The good news for Joe Biden last night? He was a lot more energetic, forceful and coherent than he usually is. The bad news for Joe Biden? He’s still Joe Biden. He’s still 76. His mind is a sloppy bowl of oatmeal with crust spilling out over the edges. It would have been entirely appropriate if George Stephanopoulos had replied to his late-evening stemwinder by saying, “Mr. Biden, what you’ve just said was one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

Linsey Davis of ABC News posed the following question: “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?” Biden’s answer looks even more demented in the transcript than it sounded last night:

Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Red-lining banks, making sure that we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title I schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise, the equal raise to getting out — the $60,000 level.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need — we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy.

The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have — make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school. School. Not daycare. School. We bring social workers in to homes and parents to help them deal with how to raise their children.

It’s not want they don’t want to help. They don’t — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — the — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

Davis cut him off with a “Thank you, Mr. Vice President,” for which Biden should have been grateful. But the chatter about him giving abbreviated answers in previous debates had gotten to him. So he decided to blather on. And then things got even crazier.

There’s so much we — no, I’m going to go like the rest of them do, twice over, okay?

Because here’s the deal. The deal is that we’ve got this a little backwards. And by the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro.

Number two, you talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million to see to it those three countries, in fact, changed their system so people don’t have to chance to leave. You’re all acting like we just discovered this yesterday. Thank you very much.

Joe Biden is a Botoxed babbling brook. He is not fit to be president.

A Republican state representative issued what Beto O’Rourke is referring to as a “death threat” last night in response to O’Rourke’s vow to pursue gun confiscation policies if elected president.

Briscoe Cain, who represents the Houston area in the Texas state legislature, wrote “my AR is ready for you Robert Francis” in a since deleted tweet sent Thursday night in response to’s O’Rourke enthusiastic confirmation that he would forcibly confiscate AR-15 and AK-47 rifles if elected.

“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke said during the third Democratic primary debate in Houston.

O’Rourke responded to Cain’s tweet by arguing that the message alone should disqualify him from owning an AR-15.

This is a death threat, Representative. Clearly, you shouldn't own an AR-15—and neither should anyone else. pic.twitter.com/jsiZmwjMDs

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 13, 2019

Twitter deleted Cain’s tweet roughly two hours after it was posted because it violated the company’s prohibition against issuing violent threats.

O’Rourke’s campaign told CNN that it plans to report Cain’s message to the FBI.

The former Texas congressman has prioritized impassioned pleas for increased gun control during most public appearances since 22 people were shot and killed in a Walmart in his hometown of El Paso last month.

In addition to calling for a policy of mandatory confiscation, in which gun owners who refused to sell their firearms to the government would be criminally liable, O’Rourke is urging major financial institutions not to finance gun transactions.

“However inadvertent or deliberate, credit card companies and banks profit off of those who terrorize our communities,” O’Rourke said in an email to voters on Thursday. “And we know that in this moment, no one can sit on the sidelines. Everyone has a responsibility to do their part.”

O’Rourke’s gun-control proposal, released last month, also calls for the creation of a national gun registry, and a ban on bump-stocks, silencers, and magazines that hold more than ten rounds.

​​​He almost certainly doesn’t realize it, but Beto O’Rourke is likely to be the worst thing to happen to the gun-control movement in decades — and, if he continues in this mode, he may turn out to be the worst thing to happen to the Democratic party in a long time, too. In Houston last night, O’Rourke abandoned his cloying euphemisms (“mandatory buybacks”) and delivered a deliberate, carefully scripted endorsement of gun confiscation, which, within minutes, his campaign began to sell on t-shirts. “Hell yes,” Beto said, “we’re going to take your AR-15.”
​​
​​Thus, upon the instant, did two decades’ worth of Democratic rhetoric go up in a puff of smoke.
​​
​​Beto’s increasingly unhinged rhetoric is not only at odds with political reality — is he unaware that that the Democratic House failed this week to marshall enough votes for ban on the sale of “assault weapons,” let alone for confiscation? — it also chronically undermines the assurances on which the Democratic party’s more modest gun-control proposals have been built. For years, Democrats have insisted that “nobody is coming for your guns,” and they have used that line to explain why their coveted registry and desired licensing systems do not pose a threat to anyone but criminals. The current push for an expansion of the background check system rests heavily upon this assurance: “Don’t worry about the de facto registry,” advocates like to argue, “it won’t affect you at all.” With reckless abandon, O’Rourke just blew straight through that, screaming, “yes, it will!”
​​
​​And in the worst possible way, too. When O’Rourke first decided that he was in favor of confiscation, he was at pains to promise that enforcement would be unnecessary because Americans would comply, and that the punishment would be a fine and nothing worse. With his “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15” language, O’Rourke has abandoned even that. And for what? So that he might increase a few percentage points in a poll that he is never, ever going to win, and then disappear from electoral politics forever?
​​
​​A year from now, when O’Rourke is a contributor on MSNBC, the people who stayed in the arena are going to look back on this period and curse his name. “Did that guy help us?” they will ask. “Hell, no.”
​​

I thought the Democratic debate last night was a something of debacle. I didn’t think there were any clear winners, while Harris hurt herself substantially.

