Welcome To Clownworld

America must love a good cat fight.

How else can we view the latest lunacy of the legacy media, which is giving serious treatment to the latest conspiracy theory to emerge from the one-time Queen of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton: flailing and wholly irrelevant Democratic 2020 Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset.

CNN believes this is actually "news". Seriously.

Even the alternative media weighed in on the circus, as ZeroHedge summarized the Twitter "war" that arose when Tulsi Gabbard responded by tweeting out that Hillary Clinton was the "queen of the warmongers":

Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 18, 2019

Welcome to clownworld.

Let us be clear about this much: Whatever her politics, Tulsi Gabbard serves in the National Guard, has deployed multiple times to combat zones, in addition to being a four-term Congresswoman from Hawaii. The claim that she is in league with the Russian government, or of any government hostile to the interests of the United States, is an extraordinary one for which extraordinary evidence must be provided before the claim can be taken seriously. Hillary Clinton has provided no such evidence.

Since Hillary's claim cannot be taken seriously on its face, we are quite justified in considering what alternative motivations might exist for such a claim. We do not need to look very far, merely as far as the forefront of the Democratic 2020 contenders: Elizabeth Warren.

It is known that Hillary Clinton has been having behind the scenes meetings with Elizabeth Warren, the substance of which is not publicly disclosed. It is widely assumed among Democrats that a lack of support for Warren from Hillary Clinton would be "counterproductive." Hillary Clinton's public commentary in this Presidential cycle has not mentioned Elizabeth Warren at all.

Then we have the impact of Hillary's comments. This is the relative news search interest among Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren the day before Hillary made her remarks:

Note that Warren and Biden are in rough parity, in keeping with their status as co-frontrunners in the race.

Consider the change in News Search interest in just 24 hours:

With a single conspiracy theory, Hillary Clinton pushed both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren right off the front page pretty much everywhere. With "friends" like Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren surely has no need of enemies.

It is purely speculation on my part, but I venture to say that talks between Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton have not gone well.

What is not speculation is that I have just provided more evidence that Hillary Clinton is actually attacking Elizabeth Warren than Hillary Clinton has provided regarding Tulsi Gabbard's presumed ties to Russia, something I pointed out on Gab at the time.

There is an alternate conspiracy theory to consider: Tulsi Gabbard needs notoriety to stay in the hunt for the Democratic nomination.  Part of her response to Hillary Clinton's intemperate attack has been to make another plea for campaign contributions. Given the fact that, as of this moment, the hashtag "#IAmTulsi" is the number two trening topic on Twitter within the United States, the notion this was instigated by Tulsi Gabbard cannot be dsimissed.

What can be dismissed is that Tulsi Gabbard is in any position to contemplate any sort of independent run for President. With between 1% and 3% support in the polls making up the RealClearPolitics aggregate, Tulsi Gabbar has almost no following or constituency to support her bid for the Presidency.

What should not be dismissed are the news stories the legacy media is ignoring while it focuses on the inane and irrelevant.

While the legacy media pontificates over the Clinton-Gabbard catfight, the alternative media is exploring the shrinking global market for automobiles, and the recessionary impacts this has.

While the legacy media swoons over Tulsi Gabbard tweeting back smack to counter Hillary Clinton, alternative media outlet Human Events is documenting the plight of the Uyghurs in western China, and Beijing's campaign of genocide against them.

While the legacy media marinates in melodrama, ZeroHedge highlighted the constant struggle the Federal Reserve has had the past several weeks maintaining liquidity in this country's financial systems. If you only read the legacy financial media outlets you would not know America's financial systems are flirting with a 2008-style lockup, and the Federal Reserve is unable to get ahead of the problem--a rather significant oversight by the legacy media.

There is news people need. There are stories that must be told. There are stories of profound human interest that should prick our collective conscience. A twitter cage match between Tulsi Gabbard and Hillary Clinton is not one of those stories. Nor is a twitter blood feud between Tulsi and the legacy media over their "smears" directed towards her and her campaign.

The legacy media would rather cover Tulsi vs Hillary than provide actual news. The legacy media would rather serve up digital "bread and circuses" than meaningful, substantive content.

I will keep beating the same drum as in my last post, for the message is that important:

Read broadly. Read critically. Read for quality, and reward quality. Set high expectations for those who would call themselves "journalists". Critique, criticize, and challenge everything and everyone.

I will be blunt: clickbait works. I know clickbait works. Even I phrase my tweets and Gabs and other social media with an eye towards attracting intention and inviting response. Like every other blogger and would-be commentator and journalist, I want to be noticed. I will not be so much the hypocrite as to pretend otherwise.

