Just been a busy week, hasn’t it?
Anyways, we had snow in Las Vegas. Real snow – like parts of the town getting 4 to 8 inches, and it isn’t melting off in an hour. Right around Casa Noonan, just a few dustings; but other friends have pictures up on Facebook with piles of snow and snowmen. This is very strange for Las Vegas. And this is the coldest, wettest winter I’ve ever experienced out here. Our average high this time of year is 64 degrees, by the way. Usually, I’m planting flowers by this time.
William Jacobson theorizes that with the Democrat primary field becoming a clown car, Democrats will draft Michelle Obama to save them from Four More Years of Trump. The Powers That Be will have to do something, or 2020 is going to be mighty disappointing. I think that so many Democrats are getting in because they believe MSNBC and so think that getting the nomination is tantamount to getting elected President. So far, I don’t see any of the declared candidates acting as if they are merely angling for a VP slot or laying the groundwork for future efforts…they all seem to be convinced they are the one. And the field will get more crowded…and the Starbucks billionaire guy will siphon away Democrat votes. They’ll have to do something.
Of course, they might not be able to – I never got the impression that Michelle Obama really cared about politics. And I’d love to see a deadlocked DNC with various Prog pressure groups trying to work out a compromise candidate.
Speaking of which, Harris and Warren have both come out in favor of reparations for African Americans. My first question: a friend of mine immigrated legally from the West Bank about 20 years ago; how much does he owe? That aside, I can’t think of anything which would make the Democrats toxic outside the deep, blue areas than arguing for reparations. They might feel it necessary in order to energize African American voters, but I can’t see it costing them less than two votes for every one they gain. So, I completely support the Democrats going in this direction.
Lara Logan is a reporter and she was brutally raped by a gang of Islamists during the Arab Spring. Now, she’s come out to say that the MSM is a mere propaganda arm – and for some reason, in spite of her courage and grit in overcoming terrible personal tragedy…she’s not getting a lot of MSM respect. Go figure.
Low T men are moody and angry – but, you already knew that.
SJW idiots try to torch a statue of General Lee…only problem is that it was a statue of General William C. Lee, father of the American airborne forces in WWII. Liberals are not just dumb, they are also astonishingly ignorant.
The Virginia Democrat saga has been sent into the Memory Hole by the MSM, but it turns out that Fairfax’ second accuser is willing to testify about it…so, maybe this gets back in the news. You can bet that VA GOPer’s wouldn’t mind holding a hearing or two in October about the whole mess.
Blogs For Victory 
so many Democrats are getting in because they believe MSNBC and so think that getting the nomination is tantamount to getting elected President.
They all seem to have forgotten one key dynamic. Whoever gets the nomination is going to have to figure out how to win back the 6 million Obama voters who voted for Trump. That could prove problematic on the heels of a primary season where they all try to out-liberal each other.
Not to mention that whoever gets the nomination is also going to have to figure out how to sanitize the radically Leftist sentiments and policies he or she had to enthusiastically support and promote during the primaries once the voting is going to be done by people who are not Democrats.
The spectacle of all these clowns elbowing each other out of the way to get farther and farther Left will be fun to watch, but the scramble to then claim to be “moderate” during the election itself will be very entertaining. No doubt the Complicit Agenda Media will do all it can to help, burying the more inflammatory comments and outrageous statements, but the existence of the Internet is going to make that job a lot harder. The contestants are going to push each other into more and more extreme positions and explicit policies, which will be kind of hard to walk back when trying to appeal to the general public.
Speaking of which—isn’t it time to take on the weasel word “moderate”? What does it really mean?
Oh, in the context of issues I know what it means—it means it is OK to kill unborn babies but only in the earlier months of pregnancy, it means it is OK to redistribute OPM but only to some people in some circumstances, it’s fine to call a man “she” but not to let him into a girls’ bathroom, etc. It is an effort to straddle issues, being a little bit this and a little bit that and trying to make everyone happy. It’s the inability or refusal to take a firm principled stand, preferring to retain the ability to shift positions based on whim or which way the wind is blowing. It’s squishy dressed up as admirable.
