Open Thread

Open Thread

Mark Noonan31 Comments

So, Trump called out Representative Cummings about how his District is lousy. Democrats, MSMers and Never Trump (bit I repeat myself) all jumped on it as racist – which shows how incredibly stupid they all are. Cummings has been in Congress for 23 years, “fighting for his constituents”…which means he’s the most incompetent fighter the world has ever seen.

What Trump did was a flash of strategic brilliance – he’s forcing Democrats to defend the indefensible (ie, the places they’ve run into the ground) while also, just perhaps, opening a few eyes. The inner city – entirely Democrat run – is a festering sore on the nation. Places with no jobs (except for the political connected), no hope; fatherless families; high crime; drug addiction; abuse of various types. They are havens for gangsters. Their infrastructure is crumbling. Disease is common. Garbage goes uncollected. They are getting infested with rats. But we’ve all pretty much pretended that none of it was happening – for fear of being called racist as a huge number of the politicians directly in charge are black. Well, Trump has the guts – and now the Democrats have to defend what they’ve done. It will end badly for them. They made these areas what they are – and they are horrible.

A Christian heretic becomes an apostate – some geebo who wrote a while back ago that if you do A and B and C, then God will surely give you D, in this case in relation to sex. It doesn’t work like that: God isn’t a vending machine. People are always trying to fit Christ’s message into their own desires…they manage this trick by ignoring such crucial things as the command to take up your cross and follow Him. God doesn’t promise you joy and wealth on Earth…He promises you eternal life, which is vastly more important, and next to which any sufferings here are nothing. You may get joy and wealth, but rely on it you didn’t get them because you’re special. And you may get suffering – in which case, you rely on God and do your best.

Don Surber has more faith in PM Boris Johnson than I do – but that is because I think Britain is already dead. I’ll be pleased to be proven wrong.

Anti-Semitism will get you fired from CNN…but only if someone NOT from CNN uncovers it. If only CNN had people who were trained to investigate things and report the facts…

Open Thread

Mark Noonan44 Comments

Interesting article about the Trump/Bolton dynamic. You may have been wondering – many have – how an Establishment guy like Bolton manages to work with Trump? Well, the bottom line is that Bolton is a patriot, first and foremost. Bolton knows that his job is to provide the President with the best advice possible…and then let the President decide the course of action. Bolton is, apparently, abrasive and pushy (and this does some times rankle Trump), but at the end of the day, when the President decides, Bolton backs the President. This isn’t the first time a leader had someone like that on his team – and the best leaders have two or three like that. You have to, if you want to win…you need people who aren’t afraid of you, who can shake you up, but who will also do as they’re told.

Omar’s family is keeping to Omerta about her marriage issues – to the point where even reporters trying to figure it all out just can’t do it. To me this means that there is something in there hideously embarrassing.

NR article about how the Left is convinced they’ve already won in 2020. I’ve seen this for about a year – especially after the mid-terms. the Left isn’t convinced they will win: they are convinced that they already have won; with a subtext that if Trump did somehow manage to win, it could only be via fraud. The Left looks at the vision of future America and the 2044 Presidential election wherein a majority of Americans will be non-white and so their future is assured, no matter what. No one seems to have told them that Texas is only 45.35% white. But, be that as it may, they are certain – and that is why they are pushing themselves ever further Left. They’ve already won, you see? And that means the Left has won…so by insisting upon open borders and Medicare for all, they are just doing what they were elected to do (next year, but don’t confuse the poor dears).

Meanwhile, some polls have Trump garnering support of 45% of Latino voters.

Boris Johnson will be the next British PM…and he’s pledged to get Brexit done, but I doubt he will. Certainly not the full break with the EU that the Brexit vote ordered. Britain is done. They lay supine under Iranian threats because they don’t have a fleet large enough to fight. They get arrested for saying The Bad Words. There’s nothing left.

Cory Booker says he’d like to beat Trump up. I doubt that Trump is worried.

We have to discuss nutsack waxing because our Tru-Con Expert Betters spent the last 50 years making sure Big Corporation was taken care of while civilization died.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Team Trump and the GOP are building a rather large ground game for 2020:

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) are mobilizing thousands of volunteers in more than a dozen battleground states, including a handful that President Trump lost in 2016, as they seek to expand the electoral map ahead of 2020.

Trump Victory, a joint operation comprised of the Trump campaign, the RNC and state Republican parties, kicked off a “National Week of Training” on Friday in a bid to train more than 6,000 volunteers and register voters in 14 states that Republicans have set their sights on for 2020.

At the same time, the committee is adding to its roster of state directors overseeing its organizing efforts, hiring staffers in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Virginia, Republican officials told The Hill.

I’ve been wondering if Minnesota will correct its horrendous error of 1984, and 2020 might be the year it happens. We GOPers have looked and looked and looked at Minnesota and just haven’t been able to crack it. But, that’s how we thought about Wisconsin for the longest time, as well. In my view, the untold story of 2020 – though it will be told afterwards – is that the swing States are no longer Florida and Ohio, but Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Yes, I’ve heard the stories of Democrats surging in Texas…but, for 2020, that’s drivel. Trump will win Texas, easily. But, it can’t be taken for granted. Fortunately, the GOP is strong and well lead in Texas. Expanding the map is important, in and of itself, but I see something else at work here: Trump wants to win the popular vote, and he wants the House back. He’s got second term plans (most Presidents really don’t – which is why second terms are usually hideous and end up with the other party winning the next time around…Trump, I think, will change that).

Related: Democrats on the campaign trail are bedeviled by Trump’s strong economy.

Also Related, and enormously funny: factions of the Democrat party prepare to primary each other. Another untold story of 2020: the white, upper class, far left base of the Democrat party is going further and further left…so far left that Indys are being turned off and, just perhaps, a slice of Latino and African-American voters are being turned off, as well. Seriously: imagine yourself a middle or working class black guy…does anything these weirdos talk about resonate with you? Green New Deal? Open borders? Meanwhile, over there is Trump… and he’s at least a hell of a lot more fun than the Doofuses of Intersectionality.

The New York Times decides that the Soviets are the people to celebrate on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. This surprises none of you.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan33 Comments

America: love it or leave it. That is all Trump’s tweets really amounted to. He didn’t mention race: all he said was, “if you really hate it here that much, leave”. And that is the truth of the matter.

You can’t fix what you don’t love – you must love something before it is lovable. People like Omar and AOC clearly do not love this country. Not the country founded in 1776. To them, that country is racist, slave-owning, genocidal, sexist, homophobic, rapacious, war criminal. They hate it and want it gone, to be replaced by an America they will love…a country which has torn down the Washington Monument and will consider its founding moment to be MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech (not that they believe a word of what King said that day). They want an America which despises the Pilgrims; the Founders, the Westward Expansion. That rejects the Constitution and the idea that the individual matters. It is not an America I will ever be part of – first off, because they’ll jail or kill me, and those like me; but mostly because I’ll die fighting such a thing.

Democrat says that skin color is the only thing which matters. This is racist.

They’ve decided to kill the James Bond franchise by making the next 007 a woman. This is just stupid. Bond is a male fantasy: we kill the bad guys while dressed well and looking sharp and get all the hot women. No man will want to go see Super Chick do that…nor will women, I suspect.

Don’t know why any parents let their kids have their own internet accounts: 17 year old girl murdered by loser she met on line.

The Ninth Circuit gave a win to pro-lifers. Yes, that Ninth Circuit. Trump is remaking the Courts. That, alone, is enough to re-elect him next year.

I’ve stared the sequel to Mirrors, to be called Secrets. Don’t want you guys to have to binge-read, so you’d better pick up a copy of Mirrors, today!

Open Thread

Mark Noonan65 Comments

Well, I’ve got the first bit of feedback on Mirrors which isn’t from a close friend or family member and it is remarkably positive. I’m very pleased with this. Seems that my character Celeste is proving very popular. No spoilers: go read the book and see why. Don’t fret if the genre isn’t one you normally buy: its a story, and I think quite a fun one.

