The number one British album today in 1970 for the first of eight times on top of the British charts:
The number one British single today in 1976 was about a supposed event 12 years earlier:
The number one single today in 1981:
The Bloomberg and Bernie battle is almost like a comic book come to life. The two combatants cover almost every cliché on the right-wing scorecard.
The right couldn’t have invented a better candidate than Bernie Sanders. In 1971, he was kicked out of a commune for talking too much. In 1987(!) he recorded a folk album. The following year he got married and left the next day for a combination fact-finding delegation and honeymoon in the Soviet Union. When he returned, he sounded a bit like Lincoln Steffens, the famous journalist who had said of the USSR, “I have seen the future and it works.” In Steffens’ defense, he visited in 1919, two years after its founding and before most of the inconvenient mass murder and starvation. Sanders thought the Soviet Union was the future three years before it collapsed.
Of course, this isn’t why most of his fans like him. He was on the right side of the civil rights movement when it really mattered. He’s been a consistent advocate of what he calls democratic socialism here at home all his life. And, he’s an unreconstructed enemy of the economic elites, particularly the hated “billionaire class.”
Which brings us to Michael R. Bloomberg, who sits atop the 1% of the 1%. Bloomberg is a perfect stand-in for a completely different kind of liberalism, one that doesn’t even like to call itself liberal. He headlined the launch of No Labels, an organization dedicated to getting ideology out of politics. A lifelong Democrat, he switched labels to become a Republican to run for mayor in 2001. By his third term he was an independent. Now he’s a Democrat because he’s running for president.
As mayor of New York, he was a poster boy for a kind of arrogant progressive-post-partisan technocratic government that prizes data over feelings. The data showed that obesity cost the healthcare system money, sugary sodas contributed to obesity, so Bloomberg said let’s clamp down on them. The data showed that young black men committed most of the gun homicides, so Bloomberg said, let’s clamp down on them with stop and frisk. “Ninety-five percent of murders, murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops,” he explained in 2015.
In a new video going around, Bloomberg offers a quasi-endorsement of “death panels.” “If you show up with prostate cancer, you’re 95 years old, [we] should say go and enjoy, you’ve lived a long life, there’s no cure. We can’t do anything,” Bloomberg says. “If you’re a young person, we should do something about it. Society’s not willing to do that, yet.”
This isn’t why his fans like him. For a long time he was an icon of the credentialed upper class who saw ideological culture war fights as so much boob-bait. More recently, he’s become the liberal’s “Chicago way” response to Trump. If the right comes at you with a billionaire would-be Putin, you come back with a bigger billionaire and would-be Lee Kuan Yew.
Both men represent two strands of liberalism with very long pedigrees. Sanders can trace his lineage back to antiwar socialists and populists like William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Debs, as well as to reformers like Jane Addams. Bloomberg’s antecedents can be found in the democracy-skeptical “disinterested” progressive pragmatists like Walter Lippmann, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Wisconsin school economists. Usually these two strands intertwine and overlap, (Barack Obama had a foot in both camps. He was both the anointed leader of a mass movement and the overseer of the Affordable Care Act, with all of its data driven rationing). But when stripped to their purest elements, one camp is all about solidarity and people power and the other is about technocratic expertise.
Like Trump, both men are beneficiaries of our hollowed-out political parties, which are incapable of performing the gatekeeper function of the nomination process.
And that raises the stakes of their contest. Trump has transformed much of the GOP in his image. Too weak to protect their own brand, the Republicans have adopted his.
If either Sanders or Bloomberg wins the nomination, it will be interesting to see if the same thing happens to Democrats. If it’s Sanders, will they become a populist party of Social Democrats? Or if it’s Bloomberg, will the Democrats become the party of bureaucratic authoritarianism?
Again, normally Democratic politicians straddle these two tendencies. There are, of course, still other options for primary voters. But the choice between these two is zero-sum, and if either man wins, the Democratic Party could end up making a choice that will define it as much as Trump has come to define the GOP.
Mike Bloomberg once pointed to the in utero child of an employee and said “kill it, kill it,” according to two witnesses.
According to another female employee, he would say of attractive women, “I’d like to do that piece of meat.”
