YEP: Axelrod: Trump “Forcing” Democrats To Embrace AOC’s Squad, Accept They Run The Party.
InstaPundit readers have known this since early Sunday evening. “All the Democrats have to do is not be crazy, and Trump’s making it impossible for them to do that.”
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Tying Up Loose Threads In The Curious Case Of Ilhan Omar.
AT AMAZON, today’s Deals of the Day.
TYLER O’NEIL: Hidden Motives Behind the Huge 2020 Democratic Primary.
Every presidential candidate receives free hours of TV, radio, and internet attention, with the promise of bigger things to come. “Even if you lose, you exponentially increase your marketability,” aa Republican consultant said in 2015. How much more true is this for Democrats, whose liberal ideology dominates Hollywood, most of the mainstream media, and universities?
As in 2016 with Republicans, the cashing in has already begun. Kamala Harris received a $446,875 advance for her political memoir The Truths We Hold, along with an additional $49,9000 for a young reader’s edition, POLITICO reported. She also got $60,000 for her children’s book Superheroes Are Everywhere. She reported gaining $320,000 for books in her 2018 tax return submitted in April.
Bernie Sanders reported $391,000 in book royalties between 2018 and spring 2019. Ironically, Sanders became one of those “millionaihrs” he loves to hate — by running for president. Amy Klobuchar received a $27,000 advance for an upcoming book, and took in less than $200 in royalties for her 2015 memoir The Senator Next Door.
It’s all about the money, honey.
QUESTION ASKED: Is Boris Johnson wrong to claim Islam set the Muslim world back?
HEALTH: Ebola Epidemic in Congo Declared a Global Health Emergency. “World Health Organization says outbreak has infected more than 2,500 people and killed nearly 1,700 of them.”
BUT: Measles is killing more people in the DRC than Ebola — and faster. “‘Frankly, I am embarrassed to talk only about Ebola,’ WHO director-general says.”
FLASHBACK: When Rulers Despise The Ruled. “If the rulers feel neither loyalty nor empathy toward the ruled, the ruled can be expected to return the favor.”
ANOTHER MUCH-HOPED-FOR TRUMP “INVESTIGATION” bites the dust.
CBS “NEWS”: These are the Republicans who voted to condemn President Trump’s racist tweets.
That’s an OK (if incorrect) headline for an opinion piece, but Jason Silverstein’s brief item is written up and presented as straight news. But as Glenn noted last night, there’s a lot of that going on.
NOW OUT FROM FRANK J. FLEMING: Hellbender.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Democrats Can’t Take Their Own Medicine.
I can imagine Trump at some point next year getting up and saying, “Never before in all our history have these forces [the media and the opposition party] been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
Actually those are the words of President Franklin Roosevelt in his last major campaign speech before the 1936 election. FDR didn’t refer to the media outlets that opposed him (like the Chicago Tribune) as “the enemy of the people.” Instead, he called them “the Tory press.” And what did he mean by the term “Tory”? Subtle, perhaps, but it meant they were anti-American.
Read the whole thing for additional examples.
OOPS: Bill Gates accidentally makes the case to regulate the hell out of platform companies.
I want to focus on what Gates said next, because it is incredibly relevant to the current conversation about platforms, regulation, and antitrust. Here it is, with my emphasis in bold:
It’s very tricky for platforms… these are winner-take-all markets. It really is winner-take-all. If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system and what’s that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G to company M.
What Gates is describing is commonly referred to as the network effect, which says that the value of the platform to users is really created by all the other people on that network. There’s been a lot of great work exploring how this plays out over the past few years — you might be familiar with Ben Thompson, who has laid out a very refined argument about the network effect called “Aggregation Theory.”
The important thing to know is that it’s well-established that the network effect enables the winning platforms to achieve massive scale and preclude competition. It’s a devastating combination that Gates calls “complete doom.” There’s a reason so many tech markets tend toward monopoly or duopoly, like Android and iOS, or Google search, or Facebook, or Uber and Lyft — the network effect makes it basically impossible to build a competitor because you can’t populate the network. And you can’t buy your way out of this problem: Microsoft famously paid app developers to write Windows Phone apps when there weren’t enough users to otherwise draw developer attention, and… it didn’t work.
This is actually from three weeks ago, but I missed it then. Libertarian/conservative economic theory is sadly out of date when it comes to network effects, but maybe that’s changing.
GRAY LADY CONTINUES TO DIMINISH THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF APOLLO 11:
And unlike those uptight Americans, those hard-partying Soviets did it with the swingingest culture in the world!