But the real failure was that of the moderators in the obvious and important questions and follow-ups they didn’t ask. Here’s just a partial list:

• “Do you support or oppose the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act? It merely requires a living baby to be treated like a living baby and wouldn’t prevent abortion. What basis is there to oppose it?”


• In the discussion on “Medicare for All”: “Would the plan require healthcare rationing?”


• “African-Americans are enjoying the highest levels of employment in U.S. history. Shouldn’t that count when deciding who African-Americans support for president?”


• In the discussion on guns: “Do you agree with San Francisco that the NRA is a terrorist organization?”


• In the discussion on letting everyone and their cousins out of jail: “Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani prosecuted minor lifestyle violations because he believed the perpetrators also commit major crimes. He turned the city around. San Francisco now refuses to prosecute minor crimes and consequently, it ranks number one in the country for property crimes. Under your policies, why wouldn’t the same thing happen nationally as has happened in San Francisco?”


• In the discussion on immigration: “Sanctuary policies have prevented police agencies from holding violent illegal alien criminals under detainer holds from ICE who later committed other violent crimes. What would you tell the victims of those crimes about the virtue of sanctuary policies?”


• Under the discussion of leaving Afghanistan: “If we leave Afghanistan undefended it is likely that women will be returned to slavery status and the people who helped us who will be killed. What will you do to prevent such an awful outcome?”


• In the discussion of removing all carbon from energy production: “Do you support nuclear power?”

Given the probable political leanings of the moderators, I am not surprised they failed to explore the important depths of the issues presented. I think it was simply a matter of their knowing what they didn’t want us to know.

Joe Biden rambled and stumbled during the third Democratic presidential debate in Houston Thursday night. Somehow, he still managed not to lose it.

Biden is a weak frontrunner, and his greatest weakness was on full display in Houston: His age has caused him to lose a step since the blustery-yet-effective debate performance he gave against Paul Ryan in 2012.

He was less lucid and articulate on Thursday night than he was during his clear victory at the last Democratic debate in July. Some of his verbal mistakes in Houston were slight — confusing “billions” with “trillions,” and “councilman” with “congressman,” and talking about “record players.” At other times, his errors were more substantive. “Nobody should be in jail for a non-violent crime,” he said, likely meaning “a non-violent drug crime.” “We didn’t lock people up in cages, we didn’t separate families,” he said of the Obama administration. (Fact check: They did.)

His comments on Afghanistan were at times incomprehensible. At one point, his dentures appeared to slip. “There are definitely moments where you listen to Joe Biden and you just wonder,” Cory Booker told CNN after the debate.

But despite it all, Biden didn’t lose the debate, because the other candidates failed to capitalize on his weaknesses. At one point, Julian Castro even seemed to inoculate Biden from criticism about his age by pressing the attack too forcefully, making the former vice president seem sympathetic.

“Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” Castro asked, taunting Biden during an exchange on health care. “Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? I mean, I can’t believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in and now you’re saying they don’t have to buy in. You’re forgetting that.” (The Castro brothers are apparently not big fans of subtlety.)

Biden also managed to win some key exchanges on matters of substance.

ABC moderator David Muir said to Kamala Harris:

In recent days former Vice President Biden has said about executive orders, “Some really talented people are seeking the nomination. They said, ‘I’m going to issue an executive order.'” Biden saying, “There’s no constitutional authority to issue that executive order when they say ‘I’m going to eliminate assault weapons,'” saying, “you can’t do it by executive order any more than Trump can do things when he says he can do it by executive order.”

Does the vice president have a point there?

“Well, I mean, I would just say, hey, Joe, instead of saying, ‘No, we can’t,’ let’s say ‘Yes, we can,’” Harris replied, before laughing uproariously at her own zinger as is her wont. She utterly failed to provide any constitutional argument in favor of banning assault weapons by executive fiat, and Biden stuck to his guns. “Let’s be constitutional. We’ve got a Constitution,” he shot back.

Biden also got the better of his opponents during the discussion of Medicare for All, the most important policy debate in the Democratic primary. He contrasted his $740 billion plan with the $30 trillion Medicare for All plan of Warren and Sanders early in the debate. “Thus far, my distinguished friend, the senator on my left, has not indicated how she pays for it,” he said, referring to Warren, while Sanders has only gotten “about halfway there.”

Later, Biden hit his rivals for proposing grand Medicare for All plans that would take years to implement. “We’re talking four, six, eight, ten years, depending on who you talk about, before we get to Medicare for All,” Biden said. “Come on. I’ve been there. You’ve been there. You know what it’s like. People need help now, hope now.”

Finally, he ended on a memorable high note. Asked what his greatest “professional setback” was, the former vice president had the good sense to collect himself and explain that any professional setback he had ever suffered didn’t come close to the personal suffering he’s experienced.

“I lost my faith for a while,” he said of his experience losing his wife and daughter in a car crash. “It came back.” Losing his son Beau to cancer, Biden added, was “like losing part of my soul.”

“The way I’ve dealt with it is finding purpose. And my purpose is to do what I’ve always tried to do and stay engaged in public policy,” Biden said, before connecting his suffering to “a lot of people [who have] been through a lot worse than I have who get up every single morning, put their feet one foot in front of another, without the help I had. There are real heroes out there. Some real heroes.”

