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“Sol Sanders”

Yesterday’s Gone: Iowa Was Waterloo for Democrats In a fiasco for the ages, the blue party faceplants in Iowa Matt Taibbi

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iowa-caucus-democrats-disaster-trump-sanders-949655/amp/

EXCERPT

“What happened over the five days after the caucus was a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude. Delay after inexplicable delay halted the process, to the point where it began to feel like the caucus had not really taken place. Results were released in chunks, turning what should have been a single news story into many, often with Buttigieg “in the lead.”

The delays and errors cut in many directions, not just against Sanders. Buttigieg, objectively, performed above poll expectations, and might have gotten more momentum even with a close, clear loss, but because of the fiasco he ended up hashtagged as #MayorCheat and lumped in headlines tied to what the Daily Beast called a “Clusterfuck.”

Though Sanders won the popular vote by a fair margin, both in terms of initial preference (6,000 votes) and final preference (2,000), Mayor Pete’s lead for most of the week with “state delegate equivalents” — the number used to calculate how many national delegates are sent to the Democratic convention — made him the technical winner in the eyes of most. By the end of the week, however, Sanders had regained so much ground, to within 1.5 state delegate equivalents, that news organizations like the AP were despairing at calling a winner. 

This wasn’t necessarily incorrect. The awarding of delegates in a state like Iowa is inherently somewhat random. If there’s a tie in votes in a district awarding five delegates, a preposterous system of coin flips is used to break the odd number. The geographical calculation for state delegate equivalents is also uneven, weighted toward the rural. A wide popular-vote winner can surely lose.

But the storylines of caucus week sure looked terrible for the people who ran the vote. The results released early favored Buttigieg, while Sanders-heavy districts came out later. There were massive, obvious errors. Over 2,000 votes that should have gone to Sanders and Warren went to Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer in one case the Iowa Democrats termed a “minor error.” In multiple other districts (Des Moines 14 for example), the “delegate equivalents” appeared to be calculated incorrectly, in ways that punished all the candidates, not just Sanders. By the end of the week, even the New York Times was saying the caucus was plagued with “inconsistencies and errors.”

Emily Connor, a Sanders precinct captain in Boone County, spent much of the week checking results, waiting for her Bernie-heavy district to be recorded. It took a while. By the end of the week, she was fatalistic.

“If you’re a millennial, you basically grew up in an era where popular votes are stolen,” she said. “The system is riddled with loopholes.”

Others felt the party was in denial about how bad the caucus night looked.

“They’re kind of brainwashed,” said Joe Grabinski, who caucused in West Des Moines. “They think they’re on the side of the right… they’ll do anything to save their careers.

An example of how screwed up the process was from the start involved a new twist on the process, the so-called “Presidential Preference Cards.”

In 2020, caucus-goers were handed index cards that seemed simple enough. On side one, marked with a big “1,” caucus-goers were asked to write in their initial preference. Side 2, with a “2,” was meant to be where you wrote in who you ended up supporting, if your first choice was not viable.

The “PPCs” were supposedly there to “ensure a recount is possible,” as the Polk County Democrats put it. But caucus-goers didn’t understand the cards.

Morgan Baethke, who volunteered at Indianola 4, watched as older caucus-goers struggled. Some began filling out both sides as soon as they were given them. 

KIMBALL ON “PETE”, SCALISE ON DURHAM INVESTIGATION, THE COUP THAT FAILED

https://spectator.us/mayor-pete-moderate-bernie-sanders/

Pete Buttigieg Is not Going to Win Roger Kimball,

I see that various pundits are competing to write the political epitaph for Joe ‘son-of-a-bitch‘ Biden. That’s entirely understandable. It’s been clear for some time that Biden is on the threshold of senility, and it is only my charitable disposition that prevents me from speculating about which side of the threshold he occupies.

And then there was the desolation wrought by the Democrats’ impeachment entertainment. From the start, it was clear that the chief casualty of that amateur theatrics was going to be Joe Biden and his sniff, sniff, sniffing son Hunter.

