Open Thread

Grumpy Open Thread

Mark Noonan80 Comments

Feeling grumpy. Lots of things got on my last nerve today.

McConnell says the Omnibus is great because it addresses what Republicans care most about.

Look, you know I’ve defended Mitch…but this is just an insult. He clearly no longer cares what we think.

That Omnibus has $3,600,000.00 in it for the Michell Obama Memorial Trail. This is the entire Ruling Class insulting us. Look. I don’t know Michelle from Adam. For all I know she’s the sweetest person who ever lived. But has she done that is worthy of a memorial? Has every last Medal of Honor recipient already had their memorial constructed? Are we simply out of real heroes to honor?

There’s also the $47 billion going to Ukraine – which is, apparently, not enough because Zelensky is heading to town to pan for more money. It is a bottomless pit – and I’ve seen no substantial Ukranian advance into Russian-held territory. What the heck are we paying for? And nobody knows where the money is really going. There’s no audit or oversight – we’re just supposed to take it at their word that none of it is being stolen.

Meanwhile, the J6 Committee referred Trump for criminal charges. I figure its 50/50 they’ll indict him – thought it will be an interesting legal issue when the House rescinds that referral next month. But the Democrat base has been shouting for a perp walk for two years and the Democrats may feel they owe them one. Another Committee also voted to release Trump’s tax returns…so, feel safe, guys! They’ll never do that to you!

A picture was posted by the NY Post showing a clearly happy Kellyanne Conway out to a swanky dinner with Andrew Cuomo. Think about that. This is the thing that started me being grumpy today. Supposedly, Conway was one of the good ones. We all defended her because she was one of us. Now, you might think, “hey, her personal life is hers and maybe she just sets politics aside on it”. Yeah, no. Andrew Cuomo is a woman-abusing, lying, corrupt thug who engineered sending Covid patients into nursing homes so that the death toll would spike and be blamed on Trump. I could set aside differences of opinion…I can’t set aside gross immorality. That Conway feels that Cuomo is a proper person to jump into the sack with means she approves. She probably is impressed with Cuomo’s “kill granny” program and how well it worked. And now we know where at least some of the leaks came from. We also, now, can see why her daughter went ballistic…she could see from the inside the corrupt game mommy was playing. And we also tip our hat to George Conway – his hatred of Trump was misplaced, but he probably figured that if Trump was aligned with Kellyanne, he must share her amorality.

Nothing better illustrates the Uniparty than someone we thought one of our champions turns out to be someone who couldn’t wait to join the Ruling Class. A lot of people blame Trump’s personnel picks and, sure, he must bear his share of the blame here…but, my goodness, was there anyone who wasn’t stabbing him in the back from Day One? He had people around him. He was politically inexperienced. He assumed that there was some basic amount of honesty and patriotism in all those who expressed a desire to work with him. How could he possibly have foreseen the depth upon depth of depravity?

Grumpy enough yet? No? Ok, then lets go on.

You might recall the Wi Spa incident where a woman and a couple minor girls where confronted by the swinging…stuff of a transwoman and the Official Word immediately became that We Must Stand Against Anti-Trans Hate and that anyone offended at a swinging…thing in the girls’ room was a bigot. Yeah, well now that its no longer a burning issue…the guy is a convicted sex criminal who became “trans” so that he could whip it out in the girls’ room because that is how this perv gets his jollies. Which, by the way, was exactly what we all said would happen as soon as you allowed biological males into female spaces. It is a red carpet for every flasher in the world to wear a dress and just get rocking.

Not only was Twitter censoring the news, the FBI was paying Twitter to censor the news. This violates a host of federal laws. But, the law doesn’t matter. Nothing will be done. Even if we get a Trifecta in 2024, nothing will be done.

Enough Grump? Ok.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan25 Comments

Big Q1 2023 layoffs are coming for the Washington Post – word is they’ve lost half a million subscribers. This is good on so many levels.

And I think it is just the start – when Musk bought Twitter it had 7,500 employees. From what I can tell, he’s down to less than a hundred now and the thing is running just fine. These employees were being paid San Francisco wages – so, you gotta figure even the mail rook clerk (do they still have those?) was making north of 50 grand a year. The cost savings are immense. Additionally, there is rumor than Musk will move it to Texas, thus saving massive amounts in taxes and other fees. Other companies will be looking at this and wondering just how much they can cut.

