Why Bloomberg would be the cynical choice for Democrats

Back in 2016, when Donald Trump had shockingly claimed the GOP nomination but still wasn't assured of the support of Republican elites and conservative intellectuals, "The Flight 93 Election" essay appeared in The Claremont Review of Books. The author — writing under the pseudonym "Decius" but later revealed to be conservative writer and activist Michael Anton — made the case that conservatives must support Trump. To do otherwise, he suggested, would mean the end of the American republic.

"A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto," Anton wrote. "With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances."

It was a startlingly cynical argument — and it succeeded. And now that Michael Bloomberg has become a contender for their party's nomination, it appears Democrats may have reached their own "Flight 93 Election" moment.

Under normal circumstances, Bloomberg might find it extremely challenging to try to buy the Democratic nomination for the presidency. A septuagenarian New York billionaire with a history of both misogyny and support for racist policies — not to mention a recent history of getting Republicans elected to the Senate — is exactly what the party is standing against in 2020, right?

Maybe not. Bloomberg is rocketing up the polls. Some Democrats and pundits appear to be convinced only a Trumpesque figure can beat Trump himself. Nominating anyone else risks — you guessed it — the end of the American republic.

"My fellow Americans, we face a national emergency," Thomas Friedman wrote last week in The New York Times. "Never before have we had a president so utterly lacking in personal integrity, so able to lie and abuse his powers with such impunity and so blindly backed by an amoral party, an unscrupulous attorney general and a media-fund-raising juggernaut."

Bloomberg, Friedman wrote, "can fight this fire at the scale of the fire."

"Among all the candidates, the person who I believe could stand toe-to-toe, strongest and longest with Donald Trump is Mike Bloomberg," added Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. earlier this month. "I think that he's tough, and I think he could take on the bully Donald Trump. Very few people can stand up to a bully. Mike's got some bully in him."

The logic is appealing. For one thing, Trump really does appear to be a threat to American self-governance — and this moment really does feel like an emergency. And among the candidates, Bloomberg has probably done the best job of presenting himself as the anti-Trump — although that is in large part because he has ignored his rivals for the Democratic nomination and instead poured millions of dollars into TV advertising attacking the current president.

The problem with Flight 93 Election logic — vote for my candidate or the American democratic experiment is over — is that it encourages us to gloss over a candidate's flaws in favor of panicked, fearful, break-glass-in-case-of-emergency thinking. More dangerously, that thinking also encourages us to believe that there should be few or no limits to the methods we deploy to defeat the other side. We can justify supporting any candidate, using any political trick available, as long as we're convinced our rivals are the real bad guys, that the ends of defeating them justify any means. We betray our professed values for the sake of a political victory.

It's amorality cloaked as morality. And it's how we got into this mess in the first place.

I'm convinced that such thinking — along with the aforementioned millions of dollars in ad spending — is behind Bloomberg's rise. The fear of a second Trump term is palpable among Democratic voters. But Democrats should not take the route that Trump blazed. They should offer voters a choice, not an echo. Otherwise, what's the point?

Bloomberg is not completely without merit. He governed as a liberal Republican during an era in which that variety of political species had largely disappeared. He has given substantial amounts of money to anti-gun campaigns. And he certainly brings more governing experience to his campaign than Trump did.

In the end, the similarities between Bloomberg and Trump are just too much. And given the antipathy of the Bernie Sanders wing of the party to billionaires, generally, it seems likely that Bloomberg — no matter how much "bully" he has in him — could win the Democratic nomination but lose the general election when Sanders voters stay home. Democrats might lose to Trump either way, but it's better to do so upholding both big "D" and small "d" democratic values than by offering voters a somewhat different version of what they already have. The more Democrats can vote their hopes instead of their fears, the more they can encourage the rest of the country to do the same.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-bloomberg-cynical-choice-democrats-110215410.html

Trump’s Top Trade Adviser Peter Navarro Has a Side Project: Secretly Hunting for ‘Anonymous’

As President Donald Trump moves to purge his administration of perceived disloyalty, one of his top deputies is also doggedly working to expose perhaps the most famous dissident in its ranks.