Biden is polling low enough that it’s easy to see another candidate overtaking him at some point. But it’s hard to see how anything that happened on Thursday night will diminish his coalition or dislodge him as the race’s front-runner.

Frank Bruni on Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to tell the truth about the middle-class tax increases that would be needed to pay for her health-care scheme:

I was most struck by how she refused to say whether Medicare for All would require a middle-class tax increase. One of the debate’s moderators, George Stephanopoulos, asked her, and then Biden pressed her, but she never grew flustered and never succumbed, instead stressing over and over that in terms of people’s reduced health care costs, they’d be ahead of the game.

You could call that deceptive. But you could also call it disciplined. I shook my head as I watched it, but I also tipped my hat.

The elevation of the team-sports aspect of politics above other more substantive considerations leads, seemingly inexorably, to the admiration of skillful lying for mere technique’s sake. Those of you who were paying attention in the Nineties will remember how Bill Clinton’s sycophants absolutely celebrated his dishonesty and its effectiveness.

But if you admire Warren for being deceptive, then why condemn, say, Donald Trump for his bullying schoolyard antics? Because that works, too. And if effectiveness is your criterion, then tip your hat to that.

There’s an old joke often expressed well into banquets and conferences, where a speaker says, “We’re at the point where everything that needs to be said has been said, but not everyone has said it.” We’re already at that point with the Democratic primary debates. Tonight was a three-hour ordeal, and candidates largely repeated the arguments they made in the previous two debates. There’s not much reason to expect tonight will generate any dramatic swings in the polling in the coming days or weeks. The conventional wisdom will remain that this is a three-person race, with Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders having far and away the best shots at the nomination.

Perhaps the most dramatic moment came when Julian Castro “went there” on Biden’s age. Discussing the government-based health insurance he envisioned, Biden’s verbiage was typically garbled, declaring, “If you lose the job from your insurance company, from your employer, you automatically can buy into this.” So is it a form of health insurance that you choose to buy into, or something you’re automatically enrolled in? Earlier Biden had said, “Anyone who can’t afford it gets automatically enrolled in the Medicare-type option we have.”

Castro jabbed, “You just two minutes ago said they would have to buy in. Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” Everyone knew what Castro was hinting at – forgetfulness, age, maybe even Alzheimer’s – and just in case anyone missed it, as the crowd either went “oooh” or booed, Castro repeated the “are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” line. Whether or not you think Biden’s mental state and health are fair game for the public to consider, Castro’s attack will be seen by many as personal and over the line for a candidate to bring up. For what it’s worth, ABC News’s Matthew Dowd said he was hearing from other Democrats who thought the attack was a “disqualifier,” “mean,” and “vindictive.”

It was another just-good-enough night from Biden. He came out with vigor, and he seemed to be enjoying himself early on. But his answers got sloppy, choppy, and verbally messier as the night wore on. It wasn’t that his mind wasn’t working; it was that he would start a sentence, he would think of another point, and then try to jump to explain that other thought without clearly finishing the first one. A lot of his later answers devolved into “word salad.” There’s good reason to wonder if he’s going to really falter in one of these debates some night. But Biden closed well by discussing resilience and discussing the tragedies in his life. Almost nobody’s backing Biden because they think he’s got the best policies, or that he’s the most articulate advocate for them. They’re backing him because he’s the person they connect with the most.

Warren is playing it safe; she may not be throwing haymakers against anyone for a while. Almost all of the candidates seemed to have gotten a memo about speaking more positively about President Obama. Someone must have told Warren to avoid any tone or comment that could be labeled “shrill”; this was the softer, kinder, more uplifting Warren. This is probably exactly what you want to do when you’re in second place, there are still a lot of debates to go, and the guy in third is closer to you on policy. When pushed about her plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan, Warren answered that she traveled to that country with John McCain, she’s talked to a lot of experts, and three of her brothers served in the military. This is three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust debating.

Poor Bernie Sanders. He desperately needed a throat lozenge tonight. He still shouts almost every answer, he still rattles off statistics, he’s still insisting that the United States has the highest rate of child poverty in the world. (We don’t. It’s higher than it ought to be, but we’re not the highest.) But this style, tiresome as it can be over three hours, got Sanders to this point, and he’s unlikely to ever change.

A lot of these candidates have strengths on paper but just don’t shine on the stage, or they get lost in the crowd. Harris’s demeanor was a little different tonight, as if she had been coached to be warmer or funnier. She didn’t really go after Biden like she did in the first debate, and no one really went after her, either, now that she’s back in single digits.

Klobuchar had some slightly better-than-usual moments, arguing that Sanders’s health-care proposals are simply unaffordable, but it’s the same story as the previous two debates. She’s soft-spoken, pleasant, a little corny with her jokes . . . and completely forgettable.

The big news before the debate was Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes candidate Andrew Yang’s pledge to give $1,000 a month to ten families for a year. It’s gimmicky, but maybe Yang needed to do something like that. When Yang gets a chance to speak – which isn’t often – he seems like a normal and relatable guy for a tech multimillionaire.

