[guest post by JVW]

In “celebrating” the anniversary of Title IX earlier this week, the Biden Administration quietly undermined it by insisting that transgender females be given expansive rights to participate in women and girls sports, despite the biological advantages they may have accrued while male. Appearing with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, President Biden put the full weight of the federal government behind the transgender agenda:

One proposed change “would make clear that preventing any person from participating in an education program or activity consistent with their gender identity would subject them to more than de minimis harm on the basis of sex and therefore be prohibited, unless otherwise permitted by Title IX or the regulations.”

If adopted, the rule change would bar universities and any other federally funded institutions from maintaining men’s and women’s sports and sex-segregated spaces like locker rooms and dormitories.

And there you have it: further proof of the leftward lurch of Joe Biden, who won his party’s nomination largely because he seemed to be immune to the loudest voices in his coalition who were demanding radical social change. In retrospect, it would seem that perhaps the confused old codger was simply unaware of this stuff, and now that it is in front of him he lacks the intellectual wherewithal and the common sense to reject it. This ill-conceived decision hearkens back to the Obama Administration’s notorious 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter sent to university administrators instructing them to take a harsher stance against allegations of sexual abuse, which critics claim led to agenda-driven campus disciplinary proceedings against young men which were administered via kangaroo courts. The idea in both cases being to placate a loud and media-savvy group, collateral damage be dammed.

At a time when FINA, international swimming’s governing body, has tightened their rules with respect to under what circumstances a former male can compete as a female — rules which were expected to be adopted by the NCAA in the wake of the Lia Thomas controversy this past spring — the Biden Administration is seeking to circumvent the international sport regulations by apparently proposing the loosest possible rules imaginable and demanding that schools who participate in NCAA-sanctioned athletics adopt them. Instead of trying to navigate the shoals between all-or-nothing transgender activists and supporters of women athletics (including many feminist Democrats) who want to see a biologically-level playing field, Joe Biden sided with the radicals, as has been his wont lately.

And you know who is not having any of this nonsense? Sure you do. Former Hawai’i Congresswoman and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has little use for woke posturing and she appeared yesterday at a pro-woman sports rally in Washington DC and spoke with Maddy Kearns of NRO, who is doing absolutely fantastic work to expose the dishonesty and underhandedness of the transgender lobby. Read the entire interview, presented in transcript format, to understand what draws our Warrior Princess to this cause. Here she is discussing the bravery of the young women who dare to question left-wing transgender orthodoxy:

Kearns: Why don’t you fear this [ostracism from progressive Democrats], then? Given that a lot of Democratic politicians —

Gabbard: Because I choose not to be driven by fear. You know, my actions are driven by my desire to do what I can to be of service to make a positive impact to serve the best interests of the people of this country, men and women alike, for all Americans. And I don’t care what the backlash may be. Just as women for generations fought for the rights of women, fought for Title IX to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, they faced backlash, and they were ostracized, and they were criticized. It’s that kind of courage that we need to see from our leaders today. And it’s that kind of courage that we’re seeing from these young women, these athletes here today who are choosing to use their voice to represent the many who are being directly impacted by this today, and to represent those who will come after and whose future in many ways will be impacted based on what we choose to do or not do at this moment.

[. . .]

Kearns: What would you like to see with regard to policy to push back on some of this stuff? Today, the Biden administration came out with regulations redefining “sex” to include gender identity. What can be done about that?

Gabbard: Congress needs to pass legislation. I mean, that’s the check and balance of the executive and the legislative branch. Congress needs to pass legislation in order to stop that action, [the] Biden administration’s action from moving forward because it will directly undermine Title IX and erase the progress that women have made.

I wanted her to be the Democrats’ nominee for President, and when it became obvious that wasn’t going to happen, I urged Joe Biden to name her as his running mate, but he instead went for the vacuous and annoying lady who used to — uh — “keep company” with Willie Brown. But the Little Aloha Sweetie is correct: it’s high-time for Congress to get off of its duff and push legislation to protect women athletes and keep the playing fields fair.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

Don’t pretend like you didn’t see this one coming.

With putative Democrat Presidential nominee Joe Biden zeroing in on his Vice-Presidential pick — and believe me, the leaked names under consideration are indeed a bunch of zeros — it’s time to make the argument for a bold, refreshing, unconventional pick that would establish Slow Joe as something other than a dinosaur who has spent a half-century mucking around Washington, DC and who is in complete thrall to the power players and elite opinion makers which sadly dominate his party. Various names have been bandied about over the past few months: Stacey Abrams, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Tammy Duckworth, and now Karen Bass. They each have something to offer the elderly white male Establishment figure around whom party pooh-bahs rallied during that harrowing point last winter when a nutty old socialist nearly stormed the gates and threw out everyone who wore a tailored suit.

But none of them offer the advantages that Mr. Biden stands to reap if he takes the bold step of naming the fourth-term Congresswoman from the islands of Hawai’i to his ticket. She matches and/or surpasses any of the strengths of the other potential candidates, and at worst her liabilities are no more troublesome than those of the rest of the field. Don’t believe me? Let’s consider:

Stacey Abrams
Pros: Almost managed to get herself elected governor of Georgia.
Cons: Garden variety leftist of the Sanders stripe. It’s hard to see her winning over voters in the Rust Belt.

Karen Bass
Pros: Apparently she and Biden get along well together, though Biden might have mistaken her for his nurse.
Cons: As late as 2016 still thought Fidel Castro had done a bang-up job in Cuba. Her only major accomplishment as Speaker of the California Assembly, a budget deal with Governor Schwarzenegger, was overwhelmingly rejected by the state’s voters, hardly an endorsement of her ability to sell her fellow Democrats on compromise.

Keisha Lance Bottoms
Pros: Executive experience in government, I suppose.
Cons: Atlanta has hardly been a model for how to deal with civic unrest, and her dithering ended up in the senseless death of a young girl.