Yet I want to be noticed for having something to say. I want to be noticed for having provoked a bit of thought, an occasional discussion, an inspiration to research independently and explore with a critical eye the world around us.   

I want people to know all the stories that are out there, A people cannot be truly free if they are not accurately and fully informed. Throughout the evolution of this blog, presenting information and encouraging discussion and debate have always been the overarching theme (I leave it to the reader to decide how well I succeed in this objective).

Sadly, the legacy media no longer appears to share this objective, if indeed it ever did. The extent to which the alternative media shares this objective is problematic, with some independent journalists such as Tim Pool, creator behind Subverse, striving to remove the spin and the clickbait from journalism, while other commentators preferring to wallow in various episodes of melodrama. This is a shame, for the world is rich with stories to tell--some good, some bad, some uplifting, some depressing, all important and relevant to everyone.

The warning and the caveat remains: If we are to once again have a truly free press, the one thing we must absolutely stop doing is trusting the press. Doubt and skepticism must become our cardinal virtues whenever we read anything that would presume to present "the news".

Do not trust anything. Verify everything. And look beyond the legacy media to see all that is happening in the world.

Hillary Clinton Jumped The Political Shark With Reno Rant Against Donald Trump

This past Thursday, on August 25, Hillary Clinton launched a full rhetorical broadside against Donald Trump. She called him out as a racist, and for having built his campaign on "prejudice and paranoia."

However, Hillary Clinton also exposed several vulnerabilities in her own campaign:

1. Unlike Donald Trump, she does not have a transcript of her speech (or, indeed of any speech) posted on her campaign website. Donald Trump not only posts transcripts of all his prepared speeches (NOT his rally presentations, which are mainly extemporaneous performances), but he documents those transcripts with liberal footnoting and citation of sources.

Donald Trump cites facts and evidence, while Hillary Clinton does not, yet Donald Trump is the candidate trafficking in "paranoia"?

2. Hillary Clinton abandoned substantive policy statements to attack Trump for his "divisive rhetoric." That "divisive rhetoric" is Trump speaking out directly, forcefully, and even bluntly about problems not only within black communities, but across America. His "divisive rhetoric" IS substantive and IS about public policy--one can argue his assessment, criticize his conclusions, and pan his proposals, but one cannot realistically dismiss the fact that assessment, conclusion, and proposal is the stuff of which serious public policy discussions are made. Rather than attack Trump on policy, she abandoned all discussion of policy to attack Trump personally. Worse, she explicitly admitted as such in her opening sentences. For a supposed policy wonk to concede the policy battlefield to Trump seems a bizarre and unwise strategem.

3. She resurrected her claims of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" from the 90's -- now recast as the "alt-right" conspiracy. The claim was absurd then and it is absurd now, and for the same reason: conspiracies by their nature require a rather limited group of conspirators, and to link together all Trump surrogates, conservative media outlets, and alt-right social media personalities in a single organized cabal simply flies in the face of all observed behavior by the people involved. Even worse, she bizarrely claimed this conspiracy was masterminded and controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin--without a trace of irony she branded him as the "godfather" of an oxymoronic "global brand of extreme nationalism" (nationalist movements by their very nature are the antithesis of "global" anything).

4. As verbal barrages go, her attacks are largely weak and ineffective. Donald Trump has endured a steady stream of negative ads and campaign tactics since the middle of the GOP primaries and he's STILL running neck and neck with Hillary Clinton. The negative tactics and negative ads, and now Hillary's negative speech, simply are not moving the needle on Trump much, if at all. The negative campaigning to date has had the perverse effect of inoculating Trump against further attack, such that continued or even increased negative rhetoric against Donald Trump has little potential to pull Trump supporters into the Clinton camp.

On the other hand, there are reports from some Democratic circles that the extreme nature of Clinton's attack on Trump may alienate portions of the Democratic base--in particular those segments who were all in for Bernie Sanders.

5. With 76 days still to go before election day, Hillary Clinton has, quite simply, jumped the shark. Negative attacks, and even personal insults and slanders against a political opponent are hardly novel ideas for political campaigns. Yet to set aside presumably substantive policy remarks for an extended personal attack against Donald Trump begs the question "What does Hillary Clinton do for an encore?" How can she top this speech?