To be sure, any of us who have ever lost a job knows that it is devastating. You suddenly don’t have assurance of paying the bills and with that worry, you scramble for another position. On the other hand, the bloat in corporate America is massive. Huge numbers of people are employed doing nothing that produces the product sold, whatever that may be. Empire building doesn’t just happen in government bureaucracies – it is a disease of all bureaucracies. The most positive aspect of this is that the people most likely to be fired are those who pester the American people the most: the woke with useless degrees are going to find that the 200 grand a year job attending a couple half hour meetings per day is gone for good.

As I’ve said before, a huge amount of America’s workforce is employed in useless jobs – and it wouldn’t be so bad if they were just useless, but these people also use their positions to push ever more wokeness on us…because that is their bread and butter. The more DEI you get, the more money you make.

Until, of course, there is no more money to make. We can’t sustain a pack of parasites. We need our workers to produce useful product.

I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t think we realize just how malevolently insane the United States has become. We are no longer the good guys in the world. We’re funding the war in Ukraine when that could have been almost immediately settled by Ukraine giving up the ethnic Russian territory. We’re refusing to produce our own oil and natural gas while pressing foreigners to ruthlessly exploit their own resources and workers so we can have energy cheap enough to keep political damage to democrats to a minimum. We’re arguing over whether or not a healthy 14 year old should have a double mastectomy. We’re allowing what amounts to a new slave trade to operate on our southern border. On and on it goes like that – not just bad policies which could result from mistakes, but directly baleful actions which hurt our own people and people all around the world…all the while with an MSM lauding our leadership and everyone passing out awards to each other for doing it. A reckoning will come for this – and I do believe that in God’s mercy we will have to pay a high price for it all.

But there is some good news – the Temecula Valley (CA) school district has banned critical race theory. This is in California. And this shows just how crucial things like school board elections are. Just put a few sane people into office and, presto, the hate-filled insanity stops. I hope we can get more and enough of this soon enough to avert total disaster.

Donald Trump is not having a good time – ignoring polls (most are created to manipulate rather than inform), he’s just not gaining much traction for 2024. His core supporters are still with him, but it looks like enough other GOP voters are out there to deny him the nomination if they can swiftly coalesce around one candidate (more tricky than it seems). Now he’s saying he has a big announcement coming tomorrow. I guess we’ll see if he’s got something that will restore his fortunes.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan37 Comments

Yoell Roth, the former trust and safety capo at Twitter, tweeted back in 2010 a question about kids consenting to sex with their teachers. In case you were wondering why Twitter prioritized getting the Bad Orange Man rather than all the sexual abuse stuff off their platform.

That, by the way, is something to be wary of when going on Twitter. It isn’t shoved in your face, but sometimes rather innocuous searches can result in some astonishing results. So, best to have a care – I mean, you know if you search “boobs” what you’re going to get…but other words which have completely innocent meanings have been coopted by the naughty into other meanings.

Unlike Facebook, you can find actual rated X stuff directly posted on Twitter – but whether it is the real deal or just a scantily clad woman, the purpose is to get you to click a link which brings you to the adult website. Lots of us, of late, have been followed by bot accounts with all sorts of different names but they all share pictures of the same very pretty Chinese lady. We’re not sure if its Chinese spyware or just a come on for Chinese-themed dirty bits, but none but a fool would actually click the links. As for me, I just block them as they come up – must be at least a couple score by now. There is some hope that Musk will curb that – I mean, I don’t think Twitter needs to be the morality police, but certainly any links to sites which are not just dirty but downright evil should be banned. And now that Roth is out, it might happen.

On Twitter, a mutual posted a poll showing that support for Reparations now sits at 60% among Democrats. This is no surprise at all – Democrats are sheep who will just do what they’re told. But it is also going to be a tricky issue for the GOP. Given the way things are, passing out the cash is popular, as such. And the GOP is perceived as the party that will pass out cash to business and to wars, but always balks at giving money to regular folks. I doubt that Reparations will ever gain overall majority support, but its going to come close and soon – maybe as soon as 2024 and when it does get there, Democrats will campaign on it. This is especially so if trends in black voting towards the GOP accelerate. So, when the issue comes up, we’d better be ready for it and our answer can’t just be, “no”.

