Joe Biden, Candidate for President

Bill McGurn thinks ex-Vice President and ex-Senator Joe Biden (D) would make a formidable candidate for President on the 2020 Progressive-Democratic Party ticket.  After all, he has all that Presidential campaign experience from 1988 and 2008. And he presents as an everyman with whom ordinary Americans can identify.

But McGurn also listed these two items as Biden’s rationalizations for not running in 2016 (the sheer number of rationalizations McGurn came up with also is an indicator of Biden’s viability).

…efforts of President Obama and his team to persuade him he couldn’t win the Democratic primary and therefore shouldn’t run, and what he apparently took as a veiled threat from Mrs Clinton that if he did challenge her for the nomination, her team would go dirty.

The former shows how gullible he is. The latter shows what a coward he is. We don’t need someone whom our enemies can both sucker and cow in the White House.

Special Treatment?

Or just another sordid example of the Left’s double standard?

Recall the 29 cops, including SWAT members who did the dawn raid on an old man’s home in order to arrest that dangerous criminal Roger Stone.

Compare that with the treatment of a member of the Hollywood elite, Lori Loughlin, who’s accused of bribery and other crimes related to the current college admissions scandal.  She’s being permitted to present herself at a local police station at a time of her convenience pursuant to the allegations.

Loughlin has made arrangements to surrender when she returns to Los Angeles, TMZ, the celebrity news site, reported.

It may be true that Loughlin “working in Vancouver, Canada” at the time arrest warrants went out, but Canadian authorities have shown themselves capable of on-the-spot arrests—like with a Huawei executive.

She has, eventually, found it personally convenient and reported to an FBI station.

Hmm….

Wisconsin Progressive-Democrats for Choice

The newly elected Wisconsin Governor, Progressive-Democrat Tony Evers, has made plain the Party’s definition of “choice.”  Choose to do it our way.

Evers’ current budget proposal

caps voucher enrollment in 2020, entirely phases out the program for special-needs students and blocks the creation of new independent charter schools.

No need for all those charter schools.  Progressive-Democrats want to avoid confusing us with such a plethora of decisions to make; they’ll protect us by deciding for us.

With not too many apologies to a hypothetical Joseph:

My dear fellow, there are in fact only so many choices the mind can contemplate in the course of an evening. …there are simply too many choices, that’s all. Cut a few, and it will be perfect.

Witness Tampering?

…Michael Cohen told House investigators this week [the week ending 8 Mar] that staff for Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D, CA) traveled to New York at least four times to meet with him for over 10 hours immediately before last month’s high-profile public testimony….

Schiff and his staff conducted these “meetings” in secret and without minority party representation (here Republican) present.

Then

One by one…Cohen fielded questions on precisely the same topics that the sources told Fox News he discussed with Schiff’s staff during the sit-downs in New York.

Sure looks and sounds like tampering.

Expanding Government for Freedom

That’s the Progressive-Democrats’ Orwellian claim about their HR1 bill, just passed on party lines.  It’s for the children, too.  If it saves just one life….  Here is some of what’s in the bill:

Mandates a nationalized system to publicly finance federal elections. It would allocate federal money to match certain small-dollar donations 6-to-1 and deposit those funds in campaign accounts.

We already can designate, on our tax returns, a donation to a Federal fund for Presidential campaigns; the monies to be divided equally between the political parties.  That’s been a complete failure over the years, with the amounts designated falling, and private money going directly to the parties, candidates, PACs, etc, expanding. The Progressive-Democrats’ answer is to “correct” that by forcing us to donate to political campaigns in even larger amounts, whether we want to or not.

Requires several classes of politically active organizations, including tax-exempt 501(c)(4) groups, to disclose donors who have given $10,000 or more during an election cycle.

Because anonymity is as anathema to Progressive-Democrats as it is critical to free speech and to liberty generally.

Changes the membership of the Federal Election Commission to five members, with the president’s party in the majority, from its current six members, evenly split between Democratic and Republican appointees.

Because balancing the membership also is anathema to Progressive-Democrats: they desperately need a purely partisan facility for overseeing our elections.

Fortunately, Republicans still have a majority in the Senate.