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.

Well, Shoot: That Didn’t Work!

Mark Noonan27 Comments

Still a lot out there here at about 10:30 pm Pacific but, clearly, the GOP got beat. Looks like we’ll win the House and might still take the Senate, but clearly the Democrats out-hustled us where it mattered. Turns out that abortion did come riding to the rescue!

This is a telling blow against Trump – large numbers of his people went down in flames. And in this environment, that simply should not have happened. Now, we can whine all we want about unfair attacks and the usual run of Democrat cheating…but, seriously, none of that should have mattered. We got beat like a rented mule, guys: don’t try to sugar-coat it.

That said, Florida and Texas went bright Red. These are large population, highly diverse States and yet the GOP managed to wrack up impressive victories – with Florida being orders of magnitude more Red than anyone expected. Democrats are largely finished in that State and it will take them a generation to recover – and then only if they start changing their tune, which the national Democrat party might not let happen.

Ron DeSantis is the clear winner tonight – just a huge, crushing win. Rubio, too (his opponent torched $73 million in a losing effort). I can’t see DeSantis not running for President in 2024. I sure in heck would if I were him. Now, its not a 1 for 1 State to National transfer – sometimes people who do fine at the State level fall apart on the national stage. Bobby Jindal, anyone? But this is his moment and I can’t see him passing it up.

What about Trump? I’m sorry to say it might be time for him to bow out. It won’t be for me to decide for him and if he secures the nomination I’ll enthusiastically back him, but while millions love him, millions also despise him. It might be time for us to find someone less divisive who is yet a proven fighter. I hope Trump thinks long and hard. We own him an incalculable debt: but for him, we never would have realized how deep the rot had gone. He woke us up and sent us into battle as happy warriors. We owe him, big time. But politics is often all about timing and Trump’s time may be past. If he announces he’s staying out he can clear the field for DeSantis – keep the Trump base fired up and transfer that love and loyalty over to our new champion. He’ll be remembered in the history books as America’s Pitt the Younger: he didn’t defeat Napoleon, but it was the Britain he reshaped that defeated him.

Now, I do not and never will regret getting rid of Roe. Outside of moral considerations, it was the correct legal decision. We did the right thing and if we pay a prices for that, we should wear it like a medal. We do have to retool our message – social issues can win for us (see Ron DeSantis, eg) but we have to be careful how we message and whom we pick fights with. We also need a better economic message – something far more hopeful than what we’ve had so far.

Chin up! The fight isn’t over!

‘Twas the Night Before Midterms

Mark Noonan8 Comments

And all through the House, Democrat Committee chairs were having their stuff boxed up.

How will it go tomorrow?

I think well. At least to the point where we win the House and Senate. I can’t see a path for the Democrats to get above 49 Senators after all is said and done and even 48 is a big stretch requiring a pretty darned good Democrat election day turnout. The House, as I’ve said all along, is a foregone conclusion – the GOP only needs a net of 5, after all. If Democrats run massively ahead of Pudding Brain’s approval, they’ll still lose 15 to 20 in the House.

Governorships? Looks like PA will stay Democrat and that is really too bad (there are some rays of hope in that response bias among GOP voters especially in rural PA is so low that the polls – even the good ones – are missing a huge bloc of GOP voters: I would like this to be true, but I’m not counting on it). New York looks definitely within reach for the GOP – still have to say it is Tilt Democrat but, really, that Democrats are in a last-ditch defense of the NY Governorship is pretty much the tale of 2022. Things are bad – and they are worse in Blue areas than Red. There’s even a shot that a sorta-GOPer could win the Los Angeles mayor’s race. I do believe we’ll win NV and hold AZ (perhaps by a comfortable margin) while FL and GA have long been out of reach for the Democrats. On the whole, I expect us to do well at the governor level and consequently well in State legislative races (in NC looks like we’ll take the State Supreme Court and, once and for all, we’ll be able to draw district lines in that State as we see fit). Still also have some hope for us in MI and I’m very confident we’ll prevail in WI.

What is all comes down to, as in all elections, is who shows up? Democrats are nervously reassuring each other than this time will be different – that the in-Party will buck the President’s approval rating and a surge of Election Day Democrats will turn the tide. Some Democrats are downright insane on this, by the way: predicting a Blue Tsunami! But most just hope to limit the losses and maybe keep a 50/50 Senate on the backs of this Democrat surge. As per usual, anything is possible. But as any Democrat dreams their happy dream of a sudden late Democrat surge, do keep in mind that it could be the other way – we could have a late GOP surge.

The predictions (which mostly run to a 1-2 GOP Senate and 30 House gain) are predicated upon strong but still rather normal GOP mid-term turnout. And if you look deep and ask, you’ll find that just a small increase above that and things start to fall apart for Democrats very fast.

In light of this, I found it interesting that there have been a slew of MSM articles telling Democrats on Election Day to beware of the Red Mirage. The theory here is that a blowout GOP win in FL with, perhaps, Oz and Walker leading early doesn’t mean disaster: Democrats could make up all that in late-counted early votes! This has triggered some gloom-and-doomers to assume the fix is in. Not me. Mostly because I know that while you can fix a Presidential vote by having control of a few cities in key States, doing it nationwide in a mid-term environment is just about impossible. The Democrats will cheat as much as they can, but they simply lack enough control of the process to prevent a GOP wave. Their cheating might save a few marginal seats for them in deep Blue areas, but it won’t stop what’s coming.

