or McKinley (R) Administrations?  From Lincoln's inauguration in 1861 to Wilson's in 1913, only 1 Democrat had been elected: Grover Cleveland.  Cleveland was a Democrat from Buffalo, New York, and somewhat milquetoast on the Jim Crow and voting rights issues.  Wilson's mother had been a southern belle and he was ready to bring Democratic Party values into the federal government.

If we are going to toss out all the good that Jefferson or Washington did because they were slave owners, how can we not cancel this party that supported slavery for decades and then oppressed blacks for at least a century after the Civil War?  The majority of the party history is horrendous.

Ban the Democratic Party!

Columbus removes Columbus

The city of Columbus, OH has removed a statue of Columbus.  Gifted to the city in 1955 by Genoa, Italy, the statue has been declared to represent "patriarchy, oppression, and divisiveness."  I have always seen him to represent exploration and discovery.  Agree to disagree.  Anyway, by the given logic, it is time to rename the city of Columbus.  Maybe also rename Columbia University, the District of Columbia, Columbia, SC, Columbus, GA, Columbus, NE, Columbus, TX, and many, many more.  Let the insanity roll on.

As an aside, guess the party affiliation of the mayor of Columbus.

Lose-Lose Situation

Tucker Carlson recently blasted President Trump's lack of action against the widespread unrest throughout the country.  He announced that President Obama would never have allowed things to get this bad.  The National Guard or even the 101st Airborne would have long since retaken the CHAZ and stamped out the riots in various cities.  I generally like that plan.  I'm all for peaceful protests but when they transform into lawless bands of looters and vandals, it's time to read the riot act.  But let's take it to the next step.

Suppose the national guard or the military is deployed to end the riots and stamp out the autonomous zone.  How will that be reported in the media?  Will the president get praise for returning law & order to the cities and protecting the property of private citizens?  Unlikely.  Will the president be denounced as an authoritarian who stomped on the rights of black Americans to protest police brutality?  Oh yeah!  Big time!  If Trump does nothing, he is a weakling in a time of crisis but if he does something, he provides the evidence for the old claims that he is a fascist.  That is how it will be reported.  It is lose-lose.

What to do?  Trump's initial efforts have been to demand that the mayors and governors of these various cities and states take action.  Governor Jay Inslee has the authority to call up the national guard and deploy it to reassert control of CHAZ.  He has declined to do so despite Trump's emphatic prompting.  By pointing out that the local authorities (all Democrats) who have the authority to put down the riots are doing nothing, the president is blame-shifting.  Is it blame-shifting?  Shouldn't the first group to respond to a local riot be the local police?  If that isn't enough, request state assistance.  If that still isn't enough, call upon the federal government.  Yes, that would be federalism.  Trump has further offered to help, if requested.  No requests.  The locals will neither put down the riots themselves nor will they accept some responsibility by requesting federal aid.  Hmm.  This sounds like a setup.

The people of Seattle voted for the government that is more or less cheerleading for the CHAZ/CHOP.  Elections have consequences.  Minneapolis has a Democrat mayor, a Democrat city counsel, all Democrat Congressional Representatives (Ilhan Omar among them), 2 Democrat senators, a Democrat Attorney General, and a Democrat Governor.  Obviously, the Republican President is the problem.

Sadly, this is all about an election year.  How will a crackdown impact the November election?  More importantly, how will a crackdown be reported?  Trump thinks that he is better off letting blue cities and states burn.  Further, he hopes that blue politicians suffer in the polls and he's going to run ads putting the blame on them.  By contrast, it will be hard for those blue politicians to blame Trump for not taking actions that they refused to take themselves.

Whichever side you are on, we have the worst political class in my life.  Political maneuvering is more important that doing their jobs.  Tragic.

Money Not So Decisive

Michael Bloomberg has ended his presidential campaign after having dumped $500 million dollars on his brief run.  For that kingly sum, he won American Samoa.  Yes, he won 49.9% of the votes, which is 175 votes.  No, that isn't a misprint.  Tulsi Gabbard was second with 103 votes.  Wow, what a huge turnout.  Of course, Bloomberg won delegates in states where he didn't carry the state, accumulating 60 delegates.  Meanwhile, Joe Biden's campaign was close to insolvency and yet he won 10 delegates for every one Bloomberg won.  Huh?  Conventional wisdom says Bloomberg should have dominated the field thanks to his money advantage.

Bloomberg spent more on his short-lived primary campaign than Hillary Clinton spent on the primaries and general election combined.  As has been demonstrated time and again, money does not automatically mean victory.  Well-funded incumbents have been trounced by shoe-string campaigns.  For example, Eric Cantor outspent Dave Brat by 40 to 1 and still lost in 2014.  Joe Crowley outspent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by 18 to 1 and lost in 2018.  Jeb Bush started the 2016 campaign with a daunting $100 million war chest but he flopped.  His campaign won 4 delegates.

What Bloomberg needed to do was hire a Russian strategist.  According to Rachel Maddow, the Russians were able to swing the national election in 2016 for the bargain sum of $200,000 to $300,000 in Facebook ads.  Or did they?  If Bloomberg couldn't win even one state with $500 million, how credible is it that Russia swung the election with 0.05% of that amount?  It isn't.

Rush to Impeachment

Do the Democrats know how this works?  The House plays prosecutor and the Senate plays judge and jury.  The prosecutor is supposed to investigate all the fact before the case is ever brought to court.  What prosecutor would schedule a court date and arrived to announce that the case needed more evidence?  The vote to impeach in the House was supposed to be the completion of the investigation.  By voting to impeach, the House declared that sufficient evidence and testimony had been uncovered to merit the removal of the president.  However, now in the Senate, there are calls to examine witnesses who did not appear in the House.  That would be a continuation of the investigation rather than a trying of the case.  Why didn't the House simply investigate longer?  The entire foundation of the obstruction of Congress charge is based on the House not pursuing remedies in the courts.  The President can't have executive privilege during impeachment hearings?  If so, executive privilege would always be nixed by the House declaring all hearings to be for impeachment.

 

The House had hearings and heard testimony.  That is what should be presented and nothing else.  That is the case they voted out of the House.  If it isn't enough, tough.  Be more thorough next time, which may very well happen before the election.  Trump may be the first president with multiple impeachments.

President Troll

The Democrats are in the midst of a civil war.  The squad, led by AOC, is accusing Speaker Pelosi of being a racist.  Republicans break out the popcorn.  After all, if your opponent is making a fool of herself, the age old advice is to stand back and watch.  President Trump chose otherwise.  He tweeted that the squad should return to their countries of origin, even stating that Nancy Pelosi would be only too happy to make travel arrangements.  PowerLine holds that this was an unforced error that will haunt Trump.  No, I don't think so.  Why not?

To Democrats and Never Trumpers, everything Trump says or does is wrong.

Trump has sided with Nancy Pelosi over AOC and the Squad.

Democrats who side with Speaker Pelosi will be in agreement with Trump.  Unacceptable.

Democrats who side with the Squad will exacerbate the civil war.

Though beloved by the SJW left, the Squad is viewed unfavorably nationwide.  AOC has a 22% favorability while Ilhan Omar has a 9% favorability.

By siding with the more moderate wing of the Democrats, Trump herds Trump-hating Democrats toward the more leftist side and improves his re-election chances.

The veracity of his tweet is irrelevant.  He's trolling.