And it was fitting, too, given that Klobuchar is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which holds the Supreme Court hearings. She could have held that tweet up as proof that she's fair and impartial.
But she didn't. She went along with the leftist herd like the rest of them and disowned her own tweet. Instead of being a fan of rule of law, she's a fan of Democratic politics.
Schweizer, author of Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, documented Klobuchar’s numerous conflicts of interest across her political career.
Peter Schweizer: Politicians Need to Use ‘Breaking the News’ Exposé of Chuck Todd in Future Interviews
Peter Schweizer, author and president of the Government Accountability Institute, said on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily that politicians should ask MSNBC’s Chuck Todd about his numerous conflicts of interest as revealed in Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow’s book, Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.
Marlow revealed Chuck Todd’s political conflicts of interest in Breaking the News, which includes his renting a house to Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and his wife’s career as a Democrat Party political consultant, including consulting for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign. Todd does not disclose his conflicts of interest related to his profession as a news media anchor and analyst while presenting himself as an objective and non-partisan operator.
Schweizer advised politicians to draw on Breaking the News‘s revelations of Chuck Todd’s financial and political conflicts of interest in future interviews with the MSNBC figure.
“Here’s what I hope — and I think — has to happen,” Schweizer remarked. “The next time Chuck Todd on his show smiles and says, ‘Well, you know, congressman or senator, this individual did a fundraiser for you. Didn’t that affect your vote?’ I hope that those individuals turn around and ask him the same question in return.”
LISTEN:
He continued, “They’re legitimate questions in both ways, but for some reason there are no watchdogs on the so-called watchdogs. There’s nobody out there other than you and Breitbart that is really holding them to account. Their colleagues aren’t going to do it, and that’s part of the problem. Again, they are the insiders. They’re not the outsiders. They haven’t been outsiders for a very long time.”
Chuck Todd’s refusal to disclose his compromised status as a news media anchor and analyst is part of a broader corruption across the news media industry, Schweizer observed. Deceptive presentations of political objectivity — as illustrated by Chuck Todd — are an essential ingredient in the recipe of news media mendacity, he added.
“The point is, the point is not that Chuck Todd can’t rent out his place,” he stated. “The point is that what journalism is all about is disclosure. … Our political leaders are required to disclose their financial ties, because we have to know what is entering into the professional decisions that they’re making. Same in the executive branch.”
Schweizer noted that Chuck Todd’s lack of disclosure of his conflicts of interest cannot be an oversight given the centrality of disclosure to journalistic ethics.
He said, “Disclosure is so important. For the life of me, the fact that there was no disclosure [when Chuck Todd was] sitting down having conversations with somebody with whom he’s had a financial relationship is absolutely shocking. This is his profession, so this is not a question of him sort of stumbling into a field and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I should have disclosed this.’ This is what he does for a living.”
“[Chuck Todd] should be disclosing the fact that [his] spouse is making serious money working for Bernie Sanders and Democratic causes when [he is] interviewing Democrats and/or Republicans on national television,” he added.
Marlow highlighted Chuck Todd’s career as a political consultant for Democrats.
“Kristian Denny, who is [Chuck Todd’s] wife, is a Democrat consultant,” Marlow said. “She got paid over $90,000 from the socialist Bernie Sanders campaign, and over $1.5 million from the socialist Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. So, she’s gotten over $2.5 million from the socialist guy, and then they don’t mention any of this, like Chuck Todd [saying], ‘Oh, and just to let you know, we got a new Porsche last year thanks to Bernie Sanders.'”
He added, “I get why they’re not disclosed, because it’s so impossibly humiliating, but it is unethical.”
Schweizer remarked, “[Breaking the News] really underscored the kind of industrial logic of the corruption that is part of the media, and what stands out in your book and what people have really come to realize is that journalists desperately want people to think they’re the outsiders, and that they’re the ones who are speaking truth to power, they’re the ones that are holding power accountable.”
“They’re not,” he continued. “They’re the ultimate insiders. They club with these people. They’re even landlords of these people. … People understand economic incentives. They understand financial ties and financial corruption, and the reason that they are going to try to desperately ignore this book is precisely because it’s so devastating.”
Schweizer, author of Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, documented Klobuchar’s numerous conflicts of interest across her political career.
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Amy Klobuchar steps in it on Supreme Court nomination, then tries to clean up, badly
As Democrat go into a feeding frenzy over the news that President Trump intends to pick a new Supreme Court nominee, Minnesota's supposedly moderate senator, Amy Klobuchar, stepped in it by supporting his rationale, and wasn't happy about it.
