Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
July 25, 2024
While Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate, he has governed as one of the most progressive presidents in modern American history. In 2020, Biden sought to distance himself from self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders; after Biden as president pursued massive stimulus and spending programs, Sanders became one of his biggest supporters.
Now that Biden has announced that he will not pursue reelection, the Democratic nomination will likely fall to his vice president, Kamala Harris. While Harris may campaign as a moderate, analysis of her economic record does not support that label.
In her time in the Senate, Harris positioned herself on the far left of a Democratic Party already moving sharply to the left. According to DW-NOMINATE, a measure that compares the votes of senators and representatives and ranks members from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative) Harris was the second-most liberal member of the Senate when she served from 2017 to 2021, behind only Elizabeth Warren. In fact, her overall voting record is more liberal than that of Bernie Sanders. Though it is difficult to compare members across time, Harris’s score (-0.709), which is based largely on economic votes, ranks among the more left-wing in American history.
Harris’s senatorial record differs starkly from that of her boss. While Biden shifted left on entering the White House, he remained a moderate across his nearly four-decade Senate career. His approximate -0.3 DW-NOMINATE score put him close to the middle of his party throughout his time in the upper chamber.
When Harris was in the Senate, she introduced and co-sponsored bills that would have dramatically shifted U.S. policy leftward. In 2019, she unveiled a $10 trillion plan to reduce greenhouse gases to zero by 2045—five years faster than proposed in the uber-progressive Green New Deal. Harris also advocated for an end to fracking, a measure that, had it taken effect, would have stopped about two-thirds of all oil production in the United States.
Why, it’s almost as if she was “the single most left-wing senator” or something, and that’s saying something — at least until it isn’t: Webpage that rated Kamala Harris the ‘most liberal’ senator in 2019 suddenly disappears.
And the perfect candidate for her veep is lobbying hard for the job! Buttigieg Slams Vance for ‘Childless’ Comments.
Evergreen:
FAIR ENOUGH. WHEN DOES SHE START? Ocasio-Cortez to Musk: ‘Sometimes being quiet’ is ‘good for you.’
Why does so much advice from the left boil down to “shut up?”
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S PALACE GUARD: Washington Post Smears Conservatives For Asking Questions About Timing Of Biden’s Exit.
[The WaPo’s Sarah Ellison gave Federalist CEO Sean Davis] less than an hour to respond to her demands for comment before her article, written in conjunction with [Mariana] Alfaro, went live.
When Davis did respond a few hours after Ellison’s initial comment request, he noted that she and the paper she represents “spread false and dangerous conspiracy theories” on social media and in the publication’s pages about targets of political violence, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Trump.
“Do you feel personally responsible at all for the violence directed at Kavanaugh given your participation in spreading those conspiracy theories?” Davis queried. “Are you concerned that your paper’s false reporting and dissemination of conspiracy theories has encouraged individuals to inflict violence on Trump or his supporters?”
Davis also pointed out that Alfaro “sent me a nearly identical e-mail earlier this week” but “did not acknowledge my response to her.”
“I can’t imagine it’s the policy of your paper to ignore responses you receive only to send new reporters to ask the same question over and over again until you get a quote you can slice and dice to smear your political enemies,” Davis concluded.
Read the whole thing.
NOAH ROTHMAN: The Real Reason Harris’s Time as ‘Border Czar’ Is a Political Vulnerability.
Harris’s record is a story both of incompetence and of how little faith her own allies have in her political acumen and capabilities as an executive.
Since Joe Biden announced his intention to withdraw from American public life at the end of his term, the Trump campaign and its Republican allies have focused on their new opponent’s subpar performance handling border security. The GOP’s strategy makes sense. For all the media’s efforts to revise or even erase history, Harris was, in function if not title, the Biden administration’s “border czar.” And yet, the Republican Party’s approach to this messaging campaign has so far been to frame Harris as a fully empowered functionary who nevertheless bungled her charge. In reality, the Biden administration set Harris up to fail, as a way of providing the president cover for his own dismal mishandling of the border.
Well, it wasn’t a “mishandling” from the administration’s point of view, and as Jim Geraghty speculated in June of 2021, Biden dumped so many tasks on Harris as “a passive-aggressive form of revenge for her shivving him in that first Democratic presidential-primary debate.”