Tammy Duckworth
Pros: Inspiring life story about her service to our country and how she overcame devastating war wounds. Her politics generally align with those of one of her seat’s previous occupants, Barack Obama.
Cons: I consider Sen. Duckworth, whose mother was Thai-Chinese, to be a person of color, but will African-Americans? The recent prominence of BPIOC (Black & Indigenous People of Color) in woke leftist usage seems particularly designed to omit Asians from the intersectionality grievance matrix.

Kamala Harris
Pros: I pass.
Cons: Mr. Biden would look weak by choosing a woman who relentlessly demagogued him at the first Democrat debate. Her accomplishments in offices she has held have been scant, but the controversies she has stirred up have been formidable and will at last get full airing should she be chosen.

Susan Rice
Pros: I don’t know; maybe having worked with her in the past there will be a flicker of recognition in Mr. Biden’s mind when she walks into a meeting room.
Cons: It makes more sense to pick an elected official who is notable for brazenly lying to us than an appointed official who is notable for brazenly lying to us. And I don’t think the Biden team wants to give strong hints that they will merely be reassembling the Obama squad.

Elizabeth Warren
Pros: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Cons: Where do I begin? Let’s just leave it at the fact that a party which fetishizes youth and diversity would have 150 years’ worth of white folks on their ticket.

Here’s a helpful tool I created so that you can all see how My Little Aloha Sweetie stacks up against all of these mediocrities:

By naming Tulsi Gabbard to the Vice-Presidential slot, Joe Biden could improve his candidacy in several ways. First, he keeps his promise to appoint a woman, and he gets a woman of color to boot (though, like Sen. Duckworth, Rep. Gabbard would have her BPIOC credentials challenged). Second, he gets an ally of Bernard Sanders to join him, and one who is far more personable and charming than the cranky old Marxist bastard. Third, he flanks the Trump/Pence ticket by appointing a generation other than the Baby Boomers who have ruled the roost for the past twenty-eight years. (Fun note: Joe Biden would be the first representative of the Silent Generation to be elected President; Dick Cheney is the only one to serve as VP.) Fourth, in our heavily divisive times he would be choosing someone who doesn’t seem to have much interest in scoring cheap partisan points, and who generally treats her ideological opponents as serious people with whom she should discuss ideas rather than as irascible racists who need to be silenced. Her weaknesses — impractical economics, a tolerance of murderous dictators, lack of high-level leadership — aren’t any different than the weaknesses of any of the other candidates, or for that matter her potential boss. And we have seen the Warrior Princess on the debate stage and we know that she has a toughness and a resiliency that are quite admirable.

Joe Biden could do a whole hell of a lot worse. And he probably will.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

Presidential candidate, Hawaii Congresswoman, National Guardswoman (currently on deployment), and wahine nani loa Tulsi Gabbard finds herself on the bubble in qualifying for next month’s Democrat debate. The DNC has upped the qualification, requiring 130,000 unique donors (up from 60,000 for the first rounds), and a showing of at least two percent in a minimum four qualifying polls. The list of the DNC’s qualifying polls consists of the following: Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Des Moines Register, Fox News, Monmouth University, NBC News, New York Times, National Public Radio, Quinnipiac University, University of New Hampshire, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, and Winthrop University. Currently, the Congresswoman only reaches the 2% threshold in the CNN and Fox polls.

But wait, the Gabbard Campaign insists: the Congresswoman is above the two percent mark in The Boston Globe poll, which serves the entire New England region including the key primary state of New Hampshire, and in The Post and Courier, the major newspaper in the largest city in South Carolina, which happens to be the first primary state not dominated by insufferably twee white progressives and university faculty. Furthermore, they point out that many of the qualified polls have not been updated since the second debate where My Little Aloha Sweetie memorably eviscerated the odious Kamala Harris, and that only four of the DNC’s qualified polls have come out since that beautiful night.

NRO’s Jim Geraghty isn’t particularly sympathetic. While stipulating that the Gabbard Campaign makes some salient points about the DNC’s polling practices, he finds a huge limit to their argument:

That having been said . . . the threshold is 2 percent, people. If consistently getting 2 percent or more of members of your party to make you their first choice is too difficult . . . well, the presidency doesn’t have many easy days. You can picture some of the asterisk candidates muttering that the DNC rules have reduced the debate qualification process to a popularity contest. Well, yeah. A presidential primary is a competition to see who can get the most people to make a candidate their first choice. If Democrats really feel like Gabbard is getting screwed by an unfairly high threshold, they can inundate the DNC with messages of objection. But as is, when YouGov, or CNN, or Gravis, or Morning Consult or Fox News come calling, not enough Democrats are saying that their first choice is Tulsi Gabbard.

Point taken, though I still hope our gal (ok, ok: my gal) makes it to the Houston stage. I would assume that the Labor Day weekend will be a big time for pollsters and those organizations who haven’t released info since the second debate will soon update their results. Hopefully at that point, the Congresswoman will score in the magical four polls and thus secure her debating spot. Perhaps she will once again unleash her ihe ‘ō ‘ia nalohia pua and bury it in some other candidate’s deserving backside (looking at you, Fauxcahontas!). All hail (and fear) our warrior princess!

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, forever and always My Little Aloha Sweetie, announced earlier today that she is ending her campaign to be the next President of the United States.

Important announcement.
From Oahu, Hawaiʻi. #StandWithTulsi pic.twitter.com/XcHshtgVYA

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) March 19, 2020

Listen to her announcement; it’s worth the five minutes of your time. Sure, I joked a great deal about my crush on the Congresswoman and I would be Fauxcahontas-level lying to you if I tried to claim that I don’t find Congresswoman Gabbard to be quite attractive, from her rich Island beauty invoking the Goddess Pele; to the dulcet tones of her voice, as pleasing to the ear as the soft song of the Puaiohi heard over gently rolling ocean waves; to her graceful and elegant bearing, appropriate for an athlete and soldier. When she stares into the camera it’s as if she is looking deep into my soul, healing all of my pain and exciting in me such an overwhelming feeling of–

Uh, what point was I trying to make?

Oh yeah.