Everyone who is not Bill Kristol understood that the bullet of that purely partisan hit job would miss President Trump. I do not understand why it was not also understood that the Bidens, knee- or perhaps even neck-deep in the influence-peddling nepotism-is-neat corruption biz, would be the prime victims of that bizarre soap opera. Or maybe it was understood and the real point was to give old Joe the shove that he required but to do it covertly. Deep waters.  CONTINUE READING

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/scalise-ive-seen-classified-information-showing-people-ought-to-go-to-jail-over-durham-investigation

SCALISE: “I’ve seen classified information showing ‘people ought to go to jail’ over Durham investigation.”Andrew Mark Miller

Rep. Steve Scalise said that after seeing classified information, he believes that some people should be in jail after U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia inquiry concludes.

“People ought to go to jail,” the Louisiana Republican said to Sean Hannity after explaining there are still “dirty cops” in Washington undermining the president’s agenda.

“I have seen some classified information I can’t go into — but, I can say this: Hopefully, Durham names names. I think the attorney general is waiting to see what comes out of that. And then, hopefully, they go after those people and put them in jail.”

Scalise assured the public that Durham’s report will exonerate “99%” of FBI rank-in-file employees who are “good people” at an important agency. 

Durham was given the task of investigating the origins of the Russia investigation and the surveillance of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with a wider scope than Inspector General Michael Horowitz had while putting together and eventually releasing his report documenting FISA abuses. CONTINUE READING

http://andmagazine.com/talk/2020/02/03/the-coup-failed-now-what/ 

THE COUP FAILED – NOW WHAT? Charles “Sam” Faddis

Throughout history, political succession has been a bloody, chaotic business. The Romans and the Ottomans among others engaged in palace intrigue, assassination and civil war as a means of determining who would rule next when an emperor or sultan was replaced.We have been, for over two hundred and fifty years, a rare example of the legal, peaceful transfer of power.

Until now. Until 2016.

The absurd Ukrainian impeachment attempt is dying. A final stake will be put through its heart within days. Three years of unprecedented extralegal efforts by members of the Democratic Party and rogue federal bureaucrats to overturn the results of a free and fair election are coming to an end. CONTINUE READING

Democrats Feel the Bern. For Insiders, It’s Heartburn Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020//06/democrats_feel_the_bern_for_insiders_its_heartburn.html

A specter is haunting the Democratic Party—the specter of socialism.

For several years, this hard-left movement has been gaining support within the party, especially among younger voters. In a few deep blue districts, socialist/populist candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad have managed to defeat entrenched center-left incumbents. The movement is now powerful enough that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi chose to press forward with impeachment, which she never favored, to retain her leadership position. Bernie is pressing an equally radical agenda in the primaries. He finished in the top two in Iowa and is currently leading a weak field in next week’s New Hampshire primary.

Party leaders are appalled—and alarmed—by Sanders’ strength. They uniformly opposed him in 2016, and they are doing exactly the same this year. They favor Biden, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, or even Warren—anybody but Bernie.

When party insiders “feel the Bern,” it’s acid reflux. Democratic donors, lobbyists, think tanks, and elected officials are convinced their party is doomed this November if an avowed socialist heads the ticket. They’re right, but they don’t have an easy answer.

The insiders’ dilemma is simple to state but tricky to solve. They think Bernie’s nomination would be an electoral disaster, but they must prevent it without alienating his supporters. They need them to win in November.

Democrats Have a ‘Go Big or Go Home’ Problem by David Davenport

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/democrats-have-a-go-big-or-go-home-problem

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/democrats-have-a-go-big-or-go-home-problem

The fact that Democrats could not even deliver timely results of their own Iowa caucuses underscores their larger problem. They have become the party of big, structural changes led by government in a time when people lack confidence and trust in big government.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren likes to talk about the need for “big, structural change” to our domestic policies. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is right with her, denouncing “half measures” and arguing, as he did in a recent commercial, “America is best when we strive to do big things.” 

Nearly all of the Democratic candidates have jumped on the “go big or go home” bandwagon, with calls for “Medicare for all,” free college, a revolutionary and expensive Green New Deal, and huge tax increases on the wealthy. Apparently, Democrats have concluded that if policy proposals are not blockbuster, then they are merely lackluster. Their pitch is not President John F. Kennedy’s “we can do better” call for improvement, but rather President Franklin Roosevelt’s plea for a revolutionary New Deal.