Buttigieg was fine, in the sense that no matter what was asked, he was able to pivot and maneuver to the anecdotes and points he wanted to make. Sometimes this got a little glaring, when he worked in a complaint about members of the military staying at Trump’s hotels in Scotland when asked about his policy proposals for Afghanistan. Trump-bashing is a really convenient crunch for all of these candidates when they’re in a jam, and they use it when their proposals about what to do after Trump are fuzzy, excessively optimistic, or implausible.

Remember when so many analysts said Cory Booker was one of the big winners of the last debate? Here we are, a month later, and nothing has changed for Booker in the polls. He was good again tonight. A month from now, will anything change?

Reports of the dramatic reinvention or relaunch of Beto O’Rourke are greatly exaggerated. Everything he says sounds like a pander, including “good evening.” He is still clumsily answering in Spanish. His pledge, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15s” ensures he’ll never get elected statewide in Texas. For almost every issue, he shares an all-too-perfect anecdote about someone he met on the trail. This was the sort of rhetorical maneuver that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did smoothly and convincingly. With O’Rourke, you can always see the strings.

For anyone who actually knows a thing or two about these issues, these debates are pretty painful, watching ten candidates offer variations of bumper-sticker slogans, pretending that we can withdraw our way to world peace, regulate our way to good health, release our way to no crime, and spend our way to prosperity.

At one point, Yang asked, “Why do we lose to the fossil-fuel companies? Why do we lose to the gun lobbyists? We all know why. Our government has been overrun by money and corporate interests.” Really? That’s the only reason Democrats lose? Because there’s a lot of money that comes from Steyer, and Bloomberg, and Soros, and Hollywood, and trial lawyers, and academia, and so on. Corporate America’s hardly a lockstep right-wing force in American politics, particularly on social issues. The idea that the only reason Democrats lose in elections or policy battles is the influence of sinister wealthy conservatives is a fairy tale that liberals tell themselves so they can sleep comfortably at night, secure in their self-righteousness.

In a 2018 midterm election that didn’t give Republicans a lot to laugh about, one development that no doubt left them smiling was watching progressives across the country donate $80 million to Beto O’Rourke, in a Texas Senate race that was always going to be a steep uphill climb. Democratic party leaders can fairly grumble that if even a fraction of that money gone to, say, Stacey Abrams or Andrew Gillum or Bill Nelson, 2018 would have gone even better for them.

The grassroots donors are always going fall in love with the candidates they want to fall in love with, whether or not it represents the best way to spend finite resources.

Today Bill Scher raises the fair question of whether Pete Buttigieg is this cycle’s Beto O’Rourke — a walking charm machine who thrills the donors but is running in a race he can’t win, amounting to a waste of resources.

Buttigieg has raised $32 million since the start of the cycle, an off-the-charts sum for a guy who started the race as an obscure mid-sized city mayor. The New York Times notes he’s the rare candidate who has simultaneously impressed both the elite big donors and the online left grassroots donors. For obvious reasons, gays and lesbians are thrilled to see an openly gay Democratic presidential candidate. He’s a Midwestern veteran who can get donors to write checks in Silicon Valley, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket.

And yet . . . he’s at 4.8 percent in the RCP average nationally, 7.5 percent in Iowa, 7.6 percent in New Hampshire, 5 percent in Nevada, 4.7 percent in South Carolina. A solid fifth place in a 24-person race isn’t bad, but it’s still fifth place. After making a big splash, Buttigieg is sliding into “noteworthy also-ran” status.

Playing off Ron Brownstein’s classification of “beer Democrats” and “wine Democrats,” Scher mocks Buttigieg as “the IPA of Campaign 2020, a hipster nerd flavor” and laments, “even though the Democratic donor community has been expanded with the rise of easy-click online giving, it remains a small, disproportionately white, disproportionately wealthy faction of the total Democratic electorate.”

But the issue isn’t really that they’re white (the United States is still 76.5 percent white, according to the Census Bureau), and we shouldn’t be surprised that big political donors tend to be wealthier than average because they’re the ones who are likely to have the money to donate to a political candidates. No, the issue of which kind of candidate attracts swooning donors relates a bit to Amanda Hess’ essay in today’s New York Times, observing that the most important political figures in American life no longer have constituents, they have fans, complete with merchandising. The South Bend mayor personifies, crafted, and sculpted an image and “brand” that intensely appeals to some Democratic party demographics but not others. He is exactly the guy you want if you need to wow a group of big Democratic donors in the Hamptons. He is not the guy you want speaking from the pulpit of an African-American church in Charleston.

David Brooks called Buttigieg “an older person’s idea of what a young person should be” — Harvard, Oxford, McKinsey Consulting, time in uniform, married, talks a lot about his faith in a way that soothes secular progressives, opposes the designated hitter in baseball. It’s like he was engineered in a laboratory to be the subject of a a gushing New York Times magazine cover piece.

Part of the problem is that Buttigieg more or less came out of nowhere, and voters haven’t “traveled” with him yet. Even Obama had been on the national scene for two years when the 2008 campaign cycle started in January 2006. He’s 37, but looks young enough to get carded if he tries to buy beer. He’s polished and prepared and good in his debate performances — maybe a little too good. It’s a fine line between polished and slick. You can almost hear his past presentations in corporate conference rooms: “At McKinsey, we believe your company’s greatest problem is also your company’s greatest opportunity . . .”

