The Democrat debate looked like a mixed martial arts cage fight By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/the_democrat_debate_looked_like_a_mixed_martial_arts_cage_fight.html

Who could have imagined that the debate in Charleston on Tuesday would be worse than the previous one, the one during which Elizabeth Warren went after Bloomberg with a scythe, Bernie did his wild-eyed crazed thing, and Biden fell flat?  This time Bloomberg was better, but Warren is still a shrew.  And Steyer? Why is he even there?  He has nothing to say.  

Joe Biden has lost a bit more of his disappearing grey matter; he consistently mispronounces words, loses his train of thought, claims credit for things he did not do, and generally embarrasses himself.  He thinks he is Zelig, that he was arrested in South Africa, that he negotiated the Paris Climate Accord with Deng Xiaoping, who died in 1997.   Why on earth has his wife not put an end to his nightmare?  No matter who has urged Biden to run, his wife should have known he was not up to the challenge.  She must want this more than he does, which is contemptible.  She is allowing him to make a sad fool of himself over and over again. No need to repeat the long list of his many gaffes here. 

Klobuchar, Buttigieg and Bloomberg all seemed relatively rational compared to Sanders, Warren, Biden and Steyer, but they all essentially support Sanders’ policies.  They are just less honest about their socialism.  They all know that not one of them can beat Trump.  They all know that the policies they are promoting will undo the thriving Trump economy and they don’t care.  They are all leftists and leftists are all about imposing their stringent, authoritarian commands upon us all.  Not one of them ever mentions the words “freedom” or “liberty.” These basic rights guaranteed to us all by our Constitution are not remotely on their radar.  This is why none of them can win.  They all eschew the American Constitution but claim their allegiance to it for political purposes only.

The Highest-Stakes Moment Brings the Worst Debate By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democratic-debate-highest-stakes-moment-brings-worst-debate/#slide-1

Tonight’s debate would have been only marginally less incoherent, noisy, and grating to the ears if CBS had broadcast two hours of static.

The last debate before the South Carolina primary featured so much shouting, you would think that the candidates had just been told their microphones weren’t working. This could well be the last debate for some of these candidates, and Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren have rapidly shrinking paths to the nomination. Every candidate was itching to interject, interrupt, shout over, and have a dramatic moment.

If the polls are accurate, South Carolina will end with a Joe Biden win or a Biden tie with Bernie Sanders, and Sanders set to do well in most or all of the Super Tuesday states. Last week’s debate was Get Shorty. The mission of everybody on that stage tonight who wasn’t named Bernie Sanders was to go on stage and beat the tar out of Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg is not on the ballot in South Carolina, and he’s won no delegates so far.

Most of them didn’t do that. Elizabeth Warren spent her first comments discussing her differences with Sanders, but then settled into a campaign to be Sanders’s running mate, using every opportunity she could find to steer the conversation back towards attacks on Bloomberg’s record. Tom Steyer just took up space and called up racial preferences again.

Amy Klobuchar has hit her ceiling. She’s personable enough, she likes to position herself as the sensible pragmatist . . . but it’s hard to see how much of her performance broke through in the chaotic shout-fest.

Bloomberg the Nanny By John Stossel

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bloomberg-the-nanny/

Good for Mike Bloomberg.

During his first debate, he slammed Bernie Sanders by saying: “We’re not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism, and it just didn’t work!” Exactly right. It’s safe to say Bloomberg is not a communist. I wonder if that means there’s still room for him in the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, Bloomberg is no principled, limited-government capitalist, either.

Like his fellow New York billionaire Donald Trump, he’s used to getting his own way at his own company.

Unfortunately, he assumes government should function in a similar fashion.

Justice Department: 45% of Blacks at Harvard Admitted Through Illegal Race Preferences By J. Christian Adams

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/justice-department-45-of-blacks-at-harvard-admitted-through-illegal-race-preferences/

Almost half of all blacks and Hispanics who attend Harvard were admitted because of illegal racial preferences in admissions according to a brief just filed by the Department of Justice.

The Department of Justice filed the brief in a federal lawsuit filed by Students For Fair Admissions. It says Harvard’s race-based admissions process violates federal law. This filing marks an extreme departure from the Obama Civil Rights Division that spent significant time and resources seeking to expand the use of race in decision making.

The brief says Harvard “considers applicants’ race at virtually every step, from rating applicants to winnowing the field of applicants when attempting to avoid an oversubscribed class.” It notes that forty-five percent of African-Americans and Hispanics at Harvard are there because of racial preferences given to them during the admissions process.

Bernie Sanders takes heat in a messy debate – here are the highlights from South Carolina

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/25/democratic-debate-recap-highlights-from-south-carolina.html

In the first Democratic presidential debate since Sen. Bernie Sanders earned a big target on his back, Democratic candidates jumped into an often chaotic and uncomfortable fray.
The candidates on stage included Sanders, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Mike Bloomberg, Tom Steyer and Pete Buttigieg.
None of the seven candidates emerged from the debate, at times a choppy affair as White House hopefuls interrupted each other and talked over the CBS News moderators, untouched by opponents’ venom.

The Democrats Make Bloomberg Their PC Punching Bag But it seems a dubious way of getting votes. How many American voters subscribe to political correctness? Joseph Epstein

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-make-bloomberg-th

Poor Democrats. As if they don’t already have enough trouble, they also happen to be lashed to political correctness. How firmly lashed we learned at last week’s presidential debate, in which candidates competed over who is the most PC.

