All Three Defendants Convicted of Murder in Ahmaud Arbery Lynching

Very emotional and uplifting press conference.

Spiritual. Grateful for the grace of God.

At NYT, "Three Men Found Guilty of Murdering Ahmaud Arbery: Defendants Face Up to Life in Prison":

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Three white men were found guilty of murder and other charges on Wednesday for the pursuit and fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, in a case that, together with the killing of George Floyd, helped inspire the racial justice protests of last year.

The three defendants — Travis McMichael, 35; his father, Gregory McMichael, 65; and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — face sentences of up to life in prison for the state crimes. The men have also been indicted on separate federal charges, including hate crimes and attempted kidnapping, and are expected to stand trial in February on those charges.

The verdict suggested that the jury agreed with prosecutors’ arguments that Mr. Arbery posed no imminent threat to the men and that the men had no reason to believe he had committed a crime, giving them no legal right to chase him through their suburban neighborhood. “You can’t start it and claim self-defense,” the lead prosecutor argued in her closing statements. “And they started this.”

Though the killing of Mr. Arbery in February 2020 did not reach the same level of notoriety as the case of Mr. Floyd, the Black man murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer three months later, Mr. Arbery’s death helped fuel widespread demonstrations and unrest that unfolded in cities across the country in the spring and summer of 2020.

The case touched on some of the most combustible themes in American criminal justice, including vigilantism, self-defense laws, the effects of widespread gun ownership and the role of race in jury selection.

Like many other recent episodes involving the killing of Black people, the confrontation was captured on video that was eventually made public. Unlike many of the others, the video was made not by a bystander but by one of the defendants, Mr. Bryan.

From the beginning, Mr. Arbery’s family and friends raised questions about local officials’ handling of the case. The three men who were later charged walked free for several weeks after the shooting, and were arrested only after the video was released, a national outcry swelled and the case was taken over by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Jackie Johnson, the local prosecutor who initially handled the case, lost her bid for re-election in 2020 and was indicted this year by a Georgia grand jury, accused of “showing favor and affection” to Gregory McMichael, a former investigator in her office, and for directing police officers not to arrest Travis McMichael. The case was ultimately tried by the district attorney’s office in Cobb County, which is roughly 300 miles away from Brunswick in metropolitan Atlanta.

The case brought political and legal upheaval. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed a hate-crimes statute into law, and sided with state lawmakers when they voted to repeal significant portions of the state’s citizen’s arrest statute.

During the trial, defense lawyers relied on that citizen’s arrest law, which was enacted in the 19th century. They argued that their clients had acted legally when, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in February 2020, they set out in two pickup trucks in an effort to detain Mr. Arbery, an avid jogger and former high school football player who spent nearly five minutes trying to run away from them.

Eventually trapped between the two pickup trucks, Mr. Arbery ended up in a confrontation with Travis McMichael, who was armed with a shotgun and fired at Mr. Arbery three times at close range. Mr. McMichael testified that he feared that Mr. Arbery, who had no weapon, would get control of the shotgun from him and threaten his life.

Over the 10 days of testimony in the trial, prosecutors challenged the idea that an unarmed man who never spoke to his pursuers could be considered much of a threat at all.

“What’s Mr. Arbery doing?” Linda Dunikoski, the lead prosecutor said in her closing statement. “He runs away from them. And runs away from them. And runs away from them.”

The verdict, read aloud in a packed, windowless courtroom in the Glynn County Courthouse, came at a time when Americans were already divided over the acquittal, a few days earlier, of Kyle Rittenhouse. Mr. Rittenhouse, who asserted that he was acting in self-defense, fatally shot two men and wounded another during protests and violence that broke out after a white police officer shot a Black man in Kenosha, Wis.

Before the verdict in the Georgia case, some observers worried that the racial makeup of the jury — which included 11 white people and one Black person — would skew justice in the defendants’ favor.

Superior Court Judge Timothy R. Walmsley oversaw the proceedings. When he approved the selection of the nearly all-white jury, he noted that there was an appearance of “intentional discrimination” at play, but he said that defense lawyers had given legitimate reasons unrelated to race when they moved to exclude eight Black potential jurors in the final stages of the selection process.

Before the verdict, Wanda Cooper-Jones, Mr. Arbery’s mother, said she had faith in the power of the facts that the jurors were shown. “I’m very confident that they’ll make the right decision once they see all of the evidence,” she said.

Mr. Arbery’s family said he was out jogging on the day of his death, but defense lawyers said no evidence had emerged to show that Mr. Arbery jogged that day into the defendants’ neighborhood of Satilla Shores, just outside of Brunswick, a small coastal city.

Video footage showed Mr. Arbery, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, walking into a partially built house in the neighborhood shortly before he was killed. It was a house he had walked into numerous times before. Each time, surveillance video showed him wandering around the property, but not taking or damaging anything. The owner of the house told police that items had been stolen from a boat that was sometimes stored on the property, though he was not sure the boat was there when the thefts occurred.

General concerns about property crime in Satilla Shores were widespread in early 2020, residents testified at the trial.

Travis McMichael told the police that he had seen Mr. Arbery outside the partially built house one evening 12 days before the shooting. During that encounter, Mr. McMichael said, Mr. Arbery put his hands in his waistband, as if reaching for a gun. Mr. McMichael called 911 that evening. Mr. Arbery ran away.

On the day of the shooting, a neighbor across the street saw Mr. Arbery in the house and called the police. Mr. Arbery left the house soon after, and ran down the street. Gregory McMichael spotted him and, along with his son, jumped into a truck and gave chase. Moments later, the third defendant, Mr. Bryan, began chasing Mr. Arbery as well.

At the trial, defense lawyers sought to show that the men were acting that day out of a “duty and responsibility” to detain a man whom they felt they had reasonable grounds to believe was a burglar, as Robert Rubin, a lawyer for Travis McMichael, put it. In her closing argument, Laura D. Hogue, a lawyer for Gregory McMichael, noted that Mr. Arbery had been on the property before and said he had become “a recurring nighttime intruder — and that is frightening, and unsettling.”

Travis McMichael was the only defendant to take the stand. He told the court he took his shotgun out during the pursuit because his U.S. Coast Guard training had taught him that showing a weapon could de-escalate a potentially violent situation.

He testified that he believed he had little choice but to shoot Mr. Arbery once they clashed...

More at Memeorandum.

And from Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "AHMAUD ARBERY CASE: Jury finds Travis McMichael, his father Greg McMichael and their neighbor, William “Roddie” Ryan, guilty of felony murder, among other charges."

Batya Ungar-Sargon tweets:

In a country with our ugly history, today is a good day. The tragic lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, the theft of a young man's life, cannot be undone by a just verdict. But it would have been compounded by an unjust one. We haven't overcome all our demons, but we are one step closer. https://t.co/Y8K8t2MijA

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) November 24, 2021

Sixth Victim Has Died After Deadly Car Attack at Waukesha Christmas Parade (VIDEO)

One the kids has passed away. 

How awful. Terrible. Tragic.

Scroll down, at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, "Sixth person, an 8-year-old boy, dies from parade injuries":

Jackson Sparks, an 8-year-old boy who was marching in the Waukesha Christmas Parade with his baseball team, has died from his injuries.

 

Kenosha, Portland, and the Lies

From Nancy Rommelman, at NYT, "Kenosha, Portland, and the Lies We Must Leave Behind":

.@NYTOpinion asked: Can you show us the 2020 riots in a clear light? With pleasure. And I thank them for asking https://t.co/qkQ93X0wNH

— Nancy Rommelmann (@NancyRomm) November 23, 2021

On Aug. 25, 2020, violence was exploding on the streets of Kenosha, Wis., two days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Anyone who had been paying attention since the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis on May 25 most likely had one of two reactions: “Why is this happening? It’s unjustifiable” or “Of course this is happening, it’s completely justifiable.”

The violence in Kenosha was part of a familiar pattern. In cities across America, amid the upswelling of peaceful protest against racism and police brutality there were repeated episodes of rioting, looting and vandalism. This pattern was polarizing: Each act of violence, each injured participant or bystander, further entrenched the conviction that something was very, very wrong with the other side.