Anyway, I know that her affection for big government runs counter to pretty much everything I have ever written on this blog, and while I greatly respect her pacifist and non-interventionist foreign policy as being heartfelt and authentic, I do have to grit my teeth at her rather blasé reaction to some of the world’s worst tyrants. I’m sure that if we were to sit down to discuss domestic and international policy I would find myself disagreeing with much of what she had to say as I stared deeply into those coconut brown eyes which haunt my dreams with desires of such longing–

[Dammit, man. Focus!]

The point of this being that even though I would disagree with much of what she says, I don’t think that she would readily dismiss me as some sort of neanderthal right-wing nutjob, in the way that the rest of her fellow candidates — with perhaps Andrew Yang exempted — would. Though she has pretty much garden-variety progressive left opinions, she distinguished herself on the campaign trail by not venturing out to the far fringes of social policy where her party’s center seems to have gravitated. Alone among the candidates — again, with perhaps the exception of Andrew Yang — Congresswoman Gabbard expressed some trepidation with late-term abortion, and suggested that the entire practice was not something to be “celebrated” or “shouted,” but should be considered a necessary evil. When Rush Limbaugh announced his cancer diagnosis, Tulsi Gabbard put aside the ideological warring to wish him well. Unlike a Nancy Pelosi or a Chuck Schumer or a Gavin Newsom, to name but a few, she was one Democrat who didn’t have contempt for those who had different beliefs from her own.

And of course I will be forever grateful that she ended the candidacy of the obnoxious Kamala Harris, realizing that unlike her friend Bernard Sanders she had the guts to go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and call both of them out on their mendacious bullstuff. It’s no wonder the Democrat Party hated her so.

As I said three-plus years ago, it would be a great idea for President Trump to bring her into his cabinet, should he win reelection later this year. She was allegedly considered for Donald Trump’s first cabinet, even perhaps for Secretary of State. I think I would offer her something more along the lines of Secretary of Veterans Affairs, but if President Trump needs a token Democrat for his cabinet he couldn’t do any better. Of course the President would have to swallow his pride and accept a woman who has harshly criticized him, although he can take heart that she refused to vote in favor of his impeachment. She would support President Trump’s reluctance to intervene in overseas affairs, though she would almost certainly try to move him to the big government left in domestic affairs. He would have to be strong to resist her island charms lest he start going all Green Mountain Gramsci on us. Speaking of Comrade Candidate, I would be interested in seeing if the foolish old Marxist would vote in favor of her nomination.

I’m glad that Tulsi Gabbard ran for President. She was a welcome break from the Ivy League overachievers, the mediocre lifelong “public servants,” and the riff-raff from the financial and dot-com worlds. I hope we see her reemerge in a leadership position in the next administration, no matter who the chief executive is, and I hope that both of our major parties can attract interesting, even unconventional, candidates such as My Little Aloha Sweetie.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

Might as well do it this way.

Item One: Keep It in Your Pants, Pal
I, as many of you know, have been assigned by the newsdesk at Patterico’s Pontifications to provide unstinting coverage of women’s soccer, the fiendishly stupid bullet train, My Little Aloha Sweetie, and, of course, sex deviants. So I found this story to be right up my alley (wait, not the idiom I ought to be using):

University of Wisconsin-La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow, who was axed over the adult videos he created with his wife, said he was shocked that board members weren’t a “little more understanding” — but maintained that he had no regrets about filming the content.

Gow, 63 — who was fired from his long-term position by the Board of Regents on Wednesday — has argued that he shouldn’t have been given the pink slip because his videos should be protected by the First Amendment.

“I did not expect that we’d end up where we are now,” Gow told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in the aftermath.

“I thought the board, given their staunch support of free speech, would be a little more understanding. But clearly, that’s not the case.”

When I reported on the candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates who made sex videos with her husband for a paid audience, some of the comments were along the lines of “Hey, consenting adults, and all that.” I get that attitude, and I want my inner libertarian to be cool with what a couple chooses to do behind closed doors. But when they then open up those doors and invite us to peek in, my inner conservative reserves the right to call them perverts. Joe Gow had previously been criticized by the UW board for having invited porn actress Nina Hartley to lecture on campus and paying her an honorarium, so rather than being some sort of First Amendment crusader I’m sort of thinking that Mr. Gow is simply a pornography addict.

Item Two: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
This probably won’t end well:

The national governing body for amateur/Olympic-style boxing recently codified a rule permitting male participation in the women’s division in its 2024 rulebook.

USA Boxing added a ‘Transgender Policy,” written in August 2022, into its 2024 rulebook, declaring that male boxers who transition to female are eligible to compete in the female category under certain conditions. To qualify for the female division, a man must declare his gender identity as female, have undergone gender reassignment surgery, have done hormone testing for a minimum of four years after such procedures, and have met testosterone limits set by USA Boxing.

“The athlete’s total testosterone level in serum must remain below 5 nmol/L throughout the period of desired eligibility to compete in the female category,” the 2022 rule said. Male boxers must demonstrate a total testosterone level in serum that is below 5 nmol/L for at least 48 months before first competition.

Minor boxers under the age of 18 must compete in the category aligned with their biological sex, but adult boxers can switch to the category of their preferred gender if they meet the requirements.

Raise your hand if you expected boxing to be a woke sport. I appreciate that they are now requiring four-years of hormone testing after gender reassignment (previous athletic policies required as brief a duration as one year). But according to this conversion app, a level of 5 nmol/L is equivalent to 144 ng/dL, which is roughly six times the testosterone level of the average woman under age 50 even if it is also apparently the same limit that the International Association of Athletics Federation adopted five years ago.

Parents, would you want your daughter in the ring with a competitor who just barely met these requirements?

Item Three: How Can Claudine Gay Possibly Survive?
It simply has to be that the walls are closing in on Claudine Gay. It is inarguable that she has, on several occasions, failed to properly cite sources in academic articles and papers that she has written. It is inarguable that Harvard has bent over backwards trying to find flimsy rationale why this is not a dismissible offense, and has run a slipshod investigation into her acts of plagiarism. It is furthermore inarguable that Harvard students are held to a far more rigorous definition of academic misconduct than their president is, and this is an ongoing problem in West Cambridge. We are reminded that Claudine Gay failed to support fellow black colleagues when the baying woke mobs came for them, so she should not expect her race and gender to bail her out of this predicament.

