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WASHED UP … "These Iowa voters loved Joe Biden in 2008. Now, they’re not sure he’s the one," via WAPO: Even Jirgens, who, along with her husband, were among Biden’s best-known supporters in [Pocahontas County], remains on the fence. "Joe’s on our list, but I just don’t know," she said. Earlier this month, Biden campaigned in nearby Emmetsburg, about a half-hour north of Laurens, as part of his week-long No Malarkey bus tour of Iowa, but she didn’t attend …
Many said they didn’t want to speak negatively about the former vice president or his campaign or didn’t feel comfortable talking about politics in a conservative county that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and where many voters are already displaying signs or flying flags touting their support for the president’s reelection.
INNOCENT MISTAKE … "Tlaib Blames ‘White Supremacy’ for Anti-Semitic Murders Carried Out by Black Assailants," by WFB’s David Rutz: Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) blamed "white supremacy" Thursday for a mass killing in New Jersey carried out by two black assailants, one of whom had ties to a nationalist hate group …
Tlaib, who represents a majority African-American district in Detroit, deleted her tweet after respondents pointed out the race of the suspects. She didn't send any follow-up tweet acknowledging her error, condemning the perpetrators, or expressing condolences for the victims.
CHIEF WARREN RUNS OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S WAMPUM … "Warren's wealth tax will generate $1 trillion less than she claims, study finds," via CBS NEWS: Senator Elizabeth Warren's plan to tax the fortunes of uber-wealthy Americans could generate $1 trillion less in revenue than she forecasts, according to a new analysis.
The analysis says a wealth tax could also crimp U.S. economic growth and hurt wages. By the Penn Wharton experts' reckoning, the wealth tax would cause the economy to contract between 0.9% and 2.1% by 2050. Average wages could also slide, even affecting households not rich enough to qualify for the tax.
HAMAS WEEPS … "Socialist Jeremy Corbyn to step down as leader of Labour Party after crushing defeat," via NBC NEWS: Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist leader of the opposition Labour Party, has announced he will step down the day after overwhelming election results meant the party not only failed to oust the ruling Conservatives but also lost a swath of formerly dependable seats.
Corbyn said he would resign early Friday morning local time, after exit polls predicted that his party gained just 201 seats in the 650-seat British Parliament.
Corbyn admitted it had been a "very disappointing" night as support crumbled in his party's former heartlands.
INTERSECTIONAL ANTI-SEMITISM … "AOC urges U.K. voters to back Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party," via AXIOS: [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez, who said a Labour-created video "might as well have been produced about the United States," is the latest big-name U.S. politician to have a stake in the U.K.'s trip to the polls—which features Brexit at its center …
Labour has faced a number of scandals, including an ongoing anti-Semitism controversy in the party that caused the U.K.'s chief rabbi to label Corbyn unfit to be prime minister.
BUILD THE WALL … "Border Crisis Left Criminals on the Streets, ICE Says," by WFB’s Charles Fain Lehman: ICE's Fiscal Year 2019 Enforcement and Removal Operations report, released Wednesday, showed an agency still struggling with the aftereffects of the nearly one million people who were apprehended illegally crossing the border in the last fiscal year. While criminals still made up 86 percent of those ICE arrested, the overall drop left thousands of criminal illegal immigrants on the streets.
TONE DEAF … "CNN's Cillizza Mocks Republicans Over Poll That Was Worse For Dems," by WFB’s Alex Griswold: CNN's Chris Cillizza mocked Republicans' "fealty" to Donald Trump, citing a poll in which a minority of party members said Trump is a better president than George Washington. Cillizza's analysis ignored that twice as many Democrats said the same of Barack Obama. …
At no point in [Chris] Cillizza's analysis does he mention the results among Democrats, criticizing only Republicans' views of the president.
"Stop for a minute," Cillizza intoned. "Almost 4 in 10 Republicans told a pollster that Donald Trump is a better president than George Washington. The same George Washington who led the country's armed forces to victory over the British, helped found our country and then walked away from office after two terms even though he could have kept getting elected for as long as he wanted."
BELLWETHERS … "Newspapers In Swing States Have Yet To Embrace Impeachment," via POLITICO: The Phoenix-based outlet was one of numerous papers that traditionally backed Republican presidential candidates but instead endorsed Clinton, along with the Cincinnati Enquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Dallas Morning News, and Houston Chronicle. None have yet made the case for impeaching Trump for his role in the Ukraine scandal.
Impeachment also isn’t dominating the news side of those five publications, where local issues remain paramount to the constitutional debate consuming Washington. House Democrats charging Trump on Tuesday with abuse of power and obstruction was covered Wednesday morning on all five front pages. But by midday Wednesday, stories on impeachment were either buried below dozens of headlines on the paper’s homepages or missing altogether.
BUSTED … "Andrew Yang says being Asian American may explain lack of media coverage," via NBC NEWS: "Race might enter into it in the sense that my candidacy seems very new and different to various media organizations," said Yang, who is Asian American. "I think you can make an argument that it’s somehow intersecting with some other dynamics."
One news organization that has come under particular fire from Yang’s supporters, known as the "Yang Gang," is MSNBC (which is owned by NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News) for having omitted the candidate’s name from polling and fundraising graphics on several occasions, even though Yang has polled better than others in the field who have appeared on screen.
DECLINE OF THE WEST … "Appeals court questions whether Boston Marathon bombing jury was biased," via BOSTON GLOBE: A federal appeals court judge questioned Thursday whether jurors who decided the fate of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were properly screened for bias, raising a possible flaw in the proceedings that could force the court to vacate Tsarnaev’s death sentence and require a new trial.
"You’ve got lots of qualified jurors. The government’s own data shows it … You just have to make sure you don’t pick the wrong ones, and that’s what it sounds like you did," Appeals Court Judge William J. Kayatta Jr. told a government prosecutor during oral arguments in the appeal of Tsarnaev’s case in federal court in Boston.
NO WORLD ORDER … "Present at the Demolition," by WFB’s Matthew Continetti: From Turtle Bay to Brussels, from Washington to Vienna, the decay of the economic and security infrastructure of the postwar world has accelerated in recent weeks. The bad news: As the legacy of the twentieth century recedes into the past, the only twenty-first century alternatives are offered from an authoritarian surveillance state.
The pressure is both external and internal. Revisionist powers such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea undermine the foundations of global governance and hijack institutions to the detriment of the liberal international order. The institutions themselves lack the self-confidence necessary to further the cause of human freedom. Meanwhile, the most powerful nation in the world has turned inward. Its foreign policy is haphazard and improvisational, contradictory and equivocal. The confusion and zigzagging contribute to the erosion of legitimacy.
DAYS SINCE JOE BIDEN DID A SUNDAY SHOW: 1,097. Come back, Joe!
"You know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden." —Former President Barack Obama
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