The Democrats, of course, just want a race slush fund – a pile of government money that their cronies control and pass out to loyal foot soldiers who will then agitate for even more money. To counter it, I think we need some sort of program to build business and home ownership among the black community. Real wealth owned by individuals, families and cooperatives. And we can’t ignore the fact that from 1776 to 1865 almost all wealth generated by blacks was stolen and from 1865 to 1965 wealth creation among the Africa-American community was hampered a thousand ways in law and custom. It is simply true that the African-American community would be per-capita richer today than it is had there not been nearly two centuries of effort to prevent black wealth creation. We should take that line with it – that those who are genuinely descended from slaves (with some sort of cut off percentage – say 33% at a bare minimum) didn’t inherit as much wealth as they could have, and so we should try to make up for that – perhaps with a program of selling federal land and using the proceeds to pay out? I don’t really know: I’m spitballing here. But some means whereby out of the national wealth, those who’s ancestors were actively prevented from accumulating wealth are granted some sort of benefit. Because, like I said, it can’t just be “no”. We’ll get destroyed on the issue if we just say “no”.

Side benefit to selling federal land: it gets land out of Uncle Sam’s hands. The less land the feds own, the less legal power they have to interfere on the State and local level.

There is a great deal of argument between anti-Trump GOPers and the Trumpsters. Each is arguing in their various ways that the other side getting their way means doom for the GOP. Nominate Trump and we’ll lose! Nominate Ron DeSantis and we’ll lose! The correct answer is: we’re going to lose.

It is always difficult to get the incumbent party out after one term. It only rarely happens – and that usually takes massive economic catastrophe. But even with such, it still won’t be easy – there is so much welfare out there that the pain felt in, say, 1980 or 1932 simply won’t be there. Nobody is going to be worrying about their next meal. So even if, as I expect, we have bad economic times in 2024, that is no assurance that we’ll beat Pudding Brain.

And this is absent fraud – which various laws in places like Georgia has made a lot harder. In a straight up race, we’ll lose. Not only because it is hard to beat an incumbent, we’re also simply too divided and too weak. The Never Trump and Trumpsters hate each other far more than they hate the Democrats. Nominate Trump and the Never Trump ‘burbs will stay home. Nominate RDS and the Trumpster rurals will stay home. In either case, I can’t see our guy getting to 270 absent something like 25% unemployment. And even then it would be iffy.

I think that for 2024 our prime effort should be on holding the House, gaining the Senate and flipping as many county commissions and school boards as we can. That is the seed corn for the future while holding part or all of Congress means that at least Democrat policies aren’t enshrined in law. Now, miracles can happen – and if we find ourselves with a trifecta in 2024, cool. But don’t count on it – and any result will be better if we also won a lot of counties and school boards, where the real power to shape the country lies.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan21 Comments

As expected, Warnock won – and a lot of people are down on our prospects in Georgia in general. And there is much to be worried about. But I don’t think we need worry quite as much as some urge.

Yes, I do realize that the metro Atlanta area is getting a huge influx of northern voters who are ancestrally Democrat and so they are tilting the State Blue. But that same sort of people moved to Florida and look how that turned out.

Message and messenger: that is always going to be key for us. And they both have to be good. Walker has a past – a past not in any way as bad as Warnock’s (who seems a grade A jerk), but it must be kept in mind that our molehills will be made into mountains and the Democrat mountain will be hit with the SEP Field. I bet that just enough GOP voters were demotivated by Walker’s past. Meanwhile, ninety percent of Warnock’s voters – being consumers of the MSM – never even heard of the bad stuff about Warnock. So, our guys have to be first rate. I do, as an aside, think that even someone with a past can get around it – but only by being forthright about it. Get it out early and openly and don’t leave the least detail out. Once it is out and you can credibly show that it was a long time ago, you may have inoculated yourself: you’ve certainly lessened the effect of October Surprise stuff.

But it isn’t just candidates, messages and our ability (ala’ Florida) to eventually turn Democrats our way – that won’t be enough. No: we need more voters. Turns out, I know where they are.

Chicago.

“But, Mark: are you nuts! Biden won Chicago overwhelmingly!”

He sure did. But turnout in Chicago was 73 percent. More than 420,000 of Chicago’s voters didn’t vote. This isn’t residents or citizens – that is registered voters who didn’t vote. And that is just Chicago – not the rest of Cook County and surrounding areas which are the Democrat strongholds in Illinois (outside the Chicago area, Illinois votes like Alabama). And I’ll bet in the other Blue areas around the county we’ll find similar numbers.

So, there’s the votes: they are right there, waiting to be picked up. They are in the low-propensity voter and in the person who has never voted. Democrats area already doing a bang up job with some of these people. We can, too. And not just in getting Deep Red to turnout more…but going into Deep Blue and stealing some. You have to figure if you live in Deep Blue and don’t vote, you’ve gotta be disgusted with the system. That is fertile ground for us…if we can find the right message and messenger. Zeldin seems to understand this best, but others are coming around to it. The millions of votes we need to win are just waiting for us to ask for them. And, look, it isn’t about carrying Chicago and Los Angeles…it is about picking up enough votes in Deep Blue to lock down States like Georgia and North Carolina and put us in striking distance in places like California and New York.

