How Elizabeth Warren’s Candidacy Benefits From Her Democrat Competitors’ Weakness

Even so, Democrats usually prefer to fall in love with their candidates. Warren’s slow but steady climb in the polls suggest it has not been love at first sight for many. Rather, her success may be as much a function of the competition and where she is positioned among the top candidates.

The Federalist  "According to GQ magazine, it is “The Summer of Elizabeth Warren,” so if you’re going to Massachusetts, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. The professor-turned-senator has turned “rock star,” drawing an estimated 15,000 people for a rally in Seattle (although the 12,000 who turned up for her in Minnesota is probably more impressive).
"The establishment media is convinced more each day that Warren would run away with the Democratic presidential nomination, were it not for the voice of the patriarchy placing doubts in the heads of middle-aged women that she is not as electable or likeable as some of her rivals. Ironically, Warren’s rise is probably driven as much by her rivals as her own efforts.
"Warren’s main problem is still Warren, and she knows it. The GQ profile gushes about her update of traditional rope-line politicking: “Other 2020 hopefuls oblige random requests for selfies with voters, but no one has the casual spontaneity of picture-taking down to a perfectly engineered production the way the Warren campaign does.” Her campaign sells the idea she has time for 42,000 selfies (and counting) because she has rejected big, corporate fundraising.
"The truth is closer to the reverse. Team Warren wants those selfies flooding social media to raise her name identification in a crowded field and create the appearance of broad, grassroots support. While the campaign would probably never say it out loud to any but the friendliest journalist, the personal touch implicitly pushes back against the widespread perception that Warren is not particularly likeable. The rally crowds suggest this plan is working better to humanize her than that early campaign video of her drinking beer in her kitchen." . . .

CNN Actually Does Need to Make Brian Stelter Apologize or Discipline Him for This:

The Resurgent Hat tip to the Doug Ross Journal

"For a show host who covers “Reliable Sources,” Brian Stelter went a bridge too far on Sunday and CNN either needs to make him apologize or needs to discipline him. This is too much for a network that prides itself in being fair and objective.
"First, Stelter decided it was appropriate and relevant to bring on people to discuss, as experts, the President’s mental state even though they have never diagnosed the President.
"Then, when one psychiatrist disagreed it was relevant and then insisted President Trump had perhaps killed more people than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, Stelter only interrupted the man to insist talking about the President’s sanity was appropriate." . . .

"Yes, the guest on the show said it was not helpful to talk about the President’s sanity then suggested Trump had possibly killed more than Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.

"Stelter’s response?

"He didn’t rebuke the man, but instead challenged the man that yes we should talk about the President’s sanity." . . .

How sad that when the 1991 Gulf War was on we were tethered to CNN as a trusted news source. Now it is nothing but a propaganda channel for the left. TD

Maher On Koch’s Death: ‘F**k Him. I’m Glad He’s Dead.’ ‘Hope’ It ‘Was Painful’

Maher On Koch’s Death: ‘F**k Him. I’m Glad He’s Dead.’ ‘Hope’ It ‘Was Painful’

In a clip flagged by NewsBusters' Brent Baker, Maher said: "Yesterday David Koch of the zillionaire Koch brothers died ... of prostate cancer. I guess I'm going to have to re-evaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer."

 Bill Maher dances on David Koch’s grave: ‘I’m glad he’s dead and I hope the end was painful’

The list is of charitable donations is astonishing. But Maher, the ignoramus, can only see the money he gave to climate skeptics.

It should be noted that both sides engage in this race to see who can say the nastiest, most vile, most despicable things about the recently dead. But Maher's words -- as I'm sure he intended -- shock the sensibilities of decent people who may be passionate about their politics, but set boundaries where good taste and decorum are needed.

 David Koch: An Appreciation  "He was the perfect gentleman and a man of utter competence."

I would like to compare how often George Soros’s name appears on a building or a work of art as opposed to the Koch name. The fact is that George Soros and the moneyed people on the left give their money almost exclusively to politics. The Koch money covers a much wider range of human experience. That is because the Kochs and other moneyed people on the right live normal lives. Politics is only one of their interests.