I was at the time reporting from the streets of Portland, Ore., covering the nightly rampages over the course of five months: the setting of fires at police stations and offices, the smashing of storefronts, the battling with forces the Trump administration had sent to protect the federal courthouse. It was an ecstatic experience for some of those young rioters, to be free after months of Covid sequestration, to be taking it to Mr. Trump’s goons and the police, to be, by their lights, able both to save the world and to experience a nightly spurt of relief.

But every morning the streets looked worse, the ideals for which the non-peaceful protesters believed they were fighting not any closer, in fact not in evidence at all. It was often broken glass and ashes, and the riots would happen for 100 nights running and on into 2021. More than once, I heard people refer to what was going on as Groundhog Night, and I wondered, more than once, if anything would shake them from their mission, such as it was. I also wondered when the media was going to do what I felt was our job to do: Report what we saw as clearly and calmly as we could, in order to give the public the information they needed to be informed, form their own opinions and make rational choices.

Along with many Americans, I watched coverage of the Kenosha riots on television. I experienced the cognitive dissonance others did, seeing the live CNN shot of a reporter standing before a conflagration while the chyron read, “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.” This mismatch mirrored my experience with how much of the news from Portland was being reported, which often sought to present the protesters as only on the defensive, rarely the instigators, as if pointing out any bad actors ran the risk of tarring the entire protest movement.

It was bold that CNN believed its viewers capable of covering one eye, so to speak, so that the picture made sense. But it was also unsurprising, given that the station was constructing that picture, choosing the images that helped confirm viewers’ convictions (just as Fox News did, with Sean Hannity telling viewers that Portland had “been ripped apart by a group of malicious so-called anarchists” and calling the city a “war zone”; Laura Ingraham peddling the theory that 2020s California wildfires had been set “intentionally” by people “including antifa” and using the riots as an election year cudgel, warning that under President Biden the “whole country” would “look like Portland”).

I found these tactical framings reprehensible. How could anyone in good conscience use the looting and burning of people’s livelihoods as fuel for their ideological fires? It made me wonder if those who framed the destruction to fit their own means understood they were supporting violence against the working class and, often, people of color; that by their explicit or tacit encouragement, they were as good as standing on the sidelines cheering as people’s lives were burned to the ground. And if it was OK to destroy property today, what would they be able to see their way past tomorrow?

I would almost immediately have a chance to find out. On Aug. 29, Aaron Danielson, a Trump supporter and member of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, was shot dead after participating in a pro-Trump caravan on the streets of Portland. The man suspected of killing him, Michael Reinoehl, was an antifa supporter who claimed to have been acting in defense of himself and others. The story, predictably, became a Rorschach test, some on the left seeing it as evidence that, as a woman who’d never met Mr. Danielson shouted through a bullhorn: “Our community can hold its own without the police. We can take out the trash on our own.” She added that she was “not sad” that a “fascist died tonight,” deriding Mr. Danielson with an expletive. Kate Brown, the governor of Oregon, tried to tighten security by fortifying the local police with nearby sheriff’s deputies and Oregon State Police troopers. But the sheriffs of Clackamas and Washington Counties rejected the governor’s plan, taking pains to criticize Portland’s approach to crime as they did so.

After Mr. Reinoehl was killed by officers from a federally led fugitive task force on Sept. 3, there were attempts on the left to lionize him as a casualty of the fight for racial justice. The standoff, even with lives at risk, reified for me how spring-loaded people were for the other side to be at fault, how ready to refashion events into what could be seen as useful weaponry.

Kyle Rittenhouse says he went into the streets of Kenosha with the mission to protect property and people. His father and other relatives lived in Kenosha, he had worked as a lifeguard there, and had a military-style semiautomatic rifle stashed at the home of a friend’s stepfather. The night of Aug. 25, Mr. Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, carrying a first aid kit and the rifle, waded into the mayhem with hazy ideas of helping, maybe of heroics. He ended up killing two men and badly injuring another. That it went terribly wrong is inarguable.

Also inarguable is that many see Mr. Rittenhouse as symbolic of the very worst of the other side. There is no hope of consensus regarding what happened in Kenosha on Aug. 25, 2020. There are those who believe that Mr. Rittenhouse’s actions were sensible or even laudable — the city had descended into lawlessness; the teenager, however benightedly, believed that he could offer some semblance of protection...

 

Hey, I'm a Raiders Fan Too!

I just pray they'll win a game or two, sheesh.

Via Lady Lake, "Revisiting the women who wear Daisy Dukes."

ADDED: Dua Lipa Photos.

Think Gas Prices Are Too High? In This California County, a Gallon Costs $6

Shoot, I see signs for $6.00 in Santa Monica. It ain't just one county.

At WSJ, "Mono County, Calif., has the highest gasoline prices in the state with the country’s top prices as costs soar across the U.S.":

Think Gas Prices Are Too High? In This California County, a Gallon Costs $6 (@acaldwellwsj / Wall Street Journal)https://t.co/zlmvxjrDcDhttps://t.co/TnBWIi1miK

— memeorandum (@memeorandum) November 21, 2021

BRIDGEPORT, Calif.—When Miguel Lujan needs gasoline for his truck, he gets it in Carson City, Nev., located 80 miles from his hometown. It’s worth it, the store clerk and roller-derby player says, to pay one-third less than the local average of nearly $6 a gallon.

California currently has the highest gas prices in the nation, an average of $4.70 a gallon of regular unleaded, according to AAA. Gasoline prices in the U.S. were up 50% in October from the same month last year, amid rising inflation.

The most expensive gas in California is here in Mono County, a 13,000-person tourist destination on the border with Nevada that is home to the Mammoth Mountain ski resort. The average price for a gallon of regular unleaded is $5.66, according to AAA.

In Bridgeport, a town of about 550 that serves as the county seat, the two gas stations were selling regular unleaded for $5.95 and $5.99 a gallon last week. In the nearby town of Lee Vining, which serves as a gateway to Yosemite National Park, a gallon of regular cost $6.09.

Mr. Lujan said he makes the trip to Carson City about three times a week and sometimes takes the bus to save on gas. He fills canisters, routinely keeping about 100 gallons stored in his house.

He started buying gas out of state soon after moving to Mono County four years ago. “The first year I was here, I spent more on gas than anything else,” he said.

President Biden on Wednesday called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether oil-and-gas companies are illegally keeping prices high. Outside analysts were skeptical whether the FTC will find sufficient evidence to substantiate those claims.

California has long had the highest gasoline prices in America. It has the highest tax, at nearly 67 cents a gallon, and only a few aging refineries, which sometimes go offline because of maintenance or other issues, are capable of producing gasoline that meets the state’s standards meant to reduce air pollution.

Though $5.66 represents a new high, inflated gas prices are nothing new in Mono County. Local residents and analysts attribute that to a variety of factors including its distance from population centers from which deliveries including gasoline come. Sacramento, the closest major city, is about 200 miles northeast.

Even with the high prices, gas stations are able to operate primarily because of tourists who buy gas on their way through, according to Linda Smith, a clerk at the Lee Vining Chevron station.

“They come in and complain,” Ms. Smith said of customers unhappy with the station’s prices. The most common reason she gives, she said, is that it is difficult to operate a business in a remote area that relies on seasonal tourists.

“We’re a pass-through town,” she said.

Station owners in Lee Vining and Bridgeport didn’t respond to requests for comment. Owners of gas-station franchises typically set their own prices based on factors such as wholesale costs, expenses and competition.

Some people stop at the stations in Mono County simply to gawk at the prices.

Tony Malais pulled over at the Lee Vining station Tuesday afternoon on his way back to Boise, Idaho, from Southern California. He had filled his Cadillac sedan in Northridge, outside Los Angeles, for $3.79 a gallon and hoped to make it to Nevada before needing to fill up again.

He had already stopped to take a photo of the station’s price sign on his way into California. This time he bought a soda. “I had heard it was about $5 a gallon. But I was surprised to see it over $6,” he said.

Pam Mowat, a real-estate agent who also runs a vacation and rental property business in Mono County, stopped by the Chevron on Wednesday. She said sky-high prices at the few area gas stations was a fact of life that local residents had gotten used to.