This came out emphatically in the attacks on Michael Bloomberg. He was vulnerable on the two major political-correctness fronts: race and the treatment of women. Nearly everyone on the debate stage took a moment out to spit upon Mr. Bloomberg for his stop-and-frisk policy while mayor of New York. That the policy seemed to work, radically reducing the number of murders in New York, mattered little beside what the other candidates took to be its inherent and loathsome racism. The logic, apparently, is that it is better to live in a murderous city than a racist one. One of the hallmarks of political correctness is that words matter more than deeds.

Nor are the purveyors of political correctness notable for self-examination. Thus Bernie Sanders, a mere millionaire with the utmost contempt for billionaires, blithely called Mr. Bloomberg a racist. Sen. Sanders apparently forgot that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union at a time when it was still murdering its own citizens and sending them to gulags. He apparently also forgot that he long approved of the cruel and stunting regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Sanders was one of those people Lenin called “useful idiots,” dupes of a murderous regime. Is a useful idiot in a position to call another man racist? Perhaps, since there is nothing politically incorrect about being a useful idiot, whereas a racist is clearly beyond the pale.

Nunes: House Republicans Are Mulling Criminal Referrals Against Mueller Prosecutors Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/25/nunes-house-republicans-are-mulling-criminal-referrals-against-mueller-prosecutors/

House Republicans are prepared to send criminal referrals to the Justice Department alleging that some of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors purposefully misled the courts and Congress.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told investigative journalist John Solomon that his team found glaring evidence of deception while scouring documents recently released by the FBI, including witness reports known as 302s.

“We’re now going through these 302s, and we’re going to be making criminal referrals on the Mueller dossier team, the people that put this Mueller report together,” Nunes said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

In one instance, Mueller’s deputies seem to have distorted FBI interview memos of key figure George Papadopoulos, concluding wrongly that he was trying to thwart or frustrate the investigation’s efforts to question Mifsud, when the 302 show that he was actually trying to be helpful.

According to the sentencing memo signed by [Aaron] Zelinsky and fellow Mueller prosecutors Jeannie Rhee and Andrew Goldstein: Papadopoulos’ “lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then.”

But FBI 302 reports detailing agents’ interviews with Papadopoulos show that he had in fact supplied information that would have enabled investigators to challenge or potentially detain or arrest Mifsud while he was in the United States.

Kansas Fourth State to Introduce a Campus Intellectual Diversity Bill By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kansas-fourth-state-to-introduce-a-campus-intellectual-diversity-bill/

Kansas has just become the fourth state to file a Campus Intellectual Diversity bill based on model legislation I proposed and explained here on the Corner last year. In the Kansas House of Representatives, bills are sponsored by committees, rather than by individual members. The sponsor of Kansas HB 2697 is the Committee on Education. The individual member who requested that HB 2697 be introduced is Representative Randy Garber. Garber deserves considerable credit for taking that initiative. The Kansas bill follows on similar bills introduced in Arizona, Missouri, and Iowa.

Like the other three bills, the Kansas Campus Intellectual Diversity Act instructs the public university system to stage debates, panels, and individual lectures that explore our most widely discussed public-policy controversies from diverse and conflicting perspectives. These debates, panels, and lectures will be open to the public. Videos of the events will also be posted online. The goal is to broaden the scope of viewpoints considered on campus and to educate students and the public through the clash of ideas. Frequent thoughtful debate over our sharpest national controversies should normalize disagreement and lower the emotional temperature on campus. Greater freedom of speech will result. (I lay out some additional thoughts on these bills here.)

‘Gray Matter’–Deficient Americans By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/gray-matter-deficient-americans/

The billionaires and bureaucrats depend on the skilled workers they mock — and that makes them more than a little uneasy.

F ormer New York mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, four years ago at Oxford, England, dismissed farming, ancient and modern. He lectured that agriculture was little more than the rote labor of dropping seeds into the ground and watching corn sprout — easy, mindless, automatic.

“I could teach anybody,” Bloomberg pontificated, “even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.”

He contrasted such supposedly unintelligent labor of the past (and present) with the “skill set” of the current “information economy” that requires “how to think and analyze.” In this new economy, he said, “you have to have a lot more gray matter.”

Gray matter?

For all his later denials and efforts to contextualize those remarks, Bloomberg seems to see both ancient and modern agriculture, and farmers, as either unskilled or not very smart, as if the genetically inferior gravitate to muscular labor far from the “skill sets” of those like Mike Bloomberg. He certainly has no idea about either the sophistication of ancient agriculture or the high-tech savvy of contemporary farmers — much less just how difficult it is, and always was, to produce food, much less that history is so often the story of mass famine rather than bounty and plenty.

Bloomberg’s apparent dismissal of rural people might seem odd, given that Democrats profess allegiance with the working classes and muscular labor. But, in fact, his disdain is perversely logical and indeed predictable.

Stunner: Watch Side-by-Side Video of Re-Pete Buttigieg and Obama Giving the Same Speech. By Victoria Taft

ttps://pjmedia.com/trending/stunner-watch-side-by-side-vide

Pete Buttigieg is Barack Obama’s Mini Me, or, as one Twitter user put it, “Fauxbama.”

Buttigieg’s speech cadence, his shirt sleeves and even the knot of his tie are the same as President Obama’s.

And now a political Twitter account called “The Recount” has found that former Mayor Buttigieg’s words are exactly the same as Obama’s.

For years Barack Obama reused and recycled Deval Patrick’s old “no red America, no blue America, just the United States of America” speech written by their mutual political spirit animal David Axelrod. Obama, ahem, borrowed Elizabeth Warren’s “you didn’t build that” trope to denigrate initiatives by business owners to support the idea that government help was really responsible for your success.

But now the former president knows what it’s like when someone plagiarizes him.

Watch this video and marvel at the chutzpah of Buttigieg. It’s not as funny “bad lip reading” but it is amazing to behold: