The Democrats: A Corrupt, Insane Posse Masquerading as a Political Party
Eleven years ago, the writer Michael Walsh wrote (under his penname David Kahane) “Think of the Democratic Party as it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.”
After the Democrats’ Russia, Kavanaugh, Mueller, and Ukraine fiascos, the Iowa caucus debacle, and Friday’s bizarre Democratic debate, I think we need to update it: It’s a Criminal, Insane Posse masquerading as a political party.
The week began with an outstanding, uplifting, and inspiring State of the Union address by the President before a joint Congress. Among the House delegates were a gaggle of Democratic congresswomen dressed in white who insist they are strong, independent, capable, and worthy to lead. They stood, clapped, or sat in unison at signals from Speaker Pelosi who sat behind the President, mouthing words to some imaginary friend and moving her mouth reminiscent of someone on psychotropic drugs. (Message: I am woman -- hear me meow chasing the laser red dot.) At the conclusion of the speech she stood and ripped up her copy of the SOTU address in small packets either because she lacked strength to rip it all in one batch or for dramatic effect. To say the Democrats’ behavior was disconsonant with any message of sober adult solons is to understate it.
The following day, the Senate voted down the House’s absurd impeachment effort, after which the President gave a heartfelt address to all those in the House and Senate who had helped him in exposing the fact-free, corrupt House effort to overturn the 2016 election by ousting him from office. If you missed it, here’s a video of it. He was gracious and thankful to all those who stood by him, something Republicans are not known to do as soon as Democrats hurl charges, no matter how patently flimsy and partisan those charges are. For once, Republicans didn’t flee the forum for fear of spotting their white togas when the jackals appeared. (I suppose when much of the media described the address the address as “dark,” they meant the pushover Republican days were over for them and their party of choice.)
The App that Failed
And then there was the Iowa Caucus, the results of which are unclear -- did Sanders or Buttigieg win? Will the DNC chair who is about to leave that slot with a big bonus persuade Iowa to recanvas or will they give him the back of their hand? Only the Shadow apparently knows… Although it is clear that Warren and Biden lost.
Over at the Wall Street Journal, James Freeman explains the genesis of the App that failed. “Veterans of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign” who for some reason were considered “gurus at this sort of thing“ created the app. (Professor Kevin Gutzman reminds us: ”Robbie Mook, the Hillary staffer who laughed at Bill Clinton when he said Hillary needed to go to Michigan and Wisconsin in the 2016 campaign’s final days, is the fellow responsible for the app that didn’t work in Iowa.”)
Their outfit, Shadow, in turn was supported by a firm called Acronym, Acronym is a “non-profit” run by Tara McGowan, continues Freeman. Certainly not by coincidence, McGowan “oversaw the $42 million digital program in 2016 for Priorities USA, the primary super PAC for Hillary Clinton.” Among the hotshot coders Shadow engaged “was a prep cook for Starbucks.”
Why was Shadow hired to do this? Connections.
David Burge, Iowahawk, tweeted the contract chain:
Keep in mind whenever you donate to a political party or movement, this is where your money goes -- to make sure Senator McDreamy’s nephew’s roommate gets his piece of the takeI know there are Bernians who see the app as a Machiavellian technoplot to fix the vote, but the truth is much more likely a bunch of Hillary campaign wunderkinds decided to cosplay as a Silicon Valley startup, and everybody was afraid to say they were in way over their headsWhere you come from, the software salesman isn’t your boss who says you better damn well buy it if you know what’s good for you.
Vice, like Iowahawk seems to think that the coders were working off an App Coding for Dummies book.
It’s not clear that this simple and likely explanation for the app that failed will persuade Sanders’ followers. After all, he was cheated in 2016 and the people whose app seem to have cheated him out of a clear victory in Iowa and momentum going on to New Hampshire were intimately connected to Hillary Clinton.
Of course, you can ignore the app’s factual genesis and look elsewhere for blame. Sheila Jackson Lee, B.A. Yale JD U Va, whose gerrymandered district looks like a gaping shark’s mouth, suggested that Russia was responsible for the crashing App in Iowa.
Rachel Maddow blamed the weird message board 4 Chan.
As for me -- I’m sticking with graft and incompetence, the usual Democratic Party’s operational mode.