“It’s a f—ing baby,” Bloomberg reportedly yelled at another female employee when she was scrambling to find a nanny for her child. “All it does is eat and shit! It doesn’t know the difference between you and anyone else! All you need is some black who doesn’t even have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building!”
It’s easy to assume that Bloomberg, like the man he wants to replace in the White House, is simply selfish, crude, and misogynistic. It’s tempting to see Bloomberg’s cutthroat capitalism as unrelated to, or even at odds with, his social liberalism. But there’s a bigger story here, a pattern that becomes clear when you consider Mike Bloomberg in full.
Bloomberg’s odd apology for China’s authoritarian communist regime is not some weird blind spot. His embrace of stop-and-frisk policing was not just some New York City thing. And his nanny-statism on sodas, cigarettes, and trans fats is not merely an over-enthusiasm for clean living.
Nor is Bloomberg an inconsistent thinker or some nonideological independent. He has a very clear view of the world that underlies his economic policies, his social policies, his personal life, and his behavior. Bloomberg’s ideology is neither left nor right. Instead, his worldview is supremely materialistic, and ultimately inhuman.
In Bloomberg’s eyes, any talk of the dignity of the human person is mawkish sentimentality. Mike Bloomberg doesn’t see people as ends in themselves, but instead as means to ends.
Begin with Bloomberg’s disturbing warmth toward China’s regime. Bloomberg News has, according to insiders, spiked stories that were critical of the regime. Bloomberg also kicked off his current presidential run by praising China’s environmental record and lauding the way the government holds power, in addition to rejecting the idea that Xi Jinping is a dictator, suggesting that a majority of the population approves of his rule.
At best, Bloomberg is saying that individual liberty and free expression can be suppressed, so long as the guy suppressing them could, in theory, find public support for it — and by “support,” he’s not necessarily referring to a free election. That’s unnerving, coming from a guy running to become president.
In this context, consider his Big Gulp bans, his smoking bans, his trans-fat bans, and his tireless campaign to outlaw guns. Bloomberg clearly rejects the notion that ordinary people should be allowed to make their own mistakes. Treating adults as adults and respecting their self-determination is not something Bloomberg believes in.
So, how then to understand his massive support for Planned Parenthood, his 100% pro-choice record on abortion, and his call to deregulate abortion clinics? Just go back to his workplace conduct.
Telling an expectant mother to kill her baby, mocking a new mother’s desire for quality child care, cursing whenever a female employee gets pregnant, and publicly denigrating marriage among professional women all reflect a clear and consistent mindset: The women who worked for him were worker bees. Their humanity, their fertility, their love, and their human attachments were all impediments to productivity. He saw these women as means to his ends of profit.
Hence the misogyny, the keeping of a girlfriend in every city (and bragging about it), the jokes that some employees’ value was in providing sexual favors — that all fits in, too.
Once you see Bloomberg as someone who rejects the dignity of the individual, his attitude toward policing makes sense. The virtue of his “stop-and-frisk” practice, Bloomberg once explained to a crowd of elites, was that officers would stop black and Hispanic children without probable cause and “throw them up against the wall and frisk them,” so as to scare them straight.
That may seem to you to be inhumane and demeaning. Bloomberg sees that as being realistic. The former mayor tellingly described criminals and crime victims in New York as all being the same: “You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops.”
Human beings, to Bloomberg, are not unique creatures, all deserving freedom, respect, and dignity. They are not ends in themselves, in Bloomberg’s eyes. People are either inconveniences to be ignored or terminated (babies), threats to be neutralized and intimidated (minority males), corporate machine parts to be exploited for profit (employees), or tools for sexual gratification (women).
It may look like Bloomberg’s views and policies are all over the place, until you see people the way Bloomberg does. And once you’ve seen him for what he is, you can’t unsee it.
Another cautionary note about Bloomberg that is emerging: His critics on the right and on the left see the same traits that trouble them.