I did a radio interview about it today on The Barrett Brief and Richard Barrett asked me if I was trying to be original. Most emphatically, I was not. I was trying to tell a story of good guys (and gals) placed in strange and dangerous circumstances and trying, by their wits and courage, to emerge triumphant. RSM takes a look at the upcoming and sure-to-be-dreary Terminator sequel and notes:

Oh, wait, guess what the original Terminator had going for it? Yep, a Nordic blonde playing the damsel in distress, functionally analogous to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. It might seem farfetched to compare a schlocky science-fiction thriller to Casablanca, and you might object that Linda Hamilton is no Ingrid Bergman, but from the audience perspective, the theme of the beautiful young woman in peril, with the hero coming to rescue her from danger, is a winning formula. It’s transcendent, the stuff of classics. Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, Han Solo and Princess Leia in Star Wars — all variations on this same timeless theme.

My hero is not a Rick Blaine – the cynical but good man. My male heroes are, if anything, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. But the basic formula is still there: St George must defeat the dragon and save the Princess. This is the timeless reality and the basic element of Christian literature. And I wrote it for two reasons. First off, because I’ve wanted to tell a story for a very long time. Secondly, because we’ve gone completely wrong in story telling. Too much Marxist and psychological claptrap. Trying to be edgy by making the hero nearly as much a rat as the villain. Mirrors is my small contribution towards returning popular culture back to sanity – and a bit of fun, for crying out loud.

AOC is accusing Pelosi of racism – you and I should go long on popcorn futures.

Epstein may not be all that rich – this is not surprising. As I’ve said before: my theory is that he’s a pimp and a blackmailer. He’s been deep in with some of the richest and most powerful people in the world for decades but there is nothing in his past which says he’s done something which would result in him being a billionaire. We’ll see what, if anything, comes out. The smart people bailed out on him in 2010 after his first conviction, but plenty of people stayed in. And my bet is because they had to: Epstein had the goods on them.

Millennials are turning to pagan sorcery for their spiritual needs. They just can’t believe that God would become incarnate because that’s so silly…so they believe a fricking crystal will heal them. This will not end well. Paganism can be healthy, but only for a while…if you are worshiping the gods of the field that can be ok…but always, every last time, pagan worship degenerates into either worship of sex or a desire to kill. Or a really twisted combination of both.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Have you bought your copy of Mirrors, yet? A fairly good number have – don’t be left out!

Also, don’t be left out of Matt’s new offering: Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us from Barack Obama’s Legacy.

We’ve been busy little authors, haven’t we? Meanwhile, I’ve already started on Part II of my fiction series, to be titled Secrets. Hope – and I really will work on it – to have it out in January.

The Left is now pointing out that 2 of McConnell’s 8 great-great-grandfathers owned slaves. I guess they are really going to run on this reparations thing. I think it’ll be disastrous for them, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Perhaps there is a majority who think we have to shell out because 150 years ago, some people did bad things.

FredoCon David French is wringing his hands and getting all, “well, I never!” over a survey which claims that Christians – especially white Evangelicals – feel little or no obligation to take in refugees. But, do we have such an obligation? Meaning, does our Christian faith require us to take in everyone who lives in a lousy country? I can’t see how – welcoming the stranger is a requirement, but does this extend to essentially whole nations wishing to leave their homelands? I can’t see how – mainly because it is impossible for us to do so. The lousy nations of the world are lousy – and the good nations of the world are getting lousy – because of a moral failure which goes far beyond whether or not we’ll let a refugee in. Right after WWII the Ruling Class of the world made the determination that lousy people shall be allowed to flourish. That the West – the moral leader of the world – would not exercise its power to force barbarians to be civilized. The result has been very predictable: the barbarians have asserted themselves. We can fix the world – but it would require us to be the world’s overlords. Unless you want to do that, don’t try to sell me the notion that I have a moral obligation to take in each and every victim of barbarism.

Yes, I have heard about the Epstein arrest – hadn’t really paid much attention to that saga. My guess – with limited knowledge – is that he’s a pimp. A procurer of certain products for rich degenerates who then trades on that to obtain great wealth. I’m pretty sure not much will come of it – too many highly placed people are tied up in this. The Left is trying to work it up as an anti-Trump thing but I fully expect Trump to be clean on this as he has been on everything else they’ve tried on him. Trump does like pretty women – but women, not girls. Melania is younger than Trump, of course, but she married the man when she was 35 and is now 49. If Trump was into very young, this would not be what he did.

