Bernie Sanders Internal Numbers

CNN's reporting the Iowa results right now, as are the other networks, no doubt.

Bernie's leading the popular vote totals, but Buttigieg has won more voters around the state, and hence took a larger share of the delegates.

Joe Biden absolutely crashed last night, and I expect he'll bomb in New Hampshire as well. (And Nia-Malika Henderson, on CNN earlier, questioned the strength of Biden's "wall" in the South Carolina primary coming later this month.

I love it.

In any case, at the Intercept, "SANDERS CAMPAIGN’S INTERNAL CAUCUS NUMBERS SHOW THEM LEADING IOWA, WITH BIDEN A DISTANT FOURTH."

BREAKING: The Iowa Democratic Party has released 62% of its caucus results.

Pete Buttigieg leads with about 27% in the State Delegate Equivalent count.

Bernie Sanders follows with about 25%.

More here:

BREAKING: The Iowa Democratic Party has released 62% of its caucus results.

Pete Buttigieg leads with about 27% in the State Delegate Equivalent count.

Bernie Sanders follows with about 25%.

More here: https://t.co/glyEmOk8dS pic.twitter.com/Kjej9p4q5y

— NPR (@NPR) February 4, 2020

Democrats Are Decadent and Depraved

It's true.

At the Other McCain, "Disaster in Iowa: The Democratic Party Is Decadent and Depraved":

The way Democrats run their Iowa caucuses is difficult to explain briefly, but the result Monday was clear. Within an hour of the beginning of the complicated process, the totals of the first-round voting began to be reported via social media, and from precinct after precinct came the same phrase: “Biden — not viable.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden has based his campaign on the argument that he’s the most “electable” Democratic candidate, but the voters of Iowa shot a torpedo through the hull of that argument. Due to a technical glitch that delayed the state Democratic Party’s counting process, we still don’t have official results. But by 10:30 p.m. Eastern time Monday, it became apparent to caucus-watchers that Biden was headed for a fourth-place finish in the Hawkeye State, behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Buttigieg’s strong second-place showing is a big story — the young mayor out-performed expectations — but Biden’s humiliating defeat is much bigger. . .

Superbowl Halftime Show (PHOTOS)

I liked it.

Conservatives got their panties in a wad, sheesh.

At Drunken Stepfather, "SHAKIRA PANTY FLASH FOR THE SUPERBOWL OF THE DAY."

Watch the Super Bowl LIV Live visual album now & relive your favorite moments from the @Pepsi Super Bowl LIV Halftime show w/ @JLo, @Shakira, @JBalvin & @sanbenito, the National Anthem w/ @ddlovato and America the Beautiful w/ @YolandaAdams: https://t.co/TegS1UhgC6 #SBLIV pic.twitter.com/D0vQCHC9Vz

— NFL (@NFL) February 3, 2020

How China Implements Quarantine

What a nightmare.

At NYT, "China, Desperate to Stop Coronavirus, Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor":

Bounties, informant hotlines, barricaded doors and a lot of harassment: China authorities are doing everything to hunt those from Wuhan. In the process they risk eroding trust, establishing new stigmas and scattering scared carriers of the coronavirus. https://t.co/dfxtc6mJ5n

— Paul Mozur 孟建国 (@paulmozur) February 4, 2020

GUANGZHOU, China — One person was turned away by hotel after hotel after he showed his ID card. Another was expelled by fearful local villagers. A third found his most sensitive personal information leaked online after registering with the authorities.

These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, which is at the center of a rapidly spreading viral outbreak that has killed more than 420 people in China and sent fear rippling around the world. They are pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential carriers of the mysterious coronavirus.

All across the country, despite China’s vast surveillance network with its facial recognition systems and high-end cameras that is increasingly used to track its 1.4 billion people, the government has turned to familiar authoritarian techniques — like setting up dragnets and asking neighbors to inform on one another — as it tries to contain the outbreak.

It took the authorities about five days to contact Harmo Tang, a college student studying in Wuhan, after he returned to his hometown, Linhai, in eastern Zhejiang Province. Mr. Tang said he had already been under self-imposed isolation when local officials asked for his personal information, including name, address, phone number, identity card number and the date he returned from Wuhan. Within days, the information began to spread online, along with a list of others who returned to Linhai from Wuhan.

Local officials offered no explanation but returned a few days later to fasten police tape to his door and hang a sign that warned neighbors that a Wuhan returnee lived there. The sign included an informant hotline to call if anyone saw him or his family leave the apartment. Mr. Tang said he received about four calls a day from different local government departments.