But in a purely POLITICAL sense, it means putting some kind of personal, arbitrary and usually flexible limit on how often and to what extent the “moderate” thinks it is OK to violate the Constitution—but always to allow some such violation. Of course, what is an acceptable expansion of Constitutional authority to one “moderate” is not the same level or kind of expansion, or for the same reason, a different “moderate” would support ignoring our rule of law, so in the long run the word is meaningless except as an effort to disguise disdain for the Constitution by trying to make it sound reasonable.
“What is a moderate interpretation of the Constitution – half way between what it says and what you want it to say?” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
Not to mention that whoever gets the nomination is also going to have to figure out how to sanitize the radically Leftist sentiments and policies he or she had to enthusiastically support and promote during the primaries once the voting is going to be done by people who are not Democrats.
The ads should practically write themselves, but I have no fear that the GOP will figure out some way to screw it up.
I have no fear that the GOP will figure out some way to screw it up.
LOL. Ain’t that the truth!
Lara Logan is an amazing woman. I saw her interviewed the other day and was thoroughly impressed with her credentials, experience, her courage, her objectivity, etc., etc …. just an impressive human being. And she is shining the antiseptic light on the infected MSM. Good for her.
I think the national political tide is slowly turning … finally. I think the voting public has already seen enough of the Democrats from their despicable display at the Brett Kavanuagh hearings, to the Covington kids, to the Green New Deal, to the Jussie Smollett story …. Democrats and the progressive media have shown themselves to be intolerant authoritarians who have a complete disregard for decency or the truth. And that doesn’t sit well with Americans in fly over country. In fact the odds at Vegas reflect this:
The latest odds released by Bovada show Donald Trump as the +200 betting favorite with potential Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke nipping at his heels at +500 and +800 respectively. Since his election in 2016, this is the highest odds for Trump’s re-election and the lowest odds for any of the potential Democratic challengers.
I think the only Democrat that even has a shot would be Biden. But how does an older, heterosexual, white male win that nomination?
Democrats and the media also hurt themselves by their fantastical outrage at everything. This mornings hyper ventilating was over the Cost Guard whack job arrested the other day. You only have to remember how the media covered the baseball field shooter just a few years ago who targeted GOP members and nearly killed Scalise. The media back then held blameless their actions and the actions and rhetoric of all Democrats … simply stating that the shooter was mentally imbalanced.
This morning however, IT’S ALL TRUMPS FAULT. And white nationalists. Like Spook says, we know their playbook. It really gets old but never tires of being amusing. Evidently Trump is to blame for Democrats dressing in black face 30 years ago … hahahahahaha
Host Craig Melvin: “When did blackface become a thing again? Why does it seem as if blackface is all of a sudden front and center in America again? What’s happening?”
MSNBC political analyst/Princeton professor Eddie Glaude: “I think it has something to do with what Donald Trump has unleashed. It has something to do with the reservoir that’s underneath our politics that can always be activated at any moment. So it’s not like something new has happened, it’s always underneath. It’s the undertow.”…
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/geoffrey-dickens/2019/02/22/trumped-rage-president-and-maga-hatters-blame-everything
Mark, your comment about snow and the cold temperature is a reminder that it’s nothing that hasn’t happened before. I was in Las Vegas in January in the late 80’s. There was a dusting of snow on the ground, and the daytime highs were in the mid-30’s. I’d venture to say that the majority of Millennials who buy into global warming/climate change think history started the day they were born, and that’s reinforced by our educational system not teaching them anything different.
Records come and go — we’ve broken a couple low temperature records and a couple high temperature records this winter, at least a couple dating back to the 1930’s. I know Liberals think, if they can just get completely in charge, they can control temperature and climate within certain acceptable limits. Of course they never spell out just exactly what those acceptable limits are, how they’re going to get there, or how much it will cost. All one has to do to see just how much the Left has moved the goal posts over the years is go back and read the summaries of all the IPCC assessment reports dating back to 1990.
I want to go on record as supporting, quite enthusiastically, reparations to every single person who is or was a slave in the United States. These people suffered greatly and we owe them some kind of compensation.