One of those tasks being, as the media dubbed her that year, “Biden’s ‘Point Person on Immigration:’”
UPDATE: Huge: Kamala Harris Receives Bipartisan Condemnation For Her Handling of the Border. “In a stunning move on Thursday, the House of Representatives strongly condemned ‘the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border’ in a bipartisan vote. All Republicans supported the resolution, as did six Democrats: Reps. Yadira Caraveo (D-Colo.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Donald Davis (D-N.C.), Jared Golden (D-Maine), Mary Peltola (D-Alaska), and Mari Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.).”
WAS IT OVER WHEN KIM JONG UN BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?!
This is what happens when you’ve been elevated to a position that is above your ability to function.
pic.twitter.com/ZEaZo6sfwF— Eric Matheny 🎙️ (@ericmmatheny) July 24, 2024
ROGER KIMBALL: We should be grateful that Biden is going nowhere… for now.
In the meantime, I will be interested to see how Biden’s address plays in the media. The thing that struck me were the number of lies it contained. Consider just this one passage, which occurred near the end of Biden’s address. We are, Biden said, “stronger, more prosperous and more secure” today than before, but that is not true. Nor is it true that “today we have the strongest economy in the world.” Wages are not up, as Biden claimed, nor is inflation tamed. Biden claimed that “violent crime” is at “a fifteen-year low,” but in fact it is soaring. Biden even said that he was “securing our border” and that “border crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office.”
These are but a few of the gross misstatements — indeed, gross and obvious lies, with which the president regaled the American people in his address, probably his last such address as president.
The bottom line of this curious — probably unprecedented — performance is that Biden will cling to power as long as possible. He will not — not now, anyway — endow Kamala Harris with the perquisites of incumbency. For that, I suppose, we should be modestly grateful.
Certainly the photographs shot tonight of the Bidens during and after Joe’s speech have a funereal pall about them. How much longer can the regime keep John Gill’s desiccated husk in the Oval Office?
July 24, 2024
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH THE BORDER CZAR:
This is so good from @newsbusters pic.twitter.com/wqwQkz0i6y
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 25, 2024
More airbrushing here: GovTrack Tells Axios to Hold Its Beer, ERASES Kamala’s Record As ‘Most Left-Leaning Senator.’
UPDATE: Gaslighting the Public on Kamala Harris as ‘Border Czar.’ “We can be sure of this much: If the border was not a mess, if this was not a winning GOP issue, Kamala Harris would be running on it right now. And her media sock-puppet friends—who seem to believe in nothing except making sure she wins—would be celebrating ‘The Greatest Border Czar Who Ever Was.’”
As Jim Treacher has said:
Today’s shameful protests are yet another reminder that it’s Charlottesvilles all the way down in Joe and Kamala’s America:
UPDATE: Republicans pounced all right:
DISPATCHES FROM THE POLITBURO: Biden ‘absolutely’ sharp enough for second term, no ‘coverup’ of mental decline, White House insists.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted Wednesday that President Biden remains sharp as a tack and “absolutely” could serve another four-year term — stunning journalists at her first briefing since Biden dropped his re-election campaign over concerns about his mental acuity.
“Look, he didn’t step down from campaigning or from running because he didn’t believe he can serve in a second term. That is not why,” Jean-Pierre claimed to the incredulity of the press corps.
The press secretary said the 81-year-old president’s decision to drop out Sunday and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, was in the “best interest” of the country and the Democratic Party and that viewers should “stay tuned” for a fuller explanation from Biden in an 8 p.m. Oval Office address on Wednesday.
“So today, the president believes that he is capable, fully capable of serving in the office that he currently has now and for the next 4.5 years if he wanted to?” an Associated Press journalist asked Jean-Pierre.
“Absolutely,” she said.
Honestly, I’m quite certain that Armando Iannucci didn’t intend for the Death of Stalin to be a how-to guide for the transparent and orderly transition of power in one of the world’s most powerful nations.
MICHAEL OREN: Netanyahu’s Visit Is a Test for the Democrats*.
Sitting before the cameras with Netanyahu, Biden will have the opportunity to prove that he is still competent enough to complete his term. He can rebuff those calling on him to resign and allow Kamala Harris to run as an incumbent.
Should he receive Netanyahu, as planned, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump can smooth over his differences with him and reinforce the Republicans’ claim to be the true pro-Israel party.
