The Smoke Eater For Feb. 19, 2020
Bloomberg's world, "winning" in Munich, and killing Hamza.
Good morning, this is The Smoke Eater for Wednesday, February 19, 2020, and I'm still standing.
Quick Hit
* A(nother) great debate * Run it up the 2020 poll and see * Bloomberg, Bloomberg, Bloomberg * The #AlohaGang are scammers * Much ado about Munich * And Trump’s infatuation with assassination *
NOTE: Sorry for the lack of updates this week. I won't go into the sob story; I've just been battling health issues. There were a couple of briefs I wrote this weekend that I'm still including due to their importance and timeliness. Feel free to yell at me via email, DMs, or the new comments section.
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Iowa Postmortem
Before we go anywhere, check out Issac Stanley-Becker's piece on what happened in Iowa earlier this month. TLDR: It was a perfect storm of pride, stupidity, and bending over backwards to coddle talking heads and the skeptical Sanders camp. The bottom line here is that everyone deserves some blame, not just the Iowa Democrats.
Debate-A-Palooza
There's yet another presidential debate tonight, but this one should be particularly interesting as former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg will square off against the other five candidates we've all come to know and form a love/hate relationships with. You can catch tonight's debate on MSNBC and Telemundo starting at 9 pm Eastern.
Yesterday Bloomberg made the debate cut after an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marrist poll showed him running at 19 percent nationally. Additionally, a fresh new Washington Post-ABC News poll of registered voters shows Sen. Bernie Sanders shooting up to 32 percent, Joe Biden sinking to 16, and Bloomberg edging out Sen. Elizabeth Warren with 14 percent to her 12, respectively. [WaPo / NPR]
Last night Nate Silver tweeted an update to the FiveThirtyEight forecast that showed Sanders was likely to come out of Super Tuesday with 608 delegates, roughly 41 percent of the total haul. In response, David Ploufe commented that Sanders would "have the pledged delegate lead he'll never relinquish." Naturally, the Bloomberg camp jumped all over this and dropped a memo suggesting everybody else should drop out of the race in order to keep Sanders from netting a plurality of delegates. As a side note, Reuters is reporting that projected turnout in urban areas is up compared to 2016, with the potential to tip important Midwestern states.
Bloomberg's Big Night
It's likely Bloomberg will be hit from all sides during tonight's debate; he's already attempting to head off some of the more obvious attacks with tough talk, policy proposals, and saber rattling. Yesterday Bloomberg dropped a financial reform plan (PDF) that would require banks to hold (a lot) more capital on their balance sheets, and and perform stress tests. In addition, the plan would levy a number of taxes on Wall Street transactions aimed at the super rich and high-frequency traders, nationalize Fannie and Freddie, tie student loan payments to incomes, make it easier to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, and allow the post office to provide banking services. Bloomberg also announced he would sell off his company if he's elected. Interestingly enough, Bloomberg said this back in 2018 during an interview with Radio Iowa.
Bloomberg is likely to get rocked after several nasty pieces dropped over the last few days. This morning HuffPo reminded everyone about a Muslim surveillance program enacted under Bloomberg's tenure as mayor. The Islamophobic hysteria of the post-9/11 world saw the NYPD using census data to monitor Muslim communities with a wide ranging surveillance campaign that included undercover informants, and photos and video of mosque attendees, sometimes without the knowledge of the FBI or neighboring police forces.
The New York Times took a dive into the murky world of Michal Bloomberg's philanthropies. Bloomberg's billions have been a joke among some politios, with unspoken winking and nudging that the man is effectively leaning on beneficiaries to endorse his candidacy. To say that the man has bought political influence does a disservice to the liberal and progressive causes that have benefited enormously from his support over the last two decades, including the fight over gun control and climate change.
Jumping off that, the Washington Post has an investigation into the culture of misogyny at Bloomberg's business over the last 30-odd years. Some of the low-lights include allegations that Bloomberg discouraged female employees from getting pregnant, going so far as to allegedly tell one employee who had become pregnant to, "kill it." There's also allegations of Bloomberg jokingly told female employees to give at least one male employee oral sex upon hearing of his engagement.
(DoD photo by Air Force Staff Sgt. Jette Carr. Not a real campaign ad.)