Their descendants? No way.
I am listening to an audio book about ancient history and the lecturer said, about civilizations that were overtaken by others, that they were often enhanced by this submission to the victors. That struck me as a bold and un-PC comment, and it occurred to me that this can also refer to the descendants of slaves in the United States.
Slavery—the owning of another human being—is indefensible and dehumanizing, whether the owned human is an adult or an infant or a child not yet born. Being considered as and treated as property is a denial of human dignity. But having said that, slavery has often throughout history also provided a better way of life for at least some who were enslaved. We forget that in many cultures, including the cultures of Africa where people of some tribes captured and sold people from other tribes, slavery was simply part of life. When someone was captured and made into a slave, he or she was often of a tribe that captured and enslaved members of other tribes, and also was often then moved into a life of relative comfort and opportunity if the new owner was of a more affluent economic level or exposed his slaves to different levels of education, experience and quality of life. (I’m going back here to pre-Colony days, of Egypt and Rome and other ancient civilizations, as well as more recent examples.)
My point is, we have accepted a very broad-brush narrative in which all slaves in America were ripped from their own rich and rewarding cultures and then forced into a totally alien kind of existence and cruelly brutalized. But—loss of freedom, even if accompanied by a better standard of living and extended life span, is a violation of human rights and those who experienced it should be repaid in some way, in some measure. If this were possible. And it is not.
But realistically the descendants of those who were victimized by being enslaved had the good fortune to be born in a much richer nation with many more opportunities, a nation which has as its stated goal (even if it often falls short) of equality of treatment and opportunity. These people have never experienced slavery. They are several generations away from any ancestor who did. Some generations that immediately followed the end of slavery had a very tough time in many parts of this country, because the very identity of being a slave imparts the perception that the slave is not an equal, and lack of education and opportunity led to the perception that these people were also less intelligent. Those were very hard obstacles to overcome. If no one was able to overcome them, we might think this was impossible. But the examples of those who did is proof that it could be done, and that success depended at least as much on the individual as it did on society.
I would also suggest that even the worst conditions of life in this country of poor black people still had fewer dangers and a higher level of life as well as more opportunities that their cousins who were still living in the same tribal conditions in the same harsh environments from which their ancestors came. Look at how few descendants of slaves have wanted to return to their ancestral lands when they had the freedom to do so. They have always known they were better off here.
Today, nearly 175 years after slavery was ended in this country, decades after repeated legislation to ensure equal treatment under the law, decades after special treatments such as Affirmative Action to help descendants of slaves acquire the same educational and social skills that many (though far from all) white Americans have, there is no reason to even consider paying these people for insults and harms done to their rather distant ancestors.
We are finally getting some snow, after a winter in which we have really only had about two weeks of winter weather. We’ve had many days of 40-50 degree weather (which, when accompanied by Western sunshine, means T-shirt weather) and nights that, while cold, are nowhere near the sub-zero nights we usually experience several times a year.
I liked that, and wish it was continuing, and the current snow is screwing up some plans, but getting toward the end of February with only a couple of weeks of true winter weather has been pretty nice. Two years ago when I left a Christmas party at about midnight the temperature was -29. That is, 29 degrees below zero.
This is no big deal, especially with spring on the horizon.
BTW, the coldest I have been in a long long time was in Las Vegas, or near Las Vegas at Nellis in November at a big air show. And that is coming from someone who had a ranch at almost 10,000 feet in the Rockies. It was grey and overcast with wind coming off the mountain and it was brutal.
The mildest winter I ever spent was a summer in Montana
That is really funny, Cluster—except it reminded me of a trip I made to Alberta to pick up horses. I had a big deuce-and-a-half and a 36 foot single axle trailer, so I was driving a rig totally unsuited to winter weather, and had to have chains on to get into Denver and then hit viciously cold weather as I headed north. But after I got north of Wyoming it was suddenly warm, and green, and the trees were leafing out. I was amazed. I had expected Montana to be even worse, and it was like it was a full month ahead of Wyoming and Colorado.
