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The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC has published a statement rejecting the kind of analogy Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made recently when she called migrant detention centers along the southern border “concentration camps.” The statement was posted on the museum’s website as a press release:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now. The link to the Museum’s statement is here.

The Museum further reiterates that a statement ascribed to a Museum staff historian regarding recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s does not reflect the position of the Museum.

The Museum deeply regrets any offense to Holocaust survivors and others that may have been engendered by any statement ascribed to a Museum historian in a personal capacity.

The staff historian referenced in the statement is Dr. Becky Erbelding who tweeted a reaction to a PBS special more than a year ago:

The parallels to the 1930s-1940s refugee crisis are so obvious. Why can't we learn?https://t.co/Kwu5BvTC5x

— Dr. Becky Erbelding (@rerbelding) January 25, 2018

That tweet was cited by a website called “World Israel News” Saturday as if it were in response to AOC’s comments about concentration camps. Dr. Erbelding is demanding a retraction and a correction:

In an article appearing today, a reporter entirely manufactured a tweet she claims I posted. This appears to be a clear case of libel. I have demanded a public retraction and correction.

— Dr. Becky Erbelding (@rerbelding) June 23, 2019

She also wrote a response on her personal website:

On June 22, 2019, the website “World Israel News” posted an article claiming that I tweeted that “parallels to the 1930s-1940s refugee crisis are so obvious” in response to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s tweets last week. That claim is a total fabrication. I have demanded a public retraction and correction.

Holocaust analogies are lazy, distracting, insensitive, and incorrect. I have never compared detention camps on the US southern border to Nazi concentration camps. I am a good, careful, and award-winning historian, and this article contains lies and distortions.

This morning, Dr. Erbelding updated her statement to note that World Israel News has corrected the date of her tweet:

Note: I have made a correction to this statement. (6/24, 11:20am). The WIN article originally claimed that I tweeted the “parallels” statement in response to AOC’s comments last week. This is untrue. Now, without stating that they have made a correction, they changed the article to read that I made that statement in 2018 in response to a Frontline article describing the intensive vetting of refugees. I have gone back through my tweets and found the tweet in question, from January 25, 2018. At the time, it received two “likes” and no retweets, and again, was tweeted from my personal account.

So it sounds as if Dr. Erbelding had forgotten she ever made the statement on Twitter. In any case, she was not replying to or endorsing AOC’s statement about concentration camps.

This rebuke from Dr. Erbeldiing and the Holocaust Museum comes after the World center for Holocaust research, documentation, education and commemoration tweeted this last week:

.@AOC Concentration camps assured a slave labor supply to help in the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of "extermination through labor."

Learn about concentration camps https://t.co/oBPQsjf6FC#Holocaust #History pic.twitter.com/nmc9As2nlO

— Yad Vashem (@yadvashem) June 19, 2019

But none of this seems to matter to AOC’s fans, thousands of whom have swarmed every tweet on this topic to back her up. Even the tweet above has hundreds or responses arguing that AOC is right.

Update: I knew this was coming. Here’s AOC claiming Republicans made a “wild jump” by claiming she was talking about the Holocaust:

If you doubt it, here’s the original tweet. This is a deliberate, intentional, wild jump made by Republicans (frankly, often) for the explicit purpose of eliciting + manipulating pain for political purposes.

Meanwhile, kids are still dying.https://t.co/LTS1RnoXGS

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 24, 2019

So she mentioned “concentration camps” and “never again” and a “fascist” leader but it’s a wild leap to think she meant Nazi Germany. This is pure gaslighting because she’s being called out by organizations like the Holocaust Museum. AOC even retweeted a piece last week directly comparing migrant detention centers to Nazi concentration camps. Why didn’t she call out the author of that piece for making a “wild leap?”

No matter how far to the left much of the mainstream media may swing, I’ll confess to never having seen this one coming. At the Washington Post this week, Jackson Diehl pens an op-ed about the horrific conditions in Venezuela. Regular readers are already familiar with the tragic story because we cover it here every week. Four million refugees have now fled the country and are outstripping the humanitarian aid available in Colombia and other neighboring nations. The lack of food, potable water and medical supplies inside Venezuela literally has people falling down dead in the streets. Violence and starvation are rampant.

And who does Diehl predict will get the blame for all of this carnage? Why, Donald Trump, of course! Give these two paragraphs a gander and see if you can follow this “logic.”

The most plausible and most disturbing forecast was this: By December, an additional 1 million Venezuelans will pour into Colombia and other nearby countries — and the region will be unable to cope with them. The Trump administration will find itself facing demands that it mount some kind of intervention to stanch a crisis on the Venezuelan-Colombian border far worse than anything ever seen on the U.S.-Mexican frontier.

Meanwhile, the claim that the United States is responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe, now confined to the Maduro regime and the fringe left, will have gravitated to the mainstream. That’s because even though the ban on Venezuelan oil purchases that Trump rashly ordered in January failed to accomplish the goal of forcing regime change, it has had a devastating economic effect.

The title of this piece is literally, “The Venezuela crisis is going to get much worse — and Trump will get the blame.”