First, she tweeted this.
The people pick the President; the President nominates the Justice. That is how it works.
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) September 21, 2020
She's so invested in the idea that President Trump isn't president and that President Trump could never be re-elected that she found that this statement perfectly meshed with all her other far-left views.
Then she started getting replies like this:
I agree and @realDonaldTrump is the President. Glad to have your support on this Amy. https://t.co/THdDsK0aHP
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 21, 2020
So she tried to clean up after herself, with no success:
People are voting RIGHT NOW to pick our president — that president should pick the next Supreme Court Justice.
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) September 21, 2020
And got replies like this:
Democrats are saying that a Supreme Court justice should not be replaced until a new president takes office; but that would be 4 1/2 years from now — and that's WAY too long. @realDonaldTrump
— Louie Gohmert (@replouiegohmert) September 21, 2020
This is sorry stuff, given that she's supposed to be the Democrats' version of the moderate. That's why she couldn't get any delegates during the primaries. In this election, Democrats wanted a crazed extremist. When I first saw that tweet, I thought she was serious, given her reputation for moderation. Maybe she's as moderate as she's billed, I thought.
And why, if she were smart, she would have stuck to her tweet, which was factual, even if President Trump was saying it.
And it was fitting, too, given that Klobuchar is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which holds the Supreme Court hearings. She could have held that tweet up as proof that she's fair and impartial.
But she didn't. She went along with the leftist herd like the rest of them and disowned her own tweet. Instead of being a fan of rule of law, she's a fan of Democratic politics.
And as a result, she's now a laughingstock. As Ed Morrissey put it in his excellent blog post on it, she's done an "own goal." If she had any brains, she would have stuck by her guns and given rule of law a small shoutout.
Image credit: Twitter screen shot.
Joe Biden Veepstakes Take Bad Turn as Scandals Hit Amy Klobuchar, Gretchen Whitmer
Two women reportedly on Joe Biden’s shortlist for vice president have been hit with major scandals that could cripple their chances of being nominated.
On Thursday, Minnesota-based Mint Press News reported that U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) was the district attorney at the time Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin shot and killed Wayne Reyes in 2006.
According to Mint Press News, between 1999 and 2007, Klobuchar “did not bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against Chauvin himself.”
Chauvin was involved in a fatal accident in 2005, killed Wayne Reyes in 2006, shot another man while in uniform in 2008, and had a litany of complaints against him. To be fair to Klobuchar, the Reyes shooting happened in October 2006, as her time as state prosecutor was coming to an end and she was campaigning for the senate. By the time Chauvin’s case finally made it to a grand jury, she had relinquished her role.
The site reported Klobuchar “declined” to bring charges against the officer who was filmed putting his knee on the neck of George Floyd on Monday, allegedly causing his death.
The news site claimed Minneapolis had a “history of racist policing, thanks to Klobuchar.”
Meanwhile, in Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has suffered a series of scandals, most recently her husband’s attempt to use his wife’s stature to get his boat in the water before other residents.
Whitmer at first denied the story, then claimed it was a “failed attempt at humor” on her husband’s part, before demanding an apology from Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey after he said she “lied” about the situation.
Volume 90%
“My husband made a failed attempt at humor last week when checking with the small business that helps with our boat and dock up north,” Whitmer said.
“Knowing it wouldn’t make a difference, he jokingly asked if being married to me might move him up in the queue,” she said.
“Obviously with the motorized boating prohibition in our early days of COVID-19, he thought it might get a laugh. It didn’t,” Whitmer continued.
“And to be honest, I wasn’t laughing either when it was relayed to me, because I knew how it would be perceived. He regrets it. I wish it wouldn’t have happened, and that’s really all we have to say about it,” she said.
“It would be nice if this governor was as quick to identify failed leadership. How can we trust the governor, how can the citizens of Michigan trust the governor? What else is she willing to lie about if she lied about putting a boat into the water?” Shirkey said.
On Thursday, Whitmer attempted to shift away from the scandal and called on Shirkey and the legislature to work with her to address an estimated $3 billion budget shortfall created by her shutdown of the state.
In another blow to Biden’s pool of prospects, U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) said she’s “not interested” in running with him, the AP reported.
“I support Joe Biden 100% and will work tirelessly to help get him elected this November. It is an honor to be considered as a potential running mate but I have decided to withdraw my name from consideration,” Cortez Masto said.
Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. He is also host of “The Kyle Olson Show,” syndicated on Michigan radio stations on Saturdays. Listen to segments on YouTube. Follow him on Twitter and like him on Facebook.
