They’re also very surprised, because they had written him off as a lightweight and even a betrayer. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump gave him a name – “Little Marco” – that seemed to sum this up. And Chris Christie mocked him for repeating himself in one of the Republican debates.

But the worm sometimes turns. Somewhere along the line, Trump decided that Little Marco was big enough to become his Secretary of State, and now he praises him to the skies. Those who think Trump never abandons a grudge forget things like this. Then again, maybe Trump never disliked Rubio at all and the name-calling was just his usual tactic of insulting his rivals.

Now we’re hearing there’s a chance that the Cuban Communist regime will fall soon. Wouldn’t it be extraordinary if a man of Cuban heritage, whose parents hated Communism, would hold the post of Secretary of State when the end of the regime came?

NOTE: Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of verbiage here defending Rubio. In this 2015 post I highlighted some suggestions for how he should deal with his earlier stance on amnesty, and in two long post I analyzed what happened in that awful exchange with Christie during the debates. Those posts are this one and especially this one. That latter post might even help you in arguments you have in your own life; it contains some information about the art of arguing.

The post Rubio: old and new appeared first on The New Neo.

I think Rubio got a bad reputation on the right for a number of reasons, the first (but only among people old enough to remember) being his participation as a new senator in the 2013 “Gang of Eight” attempt to deal with illegal immigration in a bipartisan manner including a path to citizenship for illegal aliens already in the country. A second reason for his problematic reputation was twofold, and occurred during his 2016 run for president: Trump’s “Little Marco” nickname for him (Rubio isn’t tall; he’s officially listed as 5’9″ or so, but having actually stood next to him once during the 2016 campaign, I’d say he’s at least an inch shorter), and Chris Christie’s mocking tactics concerning Rubio’s repeating himself during a Republican primary debate in February of 2016. I did a lengthy analysis of the latter; you can find it here, and I think it shows that Rubio was nowhere near as bad as Christie’s attack made him out to be.

Trump’s “Little Marco” nickname for Rubio drew blood not only because Rubio is relatively short, but because he also has a baby face and looks younger than he is. Plus, he is fairly young even now – 53 – and at the time of that debate he was 44. When he became a senator he was forty, by my calculations. Pretty darn young.

But I’ve always been impressed by Rubio, who is one of the most articulate politicians in stating a case without being pedantic or obscure or affected. That’s what people are responding to now in those YouTube videos featuring him. I was surprised and pleased when Trump chose him for the SOS position, and so far so good.

NOTE: Rubio’s birth name is Marco Antonio Rubio – Mark Antony?

The post Rubio updated appeared first on The New Neo.

But see this:

Overall, Republicans today are more excited about what Trump will do as president now than they were in 2016 when he was first elected.

Democrats say they feel more scared about what Trump might do than they did in 2016, and a large majority of Democrats think as president he will threaten their rights and freedoms. But at the same time, there seems to be a sense of exhaustion, as fewer than half of Democrats feel motivated to oppose Trump right now.

There are a lot of poll results at the link, with simple charts.

And here’s a relevant clip from CNN:

There are three main reasons for this, the first two being the most important:

(1) People have endured the Biden years and the prospect of Harris, and are soundly rejecting them.

(2) People experienced Trump’s first term and it was pretty good, especially in retrospect.

(3) The opposition is somewhat tired – for the moment, anyway.

I think there are quite a few people like me who in 2016 were happy Hillary Clinton lost but were apprehensive about Trump, the unknown and potential loose cannon. Now he has a track record that is reassuring – although of course anything can happen.

The post Well, I’ll be! Trump is getting a little bit of a honeymoon, for a change appeared first on The New Neo.

It seems as though there have been so many rapid-fire events starting with Trump’s 2016 election that it’s easy to forget many of the details. But I think it’s very instructive to take a little stroll down memory lane from time to time. The article is from 12/17/16 [my emphasis]:

On Monday, members of the Electoral College will cast their historic votes for the next president of the United States. In the meantime, they are under siege.