It’s actually quite sad that Ms. Gay lacks the dignity to simply step down and spare Harvard this ordeal, but the higher education establishment has spent the last half-century choosing political posturing over maintaining principles and standards, so I guess the reckoning is long overdue. Veritas my ass, Harvard.

I’m going to wrap it up here, gang. Happy New Year. I may try to sneak in one more post tomorrow that is already a few weeks overdue.

– JVW

[guest post by Dana]

Let’s get started!

First news item

What a time to be alive:

TikTok stars are dancing their way to the bank. Some are making more than America’s top chief executives.

Charli D’Amelio, who started posting videos of herself dancing on TikTok in 2019, brought in $17.5 million last year, according to Forbes, which recently ranked the highest-earning TikTok stars of 2021. With 133 million followers on TikTok, she makes her money from a clothing line and promoting products in TikTok videos and other ads…Ms. D’Amelio’s compensation was higher than several CEOs of big publicly traded companies, including Exxon Mobil Corp. ’s Darren Woods ($15.6 million in 2020), Starbucks Corp.’s Kevin Johnson ($14.7 million), Delta Air Lines Inc. ’s Ed Bastian ($13.1 million) and McDonald’s Corp. ’s Chris Kempczinski ($10.8 million), according to the Journal’s analysis of their recent compensation figures.

Second news item

Here it is:

Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group, and 10 other members or associates have been charged with seditious conspiracy in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, authorities said Thursday…The indictment alleges Oath Keepers for weeks discussed trying to overturn the election results and preparing for a siege by purchasing weapons and setting up battle plans. They repeatedly wrote in chats about the prospect of violence and the need, as Rhodes allegedly wrote in one text, “to scare the s—-out of” Congress. And on Jan. 6, the indictment alleges, they entered the Capitol building with the large crowds of rioters who stormed past police barriers and smashed windows, injuring dozens of officers and sending lawmakers running…Authorities have said the Oath Keepers and their associates worked as if they were going to war, discussing weapons and training. Days before the attack, one defendant suggested in a text message getting a boat to ferry weapons across the Potomac River to their “waiting arms,” prosecutors say.

Rhodes’ attorney, John Mosely, said the group was under the “fanciful idea that Trump was going to activate them as a militia under the insurrection act.”

Third news item

President Biden’s strategery in action: attacking the Senators whose votes he desperate needs:

“Will you stand against election subversion? Yes or no? . . . Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Observation:

When national Democrats talk to the country they always seem to be talking to themselves. They are of the left, as is their constituency, which wins the popular vote in presidential elections; the mainstream media through which they send their messages is of the left; the academics, historians and professionals they consult are of the left. They get in the habit of talking to themselves, in their language, in a single, looped conversation. They have no idea how they sound to the non-left, so they have no idea when they are damaging themselves. But this week in Georgia Mr. Biden damaged himself. And strengthened, and may even have taken a step in unifying, the non-Democrats who are among their countrymen, and who are in fact the majority of them.

Biden’s polling has certainly taken a hit, and his latest attack hasn’t helped matters:

It’s hard to know how this all factors into Biden’s job approval rating, but broadly speaking, the public is dissatisfied. And it has been for a while now, too, as Biden’s approval rating has hovered in the low 40s for nearly three months, with roughly 42 percent of Americans currently approving of his job performance and 51 percent disapproving, according to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker.

Looking back at recent presidents, this development is particularly troubling for Biden, as he has the second-lowest approval rating of any president one-year in. Only Donald Trump, whose approval rating was in the high 30s, had a lower rating.1

Also:

[A] new Quinnipiac poll showed the usual low Biden numbers, but, most pertinently, that 49% of respondents say he is doing more to divide the country, and only 42% see him as unifying it.

You can read the White House’s pushback against the Quinnipiac poll here.

But clearly, no matter what nonsense President Biden spouts, Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema aren’t playing:

Long @Sen_JoeManchin statement: "Allowing one party to exert complete control in the Senate with only a simple majority will only pour fuel onto the fire of political whiplash…As such, and as I have said many times before, I will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster." pic.twitter.com/Joe6beO1T4

— Grace Panetta (@grace_panetta) January 13, 2022

BREAKING: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema praises proposed voting rights bills but reiterates support for filibuster rule, saying "I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country." https://t.co/ihVuth6xKF pic.twitter.com/GVNP9wBLYe

— ABC News (@ABC) January 13, 2022

Also, thinking of JVW – here is his Little Aloha Sweetie’s response to Biden’s divisive speech as well:

Hillary’s calling tens of millions of Americans deplorables was divisive & disgusting. But Biden has gone further, calling those who disagree with his actions & policies domestic enemies, traitors, and racists. Biden promised to unite us, but he is doing all he can do divide us. pic.twitter.com/1XKS9rfZQT

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) January 13, 2022

Fourth news item

Cyberattack in Ukraine:

A massive cyberattack warning Ukrainians to “be afraid and expect the worst” hit government websites late on Thursday, leaving some websites inaccessible on Friday morning and prompting Kyiv to open an investigation.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesperson told Reuters it was too early to say who could be behind the attack but said Russia had been behind similar strikes in the past.

The cyberattack, which hit the foreign ministry, the cabinet of ministers and the security and defence council among others, comes as Kyiv and its allies have sounded the alarm about a possible new Russian military offensive against Ukraine.

Related:

The US has information that indicates Russia has prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation in eastern Ukraine, a US official told CNN on Friday, in an attempt to create a pretext for an invasion.

The official said the US has evidence that the operatives are trained in urban warfare and in using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces.
The allegation echoes a statement released by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense on Friday, which said that Russian special services are preparing provocations against Russian forces in an attempt to frame Ukraine. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan hinted at the intelligence during a briefing with reporters on Thursday.