So let’s see if we’ve got this straight. The humanitarian crisis on the Venezuela-Colombia border is going to get so bad that the Trump administration will “face demands that it mount some kind of intervention.” Who exactly is going to be making these demands? (I mean, outside of the Washington Post, of course.) And what sort of intervention are we talking about? A military intervention? I think Colombia might have something to say about that, even assuming you could convince a majority of the American people that what we really need right now is another war, this time in South America.

Or perhaps you’re talking about a humanitarian intervention? There’s already been plenty of that going on. But you may recall that when the truckloads of food and other aid showed up at the border, Nicolas Maduro ordered tanks and trucks to block the bridge so it couldn’t be delivered.

Diehl then goes on to blame the chaos and starvation on Trump’s decision to sanction Venezuelan oil sales. You’ll recall that this action was taken in January of this year. Venezuela has been in a full-blown implosion for years now. And just for the record, there wasn’t much oil to block the sale of. The state oil company had long since been so badly looted by the corrupt government that they were barely able to produce anything and tankers were lined up in the harbors because the country couldn’t deliver on their promises or pay for things they had ordered.

Venezuela’s decline began with the ascent of Hugo Chavez and the socialist revolution. But it really accelerated when Maduro got hold of the reins of power. His rampant corruption, strongarm tactics and socialist policies have brought what was formerly one of the richest and most productive countries in South America to its knees. Its people are suffering because they live under the thumb of a tyrant. And unless you want us to invade the country (and take ownership of that disaster under the Pottery Barn Rule), there’s not a lot more we can do about it at the moment. The idea that you can somehow lay this disaster at the feet of President Trump is as laughable as it is insulting.

A lame pander reeking of flop sweat. Warren beat him to the punch on this, remember, proposing in April that a small tax on mega-millionaires could pay off most of the student debt in this country. That was back when she was crawling along at around six percent in the polls and trailing Bernie by double digits. A splashy bailout for the young and young-ish was her way of trying to show Sanders’s progressive base that there are other choices on the primary menu this year. But even in lefty-pander mode, Warren’s plan placed limits on taxpayer largesse. Only the first $50,000 of debt for each debtor would be paid off under her plan. If you’re someone who racked up truly massive loans, as one aiming for a lucrative postgrad degree in law or medicine might, then you’d have to pick up some of your own tab. That was her concession to the poor optics of handing out cash to some of the best-paid members of America’s professional class. Can’t fight a class war in which the upper class benefits as much as, or even more than, the lower class, right?

Now here comes Bernie, two months later, nervously insisting that you can do that. Warren has roughly doubled her polling since April, mostly at Sanders’s expense; she’s already passed him in more than one national poll and stands poised to pass him in the RCP average soon if trends continue. The man needs a way to remind lefties that there’s only one true socialist in this race and all the rest, including Warren, will cuck out with half measures as president. So here it is: Student-loan forgiveness for everyone, full stop, without regard to their ability to pay. Doctors, lawyers, you name it — everyone’s off scot-free. (What I said about Warren’s plan in April is even truer here: Under this proposal, the less responsible you were in incurring debt you couldn’t afford and the less willing you’ve been to sacrifice in order to repay it, the more your government will reward you.) A class-war giveaway that doesn’t account for class feels absurd, but it makes sense as a primary pander. This is Bernie showing Democratic voters that no one but no one will be as bold in handing out free sh*t as he will.

Sanders is proposing to pay for the legislation with a new tax on financial transactions, including a 0.5 percent tax on stock transactions and a 0.1 percent tax on bonds. Such a levy would curb Wall Street speculation while reducing income inequality, according to a report by the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, although conservatives warn it would stunt economic growth and investment…

“The cost will march toward $3 trillion and benefit a lot of wealthy families and future high-earners,” said Brian Riedl, an analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank. “Of all problems requiring a $3 trillion federal expenditure, the college costs of middle- and upper-class college graduates seem lower-priority.”

A fierce debate has raged in left-leaning policy circles as well as over whether canceling student debt offers too much help to families with higher incomes. The top 40 percent of earners would receive about two-thirds of the benefits from Warren’s plan, according to Adam Looney, a former Treasury official under President Barack Obama who is now at the Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank.

That number is likely to be higher under Sanders’s plan, given that proposals by Warren and Castro do not call for wiping clean the debt of those earning over six figures.

He also wants to make all public universities and community colleges free, because why not? As for suckers like me who already paid off their debt or the many Americans who decided to pass on college for whatever reason — including, perhaps, because they didn’t want to take on debt — I don’t know what to tell you. There are no plans in Sanders’s or Warren’s proposals to compensate those who made the mistake of managing their financial obligations prudently, but Philip Klein is probably right that that’ll change soon. Now that Bernie’s offered to pick up the tab for everyone with current debt, the only move left to out-socialist him is to offer reparations to those who don’t have debt but might have if they’d handled things differently. Expect that plan from Beto or Buttigieg in a month or two.