“I live here, I don’t have a choice,” said Ms. Mowat, who spent about $55 for roughly nine gallons of regular. She said she was headed to Reno later in the day, and would fill her Subaru Forester there, where AAA reported an average price of $4.20 a gallon for regular.

Rose Lierly said it isn’t just gas prices that are high in Bridgeport. Costs for nearly all supplies for Big Meadow Brewing Co., a small brewery she runs with her husband, have been on the rise in recent months.

“I used to buy [cases] of bottled water, 48 for $5.25. Now I get 32 for $5.25,” Ms. Lierly said. “It’s just because we are so remote here and freight charges are going up.” ...

Ship Captain's Dead Body Kept in Freezer for Six Months

Not just bizarre but the ultimate cruelty.

At WSJ, "The Ship’s Captain Died at Sea. Six Months Later, His Body Was Still in the Freezer":

BUCHAREST—After 40 years at sea, on his last voyage before retirement, Captain Dan Sandu slipped into his cabin on the MV Vantage Wave, a cargo ship sailing away from India, feeling unwell. “Don’t worry,” he typed in what would be a final email to his wife in April. “Everything will be fine.”

Last month, the ship, by then floating off the United Arab Emirates, sent what had become a familiar plea. Captain Sandu was dead and his body was in the ship’s walk-in freezer. For six months, it had traveled thousands of miles lying near the crew’s meat and vegetables. They needed to get him back to Romania.

It was the 13th country the Vantage Wave petitioned. All had refused to receive the body.

The plight of Capt. Sandu, a 68-year-old born near the Black Sea, who decorated his home with mementos from a life on the ocean, had become a diplomatic incident. “All we wanted was to get our father home,” said his son, Andrei Sandu, also a ship captain. “How can this happen in 2021?”

Strict and uneven rules governing the world’s ports prevent the unloading of bodies suspected of being infected with the coronavirus. Though the pandemic has eased somewhat, the restrictions remain, leaving ships like the Vantage Wave to cross oceans in search of a port to offload a fallen crew member. That leaves corpses stuck for months on the world’s cargo ships, stored in freezers meant for food.

In September, a 23-year-old seaman from Ukraine died aboard a Swiss-flagged bulk carrier anchored at China’s southeastern port of Rizhao, an apparent suicide. After Chinese authorities refused to take his body, the ship traveled for nearly two months and more than 5,000 miles, to Vancouver, where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police agreed to help repatriate his body. It’s still not home.

The corpse of a Syrian cook who died off the coast of Venezuela was trapped aboard for four months. And when an Italian cargo-ship captain died off Indonesia, his body stayed in a storeroom for six weeks, for lack of cold-storage large enough, decaying in the tropical air. There currently are four seafarers’ bodies stuck aboard cargo ships, the International Maritime Organization says—as well as 36 urgent cases involving medical or humanitarian emergencies.

An Indian sailor sick with severe Covid-19 was denied entry to Singapore, Malaysia and several other Asian ports before being ferried back to India and put on a ventilator. When a Chinese officer aboard the Newmax bulk carrier collapsed, vomiting blood, Chinese port officials allowed him ashore briefly in an ambulance before returning him to the ship with some pills.

“We are spending our lives here on board to bring the goods to your house,” said the Newmax’s captain, Tymur Rudov, in a YouTube video. “What do we get in return?” he shouted into the camera. “We are not allowed to even be ill! We just have to die.”

International maritime law says shipowners must see that crews get home after assignments, but the obligation vanishes the instant a sailor dies, said Jason Chuah, a professor of maritime law at London’s City University.

And while insurance companies are meant to contribute to the cost of burying or cremating a dead seafarer, under a pact called the Maritime Labor Convention, the treaty doesn’t require them to get a body home. For the owners of ships full of cargo to be delivered on deadlines, returning to port to deposit a corpse can be onerously expensive.

That leaves shipmates, lawyers, diplomats and above all families to navigate the ever-shifting pandemic-era regulations of the international seafaring bureaucracy. The crew of one vessel declared force majeure, the “act of God” clause, which allowed them to sail more than 6,000 miles from Indonesia to Italy to return a dead captain.

“The depressing thing about this is that deceased or dead people have no rights whatsoever,” said Mr. Chuah. “It is a huge problem and reflects so poorly on our common humanity.”

The body backlog is part of a broader problem of seafarer abandonment in the era of Covid-19. More than 1,000 people were left stranded on container ships and bulk carriers this year without pay, according to estimates by the International Transport Workers’ Federation. It’s a record stemming both from pandemic-induced trade disruptions and the competitive nature of the lightly regulated global shipping industry...

 Still more.

Leah Pezzetti's Sunday Forecast

At ABC 10 News San Diego:

Bari Weiss on the Rittenhouse Not Guilty Verdict

The best. Ms. Weiss is always the best.

If you are shocked by the Rittenhouse verdict reconsider what media you consume: https://t.co/zIMveD3IXN

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) November 19, 2021

Wild Looting at Walnut Creek Nordstrom Store (VIDEO)

By this point, California's basically a post-civilization dystopia. Move now while you can still get out alive. 

At CBS KPIX 5 San Francisco, "UPDATE: ‘It Was Insane’; Dozens Of Looters Ransack Walnut Creek Nordstrom Store."

Sunday Sweeties

On Twitter.

Also, "JULIETTE LEWIS BIKINI DANCE OF THE DAY.

More, "Britney Spears Sexy."

Kyle Rittenhouse Found Not Guilty on All Charges in Kenosha Self-Defense Trial (VIDEO)

Justice was served. 

A brave young man, yet just 18 years old (and 17 at the time of the shootings) who showed courage under fire, in Kenosha and trial by a the bloodthirsty and vicious leftist mass-media.

At the Other McCain, "Kenosha: Verdict Today? Or Never?"

From Stephen Green, at Instapundit, "BREAKING: KYLE RITTENHOUSE NOT GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS."

And at WSJ, "Kyle Rittenhouse Found Not Guilty of All Charges in Killing of Two."

A Wisconsin jury found Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged in the killing of two people during unrest in Kenosha, Wis., last year, not guilty on all charges.

Mr. Rittenhouse, now 18 years old, faced charges of intentional, reckless and attempted homicide, and reckless endangerment. The case revolved around his actions the night of Aug. 25, 2020, as he patrolled the city with a small medical kit and an AR-15-style rifle amid unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

His attorneys argued he acted in self-defense and entered a not guilty plea. He has been free on $2 million in bail, mostly raised by supporters online.

The jury deliberated for three days and three hours, after a trial that took a little over two weeks.

Mr. Rittenhouse cried, breathing quickly and shaking while he clutched at his chest as the verdict was read. The judge thanked the jury and said they had been wonderful to work with. The judge said the charges were dismissed with prejudice and that he had been released from his bond.

The most dramatic moments of the trial came as Mr. Rittenhouse testified in his own defense, at one point breaking down on the stand. He later said that he feared for his life as Joseph Rosenbaum, the first person he shot and killed, ran toward him and had his hand on the barrel of Mr. Rittenhouse’s rifle as Mr. Rittenhouse began firing.

“If I would have let Mr. Rosenbaum take my firearm from me, he would have used it and killed me with it and probably killed more people,” Mr. Rittenhouse testified during cross examination by prosecutors.

Lawyers who weren’t involved in the case said the testimony probably helped his case.

The prosecution portrayed Mr. Rittenhouse as an outsider who lied about his status as an EMT and was ill-prepared to render aid or handle a firearm in the chaotic situation. But even some of its own witnesses bolstered defense arguments that he acted in self-defense when he shot and killed Mr. Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and injured Gaige Grosskreutz, now 27.

Richie McGinniss, a videographer for the online publication the Daily Caller who was called by the prosecution, testified that Mr. Rosenbaum was chasing Mr. Rittenhouse through a parking lot and appeared to lunge for Mr. Rittenhouse’s gun in the moments leading up to the shooting.

Mr. Grosskreutz said in his testimony that he was pointing a handgun toward Mr. Rittenhouse when the then-17-year-old fired at him, causing severe damage to Mr. Grosskreutz’s arm.