The problem is that the public increasingly distrusts big government. A Pew Research Center study published last year showed that only 17% of people trust the government to do what is right, while 75% believe that trust in the federal government is shrinking. Examining trust in various leadership groups, government officials came in dead last, behind scientists and educators, but even trailing journalists and business leaders.

A Week of Political Karma for the Democrats Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/05/a-week-of-political-karma-for-the-democrats/

President Trump now stands acquitted. The Democrats must confront the debacle that is their presidential primary field and run on a nonexistent record of achievement as the 2020 campaign season kicks off. Karma, indeed, is a bitch.

Donald Trump couldn’t have scripted it better himself: The Democratic Party’s karma knocked them right on the head this week as their countrymen watched in disgust—some, admittedly, in delight.

After three years of deception, gaslighting, and public temper tantrums, these power-hungry partisans finally got their comeuppance. An assembly of agents provocateurs, motivated by an insatiable amount of contempt not just for the president but for Americans in general, who gambled on a farcical impeachment crusade rather than build a persuasive policy case to win over voters this year, are ranting and pouting and tearing up stuff because . . . well, because they are losing. If Nancy Pelosi could have thrown a pacifier from her Capitol high chair Tuesday night, she would have.

The past several days have been filled with delightful metaphors: The president gave a lengthy interview before kickoff on Super Bowl Sunday, touting his achievements and mocking his political foes. A team from a pro-Trump red state faced a team from a Trump-hating blue state, which was favored to win. The San Francisco 49ers, based in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hometown, had a 10-point lead going into the fourth quarter.

Senate Acquits Trump on Both Impeachment Articles By Natalie Andrews and Rebecca Ballhaus

https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-expected-to-vote-to-acquit-trump-on-impeachment-11580908525

WASHINGTON—The Republican-led Senate acquitted President Trump of charges stemming from his efforts to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations that would benefit him in this year’s election, concluding a four-month drama that has consumed Washington and intensified the nation’s sharp divide over his presidency.

On the first article of impeachment, abuse of power, all 47 Democrats and one Republican voted to convict the president, falling short of the 67 needed to remove the president from office. On the second article of impeachment, obstruction of Congress, the vote also failed, with all Democrats and no Republicans finding the president guilty.

The presidential impeachment trial, the nation’s third in its history, grew out of a July 25 phone call in which Mr. Trump asked Ukraine’s president to announce certain investigations just as he was holding up U.S. aid to the country. Mr. Trump has defended the call as “perfect” and has said he did nothing wrong regarding Ukraine. The aid was later released after bipartisan outcry from lawmakers.

“The American people, and frankly, people all over the world, know it’s a hoax,” he told supporters at a recent rally in Des Moines, Iowa.

Mr. Trump had hoped for vindication in the Senate trial after a House investigation that he had decried as politically motivated. What he got was something less: Amid strong support for his acquittal from his own party, several Republicans also said Democrats had proved that he acted improperly regarding Ukraine.

Cuba: The grim reality of life in a communist country By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/cuba_the_grim_reality_of_life_in_a_communist_country.html

Thanks to Obama’s reopening official relationships with Cuba, as well as the fondness that Hollywood and the media have for that Caribbean island, young Americans grow up thinking that Cuba is cool and that communism can’t be that bad. Four young men who traveled there, though, discovered the ugly truth: communist countries are every bit as bad as traditional Americans have been saying for the last 100 plus years.

One of the most shocking things about the 2020 election is how many people support a man who has had a lifelong love affair with totalitarian governments. We’re used to the fact that, for decades now, Democrats have viewed soft-socialist Europe as superior to a free and constitutionally governed America. They never did figure out that Europe had that kind of glamorous socialism because America footed the bill by absorbing all of Europe’s defense costs.

Bernie, however, has no time for the weak sauce that is European socialism. Bernie’s love is for hardcore communism. Everyone knows that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union and praised the wonders of breadlines. Some, though, forget that he has also had a love affair with Cuba’s communist dictatorship. Bernie wants the real socialist deal: the end of all private forms of ownership, the consolidation of everything in government hands, and himself as the head of the government. He’s not a cute, crazy grandfather. He’s a wannabe Lenin.