Officially, assistant to the president Peter Navarro is Trump's point-man on trade policy. But Navarro has also taken it upon himself in recent weeks to uncover the identity of the person known simply as “Anonymous,” the senior Trump administration official who has railed against the president in the New York Times opinion pages and, most recently, in a bestselling book titled A Warning, and whose actual identity has so far confounded White House leak hunters.

Since at least the time of the impeachment process against Trump, Navarro—whom the president affectionately calls “my Peter”—began conducting his own private investigation into the identity of Anonymous, according to three sources with knowledge of Navarro’s efforts.

One of those sources described Navarro’s investigative efforts as partially an in-depth analysis of the language and phrases used in Anonymous’ book and other public writings. The process, as described to The Daily Beast, mimics forensic linguistic profiling, and the goal is to cross-reference Navarro's “profile” with a list of potential suspects.

Two other people familiar with Navarro’s efforts said he had zeroed in on at least one likely suspect and that he has compiled his findings in a written report that he’s shared with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who is leading official internal efforts to unearth Anonymous’ identity.

One of the sources who spoke with The Daily Beast specifically asked to be identified in this story as a “senior administration official” because that is how Anonymous is self-described in the famous op-ed and book. Navarro declined to comment when reached by The Daily Beast on Sunday.

A White House spokesman did not provide comment by press time. But Navarro, it should be noted, is not working alone. Instead, his efforts are part of a multi-pronged effort inside the administration to figure out who, exactly, Anonymous is. In addition to work by the counsel’s office and Navarro, a handful of staffers on the National Security Council have taken it upon themselves to conduct their own unofficial probe, one source said.

Despite those efforts, Anonymous has vexed and fascinated political and media figures since writing a New York Times column in September 2018 describing himself or herself as “part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.” In November 2019, the person released A Warning, which lambasted Trump for his alleged erratic, reckless, and ignorant behavior and actions in office. The book claimed that numerous other administration officials share Anonymous’ disdain for the president, and frequently work to subvert his agenda.

Trump himself has taken notice, and on many occasions has privately asked senior aides about efforts to unmask Anonymous, according to those close to the president. Both he and his allies have taken Anonymous’ presence as confirmation of the existence of a “deep state” cabal operating within the federal government to thwart the president’s efforts to disrupt the status quo in Washington.

That view has inspired the West Wing’s efforts this month to purge the White House of perceived subversives, such as Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified to Congress about Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president. Vindman is not suspected of being Anonymous, but was removed from his NSC post last week in retaliation for his (legally mandatory) testimony before a House panel investigating conduct that led to the president’s impeachment.

It’s not clear whether Anonymous actually remains in an administration post, or has moved on. Reporting since his or her Times column has floated a variety of potential culprits. Every administration official who’s been asked has denied being Anonymous. But then that’s what Anonymous said he or she would do.

“For now,” the person wrote in A Warning, “if asked, I will strenuously deny I am the author of this book, including when the president demands we each disavow it.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-top-trade-adviser-peter-095014625.html

Getting ahead of any MOABS, DEEP FAKE FREAK OUT

This new deepfake of 'Back To The Future' with Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr is terrifying

There's a new deepfake doing the rounds on YouTube, and while previous face-swapping efforts have been unsettling, this one is borderline disturbing.

It finds Avengers stars Tom Holland as Marty McFly, and Robert Downey Jr as Doc Brown from Back To The Future.

And while it's lovely to see Spider-Man and Tony Stark back on screen together, it's also a harrowing glimpse into a post-truth world where we can trust nothing that we see anymore.

God help us all.

This worrisome clip has been put together by EZRyderX47, and has already gone viral, receiving a staggering 1.8 million views in just a few days.

EZRyderX47 has said that he used free software DeepFaceLab and Hitfilm Express 13 to make the faked clip.

One of his previous somehow slightly more jarring – so slightly less uncanny – videos also switched out Spider-Man so that it was Marty McFly in the scene in which Tom Holland's Peter Parker meets Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home.