There’s also the small matter of the middle and even lower class, most members of which didn’t go to college, having to fund this bailout with their tax dollars. Right, right, I know — Bernie says he’s going to fund it by taxing Wall Street. But every dollar extracted from Wall Street for a student-loan bailout is a dollar that can’t be applied to one of the many, many other expensive new entitlements which the left wants to introduce during a Sanders presidency. Remember, by one estimate this guy’s health-care plan will cost $32 trillion over 10 years. The tax he’s proposing on Wall Street to pay for this student-loan thing could have helped pay for that instead. You’ll have to pick up the slack for one program or another.

Ironically, although this plan is obviously aimed at winning back some progressive votes from Warren, I think it may end up helping her expand her appeal. Warren isn’t trying to win the nomination by consolidating progressives and counting on them to outvote the rest of the party. She’s pitching herself to the center too, insisting repeatedly that she’s a capitalist to contrast her relative moderation with Bernie’s socialism. It appears to be working, with some centrist groups beginning to see her as a potential compromise nominee between Bernie and the more centrist Biden. Having Sanders go nuts with student-loan relief makes Warren’s still-nutty-but-not-as-nutty capped handout of $50,000 per debtor seem prudent and “moderate” by comparison. It might even help her with some lefty voters who, while appreciating Sanders’s ambition, won’t easily digest the criticism that Bernie’s plan will primarily benefit postgrads with higher earning potential.

As fraught and alienating as it is, the case for racial reparations seems more straightforward to me than the case for bailing out a single generation of student-loan debtors en masse. I’d understand it more if the bailout targeted only the poorest students, or if it was limited to those who encountered a gruesome labor market in the first few years after the Great Recession, but there seems to be no logical limiting principle here and no explanation for why these debtors as opposed to debtors who are 10 years older should receive relief. It’s like a conservative caricature of a left-wing redistributionist program, lifting a pot of money from Wall Street and then looking for some pretext, without much rhyme or reason, to give it to someone else.

Bernie Sanders: "Our proposal, which costs $2.2 trillion over 10 years, will be fully paid for by a tax on Wall Street speculation … The American people bailed out Wall Street. Now, it is time for Wall Street to come to the aid of the middle class of this country” pic.twitter.com/PBxeXBTQKQ

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 24, 2019

Project Veritas has released a new video featuring an interview with an anonymous “Google Insider” who has come forward to reveal how Google is working to create “fairness” online through the use of machine learning.

“Fairness is a dog whistle. It does not mean what you think that it means and you have to apply doublethink in order to understand what they’re really saying,” the Insider tells Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe. He adds, “What they’re really saying about fairness is that they have to manipulate their search results so it gives them the political agenda that they want.”

O’Keefe uses autocomplete as an example, showing that typing “Men can” into Google search yields suggestions like “Men can have babies” and “Men can get pregnant.” The Insider says these are selected because they are the things most people are searching for on Google, rather they are suggestions that have been trained into the algorithm that are in keeping with a particular political outlook. Later, O’Keefe notes that typing “Hillary Clinton’s emails” into the search bar yields no suggestions, despite the fact that this has been a popular search term over the past several years.

Of course, Google’s recommendations aren’t necessarily the same as its actual search results. But later in this clip, the Insider suggests there has been a recent effort to clamp down on conservative YouTube channels, including Prager U, Dave Rubin, and Steven Crowder both to demonetize them and to make them less likely to appear in search results. Something similar seems to have happened to Benjamin Boyce, who I wrote about last week. Boyce had dozens of his videos partially demonetized and, at the same time, it appears his clips critical of Evergreen State College no longer turn up in Google’s video search results.

Project Veritas has also received documents describing the concept behind the algorithm known as “ML Fairness” (machine language fairness). He reads a couple of selections from those documents including this: “In some cases it may be appropriate to take no action if the system accurately reflects current reality, while in other cases it may be desirable to consider how we might help society reach a more equitable state via product intervention.”

Finally, this clip also contains a hidden-camera recording of a Google staffer named Jen Gennai who is identified in the clip below as the Head of Responsible Innovation at the company. She describes Google’s efforts to promote fairness despite the fact that not everyone agrees with what that should look like. “People who voted for the current president do not agree with our definition of fairness,” Gennai said. So there seems to be an awareness that many of these moves are partisan but that’s apparently fine with Google.

Here’s the clip which is being hosted on Google-owned YouTube:

When we previously discussed the President’s decision to put the planned deportation raids in as many as a dozen cities on hold, I suggested that Speaker Pelosi might have put an offer on the table that caught Trump’s attention, prompting the delay. His statement about giving Congress “a couple of weeks” to hammer out a deal seemed to provide further indication that this was what happened. Now we’re getting some of the details of the “offer” Nancy Pelosi is putting forward and as far as I can tell, ICE should probably gas up the trucks and get ready to head out because it stinks on ice. (Pardon the pun.)

Our colleague Beth Baumann at Town Hall has most of the details in the plan. They are almost entirely based on help for the immigrants at the border (much of which would be fine if they want to spend the money) and virtually nothing that the President or conservatives want out of a border bill.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Sunday said the House of Representatives will advance a border bill brought about by the House Appropriations Committee. The announcement comes after President Donald Trump’s last minute decision to cancel a deportation raid that was scheduled for Sunday in 10 cities. Trump said he would give Congress two weeks to pass a border bill before the raid is reinstated.