The nation’s 538 presidential electors have been thrust into the political foreground like never before in American history. In the aftermath of a uniquely polarizing presidential contest, the once-anonymous electors are squarely in the spotlight, targeted by death threats, harassing phone calls and reams of hate mail. One Texas Republican elector said he’s been bombarded with more than 200,000 emails.

Trump had been elected, but it seems it was perfectly okay to try to harass his electors and even to threaten them, in order to get them to vote for Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the perpetrators should have been tracked down and charged with obstructing an official proceeding (or at least attempting to do so)? After all, that has been one of the most common charges against the J6 demonstrators of 2021, including peaceful ones. But back in 2016 Republican lawyers were nowhere near as creative as Democrat lawyers became in twisting statutes into something they never were meant to be, in order to charge the opposition with crimes.

More [my emphasis, and my remarks in brackets]:

In recent decades, the Electoral College had become such a reliable rubber stamp of Election Day results that it was viewed as an afterthought.

But with many Democrats desperate to block the all-but-certain ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, this long-neglected body has been gripped by turmoil, and its members have been subjected to pleas to upend centuries of tradition by casting their votes for someone other than the president-elect.

There have been ad campaigns targeting electors and op-eds assailing their role. One Democratic member of Congress has called to delay the vote for president while an investigation of Russian involvement in the election is underway [isn’t that very similar to requests from Trump supporters in 2020?]. Two others have pleaded with electors to consider Russia’s role when deciding how to vote. Progressive groups are preparing protests across the country at sites where electors will meet to cast their ballots [sounds like a planned “insurrection” to me]. Personal contact information for many electors has been posted publicly — and it’s been used to bury them with massive email campaigns.

There were indeed demonstrations, although they were pretty tame. But the people involved certainly tried to obstruct an official proceeding. For example, in Wisconsin:

There were demonstrations in other states, too, and of course this happened in Congress:

The post Remember the olden days of 2016, when it was okay to mess with electors? appeared first on The New Neo.

Actually, they never stopped. You almost have to admire their work ethic, even if you disagree with their goals and methods. The basic message: it’s possible that you peons may be able to elect Trump – although we’ll do our very best to prevent that – but he certainly won’t be allowed to govern. We know better than you, and when we say “our democracy” we mean ours, not yours.

Excerpt:

Opponents of Donald J. Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication.

Only the left is allowed to sic the IRS on its opponents the conservatives. Nor did Trump do this during his first term, as far as I know. And Trump isn’t even against early abortions.

More:

A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking extraordinary steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, drawn together by the fear that Mr. Trump’s return to power would pose a grave threat not just to their agenda but to American democracy itself.

Talk about projection! And note, “democracy” is defined as the left wants to define it.

“Trump has made clear that he’ll disregard the law and test the limits of our system,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties. “What we’re staring down is extremely dark.”

Projection, projection, projection. I don’t even think most of them believe what they’re saying; it’s propaganda for the rest of us. But the ones who are far gone do believe it.

This one is unintentionally funny. Or maybe it’s intentionally funny and meant to taunt and mock anyone on the right:

If Mr. Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones. Those plans include using the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries …

Anyone who’s been paying any attention to what’s been happening to Trump and his supporters at the hands of the DOJ and radical leftist state officials would recognize that they’re describing their own actions. And yet I believe that a significant number of people seem to be taken in by these accusations about Trump. And of course the left is afraid of payback, even though they don’t define it that way.

The leftists are the good guys, folks! We promise! I’ve highlighted the most important and most dangerous message, the one the left and many Democrats have been sending pretty much from the moment Trump declared his candidacy, and certainly from the moment he assumed the presidency:

Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, said the planning for how to resist such an agenda should not be seen as an ordinary policy dispute, but as an effort to defend fundamental aspects of American self-government “from an aspiring autocrat.”

“He is no normal candidate, this is no normal election, and these are no normal preparations for merely coming out on the wrong side of a national referendum on policy choices,” Mr. Bassin said.

