Not ready for prime time
Although he could boast of recent backing from ancient country singer Willie Nelson, former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke of Texas had trouble answering a straightforward question by CNN host Jake Tapper recently. He asked if O'Rourke believed it should be a crime to illegally cross into the United States from Mexico.
Although it will come as a shock to many on the left, it is crime to do so.
Tapper, basing his question off a proposal by former San Antonio, Texas, Mayor Julian Castro that border crossings should be decriminalized and treated as civil offenses, asked if the current law in which the crossings are illegal should be repealed.
On the third ask, O'Rourke finally burbled a non-answer: "I don't know if it should be repealed but we should acknowledge that most of those arriving at the border now, especially from Central America, are at the most desperate and vulnerable moment and they pose no threat or harm to this country."
Coincidentally, two U.S. agencies, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recently conducted an investigation on two caravans from Central American bound for the U.S.
Among their numbers, according to the findings, were hundreds with criminal histories, including murder, aggravated assault and sexual offenses previously committed in the U.S.
No threat or harm? Sorry, Beto, no one's buying that one.
Just makin' stuff up
Poor Joe. It's sad that former Vice President Joe Biden, leading in early 2020 polls for the Democratic presidential nomination, is the subject of assaults from the nearly two dozen other candidates. But now he's resorting to funny math in order to make his points.
Last week, he told the Poor People's Campaign presidential forum that "almost half the people in the United States [are] living in poverty."
Even the far left Washington Post didn't let that one go by, giving him "three Pinocchios" (a "significant factual error") for what it said was a claim that is "flat-out wrong."
The official poverty measure puts the number at 12.3%, and the supplemental poverty measure puts it at 14%.
But, wait, said the Biden campaign, he meant every individual or family with an income below 200% of the poverty level, which would put the number at 43.3% of the 2017 U.S. population. For comparison's sake, 200% of the poverty level for a family of four in 2019 is $51,500.
"Biden is flat-out wrong to claim half the country is living in poverty," The Post Fact Checker wrote. "The three independent experts we surveyed, all of them leaders in the field of poverty research, did not hesitate to criticize his math and rejected the notion that all people below 200 percent of the poverty line should be counted as poor."
Here's a thought
While a U.S. House hearing on slavery reparations was covered by news agencies last week, most of them didn't include the testimony of former National Football League star Burgess Owens, or if they did, they just mentioned that he testified at the hearing.
Why? Because the black former Super Bowl champion didn't toe the line.
Oh, Owens thought reparations were due the descendants of slavery, but he thought the political party that wanted slavery to continue, the party of the Ku Klux Klan, the party of Jim Crow laws, the party of abortion ought to pay the reparations. That party, of course, is the Democratic Party.
"I used to be a Democrat," he said, "until I did my history and found out the misery that that party brought to my race ... Let's pay restitution. How about the Democratic Party pay for all the misery brought to my race "
To date, no Democrat has stepped up and given Owens a high-five and said he was right with him.
Here's your gun control
Being a good little Democratic state, Maryland followed the party playbook and banned "high capacity" magazines and a variety of "assault weapons," and required would-be handgun buyers to submit fingerprints to state police in registering their guns through its Firearm Safety Act of 2013.
Per Democrats, that should lower handgun crimes and virtually end any shooting with assault weapons. Well, Baltimore, the state's largest city and run by Democrats for 68 of the last 72 years, didn't play along.
Recently, the Baltimore Sun reported that shootings in the city were on track to surpass 2018 figures, and those were up nearly 80 percent from 2014.