But there is a catch. There always is, isn’t there? You’re not going to get these people with a traditional GOP message. They don’t even know who Madison is and aren’t at all concerned about tax rates or the problem at the border. They’re worried about their own poverty…their lack of safety. They feel they should be given more help.

And you’re going to have to give it to them. Sorry, guys, but the days of small government America are gone and they ain’t coming back any time soon. Right now, we’re just trying to preserve liberty and property, as such. It is either buy their votes and use the power to preserve your liberty…or stick to your small government ideals, lose, and have Communism imposed on you.

Senator Tom Cotton told woke Kroger corp to take a hike: that is one of those “first step” things we need to do. We can’t defend corporations which hate us and fund our enemies.

James Baker was an FBI guy who played a key role in the Trump-Russia drivel. When the heat came on, he was eased out of the FBI (rather than, say, being shot for treason) and got a job at … Twitter! Where he most recently was (briefly) in charge of vetting documents for Musk before they were released to the press. Well, someone pointed out that this probably wasn’t a good idea – so Musk fired him. I was wondering why in the first batch of documents, no names were being named. Now, I know: the Deep State had their finger in the pie. But now that finger is out – what comes out now may prove very interesting.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan40 Comments

Elon Musk announced that he was going to release the info about how the Hunter laptop story was suppressed on Twitter and everyone got al excited. Except me.

The crucial thing we need to know – the only thing we need to know – about how Twitter suppressed the story is who outside Twitter ordered it done. Now, do I have proof that someone outside Twitter gave the order? Of course not. But the bottom line is that as soon as the Post released the story federal law enforcement, almost all the MSM and all major social media platforms suppressed it. You don’t get that sort of uniformity of action without coordination – and you can’t coordinate that sort of action on the fly. People way up high in power in the USA were aware at least some days in advance that the Post story was coming and they swung into action to make sure it had as little effect as possible. They had their talking points all lined up – it was Russian disinformation. They got 50 former intel guys to sign a letter stating it was a Russian op. Doing this sort of thing takes a few calls, ya know?

So what I want to know is who called Twitter. Someone did. There’s no way it didn’t happen. If I can find out who made the call then I can find out who was ultimately behind the suppression effort by working backwards from that person and seeing who they did or do work for. And I called it before Musk released the info – 100-1 against us getting that crucial bit of information. And, sure enough, when the data was dropped, it lacked that. All it told us was what we already knew – that Twitter came up with an absurd excuse out of the Safety group and the story was gone.

Now, to be sure, they did say that political operatives – including some Republicans – had made various requests to suppress this or that account. But they still didn’t name any names. Likely because if we had an idea who had been calling before Laptop, we could eventually figure out who called for Laptop. Because as far as that goes, it had to be someone who knew about it – so, likely DOJ and/or Team Pudding Brain made that call.

And keep in mind that even if you want to say that fraud played no role in 2020, the suppression of this story did. It is absolutely hideous. Had it been about Don, Jr then Trump would have been lucky to crack 40% on election day. China Joe’s son is hip deep in federal crimes based on info on that laptop…and the pictures are downright disgusting. It was a candidacy-killer. Had it been given the normal play a story like that gets, these days Joe’s lawyers would be arguing he’s senile and so isn’t fit to stand trial. It was killed because to save Biden and get Trump out, it had to be killed. And, yes, this does make it even money that senior GOPers played a role in suppressing the story.

Until we get that info, its all pretty pointless. Musk says there is more to come – so, let’s hope. But I have my doubts that the truth will come out…because, remember, a lot of laws get broken in campaign offices and law enforcement agencies when you coordinate with media to favor one party over the other in a political campaign. A lot of well-placed people will be in jeopardy if it all comes out.

Apple CEO Tim Cook dodged questions about Apple’s relationship with China – because what else could he do? You do business in China and the Chinese own you. They have your factory. They control your labor force and supplies. If you don’t toe the PRC line, you’ll lose everything. And that is before the PRC gets you in-country, indulges any perversions you have and gets it all on video.