Klobuchar Previously Declined to Prosecute Officer Involved in George Floyd’s Death
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), as a Minnesota county prosecutor in the early 2000s, refused to prosecute the police officer now at the center of the controversy surrounding the death of George Floyd.
Klobuchar, who served as the chief legal officer of Hennepin County, Minnesota, before ascending to the United States Senate, declined to charge Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for his role in the shooting death of Wayne Reyes in October 2006.
Reyes allegedly “stabbed his girlfriend and a male friend,” before fleeing in his vehicle and setting off a chase by law enforcement, according to a report on police brutality from the Minneapolis-based Communities United Against Police Brutality.
Chauvin, who at the time had been on the Minneapolis police force since 1999, was one of six officers involved in the pursuit. When Reyes was eventually stopped, Chauvin and the other officers claimed he aimed a shotgun towards them in a threatening manner. Reyes’s alleged burnishing of the weapon resulted in all six officers opening fire and killing him.
The incident, which was reported by The Guardian on Thursday, elicited widespread concern among Minneapolis residents at the time of Reyes’s death for what was seen as too strong a use of force. As such, Klobuchar, who was running for the U.S. Senate at the time of the shooting, was pressured by the local black community in Minneapolis to prosecute the officers involved.
In the weeks following the shooting, however, Klobuchar declined to act on the matter. Instead, having won her Senate race, she spent the remaining three months of her tenure between November 2006 and January 2007 planning for her transition to Washington, DC. The case eventually went to a grand jury in 2008, which opted not to charge the officers with any wrongdoing for their conduct.
Chauvin would continue to serve on the Minneapolis police force for the next decade and a half. It would not, though, be his last brush with controversy. In 2011, Chauvin would be placed on temporary leave after he and four other officers shot a Native American man, who was later charged with felony second-degree assault. Overall, Chauvin would face at least ten civilian complaints throughout his tenure with the force. Three of those, which arose because of his use of “derogatory language” and “demeaning tone” towards suspects, would result in oral reprimands.
His career officially came to an end earlier this week when he was fired for his involvement in Floyd’s death. The firing came after a video went viral showing Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck while attempting to arrest the man for alleged forgery. In the video, Floyd is heard pleading for help, claiming he cannot breathe, as Chauvin stands over him. Tou Thao, Chauvin’s partner who also has a record of police brutality complaints, is seen in the video refusing to intervene.
Since the video went viral, protests have arisen across Minnesota and other parts of the country from activists hoping to shine a light on what they see as the failures and inequities of the criminal justice system. Although most of the protests have been non-violent, several riots broke out in Minneapolis and neighboring Saint Paul on Wednesday and Thursday.
The attention drawn by both the protests and the riots has brought Klobuchar’s 2006 decision to not prosecute Chauvin back into the spotlight. Such scrutiny, however, comes at an inopportune moment for the senator, who leads the short-list to be former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate this November.
Even though Klobuchar was always going to face criticism for the law and order image she cultivated as a county prosecutor, the current situation in Minnesota disqualifies her in the eyes of many black Democrats and activists. The sentiment was perhaps best summed up by Sunny Hostin during an episode of ABC’s The View on Wednesday.
“We’re seeing that black people in Minneapolis are arrested at nine times the rate of a white person for nonviolent offenses,” Hostin said. She added “that this is why the black community has said that Amy Klobuchar is a nonstarter for them, because … she declined to prosecute over two dozen cases involving police killings of unarmed people.”
Amy Klobuchar Hides Her Support for Exporting College Graduate Jobs to India
Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar is touting her support for amnesty and easy migration of blue-collar workers — but she is hiding her support for laws that allow employers to hire foreign graduates for the white-collar jobs needed by Klobuchar’s college graduate progressive voters.
“We know that immigrants don’t diminish America, they are America,” she told a February 13 event in Nevada organized by the League of United Latin American Citizens. She continued:
We also know that we need workers in our fields, in our factories, to start more small businesses, in our nursing homes, working as doctors, and [in] our hospitals and [as] nurses. So I think that economic case … is the case I’ve been making in every state. …. In nearly every town hall meeting, I would bring up immigration, because I just think it’s so important for people, even in states that don’t have big Hispanic communities, to start thinking of it as an economic imperative.
Klobuchar has a long history of support for white-collar migration, despite the impact on college voters in her home state.