Democratic primary voters can be forgiven if they like Buttigieg but aren’t sure they want to trust him with the nomination yet.

Later this month, Federal Election Commission chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, will convene representatives from Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to discuss something that is far outside the bailiwick of the FEC and has absolutely nothing to do with her duties as a commissioner: “fighting the disinformation that risks further corroding our democracy.”

This sort of government meddling is very dangerous to free speech. If some of these companies decided on their own to limit political speech on their platforms, consumers could take their mouse clicks elsewhere. But if government agencies such as the FEC put the screws to all the biggest players in Silicon Valley — as Weintraub seems to be planning — political caprice could shape the entire industry.

Anyone who assumes the gathering will focus solely on stopping Russian trolls or neo-Nazis should think again. The symposium is cosponsored by PEN America, an organization the Washington Examiner characterizes as an “anti-Trump free speech advocacy group.”

Too many progressives believe any political opinion, information, or advocacy online that supports conservative policies and principles or President Trump is, by definition, “disinformation” that must be censored. Or, as Weintraub labels it in her invitation, “fraudulent news and propaganda.”

The 2018 election demonstrated that some social-media companies will not hesitate to remove from their platforms political speech and advocacy on the basis of very hazy standards. Only a few months before the 2018 midterms, Facebook took down hundreds of pages registered to American citizens for what the company termed “sensational political content.” Only days before the midterms, Twitter shut down several accounts after Democratic officials complained that they were attempting to discourage voter turnout.

We certainly want to encourage citizen turnout and participation in the election process. But some Americans disagree with that idea for various reasons (including as a protest against the system) — and they should be able to express those views without being censored by the holier-than-thou inquisitors of the tech world.

Yes, social-media corporations are private entities with private-property rights over their platforms. Unlike the government, they are not bound by the First Amendment. But companies such as Google hold themselves out as being “neutral” in the political realm when their actions — and in some cases whistleblowers — seem to indicate that this may not be true.

The campaign against domestic “disinformation,” trolls, and fake news is dangerous because these terms are moving targets. When does an op-ed that Weintraub or the mavens of Silicon Valley disagree with or don’t like become an impermissible effort to mislead? When does a provocative political view become “dangerous” hate speech?

Without clear guideposts, there is no way for writers, tweeters, politicians, and pundits to know when they are crossing whatever murky lines Weintraub, Facebook, Twitter, and Google will consider at their symposium. Indeed, many of the people “demonetized” or dispatched from popular social-media sites are not hate-spewing villains.  Rather, they simply disagree with the prevailing political orthodoxy of liberals such as Weintraub.

The post-2016 battle against so-called “disinformation” was initially wrapped in Red Scare-era rhetoric. That veneer has now been dropped.

Many left-leaning political commentators, non-profits, and think tanks clearly view domestic political speech with at least the same degree of suspicion as that cast upon the Kremlin. Indeed, the Atlantic Council’s Ben Nimmo insinuates that online domestic speech might be more dangerous because it is “much easier to understand what’s happening — and influence what goes on — if you’re in Texas as opposed to St. Petersburg or Tehran.”

Liberal politicians are still slightly cagier about their intent to curtail the free speech of both Russian bots and American citizens, but their actions speak volumes. For instance, the Honest Ads Act — legislation proposed by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), Mark Warner (D., Va.), and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) — was billed as an effort to stop Russian meddling. However, the bill would do little to target Russian trolls and quite a lot to make it more difficult for American citizens to voice their own political opinions.

The Honest Ads Act is, in its essence, a bundle of speech limitations liberals have long supported repackaged as an anti-foreign-interference measure. Weintraub’s symposium, and any regulatory agenda that flows from it, will likely follow the same playbook. The rhetoric will likely focus on Russia, but the repercussions will surely affect Americans.

The FEC is the federal agency tasked with enforcing federal campaign-finance laws. It does not have the power (thank goodness!) to censor political speech. It does not have the authority to do anything about the subject of Weintraub’s symposium, and she has no business even convening such a symposium.

If the FEC, led by commissioners like Weintraub, were to take it upon itself to combat so-called “disinformation” and “fraudulent news and propaganda,” free speech would be in dire straits. Fear of being banned from Twitter or Facebook could have a chilling effect on political speech online. Many more citizens may shrink from the public square if an accusation of spreading disinformation or propaganda carries with it the risk of persecution by a federal agency.

It is difficult to deny that our politics today are highly polarized and hyperbolic. It is also hard to miss the role social media plays in enflaming passions and obscuring the truth. Real as these problems are, the danger posed by a government entity patrolling the Internet for what it deems to be fake news — or tech companies censoring political speech at the behest of bureaucrats like Weintraub — is far worse.

The temptation to use such an expansive and flexible writ of authority to silence political dissent would be overwhelming. Moreover, the real source of our political conflicts today is generally not a misunderstanding of the facts; it is rooted in fundamental disagreements over which facts matter most according to our differing values, principles, and interests. There is no objective way to mediate conflicts of this kind.

It is far safer to rely on the discernment of the public than the fair-mindedness of a body of government (or corporate) censors. We have much more confidence in the intelligence of the American people than Weintraub does.