If this speech were to exist in a political vacuum, within a week or two its impact would be next to nil. For this speech to have lasting impact on Trump, Hillary Clinton has to keep repeating it, or at least keep repeating the talking points contained therein. And to ensure continued public focus on those talking points, she will have to keep making the charges more extreme, more noxious, and all the while each of those charges and talking points is time NOT spent discussing her public policy proposals and ideas. Worse, by focusing everything on Donald Trump, she is making sure Donald Trump's public policy proposals and ideas receive even more attention than they are now, while at the same time ensuring her own ideas are virtually ignored.

As Ted Cruz found out the hard way in the primaries, exchanging policy points for personal attacks quickly becomes a swamp of negativity that will drown a campaign. Hillary Clinton has not merely conceded a few policy points; she has abandoned policy altogether. After the Reno speech, her campaign strategy is now reduced to simply this: Donald Trump is evil.

It is very hard to envision a demonizing of The Donald as inspiring waves of Democratic voters to turn out and pull the lever for Hillary Clinton come Election Day.

Yes, CNN, It DOES Matter If Obama Uses The Term "Radical Islamic Terrorism"

CNN's bias is showing again--or, rather, still.

Throughout the 2016 Presidential campaign, Donald Trump has repeatedly called for  both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to call the motivations behind atrocities such as the Orlando and San Bernadino shootings by name: "Radical Islamic Terrorism." When assessing the importance of this label, CNN conveniently leaves off the "Radical" adjective while pontificating about the efficacy or inefficacy of the term.

To critique a term, one must first accurately reference the term. If the term is "Radical Islamic terrorism," then critiquing the use of "Islamic terrorism" is ultimately a straw man argument. CNN is, as is its wont where the Republican nominee is concerned, making a straw man argument.

It should be noted that many commentators, particularly of a conservative bent, are ambivalent about a substantive distinction between "Radical Islam" and "Islam". A great many people will agree with Milo Yiannopolous on this point--that the problem, and the enemy, is in fact simply "Islam". 

Still, I appreciate Trump's nuancing with by making it "Radical Islam." It opens the door towards the posture of "Radical Islam" being different from "Islam", in the same way "crony capitalism" is different from "capitalism." It allows for common cause with moderate Muslim communities here in the USA to eradicate those who would use religion as a justification for murder.

If a Muslim living in the United States accepts that Sharia is not the law of the land, and will not be the law of the land, we need not make of him an enemy. We can make of him a friend.

If a Muslim living in the United States accepts that he or she lives in cosmopolitan society, with diverse belief systems and creeds, and is willing to live in peace with those creeds, we need not make of him an enemy. We can make of him a friend.

If a Muslim living in the United States is willing to assimilate into our culture, meeting our culture "halfway", we need not make of him an enemy. We can make of him a friend.

If a Muslim living in the United States demands Sharia, rejects our cosmopolitan society, and refuses to assimilate, then he has made of himself an enemy, and we can never make of him a friend. That is simply not one of the potential outcomes under those circumstances.

The United States is still the nation founded on the premise that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that government is the tool men use to preserve those same rights. Any religion or creed that cannot celebrate this premise will never be compatible with American civic life, and so must be removed from our civic society.

It necessarily follows from the term and Trump's repeated use of it that Trump understands both the nuance and the need for the nuance. In the chaotic and painful aftermath of the carnage in Orlando, that nuance and only that nuance allows Trump (or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton), to label, identify, and call out the threat that faces us--"Radical Islam"--while leaving an opening for the more moderate Muslims to make common cause against what should be a common enemy.

"Radical Islamic Terrorism" is the nuance that allows Muslims either living in this country or wishing to legally emigrate to this country the chance to be Americans, certainly in spirit and ultimately in citizenship as well. "Islamic terrorism" compels all Muslims to decide: their fate or this nation, their personal liberty or the freedom our society hopefully still cherishes. "Radical Islamic Terrorism" is the nuance allows us to oppose ISIS directly on its own without alienating the Muslim states we need as allies to defeat ISIS once and for all.

Yes, CNN, is does matter if Obama uses the term "radical Islamic terrorism." The term tells us he's looking at the right problem, in the right time, and in the right frame of mind. The term tells us if Hillary Clinton can or cannot competently address the real problems facing our society, here and around the world. It matters so much, that it even matters if your staff will are able to use the term "radical Islamic terrorism."

Sadly, it appears that your staff, just like Barack Obama and just like Hillary Clinton, are not able to call the enemy by its name: 

Radical Islamic Terrorism.

Hillary Clinton's Inevitable Victory? Election Returns Say Otherwise.

Edward Luce, of the Financial Times, has declared the 2016 Presidential election over except for the shouting, and declared Hillary Clinton the winner in a blowout victory--an amazing feat, given that the actual election itself is still six months away.