According to Pelosi, the House will provide humanitarian aid that’s needed to keep families together.

“The President’s failed policies have exacerbated the situation at the border, where vulnerable children endure inhumane conditions that threaten their health, well-being and sometimes, tragically, their lives. This legislation provides urgently-needed humanitarian assistance for families, including funding for food, shelter, clothing, medical care and legal assistance, and will relieve the horrific situation of over-crowding and help prevent additional deaths,” Pelosi said in a statement.

You can go down the list, but all of the spending items are related to meeting the needs of the illegal aliens already in the country, with no provisions for slowing the flow of additional illegals crossing the border or speeding up the rate that we are able to process them.

There’s 934.5 million for processing facilities, food, water, sanitary items, blankets, etc. $866 million would go to “reduce reliance on influx shelters to house children.” Another $200 million is allocated to develop an “integrated, multi-agency processing center pilot program for families.” You’re probably getting the idea.

There’s another serious poison pill in the package as well. One provision would, “require the federal government to prospectively notify illegal immigrants that if they bring an unaccompanied child into the country and sponsor them, their illegal status would in no way be used against them, a source said, and that the child will be delivered to them without any reservation.”

Are you kidding me? So not only are we not fixing the loophole that’s allowing illegal aliens to grab a kid and use them as a passport to get into the country, but we’re going to advertise the loophole to all the migrants and codify it in law?

This is a joke and a bad one at that. Unless the Democrats want to include some money for new immigration judges, more CBP officers, and some wall construction, the GOP should tell them to take this bill and go pound sand.

It’s been a tough weekend for Pete Buttigieg. He is in an elected office while running for president and that can get complicated. Sunday I wrote about a confrontation South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg had Friday with some Black Lives Matter protesters during a Justice for South Bend rally. Mayor Pete held a town hall Sunday that resulted in outbursts from the audience and heckling.

Buttigieg is struggling to quell community unrest over a police-involved shooting a week ago in South Bend. Questions arise. How can voters place confidence in him to be the leader of the free world if he struggles to manage a small city of 100,00 people? Right now he can’t quite seem to find his footing as he juggles his day job as a mayor and still campaigns for president. Though he claimed to be leaving the campaign trail last week as he made the decision to return home and oversee the aftermath of the shooting, he flew to Miami to speak at a Latino legislators’ gathering. He spoke Friday morning before returning to South Bend for the Justice for South Bend rally. He missed the all-important fish fry hosted by Rep. Jim Clyburn but he did attend the South Carolina Democrat State Convention Saturday. Then he was back in South Bend Sunday for the town hall.

In South Carolina he took a shot at the police, accusing them of serving up the worst moments of racial injustice. Was he pandering to a largely black audience? Does Mayor Pete think this kind of language is helpful?

Pete Buttigieg speaks in SC: "Through our history, many of the worst moments in racial injustice in this country were served up at the hands of law enforcement." pic.twitter.com/WDzavBmFl4

— The Hill (@thehill) June 24, 2019

And he took jabs at President Trump.

Pete Buttigieg speaks in SC: "We are not going to win by going on the President's show. I know it's massively entertaining. I don't know what kind of show to call it. Is it a game show? Is it a reality show? It's a horror show." pic.twitter.com/AzFJZBrZtG

— The Hill (@thehill) June 24, 2019

Amongst the chaos of the town hall, Mayor Pete admitted that mistakes have been made and he took responsibility. He did, however, push back when he was accused of doing nothing. He acknowledged that his administration failed in two key initiatives – recruit more minority officers to the police department and the effort to introduce body cameras. The officer involved in the shooting wasn’t using a body camera.

The town hall was interrupted frequently by outbursts and heckling. At one point, a man yelled at Buttigieg: “You gotta get back to South Carolina like you was yesterday? Talk about ‘all lives matter’ in South Carolina?” Another man approached the stage to yell at Buttigieg and South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski, ignoring the moderator’s attempts to restore order.

“I don’t want to seem defensive, but we have taken a lot of steps,” Buttigieg said at one point. “They clearly haven’t been enough. But I can’t accept the suggestion that we haven’t done anything.”

Many in the town hall audience voiced their frustration with the police department, which included charges of racism.

The town hall grew contentious when some community members questioned whether the mayor had done enough to reform the police department in the city of 100,000 people, which is about a quarter black.

“Get the people that are racist off the streets,” one woman in the audience said. “Reorganize your department. You can do that by Friday.”

The town hall Sunday was described as “hastily arranged” and Buttigieg’s usual unemotional persona turned emotional as he struggled to cope with the angry crowd. He explained to reporters that the decision to hold a town hall that descended into chaos was a necessary action.

As a hastily arranged town hall meeting Sunday in South Bend descended into chaos — with attendees screaming profanities at him, at his police chief and each other — Buttigieg seemed to vacillate between despondency over the jeers, irritation over being interrupted and wonky erudition as he offered explanations about local laws on police misconduct that only further angered the crowd.

