The Loony Left Strikes Again

Noah Rothman reports at Commentary:

On Saturday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley were confronted by aggressive and unreasonable members of what the press has dubbed the “black lives matter” movement. Both candidates were rudely interrupted by those protestors who stormed the stage on which the candidates were seated, seized the microphone, and commandeered the event. But the most shocking episode to emerge from Phoenix this year involved a repudiation of the notion that all people of every racial background deserve to live.

When confronted by chants of “black lives matter” during his address to the conference, O’Malley replied: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” Contrary to press reports that suggested the crowd erupted in protest when O’Malley dared contend that “all lives matter,” video of the event clearly indicates it was his contention that “white lives matter” that proved truly unacceptable for the event attendees. For this perfectly reasonable contention, O’Malley was compelled by the unreasoning mob to apologize.

“I meant no disrespect,” O’Malley told the hosts of the web-based program, This Week in Blackness. “That was a mistake on my part and I meant no disrespect. I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”

The nation’s political press will no doubt devote far more attention to the Trump spectacle than a Democratic candidate’s apology for daring to contend that all lives have value. That will not reduce the impact of this moment. When a crowd of Democratic National Committee attendees erupted in a chorus of “boos” when the party platform was amended to add a reference to God and the city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the discomforting moment did not dominate the evening news but it was both powerful and consequential. Even today, that episode lives in infamy in the minds of voters. The press will not prompt Democrats to confront the excessive and irrational elements within their party. For Democrats as well as Republicans, they run the risk of allowing the nastier elements of their bases to come to typify both parties in the minds of unaffiliated voters. With the prodding of the press, however, only one party is busily confronting that condition.

Hillary's Rivals Have Problems

David Zurawik writes at The Baltimore Sun:

Martin O’Malley got a lot of national cable news attention Saturday morning in Baltimore when he announced he was running for president.

But most of it was bad, with analysts criticizing him from the left and the right before and after live coverage of his announcement.

The big narrative on CNN and MSNBC, not surprisingly given TV’s short memory and lack of historical interest, was that O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” policing initiatives as mayor of Baltimore were a major contributing factor to the civil unrest and rioting here last month.

“When he went back to Baltimore last month at the height of the riots, he was shouted down,” Chris Moody, senior politics correspondent, told anchor Randi Kaye on CNN after the announcement. “People recognized him and said, ‘This is your fault.’”
Pre-announcement over on MSNBC, Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now,” hit hard at O’Malley on zero tolerance while he was mayor and the consequences for Baltimore today.

...

Talking about him as a possible standard bearer for the Democratic Party by referencing last year’s gubernatorial election, CNN’s Kaye said, “He couldn’t even keep his state in Democratic hands.”

If there was any good news in the analysis on O’Malley, I didn’t find it on cable TV Saturday. Within 10 minutes of O’Malley’s announcement speech which took on Hillary Clinton over her coziness with Wall Street, analysts on CNN were saying he should forget Clinton at this point and just aim at U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders who has much better financing and is running well ahead of O’Malley.

Melinda Henneberger writes at Bloomberg about a 1972 Bernie Sanders column musing on the rape fantasies of men and women.

His defenders argue that the article is so far in the past that what he wrote then is irrelevant, while critics feel it’s only fair to crown him this year’s Todd Akin. (Unless you’ve mentally blocked it, perhaps in the same way that Akin said women can mentally block conception following “legitimate rape,” you’ll recall that the GOP congressman, who was Senator Claire McCaskill’s Republican challenger in 2012, became his party’s poster child for how not to talk about sexual violence.)

...

The senator’s own response to the story, which was broken by Mother Jones, was not at all serious. Michael Briggs, a Sanders campaign spokesman, told CNN it was just a “dumb attempt at dark satire in an alternative publication” that “in no way reflects his views or record on women. It was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the ’70s, but it looks as stupid today as it was then.’’

The statement doesn’t begin to answer how Sanders thought about rape then and thinks about it now, or whether he feels his essay is not only “dumb” and “stupid” but also offensive. Do we in the media really only care about appalling views when Republicans and/or front-runners hold them?.

O'Malley and Baltimore

The Washington Post reports:

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley was heckled on a street corner in riot-scarred West Baltimore Tuesday, after he cut short a trip to Europe to return to the city he led as mayor for seven years.

O’Malley (D), who is preparing to launch a White House bid, waded into a crowd near the burned-out shell of a CVS pharmacy that was destroyed and looted Monday night. He was confronted by two men on motorcycles who shouted expletives and blamed the recent violence in the city on O’Malley’s tough-on-crime policies from 1999 to 2007.

“I just wanted to be present. There’s a lot of pain in our city right now, a lot of people feeling very sad,” O’Malley told reporters at the scene. “Look, we’ve got to come through this together. We’re a people who’ve seen worse days, and we’ll come through this day.”

In his travels to early nominating states, O’Malley has described Baltimore to Democratic audiences as a down-on-its-luck city that came to believe in its potential again while he was mayor. He has trumpeted progress made during his tenure, including a steep drop in violent crime, which is attributed in part to a zero-tolerance approach that led to a sharp increase in arrests.

The mayhem that broke out Monday following the funeral of Freddie Gray— who died after being injured in police custody — complicates that narrative. And the unrest has given critics of O’Malley’s aggressive policing strategy a fresh platform to blame him for some of the deep-seated mistrust between the city’s police and the poor communities, more than eight years after he left the mayor’s office.

Name ID of Potential Democratic Candidates

Except for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, Democrats don't know much about potential 2016 Democratic candidates. Gallup reports:

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and O'Malley do not have the long political careers that Biden and Clinton have, and at this point, they are struggling to attain a high profile on the national stage.

• Andrew Cuomo, son of three-term New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, is running for his second term as governor this year after previously being the state's attorney general and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton. Despite that long career and being in a prominent family that includes his brother Chris Cuomo, a CNN news personality, nearly half of Democrats (48%) have never heard of or don't have an opinion of the governor.
• Elizabeth Warren, a first-term senator, was a former Harvard Law professor and served in the Obama administration as a special adviser to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has been campaigning nationally for Democratic candidates, some of whom are running in traditionally strong Republican states, such as West Virginia and Kentucky. Warren has said that she is touting her populist message to ensure the Democratic agenda succeeds in the next Congress. However, Warren is still far from a household name among Democrats: 57% of Democrats nationally have never heard of or don't have an opinion of the senator.
• Martin O'Malley is finishing his second term as governor of Maryland, having been elected in 2006 after eight years as the mayor of Baltimore. While he counts as a success signing same-sex marriage into state law in 2012, O'Malley has not gained much traction with the American public. The vast majority of Democrats (84%) have neither heard of O'Malley or don't have an opinion of him.