Fifth news item

California sees big exodus from state:

California, however, bled outbound citizens so badly, it broke U-Haul’s ability to measure — because the company ran out of trucks to rent:

“California is 50th and Illinois 49th on the list for the second consecutive year, indicating those states once again witnessed the largest net losses of one-way U-Haul trucks. . . . California remained the top state for out-migration, but its net loss of U-Haul trucks wasn’t as severe as in 2020. That can be partially attributed to the fact that U-Haul simply ran out of inventory to meet customer demand for outbound equipment.”

The Democratic supermajority continues to give a lot of Californians reasons to leave. On top of unspeakable levels of traffic congestion, outrageous home prices, exorbitant taxes, crumbling infrastructure, etc., etc., moves like this certainly don’t help encourage a large segment of the population to remain in state:

California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed Monday providing health care coverage to all immigrants, legal and illegal.

This move is part of a statewide effort to reduce its number of uninsured residents, which has shown success. The largest group of people that remains insured by the state’s Medicaid program is people of lower incomes in the United States illegally.

According to a legislative analysis, filling this gap would cost the state $2.4 billion annually. Newsom plans to use a surplus in the state’s $286.4 billion budget to cover this.

And I’ll just leave this here too:

Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K

— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022

Sixth news item

Better plan ahead if you get Covid-19:

The federal website where Americans can request free COVID-19 tests will begin accepting orders on Wednesday as the White House looks to address nationwide shortages, but supplies will be limited to just four free tests per home.

Starting on Jan. 19, the website COVIDTests.gov will provide tests at no cost, including no shipping fee, the White House announced Friday.

But Americans shouldn’t expect a rapid turn-around on the orders and they will have to plan ahead and request the tests well before they meet federal guidelines for when to use a test.

The White House said “tests will typically ship within 7-12 days of ordering” through the U.S. Postal Service, which reports shipping times of 1-3 days for its first-class package service in the continental United States.

Of course, most people with mild-moderate symptoms typically recover within a few weeks, so… On a side note, I went through a drive-thru PCR/rapid testing site last week. I was there 30 mins before they opened, 8th in line. (When I left, the line was three blocks long). It was well organized and easy to get through. From when I swabbed to when I received a text with my results (Neg.) was about 30 minutes. 24 hours later, I received PCR results.

Seventh news item

What??:

As crews cleaned the US Capitol on January 7, 2021, the phone lines in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office began to ring.

Rioters were calling “asking whether there was a lost and found because they forgot their phone there, or they left their purse or what have you,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told Insider on Friday.

Police officers quickly took down information from the callers, Raskin said.

“The officers quickly got on the phone and said, yeah, just give us your name, your address, your social, you know, and we’ll tie up these loose ends,” Raskin said. “But what’s so fascinating to me about that there really were people who felt as if they had been summoned to Washington by the president.”

Eighth news item

Beware the Kraken:

…people close to BILL and HILLARY CLINTON said the former first couple sees it as an opportunity to insert themselves back into political life.

The intra-party divisions have given them a chance to flex their centrist, dealmaking brand of politics as a way to move the party forward.

Bill Clinton has relished the opportunity to whip on behalf of the White House. In addition to pressing Manchin on the filibuster, Clinton suggested that he should salvage Build Back Better by zeroing in on the few elements the West Virginia senator really wants.

“I told Joe, ‘Break it up, pick one or two [pieces] you can swallow and then run on the rest,’” Clinton recalled of their phone call… The idea is drawing interest among party leadership.

Clinton also spoke with Sinema recently, according to one of the people familiar with the call, and said afterward, “I don’t know her, but I like her.”

…

Another factor that motivated Bill Clinton to get more engaged: the low ratings and muted public reaction to “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” the FX show produced by MONICA LEWINSKY, according to a long-time bundler for the couple.

“It’s a perpetual itch that will never go away,” a person close to the couple said of the draw to public life. “They know how to slowly reenter. The Clintons want to reset the board in their favor and then move the pieces.”

As for Hillary Clinton…Even though the people said there’s no chance she runs for president again, the attention allows her to gauge public reaction as she sets her sights on reemerging in lower-profile ways, like campaigning during the midterms or taking on policy fights.

“She’s bored,” the longtime Clinton bundler said of the former secretary of State, senator and first lady, who’s now hosting a MasterClass on “the power of resilience.”

Ninth news item

Mitt doesn’t mince words:

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah on Thursday blasted the Republican National Committee’s plans to prohibit future GOP presidential candidates from participating in debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee and the uncle of the current RNC chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, said the decision would deprive the American people of the opportunity to hear candidates “duke it out.”

“Well, that would be nuts,” Romney told Insider at the Capitol. “The American people want to see candidates for president debating issues of consequence to them, and it provides a service to the country and to the people, to hear the prospective candidates of the two major parties duke it out.”

Hey, have a great weekend.

–Dana

[guest post by JVW]

In my ongoing efforts to make everyone into a more informed yet caustic and bitter voter, I thought I would try to render a bit of assistance to my fellow Patterico’s Pontifications readers who refuse to support the reelection of Donald J. Trump yet can’t countenance voting for a mediocre hack like Joseph R. Biden.

Four years ago I tossed a write-in vote in the direction of Evan McMullin, a man who at the time seemed to me to be an authentic conservative yet in the intervening years has led me to believe that he is a bit of a prima donna and caused me to regret my impulsive move. This time around I have vowed to be more judicious with my vote; no more write-ins for me: I’m going to find somebody on the California ballot worthy of my endorsement. I’ll be investigating the candidates as I write up this post, so what you will get is my snap judgement — which, I hasten to add is unerringly true except in the case of that McMullin fellow — so follow along with me as I learn all about the interesting and accomplished men and women who have tossed their hat into the ring. Without further ado, here they are in the order in which they appear on my ballot:
——–
Jo Jorgensen, President & Jeremy “Spike” Cohen, Vice-President; Libertarian Party
This is probably the most likely landing point for a disaffected conservative, right? I mean now that the battle for drug legalization has mostly been won, everyone seems to hate law enforcement, and nobody wants to send American troops anywhere outside of our own borders, all that’s left for libertarianism would appear to be the battle against the encroaching socialism seen among today’s Democrats. While it’s true that we might not yet be ready to deal with a President who sports bangs, us anti-big-government types who have been frustrated by the current White House occupant’s soft spot for authoritarianism need someone to remind us that taxation is, indeed, theft.