So I learned that Montana makes its own rules.
Was out and about and didn’t get a chance to respond to some of your comments yesterday.
Spook: “OTOH, I know a lot of Conservatives, including some far Right militia types. None of them are talking about starting a civil war — NONE.”
Well, apparently at least one of them was. I refer of course to the self-proclaimed white nationalist in the Coast Guard who was planning to take out top Democratic congressional leaders and media personalities. This may have been the guy they were talking about when Mark was listening to CBS radio the other day. (Mark will probably claim that we aren’t sure this guy’s a conservative, like anyone would believe that.) Meanwhile, you guys were too consumed with an unknown actor clowning himself to notice that your side has some real kooks among the ranks.
Amazona: “But I think the only way to hold the Higher Moral Ground is to make it clear that we will become violent only in defense if attacked.”
Oh honey, that ship has sailed. You all permanently lost your claim to the moral high ground in 2016 when you decided “grab ’em by the p*ssy” was perfectly acceptable. Or defrauding thousands of Americans of their life savings. Or engaging in extra-marital sex with pornographic film actresses while your wife nurses your newborn back home. Or paying off said actress—among others–to keep her quiet. Or operating a non-profit foundation whose sole purpose was to enrich its board of directors. Or using serial bankruptcy as a business model. Most people would consider even one of these to be a serious lapse in moral or ethical judgement, but your conclude that they are qualifications for president of the United States. Funny thing: when you give up your ethical and moral standards, it”s very hard to get them back.
You know RG ironically as bad as Trump was, he still holds the moral high ground over you and progressives. That’s how low the bar is.
Clinton set the moral bar so low a worm would have to tunnel under it.
It is so odd to see a Leftist, who found nothing wrong with a Leftist leaving a woman alone to drown while he tried to preserve a political future, fretting about anything anyone else ever did.
The difference, RG, is that none of our leaders nor rank and file embrace idiots like that Coastie…don’t know what he’s about and don’t really care. If the case goes as I expect, he’ll have the book thrown at him and we’ll never hear about him again. Meanwhile, your side made Angela Davis a tenured professor. This is a huge, gigantic, Earth shattering difference.
One additional thought on the moral and ethical bar. It sucks for people like RG that his side has set the bar so low, but they did so knowing that they could always invoke Alinsky rule #4 (“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”) That is working with an exponentially decreasing number of Conservatives, and the Left continues to use it at their own peril.
Meanwhile, your side made Angela Davis a tenured professor And I believe that Angela Davis was just a stated Communist and not identified as an actual criminal. But Bill Ayers WAS, was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list as a domestic terrorist and admitted to plotting to blow up a police station, timing the explosion for a shift change to kill as many law enforcement officers as possible. When his rich daddy’s powerful lawyers got him off on a technicality about the collection of evidence he stood on the courthouse steps and gloated “Guilty as hell and free as a bird”.
His lovely bride, Bernadine Dorhn, was actually involved in killing people. These were known and admitted domestic terrorists. And they went on not only to become heroes of the Left with prestigious and lucrative academic careers but to become good friends with a young Chicago Leftist, introducing him to politics in their own home and continuing their close relationship with him into his eight years as President of the United States. Bill made many visits to the White House, was briefly identified as a presidential adviser, and he and Bernie even traveled with the Obamas (though not officially part of the presidential entourage) where Bernie gave semi-official anti-American interviews to the press while the Obamas were there on official business.
rgrg2, I see you are busily using that shovel we handed you.
1. Being a “white nationalist” is A. Not the same as being a White Supremacist, no matter how hard you guys try to conflate the two. You (plural “you” as in Leftist propagandists) keep linking the two unrelated words “white” and “nationalist” to try to create a whole new, and by the way wholly inaccurate, perception. It’s what your kind does. Sadly, it is often effective, especially with a lapdog Complicit Agenda Media obediently participating in the effort. But in reality, a “white nationalist” is merely someone who has very little pigment in his skin and who also, coincidentally, loves his country and thinks it is the best place to live. It has absolutely nothing to do with any belief that lack of skin pigment conveys any kind of superiority or right to live in or govern the nation. And B, there is no causal relationship between being a “white nationalist” and a belief that the Constitution of the United States is not only the only LEGAL rule of law in the nation it is also the best blueprint for governing it, and that is the only definition of a “conservative”.