Remember the calls for impeachment as soon as Trump took office? Here’s a memory refresher from around the time of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, in case you need one (emphasis mine):

Two civil rights groups trying to boot President Donald Trump from the nation’s highest office have launched an online campaign to get the brand new commander-in-chief impeached.

Their website, www.impeachdonaldtrumpnow.org, went live on Friday just as Trump was officially sworn in. It is run by two groups, Free Speech for People and RootsAction, which believe Trump’s possible conflicts of interest are grounds for his ouster, the Washington Post reports.

“The nation is now witnessing a massive corruption of the presidency, far worse than Watergate,” the campaign’s website says. “From the moment he assumed the office, President Donald Trump has been in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution. The President is not above the law. We will not allow President Trump to profit from the presidency at the expense of our democracy.” …

Earlier Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union said it has taken legal action to obtain government documents that may show Trump’s potential conflicts of interest.

And this is of the same vintage. The date is January 6, 2017:

The joint session of Congress is a legally required — and typically ceremonial — event to ratify the results of the presidential election. But members are permitted to challenge the validity of electoral votes, and for just the fourth time since 1877, they did so.

There was no expectation that the protests would succeed — backers acknowledged that the Republican-led House and Senate would never act to impede Trump’s imminent presidency. But it’s a continuation of efforts by Democrats to poke Trump in the eye before he takes office and undermine what his team has described as a “mandate” to govern. Democrats have routinely cited Trump’s 2.9 million-ballot popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton and pounced on Russian meddling in the election to undermine Trump’s victory.

Jackson Lee and her allies argued that widespread voter suppression in states won by Trump tarnished the results. They also pointed to research provided by a team of independent lawyers that found dozens of Republican electors were technically ineligible to serve. But their arguments failed to persuade their Senate colleagues to step forward.

But back to the present:

Many are also wary about discussing their contingency plans publicly, for fear of signaling a lack of confidence in President Biden’s campaign prospects. Their angst is intensified by Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers and by his persistent trailing of Mr. Trump in polls of the states that are likely to decide the election.

Interviews with more than 30 officials and leaders of organizations about their plans revealed a combination of acute exhaustion and acute anxiety. Activist groups that spent the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency organizing mass protests and pursuing legal challenges, ultimately helping channel that energy into persuading voters to oust him from power in 2020, are now realizing with great dread they may have to resist him all over again.

Poor babes! I feel so sorry for them. And yet I believe they are fully up to the task, if the situation should arise.

The post The new anti-Trump Resistance … appeared first on The New Neo.

The report – written by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag – details how the Obama administration CIA allegedly and improperly called on foreign allies from the “Five Eyes Nations” (the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) to surveil 26 Trump aides as “targets for collection and misinformation.” The journalists got this information from sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation. …

The report says they will have more on Thursday about how a team “hand-picked” by CIA Director John Brennan “relied on “cooked intelligence” to craft that January 6th, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment.”

I’ve previously written quite a bit on this blog about Brennan. One of the strangest facts about him is based on a story Brennan himself has told, about voting for Communist Gus Hall for president in 1976, when Brennan was 21 years old, as some sort of protest against “the system.” He couches it as a meaningless youthful protest vote, but I found it quite curious and analyzed the move more deeply in this post. An excerpt:

Brennan speaks in cliches of the time: “the system,” for example. Ah, the system! It’s a bit suspect that someone who was so against “the system” in 1976, at the age of 21, is joining that system big time by 1980. Now, that’s not impossible; minds can change, as we know. But that sort of change requires an explanation, one I’ve not seen Brennan offer, although I can’t say I’ve made an exhaustive search for one. I’d certainly be curious to know.

And if you hate “the system” and want change, let’s assume it’s change for the better. Why, then, would you vote for a Communist as a protest vote? By 1976 it was crystal clear that Communism wasn’t going to represent that change for the better. Brennan wasn’t an impressionable child, either, and this would have been his very first vote for president, which is often a time of great solemnity and importance (at least it was for me). To throw it away like that—if indeed that’s what was happening—is the mark of a rather impulsive and immature person, and that’s putting it kindly.