Netanyahu’s most impactful meeting, though, will be with Harris. It will showcase her as a statesperson capable of interacting with a formidable foreign leader. It will facilitate her necessary movement from the progressive left to the moderate center. Ironically, one of Netanyahu’s most outspoken critics in Washington stands to benefit substantially from his visit.
The New York Times was wrong and so, too, was the State Department’s Office of the Chief of Protocol, which apparently failed to give Netanyahu a respectable welcome. No matter. His time in Washington will be nevertheless noteworthy and perhaps even fateful.
* One they’re already failing very badly. Harris was addressing the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority in Indianapolis instead of at Netanyahu’s speech, and as America’s Newspaper of Record notes, even more radical Dems are using it as a way to once again champion their preferred pronouns:
Meanwhile, the Democrats’ base demonstrate their tolerance of diversity, America’s traditions, peace on earth, and goodwill to their fellow man: Terrorist Protesters Storm Union Station in DC and Burn American Flags.
Naturally Harris will receive no questions about this from the DNC-MSM, once again moving in lockstep to advance her coronation.
FLORIDA DEM. LIKENS CALLING VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS A ‘DEI HIRE’ TO USING THE N-WORD:
A Florida Congressman has slammed his Tennessee Republican counterpart for calling Kamala Harris a ‘DEI hire’ – saying he might as well have used the N-word.
Maxwell Frost, 27, erupted in fury after Representative Tim Burchett insisting on CNN that the vice president was not the Democratic candidate based on merit.
‘They want to call her a DEI president, or a DEI candidate. She has more experience than Trump and J.D. Vance combined, times a million, right?’ he told CNN’s Jim Acosta Tuesday.
‘She worked at the state level, she was the attorney general, she was vice president, she was a senator representing one of the largest states in the entire country.
‘And so these are just racist dog whistles. Whenever you hear DEI, I want you to think about the N-word. I want you to think about racial slurs. That’s what they actually mean,’ he concluded.
I too am shocked by Joe Biden’s long history of trafficking in racist dog whistles:
‘STRUGGLE AGAINST ZIONIST REGIME:’ Masked man vows ‘rivers of blood’ at Paris Olympics.
A masked individual threatened the 2024 Paris Olympics “with rivers of blood” in a video published on social media earlier this week.
The man, clad in a shirt adorned with a Palestinian flag, stated, “In the name of God, our struggle against the Zionist regime continues.”
Addressing “the people of France” and “French president Macron,” the masked individual said, “You supported the Zionist regime in its criminal war against the people of Palestine. You provided Zionists with weapons; you helped murder our brothers and sisters, our children.”
“You invited the Zionists to the Olympic games. You will pay for what you have done!” he continued.
“Rivers of blood will flow through the streets of Paris. This day is approaching, God willing. Allah is the greatest.”
Enoch Powell, call your office.
OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM:
Imagine the people being threatened weren't Jewish.
Imagine they were black and the person threatening them was a white person saying he was going to do these things to black people.
Imagine the speed with which the media would identify this man. https://t.co/NqJOSJ01ap
— RBe (@RBPundit) July 24, 2024
Disgusting. There is no way there is not video footage of the criminals that did this. Arrest every one of them. https://t.co/WucpMk81fJ
— John Spencer (@SpencerGuard) July 24, 2024
Why is anti-Israeli far left partying once again like it’s 1939? How Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews to facilitate the Holocaust. “Rats, lice, cockroaches, foxes, vultures – these are just some of the animals the Nazis used to deride and dehumanize Jews.”
Related: So what happens when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses Congress later today? Kamala won’t be there, because “she accepted an invitation to speak at the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority’s ‘Grand Boule’ in Indianapolis. That’s clearly a much higher priority and a hotspot being watched by the entire world. And it’s not even Harris’ sorority.” But the Squad will. “Speaker Johnson has threatened to order the Sargeant at Arms to arrest any members who ‘get out of hand,'” Jazz Shaw writes. “But that’s constitutionally problematic, to say the least, so it almost certainly won’t happen. The threat might even backfire because, at least when it comes to The Squad, they would probably love nothing more than to be led away in handcuffs because of the photo op it would provide for them, along with a chance to try to bring charges against the Speaker.”
JIM TREACHER GOES TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Who’s Joe?