The prosecution has always faced an uphill battle in the case. Under Wisconsin law, the defense must only cite some evidence for self-defense, putting the burden of proof on prosecutors to negate that claim beyond a reasonable doubt...

Build Back Brandon

 At AoSHQ, "#BuildBackBrandon Bill Is Unpopular in Competitive Swing Districts -- and That's Before the Public Realizes It's a Huge Billion Dollar Boondoggle In Tax Breaks for the Left's Plutocrat Donor Base."

House Democrats Pass Build Back Better (VIDEO)

Straight party line vote, just like Obamacare. Most of the bill's big spending is temporary, thus a Republican Congress will surely refuse to reauthorize the law's gargantuan social policy giveaways --- and that's if it passes the Senate, which is no sure thing. Not a single Democrat can defect. 

At USA Today, "House passes Biden’s Build Back Better bill, sending measure with free preschool, climate initiatives to the Senate."

And the New York Times, "Kevin McCarthy Speaks for More Than Eight Hours to Delay a House Vote."

More here, "House Narrowly Passes Biden’s Social Safety Net and Climate Bill":

WASHINGTON — The House on Friday narrowly passed the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, approving $2 trillion in spending over the next decade to battle climate change, expand health care and reweave the nation’s social safety net, over the unanimous opposition of Republicans. The bill’s passage, 220 to 213, came after weeks of cajoling, arm-twisting and legislative legerdemain by Democrats. It was capped off by an exhausting, circuitous and record-breaking speech of more than eight hours by the House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, that pushed a planned Thursday vote past midnight, then delayed it to Friday morning — but did nothing to dent Democratic unity.

Groggy lawmakers reassembled at 8 a.m., three hours after Mr. McCarthy finally abandoned the floor, to begin the final series of votes to send one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in half a century to the Senate.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened the final push with what she called “a courtesy to” her colleagues: “I will be brief.” She then put the House’s actions in lofty terms.

“Under this dome, for centuries, members of Congress have stood exactly where we stand to pass legislation of extraordinary consequence in our nation’s history and for our nation’s future,” she said, adding, the act “will be the pillar of health and financial security in America.

The bill still has a long and difficult road ahead. Democratic leaders must coax it through the 50-50 Senate and navigate a tortuous budget process that is almost certain to reshape the measure and force it back to the House — if it passes at all.

But even pared back from the $3.5 trillion plan that Mr. Biden originally sought, the legislation could prove as transformative as any since the Great Society and War on Poverty in the 1960s, especially for young families and older Americans. The Congressional Budget Office published an official cost estimate on Thursday afternoon that found the package would increase the federal budget deficit by $160 billion over 10 years.

The assessment indicated that the package overall would cost slightly more than Mr. Biden’s latest proposal — $2.1 trillion rather than $1.85 trillion.

It offers universal prekindergarten, generous subsidies for child care that extend well into the middle class, expanded financial aid for college, hundreds of billions of dollars in housing support, home and community care for older Americans, a new hearing benefit for Medicare and price controls for prescription drugs.

More than half a trillion dollars would go toward shifting the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels to renewable energy and electric cars, the largest investment ever to slow the warming of the planet. The package would largely be paid for with tax increases on high earners and corporations, estimated to bring in nearly $1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Savings in government spending on prescription drugs were projected to bring in another $260 billion, though a scaled-back measure to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for some medications was estimated to save only $79 billion, far less than the Democrats’ original $456 billion proposal would have.

“This bill will be transformational, and it will be measured in the deeper sense of hope that Americans will have when they see their economy working for them instead of holding them back,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House majority leader, said Thursday during what was supposed to the closing debate.

The fact that the bill could slightly add to the federal deficit did not dissuade House Democrats from proceeding to vote for it, in part because the analysis boiled down to a dispute over a single line item: how much the I.R.S. would collect by cracking down on people and companies that dodge large tax bills.

The budget office predicted that beefing up the I.R.S. with an additional $80 billion of funding would bring in just $127 billion over 10 years on net. That is far less than the $400 billion the White House estimates it would bring in over a decade, both through enforcement actions and by essentially scaring tax cheats into paying what they owe.

The legislation is moving through Congress under special rules known as reconciliation that shield it from a filibuster, allowing Democrats to push it through over unified Republican opposition in the Senate...

 

Senator Manchin Could Singlehandedly Kill Build Back Better

The House is expected to vote tonight, but chances are slim in the upper chamber.

At CNN, "Democrats gear up to pass social safety net bill Thursday night but major obstacles await in the Senate."

Tiya Miles, All That She Carried

Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.

Andy Ngo, Unmasked

At Amazon, Andy Ngo, Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. 

Daniel de Vise, King of the Blues

At Amazon, Daniel de Vise, King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King.

Democrats Should Go Into Shock.

I'd be shocked if Republicans don't take at least 50 seats next November. I expect this year will match or even exceed the victory totals from 2014, when the G.O.P. picked up 63 seats in the House.

Here's Thomas Edsall, at the New York Times, "Democrats Shouldn’t Panic. They Should Go Into Shock":

The rise of inflation, supply chain shortages, a surge in illegal border crossings, the persistence of Covid, mayhem in Afghanistan and the uproar over “critical race theory” — all of these developments, individually and collectively, have taken their toll on President Biden and Democratic candidates, so much so that Democrats are now the underdogs going into 2022 and possibly 2024.

Gary Langer, director of polling at ABC News, put it this way in an essay published on the network’s website:

As things stand, if the midterm elections were today, 51 percent of registered voters say they’d support the Republican candidate in their congressional district, 41 percent say the Democrat. That’s the biggest lead for Republicans in the 110 ABC/Post polls that have asked this question since November 1981.

These and other trends have provoked a deepening pessimism about Democratic prospects in 2022 and anxiety about the 2024 presidential election.

Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, holds similar views, but suggests that the flood tide of political trouble may be beyond Democratic control:

Biden and the Democrats have had almost all bad news: the pandemic is still going; the economy has not picked up in terms of perceptions of the expected increases in employment and economic growth not on fire; perceptions of what happened in Afghanistan; what has happened on the southern border; high crime rates, all amplified in news reports. It is all perception, and the latest is the increase in inflation and gas prices that people see/feel. The critical race theory controversy and perceptions of Democrats being too woke and extreme. The bad news is overwhelming.

Bill McInturff, a founding partner of Public Opinion Strategies, provided me with data from the October WSJ/NBC poll asking voters which party can better manage a wide range of issues. On three key issues — controlling inflation (45R-21D), dealing with crime (43R-21D) and dealing with the economy (45R-27D) — the Republican advantage was the highest in surveys dating back to the 1990s.

“Washington Democrats are spending months fighting over legislation,” McInturff wrote by email,

but, during this time, voters tell us prices are soaring, the cost of living is tied for the top issue in the country, and there is a sharp increase in economic pessimism. It is these economic factors that are driving negative impressions about the direction of the country to unusually high levels, and this is hurting Democrats everywhere. No administration is going to thrive in that economic environment.

In his analysis of the Nov. 6-10 Washington Post/ABC News Poll, Langer made the case that

While a year is a lifetime in politics, the Democratic Party’s difficulties are deep; they include soaring economic discontent, a president who’s fallen 12 percentage points underwater in job approval and a broad sense that the party is out of touch with the concerns of most Americans — 62 percent say so.

The numbers are even worse for Democrats in the eight states expected to have the closest Senate elections, according to Langer — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Not only is Biden’s overall job approval rating in those states 33 percent, 10 points lower than it is in the rest of the country, but registered voters in those eight states say they are more likely to vote for Republican House candidates than for Democrats by 23 points (at 58 percent to 35 percent).

On Nov. 3, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball updated the ratings for three incumbent Democratic senators — Mark Kelly of Arizona, Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada — from “lean Democratic” to “tossup.”

An examination of Gallup survey results on the question “As of today, do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?” reflects the damage suffered by the Democrats. From January through August, Democrats held a substantial 7.9 point advantage (48.2 percent to 41.3 percent). In September, however, Gallup reported a 2-point (47-45) Republican edge that grew to a 5-point (47-42) edge by October.

In terms of election outcomes, Republican are once again capitalizing on their domination of the congressional redistricting process to disenfranchise Democratic voters despite strong public support for reforms designed to eliminate or constrain partisan gerrymandering. On Monday, The Times reported that the Republican Party “has added enough safe House districts to capture control of the chamber based on its redistricting edge alone.” The current partisan split in the House is 221 Democratic seats and 213 Republican seats, with one vacancy.

There is perhaps one potential political opportunity for Democrats — should the Supreme Court overturn or undermine Roe v. Wade, mobilizing supporters of reproductive rights across the country.

In the meantime, uneasiness prevails. Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard, noted in an email that

Biden had two drops in approval ratings, one from June to August of about 6 points, and another from September to October of another 6 points. The first was a response to Afghanistan. The second was a response to Covid and weak employment growth over the summer.

Passing the infrastructure bill should help “with the sense that the administration wasn’t doing enough for the economy,” Ansolabehere continued, but “the hit from Afghanistan is going to be harder to reverse, as it was a judgment about the administration’s handling of foreign affairs.”

Micah English, a graduate student in political science at Yale who studies race, class and gender dynamics, argued in an email that Democratic leaders have, at least until now, mismanaged the task of effectively communicating their agenda and goals.

“The Democratic Party has a messaging problem that they don’t seem to have any plans to rectify,” she wrote:

The Republicans message right now is essentially “Democrats and Biden are only concerned about teaching your children critical race theory instead of focusing on the economy!” The Democrats have no unified countermessage, and until they do, they are likely to continue to suffer major losses in the midterms and beyond.

This failure, English continued, has resulted in an inability to capitalize on what should have been good news:

The Democrats have proposed legislation that contains incredibly popular policies, but if they continue to fail to communicate the benefits of this legislation to the wider public, it won’t do them any good in the midterms. Additionally, as the 2020 election demonstrated, the Democrats cannot continue to rely on the prospect of changing demographics to deliver them electoral victories.

One theme that appeared repeatedly in the comments I received in response to my questions is that even as Biden has succeeded in winning passage of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, he has struggled to maintain an aura of mastery.

Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, argued in an email that

what a lot of swing voters expected from Biden was competent leadership during a time of crisis. And many perhaps expected that a return to normal leadership would immediately solve the unprecedented problems facing the country. Of course, that was never a realistic expectation.

The crucial factors underlying Biden’s declining favorability rating, Schaffner continued, are “several things calling into question Biden’s effectiveness — the Afghanistan withdrawal, the continued impact of Covid, the struggling economy and the difficult time Democrats have had in passing their major legislative initiatives.”

I asked a range of political scientists for their projections on how the 2022 elections for control of the House are likely to turn out. Their views were preponderantly negative for Democratic prospects.

Matt Grossmann of Michigan State wrote: “Based on simple midterm loss averages, the Democrats are expected to lose 4 points of vote share and be down to ~45 percent of seats on ~48 percent of votes in 2022.” Those numbers translate into roughly a 24-seat loss, reducing Democrats to 197 seats. “There is not much under Democrats’ control that is likely to make a big difference in the extent of their losses,” Grossmann added. “They can try to avoid retirements and primary challenges in swing districts and avoid salient unpopular policies.”

Robert M. Stein of Rice University is even less optimistic:

In South Texas, Florida and parts of Arizona immigration policy is hurting Democrats with traditional-base voters. This is especially true with Hispanics in Texas border counties, where Trump did well in 2020 and Abbott (incumbent Republican governor) is making significant gains by appealing to the concerns of Hispanics over jobs and immigration.

Stein adds:

My guess is that Republicans are poised to take the House back in 2022 with gains above the average for midterm elections. Since 1946, the average seat gain for the party not in the White House is 27 seats. The best the Democrats can do is hold at the average, but given the Republican’s advantage with redistricting, my guess is that the Republicans gain 40+ seats.

Martin Wattenberg of the University of California-Irvine wrote that “it would take a major event like 9/11 to keep the Democrats from losing the House.” He was more cautious about control of the Senate, which “really depends on the quality of the candidates. Republicans have had the misfortune of nominating candidates like Christine (“I am not a witch”) O’Donnell who have lost eminently winnable races due to their own foibles. It remains to be seen if they will nominate such candidates in 2022.”

Wattenberg cited data from the General Social Survey showing a sharp rise in the percentage of Democrats describing themselves as liberal or slightly liberal, up from 47 percent in 2016 to 62 percent this year: “The left-wing movement of the Democrats is probably going to hurt with the 2022 electorate that will likely be skewed toward older, more conservative voters.”

Still more.

Wednesday Women

 On Twitter.

More, "Gal Gadot Deleted Scene From 'Red Notice'."

Also, nice and big lady here.

And here:

Michael Knox Beran, WASPS

At Amazon, Michael Knox Beran, WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.

Out in Paper: Volker Ullrich, Hitler (Part 2)

 At Amazon, Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945.

Abe Greenwald: "Review of 'Woke Racism' by John McWhorter"

At Commentary, "Among the Elect":

If the United States manages to put down the woke revolution, it will be because a critical mass of liberals chooses to reject it. Conservatives, opposed to wokeness from the start, can make arguments and stand up for their principles individually. But they can’t stop the liberal-to-woke conversion process that turns mildly left-of-center Americans into cosplay Black Panthers overnight. The liberals themselves are the gatekeepers of their own movement and its institutions. Given that these institutions—news media, social media, entertainment, academia, and the current majority party in Washington—shape so many aspects of American life, it’s mostly up to liberals to halt and reverse the transformation of the country.

Among the dozen or so prominent liberals who have answered this call, John McWhorter has taken on an invaluable role. McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, is less consumed with particular woke-inspired outrages than with getting at the substance of wokeness itself and the threat it poses to his fellow black Americans. On those matters, his new book, Woke Racism, makes several major contributions.

First, it’s not pitched at the woke. McWhorter is done with them. “Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy by missing the futility of ‘dialogue’ with them,” he writes. No one can be argued out of wokeness and, just as crucially, McWhorter wants to get to liberals—black and white—before they’re irretrievably lost to the impenetrable mob: “I want to reach those on the fence, guilted into attention by these ideologues’ passion and rhetoric but unable to disregard their true inner compass.”

McWhorter also argues that wokeness is insulting to and catastrophic for black Americans. By the lights of the woke, he says, “white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special.”

Despite the book’s title, McWhorter dispenses with the term woke altogether. Borrowing, with acknowledgment, from the conservative writer Joseph Bottum, he deems the woke “the Elect.” The term evokes the social-justice warrior’s smugness in his sense of having come to higher moral knowledge. The Elect also has a helpfully medieval resonance to it: “This is apt, in that the view they think of as, indeed, sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are.” The Elect are, to some degree, inquisitors.

From there, McWhorter makes his most convincing argument—that Electism is not a political persuasion at all but a religion. “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion,” he writes. “I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.”

Understanding Electism as a real, not metaphorical, religion, requires some explication. McWhorter details the new faith’s tenets and motivations at length. Like any religion, Electism involves “certain suspensions of disbelief.” This means, for example, one is not to question the Elect’s boundless outrage over the police killing of George Floyd compared with its more muted response to thousands of black-on-black murders committed the same year. “Does that mean ‘It’s not as bad if we do it to ourselves?’” McWhorter asks. Moreover, “to suspend disbelief,” he writes, “is a kind of submission.” And the Elect evince this submission when they refuse to question a host of policies—from an extreme version of affirmative action to defunding police—that show no benefit for the black Americans the Elect want to help.

The Elect also have a very influential clergy. Figures such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Ta-Nehisi Coates make up a priestly class, and their writings are scripture...

Continue reading.

And buy the book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

America Is Built on a Great Culture. Progressives Want to Abandon It

It's Joel Kotkin, at Newsweek.

Joseph Bruchac, Code Talker

At Amazon, Joseph Bruchac, Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two.

The Problem of Loudoun County Schools

 At the New York Times, "How a School District Got Caught in Virginia’s Political Maelstrom":

LEESBURG, Va. — Long before the father was tackled by sheriff’s deputies at the school board meeting, before there was shouting to reopen classrooms and before “parents matter” became the central slogan of the most closely watched campaign in the post-Trump era, Loudoun County was just another American suburbia taking a hard look at its schools.