The American public can be counted upon to glean what they need from the messy, noisy cacophony that is our democratic republic and, ultimately, cast their ballots in their best interests.

After all, they’ve been doing it successfully for over 200 years.

Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow and John York is a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Von Spakovsky served as a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission in 2006 and 2007.

Ryan Lizza of Politico reports that the Biden camp is frustrated by its media coverage. The former vice president’s advisers attribute this mix of ambivalence and hostility to the generation gap. A “well-known Democrat backing Biden” tells Lizza, “You have a press corps in which most of them were in college when Barack Obama ran for president and they have fundamentally no understanding and experience in how politics works.” Lizza adds: “To Biden world, it’s the media’s cultural affinity for this New New Left that explains why the Biden-will-soon-collapse storyline has such staying power.”

It’s not just the cool kids who are unenthused about Biden, however. Plenty of the un-woke Democratic establishment is, too. They worry, in private conversation and occasional public comment, that at some point the Democratic frontrunner’s many liabilities, on display for close to half a century, will crash his candidacy. Just the other day, David Axelrod groused that Biden is “creating a more damaging meme” by “serially” distorting his record. Recently a veteran pollster told me of his skepticism that Biden would even make it to Iowa.

Biden might not care about the media narrative. What matter more are the anxieties of Democratic elites, many of whom will be super-delegates — excuse me, “automatic delegates” — to next year’s convention. It will be they who, in a closely divided three-way race, may ultimately decide the party’s nominee.

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang made good on his promise to do something no presidential candidate has ever done before during Thursday evening’s primary debate, saying he will debut a test launch of his universal basic income proposal.

The entrepreneur 2020 candidate said his Freedom Dividend Pilot Program will pay at least ten American families $1,000 month for a year for a total of $12,000 out of Yang’s campaign funds.

“When you donate money to a presidential campaign, what happens? The politician spends the money on TV ads and consultants and you hope it works out,” Yang said during his opening statement. “It’s time to trust ourselves more than our politicians. That’s why I’m going to do something unprecedented tonight.”

Yang’s campaign has focused on his proposed a universal basic income policy, which would give every American adult $1,000 a month.

“We have to see ourselves as the owners and shareholders of this democracy rather than inputs into a giant machine,” Yang said.

“The secret’s out! Have you entered to win our 1k Giveaway?” Yang’s campaign Twitter account wrote after Yang made his reveal. Applicants can enter to receive the funds through Yang’s campaign website.

“It’s original, I’ll give you that,” quipped fellow 2020 candidate Pete Buttigieg, who gave his opening statement directly after Yang.

Twitter users immediately found the humor in Yang’s plan.

“Can someone please tell Andrew Yang that we already have a game show host as president,” one user wrote.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden quickly took aim at fellow 2020 contenders Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders at Thursday evening’s Democratic presidential debate, saying their sweeping Medicare for All proposals simply cost too much.

“My plan costs a lot,”the former vice president said of his plan to enhance the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration’s signature legislative accomplishment. “But it doesn’t cost $30 trillion. That’s twice the entire federal budget before it exists now. How will we pay for it? I want to hear. [Warren] has not said how she’ll pay for it, and [Sanders] only gets about half way there. I lay out how I can pay for it and how I can get it done and why it’s better.”

Warren agreed that Americans “owe a huge debt” to former President Barack Obama for the Affordable Care Act.

“The question is how best we can improve on it,” Warren said. “We make sure everyone gets covered at the lowest possible cost. We pay for it from those at the top, the richest and biggest corporations will pay more and middle class families will pay less.”

Sanders hit back harder, saying “500,000 Americans are going bankrupt” from treating severe diseases such as cancer. “You’ve got to defend the fact that 500,000 Americans are going bankrupt.”

“I know a lot about cancer and let me tell you something: it’s personal,” responded Biden, whose son Beau passed away from cancer in 2015 “They will not go bankrupt because of that.”

Biden’s campaign has previously said that Medicare for All would cost taxpayers between $30 and $40 trillion over ten years, would require raising taxes on the middle class, and would include no option for a patient to keep their current insurance plan.

Beto O’Rourke vowed to confiscate legally owned rifles during the third Democratic primary debate on Thursday evening.

Citing the recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, the former Democratic congressman said the federal government must seize certain semi-automatic rifles to prevent further tragedy.

“Hell yes, we are going to take your AR-15, your AK-47, we are not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore!” O’Rourke said to raucous applause. “The high-impact, high velocity round, when it hits your body shreds everything insider your body because it was designed to do that, so that you would bleed to death on the battlefield.”

O’Rourke went on to argue that his gun confiscation plan enjoys the support of the majority of voters, including those who reside in traditionally red states.

“Folks who said, I would give that up, cut it to pieces, I don’t need this weapon to hunt, to defend myself. It is a weapon of war, so, let’s do the right thing, but let’s bring everyone in America into the conversation,” he said.

Hours before the debate, O’Rourke urged major financial institutions not to finance gun transactions.

“However inadvertent or deliberate, credit card companies and banks profit off of those who terrorize our communities,” O’Rourke said in an email to voters on Thursday. “And we know that in this moment, no one can sit on the sidelines. Everyone has a responsibility to do their part.”