Democrats guilty of 'the ultimate hate crime'

Medal of Honor recipient Patrick Brady calls out left's wild accusations of racism

"As sure as the sun rises, the party of Santa Claus candidates, race fascists and hate mongers is coming rising up during this election-cycle horror show, frantically searching for a reason to hate, horrified by their own nothingness, and somehow comforted in their hatred of good and decent Americans.

"A policy-naked party that would kill a baby on its birthday, believes you can marry your cat and denounces the rule of law will hawk their moral superiority. And half of America will cheer them on. And so will the principal enemy of the people – the majority dishonest media, a media that has convinced nearly half of America that Russia elected Donald Trump – the most extraordinary hoax ever.
. . . 

"It is important to know that this hate speech on the left is all about votes, not about policy. What have they done for blacks? President Obama made this clear when he begged black Americans, as if he were a plantation owner, "I will consider it a personal insult to my legacy if this community lets its guard down and fails to activate itself this election."

"The Republican Party was founded on the simple principle: Slavery is a violation of the rights of man. Yet the party that founded, fostered and protected slavery will call the party that fought, died and defeated slavery "racists" – and the dishonest media will support them." . . .

Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, retired from the U.S. Army, is a recipient of the United States military's highest decoration, the Medal of Honor. He is the author of "Dead Men Flying: Victory in Viet Nam The Legend of Dust Off: America's Battlefield Angels."

"This is the Democratic Party, the party that engineered the most extreme projection in American history. This is the party that cannot now survive without the black vote, yet which was born to enslave blacks, which founded the Ku Klux Klan, which promoted Jim Crow and supported Dred Scott which held that blacks could not be citizens. They opposed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which banned slavery, guaranteed due process to blacks and gave them the right to vote. This party, itself literally founded on racism, has projected its satanic past onto Republicans and others they oppose, which would seem impossible but for a dishonest media, one that manipulates not only popular perception of the present, but of the past.

"It is important to know that this hate speech on the left is all about votes, not about policy. What have they done for blacks? President Obama made this clear when he begged black Americans, as if he were a plantation owner, "I will consider it a personal insult to my legacy if this community lets its guard down and fails to activate itself this election."

Study Ranks Every State’s Highway System, Finds Road Conditions Worsening In Important Categories

Reason

North Dakota, Virginia and Missouri have the best performing, most cost-efficient state highway systems, while New Jersey, Rhode Island and Hawaii have the worst.

"After decades of incremental progress in several key categories, Reason Foundation’s Annual Highway Report finds the nation’s highway conditions are deteriorating, especially in a group of problem-plagued states struggling to repair deficient bridges, maintain Interstate pavement and reduce urban traffic congestion.

“ 'In looking at the nation’s highway system as a whole, there was a decades-long trend of incremental improvement in most key categories, but the overall condition of the highway system has worsened in recent years,” says Baruch Feigenbaum, lead author of the Annual Highway Report and assistant director of transportation at Reason Foundation. “This year we see some improvement on structurally deficient bridges, but pavement conditions on rural and urban highways are declining, the rise in traffic fatalities is worrying, and we aren’t making needed progress on traffic congestion in our major cities.”

"The 24th Annual Highway Report, based on data that states submitted to the federal government, ranks each state’s highway system in 13 categories, including traffic fatalities, pavement condition, congestion, spending per mile, administrative costs and more. This edition of the Annual Highway Report uses state-submitted highway data from 2016, the most recent year with complete figures currently available, along with traffic congestion and bridge data from 2017." . . .

Trump — or What, Exactly? Let’s compare Trump’s policies and behavior to that of prior presidents — and to his 2020 opponents’.