Ms. Jorgensen has a short but sweet URL (jo20.com), befitting a small-government advocate, and her website distills complex policy discussions into pithy one-sentence talking points in the same time-honored way that Democrats and Republicans have done for years. You still have to deal with the famous flakiness of libertarianism (she wants our foreign policy to be that of “one giant Switzerland” and her immigration policy can be un-demagogically characterized as open borders), but knowing that Congressional Republicans and Democrats might be a necessary brake on her ambitions makes her candidacy quite intriguing in this silly year. And who wouldn’t want a Vice-President named Spike?
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Joseph Biden, President & Kamala Harris, Vice-President; Democrat Party
No. Just no.
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Donald Trump, President & Mike Pence, Vice-President; Republican Party
Hard pass.
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Gloria La Riva, President & Sunil Freeman, Vice-President; Peace and Freedom Party
She is running on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, yet the campaign website describes her as “a socialist answer to the two corporatist parties,” and the word “socialism” or “socialist” appears quite frequently. Eat your heart out, Bernie Sanders! In a fortuitous twist for all of us, it turns out the answer to each of the ten key issues that Ms. La Riva identifies as pressing needs is — coincidentally enough — more socialism! People are lacking life’s basics? Give them free stuff! The environment is being depredated? End capitalism! Cops are being mean to people of color? Reparations! Immigrants are having a hard go of it? No more borders! And so on.

If our Adorably Ornery Clueless niece is too milquetoast in her commitment to socialism for your taste, why not go for the Emperor Palpatine to buttercup’s Anakin Skywalker? The water in the deepest part of the well always tastes sweeter.
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Roque “Rocky” de la Fuente Guerra, President & Kayne Omari West, Vice President; American Independent Party
I have a soft spot in my heart for Rocky de la Fuente Guerra (whose name, if I am not mistaken, translates to “from the source of the war”). He’s perhaps the most interesting candidate on the ballot: born in San Diego, raised in Mexico and California, received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, took over his family’s auto dealerships, expanded them, got into banking and land acquisition, had a bunch of disputes with governments at all levels, then embarked upon his second career as a perennial candidate. He’s run for President in the Democrat primaries (2016); the Republican primaries (2020); in the 2016 general election on the American Delta and Reform parties, the former of which was his own creation; and now in the 2020 election representing the American Independent Party, with that beacon of stability and common sense Kayne West as his running mate. When not running for President, Rocky likes to appear as a Democrat candidate for the United States Senate representing Florida (2016), a Republican candidate for New York City mayor (2017), a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate representing California (2018), an unaffiliated candidate for the U.S. Senate representing Washington (2018), a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate representing Florida (2018), as well as various offices in Wyoming, Hawaii, Minnesota, Vermont, Delaware, and Rhode Island. Earlier this spring he ran as a Democrat in the jungle primary for California’s 21st District House seat. His son Ricardo, who had previous run for House in seats in Florida and California, won a primary and is now the Democrat candidate for the 27th Congressional district of Texas. His other son, Roque III, managed to get on the Democrat Presidential primary ballot this year in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, New Hampshire, Texas, and Utah.

Seriously, what’s not to love about this family?

Rocky père is running on a largely left-wing platform: single-payer health care, amnesty for immigrants, “livable” income for those who can’t work, job guarantees, green energy transformation, end overseas adventurism, raise Social Security contributions, etc. No matter that most of it doesn’t add up: if you are looking for an unserious man for rather unserious times, you can’t do any better.
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Howie Hawkins, President & Angela Nicole Walker, Vice-President; Green Party
Speaking of unserious candidates, Mr. Hawkins has managed to swipe the endorsement of the Socialist Party USA right out from underneath Ms. La Riva, perhaps on the strength of his Jeremy Corbyn-like beard. Though he had hopes of winning the Peace & Freedom Party nomination too, Ms. La Riva nudged him out for that honor to secure her place on my ballot. Mr. Hawkins (who likes to be referred to as “Howie,” so I’ll refer to him as “Mr. Hawkins”) styles himself an “ecosocialist” which, he hastens to inform us, is different from bureaucratic state-socialism. He advocates “communalism,” though without the racial or religious overtones, probably because its close cousin communism implies that public pension or trust-fund Greens will be “asked” to share with the less fortunate. He’s also against the U.S. developing a first-strike nuclear weapons capacity, so he’s thus lost my vote.

Like any good fringe candidate, Mr. Hawkins’ website is chock-full of position papers, platform documents, op-eds, speech transcripts, and moderately-lucid rantings about the things that anger socialists the most: success, wealth, autonomy, and freedom. Facing up to the reality that he won’t win, Mr. Hawkins declares a goal of expanding ballot access to Green Party candidates, so he must be fairly cheesed that the Democrats have conspired to keep him off the ballot on technicalities in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, two states in which he could conceivably hurt Joe Biden’s candidacy.
——–
So, short of writing in My Little Aloha Sweetie (which, to be honest, is probably at least a 50% liklihood at this point) I think I’ll probably vote for Jo Jorgensen. If BLM or antifa thugs later menace me, I can always say to them, “Hey, I’m on your side; I voted for Jo!” and as long as they don’t make me write it out I’ll probably have them fooled. I can also burnish my already sterling credentials as a woke feminist by pointing out that I voted for a woman for President in both the primary election and in the general election. In this awful year, it helps to be crazier than the times in which you live.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

I mentioned a while back that one negative consequence of sliding Little Aloha Sweetie and Crazy Cute Hippie Chick a few bucks to get them on the Democrat debate stage last winter is that I have ended up on the DNC’s mailing list. I decided to track the emails that I received between September 22 and October 15, and you can see the results at this Google Sheet. During that 24-day period there arrived in my mailbox 255 email messages from the Dems, not to mention the other 182 email message from the Dems which landed in my spam folder (for what it’s worth, emails from Donald Trump and Mike Pence also go straight to the spam folder).