I’ve thought for decades that America having relations with tyrannical regimes is a huge mistake – we poison ourselves when we do that. Either we believe in our Declaration or we don’t. If we do, then we can’t hold that the PRC is a legitimate government – it is a mafia with an army. And you can’t make honest deals with the mob. We should, step by step, de-couple ourselves from all unfree nations.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan41 Comments

Elon Musk admitted that he voted Biden in 2020. A lot of people are taking this as a bad thing but for the first time I think we might have something here. Like most rich people, Musk moves in circles that are heavily liberal and he also, being rich, doesn’t have to worry about things…so, to such a person, the grand plans to “save the world” both sound good and are cost-free. Rich people are the easiest people to get on board with liberal ideology. But every now and again a rich guy has a wake-up call.

Think about what Musk has seen in the past few weeks: the liberals whom he thought of as the good guys are now trying to get Twitter deplatformed on the Ap store. Team Pudding Brain is threatening investigations. Liberals who viewed Musk previously as some sort of demi-god are turning on him viciously. In and amongst all that, Musk has obtained a first-hand look at how Twitter has operated. As CEO, there is nothing that anyone at Twitter gets to hide from him…and from what he’s saying on Twitter, my guess is that he did ask…and found out that Twitter’s “safety” staff were nothing more than Stalinists looking for any excuse to stifle dissent. These people were all let go by Musk. About 90 percent of Twitter’s staff was let go…and its still running just fine. What all this boils down to is that Musk might be, for the first time in his life, really getting a look at the mentality of a liberals and finding that it is ignorant, self-centered and cruel. I doubt that Musk will ever go MAGA, but he might become someone we can rely on in the fight for liberty.

Musk is also growing disillusioned with the MSM, and that’s a good thing. The trouble is that plenty of people – including some on the right – still believe the MSM to one degree or another. At this link you’ll see that someone put together a bunch of local news broadcasts with the subject of disinformation and the threat it poses to “our Democracy”. The MSMers all say the same thing. It is a script – and it must come out from a central source. Someone orders the MSM what to say and it gets said. With this, what they count on is that nobody sees the other broadcasts – and, of course, most won’t. So it will seem to be something that your local news guys all thought up on their own…but in the modern world, that sort of thing can get found out. Trouble is, we lack a genuine national Conservative broadcast/cable outfit that can give max exposure on such things. This sort of rank propaganda would have made Goebbles blush. It also, shows, in case you weren’t sure, how entirely mindless the news readers are – their only qualifications are the ability to look and sound good on TV. If a thought ever passed through their heads it would be the first time. And it is something we do need to take action on – can we really hold that the First Amendment was designed to protect that sort of thing? Is it really free speech – freedom of the press – when mindless drones are just repeating the talking points a political party handed off to them? Shouldn’t that at least count as an in-kind political donation? Shouldn’t they have to disclose they aren’t news organizations but merely party propagandists?

WEF’s Klaus Schwab declares China to be a role model. The same China building concentration camps – allegedly for Covid quarantine but that’s just the cover story: dissent is growing in China and the ChiComs are building places to put dissidents. I did a little looking into Schwab and he’s just a rich guy. He comes from an exceptionally privileged background and he’s certain he knows how to fix us. Not make us happy: he doesn’t care about that. But he does want us to cease being an inconvenience.

Been saying for a while now that I really do understand the Jacobins. Some people just earn a trip in a tumbril.

NASA says we’ll live on the Moon by 2030. I think we might be hanging out there for periods of time – as with Mars, we can’t live there: too much radiation and too little gravity. We just sent our first capsule to the Moon since Apollo – unmanned whip around the Moon. Which I don’t understand in the least – seems a complete waste of money and a perfectly good spacecraft. We’ve already been there. If we’ve got a ship that can do it, send people. But, anyways, unmanned – as will the next couple. Then we send people in a flyby. The plan is to put people back on the surface in 2026.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan50 Comments

Stochastic terrorism is the coming thing! If you’ve never heard it then the explanation is simple: it was just made up. Far as I can tell, less than six months ago. The claim is that when someone says something mean, it triggers the violent – so, when you say you don’t like minors going to Drag Queen Story Time, you are a stochastic terrorist…someone may hear you say that and go on a shooting spree!

Now, if a Leftist says that Trump and his supporters are Nazis and this causes Antifa to attack Trumpsters that is not stochastic terrorism. Do keep that clear in your head – it is only stochastic terrorism when you say something the Left doesn’t like. When the Left says something you don’t like, that is just Speaking Truth to Power, or whatever drivel phrase the Left is using these days. What they are trying to do, of course, is get us to shut up – but don’t think it is just to get us to voluntarily shut up. They are calling our words terrorism for a reason: because terrorism is illegal. They very much want arrests to be made of the “stochastic terrorists” who are the root cause of mass shootings.