In 2015, for example, Klobuchar backed a bill by then GOP Utah Sen. Orin Hatch that would allow universities and companies to cooperatively import an unlimited number of foreign graduates for the jobs sought by American graduates. ComputerWorld reported:
Technically, the bill is a reintroduction of the earlier “I-Square” bill, but it includes enough revisions to be considered new. It increases the H-1B visa cap to 195,000 (instead of an earlier 300,000 cap), and eliminates the cap on people who earn an advanced degree in a STEM (science, technology, education and math) field.
Hatch, who is the No. 2 ranking senator in the GOP-controlled chamber, was joined by co-sponsors Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in backing the legislation.
…
“This bill is basically a wish list for the tech industry,” said [EPI’s Daniel] Costa.
In 2020, Klobuchar is also sponsoring the updated version of the Hatch bill. The bill, titled S.386, is being championed by Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee. His bill would not change the overall number of green cards for foreign employees, but it would roughly quintuple the award of green cards to the unlimited number of temporary status Indians graduates who can take jobs from American graduates via the Optional Practical Training, L-1, and the H-1B programs.
Neil Munro
✔@NeilMunroDC
The #S386 green-card giveaway bill pushed by #SenMikeLee is driven by Utah's unified estb., which wants to build a new Silicon Valley: "Silicon Slopes"
Romney's impeachment dump on Trump taints the push by Lee & Utah for a GOP OK of Utah's business plan.http://bit.ly/38aHMnw
Mitt Romney's Impeachment Vote Backfires on Utah's Push for S.386 Green Card Giveaway
Sen. Mitt Romney's vote against Donald Trump has created a political problem for the Utah establishment's S.386 green card giveaway bill.
breitbart.com
529
314 people are talking about this
The resident population of roughly one million Indian graduates has created a U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy throughout the U.S economy, which pushes many American graduates out of good jobs. The outsourcing economy has imposed Indian-style workplace rules on Americans’ professional workplaces, despite U.S. laws against discrimination, favoritism, and kickbacks.
Klobuchar’s support for middle class outsourcing is a fundamental economic threat to her own voting base of white-collar college graduates.
She came in third in the New Hampshire primary race partly because she won the biggest share of college voters, according to the exit polls. She won 25 percent of the votes from college grad Democrats, narrowly beating the shares won by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. But she only won 14 percent of blue-collar votes, far behind Sanders’ share of 31 percent and Buttigieg’s share of 24 percent.
But the victims of this Indian outsourcing include many young, mid-career and older graduates in her home state of Minnesota.
Numerous Indian-run, Indian-staffed outsourcing firms have set up satellite offices in Minnesota. They include Infosys, Cognizant, Tata, Larsen & Toubro Wipro, IBM India, and IBM, which recently appointed an Indian CEO to run the firm.
The federal data showing the H-1B job losses are presented MyVisaJObs.com. The site shows the number of H-1B visa workers requested by Minnesota employers to take jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.
In 2019, Minnesota-based Best Buy asked for visas to import 59 foreign graduates, at expected annual pay of $113,000. Minnesota-based Target sought 288 visas for jobs paying an average of $124,000. Cargill Inc. asked for 23 visa workers for jobs paying $117,000, the University of Minnesota asked for 245 graduates at an average pay of $80,000 and Medtronic asked for 263 graduates at an average pay of $99,000.
SAITJ.org displays the same data from 2017, and it shows that half of the requested workers would earn less than $70,000 a year, while 14 percent would earn more than $100,000.
The outsourcing economy also hits older workers. In 2007, for example, Minnesota’s Best Buy retail company settled a lawsuit by American workers who were replaced by H-1B workers from the Accenture consulting company, according to ComputerWorld’s report:
Best Buy Co. this month quietly settled an age discrimination lawsuit filed in 2004 by 44 former IT [Information Technology] workers who had been laid off, most of them after the electronics retailer outsourced its IT operations to Accenture Ltd. earlier that year.
“The matter has been resolved on a mutual basis,” said Stephen Snyder, a Minneapolis attorney who represented the former Best Buy employees. Neither Snyder nor officials at the retailer would comment on the details of the settlement deal approved by a U.S. District Court judge in Minnesota.
When the outsourcing deal was announced, Best Buy told its 820 IT workers that only about 40 of them would remain with the retailer. About 650 others were expected to be shifted to Accenture and continue working at Best Buy’s offices, while the remaining 130 or so workers were told their jobs would be eliminated.
Mid-career professionals also lose out.