It’s not as though the 1976 election lacked for people to vote for if a protest needed to be lodged. Here were the major alternatives to Ford and Carter:

Roger MacBride, who had gained fame in the 1972 election as a faithless elector, ran as the nominee of the Libertarian Party.

Eugene McCarthy, a former Democratic Senator from Minnesota, ran as an independent candidate.

Ben Bubar, Prohibition Party nominee.

Frank Zeidler, former mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ran as the nominee of Socialist Party USA, which was founded in a split with Socialist Party of America.

Gus Hall, 4 time Communist Party Candidate.

Lots of choices there, all of them more innocuous than Hall and plenty good for protests, if it was protests Brennan wanted. But somehow it was Gus Hall for whom Brennan decided to vote. Among other things, this was Hall’s position:

“Hall had a reputation of being one of the most convinced supporters of the actions and interests of the Soviet Union outside the USSR’s political sphere of influence. From 1959 onward, Hall spent some time in Moscow each year and was one of the most widely known American politicians in the USSR, where he was received by high-level Soviet politicians such as Leonid Brezhnev. Hall defended the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, and supported the Stalinist principle of ‘Socialism in One Country’.”

I found it puzzling then, and find it puzzling now, that Brennan ever was accepted into the CIA in the first place. Then, of course, he seems to have climbed up the ranks to the very tip-top. Here’s how Brennan has explained his applying for the CIA in 1980; the way he describes it, it sounds like a light and frivolous whim:

Brennan attended Fordham University, graduating with a B.A. in political science in 1977. While a college student, in 1976, he voted for the Communist Party USA candidate for president, Gus Hall. He has later described his vote as a way of “signaling my unhappiness with the system”, specifically the partisanship of the Watergate era. After Fordham, Brennan attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving a Master of Arts in government with a concentration in Middle East studies in 1980. He speaks Arabic fluently. His studies included a junior year abroad learning Arabic and taking courses at the American University in Cairo.

While riding a bus to class at Fordham, he saw an ad in The New York Times that said that the CIA was recruiting. He decided that a CIA career would be a good match for his “wanderlust” and his desire for public service. He applied to the CIA in 1980. During his application he admitted during a lie-detector test that he had voted for the Communist Party candidate four years earlier. To his surprise, he was still accepted; he later said that he finds it heartening that the CIA valued freedom of speech.

But of course, this has nothing to do with free speech. As I wrote in my previous post on his Communist vote in 1976:

[Brennan] describes the [Gus Hall vote] incident as a free speech issue, but that’s absurd. I defend his right to vote for any candidate he prefers at any time. But that doesn’t mean that he should be hired by the CIA or has some absolute right to be hired by the CIA whatever his political points of view. The CIA has every right to screen its potential agents for their beliefs about the US and its place in the world.

More from Brennan’s Wiki page:

Brennan helped establish the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump’s campaign, which included the use of foreign intelligence, during the period leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Since leaving office, Brennan has been harshly critical of President Trump. In March 2018, Brennan said Trump had “paranoia”, accused him of “constant misrepresentation of the facts”, and described him as a “charlatan”. Following the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe later that month, Brennan tweeted to Trump, “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”

Axios quoted Brennan tweeting a response to Trump’s harsh comments about James Comey: “Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey… we have the opportunity to emerge from this nightmare stronger & more committed to ensuring a better life for all Americans, including those you have so tragically deceived.” On July 16, 2018, Brennan tweeted his reaction to Trump’s comments at the 2018 Helsinki summit meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin: “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors”. It was nothing short of “treasonous”. Not only were Trump’s comments “imbecilic”, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”

Sounds like a guy who would do anything to implicate Trump in any way possible, and who had the power to do so.

The post Why was Brennan the head of the CIA? appeared first on The New Neo.