Yet once the gathering dispersed after the nearly two-hour meeting, the testiness from Buttigieg seemed to turn to sadness as he fielded questions from reporters. He became visibly emotional when asked whether it had been wise to hold the event given the communal shouting match it ultimately became.

“I just think it’s my job,” Buttigieg said. “I don’t know if it’s smart or not. I don’t know if it’s strategic or not. But it’s my city.”

Buttigieg’s rise in the polls has stalled out in recent weeks. No doubt his competitors in the primary race are keeping their eyes on how he handles his hometown crisis. Will any of them confront him on the debate stage this week? We’ll know soon.

Noteworthy because of both the author and the publication the op-ed ran in.

I’m proud to have founded the Democrats for Trump movement in 2016. President Trump’s pro-growth policies have revived the stagnating U.S. economy, and he deserves a second term. But to have the best chance of re-election, he should replace Vice President Mike Pence on the ticket with Nikki Haley.

I mean no disrespect for Mr. Pence, who’s loyally served the president and the nation. But he’s given Mr. Trump all the help he can. He inspired his fellow evangelical Christians to take a chance in 2016. But in 2020 they’ll already be repelled by the Democrats’ embrace of infanticide. Mr. Trump’s greater obstacle to re-election comes from politically moderate suburban women, many of whom see him as divisive…

It’s too late for Mr. Trump to revamp his political personality. But with the 2016 election in the past, Nikki Haley on the ticket could tamp down the antipathy for Mr. Trump that seems to afflict so many moderate and Republican-leaning women. President Trump needs the prospect of a Vice President Haley to help recapture the White House.

The Journal is a Rupert Murdoch newspaper, of course, and Murdoch is a friend of the president’s. Would a friend stir up trouble for POTUS and his vice president by running this without clearing it with Trump himself first? NYT reporter Maggie Haberman doubts it:

Here’s something that doesn’t happen without a Murdoch nod https://t.co/D8mfgGoNeo

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 24, 2019

The author is Andrew Stein, former president of the New York City Council and a longtime Democrat. But as you see from the excerpt, he’s an unusually Trump-friendly Democrat. He endorsed Trump in 2016, publishing an op-ed in the Journal in that case too, and has known Trump for decades, having visited him in the White House just within the last few months. Trump donated tens of thousands of dollars to Stein’s campaigns in NYC in the 1980s, allegedly using dubious means to do so in order to skirt New York campaign-finance laws. They go way back, they’re friendly, and they’re still in touch.

Which raises the question again: Would Stein have stirred up trouble for his friend the president by submitting a “Dump Pence” piece to a newspaper without giving Trump a veto beforehand?

In fact, considering that Stein and Murdoch are both Trump pals, it’s possible that this op-ed exists as a favor to the president. Maybe Trump is toying with the idea of dropping Pence and wanted to gauge public reaction to the idea. So he dialed up his friends Andy and Rupert and asked if the two wouldn’t mind if this piece ran in Murdoch’s paper under Stein’s byline. Stein is the perfect person to do it too since, as a Democrat, he faces fewer consequences than a Republican would from factions within the GOP who are friendly to Pence. Bill Kristol is suspicious too:

This op-ed pushing a Trump-Nikki Haley ticket is by former NYC pol Andrew Stein (who later pled guilty to lying in a financial fraud). Stein knows Trump, of course, and is close to others in Trump world. Zero chance this trial balloon isn’t ok with Trump. https://t.co/r8ZGZWtIeF

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) June 24, 2019

There is, of course, the small matter of Trump having already asked Pence to be his running mate for a second term at a press conference following the midterms. But so what? Trump changes his mind all the time. If he’s convinced that replacing Pence with Haley will meaningfully improve his chances of winning, both he and every last one of his fans will support ruthlessly cashiering Pence under any pretense. It’s not like Pence is some MAGA nationalist hero. And Stein’s quite right when he says in his column that Pence won’t deliver any more evangelicals to Trump next year than Trump can deliver himself.

Would Haley deliver many new women voters for Trump? Sarah Palin didn’t deliver an outsized share of women voters for McCain in 2008. Per exit polls, Bush got 48 percent of the women vote in 2004; McCain got 43 percent; Romney improved slightly to 44 percent; and then Trump, running against the first major-party woman nominee, dropped to 41 percent. Haley’s more of an establishmentarian whereas Palin was more of a populist, though, and Haley has more government experience than Palin had when she was nominated. If putting her on the ticket boosted Trump’s share of the women vote just a few points to Romney levels, that alone might be enough to secure him a second term given how tight the 2016 race was.