“In reality there’s not much empathy,” he said. “It’s not a caring tone they’re using. It’s a warning tone. I don’t feel very comfortable about it.”

Of course, China has a major incentive to track down potential carriers of the disease. The coronavirus outbreak has put parts of the country under lockdown, brought the world’s second-largest economy to a virtual standstill and erected walls between China and the rest of the world.

Still, even some government officials called for understanding as concerns about prejudice spread. Experts warned such marginalization of an already vulnerable group could prove counterproductive, further damaging public trust and sending those who should be screened and monitored deeper underground.

“We are paying attention to this issue,” Ma Guoqiang, the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Wuhan, said at a news conference there last Tuesday.

“I believe that some people may label Hubei people or report them, but I also think most people will treat Hubei people with a good heart.”

While networks of volunteers and Christian groups have been vocal about offering help, many local leaders have focused efforts on finding and isolating people from Hubei. On big screens and billboards, propaganda videos and posters warn people to stay inside, wear masks and wash hands.

In the northern province of Hebei, one county offered bounties of 1,000 yuan, or about $140, for each Wuhan person reported by residents. Images online showed towns digging up roads or deputizing men to block outsiders. Some apartment-building residents barricaded the doors of their towers with China’s ubiquitous ride-share bikes.

In the eastern province of Jiangsu, quarantine turned to imprisonment after authorities used metal poles to barricade shut the door of a family recently returned from Wuhan. To get food, the family relied on neighbors who lowered provisions with a rope down to their back balcony, according to a local news report.

Scared for the safety of his children as conditions at home worsened, Andy Li, a tech worker from Wuhan traveling with his family in Beijing, rented a car and began driving south to Guangdong, an effort to find refuge with relatives there. In Nanjing, he was turned away from one hotel before getting a room at a luxury hotel.

There he set up a self-imposed family quarantine for four days, until local authorities ordered all people from Wuhan to move to a hotel next to the city’s central rail station. Mr. Li said the quarantine hotel did not seem to be doing a good job isolating people. Food delivery workers came and went, while gaps in the doors and walls allowed drafts in.

“They’re only working to separate Wuhan people from Nanjing people,” Mr. Li said. “They don’t care at all if Wuhan people infect each other.”

To help, he stuffed towels and tissues under the door to block the drafts.

“I’m not complaining about the government," Mr. Li said. “There will always be loopholes in policy. But in a selfish way I’m just really worried about my children.”

Across the country, the response from local authorities often resembles the mass mobilizations of the Mao era rather than the technocratic, data-driven wizardry depicted in propaganda about China’s emerging surveillance state. They have also turned to techniques Beijing used to fight the outbreak of SARS, another deadly disease, in 2002 and 2003, when China was much less technologically sophisticated.

Checkpoints to screen people for fevers have popped up at tollbooths, at the front gates of apartment complexes and in hotels, grocery stores and train stations. Often those wielding the thermometer guns don’t hold them close enough to a person’s forehead, generating unusually low temperature readings. Such checks were worthless, for instance, against one man in the western province of Qinghai, whom police are investigating on suspicion that he covered up his symptoms to travel.

Authorities have used computerized systems that track ID cards — which must be used to take most long-distance transport and stay in hotels — to round up people from Wuhan. Yet one article about the ID system in The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, included a plea to all passengers on affected flights and trains to report themselves...

Media Roundup Slams Democrats for Iowa Disarray (VIDEO)

Via Free Beacon:

Impact of the Iowa Chaos

From Jonathan Last, at the Bulwark, an excellent analysis.

It's been a perfect storm burying Iowa in negative coverage, and even the experts are saying the Hawkeye State's special role as "first in the nation" is at risk.

Iowa: Ded https://t.co/MTydnoHpQd

— Jonathan V. Last (@JVLast) February 4, 2020

Added: See also AoSHQ, "The Soyciety Pages: Bill Kristol Declares, 'We Are All Democrats Now'."

Democrats Are Facing Disaster

There's too much to report on the Iowa chaos (check Memeorandum).

But one thing's for sure, things are going terribly for the Democrats.

For example, Gallup is out this morning with the best presidential approval number for President Trump --- he's at 49 percent approval, and more than 6 in 10 approve of his handling of the economy, a death knell for Democrat prospects this fall, especially if those number hold up.

More at AoSHQ, "GALLUP: TRUMP JOB APPROVAL RISES TO HIGHEST LEVEL EVER, AT 49%."

Donald Trump’s job approval rating has risen to 49% in a new Gallup poll. https://t.co/aspVxbbTaS

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) February 4, 2020

'Credulous Boomer Rube Demo'

This kinda of stuff practically guarantees Trump's reelection.