You sneer Mark will probably claim that we aren’t sure this guy’s a conservative, like anyone would believe that but in fact any thinking person who understands the definition of “a conservative” will believe it because it is true.
Nice try, by the way, in your attempt to sanitize not just an individual trying to advance himself while sliming about half of the nation and promoting even more race-based divisiveness and general hatred as nothing more significant than an unknown actor clowning himself but the entire disgusting spectacle of the huge coordinated effort to indict millions of people for an invented, non-existent, “hate crime”. Is that the new script you guys are getting? That it was nothing but a clumsy joke perpetrated by an “unknown actor” with no other significance? I can understand why this would be an effort, but get real—no one is going to buy into that fluff. Naturally you and your kind want to distract from the rather entertaining picture of so many Leftist icons of politics, entertainment and various media dripping with the toxic stink of their own hatred and viciousness and eagerness to victimize innocent people after it blew up in their collective faces. It’s not hard to understand why this is kind of embarrassing and why you guys feel the need to change the narrative from fact to fiction. Here you all were so tickled by the trifecta of multiple “hate crimes”—race, homosexuality and politics—and it turned out, after you all made absolute utter fools of yourselves and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are right about you, to be a hoax that ended up not just rebounding on the hoaxer but on the whole support system of Leftist hatred and viciousness.
Rational people were concerned (not “consumed”) by the spectacle of so many public figures, as well as most of the media, instantly promoting a meme that was dangerous on many levels. It was an effort to further divide the nation politically and emotionally by assigning a malignancy to about half of the voting public, trying to condemn them as a group and identify them as violent, intolerant, gay-bashing racist bullies—an effort not just by the “clown” you try to dismiss as a mere “unknown” but by people who have, and use, their ability to influence the thoughts and beliefs of millions of people. It was a politically motivated attempt to influence people by abuse of the powers of the media and of celebrity. It was also an expression of the deep and abiding hatred seething in the hearts and minds of so many people eager to jump on the slightest hint of an excuse to express it. (A description, by the way, of your jumping on the Coast Guard psycho story and your palpable pleasure in wallowing in it.)
Then you get to the sad old story that Donald Trump bragged about grabbing a woman, or even women, by the genitals. You just love love love that lie, don’t you? But of course, as the entire tape has been revealed and the transcipt read it turns out that he was talking about the phenomenon of some women making themselves available to rich or powerful or famous men (“because I am a star”) and once offering to prostitute themselves can be treated disrespectfully and they won’t care. And that is common knowledge. I have never heard of a groupie offering sex to a celebrity and then demanding to be treated like a lady.
We have covered the rest of your rant over and over again, in great detail. Yes, Trump had a sordid history. No, he does not engage in that kind of thing any more. If he does, we don’t know about it. Yes, we believe in second chances. Yes, those of us who are Christians believe in the concepts of redemption, salvation and forgiveness. Yes, unrelated to religious convictions, we also know of the historical records of people who have led disreputable lives and at some point looked back on those lives and said to themselves “I don’t want to be that kind of person any more” and have gone on to lead good lives, often lives that have enriched their nations or the lives of others.
The really funny thing about your screed is your assuming some kind of moral superiority in lecturing people who actually walk the walk and not just talk the talk, in living by the beliefs I outlined above, when you are so clearly a Grievance Collector as well as someone motived only by spite and malice, going to the effort to infiltrate a site like this to spew hate and viciousness and lies. You present yourself, in every single post, as a very spiteful and immoral person motivated by the ugliest and most despicable emotions and not just willing but eager to promote lies. You don’t have to worry about “getting back” any ethical and moral standards, as it is clear you never had any. But the irony of someone like you lecturing ANYONE on morality or ethics is really bizarre.
And, as I have noted before, you post without the slightest actual political content, just a steaming pile of your mental and emotional excrement, which you seem to lovingly sift through and sniff and admire.