Yet Trump’s persona so thoroughly dominates American politics that it’s hard to imagine next fall’s election as anything other than a referendum on him personally. And it’s not as if Pence has had obvious influence on Trump’s decisions as president, which would raise the stakes on Election Day of who his number two is. The Journal reported a few days ago about Trump’s Iran deliberations that Pence supported his initial decision on Thursday morning to attack, then supported his decision not to attack later in the early evening. Trump does what he wants and Pence loyally follows along — which is no doubt how Trump likes it, and why he might be reluctant to replace Pence on the ticket even if he might stand to gain from doing it. The point, though, is that the VP thus far is basically a hood ornament for Trump’s presidency. Why would any voter be enticed into buying a car they don’t like because the salesman is suddenly offering a different hood ornament?

I don’t think Haley wants the job either. Why would she? She wants to be president, and running with Trump for a second term seems not very likely to make that dream come true no matter the outcome. For starters, the media would demand that she answer for all the allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump, starting with the latest one, which will dent her support among women. They’ll also push her to explain her foreign-policy divergences from Trump, which were often on display at the UN when she would deliver stemwinders about Russian meddling abroad. Haley would have to make peace with protectionism, which cuts against her more traditionally conservative beliefs. If they won, she’d be the first woman VP and his heir apparent as leader of the party, but she’d also be facing the hard reality in 2024 that Americans seldom (once in the past 70 years) give the same party three straight terms in the White House. If they lost, she’d have the loser label affixed to her in the 2024 Republican primaries. “Nominate Haley and we’ll win women!” her fans will say. “Like we did in 2020?” her critics will reply.

Although none would ever admit it, the best-case scenario for any aspiring Republican president eyeing 2024 — especially those who don’t fit comfortably with Trumpism ideologically (Haley, Cruz, Rubio) — is to stay as far away from Trump as possible and quietly hope that he loses next year, especially to Biden or Bernie since their age increases the chance that they’ll step down after one term. That might create an opening four years later for a younger nominee like Haley who wants to steer the party in a different direction.

Shortly after Iran shot down our drone over the Strait of Hormuz, I asked what the next logical response might be. Appropo of absolutely nothing, one possibility crossed my mind and I wrote the following:

So here’s a thought. Saudi Arabia is spoiling for a fight with Iran and they have a (sometimes regrettably) close relationship with President Trump. I wonder if someone is putting a bug in their ear about now. Just some food for thought.

These two things may or may not be causally related but we learned last night that the Secretary of State is over in that part of the world right now and he’s going to visit Saudi Arabia. Huh. I wonder what they could possibly have to talk about. (Associated Press)

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived Monday in Saudi Arabia in a hastily arranged visit amid mounting tensions between Washington and Tehran as Iran’s navy chief warned Iranian forces wouldn’t hesitate to shoot down more U.S. surveillance drones from their skies…

Pompeo, considered a hard-liner in the Trump administration, is expected to meet with Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Saudi city of Jiddah, before heading to Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, another close U.S. ally and partner.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are alarmed by Iran’s military reach and are working to limit its influence in the region.

So this was a “hastily arranged meeting” as described in the press release. Keep in mind that Saudi Arabia is now recognized as the number one weapons customer of the United States and they have plenty of military hardware. They also have bases and airfields that we could use in a pinch. So if there’s something in the works for Iran, it could either be a U.S. strike using Saudi facilities for support or, in a potentially more tense scenario, we could be looking at direct action by Saudi Arabia against Iran, putting all that hardware we sold them to use.

Of course, there’s going to be a lot of controversy surrounding this trip, at least in the media. Pompeo is scheduled to meet not only with the King but with Mohammed bin Salman. Coming on the heels of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, that’s going to be offputting to plenty of people. Then again, both politics and war make for odd bedfellows at times.

But is that really what’s going on here? I’m hard-pressed to think of anything else that would prompt the Secretary of State to hop on a plane for an unscheduled visit to the Saudis. I suppose they could be talking about the situation in either Yemen or Syria, both of whom are right in the neighborhood. But both of those conflicts have been settling into a slow boil for quite a while now. It’s true that Yemen is taking claim for the recent rocket attack on a Saudi airport, and Iran has been supporting the Houthi rebels inside Yemen. In that regard, Saudi Arabia is already fighting something of a proxy war with Iran, but as I said, that’s not particularly new.

We’ll keep an eye on the situation because it has the potential to blow up on short notice. I get the feeling that President Trump pulling the plug on the airstrike was a negotiating tactic, but that decision won’t hold forever if it doesn’t produce results. There’s almost definitely something in the cards concerning Iran, and we shouldn’t be shocked if Saudi Arabia has a role to play in what’s to come.

This is the week of the first Democratic primary debates. And you know what that means!

More talk of freebies than you could ever dream of. Or afford.

But that won’t stop these progressive candidates from proposing new spending plans to reap primary votes starting in Iowa come February and then New Hampshire. They will squeeze in mention of this wondrous free stuff during their few minutes on camera Wednesday or Thursday nights.

You won’t hear quite so much talk about how they intend to pay for all these goodies. But you can count on paying more in taxes of all kinds come early 2021, especially if one or both chambers of Congress are controlled by Democrats.

Remember the trillion-dollar stimulus package Barack Obama and a Democrat Congress produced in 2009-10? Vice President Joe Biden guaranteed back then we’d have hundreds of thousands of “shovel-ready” new jobs created each month. That didn’t happen.