Barr says he’ll get the citizenship question on the census. I think that Trump should just do it, Courts be damned. It is clearly not something the Courts have any authority over – there is no case to be made that anyone suffers harm by the government asking someone if they are a citizen. People get asked this every time they seek employment, for crying out loud.

99.99% of Americans have no idea who Chandra Bose was – but, he was an Indian nationalist who made common cause with Hitler and Japan during WWII. He is considered a hero among parts of the Indian population. Be that as it may, he did buddy up to Hitler…and AOC’s chief of staff has been wearing a shirt with Bose’s image on it. Not cool.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan16 Comments

So, AOC has been running around claiming the border patrol detention facilities are Buchenwald II…making absurd claims of horrific treatment of the illegals. I’m not quite sure what the plan is. As you would expect, rank and file lefties are taking AOC’s claims as gospel, but how does that really help the left? No one outside the left – and, I suspect, some Never Trump Fredo-cons – are lending any credence to the stories but even if they were true, the people suffering the abuse only have to agree to go back home for it to end. I can only assume the left thinks that if they really push the “Trump is a Nazi” meme, it’ll eventually take hold and a few million white, middle class voters in the Rust Belt will suddenly decide that open borders and health care for illegals is the way to go.

Nike pulled shows decorated with the Betsy Ross flag from production because Kaepernick said the flag was a symbol of slavery. Kaepernick is an anti-American jerk – and if we’re such a lousy country, why does he stay?

Austin, the one place in Texas where liberals are allowed to flourish, has legalized camping on the city streets. The natural result: homeless people are camping on on the city streets. The left wants to make America a Third World dumpster.

Independent journalist Andy Ngo was given a beating by Antifa thugs in Portland – with, from what I can tell, a wink and a nod from Portland’s police department. My view: the feds have to step in. The Constitution empowers the federal government to ensure a Republican form of government: and with the government of Portland allowing political violence, there is no Republican form of government there. Shut the city government down, arrest everyone, and force the people of the city to start all over again.

In an entirely unsurprising bit of news, it is revealed that migrants are buying children to use when they cross the border. You already knew this – because with kids as a “get into America free” ticket, that is precisely what people wanting to cross will obtain.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan40 Comments

Pelosi has agreed to hold a vote on the Senate-passed border bill. Ol’ Nance is in quite a pickle. She’s got a batsh** crazy caucus (at least half her members) which takes its cues from the even more insane upper class white liberal base of the party…and they want Resistance! They want Impeachment! They want war to the death! But, Pelosi isn’t entirely stupid: she knows that going down the route of the Insane Resistance Left means not only Trump re-elected, but likely with a restored GOP House majority. I think that here she’s trying to take a crazy-pants issue off the table. I don’t think it will work.

Supreme Court rules that we can’t have a citizenship question on the census because Justice Roberts (I’m thinking) felt he needed to throw the left a bone so that he’ll still get invited to the prestige parties in DC. It also rule that the State legislatures will continue to draw legislative district maps, in spite of a heavy effort by Democrats to get judges they’ll pick to draw the lines. So, mixed bag: and we need to re-elect Trump. Two more liberal justices are almost sure to leave the Court between now and January, 2025 and if we can get to a 6-3 or 7-2 majority on the Court, then even a squish like Roberts won’t matter any more.

The MSM got a picture of two dead illegal immigrants (father and child, it seems) and has posted it all to heck and gone…which I guess is supposed to make us all go, “Orange Man Bad! Impeach!”, or something. While we’re all sympathetic to the dead, the bottom line is that they are dead because the adult involved decided to jump the line. Nothing prevented him from applying for legal immigrant status. Nothing prevented him from showing up at a port of entry to claim asylum status. He decided, with child, to try to cross a river. Any experienced outdoor person (or swimmer) can tell you how fraught with danger crossing a rive is, especially with a child. He bet his (and the child’s) life he could make it. He lost. Meanwhile, plenty of people (me, included) have been shouting about the deaths along the border for years…deaths the MSM never covered because there wasn’t an Orange Man Bad angle.

