KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Alleged Moderate Dem Biden Adopts Prog Anti-Corporation Rhetoric. “The elevator pitch for Biden is that he’s the only one who can compete with and beat Trump in the non-coastal parts of the United States that Democrats like to spend most of their time pretending don’t exist. One BIG reason for that is that Biden hasn’t been hanging out on the progressive lunatic fringe with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.”
UPDATE: Link was missing — fixed now. Sorry!
HMM: Biden’s Democratic challengers don’t really want to win — here’s the proof.
Do Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Mike Bloomberg, and all the other Democrats running against Joe Biden really want to be president?
Because it sure doesn’t seem like they want the job.
The question is on behalf of the millions of Americans who are either working for, donating to, or simply rooting for any of the other 12 candidates still officially in the race. Put them together, and those 12 other candidates have the support of more than 70% of Democratic Party primary voters and a lot more donated money than Biden on his own. So it would be a good idea for those candidates to answer the question.
If they answer truthfully, it sure seems like all of them would have to say they really don’t want to win. At least they don’t want it enough to use Biden’s most vulnerable weaknesses against him.
Maybe Biden is stuck with the Bob Dole role from 1996: Send the old guy out one last time against an almost-unbeatable incumbent. And if Trump does suddenly look vulnerable, the Dems will trot out Hillary or Michelle as a savior.
HMM: Is China Planning To Incite A “People’s War” To Dominate The South China Sea?
Party leaders have regaled the populace with how they will use seagoing forces to right historical wrongs and win the nation nautical renown. They must now follow through.
It was foolish to tie China’s national dignity and sovereignty to patently absurd claims to islands and seas. But party leaders did so. And they did so repeatedly, publicly, and in the most unyielding terms imaginable. By their words they stoked nationalist sentiment while making themselves accountable to it. They set in motion a toxic cycle of rising popular expectations.
Breaking that cycle could verge on impossible. If Beijing relented from its maritime claims now, ordinary Chinese would—rightly—judge the leadership by the standard it set. Party leaders would stand condemned as weaklings who surrendered sacred territory, failed to avenge China’s century of humiliation despite China’s rise to great power, and let jurists and lesser neighbors backed by a certain superpower flout big, bad China’s will.
No leader relishes being seen as a weakling. It’s positively dangerous in China.
Small men can start big wars.
I’m currently reading Geoffrey Wawro’s A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire. It’s a great read on the Habsburgs’ political and military problems dating back to 1866, which I haven’t seen in such detail in any other WWI history. But it also reveals just how small some of the men were making Austria-Hungary’s and Germany’s biggest decisions.
TAKIN’ IT TO THE STREETS: Schiff town hall erupts into clashes amid shouts of ‘liar’ and ‘treason.’
WHERE HAVE ALL THE DOLLARS GONE, BANKS ARE ASKING… Why Is the World’s Cash Disappearing? Banks Are Asking, But No One Seems to Know.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for December 16, 2019. “This week’s debate is set, Biden’s back on top in Iowa, the Klobuchar boomlet continues, Delaney waits for the sweet release of death, and Castro is in sixth place…in Texas.”
WELL, MR. PRESIDENT? Voters Favor Jail, Firing for Rogue Officials Who Targeted Trump.
CHANGE: More Than 130 Abortion Clinics Have Closed in the Last 5 Years.
Also just up at PJMedia: Actual Alcoholics Unimpressed with Millennial Virtue Signaling.
It’s a followup piece to last week’s item on “sober curious” pretenders, but it’s for our VIP members. If you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter, the promo code VODKAPUNDIT is still good for a nice little discount.
OH FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: Swedish Church Removes LGBT Altarpiece After Fears It Is ‘Anti-Trans.’
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Trump Attacks Presidential Debate Commission, Hints at Something New. “I for one am looking forward to a new and improved Debate Commission, but mostly I’m getting a kick out of the Left’s unhinged reaction.”
Much more at the link.
HMM: Democrats’ Election Win in Virginia Yields Gun Registration Proposal.
Virginia Democrats are proposing a mandatory state gun registration measure after widespread public outrage forced them to back off a more aggressive plan to confiscate so-called assault weapons, a designation that gun experts have long rejected as arbitrary.
Gun-control advocates call modern sporting rifles—such as the popular AR-15—assault weapons, likening them to weapons of war.
But Gov. Ralph Northam’s plan still calls for a ban on assault weapons, albeit with a grandfather clause allowing those who already own such weapons to keep them, Northam spokeswoman Alena Yarmosky said in a statement, The Daily Wire reported on Dec. 12.
The grandfather clause will apply only if the owners register their weapons with the government “before the end of a designated grace period,” Yarmosky said.
Registration now, followed by confiscation just as soon as they think they can get away with it.
MISS LIBERTY WISHES YOU A Happy Bill Of Rights Day!
PETULANCE AS A GOVERNING PHILOSOPHY: Climate Zealots, Firing Squads, And A Load Of Manure.
Even with the canonized Greta Thunberg threatening to put the world’s national leaders “against the wall” if they don’t “do their job and to protect our futures,” the principals could work out nothing more than, according to the all-in-on-the-global-warming-hysterics Guardian, “a partial agreement to ask countries to come up with more ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet the terms of the 2015 Paris accord.”
The response from activists was predictable. They made a “really futile and stupid gesture” by dumping horse manure outside the meeting and staging a mock hanging in which one of the “condemned” held a baby while she had a rope around her neck. Reuters said these woke folk were “frustrated” by the talks. Frustrated, we’d say, in the same way a child becomes upset and throws a tantrum because he couldn’t get his way.
No one who behaves this way belongs anywhere near the levers of power.
PHIL D’AGOSTINO: It’s not a coup. It’s a civil war.
We can define a civil war as a conflict or competition between political factions or regions within the same country to take over the reins of governance without due process. A careful look at what some call the “Deep State” would tell us we have that here in the USA. Further, we have had that state of conflict for many years.
As evidenced by the statements of many current players behind the scenes who have been actively trying to fundamentally transform America, it would seem that in the 20th century, it was determined by those committed to this transformation that the people of the USA would never willfully throw away their own freedoms and embrace some form of Marxian socialism. Therefore, in order to effect this change, there needed to be an internal use of the system itself to subvert it through legislation and regulations to become a de facto state of Marxian socialism without ever calling it such, nor voting for such.
Ever since, there have been bureaucrats and presidents who have worked against the will of the majority in order to “overthrow” the duly elected government and replace it with their own view of what the USA government “should” look like. It is a war, not a coup. They are relentless. Indefatigable. They will never stop. What we are seeing with Mr. Trump is an “Antietam” or a “Gettysburg — a bloody battlefield, but just another battlefield.
It isn’t a coup. Not soft. Not silent. And if we don’t see it as a war, we lose. Why? Because we then think it’s about Mr. Trump or his administration. It isn’t.
Endless efforts to disarm law-abiding citizens show at least one side understands this.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Hallmark Caves to Wokescolds Who Will Never Watch the Channel. “Over the weekend, the Hallmark Channel came under fire for its lack of wokenicity. The company committed the unpardonable sin of acquiescing to its loyal fan base rather than appease the outrage mob who never watched the channel, but were demanding it change anyway. For a brief while, anyway.”
WHEELS TURNIN’ ‘ROUND AND ‘ROUND: This former bank robber was just sworn in as a lawyer — by the same judge who once sent him to prison.
MAYBE THEY SHOULD GET THEIR OWN PEOPLE ON BOARD FIRST: Top Democrats Make Case for Republicans to Endorse Trump Impeachment.
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