“She’s the ‘Minnesota nice’ version of [Democrat Rep.] Zoe Lofgren … [who is] the congresswoman from Silicon who is a complete foreign-labor dumping shill,” said a Minnesota-born software professional who has lost jobs to Indian outsourcing. He continued:
In 2004, I’m in Chicago, on the near-north side, near one of the restaurant districts, and this Indian guy comes up to me and asks me for directions. It turns out I end up talking to him for two hours or so, him and his sister. He told me he is working at the Best Buy headquarters in Richview, Minneapolis … He explained how he was told by a manager to lie to an American programmer, tell him there was no more work — but to [secretly] shift work overseas [to India]. The American looked at him and said, ‘What am I supposed to do? I have a mortgage and I have a baby on the way.”
If [the Indan] did not play ball, he was going to be on the first plane back to India.
“Klobuchar knows about this [outsourcing[… she is complicit,’ he said.
The Indian outsourcing has accelerated in the last decade, partly because Klobuchar and other politicians protect the business — and even used the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill to expand the flow of visa workers and foreign graduates. Klobuchar reiterated her support of the 2013 bill at the Nevada event:
I have been a long supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. I think that is the best answer and in 2013, we did, and as I mentioned, when President [George W.] Bush was in and he really wanted to get it done. And we got close, but we had a lot of pushback actually from right-wing talk radio and other things.
Then it got to President [Barack] Obama’s time, and he wanted to get it done too. And in 2013, we put together a bill that was supported both by the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL CIO, by the migrant groups as well as the Farm Bureau and the farmers union. And we got that through [the Senate] with bipartisan support. I was on the judiciary committee, am on that committee and worked on that bill hard, and then it died somewhere over in the House, next to the frozen peas in [House Speaker] John Boehner’s freezer, I don’t know. It never got through, and it was a very sad thing because we had such bipartisan support.
Klobuchar’s opponent, Sen. Sanders, opposed the 2013 bill:
NumbersUSA@NumbersUSA
In 2013, @SenSanders gave a powerful speech condemning the Gang of Eight bill written by corporate lobbyists. He then he voted for the bill despite being on record acknowledging that it would hurt American workers. https://twitter.com/ColumbiaBugle/status/1228310760582873088 …
The Columbia Bugle 
@ColumbiaBugle
#FlashbackFriday Bernie in 2013, what happened?
"Corporate America is kind of using immigration reform as a means to continue their effort to lower wages in the USA & we must not allow that to happen."@realDonaldTrump won on a similar America First Immigration policy.
137
96 people are talking about this
Klobuchar promises to push for a similar bill if she is elected President:
I am convinced that we can get this done. I think a lot of the Republicans do not want to cross Donald Trump right now. But there are a lot of them that know that we need to get it done. I am committed to getting it done in my first year. I’m not gonna wait because that would have a path to citizenship, as well as do something of course with the ‘dreamers’ and give them citizenship, as well as dealing with temporary status workers.
Neil Munro
✔@NeilMunroDC
New Infosys lawsuit helps explain how the huge H-1B/OPT outsourcing economy pressures & rewards Indian managers to discriminate against American graduates, including Indian legal immigrants.
Follow the money, all the way to India.
And to Utah's #S386http://bit.ly/31qzs0g
Lawsuit Alleges Anti-American Bias by Indian Managers in U.S.
A legal immigrant is suing an Indian outsourcing firm for allegedly violating U.S. workplace laws and anti-discrimination laws.
breitbart.com
567
386 people are talking about this
EconomyImmigrationPoliticsAmy KlobucharCognizantH-1BinfosysMigrantmigrationOPTOutsourcingS. 386U.S-India Outsourcing Economy
Amy Klobuchar wants to abandon English as America's official language
For Democrats frightened by either an openly socialist candidate or an untested man whom blacks dislike, the seemingly “reasonable” choices are an ex-Republican, sexist, anti-Second Amendment, micro-managing despot -- and Amy Klobuchar, the meanest Senator in Washington. It’s time to remember that Klobuchar has no fixed principles but will, instead, do whatever it takes to advance herself in the Democrat Party.
On Friday, Klobuchar’s latest opportunistic move was to announce at a campaign event in Las Vegas that English should not be America’s official language, even though she voted for a Senate bill that would have made English the official language. She now says that she has “taken a strong position against” the English language in America, although she cannot seem to explain her past vote. One can certainly explain her current turnabout, though, despite her efforts to keep her various immigration positions opaque:
Her policy shift comes a week before the caucuses are set to take place in a state with a large Latino population and an area where Klobuchar has about 10 percent support.
Klobuchar has flip-flopped on immigration policies, once supporting projects like a wall and E-Verify to ban employers from hiring illegal aliens back in 2006.