Luce' argument is that Donald Trump is the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee, that Hillary Clinton is assured of being the Democratic nominee, and that Donald Trump cannot help but lose horribly to Hillary Clinton in the general election. 

The first leg of his thesis is admittedly fairly sound. Donald Trump leads the Republican field, and is the only candidate with a plausible chance of securing a majority of delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot. 

The second leg of his thesis is slightly less certain, given that Bernie Sanders swept the 25 March primary contests in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii by huge margins (his narrowest victory was in Hawaii, where he won over 69% of the popular vote), and has now bested Hillary Clinton in the last 5 of 6 state contests. Hillary remains in the lead in both overall popular vote and in overall delegates, but in terms of the number of states each candidate has won, the race is far more balanced. Thanks to the Democratic party's large number (712) of so-called "superdelegates"--delegates not bound to any candidate but free to vote however they choose--the nomination remains within the grasp of either candidate. 

The third leg of his thesis, however, suffers from some rather significant cognitive dissonance. While innumerable polls point to a myriad of problems Donald Trump presumably will encounter with various voter demographics, all polling is at best a projection of future behavior--respondents are telling pollsters how they will vote, not how they actually have voted. Actual vote totals in the Democratic and Republican primary contests thus far paint a far different picture of how the as-yet hypothetical Clinton-Trump matchup would go.

Here are the actual numbers. These are the total votes cast in both the Democratic and Republican primaries through 25 March 2016.

• Hillary Clinton has received 8,924,920 votes out of 15,323,340 Democratic votes cast.
• Donald Trump has received 7,811,245 votes out of 19,783,685 Republican votes cast. (Actually, the total Republican vote is underreported as Real Clear Politics, my source for these figures, is no longer reporting vote totals for candidates who have dropped out after the primaries began: Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush).
• Ted Cruz has received 5,732,220 Republican votes.
• Donald Trump has received more votes than Hillary Clinton in the following states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, Utah, and Vermont.

These are raw numbers, without any filtering, editing, or normalizations applied. They do not take into account, for example, that up until the most recent primaries, Donald Trump has led the field in a four-way race while Hillary Clinton has only had to run against Bernie Sanders. There is no weighting given to the argument that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are fairly close in terms of policy proposals and ideology, and are jointly grouped by the commentariat as "insurgent" candidates. There is no prognostication of the impact of the "Bernie or Bust" movement among Democrats, asserting that if Bernie Sanders is not the nominee his supporters will not vote in November (or possibly might defect to likely GOP nominee Donald Trump).

With the primaries a little more than halfway done, Republicans have convinced over 4.4 million more voters to the polls and caucuses than the Democrats. The Republican turnout edge is equal to just under half of Hillary Clinton's vote total.

On the raw numbers alone, Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton only by 1.1 million votes overall, although he outpolls her in twelve states.

On the raw numbers alone, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz combined outpoll Clinton in all but four states (Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota), and their combined vote total exceeds that of Hillary Clinton by in excess of 4.6 million votes--a vote margin that exceeds the Republican turnout margin. If only half of Ted Cruz voters are added to Donald Trump's total, Hillary Clinton prevails in only two more states, Louisiana and Virginia.

If one follows the commentariat model of counting Trump and Cruz as insurgent candidates, it is not unreasonable to presume that, come the general election, supporters of whomever of the two is not the nominee will support the other. Certainly the two are not far apart on such matters as immigration, healthcare reform, and confronting terrorism and radical Islamic jihad.

Regardless of what polling prognosticators predict, based solely on votes cast thus far, the most optimistic scenario for Hillary Clinton is a close race and likely a photo finish in the popular vote, with maybe a slightly larger edge in the Electoral College. But scenarios where Donald Trump wins convincingly in both the popular vote and the Electoral College are not at all unreasonable.

Hillary Clinton might win in November. So might Donald Trump. Neither candidate is assured of victory, and it is foolish of the commentariat to suggest otherwise.

If Democrats Draft Biden, They Justify Donald Trump

The news this week that Democratic Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has vaulted ahead of Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire polls has sent chattering class scurrying for cover.  It has also given renewed impetus to the "draft Biden" scenario.

Consider: Bernie Sanders is drawing large crowds at rallies around the nation--the largest of any political candidate on either side of the aisle, he's energizing a large part of the base of the Democratic party, and the response of the party leadership to his success on the campaign trail is to look around almost desperately for a more "suitable" candidate. The crowd favorite--the unquestioned crowd favorite, judging by the size of the crowds--has been deemed "unelectable" by the Democratic Party leadership.

