Month: May 2016

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the nominal Democrat whose two-and-a-half decade career as a registered Independent in Congress has essentially been a form of leftist protest of the Democratic Party, has declared his presidential candidacy will go all the way to the Democratic National Convention in July.

Politico reports Sanders told an audience at the National Press Club that Clinton “will need superdelegates to take her over the top at the convention in Philadelphia. In other words, it will be a contested convention.” An NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll has the two candidates polling within the margin of error in Indiana, but because all Democratic primaries award delegates proportionally, Sanders needs to win over 60 percent of each primary the rest of the way to have any shot of matching Clinton’s delegate totals.

He knows he’s got little chance of overtaking former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before the final primary in Washington DC on June 14, but Sanders continues to raise money ($26 million last month, according to CNN) for his insurgent campaign which even many hardcore Clinton supporters begrudgingly appreciate, to a point, for pushing Clinton “to the left” on economics. 

Those same Clinton supporters, however, also think Sanders has had his moment and that it’s time for the democratic socialist from Vermont to stop “attacking” his only rival for the nomination or drop out entirely. Some Clinton supporters claim the party needs “unity” now, lest the presumptive nominee suffers any more public criticism that doesn’t come from the mouth of Donald Trump. 

The Clinton camp continues to tout how much leg-work it did to support then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008 once he was the nominee, but there seems to be a collective case of amnesia on how viciously Clinton’s campaign fought Obama’s down to the very last primary in 2008. In an article last week, Politico recalls Hillary Clinton saying as late as May of that knock-down, drag-out primary process that “Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening,” and the article also notes that Bill Clinton reportedly used his presidential gravitas to try to convince superdelegates that “the country wasn’t ready to elect an African-American President.”

This isn’t exactly the stuff that party unity is made of. The fact is, when it became clear that the delegate math was not in her favor, Clinton’s once-formidible support among superdelegates dwindled, and she and her surrogates did everything they could to undermine Obama as an inexperienced outsider who would lose the general election.

Of course, not only did Obama handily defeat Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) in the general, he flipped some traditionally red states into the blue column, indicating the sustained attacks by the Clinton camp didn’t seem to leave a scratch on him. 

Clinton was supremely confident she would be the nominee in 2008 and the Obama juggernaut was something she never saw coming. This time around, with Clinton’s only serious competition coming from an elderly, charisma-free senator with a long but undistinguished career in Congress, the burden of having to actually compete for her own party’s nomination is clearly infuriating to the Clinton camp. 

Supporters of Clinton will note that the race was tighter between Obama and Clinton than it is with Clinton and Sanders, which is true. But what is also true is that Obama and Clinton shared much more in common in both policy and political philosophy than Clinton and Sanders do. This is truly a competition of ideas, rather than personalities. 

Though he changed his long-time affiliation from Independent to Democrat last November, Sanders’ has demonstrated little concern with party unity. Indeed, his candidacy has promised “revolution.”

Sanders has no interest in preserving Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council-style centrism, he wants to reshape the Democratic Party into one that’s outwardly hostile to the free market and substantially increases the welfare state, but also abandons the drug war once and for all (including the legalization of marijuana) and turns its back on the relentless appetite for military intervention (or as Clinton would call it, “smart power“).

If Sanders’ end game is to influence Democratic Party policy, he has little incentive to drop out now, even if Paul Krugman thinks “he’s in the process of blowing his own chance for a positive legacy.” Bowing out now surely earns Sanders a plum time slot at the Democratic National Convention, but given how many votes he’s already earned — to say nothing of the enthusiasm of his supporters — he could demand that regardless. 

But Sanders statement at the National Press Club this past weekend that he’s “entitled to superdelegates” (specifically an amount of superdelegates that’s proportional to the voting percentages he’s won) indicates he wants to have it both ways. For all the influence his campaign may have affected on Clinton’s, it’s far too late to try to change the rules of a major party which he defiantly refused to identify himself with until he decided to run for president.

Superdelegates are a fact of Democratic Party life and specifically designed to keep insurgent candidacies at bay. For almost as long as Sanders has been a leftist thorn-in-the-side of the Democratic Party, Clinton has been a first lady, senator, secretary of state and power broker. She has cultivated the support of the party elites who are this year’s superdelegates. If Sanders has designs on reforming that system, he’ll have to save that intra-party revolution for another time. 

In the meantime, Clinton supporters shouldn’t fear competing in the marketplace of ideas. Donald Trump will still be Donald Trump when the primaries are over.

After the Minneapolis-based Target announced that it would allow customers and workers “to use bathrooms appropriate for the sex that matches their appearance, not necessarily their birth sex,” social conservatives announced an online petition and boycott of the low-end-but-still-trendier-than-Walmart retailer.

The Target Boycott Pledge is spearheaded by the American Family Association, which claims that over 1 million folks have signed up to steer clear of Target stores until the company reverses its policy and…starts inspecting customer genitalia or something. “Target’s policy is exactly how sexual predators get access to their victims,” harrumphs the AFA (emphasis in original). “And with Target publicly boasting that men can enter women’s bathrooms, where do you think predators are going to go?”

In the wake of the boycott, conservatives are crowing that they are righteously destroying Target’s stock price since the company welcomed fat, sweaty, hairy men to just sort of hang out in store bathrooms all day. The basis for this is that Target’s stock price dipped from $84.14 a share about a week-and-a-half ago to $79.27 last Friday.