Don’t underestimate the Left. They are not merely wrong – they participate in evil. Even that nice Leftist guy you know – he’ll denounce you to the police if given the opportunity. And he’d think he was doing you a favor. The basic Leftist is the sort of person Solzhenitsyn was talking about when he wrote, “you won’t understand it until they hiss at you, ‘you’re under arrest'”. They don’t understand where it all leads – that the path their on leads to Civil War…and if the Left wins, it eventually means that everyone gets arrested because the Woke dare not run out of enemies…there will always be people who weren’t with them fast enough.

There is much discussion of the 2024 GOP Primary season – mostly falling into the two Trump and DeSantis camps…but the DeSantis camp perceives a real problem: a whole bunch of also-rans are talking about getting in and they are afraid that a splintered anti-Trump vote means Trump gets it.

That is true, of course. But the way the anti-Trump people frame it shows they still haven’t learned anything. Trump can be beaten for the GOP nomination. And not just by DeSantis. In theory, any potential GOPer can beat Trump. But only if they out-Trump Trump. This has been true since 2015 and it will remain true until Trump withdraws from politics. At least 45% of the GOP base is Trumpster – and in some States, it is far higher. Plenty of Trumpsters are willing to move on and find someone else. Even my MAGA-from-the-elevator brother is willing to go for DeSantis. But you know what will happen: it will be Trump vs whomever and Team Trump will highlight the Establishment backgrounds of all other GOP contenders. For the most part, in most States, this will be an unanswerable argument – unless a GOPer proves not just that they have left the Establishment, but that they are actively at war with the Establishment. I’ve been saying this for a while and it remains true: the best first move of any Trump challenger is to take up the cudgels for the J6 detainees. Not even Trump has really done that. But if done, it proves that you don’t give a darn what the Establishment wants…and, rely on it, any GOPer voicing support for the detainees will be condemned by all Establishment people. Does DeSantis want to beat Trump? We’ll find out not in attacks on Trump. Not in attacks on Trumpsters. We’ll find it out in a relentless war against the Establishment.

Word is that Warnock is favored next month in the runoff in Georgia. But, I don’t care what Experts are saying. We’ll see how it comes out – what we’ll find out is who can turnout the base. I doubt that anyone is terribly enthusiastic at the moment – it was a long, exhausting 2022 campaign season. So, dragging people to the polls will tell the tale.

FTX is enormously funny to me. Even more than Theranos was. Just more proof that our Ruling Class is corrupt and also rather stupid. But not all of it is stupid – there is zero chance FTX got that far without the active cooperation of Money and government. It looks to be that a Ponzi scheme was used to finance political payoffs. Pro tip: if you’re buying nothing and hoping to make money by selling your nothing for even more money to someone else….give me a call: we should play poker.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan38 Comments

After Trump has his announcement speech, quite a bit of Catholic Twitter had a debate about Trump’s call to execute drug dealers. As you might recall, I long ago decided to oppose the death penalty. My grounds for that were that mercy should always triumph over justice and that I don’t really trust the government with the power to execute citizens. I’m still of that opinion but the debate got me thinking.

A hundred thousand people died of drug overdoses in the USA in the year ending April of 2021. That was a big jump – more than 25 percent – from the year before. But lets say the jump was temporary and in a normal year 70,000 die. That’s still a lot. More than 190 a day. And that doesn’t cover all the drug deaths – we’d also have to include all murders related in the first or second degree to drugs (ie, drug trade people killing each other over drugs as well as drug addicts who commit crimes – including murder – to support their addiction). Any way you slice it, that’s a lot of stiffs.

How many people would die of drug overdoses next year if this year we hung a thousand drug dealers?

It needs to be thought about. A lot of people are in the drug trade because it is a low-risk, high profit enterprise. They start tuning in each day to see a couple drug dealers were hanged, it might make them seek other lines of work. Can anyone know for certain that we wouldn’t immediately get a thousand replacements for the thousand we hung? No. But suppose we did so and it made it 50 percent less likely that a druggie can get his drugs at any given time? Hang 1,000 criminals, save 35,000 lives?

What it comes down to is how we will view both Justice and Mercy. I have my growing suspicion that softness on crime is neither Just nor Merciful – and not only unjust and merciless to the victims, but especially unjust and merciless to the criminal. I do believe it is crucial to provide a way out even for the worst criminals…but by the time we’re on a guy’s fifth arrest for drug dealing, I think we might be dealing with someone rather incorrigible. It is something to think about.