I’ll have some further posts about the assortment of pleas, promises, lies, threats, and admonishments that I have received, but today I want to highlight my (one-sided) correspondence with the beating heart of the Democrat Party, a seasoned veteran who has been a steady leader in Washington lo these many decades, a voice of reason who has risen through the party ranks to the highest level of leadership by bridging the party’s establishment flank with its progressive idealists. I am referring of course to the one, the only, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

(Oh, did you guys think I was referring to Slow Joe Biden? Pffffffffft.)

Anyway, Speaker Pelosi, whom I like to refer to as Aunt Nancy, has been my most loyal correspondent. Over those two-dozen days to which I referred above, she has appeared in my inbox no fewer than 36 times, four-and-one-half times as often as the party’s nominee for President, nine times more often than lazy Barack Obama, and thirty-six times more often than sweet but useless Jimmy Carter. Lazy-ass Chuck Schumer hasn’t bothered to email me so much as once; it’s Aunt Nancy, den mother to the party, who is doing all of the hard work, and if that’s not blatant sexism then I’m not a woke feminist.

But I’m really not here to settle scores. The reason, friends, that I want to highlight the efforts of our beloved Speaker is because, quite frankly, I am worried about her. She started off by writing to me through her Team Pelosi account on September 22, warning me that Mitch McConnell had raised a whole Clintonload of money. The next day, however, she was emailing from her personal campaign account, buoyantly reporting that Cocaine Mitch had admitted on television that the GOP could lose the Senate. By the next day, she was optimistic that Democrats could block a Republican nomination to the Supreme Court. It seemed that things were trending well for her party, and Aunt Nancy had every reason to be feeling happy about her position.

But then it all started getting rough. On September 26 Aunt Nancy sent me a message with the subject line “outraged.” She reported that she had just watched President Trump announce the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, and our Speaker was incredulous to see “Republicans fall in line and cheer for the destruction of our health care.” Two days later, she had come down from outrage and now self-reported as “deeply concerned” about the nomination of Judge Barrett, recycling a verbal tic popularized by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. The next night — the night of the first Presidential Debate — she reported that President Trump had raised $1.33 billion (huh?) and asked me to help counter that massive sum by passing along $5-25, or maybe $500 or more, to the DNC.

On the morning of the last day of September, Aunt Nancy started to spiral downward. I found in my inbox a message from her with the subject line “livid.” Uh-oh, I thought to myself, today would be a really bad day for our Adorable but Clueless Niece to pull some silly left-wing shit like wearing an ACAB shirt or something, and I sincerely hoped that dear AOC would take heed and keep a low profile. Anyway, our Speaker was agitated by Trump’s debate performance the previous evening. Fair enough. But later that day (Aunt Nancy would email me three times on September 30) she sounded determined, reminding me that the last day of the month was her final opportunity to reach her September fundraising goal. Every organization should have a fundraiser or salesperson as dedicated and thorough as Nancy Pelosi, I am telling you. She then took a week off, which I really think she deserved, with the lone exception of an October 3 message about how the GOP has imperiled the post office, because an organization that on average delivers 182 million pieces of first-class mail each and every day apparently somehow needs billions and billions of additional dollars in funding to deliver an extra 200 million ballots to voters, then pick up, process, and deliver maybe three-quarters of them all within the course of roughly 24 mailing days. But never mind that, I was just happy that Aunt Nancy was getting the rest she needed so that she could come back and finish October strong.

But I don’t know that it worked. On October 8 she was back to being agitated that Vice-President Mike Pence had “defile[d] our democracy during his first and ONLY [sic] debate performance.” By the 11th, I was receiving email from her with the subject line “deeply alarming” (Cocaine Mitch had hauled in $55.7 million for Republican Senate candidates), and by the 13th she was back to being “livid,” this time over the lies that President Trump had told at a rally. Since then, I have received three additional email messages from her in which the subject line is simply “livid”: Lindsey Graham pushing through the ACB nomination (October 22), President Trump once again lying at a rally (October 23), and the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett (yesterday).

Guys, that’s just way too much lividity for an 80-year-old woman to bear. She deserves so much better: lockdown evenings scarfing down pints of $13 ice cream from her $24,000 freezer, seeking bailouts for profligate-spending states who have chosen to hamstring their economies with strict lockdowns, or even time spent with her grandkids, if she really must. She doesn’t need nor deserve the aggravation of lying Republicans doing their Constitutionally-proscribed duty so close to an elections in which she is just sure her party will clean up. Maybe if a deadbeat like I had sent her party a few bucks when she had repeatedly requested it of me, she might have been a bit less livid. I guess we’ll never know.

In any case, spare a thought for our embattled Speaker who finds herself veering from (all of these taken from the subject lines in her email messages) dismayed to outraged to livid. It’s a lonely life she leads on behalf of a grateful nation, and she deserves a whole lot better from the likes of us.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

Because I slid a few bucks to My Little Aloha Sweetie and to the Crazy Cute Hippie Chick in order to help their odds of remaining in the primary debates, I now find myself on the Democrat National Committee’s email list. Every day, usually multiple times I day, I am sent a message ostensibly from some party hack like Nancy Pelosi or Tom Perez, or else some candidate desperate to raise money like John Hickenlooper, or even from staffers writing on behalf of Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. Inevitably they question my fealty to progressive causes and the Democrat party (and rightfully so!) and ask me to donate time or money or both to the party’s candidates. It’s nothing unusual: I got the same thing from the GOP back when I was registered in that party.

But Democrats being Democrats, I was hit with what I thought was a really obnoxious ad earlier this evening, very badly targeted to a crude schlub like my own self. Carrying the subject line “19 of the country’s top designers have come together to create clothing in support of Joe Biden and Democrats” it was an exercise in the obnoxious trendiness of the party of the cool, hip, and glamorous. Since I have become something of an expert on campaign merchandise, I just knew I had to take a closer look. Here’s a gander at the insufferable twee wokeness of the fashionista left:

Hey, I’m the first to admit that I know virtually nothing about modern fashion, but the names of the “19 of the country’s top designers” were absolutely unknown to me with the exception of one, Vera Wang. But these fashion mavens who generally create high-end fashion that can run in the five figures (all five of them, incidentally, coming to the left of the decimal point) appear to have given their least talented sub-sub-sub assistants the task of designing affordable campaign merchandise that only costs about what Joe and Jill Biden report giving to charity every couple of months in years when he isn’t on a Presidential ticket, or, to use a more generationally-appropriate comparison, what Mr. and Mrs. Robert O’Rourke of El Paso report giving on average every three weeks.