“TARGET STOCK IN TOILET: Boycott Passes 1 Million As Corporate Losses Pass $2.5 BILLION!,” reads a typical headline of the genre. “Corporate America,” warns a writer at RedState, “Learn from Target’s mistakes. Just because the self-righteous celebrities and self-indulgent rich people like Donald Trump that you hang around with make you feel socially pressured to cater to leftist ideas doesn’t mean you should. They may seem loud, but the rest of America can be a lot louder when we want to be. About 2.5 billion times as loud.”

Well, maybe. But then there’s this: The stock closed yesterday at $80.12 a share, so maybe people really don’t give a shit (har har!) about bathroom stuff. Indeed, here’s a two-year trend line of the stock’s price, just to give a larger context to what every dummy investor knows. Which is that prices go up and down a lot and only a fool mistakes short-term fluctuations for the true value of much of anything, but especially a stock in the retail industry.

More bad news for the potty warriors: According to the MarketWatch site, analysts are totally bullish on Target.

And why shouldn’t they be? Contra the AFA’s scaremongering, it turns out that the class of perverts who frequent discount retailers are not being drawn to the restrooms now that they are “free” to do so. No, they’re sticking to the traditional scenes of voyeurism, such as the swimsuit aisle. To wit, this recent news report:

A Florida woman approached by a man holding a basket full of razors in the bikini section of a Target store caught him on camera, she said.

Candice Spivey recognized Jeffrey Polizzi, 31, last week at the Jacksonville-area Target as the same creep who asked her indecent questions at a grocery store two years ago, according to the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office.

Polizzi, who was convicted of video voyeurism in 2009, could be seen on Spivey’s cell phone video telling her, “You want to make sure it’s not too sheer or clear.”

Polizzi reacted in horror when she asked him if he remembered the earlier encounter. He dropped the basket, ran out of the store and sprinted out of the parking lot as Spivey yelled, “Get this guy! Stop him! Stop this guy! Call the cops!”

And yet despite this clear and oddly comforting example of a perv acting just like they always have, the usually razor-sharp Stephen Green of Vodkapundit, still finds a reason to loop this incident back to Target’s laissez-faire bathroom policy, writing, “Under Target’s new policy, this creep could have been hanging out in the ladies female-ish gendered room, no problem.”

But—and this is a bigger but about which even Sir Mix-A-Lot himself could ever dare to dream—the creep wasn’t in the bathoom.

Let’s check back in on how that Target boycott is doing in a few weeks or month. And how the company’s stock is faring, too.

Bonus link: Target is pushing Mother’s Day gifts pretty big, so Heather, why don’t you get all your shopping for both mommies done there?

Good news on the prostitution-decriminalization front is pretty hard to come by these days, especially in states like California, Texas, and Washington where stopping “human trafficking” has turned into a full-blown war on consenting adults selling and paying for sex. But wonder of wonders, the California legislature is actually considering a measure that would reduce the criminal penalties for sex workers, including repealing the current mandatory minimum jail sentences for repeat prostitution offenders.

Under current California law, anyone convicted of a second prostitution offense must serve at least 45 days in jail, with subsequent convictions mandating at least 90 days jail time. Offenders may also have their driver’s licenses suspended for up to six months.

The California Senate has already approved a measure to abolish these mandatory minimum penalties and the licence suspension provision, with Democrats largely in favor and Republicans largely opposed. The bill is now headed to the state Assembly.

But—of course there’s a but, right?—the bill isn’t all sunshine and lollipops from a feminist, libertarian, or sex-worker rights perspective. The reason its sponsor, Sen. Bill Monning (D-Carmel), gives for favoring reduced penalties isn’t because he believes adults should have the right to enter into consensual sexual relationships without state interference. Rather, it’s predicated on a belief that women lack sexual and moral agency.

Mandatory minimum jail sentences for prostitution is a “flawed policy,” he said, because the women selling sex are “victims of human trafficking.” He’s not hoping for less arrests and prosecution of sex workers, he just wants those convicted to be sent to “diversion” programs. Right now, with the mandatory minimums, judges are forced to sentence repeat prostitution offenders to jail; now they can give them the option of attending bullshit propaganda programs and only send them to jail if they decline the “help.”

The bulk of the prostitution diversion programs that I’ve read about (and I think that’s most of them) are run by religious groups, offering a hefty dose of moral condemnation along with their alleged aid. Or they’re focused on things like yoga and meditation and teaching women why they’re better than selling sex. Unfortunately, these programs tend to provide women with little in the way of job training, job placement assistance, or any other practical components. They require an intensive time commitment (usually at least several hours a day, every day, for a few weeks), which makes sticking to the programs difficult for those who have children or are trying to work a “real” job. The rate of completion of these programs is low, and those who drop out risk being thrown in jail anyway.

But who cares if it actually helps, right? For politicians, it’s attaching one’s name to a bill that counts. Right now, California lawmakers have introduced so many human-trafficking bills that they’ve become redundant, with a slew of overlapping bills covering the same legal territory. There are currently some 25 to 30 bills related to human trafficking in the Assembly alone, according to Assemblywoman Toni Atkins (D-San Diego).

You might think legislators would simply be happy to have the issue addressed, and some sponsors of the overlapping measures would drop theirs and band together on one bill. But that, of course, would preclude each sponsor from getting the credit for Doing! Something! about a high-profile, good-PR issue.

“Invariably, there’s not coordination,” California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) told the Voice of San Diego. “Everybody wants to do something.”

Because none of these shameless grandstanding hypocrites dedicated lawmakers will actually withdraw their bills and risk losing the do-gooder credit, the bills are currently being held and sorted out by the Assembly’s appropriations committee.