Looks like the House will be a 222-213 split. The GOP is pledging investigations of Biden and we’ll see if they really do it or just go through the motions. Meanwhile the bed-wetters are upset with us – saying that we should ignore Biden’s crimes and get legislating! Morons. The last thing we want is legislation – though we do look forward to zeroing out the budget for the Special Counsel Garland just appointed to investigate Trump for the millionth time. Also those 87,000 new IRS agents. The Special Counsel was appointed, by the way, to give the MSM something else to report about if the House investigations of Biden prove to have teeth.

Maricopa – it was either cheating or the most fabulously incompetent election ever held. And don’t think that people won’t be purposefully incompetent. It is nearly as effective as box-stuffing and if done right it keeps you away from any legal jeopardy. Bottom line: cheating or incompetence kept Kari Lake out of the governorship. And as the person running the election was Lake’s opponent…kinda makes you go with cheating-via-incompetence. Certainly Abe Hamadeh coming up just short after late ballot drops is highly suspicious…but if you’re cheating the new governor in you’d better make sure you cheat in your guy as AG. No doubt things are screwy – the good news is that Hobbs is a zero and her legislature will be GOP controlled.

Elon Musk is conducting a poll on Twitter about reinstating Trump – as of this moment, 3.9 million votes, 56 percent for reinstating Trump but that is down from 60 percent earlier.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan15 Comments

We’re still up in the air in Arizona and Nevada. My thinking is that Lake and Lombardo are in far better positions than their Democrat opponents. Laxalt is about even with CCM (with a slight tilt to Laxalt) and Masters has a very difficult (but not impossible) task. If Lake, Lombardo and Laxalt win, I’ll call Tuesday a win. Masters pulls it off, a mini-wave (you might have heard that an Expert has already called it for Masters…but if he had the data to do that, he’d even more easily have the data to call the Governorship…that he hasn’t means he’s just guessing for Narrative purposes).

Don’t try to overthink why the vote counting it taking so long – the Democrats are trying to see if it’ll be close enough for them to manufacture a thousand or so votes to tip it their way. Over in Arizona, they have simply refused to count any of the votes that should tilt heavily R – which tells me they’ve spot checked them, found that they are, indeed, heavy R and are trying to see if everywhere else makes the final result close. And don’t try to tell me that there isn’t a thought of fraud here – there is no way it takes this long to count ballots no matter what source they come from. The delay is manufactured. The good news is that in Arizona we seem to have our act together on lawyers and monitoring and I’ve just gotta think that they haven’t been able to screw Lombardo because he’s Sheriff of Clark County and can arrest anyone who tries a bit of ballot box stuffing.

The House Republicans, at least in their public statements, are acting like they are sure they’ll be in the majority come January. This is probably correct…would take some things going very bad very late for this to change. Looks like we did flip 20 Democrat seats…trouble was the Democrats flipped 8 of ours. We might win the House popular vote by as much as 4 points. There are 4 Democrats remaining in the West Virginia Senate. And we doubled our numbers in the Hawaii Senate (from 1 to 2, but hey). So, there is some good out there for us – and I do believe that we were doomed-and-gloomed by an MSM Narrative which I now perceived started about 8 pm Eastern and it was designed to depress GOP turnout in the West.

We have to admit that early voting and ballot harvesting are not going away in areas that Democrats control – we have to start working on it. Haven’t been able to confirm it, but the claim is that 500,000 of Hochul’s votes came from Democrats going to peoples houses with pre-filled ballots and then asking them to sign. Nothing at all illegal about that – the person still has to voluntarily sign. We should start doing that. We likely lost NY because of turnout fails in some GOP counties. We know who our voters are – just go get them. Get used to Election Month; do our best to make early voting a 50/50 thing.

We also need to understand that in the swing voters we are dealing with people who have minimal knowledge and are easily swayed by commercials. They are the reason advertising exists, at all. The Democrats stuck to very simple, very stupid lies about themselves and us. We were bombarded with ads telling us that Democrats were fighting to lower costs while Republicans were going to take away your rights. As I said, very stupid lies – a 180 from reality. But, it worked – Titus hung on by 5 or so instead of losing on the back of such mindless drivel. We need to pitch it at just that lowest common denominator. Our ads should have been “Democrats are coming for your kids” and “we’ll bring back cheap gas” (our ads on prices here in Nevada tried to explain that all the money printing and spending caused the inflation – which is true, but the sort of person who is swing has no chance of connecting the two things – “we’ll give you something nifty!” will work a lot better).

