IF HE CAN IT’S ALL OVER BUT ANOTHER FOUR YEARS OF SHOUTING: Can Trump Match FDR’s Appeal to Black Voters?

Last week the presidential campaign of Donald Trump announced a six-figure ad buy across black radio stations and in black newspapers. The newspaper campaign targeted 11 major markets in key states across the nation, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia — all states that the Trump team believes will be in play in 2020. The radio ads were run in the same 11 urban markets. Under their theme of “Black Voices for Trump,” it is clear that the president’s Trump campaign is emulating what the Franklin D. Roosevelt campaign did in 1936.

Just as Roosevelt overwhelmingly lost the black vote in 1932, doing worse than Al Smith in 1928, Trump lost the black vote in 2016. But, again like Roosevelt in 1932, Trump did reach out to the black electorate in 2016. Both FDR in ’32 and Trump in ’16 had some limited but encouraging success in winning over these voters: Roosevelt in New York where he had been governor, and Trump in Pennsylvania where his outreach helped provide his margin of victory in that key state.

More like this, please.

THEY HAVE SO FAR: The Bidens don’t get a free pass.

During the time of Hunter’s employment, the activities of the company were investigated for corruption by the Ukrainian government. Joe Biden used his political power to threaten to withhold billions of dollars from the Ukrainian government if they did not fire the prosecutor who was, as it happened, investigating the allegedly corrupt company that had hired Hunter.

These are the hard and true facts, and they speak to the only quid pro quo we are certain of in this entire spectacle. There are even video tapes of Joe Biden bragging about the deal he made with the Ukrainians to get this prosecutor fired.

Are these facts beyond investigation because Biden is a Democratic candidate for president? Should the Trump administration ignore his blatant quid pro quo because Hunter Biden has some kind of special privilege that no other American citizen possesses — the “my dad is the vice president” privilege?

Earlier: “I think the reasons go much deeper: Trump threatened to turn over the rock and expose the creepy-crawlies underneath to the harsh light of day.”

BLUE ON BLUE: ‘Extremely alarmed’: Bloomberg union condemns 2020 coverage plans surrounding owner’s bid.

On Monday, Bloomberg News’ union pushed back on the decision and demanded that reporters be allowed to cover the campaign. The union accused the editorial team of “silencing journalists” and urged them to reconsider in a statement posted to Twitter.

“We are extremely alarmed by management’s decision to silence the journalists we represent at Bloomberg Industry Group, as well as the unrepresented journalists at Bloomberg News,” the Guild at Bloomberg Industry Group wrote. “Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth and as journalists, we must maintain an independence from those we cover.”

The guild added, “The Guild believes journalists should not only be allowed — but encouraged — to thoroughly cover every single candidate as the profession demands in one of the most important elections in modern history.”

It sure would be nice if guild members lived up to their rhetoric.

HEH: New Biden Ad Actually Shows Why Uncle Joe Shouldn’t Be Commander in Chief.

IRREVERSIBLE: ‘How do I go back to the Debbie I was?’

Almost two decades ago, aged 44, she sought help to transition from a woman to a man.

Debbie underwent a full female-to-male surgical transition, which included having a phalloplasty – where a penis was constructed from skin on her forearm.

She changed her name to Lee and spent 17 years on testosterone – masculinising hormones that can lead to changes such as more facial hair and more muscle developing.

She believed transitioning would allow her to “become accepted in the world”. But now, aged 61, she’s detransitioning back to the gender she was assigned at birth.

Magical thinking that gender is “assigned at birth” (by whom?) is part of what got Debbie into this mess.

NICE: Trump donates 3rd-quarter salary to help fight opioid crisis.

AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: ‘Guardian Angels’ Still Defending Against Insider Attacks in Afghanistan.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: As Warren Fades, Is it Down to Bernie vs. Biden?

Pity the poor progressive Democrat trying to choose a candidate in this primary season.

Marianne Williamson speaks their language, but they know in their hearts that she’ll never be president. Andrew Yang wants a massive new welfare program, and that’s always good, but Yang can’t even get respect from MSNBC, much a majority of delegates. Kamala Harris is mean to criminals and other living things, so she’s out. Tulsi Gabbard is mean to Hillary Clinton (PBUH), so she’s out, too. There are a bunch of white guys from red states that progressives have barely even heard of, and clearly aren’t to be trusted. There are three really rich white guys — well, one of them is black, but he worked for a hedge fund — or four if you include Joe Biden and his newfound millions. But progressives haven’t really been comfortable with a white guy since Clinton, who was born a poor black child or something.

