Washington Post

Open Thread

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Nevada’s Attorney General – a Democrat – decided he wanted Nevada to be a sanctuary State. Nevada’s Governor – a sane person – said not so fast:

Aaron Ford – the aforementioned AG, Democrat and lunatic – is already running for Lombardo’s job in 2026. So you can understand why Ford would want to pick some fights with Lombardo…but, this fight? Seriously? Nobody outside the Leftist loony bins likes sanctuary policies. Even those who favor loose immigration policies don’t like the idea of State and local governments not cooperating with federal law enforcement on removing illegal aliens…and the more stories we see of illegals getting caught, released and then committing absolutely hideous crimes, the less people like the idea of sanctuary.

Nevada is a closely divided State (though registrations are trending GOP of late) but with 2026 being the mid-term year after a GOP win, you’d have to rate Ford’s chances out the gate as “has a solid shot at it”. Lombardo has been an effective and generally popular governor – and Democrats seem to have a really hard time winning the governorship – so it was never going to be an easy fight for Ford…things like this are going to make it impossible for him absent a complete GOP meltdown. But that is the Democrats right now, isn’t it? They are all-in on transing kids, protecting illegals and defending wasteful spending. Trump has picked a series of 70/30 issues, got himself on the side of 70 and has the Democrats digging in behind 30. Just amazing.

Jeff Bezos has decreed that the Washington Post will take a Libertarian line on personal and economic freedom. This did get his the opinion editor to step down – we’ll see if any further resignations occur. Best post on X about it:

We’ll see how this comes out – but if WaPo merely becomes a place where non-Left opinion can exist, that will be an improvement. A vast improvement – not least in getting a lot of the Ruling Class out of their bubble. The reason Democrats are tripling down on trans, illegals and waste is because all signals they receive indicate these as the popular positions. They never hear dissenting views. You will seriously find liberals out there who never even heard of Hunter’s laptop or that Trump-Russia was totally debunked…the MSM never told them.

And that is what Jake Tapper is counting on – he’s got a book coming out in May called Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, its Cover Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. I’m not kidding. Look it up. He really wrote a book called that. As if he wasn’t one of the people desperately covering it up! He’s naturally being scorched on X over it but it must be kept in mind that most people who actually pay attention to Tapper never heard about Biden being gaga until the debate. It was just a stutter!

When we ask ourselves how Kamala Harris got 75,017,613 votes, that’s why: these people never heard about her. The MSM hid her inability to string a coherent sentence together. They carefully edited the clips. They told the viewers that what she said was brilliant. Just at they told their viewers that the Orange Man is Bad while Harris is nothing but Joy. And even after Trump put full effort into showing this to be nonsense, more than 75 million people still hadn’t been reached on it. They still bought the MSM lies…and will buy Tapper’s book.

Greenpeace is going on trial in civil court – with the plaintiff asking $300 million. An amount that would effectively bankrupt Greenpeace. At issue was a series of protests orchestrated by Greenpeace against an oil pipeline (now completed). The plaintiff argues that Greenpeace encouraged illegal acts during the protests and then raised funds off the press coverage of the protests. This would be a criminal enterprise designed to enrich the perpetrators. It all came to a head in 2019 so I can see why federal prosecutors didn’t do anything…but I believe they should now on any charges still within the statute of limitations. It is a rather new thing to consider but as I think about it, I kick myself for not thinking it up years ago. I mean, think about the BLM/Antifa people who raked in huge donations…off of riots! That they encouraged and perhaps even directly participated in. RICO – its not just for Mobsters any more!

How Liberal Is Obama?

Matt Margolis64 Comments

Anyone who is familiar with Obama’s record the past 5 years knows he’s a partisan liberal. Obama claims not to be ideological, but then again, he said we could keep our insurance plans if we liked them.

A piece today from the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza looks at the question on how liberal Obama is, looking at analyses of both his absurdly short time in the U.S. Senate, and his horrible failure tenure in the White House.

The analysis of Obama’s presidential record comes from VoteView, a website you’ve never heard of, and probably won’t ever look at again. It comes this bizarre conclusion about Obama:

We find that President Obama is the most ideologically moderate Democratic president in the post-war period, with a first dimension DW-NOMINATE Common Space score of -0.329. President Lyndon Johnson, the second-most moderate Democratic president in this period, has a score of -0.345. President Obama’s ideological position is estimated from his “votes” (statements of support or opposition) on 282 congressional roll call votes. This amount is somewhat low; for example, President George W. Bush “voted” 453 times during his last term in office. However, it is adequate to recover his latent ideological score.

The following graph paints a visual picture of the ideological bents of each president since Truman:

presidential_square_waveSo, according to this analysis, we have to believe the following:

  • That Obama is more moderate than the tax-cutting, anti-Communist, strong on defense, “Ask not what your country can do for you,” JFK.
  • That Obama is more moderate than Bill Clinton, who actually worked with Republicans, even signed the balanced budget the Republican Congress passed.
  • That George W. Bush was actually more conservative than Ronald Reagan.
  • That Democrat presidents have remained roughly consistent ideologically, while Republican presidents have generally become more partisan

Yes, you would have to believe all of those things to swallow Voteview’s analysis. It would be easier for an adult to believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. I’m not really sure why there’s such a strong effort to paint Obama as a more moderate than he really is in spite of his real record.

I’m reminded of an oft repeated claim by liberal Democrats that Obamacare, as it is, is in fact, a conservative alternative to a truly left-wing single-payer healthcare system. Would they have similarly argued that Bush’s tax cuts were the liberal alternative to the bigger tax cuts signed by John F. Kennedy? I would highly doubt that.