2020 Stuff That’s Not About Mike Bloomberg
Alt-right trolls and Russian bots supporting Tulsi Gabbard have been flirting with the #YangGang in the fallout of Andrew Yang's failed presidential campaign. Almost immediately after Yang announced he was suspending his campaign, forced memes with the #AlohaGang hashtag began appearing on social media in an attempt to game trending algorithms. Most of the memes have been aimed at keeping disaffected Yang supporters from backing Bernie Sanders.
Supporters of Sen. Warren were pissed after she was left out of an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll comparing candidates to Donald Trump in a head-to-head match-up. In related stories, McClatchy Reports that Warren's campaign has messaging whiplash ahead of the Nevada caucuses, simultaneously casting Warren as a unity candidate and a fighter. Axios reports a pro-Warren super PAC is launching in order to keep the senator alive in Nevada, South Carolina, and through Super Tuesday. The launch of the PAC makes Warren the last 2020 candidate to have the backing of a super PAC after Sen. Amy Klobuchar received the backing of a PAC last Friday. [Persist 2020 PAC ad]
War Games
Nobody is sure what to call Donald Trump's army of Bill the Galactic Heroes, so the Space Force is asking military professionals for advice on rank, the names of units, and what to call its members. In more serious news on the great space debate, Marina Koren has an interesting analysis of whether or not we should keep screwing around on the moon, per Trump's request, or skip straight onto Mars.
The Army is relaunching a competition for a robotic mule to carry heavy crap after the last competition was scrapped due to general fuckery.
An FY 2021 budget request shows the Navy wants to deploy hypersonic weapons on Virginia class submarines. Hypersonic weapons are one of the new toys first-world military's have been desperate to get working as they can race around the world at lightening speed and hit targets with stunning accuracy.
Mayhem In Munich
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had an uncomfortable weekend after European leaders spent three days dunking on the Trump administration at the Munich Security Conference. Pompeo responded with a rather tone deaf speech about how America is winning, and that somehow means Europe is winning by association? Politico reports a large contingent of congress members in attendance were upset by the theme, "Westlessness," while other attendees in expressed concern over a speeches suggesting European powers make overtures towards China and Russia.
The US delegation offered a rather rare bipartisan stance on rejecting cheap technology from China's Huawei. During a speech, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged attendees that this is like, "choosing autocracy over democracy." The ire over Huawei has already caused faltering relations between the US and the UK. This morning the Washington Post reported Trump was bucking his own administration's fight against Huawei with yet another dumbass tweet.
Lindsey Graham got into a spat with Defense Secretary Mark Esper over Esper’s consideration of withdrawing US forces from Africa. At one point Graham is said to have told Esper, “I could make your life hell.”
During the conference, Ukrainian President Voldomyr Zelensky met with a number of US Senators who are now trying to drum up more military aid for Ukraine, and the (rather remote) prospect of bringing Ukraine into NATO.
All of this comes as European countries increasingly spend more on their own defense, largely to due to the fear that an increasingly aggressive Russia (or China) may come knocking on their collective back doors, as well as Trump's belief in a half-baked retrenchment strategy he calls, “America First.”
Mark Zuckerberg was also in Munich begging for governments to regulate content on Facebook, so long as those regulations met Facebook's demands (PDF). On Monday Zuckerberg told reporters that he wants Facebook to be treated as something between a newspaper and a telecom operator, then farted out an op-ed in the Financial Times saying Facebook needed "more oversight and accountability." European regulators quickly shat upon Zuck's overture, but Casey Newton points out Zuck does has a point with regard to needing a more realistic timeline for content regulation.
On Friday, it was reported that Facebook won't require paid social media influencers (like those paid by Mike Bloomberg) to follow political ad rules. Facebook says the the sponcon ("sponsored content") will only be added to its library of political ads if the influencer pays to promote those posts. The sponcon simply has to be labeled as an ad, but (as usual) Facebook declined to make it clear if anyone will actually review any of that content.
One More Thing...
Back in 2018 the Trump administration fast-tracked the assassination of Hamza bin Laden, the son of the late Al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, for reasons that aren't at all clear to national security geeks, NBC reported this weekend. After his father's death, Hamza was used by actual terrorist leaders as a sort of recruitment token that actual jihadi assholes could point to. The kid wasn't high on anyone's list of dangerous idiots until Trump began throwing his weight around. Trump felt Hamza held a quasi-celebrity status, and thus his assassination would be good for ratings. That this story and its follow-up never hit a front page says … something.
OK, now here's a warm and fuzzy critter video! KITTENS AND PIGLETS!
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