Much more at the link.

SPENGLER: A National Nightmare: Andrew McCarthy Exposes the Plot Against the President. “McCarthy believes that the spooks went after Trump to protect their cozy post-World War II order. I think the reasons go much deeper: Trump threatened to turn over the rock and expose the creepy-crawlies underneath to the harsh light of day. A strict accounting of the intelligence community’s actions over the past two decades would leave heads rolling and pensions canceled. The peasants were marching on Dr Frankenstein’s castle, and their leader had to be put down.”

Read the whole thing.

THE PEOPLE’S GOVERNMENT WILL LISTEN TO ANYTHING BUT THE PEOPLE’S VOICE: China issues stern response to landslide victory of Hong Kong pro-democracy forces.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that no matter how the situation in Hong Kong changes, the semiautonomous region is part of China.

“Any attempt to disrupt Hong Kong and damage [its] stability and prosperity will not succeed,” he told reporters in Japan, where he was attending a G-20 foreign ministers meeting.

I think that’s actually the message Hong Kong voters sent to Beijing.

WELL, BYE: Musicians plan to remove their music from Amazon to protest its ties with ICE.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Ana Navarro’s Mouth-Food In, Racism Out. “One of the worst people to have emerged as a media personality based solely on hatred for President Trump is Ana Navarro. She’s my least favorite, actually. Her biggest accomplishments are hitching her star to three super-loser presidential bids (John McCain, Jon Huntsman, and Jeb Bush), and putting down her sandwich long enough to audition for an on-air gig.”

Ouch.

AT LEAST HE’S USING HIS OWN MONEY: Elizabeth Warren blasts Michael Bloomberg, says he’s trying to ‘buy a nomination.’

Someone trying to win an election on their own dime is bad. But trying to buy votes with promises of free stuff paid for with new taxes after the election is just business as usual.

FRIEND OF THE WORKINGMAN: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Gets Entire Solar Co. Workforce Fired After Telling Them to Unionize.

HMM: Top U.S. General: It’s ‘Very Possible’ Iran Will Attack Again.

McKenzie shed new light on the threat, saying he is particularly concerned about the possibility of a strike involving large numbers of drones and missiles—much like the Aramco attack, which used dozens of Iran-manufactured cruise missiles and drones to devastate Saudi oil infrastructure.

U.S. officials are particularly concerned about the threat to critical desalination plants in the Gulf, said a senior U.S. military official in the region. An attack on these facilities, which could threaten the region’s primary source of drinking water and potentially cause a humanitarian crisis, would be a “gamechanger,” the official said.

McKenzie cautioned that Tehran’s actions are unpredictable. “I wouldn’t discount anything from Iran,” McKenzie said. “When a nation behaves that irresponsibly, you have to be very cautious when you evaluate what they might do in the future.”

The Mullahs have to know that an attack of that kind would almost certainly be met with a regime-ending response, but as they get more desperate, who knows.

WELL, YES: WARNING! Mayor Bloomberg Is A Radical Nanny-Stater.

FACE, MEET PALM: Bill Kristol: Trump Is a Bigger Threat to Free Markets Than Warren.

But other than taxing innovators and entrepreneurs out of existence, how do you enjoy your capitalism, Mrs. Warren?

BECAUSE OF COURSE: Journalist Andy Ngo Confronts Chelsea Clinton With Facts About Transgender Violence. Twitter Suspends Him.

Related (From Ed): The Curious Case of Andy Ngo — How the mainstream media downplay left-wing violence.

GREG ABBOTT: My Success Despite Paralysis Is a ‘Testament’ to the ‘Glory of God.’

IT’S A VODKAPUNDIT TWOFER! RBG, Steve Jobs, Cancer, and the Public’s Right to Know. “I looked up the half-forgotten timeline of Jobs’s public-yet-private years-long decline after being shown a series of tweets from an anonymous user with the Twitter handle ‘au ng.’ Some of what he says is pure speculation, but given Ginsburg’s serious disinterest in being forthright with the American people, and the media’s seeming acquiescence to her wishes, speculation is all we have right now. For what it’s worth, I found au ng’s tweets to be interesting throughout, and sometimes compelling.”

Much, much more at the link. That’s from my daily column outside the VIP paywall.

And for PJMedia’s VIP members: Are Apple TV+ and Disney+ Worth Your Streaming Time and Money?