O’Rourke released an ambitious gun control plan last month that would create a national gun registry, and ban assault-style rifles, bump-stocks, silencers, and magazines that hold more than ten rounds.

A Twitter List by NRO

Mark Sanford, the former congressman and governor from South Carolina, is the latest Republican to challenge President Trump for the 2020 nomination. Sanford intends to make the rising national debt his main issue, as it was during his congressional career. He favors reforming entitlements to reduce their projected costs. Sanford is right about entitlements and debt, and right as well to criticize Trump’s record on them. During the last campaign, Trump took entitlement reforms off the table. And although as president he supported a legislative effort to rein in Medicaid, he has done more to raise spending, while also cutting taxes. But a campaign focused on this issue is likely to be too narrow to capture voters’ imaginations.

Trump responded to the campaign announcement by bringing up the episode for which Sanford is best known: the press conference in which the then-governor declared his love for a woman other than his then-wife. Republicans seem heavily inclined to back the incumbent adulterer.

If, that is, they get the chance. Four states so far have canceled their Republican primaries: Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, and South Carolina (which means Sanford won’t be able to vote for himself). The president says he has nothing to do with these decisions, but also that holding primaries he is sure to win would be a waste of money. The susceptibility of this argument to abuse by a ruler ought to preclude its being made.

The vast majority of Republicans approve of what Trump has done on taxes, judges, regulation, and most other issues, though they also support electoral competition. Trump would be likely to win the primaries handily, demonstrating his strength among Republicans while the Democrats tussle. His allies should want to see that, rather than make it seem as though he is too weak to face competition. But regardless of how it works out for him, Republican primary voters are capable of making the decision among Trump and the others — who so far include William Weld and Joe Walsh as well as Sanford. They deserve to be able to do so.

Making the click-through worthwhile: How every Democratic presidential candidate is ignoring the reality of the federal bureaucracy and not-so-distant history with their grand, sweeping proposals; the absolute moral and strategic insanity of inviting the Taliban to meet with the president at Camp David; and a lesser-known Democratic presidential candidate qualifies for the October presidential primary debate.

None of These Charlatans Can Keep Their Promises

Bernie Sanders promises that if he is elected, no one will ever have to pay college tuition for public colleges or universities ever again. Kamala Harris promises that if she is elected, the average teacher in America would receive a $13,500-per-year raise. Elizabeth Warren promises that if she is elected, no American parents would ever pay more than 7 percent of their income on childcare. Julian Castro promises that if he is elected, he will create 10 million new jobs in the “clean energy economy.” Pete Buttigieg promises that he will cut the number of incarcerated Americans in half without any increase in crime. Andrew Yang says that if he is elected, all citizens over age 18 will get $1,000 per month from the government, forever.

And Joe Biden, the supposed sensible centrist in the Democratic primary, promises that if elected, he will cure cancer.

Keep that in mind the next time Biden is unaware that a fossil fuel company executive is co-hosting a fundraiser for him; or Warren says releasing the video about her alleged Native American heritage was a mistake; or Harris insists that she misheard some question, which explains her controversial answer.

Governing well is difficult, people. Enacting some sort of sweeping change like the candidates are now proposing would be extremely difficult; it is just about inevitable that the program would not work as promised at first, and it would take time to get it right. (And this all assumes that the votes are there to pass their ideas into law in the first place.)

It’s not just a matter of “can taxpayers afford it?” although that is a good question to ask when someone comes up with huge ideas like these. An even fairer question is, “what makes you confident that the federal government will implement this program effectively?”

During the Bush years, a common argument in the comments sections of Daily Kos and other liberal corners was that George W. Bush and his administration were in effect a giant sabotage operation within the federal government. Because the administration did not ideologically support a big, powerful, far-reaching federal government*, they were constantly undermining the natural competence that the federal government could achieve if they only had the support from the top. Thus, everything that went wrong in the Bush years — the bad intelligence surrounding Iraq’s WMDs, Abu Gharib, Hurricane Katrina response, and the circumstances that led to the real estate bubble, the Wall Street meltdown and the Great Recession — could be laid at the feet of an administration that never really wanted government to succeed in the first place.

Barack Obama and the people around him believed in the capacity of the federal government to do good. Their faith in the power of the federal government to change peoples’ lives for the better was unshakable. And after a great deal of effort, the finest team Obama could assemble ended up with a website tracking stimulus spending that was full of bad data, “shovel-ready” projects that the president later admitted weren’t so shovel-ready, the taxpayers underwriting the failed Solyndra solar panel manufacturer, Operation Fast and Furious, the hacking of the Office of Personnel Management, veterans dying while waiting for care from the Department of Veterans Affairs, lavish spending on conferences for the General Services Administration, $126 billion in overpayments to beneficiaries and contractors in 2015, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the blindsiding attack on the consulate in Benghazi, the disastrous launch of Healthcare.gov, the scandal and revelations of Edward Snowden, the rise of ISIS, a foreign policy team that steadily misjudged and underestimated growing threats from Russia and China, and a $500 million program to train Syrians to fight ISIS that resulted in “four or five” fighters. Oh, and they bailed out General Motors when the company knew it was selling cars that could kill you if your key chain was too heavy.