Earlier: Apollo Shrugs.
THE GREY EMINENCES WARN THE DEMOCRATS: Democrats’ Far-Left Lean Risks More Than the Presidency.
Other dire scenarios await if the party keeps heading left, responding to its liberal base and the pressure of TV debates. One possible outcome is that Democrats will lose what slim chance they have of retaking the Senate. Then Trump will be able to nominate and confirm probably at least one more and possibly two more conservative Supreme Court justices, plus lower court justices and executive branch officials who’ll carry out his will.
It gets worse. Democrats recaptured the House in 2018 because 40 moderates took seats Republicans won in 2016. If the party is deemed far-left in 2020, Democrats could lose control of the House and Trump could once again operate without any serious congressional oversight.
No one seems to realize the danger more than Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been resisting liberal pressure to begin impeachment proceedings that would inflame Trump’s base.
Yeah, but she’s a well-known racist.
UNEXPECTEDLY! Commentary: The unexpected effectiveness of US President Donald Trump. “It is dry stuff, this, but it matters. Mr Trump has been a trooper for the anti-government right. It is a particular effort to keep up with the environmental rules he has either scrapped or loosened. Even if he had pulled off none of these domestic ruptures, his foreign policy would be enough to mark him out as a consequential leader. To harden the US line on China is no feat by itself. . . . Political, diplomatic and corporate elites now countenance a lasting struggle with China. This was not just unforeseeable in 2016. It was unforeseeable at the start of 2018. And its implications include nothing less than the gumming up of the globalisation that Mr Trump defines himself against. . . . To say this is not to credit the president with a bureaucratic guile that is somehow lost on other observers. What he does have is an obsession with a few priorities — which is strategic behaviour of a kind — and a personal force that is difficult to thwart. . . Better President Trump than President Mike Pence, Democrats used to say, reasoning that the vice-president would chase rightwing aims more successfully. You hear less of that now. It is not clear that a more seasoned politician would have achieved a great deal more.”
We’re now squarely in Scott Adams Stage Three.
Instapundit readers have known this since early Sunday evening.
Advantage: Instapundit.
AND DON’T QUESTION HER PATRIOTISM: AOC Silent After Antifa Terrorist Echoes Her ‘Concentration Camps’ Rhetoric on ICE Centers.
GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME: Ben Carson Says Trump and His Tweets Aren’t Racist.
VIOLENT, HATEFUL RHETORIC: The Left’s Demonization of Conservatives Becomes Dangerous.
Related: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.
YOU THINK THEY’LL LET HER IN? Ilhan Omar introduces pro-boycott resolution, announces visit to Israel.
Omar’s resolution revealed on Wednesday, cosponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia), seeks to oppose “unconstitutional legislative efforts to limit the use of boycotts to further civil rights at home and abroad,” and “urges Congress, States, and civil rights leaders from all communities to endeavor to preserve the freedom of advocacy for all by opposing anti-boycott resolutions and legislation.”
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) told The Jerusalem Post that Omar’s resolution should not be taken seriously.
“I can’t imagine that any committee is going to mark up or take seriously any pro-BDS resolution,” Sherman said. “Am I worried about the overall BDS movement worldwide as an economic matter? No. As an effort to delegitimize Israel, of course. The comments here today are a tiny part of that delegitimizing effort.”
Honestly, I hope they do let her in, and require her to be questioned by Israeli airport security in the way the American press won’t.
THE RISE OF THE CHINESE-AMERICAN RIGHT: New generations of Chinese immigrants hate affirmative action — and some are beginning to love Trump.
Related: Asians Get The Ivy League’s Jewish Treatment.
Plus: Harvard’s Admissions Policies Show Bias Against Asians.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Senator pledges to ‘break up the higher education monopoly’ with new laws.
Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, “is introducing two pieces of legislation this week that will expand federal aid for people pursuing vocational education and will put higher education institutions on the hook for students unable to repay student loans,” his office stated in a press release.
“[W]e have a system that preferences students who want to attend a four-year college over Americans who want to learn a skill,” Hawley stated, claiming that the current system “protects higher education institutions that have been padding their endowments with taxpayer money while they raise tuition.”
Hawley’s two proposed bills would address these purported defects. One would “make more job-training and certification programs, like employer-based apprenticeships and digital boot camps, eligible to receive Pell Grants through an alternative accreditation process.” This policy would “reduce reliance on debt and maximize opportunities for students to pursue their dreams.”
The second, more significant bill would force colleges to foot the bill for students who default on their loans.
Good ideas, both. I wonder where he got them?
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