Zaid Jilani: “It’s hardly a surprise that Bloomberg is on record defending the Chinese system of government, insisting that Xi Jinping is “not a dictator”. Bloomberg sees himself as an enlightened autocrat, who uses his money to get around inefficient democratic processes.” …
We probably all know someone in life who is a genius or indisputable runaway success in one area — making money, working out computer problems, cooking, understanding the tax code, being a coach, sorting out engineering problems — but who is not nearly as wise and astute in other areas of life. His relationships are a mess, he freezes up when speaking in public, he’s socially awkward, he micromanages others. Human beings are rarely good at all tasks.
Mike Bloomberg is that kind of personality who believes that because his judgment was proven correct in one area — building a fortune — that his judgment must be inerrant in just about all areas. (You no doubt have noticed that the current president is not exactly a bubbling fountain of humility, modesty, and self-effacement, either.) Colorado Springs and Pueblo are “a part of Colorado where I don’t think there’s roads.” Bloomberg is unconvinced God exists, but believes that if He does, “when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.” He declared, “if you want to have a gun in your house, I think you’re pretty stupid.”
If you disagree, hey, he’s the eighth-richest man in America, and you’re not. What could you possibly know that he doesn’t?
The Beatles had quite a schedule today in 1963. They drove from Liverpool to London through the night to appear on the BBC’s “Parade of the Pops,” which was on live at noon.
After their two songs, they drove back north another three hours to get to their evening performance at the Swimming Baths in Doncaster.
The number one song today in 1965:
Assume, for a moment, that the Democratic primary comes down to a choice between Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg. (Some might argue that it already has; yesterday the Bloomberg News organization reported an exclusive that the Bloomberg presidential campaign organization believed that the race already came down to Sanders and the Bloomberg presidential candidate. That strikes me as premature, as well as far too many “Bloomberg” monikers in one sentence.)
That said, former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe contends that right now Sanders is on pace to lock up a pledged delegate lead he will not relinquish by Super Tuesday, March 3. The Vermont senator wouldn’t clinch the nomination that day. But he would be so far ahead that he would be virtually guaranteed to go into Milwaukee with an insurmountable lead in delegates. At that point, the party couldn’t afford not to nominate him. He would finish about 20 percentage points ahead of anyone else.
For Democrats, the decision in the coming weeks may come down to a particularly challenging conundrum. If you nominate Sanders, how many anti-Sanders Democrats and independents drift away in the general election? And if you nominate Bloomberg, how many anti-Bloomberg Democrats and independents drift away in the general election?
The Trump campaign and fans of the president shouldn’t fool themselves; the vast majority of people supporting either Sanders or Bloomberg are going to vote for the eventual Democratic nominee. But “vast majority” might mean about 80 to 90 percent, and that might not be enough where it counts when all the votes are tallied on Election Day.
Did Sanders voters cost Hillary Clinton the presidency? Many political scientists have gone through the exit polls and come up with different estimates of just how many Sanders primary voters ended up voting for Trump in the general elections. The low end of estimates is 6 percent, the high end is 12 percent. Political scientist Brian Schaffner put it at 12 percent nationally, and offered a state-level estimate: In Wisconsin, 9 percent of Sanders voters cast ballots for Trump, in Michigan, 8 percent of Sanders voters cast ballots for Trump, and in Pennsylvania, 16 percent of Sanders voters cast ballots for Trump. That comes out to about 51,000 voters in Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin of victory was 22,000. That comes out to about 47,000 voters in Michigan, where Trump’s margin of victory was 10,000. That comes out to about 116,000 voters in Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin of victory was 44,000. Notice that even if you cut the Sanders-to-Trump estimates in half . . . you still end up with a sum larger than the Trump margin.
In other words . . . yeah, Bernie Sanders voters ended up making Donald Trump president in 2016.
The good news for Democrats is that nominating Sanders brings back at least a chunk of those voters. A “socialist grandpa” candidate doesn’t give off a vibe of urban elitist condescension. The bad news for Democrats is that nominating Sanders probably loses a chunk of Hillary Clinton voters.
Down-ticket Democrats aren’t mincing words: Nominating Sanders puts a lot of them in danger of defeat in November.
“They’re terrified,” Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., the first House Democrat to endorse Buttigieg, told ABC News of his colleagues’ response to Sanders’ rise. “Very few people see Bernie as electable.”