But the voter registration rolls are a bit different. Because New Hampshire has long had an important position in the primaries, many people who are not Independents nevertheless register as “undeclared” (there is no other way to register as an Independent in NH). This gives them the freedom to vote in either the Democrat or Republican primaries. All they have to do, as an undeclared voter, is to ask for either ballot when they enter the polling venue. They can’t vote in both, of course. But they can vote in either.

This means that there is great incentive for people to register as “undeclared.” Voting in one primary or other changes their affiliation to that party, but they can change it right back that very day before they exit the place. That’s how it works, and so it was tailor-made for people on the left to vote for Nikki Haley if they wished to do so. But that’s not just a phenomenon this year; it happens in other years, in particular when the other party has an incumbent and therefore a non-competitive race. If both races are competitive, it’s less likely to feature crossover undeclared votes for the simple reason that there is far more motivation to vote in the primary of the party one wants to vote for in the general.

As far as registration numbers go, 30.28% of the voters are registered Democrats, 29.82% are registered Republicans, and 39.90% are unaffiliated (also sometimes called undeclared at other sites). Therefore I think we can safely say that at least half of the undeclared voters actually lean to one party or other, and more of them are Democrats. The people who are registered as being members of a certain party are also able to change their affiliation, with a deadline a few months prior to the primaries.

All of this is relevant to the statistic I’ve read, which is that 70% of Haley’s votes were not registered Republicans. This is made easier by the NH system of primary voting. I don’t know how it compares to other “moderate” candidates in previous years, though, because I’ve never read statistics on it, but a quick search located this:

In 2000, 62 percent of undeclared voters chose the Republican ballot — and 61 percent of that group voted for John McCain, helping him defeat George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary. But in the 2008 primary, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off on the Democratic side, the group flipped, with 62 percent taking the Democratic ballot. Mrs. Clinton emerged as the winner.

This year [2016], undeclared voters are finding their decision especially daunting.

“I am truly, completely undecided,” said Barbara Wilson, 64, of Henniker, who said she liked both Democratic candidates, as well as Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. “I have no earthly idea what I’m going to do at the end of the day.” …

Then there is strategy to consider, with some undecided voters debating not just which candidates they like best, but also which primary would allow their votes to have a greater impact. The Democratic primary has been fairly static, with Mr. Sanders holding a sizable lead over Mrs. Clinton. But the Republican race feels up for grabs.

So you can see that this is an old story in New Hampshire.

The post About party affiliation and the NH primary appeared first on The New Neo.

“The other day I read a number that I have trouble accepting. It was that 50% of Democrat contributions come from Jews.”

Mike K:

I saw that too and wondered. Dunno.

I do believe that 10/7 has changed the game with Americans and American Jews.

It’s too early to tell whether that last sentence is true, but I can certainly check on the first part.

It took almost no time at all to discover what I believe is its origin, in this Jerusalem Post article written in September of 2016, shortly before the 2016 Trump/Clinton election. The headline goes like this: “US Jews contribute half of all donations to the Democratic Party.” Sounds similar to what is referenced in the comment by huxley and the one by Mike K, but right off the bat I noticed one difference: not “Democrats” but “the Democratic Party.” A subtle difference but perhaps a meaningful one, because many donations are to candidates rather than the party. And does the claim mean half of the total money collected, or half of all the individuals who donate?

Right under the headline we have this startling statistic in a subheadline: “Jewish donors give 25% of the Republican National Convention’s cash.” Now, that’s interesting; it seems Jews in general donate a lot to politics (I’m pretty sure they donate a disproportionate amount to charity, as well). And then in this article I discovered that for that same election cycle:

In 2016, 22% of Democrats and Democratic leaners and 10% Republicans and Republican leaners reported making a donation, according to data from ANES. This marks the first election since at least 1992 when Democrats have been significantly more likely than Republicans to donate.

So that year there were lots more Democrat donors in general, at least by percentages. Also, higher-income and more educated people were more likely to make donations, and I’m pretty sure that Jews are somewhat over-represented among those groups.