So when you’re looking for that great designer campaign piece in the $60 range, you can go with this Vera Wang hooded sweatshirt:

Or, if it is far too warm where you live to don a hoodie, you can go with this Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez t-shirt whose inspiration they ripped-off — sorry, I mean borrowed — from midcentury American artist Jasper Johns:

But if you’re down to your last few bucks yet don’t want to miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime collaboration between 19 of the country’s top designers and the Biden-Harris campaign, perhaps you can spring for this fashionable — yet functional! — facemask from Monique Péan, which Dinosaur Joe would force you to wear until November were it not for that pesky Constitution:

You can see the rest of the swag from designers such as Brett Heyman, Jason Wu, Prabal Gurung, Carly Cushine and other notables (I’ll take their word for it!) of the fashion world here. While they are all certainly better than the “I was that little girl” t-shirt from the Harris campaign, none of them hold a candle to the bitchin’ LGBTQ tank-top that the Biden campaign rolled out during last year’s Pride Week.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

Our host took us through the big night for JoJo the Indefatigable Dog-Faced Pony Soldier Boy, so I want to focus on some other races. But first, a word about the crazy evening.

A quick perusal of Twitter looking at various trending topics will suggest that the Bernie Bros and Babes are not at all happy with last night’s developments, as a search on #BernieOrBust2020 or #RiggedPrimary will make clear. What’s even more fun is that Biden supporters are clapping-back claiming that it is only Republican trolls or Russian operatives who are pretending to be Sanders supporters threatening to sit out the fall election, but if that were true then it would mean that the devious GOP and Russians have been planning this operation for the past ten years and have been carefully cultivating Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers and histories of left-wing tweets. I have no idea what Joe Biden will be able to do to bring the Sanders people back in the fold, but I can’t see him being any more successful than Hillary Clinton was at that endeavor.

I kind of hope that the Green Mountain Marxist makes a comeback and beats Slow Joe in Michigan (where he beat Her Clintonic Majesty four years ago) and Ohio, thus undermining Biden’s claim that he can put the Rust Belt states back into the Democrat column. In fact, if you compare the Clinton-Sanders race back then to the Biden-Sanders race today, the same sort of voting patterns are emerging. This is as good a sign as any that Senator Stalin has not expanded his voting base one damn bit since last time around, and we already know that there has not been some magical turn-out of young voters, no matter how dominant they may be the the social media realm. But again, I would love to see this whole thing arrive unsettled in Milwaukee later this summer.
——

Now for some local news:

California went for Comrade Candidate, but by what is shaping up to be a smaller margin than had been anticipated. The average of polls going in to yesterday suggested a twelve-point spread for Sanders over Biden, but the semi-final results show closer to a margin of under nine percent for the geriatric revolutionary. Voting in hyper-progressive California began in some counties as early as two weeks ago, and according to the Dog Trainer there were a quarter-million voters in Los Angeles County who cast their ballots prior to Tuesday, with some statewide estimates suggesting that over a half-million voters — not counting mail-in ballots — voted prior to our official election day. How many of these ballots were marked for candidates such as Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar who dropped out before Tuesday is uncertain, but if our state is going to fetishize early voting then this is what we are going to have to learn to accept.

For what it’s worth, the Congressional district where our host and I both reside thus far has Biden at 29.7% and Sanders at 24.5%, with Lieawatha with 15.5% and Buttigieg, Bloomberg, and Klobuchar combining for 26.9%. Patterico chose a winner as far as our neighborhood is concerned. I and 469 other hearty and patriotic souls cast votes for My Little Aloha Sweetie, and I anticipate her numbers will swell as we continue to count votes up until the April 3 deadline (you read that right; we have thirty days to count the votes).
——

Proposition 13 on this year’s ballot, which had nothing to do with the famous property tax limitation Proposition 13 passed in 1978 but instead was this time a ham-handed attempt to get the state to use bond money to guarantee school repair funding so that a larger share of the general funds could go towards pension and benefit obligations, went down to glorious defeat yesterday. Close to 56% of voters voted “No,” though naturally San Francisco voters were by a ratio of 3:1 in favor of the proposition and ought to thus be disqualified from ever voting again on a tax measure. Combined with last year’s embarrassing defeat of the LAUSD parcel tax and a slew of other failed school tax initiatives on yesterday’s ballot, I am cautiously optimistic that the voters of this state are finally waking up to the idea that throwing more money at structural weaknesses in policy and the bureaucracy on behalf of “children” or “veterans” or “the homeless” is a waste of valuable resources, though it could just be a sign that California voters are happy raising someone else’s taxes, just not their own. In any case, if I were an advocate of the split-roll property tax initiative proposed for November — the first serious attempt to challenge the original Prop 13 tax protections enacted forty-two years ago — I would be seriously worried about the chances for success given what we have recently seen.
——

It looks promising for Patterico’s boss, Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, who at this writing is holding on to roughly 50.7% of the vote in a three-person race, with almost double the support of her closest challenger, former San Francisco DA George Gascón. If she can stay above the fifty percent mark and avert a fall runoff we may avoid the trendy hug-a-miscreant style of public safety policy that the wokedy-woke are trying to impose on municipalities all across the country. But with mail-in ballots left to be counted and with all sorts of problems with county elections this time around, it may be some time before we know for sure whether we have dodged the Soros-funded move to blame society for the failings of criminals.

In any case, there was lots of good news for conservatives yesterday, including a handful of California Republicans with surprisingly strong showings in Congressional and state legislative races on a night when it was Democrat races that brought out the voters. It will be interesting to see if this momentum carries over into November, and if we can at long last momentarily slow the Golden State’s massive lurch to the left.

– JVW