“It could be challenging in parts of the country that we have to win in order to win the presidency and win a majority in the Senate,” Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., a centrist who dropped his own White House bid after the New Hampshire primary, said Thursday of a Sanders’ nomination.
Rep. Anthony Brindisi, a New York Democrat fighting for reelection in a district carried by Trump in 2016, wouldn’t commit to supporting Sanders if he becomes the party’s nominee for president.
“He won’t be the party’s nominee,” he said Thursday when repeatedly asked if he’d support Sanders in the general election. “I’ve made it clear that I think we should nominate a more moderate candidate who has the ability to reach across the aisle and get things done.”
A House Democrat in a swing district who did not want to be identified told the New York Times that if the Democrats nominated Sanders, “there is a growing concern among especially those of us on the front lines that we will not only lose the White House but the House of Representatives.” Texas Democrats believe Sanders would torpedo their hopes of big gains in the state legislature.
Socialism — explicit socialism, wearing the label proudly — has only niche appeal in this country. The Democratic Socialists of America endorsed 42 candidates in 20 states in 2018. None of their senatorial candidates won, neither of their gubernatorial candidates won, and three of their twelve House candidates won: incumbent Danny Davis in Illinois, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib. As you may have noticed, those are heavily Democratic districts.
Wait, there’s one other wrinkle, and I’m not making an age joke. Sanders said yesterday he had changed his mind and will not release any more of his medical records. This is a 78-year-old man who had a heart attack in October. At the time, the senator’s campaign said he had been hospitalized with “chest pains,” and three days later announced he had a heart attack and that doctors had inserted two stents.
Like any good politician, Jill Karofsky wants the public to know where she stands on the issues and how she will enact an agenda based on her ideals once elected.
“I believe in protecting our environment from corporate polluters, protecting women’s health care, and holding corrupt politicians accountable,” she says in a television ad that has been running all month.
It’s direct, to the point, and effective. It also completely disqualifies her as a serious candidate for the office she seeks.
“As your Supreme Court Justice,” she concludes in her ad, “I’ll make decisions based on the law.”
The irony here is at once laughable and terrifying. Karofsky, a very liberal Dane County Circuit Court judge, is promising to make decisions based on the law while listing off decisions that she would leave to her own conscience. Restrictions on abortion? She’d strike them down because she believes in “protecting women’s health care.” Disputes over mining regulations? Sorry, corporate polluters, but she will be the greatest champion for the environment since Captain Planet.
Not content to simply legislate from the bench, Jill Karofsky is promising to legislate from a hunch—relying on nothing more than the brilliance and morality of…Jill Karofsky.
Hers is the worst sort of judicial arrogance; a deeply held belief in her own ability to delineate right from wrong independent of the U.S. or Wisconsin Constitutions, applicable statutes, and relevant case law. It also violates the state’s Code of Judicial Conduct.
SCR 60.06 3(b) explicitly provides that “a judge, judge-elect, or candidate for judicial office shall not make…with respect to cases, controversies, or issues that are likely to come before the court, pledges, promises, or commitments that are inconsistent with the impartial performance of the adjudicative duties of the office.”
Promising to stand up against “corporate polluters,” “corrupt politicians,” and anyone who would threaten “women’s health care” is about as blatant a violation of both the letter and spirit of this guideline as one could imagine.
Land use, abortion issues (which is rather obviously what Karofsky means by “women’s health care”) and political corruption cases will obviously come before her, should she be elected to the Supreme Court, and could conceivably come before her in her current role on the Dane County Circuit Court.
How can she possibly adjudicate these cases fairly when she is openly advertising the fact that she will rule for certain parties and against others?
In December, she used her Twitter account (@JudgeKarofsky), which clearly identifies her as a judge, to publicly call for stricter gun control legislation.
“Families in Sparta and at Waukesha North have also had to deal with lockdowns in the last couple of days, and incidents like these have been happening all over Wisconsin, including a ‘hit list’ in Shorewood,” she tweeted in the wake of a particularly troubling week in the state. “I’m thankful for first responders who keep us safe.