Now, on his first day in the Oval Office, front-runner Biden has promised to kill the Trump tax cuts, which means tax hikes for nearly everyone which means less consumer spending which means a slower economy which means, well, you get the picture.

Today, Bernie Sanders is proposing to cancel $1.6 trillion (with a T) in student loan debts for about 45 million voters, I mean, Americans. Poof! Just like that. Also all private and graduate school debt gone. You’re free now.

He also wants to make tuition at every public university totally free, all part of his package that would make public universities, community colleges and trade schools tuition-free.

“This is truly a revolutionary proposal,” Sanders will say modestly as he tries to stem the advance of Elizabeth Warren on his second-place poll standing.

Sanders will announce this today with Rep. Ilhan Omar, who will introduce the legislation in the House.

Oh, look, Warren wants free tuition too. But first canceling the student debt for 95 percent of the 45 million carrying it. She calls these debts “a crisis” caused because:

State governments and the federal government decided that instead of treating higher education like our public school system — free and accessible to all Americans — they’d rather cut taxes for billionaires and giant corporations and offload the cost of higher education onto students and their families. The student debt crisis is the direct result of this failed experiment.

Warren would finance this scheme with what she calls an “Ultra-Millionaire Tax,” which is 2 percent annual tax on the 75,000 families with $50 million or more in wealth.

Sanders sees his plan financed by $2 trillion in new taxes on Wall Street transactions — a 0.5 percent tax on all stock transactions and a 0.1 percent tax on bonds.

Julian Castro also has a complex debt forgiveness plan, but the ex-mayor has as much chance of getting his party’s nomination as you do.

Surprisingly, these ideas spark opposition among some other Democrats, who see them as welfare for well-educated people. It should be fun watching them duke this out.

In an odd turn of events, an online knitting site has banned Trump supporters and white supremacists. Apparently the two groups of people are one and the same to the site’s owners. A tweet Sunday afternoon notified supporters of the change in the website’s policy.

Ravelry.com has taken an unusual stand by bringing politics into the craft of knitting. (The site’s Twitter bio also shows support for #BlackLivesMatter, for what it’s worth.) No matter the reason, this new policy was necessary and the announcement was ham-handed and confusing. Who knew fiber crafts were so political and lean so far left that all Trump voters are painted with such an ugly, broad brush?

Policy notes:

You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here.
We are not endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans.
We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.
We are not banning people for past support.
Do not try to weaponize this policy by entrapping people who do support the Trump administration into voicing their support.
Similarly, antagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions is not acceptable.

The tweet was so random to those seeing it that one person asked if the account had been hacked. The response from Ravelry was no, it’s real.

We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry. We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. More details: https://t.co/hEyu9LjqXa

— Ravelry (@ravelry) June 23, 2019

Some in the Twitterverse mocked the tweet and suggested the site’s new slogan should be “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all.” Sounds about right to me.

Responses to the announcement brought cheers and jeers online, which was foreseeable by everyone except, it seems, Ravelry. In today’s divided political environment, it’s ridiculous to expect customers to share one point of view. And it’s insulting to assume a Trump voter is necessarily also a white supremacist. With that line of reasoning, America has almost 63 million white supremacists that can be counted. The total of non-voting white supremacists isn’t known. You can see how absurd this is.

One critic hopes the site’s bottom line is affected. How could it not be? And, if it’s not a moneymaking site, then the community might collapse over such blatant politics.

I hope the decision hurts your bottom line. :D

— Dan Gainor (@dangainor) June 23, 2019

Supporters who approved of the anti-Trump administration policy weighed in as you’d expect.

Y'all are making me want to learn how to knit just to support you guys.

— Ryan Atkins (@ryantatkins) June 23, 2019

This is a free social networking service for a variety of fiber arts including knitting, crocheting, spinning, and weaving. Members share projects, ideas, and various components like tools, yarn, and fiber. Isn’t the point of participating in these crafts to relax and tune out everyday hassles? How can politics seeping into the website be so threatening to the administrators that policy must be changed?

Perhaps projects with Trump’s campaign logo were coming into online discussions or forums. Maybe knitters were creating original designs in support of President Trump or his policies and it triggered the narrow-minded leftist members. I can only speculate because I had never even heard of Ravelry before Sunday afternoon. My grandmother taught me how to knit when I was a girl but I didn’t keep up with it. I hope one day to take it up again owing to the fact that my friends who knit talk about the calming effects of the craft. And it’s a productive way to pass time.

Though the site owners make a point to declare that conservatives are not being discriminated against by the new policy, I wonder whether a member of the community would be banned if they began creating and sharing #BlackLivesMatter themed projects. I assume not since the site’s owners have made it clear that their politics don’t include room for different opinions.

This is a large online site. It claims to have over eight million members. It looks like this new policy and public statement is a nod to “diversity and inclusivity” in the knitting world. The knitting community is getting woke, y’all, and they want you to know how inclusive they are, except to conservatives. Why do they not see the hypocrisy in their wokeness?