Then there’s this rather contrary piece of information regarding the same year:

Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago. …

But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates …

It seems that 138 of the families gave to GOP candidates and 20 families gave to Democrats. There are no numbers for the total monetary amount given, but it’s a lot, as you can see by this:

The 158 families each contributed $250,000 or more in the campaign through June 30, according to the most recent available Federal Election Commission filings and other data, while an additional 200 families gave more than $100,000. Together, the two groups contributed well over half the money in the presidential election — the vast majority of it supporting Republicans.

It says “the presidential election” and the “Republicans” plural. Does this include the primaries? The whole thing is unclear, and it seems as though it might be separate from the other report which seems to concern DNC and RNC contributions.

Back to the text of the Jerusalem Post article:

… Jewish donors contribut[e] a whopping 50% of funds received by the Democratic Party and 25% to the Republican Party, [researcher] Troy says.

Although it’s still not clear, that may support the idea that these only involve contributions to the parties themselves, not to individual candidates. But now it’s time to go to Troy’s research itself, which can be found here. A relevant excerpt:

… Jews donate as much as 50 percent of the funds raised by Democrats and 25 percent of the funds raised by Republicans.

As much as – what on earth does that refer to? The document by Troy contains a long long history of the Jewish vote in the US, but it surprised me by being more of a history than a study. In fact, I couldn’t find the basis for remarks such as this, on which the 50% claim seems to be based:

In the 2016 presidential race the Jewish financial vote remains disproportionately important – with estimates that Jewish donors contribute 50 percent of the funds to the Democratic Party and 25 percent to the Republican Party.

“Estimates” by whom? Based on what? Donations to the parties? Or to candidates? Or to both?

I couldn’t find the answers to any of these questions. Later, on page 7, I found another reference to the supposed figure, but it added nothing:

… Jews donate as much as 50 percent of the funds raised by Democrats and 25 percent of the funds raised by Republicans.

“As much as”? What does that mean? Again, no answers, and no footnotes or source – just the bare statement. I see no reason to give it any credence, although of course it might be true. It does seem as though the Troy report is the source of the statistic that Mike K had cited and huxley mentioned. If you can find any other evidence about the ultimate source, be my guest. But in my experience it’s not unusual for these internet “truths” to be based on very little.

I also found this information about large individual donors in 2016 to Clinton or Trump:

According to the latest Federal Election Commission disclosure, American Jewish donors funneled more than $90 million into the presidential campaigns of Democratic nominee Clinton and her Republican opponent Trump. …

Making their contributions through campaign committees, joint fundraising entities and allied super-PACs, Clinton’s five biggest financial backers are Jewish, and so are Trump’s top two.

That’s close to the 2 to 1 ratio, but it involves a very small number of large donors:

The largest individual donor in this cycle has been Donald Sussman, a founding partner at the Paloma Partners hedge fund, based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Thus far, he’s given more than $20 million to Clinton’s campaign, mostly through a super PAC supporting her bid, Priorities USA Action.

Clinton’s four other top donors are JB and Mary Kathryn Pritzker, Haim and Cheryl Saban, George Soros and S. Daniel Abraham. Along with Sussman, they have collectively contributed $69.7 million to the campaign, according to an assessment by Bloomberg Politics.

No surprise that Pritzger and Soros were in there, Soros being a person of Jewish ethnicity who’s not just a secular Jews but by his own admission somewhat anti-Semitic.

Other prominent Jewish Americans who have poured money into Clinton’s bid are filmmaker Steven Spielberg, fashion designer Ralph Lauren, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and entertainment industry executive David Geffen.

No surprise there. As for Trump donors:

Trump’s largest funder is casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has a propensity to donate lavishly to Republican nominees and whose donation to Trump was $10.5 million. …

The New York Times reported late last month that the Las Vegas billionaire had given up hope Trump would prevail on November 8, and decided instead to focus on down-ballot races and on trying to secure a GOP majority in Congress.

I guess he was wrong about Trump that year.

[Adelson] remains the single largest overall contributor in the country for 2016, as his family has given two super PACs supporting Senate and House Republicans $20 million each.