“But that’s not enough. As a parent, I know our kids shouldn’t have to fear for their lives at school, and not a single parent should be worrying about whether our kids are coming home after school. It’s up to the policy-makers to decide what the law should be, and judges like me are here to apply and interpret the law. But I know action is needed.
“We can respect constitutional rights and at the same time take steps to make every family safer. It’s way past time for lawmakers to step up to the plate.”
Does that screed leave any conceivable doubt about how she would rule on gun control legislation signed by Governor Evers? Even if such a law represents a gross violation of the citizenry’s Second Amendment rights, Karofsky’s stated belief that “more action is needed” to “make every family safer” prejudices her in favor of the law’s constitutionality.
It is thus impossible for Karofsky to impartially (and therefore ethically) hear any gun control case that would come before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but given her stated mission to crusade against the proliferation of firearms, does anyone really believe that she would recuse herself?
Of course not. Activists like her live to decide these sorts of cases by substituting personal political preferences like the ones Karofsky tweeted for actual precedent and Constitutional principle.
By contrast, her opponent, incumbent Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly actually did recuse himself from the most hot-button political case of the year, even though it meant handing a (temporary) victory to his political opponents.
Last month, Kelly recused himself from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s lawsuit against the Wisconsin Election Commission over the Commission’s refusal to follow state law and remove more than 200,000 names from voter registration lists.
Because the ruling would affect the Spring Election and Kelly is on the ballot and could theoretically benefit from that ruling, he recused himself. Political conservatives were beside themselves since his vote would have broken a 3-3 tie (fellow conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn sided with the Court’s two liberals) and allowed the Supreme Court to immediately take up the case instead of waiting for it to make its way through the appeals process.
Even though it could have benefited him and his political supporters, Justice Kelly recognized that sitting on the case would have violated the Code of Judicial Conduct. Even though political conservatives were furious with him, as a judicial conservative Kelly could not have made any other decision.
Wisconsin faces a clear choice on April 7th: Principled, moral deference to governing law or shameless, reckless politicking.
Karofsky’s advertisements and Twitter rants are the very essence of judicial activism and illustrate why it is so dangerous. Justice Kelly, on the other hand, has just demonstrated his strict adherence to the Rule of Law. The April 7th election, then, isn’t so much a contest between two judges as it is a battle for what Wisconsin wants its Supreme Court to be.
Democrats are panicking over the prospect that socialist Bernie Sanders could win the Democrat nomination for president, saying that he would cause massive damage to the United States.
South Carolina Democrat Representative Joe Cunningham strongly pushed back on Sanders’ extremist proposals, which would cost between $60 trillion to $100 trillion, a figure that would easily bankrupt the U.S.
“South Carolinians don’t want socialism,” Cunningham said. “We want to know how you are going to get things done and how you are going to pay for them. Bernie’s proposals to raise taxes on almost everyone is not something the Lowcountry wants and not something I’d ever support.”
Self-described “registered Democrat” Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, warned that Sanders would destroy America’s economy and that Russia would use him to destroy America.
“If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military,” Blankfein said. “If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around.”
…Other so-called “moderate” Democrats warned that nominating Sanders could cost the Democrats the m majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“The anxiety is particularly acute on Capitol Hill among a small but politically important group of freshman Democrats who helped their party win control of the House in 2018 by flipping Republican seats in districts that President Trump won in 2016. Now, they fear that having a self-declared democratic socialist at the top of the ticket could doom their re-election chances in November,” The New York Times reported. “Members of the group of about three dozen — often called ‘front-liners’ or ‘majority-makers’— have toiled to carve out political identities distinct from their party’s progressive base, and most are already facing competitive re-election challenges from Republicans who bill them as radicals who have empowered a far-left agenda in Congress.”
Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) told The New York Times: “I’m the first Democrat to win in my district since 1958. I attracted a lot of independent and moderate Republican support, many of whom probably voted for a Democrat for the first time in a long time. And while I respect Bernie Sanders as a senator, as a candidate, his candidacy is very challenging for people who come from districts like mine.”
Another member of Congress, who did not feel comfortable criticizing Sanders publicly, told the Times: “There is a growing concern among especially those of us on the front lines that we will not only lose the White House but the House of Representatives.”
Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) said, “If Bernie Sanders was at the top of the ticket, we would be in jeopardy of losing the House. We would not get the Senate back.”
Steve Israel, former chairmen of the party’s House campaign arm, told the Times that Trump will use the fact that Sanders is a socialist to decimate Democrats in down ballot races.
Israel said, “Donald Trump will paint every Democrat — whether they’re running for U.S. Senate or county sheriff — as a socialist, as a ‘Bernie Sanders socialist,’ and that’s a tough deal in a lot of these districts.”
One wonders specifically how that will go over in the Third Congressional District, represented by supposedly moderate, bipartisan Rep. Ron Kind (D–La Crosse).
Sanders, however, is not a Democrat. He remains an independent in the Senate, though he is running for president for the second time.
Someone who is an actual Democrat isn’t impressed, according to Paul Bois:
A fiery feud has escalated between veteran Democratic Party strategist James Carville and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Just one day after the socialist candidate referred to him as a “political hack,” Carville angrily fired back, denouncing Bernie Sanders as a “communist.”
According to Peter Hanby, a contributor to Vanity Fair, James Carville said in a phone interview on Thursday that he relishes the label “political hack” and took it as a compliment.
“Last night on CNN, Bernie called me a political hack. That’s exactly who the f*** I am!” said Carville. “I am a political hack! I am not an ideologue. I am not a purist. He thinks it’s a pejorative. I kinda like it!”
“At least I’m not a communist,” he added. …
The feud between the former Clinton adviser and Bernie Sanders kicked off last week when Carville told Vox that he was “scared to death” of the upcoming election following the disastrous Iowa caucus.
“Look, the turnout in the Iowa caucus was below what we expected, what we wanted. Trump’s approval rating is probably as high as it’s been,” said Carville. “This is very bad. And now it appears the party can’t even count votes. What the hell am I supposed to think?”
“We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration,” Carville continued. “They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election.”
“There’s no chance in hell we’ll ever win the Senate with Sanders at the top of the party defining it for the public,” he added.
Shortly thereafter, Carville doubled-down on his attacks against Sanders and specifically denounced the “cult” that seems to have built up around him.
“The only thing, the only thing between the United States and the abyss is the Democratic Party. That’s it. If we go the way of the British Labour Party, if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days. … So I am scared to death, I really am,” Carville said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“If we lose that, we’re going to be the British Labour Party and be out in some theoretical left-wing la-la land,” he continued. “There’s a certain part of the Democratic Party that wants us to be a cult. I’m not interested in being in a cult.
Wednesday night, in an appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Bernie Sanders dismissed Carville as a “political hack” while vowing to fight establishment figures like himself from being in control of the Democratic Party.
“Look, James, in all due respect, is a political hack who said very terrible things when he was working for Clinton against Barack Obama,” Sanders said. “We are taking on Trump, the Republican establishment, Carville, and the Democratic establishment. At the end of the day the grassroots movement we are putting together of young people, of working people, of people of color, want real change.”
Today in 1956, Elvis Presley performed three shows at the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory in Tampa, Fla. Presley closed the final show by announcing to the crowd of 14,000, “Girls, I’ll see you backstage.”
Many of them took Presley at his word. Presley barely made it into his dressing room, losing some of his clothes and his shoes in the girl gauntlet.
The number one single today in 1966 here (on the singer’s birthday) …
… and over there:
James Wigderson:
Tuesday is the Spring Primary, which is when we sort out the candidates who will be on the ballot for the April 7 Spring Election, unless you’re in the 7th Congressional District. Then you will also be picking, in addition to the non-partisan races, a candidate for the special election on May 12 because our Democratic governor did not want to take a chance that all of you Republicans in that district would also vote for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly on April 7.
Remember how Democrats screamed bloody murder when the Republicans in the legislature considered moving the Supreme Court election so it wouldn’t coincide with the Democratic Presidential Primary on April 7? Something about sacred voting Election Day blah, blah blah.
So, if you are planning on voting Tuesday, keep in mind that Kelly is the only conservative running for Wisconsin Supreme Court. That’s something everyone agrees upon.