According to a survey, young Americans are growing less tolerant of homosexuality. This, to me, is a backlash – and it is created because it has been years since the gay rights movement was about securing rights for gays. It is all about punishing anyone who isn’t enthusiastic in approval of anything the most lunatic homosexual activist demands at the moment. And, of course, this was inherent from the beginning.

Oh, to be sure your average gay man out there did just want to be left alone – to be able to live as he wished without risk of losing his job over whom he had sex with. This was a reasonable demand to make. Unless we wanted to start arresting straight people for fornication or adultery, there simply was no justification for punishing someone for having sex with whomever. But the left – and, more accurately, the most insane part of the left – wasn’t after toleration; they were after destruction. Specifically, the destruction of the concepts of “right” and “wrong”. It helped gay people to win by asserting that gay is the same as straight…and regular, non-insane gay people benefited from that victory. But it came at a cost which will now, most likely, be paid mostly by non-insane gay people. Gay people would have been better served by a more go-slow approach as people were more than willing to extend tolerance…but buy forcing a leap from “leave me alone” to “bake me a cake, bigot”, a backlash has been created: people don’t like to be dictated to. (HT: The Other McCain)

Open Thread

Mark Noonan53 Comments

We’re winning, guys. Slowly, but surely:

The U.S. Supreme Court has reversed the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, and has ruled that the 1925 ‘Peace Cross’ Memorial erected to remember World War I dead can stay on public land.

It is insane that any American court even accepted the case – it is not in any way, shape or form an establishment of religion to have a religious symbol on public property. The whole thing about the Establishment clause has been twisted – as we all know, because we’re not dumb and know history, an Establishment of Religion is where the government selects a religion and makes it mandatory – and provides various penalties, large or small, for anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the officially sanctioned religion. That is all the Founders were trying to prevent – they weren’t trying to prevent the erection of a memorial cross by a people, at the time, better than 95% Christian (and even today better than 70% Christian). We’ll get more and more like this as Trump’s judges take hold of the Judiciary.

I watched most of Trump’s re-election kickoff rally – I know all our Experts say he’s doomed and its all over and we’re just waiting for the Democrat to win…but, geesh! That was a big, enthusiastic crowd…and I can’t think of a Democrat who can draw that sort of crowd absent a rock star performing at the event. We’re, once again, told that crowd size doesn’t matter…ok, Experts: you say so. I guess we’ll see how it comes out. Oh, Trump raised nearly $25 million in the first 24 hours after his campaign announcement. That’s more than any Democrat, by a lot. Too bad for Trump that a poll is more important than people and donations, right?

If you watched that rally, you saw the themes Trump is going to hammer on over the next 18 months: People Vs Powerful; “I’m for you, they’re for anyone but you”; the economy is booming. That’s a pretty strong message.

Kamala Harris – providing more evidence that Trump is going to win – asserted in a Tweet that Trump’s plan to deport illegal immigrants is an effort to change our demographics. She’s saying that the Real Americans – the people she cares most about – are the illegals! With opponents like this, Trump doesn’t need any friends.

Roger Simon – now resident of Nashville where he’ll be one of the pioneers in the creation of the American Jewish Hillbilly Community – writes about his former home, Los Angeles:

I left Los Angeles for Nashville slightly over a year ago. When I call friends back in my former home (for 50 years), most of them tell me I got out just in time.

Actually, they’re wrong. I should have gotten out ten or even fifteen years before. The handwriting was on the wall. “California dreamin’,” pace Mama Cass, “was no longer a ray-al-it-tee.” It hasn’t been for a long time.

Read the whole thing – and I can attest to what Simon is saying. I’ve been around Los Angeles since 1970, off and on. I even lived there for a few years after I got out of the Navy. Since about, oh, 1995 or so, it has just started to crumble. The last time I was in downtown LA, I was nauseated…doubly so because LA is my father’s city, and my grandfather’s. And I remember how it was when I was a kid and it’s all been wrecked. It is dirty, it is falling apart, it is overrun with zombie-like people who, per reports, are sh**ting so much on the streets that there is typhus. This is what Liberalism does. This is what they want to do to your city. We have to stop them.