The Minnesota senator has also been open about supporting amnesty but has hidden her support for exporting college graduate-level jobs overseas.
This conduct is typical Klobuchar. The PowerLine blog, which is headquartered in Minnesota, has been reporting on Klobuchar for years, revealing a calculating progressive who uses “Minnesota nice” as a way to avoid being tagged for the controversial and often inconsistent stands she takes.
In September 2017, Scott Johnson summed up Klobuchar’s tactics when it came to Trump’s nominating Judge David Stras to the Eighth Circuit. Although Stras received bipartisan support in Minnesota from everyone who interacted with him, Klobuchar was blocking him from consideration, instead using his nomination as a cudgel to gain control over four other federal vacancies in Minnesota.
While the partisan Minnesota Star Tribune dutifully ignored Klobuchar’s machinations, PowerLine’s reporting on the issue irked Mrs. Minnesota Nice:
She refused to comment on our reporting about them. She chafed over our disclosure of them. She resented the bad attitude with which we viewed them. She sought to keep the lid on. She denied that she was blocking Stras’s nomination, although she was — pending some arrangement with the White House that would reward her for turning in her blue slip.
Seeking to appease Klobuchar while it tried to reach an agreement with her, the White House reached out to me. The White House had a favor to ask. It requested that I knock off covering the moves of this highly partisan politician with an incredibly thin skin while it worked something out with her. After all, she prefers to present herself (in the title of her memoir) as the Senator next door and the local media have been happy to play along with her.
When then-Sen. Al Franken eventually announced that he would not consider Stras’s nomination, Klobuchar turned around and said that Stras ought to get a hearing:
Or course, she left her use of Stras’s nomination for leverage on the Minnesota vacancies unmentioned, and it remains unmentioned in the Star Tribune story by Jennifer Brooks and Stephen Montemayor today.
Klobuchar then issued a public statement gushing about how wonderful Stras was, only to end by stabbing him in the back:
Klobuchar wants us to believe she fits the mold of Minnesota Nice. Her sayonara to Justice Stras in the concluding paragraph, however, shows her to be worse than a phony politician. She is a contemptible human being.
Klobuchar’s habit of being cute in public and vicious behind the scenes was again on display with the Neil Gorsuch nomination:
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar specializes in avoiding outspoken stands on important issues. She looks for opportunities to lead the way on trivialities calculated to garner broad public support, such as her crusade against the threat to life and limb posed by “The crisis of the detergent pod.”
Senator Klobuchar is a reliable vote for the Democratic Party line, but she is quiet about it. She doesn’t want to upset anybody. She wants to preside over an era of good feelings — of good feelings about Amy Klobuchar. It’s a form of inanity that has won Klobuchar followers among the mainstream media in Minnesota and elsewhere.
[snip]
Senator Klobuchar strongly supports the Democrats’ partisan filibuster of Judge Gorsuch. Why? Senator Klobuchar isn’t saying.
In addition, Senator Klobuchar strongly supports the retention of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees generally. Why? Senator Klobuchar isn’t saying.
Klobuchar’s turnabout on English as America’s official language reveals the same M.O.: She presents a moderate front but generally works behind the scenes to ingratiate herself with the extremists in the Democrat party.
Amy Klobuchar: The favorite Democrat of Senate Republicans
Senator Amy Klobuchar’s presidential campaign exemplifies the anti-working class and right-wing politics of the Democratic Party. Her campaign platform addresses almost none of the pressing issues confronting millions of workers and youth in the United States. She is one of a group of candidates offering themselves as “center-left” substitutes in case the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden should fall apart.
Like a company offering multiple products to saturate the market, often made using the same ingredients in minutely different proportions, she is one of many right-wing candidates fielded by the Democratic Party who is differentiated from the rest by a slightly varied hue of alleged progressive politics.
Klobuchar announcing her 2020 presidential campaign in Boom Island Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota on February 10, 2019. (Credit: Lorie Shaull)
In some ways, Klobuchar seems a candidate prepared in the laboratory to meet the specific requirements of the 2020 campaign: years of experience in the US Senate, check; background as a tough law-and-order prosecutor, check; female, check; visibly younger than Biden and Trump, check; represents a state in the Midwest, the key battleground of 2016 and likely of 2020, check. And one might add: proven defender of corporate America and US imperialism, check, check, check.
Corporate lawyer and defender of police
violence
Born on May 25, 1960 in Plymouth, Minnesota, Klobuchar attended Yale University as an undergraduate. She was a member of the Yale College Democrats and the Feminist Caucus. While still an undergraduate, Klobuchar interned in the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, former vice president and former Minnesota senator, who would go on to lose to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.