In the 7th Congressional District, Republicans have two candidates, state Sen. Tom Tiffany (R-Minocqua) and Jason Church. Tiffany earned a rare endorsement from RightWisconsin in the race because of our concerns about Church’s ties to former Assembly Speaker John Gard and the odd flip-flop on the Davis Bacon issue, which leads us to question whether Church will be a pawn of special interests. We have a special turnout preview for that race, as well.
In Milwaukee County, your choices are bad, yucky, awful, and meaningless gesture. Milwaukee County Supervisor Theo Lipscomb decided to adopt the Petyr Baelish plan, “Chaos is a Ladder,” and got two rival candidates thrown off the ballot. Lipscomb would be the yucky choice, and he knocked off the one halfway decent choice, former Democratic state Sen. Jim Sullivan. As much as Democrats are mad at Lipscomb for using such tactics, they’re also surprised that he was competent enough to pull it off.
That leaves State Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) as the awful choice, state Rep. David Crowley (D-Milwaukee) as the bad choice, and local businesswoman Purnima Nath (R?) as the meaningless gesture vote.
Good luck, Milwaukee County.
Wigderson wrote more specifically about the Seventh Congressional District GOP race:
Writing in The Dispatch, Andrew Egger reports on the 7th Congressional District Republican Primary and sees two different sides of President Donald Trump. One side of the president is state Sen. Tom Tiffany (R-Minocqua) and the other flavor is Jason Church.
As Egger explains, the 7th Congressional District is definitely Trump country, embracing the president even during the Republican presidential primary in 2016 when the rest of the state went for Sen. Ted Cruz.
He quotes yours truly on how the once-progressive bastion of northern Wisconsin became the reliable vote generator for Trump.
“There’s a lot of people up there that have been hit hard in the last couple of recessions. … They’ve now embraced the Trump agenda out there,” James Wigderson, who runs the conservative blog RightWisconsin, told The Dispatch. “It is very blue collar up there, and they moved from Obama to Trump rather easily, just because of the nature of the people that are up there—it’s not dominated by universities. It’s not dominated by big cities.”
Of Tiffany, Egger wrote about the senator’s legislative record:
In the legislature, Tiffany was an enthusiastic ally of the Walker agenda, which he credits for helping to turn the state’s economy around. It’s the backbone of his pitch to voters: You could trust me to push hard for a conservative agenda in Madison, so you can trust me to push hard for a conservative agenda in Washington. Tiffany is endorsed by a number of prominent state Republicans, including both Walker and Duffy.
Meanwhile, Church has a different message.
As a political neophyte, Church lacks Tiffany’s solid legislative CV. But in his messaging, he’s leaned into the contrast: waving off Tiffany’s decade of work in the state legislature as “being a machine politician.” In his telling, what the district needs isn’t just someone who will go to Congress and vote for conservative policies. It’s someone who is ready to go and wage war for the soul of America against the likes of young progressive lawmakers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. It’s someone, as Church repeatedly said to me, who’s willing to be a little “boisterous.”
“There’s an issue in Washington, and in fact in Madison in general too,” Church said, “that if we just continue to try and elect people who move up the ladder, if what we’re trying to do is just work within a party system of self-promotion, we’re not going to bring the new energy and vibrance needed into Washington.”
Tiffany embraces the low-regulation, low-taxes reformer, side of Trump.
In Tiffany’s telling, Donald Trump is a model free-market, small-government, pro-business conservative: “I just look at the actions of the president, the tax cuts. I’ve seen how it’s turbo-charged the economy. I see it right here in Wisconsin, the regulatory reform that is near and dear to my heart, because I’ve worked on those issues. When I hear ‘drain the swamp,’ I think about the regulatory stuff, with all those alphabet agencies that you have out in Washington, D.C., that put so much red tape that strangles businesses large and small, that puts great restrictions on our economy.”
It’s not surprising that Tiffany plays up those elements of the Trump agenda. “In the case of Tiffany, it’s playing to his strengths because that’s the type of thing that he does in the state legislature,” said Wigderson, who has endorsed Tiffany in the race. “Tom Tiffany is definitely a small-government conservative; he’d have been very comfortable as a conservative under Ronald Reagan.”