At the Other McCain, "Republicans ‘Punch Back Twice as Hard’ With Ad Targeting CNN Elitists."

This is why Trump won and will win again. pic.twitter.com/KfaLnP1KCt

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) January 28, 2020

More here.

Trump's Digital Advantage

I love this!

Thomas Edsall, at NYT, "Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists":

https://t.co/TxRBYFkX0F via ⁦@Edsall⁩

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 29, 2020

In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics “who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days.”

Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, “91,373 mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!” CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this large, untapped reservoir — Republican-leaning white Catholics who could bolster Trump’s numbers in a battleground state.

Burch, whose organization opposes abortion and gay marriage, made his plans clear:

We are already building the largest Catholic voter mobilization program ever. And no, that’s not an exaggeration. Our plan spans at least 7 states (and growing), and includes millions of Catholic voters.

How did Catholic Vote come up with these particular church attendance numbers for 199,241 Catholics? With geofencing, a technology that creates a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a cellphone enters or leaves a particular area — a church, for example, or a stadium, a school or an entire town.

Geofencing is just one of the new tools of digital campaigning, a largely unregulated field of political combat in which voters have little or no idea of how they are being manipulated, in which traditional disclosure requirements are inoperative and key actors are anonymous. It is a weapon of choice. Once an area is geofenced, commercial data companies can acquire the mobile phone ID numbers of those within the boundary.

This is how the National Catholic Reporter described the process in an article earlier this month:

Politically minded geofencers capture data from the cellphones of churchgoers, and then purchase ads targeting those devices. That data can be matched against other easily obtained databases, including voter profiles, which give marketers identifying information such as names, addresses and voter registration status.

Such information can be a gold mine.

Burch described what CatholicVote.org initiated in the 2018 election. “We created ad campaigns targeted to mobile devices that have been inside of Catholic churches,” Burch explained. What’s more,

We told Catholics in Missouri the truth about then-Senator Claire McCaskill — that she was pro-abortion, was unwilling to protect the Little Sisters of the Poor, and opposed Catholic judicial nominees because of their religious beliefs. And she lost.

If you attend an evangelical or a Catholic Church, a women’s rights march or a political rally of any kind, especially in a seriously contested state, the odds are that your cellphone ID number, home address, partisan affiliation and the identifying information of the people around you will be provided by geofencing marketers to campaigns, lobbyists and other interest groups.

With increasing speed, digital technology is transforming politics, constantly providing novel ways to target specific individuals, to get the unregistered registered, to turn out marginal voters, to persuade the undecided and to suppress support for the opposition.

Democrats and Republicans agree that the Trump campaign is far ahead of the Democratic Party in the use of this technology, capitalizing on its substantial investment during the 2016 election and benefiting from an uninterrupted high-tech drive since then.

Republicans “have a big advantage this time,” Ben Nuckels, a Democratic media consultant said in a phone interview. “They not only have all the data from 2016 but they have been building this operation into a nonstop juggernaut.”

The new technology, Nuckels continued, allows campaigns to “deliver a broader narrative over the top” on television and other media, while “underneath in digital you are delivering ads that are tailored to those voters that you need to influence and persuade the most.”

RTWT.

Catholic Vote's 2008 campaign video is here.

Elsie Hewitt

At Drunken Stepfather, "ELSIE HEWITT OF THE DAY."

Senator Kelly Loeffler Takes Office Amid Impeachment and Foreign Policy Crises

Just appointed and not observing the normal niceties of Senate freshmen.

At NYT:

New senators typically take their time before jumping into the spotlight. Kelly Loeffler is breaking convention as she works to use the impeachment battle to solidify her place in a party where loyalty to President Trump is the key to survival. https://t.co/GzxI6aAgGg

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) January 29, 2020

After 2 weeks, it’s clear that Democrats have no case for impeachment. Sadly, my colleague @SenatorRomney wants to appease the left by calling witnesses who will slander the @realDonaldTrump during their 15 minutes of fame. The circus is over. It’s time to move on! #gapol

— Senator Kelly Loeffler (@SenatorLoeffler) January 27, 2020

Here are my takeaways:@realDonaldTrump’s team undermined your entire “case” in 2 hours.

You failed to get the job done. They proved that. No convincing evidence. Just baseless attacks.

A fair trial happened in the Senate & you don’t get a do-over. It’s time to move on! https://t.co/dPK6qfiuQn

— Senator Kelly Loeffler (@SenatorLoeffler) January 29, 2020

One thing I know Georgians are tired of hearing about? Impeachment.