After Yale, she attended the University of Chicago Law School, graduating in 1985 and becoming a corporate lawyer. She was a partner at the Minnesota law firms Dorsey & Whitney and Gray Plant Mooty, specializing in telecommunications law.
In 1994, Klobuchar first ran for Hennepin County Attorney in Minnesota but quit the race to support incumbent Michael Freeman. After Freeman stepped aside in 1998 to run for governor, Klobuchar ran again and won, narrowly defeating Sheryl Ramstad Hvass, making her the chief prosecutor in the largest county in Minnesota, including the city of Minneapolis, with a population of more than 1.5 million.
As county attorney, Klobuchar oversaw the
systematic cover-up of police murders and
violence. During her approximate tenure as county
attorney, the city of Minneapolis paid out $4.8
million in legal settlement fees for 122 police
misconduct incidents. Meanwhile, during this
same period, local police and Hennepin County
sheriffs killed 29 people.
Klobuchar did not once file criminal charges against police for misconduct, even when they killed people. Instead, she put such cases for decision by a grand jury, a process which was heavily criticized for its secrecy and for having the reputation of allowing testimonies in favor of police.
Tahisha Williams Brewer, whose 14-year-old son was killed by Minnesota police in 2004, wrote to Klobuchar at the time, “The grand jury is a way of hiding that the prosecutor is not giving the full information of guilt to the grand jury. I want this process out in the open, where everyone can observe it and make sure that it is fair to my son.”
Minneapolis police union leaders backed her candidacy for Hennepin County Attorney in both 1998 and 2002, when the Republican Party tacitly supported her as well, failing to field a candidate to challenge her reelection.
A friend to Republicans in the US Senate
In 2006, Klobuchar won election to the United State Senate, running as a member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Minnesota’s affiliate of the Democratic Party. As in 1998, she filled a vacancy left when a Democratic incumbent dropped out to run for governor, in this case, multi-millionaire Mark Dayton. She was reelected easily in both 2012 and 2018.
As a senator, Klobuchar has been identified as a “middle of the road” Democrat, that is, one who combined right-wing Democratic Party positions with excursions into bipartisanship, boasting of her ability to work closely with Republicans in Washington, both in the Senate itself and when the White House was in Republican hands.
Former President George W. Bush with Klobuchar in 2007. (Credit: White House)
This has won her a certain recognition as the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate with the most support among Republican leaders. A report on Politico.com after she announced her candidacy in February carried the headline, “Republicans gush over Klobuchar.”
It began: “Amy Klobuchar has an unusual constituency behind her as she launches her run for president: Senate Republicans … numerous Republicans are raving about Klobuchar—her personality, her respect for the other party, even her competitiveness in a general election.” The article went on to observe, “a dozen GOP senators were so effusive in interviews this month that some worried they might damage her candidacy.”
Conservative columnist George Will raved that Klobuchar was “the person perhaps best equipped to send the current president packing.” The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal agreed, arguing that because Klobuchar “hasn’t parroted lefty slogans … She may be the Democrat best able to beat Mr. Trump.”
Klobuchar actively promotes the anti-Russia hysteria which the Democratic Party has promulgated since the election of Trump. She once told ABC News, “You cannot compare any leaders in our country to what Vladimir Putin has done. This is a man and a regime that has taken down a passenger plane in Ukraine, killing hundreds of people … This is a regime that, we believe—17 intelligence agencies in our own country have said—has tried to influence our own election. I don’t think there’s any comparison.”
She backed investigating social media websites like Facebook on the pretense they swayed the 2016 US presidential elections in favor of Trump via Russian interference, telling the New York Times, “We need to know if Facebook, or any entity affiliated with or hired by Facebook, ever used any of the vast financial and data resources available to them to retaliate against their critics, including elected officials who were scrutinizing them.”
In June, Klobuchar blamed Russia on Twitter for online racist attacks against presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She tweeted, “These troll-fueled racist attacks on Senator @KamalaHarris are unacceptable. We are better than this (Russia is not) and stand united against this type of vile behavior.” Such an accusation implying Russia was responsible was made without the slightest shred of evidence and made to intentionally confound and whip up support to her campaign among right-wing elements. Referencing her tweet, a CNN anchorman asked her if she believed Russia was behind the attacks, Klobuchar responded she had “no idea.”