The old man finally returned to the public eye yesterday, proving he’s still alive and can move under his own power.2 He delicately exited his limo, walked up the big-boy steps to Air Force One all by himself without falling, and executed a crisp salute to the watching world. With Jill nowhere to be seen.
He wanted to get everything right, because it was the last time.
That’s after his initial proof of life on Monday, when he called into Kamala’s emergency campaign launch. It was obviously him — no, not an actor, not AI — and he did not sound good.
So now we know he can still speak, and we know he can still walk under his own power. We just don’t know if he can do both at the same time.
He’s supposed to address the country tonight in prime time. I wonder what he’ll talk about?
I think America is about to get our first female president of the United States.
Sorry, Hillary!
* * * * * * * *
If you’re so excited by her “history-making potential,” why don’t you want that old man to go away? Your new savior awaits.
There’s only one old white man standing in the way of history right now. And he ain’t Donald Trump.
Stay tuned.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Axios Accuses GOP of Fabricating Kamala Harris’s ‘Border Czar’ Title — 3 Years After Reporting She Was Biden’s Border Czar.
In an article published by Axios on Wednesday morning, politics reporter Stef Kight submitted that “Harris border confusion haunter her new campaign.”
“In early 2021, President Biden enlisted Vice President Kamala Harris to help with a slice of the migration issue — a move that has turned into one of the newly-presumptive presidential nominee’s first campaign headaches,” wrote Kight. “Confusion around the VP’s exact role, early media misfires and the rapidly changing regional migration crisis has made the issue a top target for the GOP trying to define their new opponent.”
She goes on to expand on the the political implications by asserting that “The Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title — which she never actually had.”
The problem for Kight is that in March 2021, she also authored an article with the headline “Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis” and the lede “President Biden is putting Vice President Harris in charge of addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border, senior administration officials announced on Wednesday.”
“President Biden said during the transition, whatever the most urgent need, he would turn to the vice president,” Kight reported an administration official as saying at the time. “And today he is turning to the vice president.”
Yet another Axios article from that April, meanwhile, stated as fact that “Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the ‘root causes’ that drive migration.”
Here’s a screenshot of the latter article, with the phrase highlighted:
As Charles Cooke wrote yesterday,“It Was Fun Having a Press Corps for a Month,” before they reverted back to form and began lying and airbrushing away, “trying to turn Kamala Harris into the second coming of Jesus Christ.”
And in the process, “The Media’s Rewriting of Kamala Harris’s History on the Border Has Begun,” Brandon Morse writes at Red State today.
UPDATE: Hey, when did Winston Smith start working for Axios?
MORE:
THROWBACK: Kamala thanks Biden and accepts the role of being put in charge of the southern border
This is the clip the media doesn’t want you to see. pic.twitter.com/7oB9AtE2Yl
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 24, 2024
July 23, 2024
ADIDAS HAS BEEN PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939 AGAIN: The Olympian Self-Deception of Anti-Zionists.
It would be difficult to design a story more tailor-made for publicity even at a time when the United States is having its own Succession-like drama: A supermodel, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Olympics—as the Saturday Night Live character Stefan would say, this one’s got everything.
There’s so much to the Bella Hadid vs. Adidas story, in fact, that a deceptively minor-seeming detail goes overlooked. Yet that detail helps explain a lot about the current round of Israeli-Palestinian hostility.
First, the controversy. Adidas launched an advertising campaign for a shoe intended to be a throwback/homage to a sneaker used by athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics. Those games will forever be under a dark cloud because that’s when eleven Israeli athletes and one West German policeman were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. (This summer’s Olympics are in Paris, where a left-wing lawmaker told Israeli athletes they weren’t welcome. France announced yesterday it will provide extra security to the Israeli team.)
Atop this questionable decision, Adidas piled a whopper: Its chosen model for the ’72 throwback shoe would be none other than Bella Hadid, a viciously anti-Israel celebrity who has used her platform to advance pro-Hamas propaganda. Adidas then apologized and said it would be revising the campaign. Then Hadid reportedly lawyered up, and Adidas apologized to Hadid. The shoe company founded by actual Nazis is very sorry to everyone involved—sorry to Bella Hadid, sorry to her critics for hiring Bella Hadid, etc.