I have a quick overview of both streaming services best and worst offerings, but this bit deserves getting broken out for non-members:

For All Mankind is the show I thought I’d love. It’s set in an alternate history where the Soviets beat Apollo 11 to the Moon by a few weeks. Then, just as NASA is really getting its act back together, the Soviets double down and land a woman on the Moon as part of a huge propaganda effort. The show is well-acted, lovingly produced, and totally had its hooks in me for the first two or three episodes. Things went downhill quickly as the show descended into the preachy strain of feminism. Worse, Ted Kennedy is presented as a feminist hero, a plot development I feared might come after catching a small tell in the first episode. When the Soviets reach the moon, it’s mentioned on the news that Kennedy cut short his weekend in Chappaquiddick. So of course Mary Kopechne lives, and of course Ted gets elected in ’72 as the most woman-loving president evah. Which I guess kinda works if you forget all the waitress sandwiches and pantsless pickup lines and stuff. Oh, and because of the extra-heated space race, Nixon got us out of Vietnam years earlier, too… yet still couldn’t manage to get reelected.

In other words, the premise of For All Mankind seems to be that the world would be a much better place if only the Communists had been more competent. Talk about your alternative histories, right?

If you’re interested in becoming a VIP member, the promo code VODKAPUNDIT is good for a nice little discount.

HMM: Elon Musk’s chaotic business strategy for Tesla is actually brilliant.

The big challenge to understanding Tesla’s strategy is that most of us only look at it from one level of analysis. Namely, when we see Tesla, we see a company that produces cars. But when I teach executives how to invest in future technology, I encourage them to think at multiple levels of the technology stack: not just products but also components and systems. So let’s take a closer look at Tesla.

At the level of the product, although a Tesla looks the same as other vehicles, underneath the hood, the vehicle has a fundamentally different architecture—both in terms of hardware and software. This matters because a long research tradition underscores that when incumbents face a new technology architecture, they struggle to understand and adapt.

Even though they can see what the technology is, they struggle to adapt both because they are reluctant to give up the existing capabilities they have perfected over decades and to fully integrate the new ones. Although incumbents may imitate the new architecture, they have a hard time overcoming the way they have done things in the past and to match the superior performance of the new, purpose-built architecture.

You can see evidence of this playing out in the auto industry. Early electric vehicles produced by incumbents on internal combustion engine architectures paled in comparison to the Tesla, and even newer “blank slate” efforts sometimes don’t quite measure up.

I’ve been saying for a long time now that Tesla’s challenge is to move from boutique manufacturer to mass-manufacturer of electric vehicles before the mass-manufacturers figure out how to make electric vehicles. But it might be more on point to say that the race is between a tech company trying to become a car company, and various car companies trying to become tech companies.

TRIGGERED: Liberals Lose It When Rick Perry Calls Trump a ‘Chosen One.’

1984, THE HOW-TO GUIDE: Data leak reveals how China ‘brainwashes’ Uighurs in prison camps.

The leaked Chinese government documents, which the ICIJ have labelled “The China Cables”, include a nine-page memo sent out in 2017 by Zhu Hailun, then deputy-secretary of Xinjiang’s Communist Party and the region’s top security official, to those who run the camps.

The instructions make it clear that the camps should be run as high security prisons, with strict discipline, punishments and no escapes.

So it’s just communism then.

IT ISN’T ABOUT SAVING THE PLANET; IT’S ABOUT GAINING POLITICAL POWER: Why Everything They Say About Climate Change Is Wrong.

First, no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species. “‘Our children are going to die in the next 10 to 20 years.’ What’s the scientific basis for these claims?” BBC’s Andrew Neil asked a visibly uncomfortable XR spokesperson last month.

“These claims have been disputed, admittedly,” she said. “There are some scientists who are agreeing and some who are saying it’s not true. But the overall issue is that these deaths are going to happen.”

“But most scientists don’t agree with this,” said Neil. “I looked through IPCC reports and see no reference to billions of people going to die, or children in 20 years. How would they die?”

“Mass migration around the world already taking place due to prolonged drought in countries, particularly in South Asia. There are wildfires in Indonesia, the Amazon rainforest, Siberia, the Arctic,” she said.

But in saying so, the XR spokesperson had grossly misrepresented the science. “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause”

What about “mass migration”? “The majority of resultant population movements tend to occur within the borders of affected countries,” says IPCC.

It’s not like climate doesn’t matter. It’s that climate change is outweighed by other factors.

Read the whole thing.

TEA LEAVES: Impeachment is Falling Apart As Moderate Democrats Are Getting Cold Feet.