But with this latest clip, he's hit viral glory.

Deepfakes have begun to do the rounds more regularly, with recent examples including Bill Hader morphing into Al Pacino while doing an interview on US TV, Jim Carrey in The Shining, and Sylvester Stallone in Terminator 2, all by the YouTuber ctrl_shift_face.

Video at link https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/deepfake-back-to-the-future-tom-holland-robert-downey-jr-120237859.html

>>8162738

It's all deflection. Anything to smear Trump as an Illegitimate POTUS, when it is them, rigging elections, (Look at all the swamp creatures that landed in office since 2016).

We're still waiting for the Evidence of those rigged elections to unseat those who truly are Illegitimate.

>>8162831

Why is it, that Wasserman's bill feels like a Harris/Booker scam?

Doctor's Suicide Note Has Parents Asking: Was My Child Really Vaccinated?

Doctor's Suicide Note Has Parents Asking: Was My Child Really Vaccinated?

An Illinois pediatrician’s mysterious suicide note has raised troubling questions about the immunization records of children in the Chicago-area community he served for years.

The doctor, Van Koinis, had been missing since August when he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Sept. 10 in a forest preserve in Palos Township, authorities said.

Investigators said they had found an “unusual” and “dark” suicide note at the scene in which Koinis expressed “horrible regrets” regarding immunizations over the past 10 years, prompting an investigation into which of his patients received vaccinations and which did not, the Cook County sheriff, Thomas Dart, said Friday.

“In the course of his note, he just made it sound like this was haunting him for a long time,” Dart said.

A statement from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office said investigators had obtained information that suggested that in some cases, Koinis “did not provide vaccinations to children at their parents’ request.”

“Was he just doing this pursuant to patients’ requests and then lying about the records, where these kids get into schools where you’re required to have immunizations?” Dart asked. “Or was it something where he went beyond that, where people who thought they were immunized were not getting it?”

In their investigation, authorities had spoken with two people who had worked for Koinis but were unable to gain clarity on the matter. After speaking with some patients, investigators learned that Koinis, who had been licensed to practice medicine in the state since 1991, was a proponent of homeopathic medicine, Dart said.

“He was pretty well known for that,” the sheriff said. “It wasn’t a secret.”

The physician was also popular in the Evergreen Park community where he practiced, Dart said. Numerous reviews on Zocdoc, an online medical care appointment booking service, praised his professionalism and bedside manner.

Koinis had about 2,500 patients at the time of his death, but it was unclear how many patients he had treated over the past decade or why the doctor had a number of patients who did not live in the general area, Dart said.

Since revealing their concerns about the suicide note, authorities have received phone calls from people expressing worry or detailing “strange experiences” at the doctor’s office in regards to vaccinations, Dart said.

At least a few of Koinis’ patients have come to his defense.

Tatiana Rudolph, a mother of two, told CBS Chicago that Koinis “never hesitated to give vaccinations.” Another parent, Dana Hamed, praised the doctor for constantly checking up on her and her daughter, according to the station. “I was absolutely blown away because I would have never in a million years imagined a doctor to do that,” she said.

In its statement, the sheriff’s office encouraged former patients to consult with their current physicians and “inquire about methods to test for prior vaccinations.” At least one local school district had publicly reiterated concerns from the sheriff’s office.

Melaney Arnold, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Public Health, said in a statement Friday that the agency was very concerned about the situation, noting that “vaccination is the best protection against many diseases.”

Dr. Len Horovitz, an internist and pulmonary specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, said Friday that falsifying medical records was an offense that could land a physician in trouble, especially if it concerned public health.

According to Horovitz, patients can be tested for vaccinations they may have received or may be missing. “Most vaccinations can be assessed with antibody levels — that includes chickenpox, measles, mumps, rubella” and others, he said.

Those who are not immunized should receive a booster. “It’s not only safe to do that, it’s recommended,” he said.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/doctors-suicide-note-parents-asking-131155213.html