Meanwhile Church has embraced union interests, once anathema in GOP primary politics, and Trump’s culture battles.
“I’ll tell you why I’ve supported him from day one,” Church said. “And that’s because President Trump identified something that we all here in northern Wisconsin have felt for a long time. And that is that our culture was under attack. I mean, people like Omar and AOC, when they start pushing things like multiculturalism and intersectionality, what they’re really doing is they’re pointing a finger at someone here in Tomahawk, someone here in Bloomer, in Hudson, in Wausau. And they’re saying, ‘You’re what’s wrong with America.’”
Egger asks, will the race signal an end for a preference among Republicans for Scott Walker-style reforms of government?
“Tom Tiffany helped create and pass an aggressive fiscal-conservative agenda that turned Scott Walker into a national conservative hero,” Egger wrote. “It’ll be up to the district’s voters to determine whether that’s a pro or a con.”
“The more zealous the attacks, the greater the risk he turns his campaign ATM against them. They’re already struggling to catch up with Sanders in national support and campaign dollars. Turning their focus toward Bloomberg only complicates that task. There’s another risk, at least for the moderates: Weakening the one who may be best poised to stop Sanders, a democratic socialist, if they fail themselves…. By not competing in the four early states, Bloomberg has gone basically unchallenged, allowing him to define himself without interference or really any debate. This has made him a top-tier candidate and the only one with the certain cash to run to the end.”
Axios summarizes.
It’s crazy that Bloomberg has achieved such status in the race without exposing his candidate skills to the people. We have no idea what impression he will make on a debate stage, which will be crucial for challenging Trump. Bloomberg has stood back and watched so many of the Democratic candidates drop out, candidates who had to try to stand out in a debate and couldn’t make it in a heavy crowd. Now, the crowd has thinned out, and everyone left is running out of money. And here’s Mike, with endless money and still waiting to go on stage.
Will he even be in the next debate, which is this Wednesday? The DNC changed the qualification rules to help Bloomberg. They got rid of the requirement of number of donor. But he needs a number of polls putting him over 10%, and the latest info I can find, here, says he’s still one short. It’s funny, because I was just checking for new polls at Real Clear Politics, and there hasn’t been anything new since last Friday and no new national poll since last Wednesday. The most recent national poll surveyed people from 2/9 to 2/11. That seems odd, doesn’t it? Are polls being held back? I remember before the Iowa caucus, the Des Moines Register held back its poll.
I wonder if the Democrats aren’t getting themselves into terrible trouble over Mike Bloomberg. I like listening to “Morning Joe” on my car radio as I drive back home after my sunrise run. This is a 5 minute drive and about all I can tolerate, but it’s good for giving me a sense of what Democrats are freaking out about at the moment. Today, they were tormenting themselves over Mike Bloomberg. He’s got race-and-gender problems, but so did Trump. He’s a billionaire, but so is Trump. If Trump did it, shouldn’t that mean Bloomberg can do it?
I don’t think they’ve faced up to why Trump was able to do what he did. Without first giving Trump credit, they’re in no position to say so then Mike can do it too. It sounded to me as though they think of Trump as evidence that weird magic things happen. So, why not Mike? At the very least, they should recognize that Trump had a powerful skill in knocking down rivals on the debate stage, and Bloomberg has yet to set foot on the stage. It’s crazy to forsake all others for Bloomberg.
Of course I want to see the Dems fail and destroy themselves from within, but it is about time one Dem really challenged another Dem. They all basically agree about most policy issues and – to me – they all look crazy.
The Green New Deal would destroy America. So-called moderate Middle Class Joe is basically for it.
Pete, however, has distinguished himself for calling for decriminalizing ALL drugs and eliminating the Electoral College. Two truly insane policies from a failed small town mayor.
There’s not a dime’s worth of policy difference with these candidates so they have to resort to superficial differences like race, age, wealth and sex.
In a way, this is all good for the country. When Trump wins in a landslide the Dems will know they were totally defeated and America has completed rejected them.
Read the other comments, which are fascinating, about such subjects as whether or not Bloomberg wants to be in the Democratic debates, what very rich Democratic donors think about Comrade Sanders, and whether Bloomberg even wants to be president.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 