The county, at the edge of the Virginia sprawl outside Washington, had grown much more diverse. White students were no longer in the majority, and educators were trying to be more aware of how racism could affect their students’ education.

The district hired a consulting firm to help train teachers about bias. It tried to hire more teachers of color. And a high school changed its mascot from the Raiders, named for a Confederate battalion, to the Captains.

But there were rumblings of resistance.

Vocal parents protested the district’s antiracism efforts as Marxism.

Some teachers disliked the trainings, which they found ham-handed and over the top.

And evangelical Christians objected to a proposal to give transgender students access to the restrooms of their choice — complaints that were magnified when a male student wearing a skirt was arrested in an assault in a girl’s bathroom.

Within a year, Loudoun County had become the epicenter of conservative outrage over education. Several hundred parents, in a district of 81,000 students, managed to pummel their school board and become a cause célèbre for opposing the district’s handling of race and gender issues.

Along the way, they got plenty of help from Republican operatives, who raised money and skillfully decried some of the district’s more aggressive efforts, even buying an ad during an N.F.L. game.

The media also jumped in, feeding the frenzy. The story rebounded from one outlet to another, with conservative media leading the way, from The New York Post to The Daily Wire to Fox News, which aired 78 segments on the racial issues at Loudoun schools from March to June this year, according to Media Matters, a left-leaning group that scrutinizes media coverage.

By November, these skirmishes had been transformed into a potent political movement — parents’ rights — that engulfed the state’s schools and the governor’s race. The Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, successfully tapped into the fury, adopting the slogan “parents matter.”

“Glenn became a vessel for their anger,” said Jeff Roe, the founder of Axiom Strategies, Mr. Youngkin’s campaign consultant.

The campaign identified early on, he said, that education was a key issue that could make inroads in Democratic strongholds. Mr. Youngkin’s opponent, the former governor Terry McAuliffe, won Loudoun County, but by a far narrower margin than President Joe Biden had won last year.

Ian Prior, a Republican political operative who lives in the county and has been at the center of the fight, called education the “one unifying issue out there that kind of gets everybody.”

Now, Republicans and Democrats are dissecting how these educational issues can be used in the midterm elections next year.

Loudoun may well be their case study. 

A District, Struggling With Change

In the not-too-distant past, Loudoun County was dominated by farmers and Republicans. In recent years it has experienced a wave of residential growth to 420,000 people, becoming more suburban, increasingly diverse and, at the same time, more liberal.

The student body has changed, too. Twenty five years ago, 84 percent of the students were white; today, 43 percent are, owing partly to an influx of immigrants working in technology jobs. Currently, 7.2 percent of students are Black.

The shift hasn’t been easy. In 2019, for example, an elementary school asked students, including a Black student, to emulate runaway slaves during a game mimicking the Underground Railroad, drawing criticism from the local NAACP.

Parents also said they encountered racist treatment, both subtle and overt. Zerell Johnson-Welch, who is Black and Latina, moved to the district in 2008 with her husband and three children.

One day, her daughter came home upset, she said. “She was in an advanced math class,” Ms. Johnson-Welch said. “A kid yelled out, ‘Why are you in this class?’” — using a racial epithet to emphasize that she did not belong.

Loudoun County commissioned a study by a consulting firm, the Equity Collaborative, which bore out such stories, concluding that Black, Hispanic and Muslim students had been the focus of racial slurs and that Black students were disciplined more frequently than others.

Loudoun set out on a plan. In addition to changing the high school mascot, the school system released a video apologizing to Black residents for past racial discrimination. The schools devised a protocol for dealing with racial slurs and other hate speech. And teachers underwent training in cultural sensitivity...

 

Nice Jeep

On Twitter.

Also, beautiful babe from Playboy.

And Billie Eilish.

The Marlboro Marine

Have a good Veterans Day everybody.

The video's from the Los Angeles Times:

How Likely Is a Democratic Comeback Next Year?

Not likely. A snowball's chance? 

I mean, yesterday's inflation numbers are bad enough, but considering Democrats haven't learned a thing from the Virginia results, I'd say their chance are about nil.

It's Kyle Kondik, from Sabato’s Crystal Ball, at the New York Times:

The election results from last week reconfirmed a basic reality about American politics: For either party, holding the White House comes with significant power, but in off-year elections, it is often a burden.

Democrats hoped that this year would be an exception. By trying to focus the electorate on Donald Trump, they sought to rouse the Democratic base. This approach would also avoid making elections a referendum on President Biden and his approval ratings, which have sagged after months of struggles with the Afghanistan exit, Covid, gas prices, inflation and congressional Democrats.

In other words, Democrats hoped that the usual rules of political gravity would not apply. But we should not be surprised that the familiar force endured.

Republicans performed well in races across the country — most notably in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, states that Mr. Biden won by double digits in 2020. Vote counts are still being finalized, but it appears they shifted almost identically toward the Republicans compared with 2017, the last time those governorships were on the ballot — margins of about 11 points. Virginia provides a striking example of how often the presidential party does poorly — the White House party candidate has now lost the gubernatorial race in 11 of the past 12 elections.

Unfortunately for Democrats, political gravity is also likely to act against them in 2022 — and

they face real limits on what they can do about it.

There were signs of Democratic decline in all sorts of different places. The suburban-exurban Loudoun County in Northern Virginia is an example. Terry McAuliffe carried it, but his Republican rival in the governor’s race, Glenn Youngkin, campaigned aggressively there on education issues and basically cut the margin compared with 2017 in half. Places like Loudoun are where Democrats made advancements in the Trump years. To have any hope of holding the House next year, the party will have to perform well in such areas.

Turnout in terms of raw votes cast compared with the 2017 gubernatorial race was up all over Virginia, but some of the places where turnout growth was smallest included Democratic urban areas and college towns.

But Republicans had no such trouble: Their turnout was excellent. In New Jersey, the county that saw the biggest growth in total votes compared with 2017 was Ocean, an exurb on the Jersey Shore, which Gov. Phil Murphy’s Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, won by over 35 points.

Democrats have also struggled in rural areas, and the results last week suggest that they have not hit bottom there yet. In the Ninth Congressional District in rural southwestern Virginia, Mr. Youngkin performed even better than Mr. Trump did in 2020. This combination — even deeper losses in rural areas paired with fallout in more populous areas — would be catastrophic for Democrats, particularly in the competitive Midwest, where Mr. Biden in 2020 helped arrest Democratic decline in many white, rural areas but where it is not hard to imagine Democratic performance continuing to slide.

Like this year, the fundamentals for the 2022 midterms are not in the Democrats’ favor. Midterms often act as an agent of change in the House. The president’s party has lost ground in the House in 37 of the 40 midterms since the Civil War, with an average seat loss of 33 (since World War II, the average is a smaller, though still substantial, 27). Since 1900, the House has flipped party control 11 times, and nine of those changes have come in midterm election years, including the last five (1954, 1994, 2006, 2010 and 2018). Given that Republicans need to pick up only five seats next year, they are very well positioned to win the chamber.

It is not entirely unheard-of for the presidential party to net House seats in the midterms. It happened in 1998 and 2002, though those come with significant caveats. In ’98, President Bill Clinton had strong approval in spite of (or perhaps aided by) his impeachment battle with Republicans and presided over a strong economy; Democrats had also had lost a lot of ground in the 1994 midterm (and made only a dent in that new Republican majority in 1996). They gained a modest four seats.

In 2002, Republicans were defending a slim majority, but they benefited from President George W. Bush’s sky-high approval rating following the Sept. 11 attacks and decennial reapportionment and redistricting, which contributed to their eight-seat net gain.

So against this political gravity, is there anything Democrats can do?

Nice Belly Button

On Twitter.

Lottie Lush:

Nicaragua Descends Into Police State (VIDEO)

Daniel Ortega is a communist totalitarian with a long history. I call for regime change. Topple the motherfucker.

At the New York Times, "Nicaragua Descends Into Autocratic Rule as Ortega Crushes Dissent":

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — Daniel Ortega became a hero in Nicaragua for helping overthrow a notorious dictator. Now, 40 years later, he has become the kind of authoritarian leader he once fought against.