That’s why I’m focusing on what matters: pro-economy, pro-farmer, pro-woman initiatives -- just to name a few.

Looking forward to another exciting day tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/eL2qGqKYe8

— Senator Kelly Loeffler (@SenatorLoeffler) January 29, 2020

Hospital Masks in Irvine

I tweeted yesterday:

⁦.@Communism_Kills⁩ #Outbreak in #TheOC. At least one confirmed case of #CoronaVirus. Drugstores are out of face masks as #Chinese immigrants panic. Avoid exotic food markets and immigrant concentrations. #Wuhan #CoronaOutbreak 😷 pic.twitter.com/Tk03nQItEk

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 28, 2020

Plane Diverted to March Air Force Base

It's a nightmare.

Irvine is Beijing west. All these Chinese immigrants going around with hospital face masks. It's ridiculous.

Might was well be in Wuhan!

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Megan Parry's Wednesday Forecast

January in California is a trip.

In the 70s during the day, it gets down to the low 40s in the early morning, brrr!

Here's the lovely Ms. Megan, for ABC News 10 San Diego.

Look at those overnight lows!

Why America Needs a Trump vs. Sanders Election

It's Roger Simon, via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.

Fear and Anger Among Americans in China

Well, I'd be mad too --- especially at myself for winding up in the China dumpster in the first place.

At LAT, "Americans evacuating Wuhan, China, clear health screening and head to California":

BEIJING —  A plane evacuating 201 Americans from the Chinese city at the center of the coronavirus outbreak arrived in Alaska and continued Wednesday to Southern California after everyone aboard passed a health screening in Anchorage, where the aircraft had stopped to refuel.
The plane was the only way out of the besieged city of Wuhan in Hubei province, and Americans clamored for seats.

A couple with a 7-year-old daughter did not receive the coveted call. A 65-year-old man’s phone rang, but he gave up his spot because others needed it more.

There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to who was tapped by U.S. officials to board the flight early Wednesday whisking them away from Wuhan, the epicenter of a respiratory virus outbreak that has killed more than 130 people in the last two months.

For a week, Wuhan has been under lockdown, with no transportation out of the city, as Chinese officials desperately try to keep the new coronavirus from spreading.

The inland city of 11 million, a university and business hub often called the Chicago of China, has become a cauldron of fear, stress and boredom, with overwhelmed hospitals, empty streets and isolated residents afraid to be in the same room with close friends.

It is unclear how deadly the virus is or how easily it spreads. Most reported cases have occurred in Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province, and most patients elsewhere had recently traveled there.

But the tally of fatalities and confirmed cases, as well as the virus’ geographic reach, has increased daily, prompting the U.S. State Department to recommend that Americans avoid traveling to China. Some airlines have begun restricting flights out of the entire country, not just Wuhan.

For expatriates in Wuhan, many of whom teach English at universities and language institutes, the crisis is especially disorienting.

Many are not fluent in Chinese and worry about communicating if they go to the hospital. They share anxieties and questions with each other on WeChat and Facebook forums. On Wednesday, one man posted that he lost his temper at a Walmart cashier who rummaged through a quilt he had just bought, potentially spreading germs.

Americans still stuck in Wuhan have received no word about any future government-sponsored flights. Some are angry at U.S. officials for not doing more to help.

State Department officials could not be reached for comment.

Still more.

Mountain House Classic

At Amazon, Mountain House Classic Bucket.

Also, Mountain House Just In Case 14-Day Emergency Food Supply.

BONUS: Jocko Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual.

Jennifer Delacruz Saturday Forecast

At 10 News San Diego.

Beautiful daytime weather but bundle up at night, brrr!

Katie Bell Saturday Selfie

Click on the photo to enlarge:

i named my headache ‘idiots’. pic.twitter.com/Sn9Su1eTTb

— Katie Bell🦋 (@katieeeeebell) January 25, 2020

Joe Rogan Endorses Bernie Sanders, Chaos Ensues

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "BERNIE SANDERS WELCOMED AS NEWEST MEMBER OF ALT-RIGHT AFTER JOE ROGAN ENDORSEMENT."

And, "JOE ROGAN IS THE WALTER CRONKITE OF OUR ERA."

MoveOn.org, the organization that wanted to "censure" Bill Clinton and "move on" from impeachment, is particularly upset.

We urge Sen. Sanders and his campaign to apologize and stop elevating this endorsement. We stand in solidarity with folks hurt by this.

— MoveOn (@MoveOn) January 25, 2020