Burning Bernie
Professor Charles Lipson explains why the Sanders supporters have reason to doubt the fairness of their opposition in the Democratic establishment:
The Democrats’ nominating process increases the likelihood of a contested convention -- and a nasty fight with Bernie and his supporters. The party discarded the traditional, Anglo-American system, where each state’s winner receives all its delegates. Instead, they chose a European-style system in which each candidate wins a fraction of the delegates proportional to his share of the vote. The Anglo-American system produces clear winners and losers. The European system doesn’t. It includes all factions in Parliament, where the leading party tries to assemble a governing coalition.Democrats’ problem is that they are not trying to form an inclusive, coalition government. They are trying to pick a nominee, but they are doing it with a system that was never designed to produce a single, decisive winner. Oops.If the convention is contested, elected delegates will be joined by “super delegates,” starting on the first or second ballot, depending on the convention rules. Who are these super delegates? They are quintessential insiders, mostly state and local elected officials. There is absolutely no way they will jeopardize their own fiefdoms by choosing Bernie or any other socialist.Their refusal will produce a bitter clash if Bernie arrives in Milwaukee with millions of votes and millions of donors. If he actually holds a plurality of elected delegates and is passed over anyway, the fight will degenerate into trench warfare. Remember, Bernie knows this is his last rodeo, and he has zero loyalty to the party. Remember, too, that his default speaking style is “really angry,” interspersed with “damned mad.” If that’s how Bernie and his supporters leave the convention, it’s hard to see a Democratic path to victory.The party’s best outcome would be for Bernie to lose decisively in both the primary vote and delegate count -- so decisively that his followers believe the process was fair and the nominee legitimate. A bad outcome would be an inconclusive primary contest, where Bernie did well but lost at the convention.Worst of all would be one where Bernie arrived with the most votes and delegates but fell short of a majority and came away empty-handed. He would blame party leaders and their back-room deals to benefit billionaires, corporations, and corrupt politicians. If that happens, the party will be in real trouble. Bernie will scream, Trump will exploit the divisions, and left-wing voters will spend November 3 in a purple haze, eating Ben and Jerry’s. What they won’t do is trudge to the polls and vote Democratic.
The Democratic “Debate”
I confess, by week’s end I lacked enough patience to watch the Democrats’ debate on Friday night, and contented myself with reading about it from trusted observers. The actor James Woods is back from a year-long jailing by Twitter, and bounced back having lost none of his acid wit:
“The #Democrats have cheated elections for so long, they can’t even elect themselves... #IowaCaucusDisaster
-- James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) February 7, 2020”
Pete Buttigieg seems to have mastered the art of glibly speaking meaningless word salads (an Obama mode). So much that Sundance cleverly satirized him:
Sample Mayor Pete quote:"The consequential moments that we face are moments of great consequence we must face; and when facing those moments we must think of the great consequence behind these faces or we will fail to be great..."sarcastically: Yup. The consequential moments that we face are moments of great consequence we must face; and when facing those moments we must think of the great consequence behind these faces or we will fail to be great...
:::crowd cheers:::
Stage crew looks around: "Huh, what the?.."-- TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) February 8, 2020
“If you take a step back and really think about what they’re saying in this debate it’s fricking bonkers stuff. Like really beyond crazy.’
Josh Holmes:
"It used to be over-the-top parody to say that Democrats want free healthcare for illegal immigrants and felons to be voting from their cells it’s now a consensus position among their leading Presidential candidates."
Greg Price:
“Elizabeth Warren says we need "race-conscious laws." Think about that. Isn't that what we spent so long trying to make sure we didn't have? #DemDebate”
Tom Maguire tweets:
“Physicists have theorized on the manner in which some stars collapse inward and then go super-nova. The Dem party may give us a lab experiment in 2020.”
Maybe so. Some viewing the weak field of Democratic contenders are placing their bets on another old White Male Hope -- the latecomer, billionaire Michael Bloomberg. He spent $20 million in Iowa to garner 20 votes. If he seriously campaigns from now to the election, and maintains that spending pattern, I think he’d still lose but it would be a bigger boon for the economy, especially Democrat coders, consultants, pilots of private planes, and ad agencies, than any other stimulus package I can imagine. The press will love that, as well. Trump has proven that clever use of social media makes it unnecessary for a candidate with a saleable message to keep them alive by paying them a fortune for ads no one watches. But if Bloomberg thinks $1 million per vote is a great campaign plan, who would complain?
Census: Number of ‘majority Hispanic’ US counties doubles
by Paul Bedard
November 21, 2019
In the latest evidence of the effect Latin American immigrants are having on the United States, the number of U.S. counties that have turned majority Hispanic has doubled.
New Census Bureau data analyzed by the Pew Research Center found that from 2000 to 2018, the number of majority Hispanic counties jumped from 34 to 69.
What’s more, the overall number of U.S. counties that turned majority minority-based, mostly Hispanic or African American, also surged to 151 from 110 in 2000. Most of those counties are in Southern California and along the Mexico-U.S. border.
“Overall, 69 counties were majority Hispanic in 2018, 72 were majority black and 10 were majority American Indian or Alaska Native. The majority American Indian or Alaska Native counties are unique in that most have experienced overall population declines since 2000, even as the share of American Indian or Alaska Native residents in these counties remained fairly flat,” said the Pew analysis.
pewone.png
Other reports have shown that the share of immigrants, mostly Hispanic, have continued to break records due to legal and illegal immigration and the baby boom among new arrivals.
The majority black counties are also in the South, though mostly from Louisiana and to the east.