After methodically choking off competition and dissent, Mr. Ortega has all but ensured his victory in presidential elections on Sunday, representing a turn toward an openly dictatorial model that could set an example for other leaders across Latin America.

He detained the credible challengers who planned to run against him, shut down opposition parties, banned large campaign events and closed voting stations en masse. He even jailed some of the elderly Sandinistas who fought with him to depose the dictator, Anastasio Somoza.

“This isn’t an election, this is a farce,” said Berta Valle, the wife of one of the jailed opposition leaders. “No one will elect anyone, because the only candidate is Daniel Ortega.”

Mr. Ortega’s path to a fourth consecutive term in office and near-total control of Nicaragua has ushered in a new era of repression and terror, analysts said. His claim to victory would deliver another blow to President Biden’s agenda in the region, where his administration has failed to slow an anti-democratic slide and a mass exodus of desperate people toward the United States.

A record number of Nicaraguans have been intercepted crossing the Southwest border of the United States this year since Mr. Ortega began crushing his opposition. And more than 80,000 Nicaraguans are living as refugees in neighboring Costa Rica.

“This is a turning point toward authoritarianism in the region,” said José Miguel Vivanco, head of the Americas region for Human Rights Watch, who called Mr. Ortega’s crackdown “a slow-motion horror movie.”

“He is not even trying to preserve some sort of facade of democratic rule,” Mr. Vivanco said of the Nicaraguan leader. “He is in a flagrant, open manner, just deciding to treat the election as a performance.”

The commission that monitors elections has been entrusted to Ortega loyalists, and there have been no public debates among the contest’s five remaining candidates, all of whom are little-known members of parties aligned with his Sandinista government.

The electoral authority said early on Monday that, with nearly half of the votes counted, Mr. Ortega had won about three quarters of them. It did not give results for congressional elections.

Once polls opened early on Sunday morning, some polling stations had lines as Nicaraguans turned out to cast their ballots. But as the day progressed, many of the stations were largely empty. The streets of the capital, Managua, were also quiet, with little to show that a significant election was underway.

The night before, at least four people from opposition organizations were arrested and their houses raided by the police.

“These elections are, thank God, a sign, a commitment by the vast majority of Nicaraguans to vote for peace,” Mr. Ortega said in a national television broadcast on Sunday. “We are burying war and giving life to peace.”

Mr. Ortega first came to power after helping lead the revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. More than a decade later, he was ousted by Nicaraguan voters, in what was considered the nation’s first democratic election.

That lesson about the risks of democratic rule appears to have shaped the rest of Mr. Ortega’s political life. He took office again in 2007, after getting a rival party to agree to a legal change that allowed a candidate to win an election with just 35 percent of the vote. He then spent years undermining the institutions holding together the country’s fragile democracy.

He made it clear that he would not tolerate dissent in 2018, when he sent the police to violently smother protests against the government, leading to hundreds of deaths and accusations by human rights groups of crimes against humanity.

But the sudden sweep of arrests preceding the elections, which sent seven political candidates and more than 150 others to jail, transformed the country into what many activists described as a police state, where even mild expressions of dissent are muted by fear.

A sportswriter was recently imprisoned for a series of posts critical of the government on Twitter and Facebook, under a new law that mandates up to five years in jail for anyone who says anything that “endangers economic stability” or “public order.”

After the detentions began, the United States placed new sanctions on Nicaraguan officials and the Organization of American States condemned the government...

 

Beautiful Katie Pavlich for Halloween

She's a knockout. 

And smarter than a stack of encyclopedias. 

On Twitter:

Shaken, not stirred #007 🍸🖤https://t.co/pfbAwPHteN pic.twitter.com/0WLMFI4VEs

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) October 31, 2021

"Biden's Crappy Polling Softens, Becomes Loose: Only 42% Agree That #PoopyPantsJoe Is 'Mentally Sharp'"

As always, Ace is hilarious. 

More at AoSHQ. 

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News

This woman is hot!

At Amazon, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.

Also, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class."

More here, "New Book: How Elite University Grads RUINED Media, Working Class Concerns IGNORED By Press."

And watch, with Megyn Kelly: 

Houston vs. Atlanta Is Rob Manfred's Nightmare World Series

I've been watching a lot of sports, but I've had no time to write about them. 

John Gruden, my favorite guy, resigns. Dodgers win seven elimination games in a row, but can't hold on against the relentless Braves.

College football: U.S.C.'s program has been nuked, their head coach fired. (And besides that, there's more scandals on that campus than the Vatican.)

Work's been busy and thus posting light. I'll pick up the pace after I get my term papers graded. That's the semester hump. After that it's pretty much downhill.

Anyway, don't miss this piece at W.S.J. Very good, "The MLB commissioner yanked the All-Star Game out of Atlanta and punished the Astros for their cheating scandal. Fans are not expected to be forgiving in either city":

HOUSTON—Sometime in the next week or so, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred will hand off the World Series championship trophy in one of the two cities in America in which he might be most despised.

One is Houston, the site of Tuesday night’s Game 1, where Manfred is seen as a villain over his handling of the sign-stealing scandal that tarnished the Astros’ title in 2017 and stained their players’ legacies. Many fans here believe Manfred scapegoated the Astros for committing a crime that was widespread at the time and unfairly transformed them into the most hated franchise in professional sports.

The other is Atlanta, where Manfred sparked a political firestorm by pulling the All-Star Game in response to Georgia’s new voting law. The move, which the Braves publicly opposed, enraged some state officials and alienated a portion of fans, who are now celebrating even more important games coming to town.

However it shakes out, it is a hellish proposition for Manfred. Sports commissioners frequently hear boos. (Just ask Roger Goodell how much he enjoys showing his face in New England.) But the vitriol Manfred will face at the end of this World Series will be particularly vicious, and coming from all directions—whatever he does now.

Manfred is pinned between liberal and conservative American politics in part because MLB began to respond to calls to act on social issues last year. It left the commissioner simultaneously under pressure to take those stances to their logical conclusion, at the same time he is still facing resentment from people aggrieved at the positions.

If the series ends in Atlanta, Manfred will deliver baseball’s highest honor at the ballpark that he deprived of hosting the All-Star Game. At the time, Manfred said relocating the game was “the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport.” The Braves responded by saying they were “deeply disappointed” and noted that moving the game was “neither our decision, nor our recommendation.”

“Unfortunately, businesses, employees and fans in Georgia are the victims of this decision,” the Braves said.

To Manfred, relocating the All-Star Game had nothing to do with the Braves or the people of Georgia but was rather a move to stave off further controversy, people familiar with the matter said. MLB worried about the possibility of players boycotting the game—or having to answer questions about their status for months leading up to it. Ultimately, MLB knew that no matter what it did with the All-Star Game, people would be angry. Manfred determined moving it to Denver was the better option.

Certainly, some people in Georgia who are against the voting law supported Manfred. Republican politicians in the state, however, are viewing the Braves advancing to the World Series and as some sort of karmic payback. “It’s really ridiculous to inject politics into sports and then to baseball, but that’s what they did,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said on “Fox & Friends” on Monday.

Astros fans feel like victims, too, and blame Manfred for undermining what should have been the proudest moment in the history of the franchise. In January 2020, Manfred suspended then-manager A.J. Hinch and then-general manager Jeff Luhnow for their involvement in the Astros’ scheme. (They were both fired that same day, though Hinch has since resurfaced as the manager for the Detroit Tigers.) Manfred also docked Houston’s first- and second-round picks in the 2020 and 2021 drafts and fined the team $5 million.

Whether they should be mad at Manfred is another story. In spite of everything, no players were punished for their roles in the scheme. In the two seasons since the revelation of the scandal, the Astros advanced to the American League Championship Series and now the World Series. They’re doing just fine.

But to some in Houston, the Astros were singled out for something other teams were already doing...

 

G.O.P. Gains in Governor's Race

 From Monmouth University, "Enthusiasm gap and shift in voter priorities boost Youngkin."