Bella’s sister Gigi is also an Israel-hating supermodel. Their father is Mohamed Hadid, a super-rich anti-Semite of epic proportions. In addition to his Jew-hatred, Hadid has been harassing pro-Israel Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres with increasingly psychotic racist and homophobic messages. “Make sure you dress as KKK to hide that ugly gray colored face of yours,” he wrote in one. In another, he suggested Torres “get a job as bouncer at gay bar.” Another published by the New York Post: “You are just unusual Black and colorful mouth for Israeli and AIPAC and looking for payday of over 500K.”
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend from Adidas says they shut down the Intranet at the firm for a while after this broke because of the staff reactions.
UNEXPECTEDLY! Secret Service* Urges Halt to Trump’s Outdoor Rallies After Assassination Attempt.
The agency finds Trump’s rallies challenging because of their large, complex outdoor venues. The former president’s large events require extensive security planning, with agents arriving early to prepare.
The authorities have been investigating the shooting and the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks. While they have unearthed some details surrounding the assassination attempt, they have still not discovered what drove Crooks to shoot the former president.
The shooting has placed the Secret Service under scrutiny for its failure to prevent Crooks from taking a shot at the former president despite warnings from rallygoers. Former Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle stepped down from her position after enduring a grilling from Republican and Democratic lawmakers during a recent hearing in which she failed to answer basic questions about the incident.
* Just a heads up: You misspelled “the Harris Campaign” in the headline.
Related: “Secret Service Director Resigns In Disgrace For Failing To Assassinate Trump,” America’s Newspaper of Record reports.
RIP: Blues Legend John Mayall Is Dead at 90.
Mayall’s Bluesbreakers were a clearinghouse for generational talent. Eric Clapton quit the Yardbirds and joined the band; his playing was featured on its debut LP, released in 1966. When Clapton left, Peter Green, later to found Fleetwood Mac, joined. And when Green left, Mick Taylor, later of the Rolling Stones, joined. Mayall was to British blues guitarists what Leo Castelli was to New York painters; his group was the blue-chip gallery you wanted to show your work in. The bassist Jack Bruce met Clapton in the Bluesbreakers, then went on to found Cream. Other future rock stars who were Mayall alumni: Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, later of Fleetwood Mac, and the well-traveled drummer Aynsley Dunbar. In these Bluesbreakers incarnations, and in many more that would follow, Mayall moved between guitar and keyboards, with spotlight moments to demonstrate his prowess on harmonica. Even so, Mayall’s chief talent may have been his uncanny, unselfish capacity for spotting it in others.
Clapton’s mating of a Les Paul and a Marshall amplifier on the Bluesbreakers album, in a homage to the guitar blues great Freddie King was seen playing in the 1950s went on to become the iconic rock guitar sound, until Eddie Van Halen arrived in the late 1970s with his heavily modified “Super-Stratocaster” style guitar, and remains highly sought after to this day.
GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING:
CNN's Dana Bash attempted to rebut claims that Kamala Harris is now, or ever has been, the "Border Czar." Regardless of the title, she was tasked with "stemming the flow" of illegal crossings and she failed spectacularly.
Receipts 👇 pic.twitter.com/S2lrBY1L3C
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) July 23, 2024
Flashback:
In a statement Friday announcing that Roberta Jacobson, Biden’s border czar who has played a key role in the Northern Triangle, would be stepping down, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the vice president would continue “overseeing a whole-of-government approach,” appearing to contradict the narrow scope of her role that officials had been insisting on all week.
—An April 10th, 2021 NBC News article headlined, “Confusion clouds Harris immigration role,” but that passage above sounds like she was being promoted as being awfully “czar-adjacent” to me.
BOB MENENDEZ (D-NJ) WILL RESIGN FROM SENATE, AVOIDING AN UGLY, INTRAPARTY BATTLE: Menendez “told members of his staff on Tuesday that he planned to resign from Congress in late August, bowing to intense pressure from Democratic colleagues who had urged him to step down or risk expulsion from the Senate after his federal bribery conviction.”
KAMALA SMILES, SAYS “SOON, AMERICA:” Californians told to stop grilling food to help improve air quality after spike in pollution.
SIGNS OF LIFE! Mr. Burns Spotted Inspecting Springfield Nuclear Power Plant:
Biden makes first public appearance since officially dropping out: pic.twitter.com/WiVLERn4aD
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 23, 2024