Was out and about and didn’t get a chance to respond to some of your comments yesterday.
Bless your heart. Words can’t describe how much we missed you.
LMAO !!!! They really think highly of themselves, don’t they?
Interesting:
Gallup: Liberals outnumber conservatives in only 6 states, down from 9
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/gallup-liberals-outnumber-conservatives-in-only-6-states-down-from-9
Democrats are engaged in child abuse:
A group of about 20 middle and high school students organized by Sunrise Movement confronted the California Democrat in her San Francisco offices on Friday. The children pleaded with the senator to sign the Green New Deal resolution championed by freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, telling Feinstein that they had heard from ‘scientists’ that the earth only has 12 years before cataclysm.
Another example of teaching our children what to think … not how to think. It is child abuse and they ought to be held accountable.
It is child abuse and they ought to be held accountable.
Hey, once the Left officially came out in favor of murdering children who are out of the womb, and defending policies that result in child trafficking ranging from using them as pawns to game the US immigration system to being sold into sex slavery, we can hardly expect them to care about the mental and emotional child abuse of terrorizing children and forcing them to live in fear.
Like here is AOC defending her, like you know position on the green new deal, right? Like she says that she’s the boss, right?
“Like, I just introduced the Green New Deal two weeks ago, and it’s creating all of this conversation. Why? Because no one else has even tried,” she declared, in an apparent snub to Barack Obama’s Paris accord.
“Some people are like, ‘Oh, it’s unrealistic, oh, it’s vague, oh, it doesn’t address this minute little thing, and I’m like, you try! You do it! ‘Cause you’re not! ‘Cause you’re not! So, until you do it, I’m the boss!
“How about that?” she declared
Like totally cool ….
Only problem is the Green New Deal isn’t her idea, and it’s not new.
It’s going to be a tough sell when the details start coming out, and people realize what it’s going to cost, and what they’re going to have to give up.
“It’s going to be a tough sell when the details start coming, out and people realize what it’s going to cost, and what they’re going to have to give up.”
You misunderstand Spook. The “government” is paying for it and you can keep your insurance and your own doctor. YOU won’t have to give up anything (yet), We have to try it before we understand it. Trust me (smirk).
Think they’ll use and get away with this line again
Is the climate changing worldwide or just here in the United States? Because the green new deal is awesome if you want to combat climate change just here in the United States so obviously the rest of the world is not suffering such existential climate threats …. weird.
Cluster, you make a point that clearly flies over the heads of Liberals. (Which reminds me of something that may have been posted here a few years ago. It sounds like something the Count would have said: It flew over Sandy’s head faster than her heels during Fleet Week.)
The United States occupies about 6.6% of the Earth’s land mass and has about 4.4% of the world’s population, and is a leader among industrialized nations in promoting and achieving cleaner energy use and production as well as other environmentally protective measures.
But to hear the enviros talk, to hear the Lefties howl, we are nearly totally responsible for polluting the Earth and therefore the entire responsibility for making any changes, assuming mankind has the power to make the kinds of changes the Left claims will happen IF we only shape up and follow orders.
Not a single thing in Sandy’s happy little unicorn and rainbow fantasy makes any demands on any other people in any other nation on the face of the earth.
And one thing that it conveniently refuses to address is that it would essentially make the United States incapable of defending itself. This is already a goal regarding invasions from the South as the Left fights any effort to control who comes across and in what numbers and for what reason, but the limits on and eventual elimination of fossil fuels would mean we would have a military incapable of responding to any other kind of threat.
I have to wonder if that is the true underlying agenda, cloaked in the hysteria about the end of the world. It sounds a lot like part of a multi-pronged effort to destroy the United States as a sovereign nation, which has been, after all, the goal of the Left since its inception.
Exactly. Democrats never mention other countries and their role in climate change … which would lead a rational person to think, well why not? It is a global issue correct? Has anyone asked AOC what we will do with all the cows in Europe?
Democrats never mention other countries and their role in climate change
And here’s the reason.
The United States was the only major country actually on track to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accord when President Trump pulled out last year.