Biden Has Lost Support Across All Groups of Americans — But Especially Independents and Hispanics

 At FiveThirtyEight, "Over his first nine months in office, President Biden has lost support among Americans of all stripes — men and women, Black voters and white voters, Zoomers and Baby Boomers."

Maria Bartiromo and James Freeman, The Cost

At Amazon, Maria Bartiromo and James Freeman, The Cost: Trump, China, and American Revival.

Sunday Women

Anne Hathway on Sunday is, er, risque.

Big Sophie Howard.

And rad chick:

Allen Guelzo, Robert E. Lee

At Amazon, Allen Guelzo, Robert E. Lee: A Life.

As Afghanistan Sinks Into Destitution, Some Sell Children to Survive

At WSJ, "U.N. warns that 95% of Afghans aren’t getting enough to eat as winter approaches":

HERAT, Afghanistan—Desperate to feed her family, Saleha, a housecleaner here in western Afghanistan, has incurred such an insurmountable debt that the only way she sees out is to hand over her 3-year-old daughter, Najiba, to the man who lent her the money.

The debt is $550.

Saleha, a 40-year-old mother of six who goes by one name, earns 70 cents a day cleaning homes in a wealthier neighborhood of Herat. Her much older husband doesn’t have any work.

Such is the starkness of deepening poverty in Afghanistan, a humanitarian crisis that is worsening fast after the Taliban seized power on Aug. 15, prompting the U.S. to freeze $9 billion in Afghan central-bank assets and causing a halt in most foreign aid.

Already, 95% of Afghans aren’t getting enough to eat, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program, which has warned that “people are being pushed to the brink of survival.” Almost the entire Afghan population of 40 million people could fall below the poverty line in coming months, according to the U.N.

Behind these statistics lie countless personal tragedies of families like Saleha’s. She and her husband used to work on a farm in the western province of Badghis, but two years ago lost that income because of fighting in the area and drought. So they borrowed money just to get food. Hoping to find employment, they ended up moving to a giant encampment of people displaced from other provinces, known as Shahrak Sabz, in Herat.

With the financial system and trade paralyzed after the Taliban takeover, prices for basic food items like flour and oil have doubled since mid-August. The lender offered early this month to write off the debt if she hands over her little girl.

They have three months to provide the money. Otherwise, Najiba will be doing household work in the lender’s home and be married off to one of his three sons when she reaches puberty. They are not sure which one. The oldest is now 6.

“If life continues to be this awful, I will kill my children and myself,” said Saleha, speaking in her tiny two-room home. “I don’t even know what we will eat tonight.”

“I will try to find money to save my daughter’s life,” added her husband, Abdul Wahab.

The lender, Khalid Ahmad, confirmed he had made the offer to the couple.

“I also don’t have money. They haven’t paid me back,” said Mr. Ahmad, reached by phone in Badghis. “So there is no option but taking the daughter.”

They have three months to provide the money. Otherwise, Najiba will be doing household work in the lender’s home and be married off to one of his three sons when she reaches puberty. They are not sure which one. The oldest is now 6.

“If life continues to be this awful, I will kill my children and myself,” said Saleha, speaking in her tiny two-room home. “I don’t even know what we will eat tonight.”

“I will try to find money to save my daughter’s life,” added her husband, Abdul Wahab.

The lender, Khalid Ahmad, confirmed he had made the offer to the couple.

“I also don’t have money. They haven’t paid me back,” said Mr. Ahmad, reached by phone in Badghis. “So there is no option but taking the daughter.”

Following the Taliban takeover, neighboring Pakistan and Iran, where many men from this community used to work as laborers, closed their borders, bracing for a flood of refugees. All that is left as work is collecting plastic bottles and other trash to sell for recycling. Other families in the area have had to surrender children to repay debts, residents say.

Growing destitution could undermine the Taliban’s so-far solid hold on power and serve as a recruiting tool for the local branch of Islamic State, their only significant rival. A Taliban official in the west of the country said that Afghans would have to get used to a meager existence.

“We suffered for 20 years fighting jihad, we lost members of our families, we didn’t have proper food, and in the end, we were rewarded with this government. If people have to struggle for a few months, so what?” said the official. “Popularity is not important for the Taliban.”

Taliban officials have repeatedly said they welcome international aid for Afghanistan but wouldn’t compromise on their Islamic beliefs to secure assistance...

 

Backlash Against Dave Chappelle's 'The Closer' (VIDEO)

If you've watched Chappelle's latest and last comedy special on Netflix, you might be flummoxed by all the hullabaloo. Then again, if you're up on despicable cancel culture, maybe not. 

One of many hilarious moments is when he told his audience that he was "uncancelable." He tells all the media scolds and woke Twitter idiots to fuck off. It's boss, heh.

Leftist won't let go, though Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has refused to cave. Maybe he still will, but I doubt it. Netflix has the power, not the ghoulish woke mob. Chappelle's show received sky-high viewer ratings on Dirty Rotten Tomatoes. Sarandos says the show's too popular to cancel. 

Anyway, just watch it for yourself. The cancel mobs make a lot of noise and they are very successful, but they can't bring down everyone, especially the biggest stars in the industry. 

The latest at NYT, "Netflix Loses Its Glow as Critics Target Chappelle Special":

It was looking like a great year for Netflix. It surpassed 200 million subscribers, won 44 Emmys and gave the world “Squid Game,” a South Korean series that became a sensation.

That’s all changed. Internally, the tech company that revolutionized Hollywood is now in an uproar as employees challenge the executives responsible for its success and accuse the streaming service of facilitating the spread of hate speech and perhaps inciting violence.

At the center of the unrest is “The Closer,” the much-anticipated special from the Emmy-winning comedian Dave Chappelle, which debuted on Oct. 5 and was the fourth-most-watched program on Netflix in the United States on Thursday. In the show, Mr. Chappelle comments mockingly on transgender people and aligns himself with the author J.K. Rowling as “Team TERF,” an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a term used for a group of people who argue that a transgender woman’s biological sex determines her gender and can’t be changed.

“The Closer” has thrust Netflix into difficult cultural debates, generating the kind of critical news coverage that usually attends Facebook and Google.

Several organizations, including GLAAD, the organization that monitors the news media and entertainment companies for bias against the L.G.B.T.Q. community, have criticized the special as transphobic. Some on Netflix’s staff have argued that it could incite harm against trans people. This week, the company briefly suspended three employees who attended a virtual meeting of executives without permission, and a contingent of workers has planned a walkout for next week.

A discussion this week on an internal Netflix message board between Reed Hastings, a co-chief executive, and company employees suggested that the two sides remained far apart on the issue of Mr. Chappelle’s special. A transcript of the wide-ranging online chat, in which Mr. Hastings expressed his views on free speech and argued firmly against the comedian’s detractors, was obtained by The New York Times.

One employee questioned whether Netflix was “making the wrong historical choice around hate speech.” In reply, Mr. Hastings wrote: “To your macro question on being on the right side of history, we will always continue to reflect on the tensions between freedom and safety. I do believe that our commitment to artistic expression and pleasing our members is the right long term choice for Netflix, and that we are on the right side, but only time will tell.”

He also said Mr. Chappelle was very popular with Netflix subscribers, citing the “stickiness” of “The Closer” and noting how well it had scored on the entertainment ratings website Rotten Tomatoes. “The core strategy,” Mr. Hastings wrote, “is to please our members.”

Replying to an employee who argued that Mr. Chappelle’s words were harmful, Mr. Hastings wrote: “In stand-up comedy, comedians say lots of outrageous things for effect. Some people like the art form, or at least particular comedians, and others do not.”

When another employee expressed an opinion that Mr. Chappelle had a history of homophobia and bigotry, Mr. Hastings said he disagreed, and would welcome the comedian back to Netflix.

“We disagree with your characterization and we’ll continue to work with Dave Chappelle in the future,” he said. “We see him as a unique voice, but can understand if you or others never want to watch his show.”

He added, “We do not see Dave Chappelle as harmful, or in need of any offset, which we obviously and respectfully disagree on.”

In a note to employees this week, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s other co-chief executive, expressed his unwavering support for Mr. Chappelle and struck back at the argument that the comic’s statements could lead to violence...

More.