“While the black share of the total U.S. population has not changed substantially over the last two decades, the number of majority black counties in the U.S. grew from 65 to 72 between 2000 and 2018. One contributing factor may be migration of black Americans from the North to the South and from cities into suburbs,” said Pew.
Census Bureau: Immigration Driving Half of U.S. Population Growth
JOHN BINDER
Immigration to the United States is now driving nearly half of all population growth in the country instead of increased birth rates, the U.S. Census Bureau finds.
The latest Census Bureau estimates on the U.S. population reveal that about 48.5 percent of all population growth is driven by the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration policy, where more than 1.5 million foreign nationals are admitted to the country every year.
Americans Must Destroy Surburbia to Benefit Immigrants, Says New York Times Author
5:00
Americans must abandon their ambitions to raise their children in suburban greenery because the country is getting too crowded, says a pro-immigration immigrant at the New York Times.
“Let’s Quit Fetishizing the Single-Family Home,” said the headline to an op-ed by columnist Farhad Manjoo in the February 5 edition of the New York Times.
“The reign of the single-family home is over. Whatever its habitable charms and nostalgic appeal, the single-family home is out of step with the future,” Manjoo writes.
That future — according to Manjoo — is the continued immigration of millions of people from India, Africa, China, and elsewhere.
Manjoo writes about his childhood in the “California Dream [of] sun-drenched suburbs” that his father provided in the less-crowded 1980s. “That dream now looks prohibitive: Houses with backyards in my neck of the woods require tech-I.P.O. levels of insane wealth,” he complains.
He cannot afford to give his own children what his father gave him, so he beats his sunny memories into a progressive sword:
And yet, wistful though I may remain for my suburban-sprawl childhood, these days I find myself continually amazed and befuddled by my state’s insane fetishization of an anachronistic model of urban development. Why — when the case for some better way of living has become so painfully obvious — can’t California quit propping up its endless rows of single-family houses? Why can’t so much of America?
Manjoo is one of many young status-seeking progressives who want to abolish the ideal suburbia because they cannot afford to buy housing in fashionable districts. So he wants government to help investors fracture, diversify, split, and subdivide ordinary Americans’ suburbia into affordable mini-homes, duplexes, four-unit apartments, and parking lots.
His demand for suburbia’s death comes after he helped to make suburbia expensive by urging more immigration.
Most migrants are clever and hard-working. So their intense competition for jobs and housing lowers wages and inflates housing prices. The resulting housing crisis is most obvious in Manjoo’s high-migration state of California:
California's poverty rate is worse than Alabama & Mississippi, says Census Bureau. The major cause of this huge change is immigration policy which spikes housing costs & shrinks wages -- and delivers huge gains for investors in real-estate & corp. shares. bit.ly/2mgvBlW
Manjoo does not entirely break the media taboo against mentioning the harms caused by mass migration. But he gets close by blaming California’s crisis on “too many people”:
In an era constrained by sustainability and affordability, a big house with a backyard should be a rarity. Much of California is straining under its own success: We have too many people and too few places for them to live, offered at too-high prices, in too many areas touched-by-climate-change-related menaces, like wildfires, all too far from where people work. And the solution is so painfully obvious it feels almost reductive to point it out: Make it legal to build more housing that houses more people.
Manjoo is one of the open-borders progressive pundits who helped spike housing prices. “My family came to the United States from our native South Africa in the late 1980s,” Manjoo wrote in January 2019 as he argued for open borders:
Economically and strategically, open borders isn’t just a good plan — it’s the only chance we’ve got. America is an aging nation with a stagnant population. We have ample land to house lots more people, but we are increasingly short of workers.
Manjoo’s self-defeating views are perfume for investors, real estate owners, and employers — including Democrats Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg. They have the wealth to profit from any inflow of immigrant consumers, renters and home-buyers, and workers.
A booklet by the investor-funded Economic Innovation Group says:
The relationship between population growth and housing demand is clear. More people means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less demand.…As a result, a shrinking population will lead to falling prices and a deteriorating, vacancy-plagued housing stock that may take generations to clear.…The potential for skilled immigrants to boost local housing markets is clear. Notably, economist Albert Saiz (2007) found a 1% increase in population from immigration causes housing rents and house prices in U.S. cities to rise commensurately, by 1%.
But Manjoo is a clever pundit who can parlay his self-defeating politics into pleasing rationalizations:
Single-family zoning was one of the many ways white homeowners and politicians kept African-Americans out of suburbs.…I don’t feel so bad. Our attached townhouse, on a piece of land a small fraction of the size of a single-family home, is less of a burden on the environment, and it is just the right size for the four of us. It’s also just as loving and pleasant a place for my kids to grow up in as my own suburban manse was for me.
Democrat & billionaire investor Tom Steyer says he will give cheap housing to many illegal migrants (plus jobs etc) - so raising Americans' housing costs.
His private house looks down on SF's Golden Gate bridge. Maybe he is just oblivious to housing costs?bit.ly/2sjnsjV
No comments:
Post a Comment