Trump’s second biggest donor is Bernard Marcus, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who co-founded Home Depot. He’s given $7 million to the former reality television star.

None of this tells us what percentage of the candidates’ donations were from Jews, nor does it tell us that for each party’s candidates in general. And this article (with the same limitations) offers a list of the top 15 contributors for the 2020 election. Five of them gave a total of about $142 million to Republicans, while the others gave about $176.4 to Democrats. That’s not as wide a disparity as one might think. But again, that’s only large individual donations (in 2020) and it doesn’t tell us what proportion of the total that is, although I’m pretty sure it’s quite significant.

However, this article contains an estimate of total spending in that 2020 election, by all parties. I have no idea if it’s correct, but the estimate falls somewhere between $11 billion and $14 billion. Those large individual donations I just discussed would be only a tiny fraction of that.

So I haven’t been able to find any substantiation for that 50% claim that makes any sense or seems based on any evidence.

The post A question of statistics: Jewish financial contributions to the Democrats? appeared first on The New Neo.

Right after the 2016 election, I read some articles describing people in government who had decided to stay put and secretly sabotage Trump. These articles weren’t exposes written by the right; they were proud confessions from the left, part of the righteous Resistance.

We are seeing the fruit of that today.

I hadn’t noted the links to any of those articles at the time, so recently I got curious to see whether I could find one. Here’s an excerpt from one typical article of the type, published in Vanity Fair on February 1, 2017, twelve days after Trump’s inauguration [emphasis mine]:

Others, however, view resistance as a part of the job. “Policy dissent is in our culture,” one diplomat in Africa, who signed the letter circulating among foreign diplomats, told The New York Times. “We even have awards for it,” this person added, in reference to the State Department’s “Constructive Dissent” award. One Justice Department employee told the Post, “You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” and added that “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable,” by whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints. Others are staying in contact with officials appointed by President Obama to learn more about how they can undermine Trump’s agenda and attending workshops on how to effectively engage in civil disobedience, the Post reports.

Let me emphasize that again: whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complains.

And then we have this, from the same article [emphasis added]:

When asked how the opposition emerging at this stage compares to past administrations, Tom Malinow­ski, who served as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, sarcastically told the Post, “Is it unusual? There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.”

The “nothing unusual” part was sarcasm, of course. But the rest was deadly serious. The plan was in place from the start, and it’s not some wild conspiracy-mongering to say so. This is a clandestine conspiracy, but not a completely secret one in the sense that we were told about its general thrust in advance by the proud perpetrators themselves. An interesting detail from those quotes is that “Obama officials” were apparently in charge of orchestrating this.

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist also noticed the trend back in the beginning. She wrote the following in an article from January 17, 2017. That’s a few days before the inauguration:

Dwight Eisenhower warned that if we didn’t stay vigilant, the military-industrial complex would start creeping into politics with pernicious motives all its own. The intelligence community’s war of leaks against Trump before he’s even taken office is just the latest questionably politicized action in the decades since Eisenhower’s farewell address. And it’s safe to say that the intelligence community pushing unproven and absurd allegations about a president-elect’s sexual perversions is probably way worse than anything Ike imagined.

In order to understand how we got to this perilous place and get a handle on what’s going on, it’s worth taking a closer look at the motives and allegations of political operatives in intelligence agencies, as well as the basic timeline of allegations of Russian electoral interference in the last few months. Far from discrediting Trump, it paints a worrisome portrait of the deep state gone rogue, desperate to stop a man who, whatever his considerable flaws, is an outsider to Washington.

She then goes into a series of warnings issued to Trump to beware of ruffling the feathers of the intelligence community. The most famous one, with which you might be familiar, was issued by Chuck Schumer:

…President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Remember, this was before Trump was inaugurated.

More:

Presidential historian Timothy Naftali said on a CNN panel that Trump should stay “silent” lest harmful information be released against him.

NeverTrumper David Frum wrote a tweet that said, “CIA message to Trump: you mess with us, get ready for a leakstorm of Biblical proportions.”