The first primaries of the 2016 election season are still six months away, and candidates can rise and fall, and rise again many times in that time frame.  Howard Dean similarly energized crowds in the 2004 contest only to fade as the Iowa caucuses approached.  Moreover, on two occasions Sanders' rallies were upstaged by activists from the "Black Lives Matter" movement, and essentially driven from the stage by their tactics--and to prevent a third he has brought members of that movement into his campaign. To presume that Bernie Sanders has any sort of lock on the nomination at this juncture would be ludicrous.

Indeed, Bernie Sanders does not yet enjoy a broad base of support among minority voters--a key constituency of the Democratic Party; as late as July, his favorability rating among non-whites was still at a lethally low 25%. Having been twice on the receiving end of minority activist antics can hardly be seen to help strengthen that number, although it is also possible that embracing the Black Lives Matter activists within his campaign will help him connect better with minority constituencies.

It is also true that Bernie Sanders has refused to formally align with the Democratic Party before now; a self-identified Socialist, he caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate but is nominally an Independent.  Whether that presents a credibility concern for him either with the Democrats or with the general electorate, should he win the nomination, remains an open question.

What is not an open question is that Bernie Sanders is surging in the Democratic polls, just as Donald Trump is leading in Republican Polls.  Indeed, the Washington Post has noted the odd parallels between these two campaigns from outside either party's mainstream, and then rather condescendingly wrote off both candidacies as transitory phenomenon, concluding that "this too--and these two--shall pass." The candidates grabbing not just the headlines but also the attention of the nation are not those from either party's rank and file--Bernie Sanders for the Democrats, and for the Republicans Donald Trump, followed (in some order) by Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson. The reality of the moment is that what these candidates are saying--and how they are saying it--is of far greater interest to Americans than the rhetoric coming from the more conventional candidates who have thus far thrown their hat into the ring.

It may very well be that Bernie Sanders' main selling point among Democratic voters is that he stands outside the status quo of Democratic politicians. His political career has been defined by his quirky refusal to embrace the apparatus of a political party, maintaining a stance as a political independent throughout his terms in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. At the very least, that notion of independence is being consciously articulated by Sanders' supporters. In a supreme political irony, a career politician has cast himself as the outsider and the agent of meaningful--and in this case liberal--political change, and the voters are rewarding that stance handsomely.

Whatever one makes of Bernie Sanders' politics or his proposals, that he is reflective of voters' desire to alter the status quo cannot be denied. In this coming presidential election cycle, the public demands different candidates, with different themes, different messages, different backgrounds. Even more than 2008, the animating force in the coming Presidential contest seems to be a rejection of the status quo, and a rejection of those who represent the status quo.

Which is why the chief beneficiary of any serious effort at this stage to draft Joe Biden into campaigning for President is likely to be....Donald Trump.  A career businessman who has never even run for elective office before (despite having flirted with a run for President in 2012), a recurring theme in "The Donald's" stump speech is a mantra he's repeated for years: "Nobody owns me". While Donald Trump is campaigning for the Republican nomination for President he has no grand affiliation with Republican party politics or the Republican party machine--and indeed has donated liberally to both Democrat and Republican candidates in the past, and has spoken out in favor of Democratic as well as Republican party policies. In his unapologetic attacks on illegal immigration, on bias in the media, and on the cronyism of both major political parties, Donald Trump has put forth an image of independence that so far has been matched by only one other candidate: Bernie Sanders.

By contrast, Joe Biden is someone who has been near the apex of Democratic leadership in Washington for decades, a two-time Presidential candidate who chaired Senate committees literally for decades prior to becoming Vice President in 2008. Regardless of his stance on issues, or his personal priorities for holding elective office, Joe Biden is nothing if not the ultimate insider. He is the status quo personified, the very thing voters on both sides of the political aisle are fervently rejecting.

If Bernie Sanders continues to dominate Hillary Clinton in the polls, and if the New Hampshire primaries draw near with him still enjoying a front-runner aura among Democrats, and if the Democratic Party leadership continues to respond to his success among Democratic voters by looking for anyone who can be a more "electable" alternative to Bernie Sanders, might that not broaden Donald Trump's appeal? If the Democrats throw Sanders under the proverbial bus, might that not create an opening for a Trump candidacy to woo erstwhile Democratic voters with his bombastic rhetorical pledge to "Make America great again," rhetoric that is every bit as populist as Sanders' own verbal assaults on economic, political, and racial inequality?

The Democratic Party would do well to consider the consequences of its actions. The alternative to a "President Sanders" might very well be a "President Trump."