Victor Davis Hanson  "In traditional political terms, there is always an alternate agenda to an incumbent president’s that reasonable voters can debate. 
"In Trump’s case, two massive annual budget deficits — coming on top of the previous two administrations that doubled the national debt — seem fair game. No president for the past 19 years has sought to offer any remotely sane budget. And with still relatively low interest rates, massive federal spending, a $22 trillion national debt, and an annual deficit of nearly $1 trillion, it is hard to imagine, in extremis, that there remains any notion of “stimulus” or “pump-priming” left.
"Yet we hear little about such financial profligacy.
""Not a word comes from Trump’s critics about the need for Social Security or Medicare reform to ensure the long-term viability of each — other than the Democrats’ promises to extend such financially shaky programs to millions of new clients well beyond the current retiring Baby Boomer cohorts who are already taxing the limits of the system.
"To counter every signature Trump issue, there is almost no rational alternative advanced. "That void helps explain the bizarre, three-year litany of dreaming of impeachment, the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller special-counsel investigation, Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti, Trump’s tax returns, White Supremacy!, Recession! — and Lord knows what next.
"The subtext of all these Wile E. Coyote all-too-clever efforts at trapping roadrunner Trump is not just the wish to abort an elected presidency; they’re offering the heat of hatred rather than the light of a viable political alternative." . . .

Political Incorrectness

You left WHAT in San Francisco?

Comedian Argus Hamilton: "San Francisco hosted the Democratic presidential candidates last weekend in the party’s state convention. The city is reeking with urban problems that nobody mentioned. Planned Parenthood should build a chain of homeless shelters all over San Francisco and call them Unplanned Adulthood."

Joe Biden Is 'Not Going Nuts,' According to Joe Biden

Politifact ignores Biden's lies, or should I simply say "misstatements"?
A comment to this article pointed out:

I still remember Politifact rating a statement Mitt Romney made during the 2012 primaries (not the time Obama dismissed it with his aircraft carriers and bayonets BS at the debate, this was earlier) about how far the Navy had shrunk that was factually correct, and they were told was factually correct, as a Pants-On-Fire falsehood. That told me everything I needed to know about Politifact.

The man himself declares: Joe Biden Tells Supporters: ‘I Want to Be Clear, I’m NOT Going Nuts!’

Biden’s Brother Promised Health Care Execs the Former VP Would Help Promote Their Business
. . . "Biden’s relatives have previously been accused of using their access to enrich themselves but the latest allegations, which are detailed in a number of sworn declarations filed in federal court on Friday, represent the first example of Biden’s relatives promising that he would use his influence to directly promote private businesses." . . .

Joe Biden Is 'Not Going Nuts,' According to Joe Biden  . . . "Which raises that age-old question, older than even Joe Biden: If a guy is crazy, does he know he's crazy?" . . .

Hoo Boy: New National Poll Shows Biden...Trailing Both Sanders And Warren
. . . "We'll see if this poll turns out to be an aberrant outlier, but according to these numbers, Biden has been matched -- and even slightly surpassed -- by both far-left contenders in the top tier.  Most interesting is the finding that although the former Vice President has seen his support among self-identified liberal voters wane, which isn't all that surprising, his bigger problem has been hemorrhaging support from moderate and conservative primary voters: . . ."

The Gambler: RBG and the Trump Campaign

The American Spectator

Trump is pushing his luck, even with another Supreme Court pick possibly in the cards.

"Over the weekend, the media took notice of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s apparently successful treatment for a malignant tumor on the pancreas. “No further treatment is needed at this time,” said Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City — which wasn’t the same thing as saying “Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court tenure is locked down and guaranteed.”
"Possibly the least edifying phenomenon you run across in politics — a highly unedifying pursuit these days, full of noise and rancor — is what might be called the death watch, as in how-long-before-we-get-to-replace-old-so-and-so-on-whatever-it-is. Few are the political folk whose disappearances for one reason or another excite public rejoicings. Ginsburg — a smart, snappy and rigorously honest jurist — isn’t among their number. “Long may she wave!” we need to exclaim so as to keep up some pretense of humanity amid all the grossness.
"This is not to deny she’s a major player in the 2020 elections — in one sense, the major player.
"Maybe Donald Trump understands, and maybe he doesn’t, that his widely supported project of tugging the federal judiciary to the right buys him tolerance he might not otherwise be vouchsafed — and well could lose if certain things don’t change.
"The bare, spare, unsentimental fact is that The Notorious RBG’s retirement from the Supreme Court, due to age and health, would allow Trump this year — next year — to strengthen a tenuous conservative majority on the court, made possible by the 2016 election, and possibly the next one up. At the same time, he would continue to staff the lower federal benches with conservatives." . . .

Former Staffers Urge Gillibrand to End ‘Performative and Obnoxious’ Presidential Campaign

National Review

. . . " 'Gillibrand, who has yet to breach one percent in major national polls, is working to secure the 130,000 individual donations required to appear on the debate stage next month in Houston — an appearance that one former staffer believes will only serve to harm her future political career." . . .
“ 'I don’t know that anyone even wants to see her on the debate stage. Everyone I have talked to finds her performative and obnoxious,” a former senior staffer in Gillibrand’s Senate office told the Post.
"Gillibrand has received roughly 115,000 individual donations, which places her behind upstart candidate Marianne Williamson, a self-help author with no political experience who has already surpassed the threshold required to qualify for the next debate."“ 'She comes across as an opportunist to the public. I think that’s the biggest problem,” said the staffer, noting Gillibrand’s reversal on gun rights and immigration restrictionism, causes she championed as a member of the House representing a rural upstate New York district but later abandoned when she ran for the upper chamber. “I think she’ll have to seriously evaluate her campaign and her candidacy if she doesn’t make this debate.' ”

For all you Bernie Sanders supporters: life under socialism and life under capitalism shown

Fidel Castro BFF Barack Obama is not available for comment. Somebody please check in with Bernie Sanders. TD

To mark the fall of the Berlin Wall Radio Free Europe photographer Amos Chapple visited the precise locations of 14 striking photos taken when the city was split - in the 1950s, 60s and 70s - and took 2019 versions of those scenes. And the contrasts - or lack thereof - are fascinating.

 Video

Berlin - THEN and NOW: Photographer visits the locations of 14 Cold War images and takes snaps to reveal how the German capital has been transformed

"Berlin today is one of the world's hippest, most affluent cities - a cultural powerhouse and a mecca for party animals.

"But just over 30 years ago it was a city torn in two, divided by a wall measuring 91 miles. On one side was capitalist West Berlin, on the other communist East Berlin. Anyone who tried to get over it was shot." . . .

. . . 

" 'The photo of the church taken from the television tower is, I think, the most interesting. To see how much the city has been built up since its devastation by war is amazing.

" 'It gives you a sense of how the city's elderly people must feel, looking at all these new buildings that the rest of us just pass by. They remember the rubble that once stood in its place, maybe sometimes the people they knew who were killed inside it.'

"Looking at his completed project, Amos says it was 'deeply educational'.

"He added: 'Looking at those old photos just reinforces my sense that government should never be allowed too much power. Whether the politics are right, left, fascist, communist or centrist - it doesn't matter. Any government is made up of people - they're just people. Even if they have good intentions, people make dumb mistakes and errors of judgement. I do, you do, we all do.

" 'So when I look at that line of scruffy communist militants standing there thinking they will make the world better by stopping people's freedom of movement, when I watch the Stasi videos of agents creeping through people's apartments, looking for evidence they were thinking the wrong way… I think it's terrifying, and it's a lesson.'

"The separation of Berlin began in 1945 when Germany was split into East and West Germany." . . .

Trump alone stands between us and these people

History has taught us how in his contempt for northern troops, Robert E. Lee referred to the Yankees simply as "those people".

Nancy Pelosi Just Delivered A Kill Shot To House Democrats’ Impeachment Hopes…For Now
. . . "So, a majority of House Democrats backs impeaching Trump. What say you, Speaker Nancy Pelosi? She isn’t budging. She knows this move will animate the GOP base. This is the declaration of nuclear political war, and she knows her side could very well lose. In fact, she knows it will; the Republicans control the Senate and they’re not going to go along with this nonsense. The Trump-Russia collusion myth has been thoroughly dissected as trash. There is no appetite to impeach among voters. As our friends at Twitchy noted, even pollsters are signaling that support for impeaching Trump has dropped." . . .

Rich Terrell

Hillary is Lurking  "Hillary Clinton, the Ma Barker of American politics, is still out hustling, still staying one step ahead of the law as she tries to weasel her way into the presidential sweepstakes. She says she isn’t running in 2020, but, as we know too well, truth is a fungible commodity to a Clinton.

"The signs don’t look good. She just announced a fundraiser for the DNC at her Washington D.C. mansion with tickets as high as $50,000 (scraps for the homeless in the dumpster out back)." . . .