The rest of Hemingway’s article is well worth reading, despite its age. Or maybe because of its age. It’s a reminder of how many things happened very early in the game that are congruent with and basically telegraphed what would happen with Russiagate and now Whistleblowergate.

[ADDENDUM: Not to mention the MAL documents case.]

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“Raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated.” Those words from the Durham Report summed up one of the most damning investigations in the Justice Department’s history.

In the 305-page report released Monday, special counsel John Durham concluded that the Trump-Russia investigation was launched without a required minimal level of evidence and shattered a host of departmental standards. Let that sink in: The Justice Department — as well as the media that covered it — effectively shut down a duly elected presidency, based on what turned out to be a politically engineered hoax.

That would make anyone angry. Really angry. Trump-level angry.

The fact is, in this instance, Donald Trump was correct when he said he was the target of a political hitjob funded by the Clinton campaign and maintained by virtually every media outlet. There is a word for that: disinformation…

In the end, it is not a crime to be unethical or incompetent, so no charges will be filed as a result of the report. Durham clearly hopes that the belated transparency provided by his report will produce greater future accountability. That may be the only naive aspect of his findings.

Of course, the FBI promptly issued a statement that it has — once more — reformed itself in light of its failures. But who really believes this is unlikely to occur again?

Turley points out that the Hunter laptop story has been lied about by the same people, and there’s really no end in sight:

Thus, Durham was left throwing haymakers in an empty political boxing ring — and those who perpetrated this scandal on the nation are left to carry on making money on books, speeches, TV commentary and lectures about political or electoral ethics. The media, meanwhile, is offering little more than a shoulder-shrug and more spin.

If anyone needs any reminder, Turley is not on the right and does not like Trump. But he’s usually fair in what he writes.

Andrew C. McCarthy is on the right but can’t stand Trump. When Russiagate began, he thought that people in the FBI and DOJ were going to be straight-shooters. But several years ago the scales dropped from his eyes, at least regarding Russiagate. Now he writes:

Among the most troubling conclusions in special counsel John Durham’s Russiagate report is that the FBI — even as it relied on Clinton-campaign-funded opposition research against Donald Trump that it failed to verify — ignored strongly supported intelligence that Hillary Clinton was intentionally smearing Trump as a Putin puppet.

To my mind, Durham is being too kind.

Perusing the report, I find it impossible to draw any other conclusion than that the FBI, and the Obama administration more broadly, did not ignore the intelligence about Clinton’s strategy but rather that the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the United States government knowingly abetted Clinton’s implementation of the strategy….

Clearly, there was a Clinton campaign strategy to frame Trump. Yet the most sensible interpretation of the evidence Durham has amassed is not that the FBI, in evaluating its collusion evidence, failed to weigh intercepted Russian intelligence about that strategy. It is that the FBI was well aware of Clinton’s strategy, fully expected Clinton to be the next president, and helped implement the strategy, regardless of what Russian spies may or may not have thought about it…

The FBI knowingly treated Clinton with kid gloves. FBI lawyer Lisa Page warned the bureau’s senior intelligence investigator, Peter Strzok, to tread lightly in interviewing Clinton about the email scandal — fearful that, upon winning the election, Clinton would otherwise be vengeful against the FBI…

Durham documents that President Obama, Vice President Biden, top intelligence officials, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI director Comey were fully briefed by CIA director John Brennan on Russia’s assessment of Clinton’s plan to frame Trump.

McCarthy’s take on the FBI’s motive is interesting. Perhaps it’s even true. The idea is that the FBI wanted to curry favor with the next president, who would of course be Hillary Clinton.

But I don’t think that’s it, or at best it’s only a small part of it. For example, if they had thought Trump was going to be elected, would they have supported him and gone against her? I very strongly doubt it. I think their hatred of Trump and support of Clinton was motivated by two things. The first was their ideological kinship with Clinton. The second was Trump’s “drain the swamp” threat. They are part of the swamp, and he represented a direct threat to their power. And power is the name of the game.

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