Open Thread

Mark Noonan39 Comments

Nearly 11pm Pacific on the 9th and we still don’t know the NV and AZ results! Why? Because Democrats are in charge and they’re trying to figure out if it’ll be close enough to “find” just enough votes to push them over the top. Don’t fret too much about this – it has to be less than a thousand or so at this point for that to work. I don’t think it will be – but, yes, both States could disappoint.

As of now (or, at least, a couple hours ago when they last updated) Lake’s people are abundantly confident as are Laxalt’s (though I have my doubts about Laxalt – he is seriously underperforming vs Lombardo). Can’t find anything directly from Masters’ or Lombardo’s people. For AZ, it is all Maricopa, for NV it is the drop-off votes in Clark and Washoe counties. And in NV, it is a matter of whether those remaining Clark and Washoe votes will cancel out the incandescent Red vote in the rest of the State? We’ll find out – but it may still be days away. As for me, if we do end up winning NV and AZ, I’ll call 2022 a victory. Not nearly as much as I would have liked, but a W is a W, right?

As of this moment in time, the GOP also leads in the overall House popular vote by 6 percentage points. That will likely shrink a bit as more of California is counted, but we are on track to win the popular vote for the House. This is meaningless because each district is first past the post, but the bottom line is, guys, we came close. How close? Well, in NV-01 the Democrat won by 28 points in 2020…looks like it’ll be 3 or 4 after all the votes are counted. Think about that shift! And it was like that pretty much all over the country – we lost narrowly. Even in Blue New York, Zeldin came so close that it looks like he carried the GOP to 4 House seat flips and ended the Democrats supermajority in the State Senate.

So, that helps – also hurts. We came that close and then didn’t get nearly what we wanted. Lots of reasons are being offered for it: lingering mistrust of Trump by Indies, abortion motivating single females (in the demographics of married men and women and unmarried men, the GOP won – but we got blasted to oblivion by single females), poor candidates in some area, the GOP misdirecting resources (even if Masters wins in AZ, it is now clear that McConnell was wrong – to the point of wickedness – in pulling RNC funds from his race), excellent Democrat effort to rake in early votes…on and on and on. Nobody is going to find the One Cause and anyone who claims they have is blowing smoke. It was everything. It was a team fail. The actual votes show we could easily have got to a Red Tsunami. We didn’t do it right.

My big takeaways are these:

First: Zeldin showed that “out of reach” is a relative thing. Honestly, he probably lost because of the number of GOP votes which fled NY for the South over the past two years. But that he still came close – and there were GOP turnout fails in many NY counties – shows that we should have been pressing NY all along. To be sure, we’re not going to win San Francisco, but we simply must start thinking in terms of fighting all over the country. Find the candidates. Find the issues that matter to the locals. Tailor the message to those issues. Sure, in Blue areas we won’t prevail often…but that the GOP is likely to have a House majority is due to Zeldin’s glorious failure. How many House seats did we leave on the table Tuesday because we simply didn’t try in certain “out of reach” States?

Second: I’ve hit on this before but we’re way past the time when we can win majorities by quoting Madison. Especially to the young who almost certainly weren’t told anything relevant or true about him in school. The plain fact of the matter is that youth is against us and if we wait for them to age and move right (as they always do) then it might be too late. We have to grab, say, 40% of them right now. We have to find the plan for student debt (at least make it dischargable in bankruptcy), speak to their concerns, start finding some Right-minded (though likely more anarchist-libertarian) Tik-Tok types who are wiling to talk up that we’re for freedom. We must cease thinking of the Welfare State as something we can dismantle overnight. It won’t happen that way. And as we can’t immediately get rid of it and the money will continue to be spent, we should work out ways where we spend it better than the Democrats do. Promise the goodies; gain the power; insert the MAGA reforms which will eventually negate the need for the goodies. But don’t talk “cuts”! Talk “corruption” and “wasted money”. I’ll bet you any money that half the Department of Education budget can be shown to be waste…tell the kiddies about it, promise that if they vote for us, there will be even more money for them…get the power, fire the Commie bureaucrats and start pressing colleges to become intellectually diverse. See where I’m going?

I have to say that I am disappointed but encouraged as well. We clearly have things to work out. Probably best at the moment we didn’t win because I don’t think we’re fit to govern: we have to figure out ourselves first. Also: things are going to go from bad to worse over the next 18 months and I don’t want our fingerprints on it. Let Pudding Brain and the Democrats have it.