Klobuchar’s career as a senator has received
blessings from large corporations. According to
opensecrets.org, from 2013 to 2017, her campaign
and PAC committee received donations from the
likes of Facebook, Target, Comcast, Best Buy,
Morgan Stanley, Alphabet Inc. (the owner of
Google), Amazon.com, General Motors, Ford and
more.
For the same period, the top contributors to her campaign and PAC committee were: Delta Air Lines at $85,314; her former law firm Dorsey & Whitney at $65,435; and Walt Disney Co. at $64,081.
A banal, right-wing presidential campaign
Klobuchar announced her candidacy for president in February 2019. In words presumably prepared in advance, she declared, “On a cold February day in Minneapolis on the mighty Mississippi River, with thousands of friends and supporters at my side I announced that I’m running for President of the United States. As I said that day in our nation’s heartland, we must heal the heart of our democracy and renew our commitment to the common good.”
Such forgettable words express the overall banality of her presidential campaign. A reading of her presidential campaign website says almost nothing significant. The cut and pasted stances fail to address the growing problems and struggles of workers in the United States.
Klobuchar with former Republican Senator John McCain and current Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. (Credit: Ernests Dinka)
But of what little is said, along with her history as senator, should be taken as a warning. For Klobuchar, the “common good” amounts to her nationalistic, pro-war agenda. Just two lines are devoted to the subject of foreign politics on her campaign website, one of which states Klobuchar “would invest in diplomacy and rebuild the State Department and modernize our military to stay one step ahead of China and Russia, including with serious investments in cybersecurity.”
But this says plenty. Klobuchar’s call to
“modernize” a military whose budget already
exceeds the next eight countries combined, would
mean further attacks on the working class by way
of slashing support programs to funnel more
money into the military. To stay “one step ahead of China and Russia,” both nuclear-armed countries, implies Klobuchar fully supports the continued amassing and building of nuclear weapons.
Klobuchar’s voting record for military budgets is a consistent yes. She repeatedly voted in favor of continued funding for both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, she supported the bloody intervention in Libya which left the country in ruins. This year, she supported the attempted coup in Venezuela by the Trump administration.
Recently, she voted against the new federal fiscal budget beginning October 1 that includes a record $738 billion for the military. The hawkish Klobuchar has not been reformed. Her “no” vote was made knowing full well the budget would pass regardless. It was a cynical attempt to distance herself from the militaristic policies of the Trump administration.
Klobuchar espouses the nationalistic politics of the Democratic Party and has fervently attacked China in an attempt to blame Chinese workers for the deepening impoverishment affecting American workers. In a 2017 letter to Trump, Klobuchar stated, “You have consistently reaffirmed your commitment to supporting steelworker jobs, and Chinese steel dumping is a major contributor to American manufacturing job loss.”
On domestic issues, Klobuchar has been careful to present herself as a “moderate,” opposed to the supposed extremes represented by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—who themselves are limited entirely to the framework of the capitalist profit system.
As a Washington Post report in May put it, “The senator has been willing to say no to some of the purity tests being pushed by far-left activists. Klobuchar has expressed skepticism of packing the Supreme Court, for example, and she has said that some of her rivals who are promising free university tuition and college-debt forgiveness are not being straight with voters. On health care, Klobuchar endorses a public option but stops short of Medicare-for-all.”
On immigration, her campaign website states,
“Amy supports a comprehensive immigration
reform bill that includes the DREAM Act, border
security and an accountable pathway to earned
citizenship.”
Klobuchar surrounded by the Minnesota National Guard in Iraq. (Credit: Office of Amy Klobuchar)
With this generic right-wing profile, and her bland campaign, it is not a surprise that Klobuchar is running ninth or tenth in the polls and other measures of support for the Democratic presidential nomination. She participated in the first two debates without notable impact, and has met the slightly higher requirements to qualify for the third debate next month in Houston.
Minnesota is the state which supplied much of the leadership of the Democratic Party in the second half of the 20th century, including three senators who were major presidential candidates, two of them becoming vice president—Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale—and the third playing a key role in ousting a sitting president—Eugene McCarthy.
Humphrey, McCarthy and Mondale all represented the Democratic Party during the period when it was still associated with a program of limited social reform and improved living standards for working people, although Mondale, as vice president under Jimmy Carter, was part of a Democratic administration that broke with that tradition, inaugurating the steady shift to the right by the Democrats over the next four decades.
Some 35 years after Mondale went down to a landslide defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan, the current Minnesotan seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Amy Klobuchar, is closer politically to Reagan than to the liberal politics of the Minnesota Democratic Party in its heyday.
No comments:
Post a Comment