App made by Clinton campaign veterans’ firm is behind Iowa caucuses debacle By Jeff Bercovici, Melanie Mason

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-04/clinton-campaign-vets-behind-2020-iowa-caucus-app-snafu

On a tense, chaotic night, with the eyes of the nation trained on the Iowa caucuses, that state’s Democratic Party was counting on a slick new smartphone app to make everything go smoothly.

The app was coded by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of them a former Google engineer. It was designed to meet new requirements instituted after that year’s contentious Iowa caucuses, in which Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders. To provide more transparency this time around, the state party promised to report not just the final results but voters’ initial and second choices as well.

With so much more data to tabulate than in previous years, party leaders feared that the established system of reporting numbers by phone would be too slow. A proposal for a “tele-caucus” system enabling virtual voting was rejected as too vulnerable to hacking. An app that could instantaneously relay the numbers as soon as precinct chairs input them, developed by Democratic Party loyalists, looked like the perfect solution.

It turned out to be a crushing failure.

Throughout the long, long night, precinct chairs found themselves unable to make the app work properly. Some never figured out how to download or install it in the first place. Those who tried to report their results via a backup phone line found themselves on hold, sometimes for more than an hour.

Results from Monday’s caucuses could not be transmitted to Iowa party headquarters, and state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price blamed the problem on a coding error. “While our plan is to release results as soon as possible today, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the integrity and accuracy of the process continues to be upheld,” he said in a statement Tuesday morning.

PIERS MORGAN: The Democrats’ smug, sanctimonious Schiff Show impeachment debacle has gifted President Trump a Super Bowl-sized touchdown just as Election 2020 kicks off – and left them needing a Hail Mary in November

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7961369/Sanctimonious-Schiff-impeachment-left-Democrats-needing-Hail-Mary-November.html

The Democrats’ smug, sanctimonious Schiff Show impeachment debacle has gifted President Trump a Super Bowl-sized touchdown just as Election 2020 kicks off – and left them needing a Hail Mary in November
DailyMain.co.uk

‘The definition of insanity.’ said Albert Einstein, ‘is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.’

Clearly, Adam Schiff didn’t get the memo.

Which is a shame, because Einstein was arguably the most intelligent human being to ever exist.

Though one person who might question that claim is Mr. Schiff, a man whose stratospheric ego is only matched by his astonishing superciliousness.

HE thinks he’s the smartest guy in America.

I think he’s the dumbest, and I’ll explain why.

Schiff, the Lead Impeachment Manager for Donald Trump’s impeachment, was asked on CBS’ Face The Nation yesterday morning if he would have done anything differently given the Senate has now voted to reject more witnesses and will inevitably vote to acquit the President on Wednesday.

‘There’s nothing that I can see that we could have done differently,’ he replied, with that curiously smug bug-eyed smirk Schiff pulls whenever he thinks he’s saying something particularly clever.

Sanctimonious: Adam Schiff’s obsession with Trump will cost the Democrats dearly this election year by handing President Trump a huge Super Bowl-sized win

Really, Adam?

Karin McQuillan The White Field Spells Disaster for Democrats The Democratic Left is losing the black vote. The paradigm-bashing President Trump is going all-out to win it.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/02/the-white-field-spells-disaster-for-democrats/

The takeaway from the Democrats’ 2020 field of white politicians is right in front of us. Black Democrats have become less racist, and young Democrats have become more radical.

No one backed the black candidates, not even black voters. Most black voters are not buying woke politics, not from Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), not from Cory Booker (D-N.J.), not from anybody. This presents an opening for President Trump.

There are more black primary voters this year than ever before. They could have turned Harris or Booker into leading contenders. Instead, they chose the old white guy. This is change.

Racial identity alone was a ticket to nowhere. Harris went nuclear and called Joe Biden a racist and all she got was a lousy three-day blip.

It’s the black voters’ choice, but the all-white field is still bad news for Democrats. Very bad news. It is a shocking image. From the first black president to this? Democrats are terrified that too many blacks will stay home on Election Day. That’s more good news for Trump.