The problem was not that Obama or anyone in his administration wasn’t trying hard enough, or that they didn’t want effective government programs badly enough, or that they didn’t believe in the abilities of the government enough — it was probably the opposite. They had far too much faith in government agencies’ abilities to achieve a task without delays, cost overruns, bad decisions, wasteful spending, petty corruption, and grinding bureaucratic inertia.

One of the points I tried to make in The Weed Agency is that plenty of federal government employees are good people, work hard, and do their best; often working against a system that is not designed to encourage or reward individual excellence. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but few people take the civil service exam or seek out a job in the federal government because they want to do a bad job. They are told to adhere to a giant binder of regulations, to avoid potential lawsuits at all costs, to not dismiss incompetent underlings, to not make waves, and to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done. If you sign up when you’re young, you’ll find a lot of older employees telling you to wait your turn. The Economist notes this week, “the federal IT workforce has five times as many people over the age of 60 as under 30.”

Some offices of the federal government do great work. Some do terrible work. The National Weather Service appears to have done a great job during this recent hurricane, keeping their heads down and focused on their duties, and not what the forecaster-in-chief was saying.

Federal bureaucracies are full of human beings, and human beings are not uniform. There are postal workers who run into burning buildings or confront burglars. And then there are ones who steal mail to get gift cards and cash.  It is really difficult to recruit and retain a good team. Because the people in charge of administering any particular program are going to have varying levels of judgment, experience, competence, trustworthiness, diligence, and drive, the results are not all going to be uniformly good. And even when the results are good, they’re never quite as good as they sounded when the candidate was promising them on the campaign trail.

The experience with Healthcare.gov should have splashed some cold water of reality into progressives’ happy dreams: As it stands, this federal bureaucracy and its most familiar contractors can’t get you where you want to go. These aspiring presidents are planning a cross-country trip in a car with two flat tires, burned-out headlights, brakes worn down, and an engine that is sputtering.

And yet, all of these candidates make these vast new programs and benefits and rules and spending sound like the easiest task imaginable. Cleaning up the language a bit in Kevin Williamson’s First Law: ‘Everything is simple when you don’t know a thing about it.’

Lest you have any lingering doubts about the difficulties of keeping campaign trail promises and enacting policies: “I alone can fix it.” “Trade wars are good and easy to win.” “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.” “We will end the sanctuary cities that have resulted in so many needless deaths.” “Department of Environmental Protection. We are going to get rid of it in almost every form.” And so on.

*I know, I know, the whole idea of Bush as some anti-government saboteur is nonsense. This is the administration that added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, created the Department of Homeland Security, enacted No Child Left Behind, and in a Labor Day address to union workers, famously said, “we have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”

The Worst Idea in an Era Chock Full of Really Bad Ideas

Who thought it was a good idea for the President of the United States to host members of the Taliban at Camp David, just days before the 9/11 anniversary?

Oh. “In the days that followed, Mr. Trump came up with an even more remarkable idea — he would not only bring the Taliban to Washington, but to Camp David, the crown jewel of the American presidency. The leaders of a rugged militant organization deemed terrorists by the United States would be hosted in the mountain getaway used for presidents, prime ministers and kings just three days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that led to the Afghan war.”

I suppose I should be reassured that on September 7, the President of the United States realized that a Camp David invitation to the Taliban would be a bad idea after their car bomb killed Sgt. 1st Class Elis A. Barreto Ortiz, 34, from Morovis, Puerto Rico two days earlier. But it is hard for the sudden cancellation to outweigh the preceding spectacularly unwise decision. As of this morning, 1,833 U.S. soldiers have been killed in action in Afghanistan since 2001, and the Taliban is responsible for a significant portion of those casualties. They are the same Taliban they were Wednesday, when Trump was eager to have them at Camp David.

As you’ve read, the Taliban has continued to blow up innocent people and target U.S. servicemen and women throughout the negotiations. This is not some calculated provocation for negotiating leverage on their part; this is who they are. There is no kindler and gentler Taliban waiting to be revealed once the right incentives are presented to them. Two administrations and the Pakistanis have been trying to negotiate with the Taliban for more than a decade. The negotiations always break down, at least in part because the Taliban keep blowing people up during the talks.

The Taliban invitation is the sort of thing that ought to make the American people sit up and take notice and ask just what kind of foreign policy this administration is attempting to enact.

In other news, the President of the United States declared on Twitter that model and celebrity Chrissy Teigen has a “filthy mouth.”

Fourth Episode of ‘The Democrats Debate’ TV Show Will Introduce a New Cast Member

Here’s an odd development: billionaire Tom Steyer didn’t qualify for the September Democratic debate, but he did qualify for the October one. Tulsi Gabbard is apparently knocking on the door as well. This means that Thursday night, the Democrats will have a one-night, ten-candidate debate, and next month they’re likely to hold two nights of six-candidate debates, a setup that is more likely to give each candidate more time and probably longer and better answers.

ADDENDA: As a New York Jets fan, I look forward to the start of professional football season sometime in the coming weeks. I mean, yes, technically the team played yesterday, but that wasn’t professional football.

We are now t-minus six days from the book signing at Barnes and Noble in Mosaic District in northern Virginia! Hope to see you there!