The Trump ban comes only months after political upheaval gripped the knitting and crochet community around issues of racial and cultural insensitivity. That debate was sparked by popular knitwear designer and blogger Karen Templer, who wrote in January about a planned trip to India, likening it, in her excitement, to visiting Mars. Many in the craft community objected to the characterisation, calling it othering and reductive.

Templer apologised soon afterwards, but the incident had a ripple effect, sparking off conversations about diversity and inclusivity in the craft community on Instagram, Ravelry and other places that crafters congregate online. A similar debate about cultural sensitivity and appropriation recently occurred in the sewing community.

The site is bound to suffer a loss in membership. People craft to get away from thoughts of the outside world. It’s like watching sports — it’s a distraction and politics are not welcome. I haven’t seen my conservative friends who knit stop knitting because liberal women make pink pussy hats to wear at Trump demonstrations.

Great news for children — and grandparents.

Toys ‘R’ Us is returning by year’s end. In more modest form, but still back.

Toys ‘R’ Us was the massive go-to temple of toys with vast aisles of eye-popping playthings for children, grandparents and parents that went out of business early last year.

The rebirth is still supposed to be a secret. But excited toy makers spilled the beans about the plans to move back into the business that once brought in $7 billion a year to the nation’s top toy chain.

It was founded in 1948 by Charles Lazarus as a children’s furniture store just as America’s postwar baby boom took off. Fourteen years ago Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and Vornado Realty Trust took the company private with plans for an IPO.

But declining sales, a series of disruptive management changes and the financial burden of debt from the buyout began a downhill slide that canceled the IPO after Walmart captured first place in toy sales.

Almost two years ago the company filed for bankruptcy, listing $4 billion in liabilities. Then in March 2018, executives announced a liquidation, closing 740 U.S. stores, 100 outlets in Britain and more in Australia. Some 200 Canadian stores were sold separately.

The return of this toy story is reportedly scheduled for this Christmas season, starting with a half-dozen stores of about 10,000-square feet, about a third the size as before, and an e-commerce site. Lenders have been toying with the idea for sometime with the name Tru Toys.

The new stores will have play areas where children (oh, all right, adults too) can try out the toys.

A business return may not be all that easy. Amazon, Target and Walmart have expanded into the toy void. And some toy makers who lost money in the liquidation may be hesitant.

But others have signaled enthusiasm for the return. “This market needs a self-standing toy store, that’s for sure,” said Isaac Larian, CEO of top-performing toy maker MGA Entertainment. “We will sell them inventory.”

So, turns out Geoffrey, the corporate giraffe mascot, may not be extinct after all.

Politics stops at the water’s edge, as Arthur Vandenberg famously asserted during the Truman administration. But apparently not if the water in question is the Strait of Hormuz. And not if the politician in question is Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D – CA 43). After President Trump pulled the plug on the Iran counterstrike, you’d think that the move dovish Democrats would all be breathing a sigh of relief. (At least for a little while.) But Waters decided that she would lay into the President, claiming that the confrontational situation was our fault in the first place.

Trump, you get no credit for so-called stopping the strike against Iran. Why was the unmanned drone in Iran's airspace? Why the surveillance? Don't provoke and then pretend innocence.

— Maxine Waters (@RepMaxineWaters) June 23, 2019

This prompted some immediate responses from some of her colleagues, including Dan Crenshaw.

This is a shocking comment from a House Committee Chairwoman. She is literally repeating the lies of the Iranian regime. What a disgrace.

Maxine Waters’ hate for Trump runs so deep that she is willing to take Iran’s side over the word of our military. https://t.co/BnJn7Qn9rN

— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) June 24, 2019

Our own Hugh Hewitt got in on the action as well.

What the appeasement caucus of left-over Obama-era Metternichs don’t get is that Iran hasn’t changed in 40 years, and it’s Khomeinist ideology will not allow it to change. Team 44 got duped, got very little, recapitalized the revolution and now objects to nat sec seriousness. https://t.co/AITfY0mN8i

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) June 24, 2019

Crenshaw and Hugh are correct here. All Maxine Waters is doing is parroting the propaganda of the Iranian regime. And that’s really going far over the line, even for the Democrats. The Iranians have been growing increasingly aggressive with their naval forces for years now, going so far as to capture two of our own command boats in 2016. (To be fair, our sailors, in that case, had decided to take a “shortcut” and went through Iran’s waters, but it was still an outrageous move for such a minor infraction.)

As far as our drone goes, unless one of them suffers a crippling malfunction, we know where those birds are at any given moment down to a matter of inches. They have satellite nav systems and geolocation so the operators know precisely where they are. And we also know exactly where Iran’s airspace begins and ends. Sure, it’s possible that some of our operators push their luck a bit and cross the lines from time to time, but in this case, the Navy is saying we were definitely in international airspace.

So if it comes down to a game of We Said, They Said, and you’re talking about the Iranian regime, whose side are you going to take? In the case of Maxine Waters, she’s made her choice. Her burning hatred for the President is so intense that she would rather take the word of the Iranian Mullahs than our own military. There’s really no nuance required in this discussion. The woman is a disgrace.