So, why write the articles? Simple: it seems highly likely that Florida will be incandescent Red and for about an hour or two it will be the only major thing for anyone to talk about on TV and Social Media. Word gets out of such a stunning win and you risk having a Democrat in, say, Arizona, heading home from work and deciding that since it is all over, might as well pick up Arby’s instead of stand in line for an hour in a lost cause. The articles are an attempt to shore up Democrats in AZ, NV and CA.

And they are fearful of that – a combined GOP larger-than-expected turnout with a Democrat lower-than-expected turnout. If that happens, this is where we not only get the upset wins in NY and MI, but also in PA, WA and NM. This is where the GOP gets 4-5 in the Senate and 40+ in the House. This is where State races give the GOP more power at the State level than they’ve had in a century.

Will that happen? Once again: it is impossible to know. Depends on who shows up. I admit to some butterflies in my stomach but it isn’t fear – it is hope. We might really win this thing. Be nice if we did! But, we also might lose this thing. That would suck. On the other hand, I’m a Christian so I know how the story ends and thus have no real long-term worry here.

Go vote. Unless you’re a Democrat. And then just wait on the results.

The Death of Thought

Mark Noonan31 Comments

Saw a Tweet by Tom Nichols – you know, The Expert who deplores how we stupid people just don’t get it – bemoaning that America is being burned to the ground by people like Trump because the Elite never accepted them. Now, to be sure, there would be a bit to that – even when everyone officially loved Trump, he was considered a boor. A flashy, crude bull in the Ruling Class china shop. His family was rich, but still very nouveau; the Trump family started to pick up some money with Donald’s grandfather, but it was dad Fred Trump who got them rich. Basically, the Trump’s haven’t had their money long enough for it to have the stench of work removed.

Nichols isn’t rich – he does well enough, but he’s not one of the rich people who probably despised Trump all along. But while not rich, he is of the class. That is, the Ruling Class. He’s got his degrees and he’s got his positions in the Establishment and, dammit, he’s mad at us for not doing as we’re told – just as the upper class of New York City couldn’t stand Trump for not trying to be like them. But what got me thinking was how Nichols is claiming that Trump, et al are trying to burn it all down. In a flash it came to me what Nichols’ real problem is: he’s never once thought about things.

If you get an engineering or medical degree then, at the end of the day, you had to show you could do some engineering or medicine before you got it. There’s just no other way to do it. On the other hand, if your degree is in history or philosophy or such like, you don’t have to show the faintest thought about the subject: to get the degree, all you must do is repeat back what the professor told you. This doesn’t mean a person with a liberal arts degree can’t think, but it does mean that such a person doesn’t have to think in order to get the degree. And, these days with all the dumbing down, you can get all the way to doctorate without showing the least spark of original thought. My bet, actually, is that most degree programs in the so-called liberal arts these day are designed to discourage thought: they want people who regurgitate information but they don’t want anyone questioning the facts or drawing an unapproved conclusion from the facts as presented.

Man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. — G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton there was discussing specifically why we study philosophy, which he admitted can be a bit of a bore. But do keep in mind that in Chesterton’s day, he was talking about the educated people in this matter. He wasn’t expecting the store clerk to take the time to learn Aristotle and Descartes. Be ok if he did, of course, but Chesterton knew that most common people don’t have the time nor inclination for such things. But society, as a whole, is going to be ruled by one or the other – thought that has been thought out, or thought that hasn’t been. It was and remains the duty of those who rule us – by fate, inheritance or transient political victory – to be those who have thought their thought out. Because if we are ruled by people who haven’t thought things out then you’ll get…well, you’ll get what we’ve got.

Over in New York, governor Hochul is in some trouble – may even get beaten on the 8th. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Even in a GOP wave year, New York – really New York City – is so reliably Democrat that the particular conditions wouldn’t matter. There would be so many Democrat votes that the Democrat will win. But there’s a problem and it is particular, especially, to New York City. Crime is rampant. Now, the MSM tries to tell us that because the murder rate is still lower than the peak about 30 years ago, this complaint about crime is just a GOP psy-op designed to fool people into voting for them. It is another example of the MSM’s willingness to say things not only divorced from reality, but from the reality the reporters know from personal experience. The regime propagandists of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia weren’t this compliant! The MSMers know. They live in NYC. They can see it with their own eyes: people waltzing into stores to rob/trash them. Goods in stores increasingly locked up to prevent wholesale looting. The feeling of being unsafe on the streets and the subways. Everyone in NYC feels it. They know it. And while the MSMers are going to loyally carry that water, the voters of NYC are under no such obligation. To be sure, if Hochul is booted on Tuesday it won’t be because NYC went red – but it could because a lot of Blue NYC just stayed home rather than ratify the homeless bum pissing on the curb outside.

And the problem in NYC stems from the imposition of certain policies: most notably the end of cash bail. If you haven’t paid attention to it, you should, because ending cash bail has become the mark of Leftist justice reform. They’ve put it on mute the past six months for political reasons but make no mistake about it: ending cash bail is something they are determined to do. The theory behind this is that cash bail unfairly burdens poor people who are disproportionately minority. This is absolutely true. I mean, no duh: the poor person, whether criminal or just some poor schmuck who got picked up, doesn’t have the money for bail nor for good lawyers who can get bail lowered or removed. Obviously, any system of bail is going to hit against the poor vastly more than against any rich person.

But the solution – ending cash bail – is obviously something which was not thought out. I can totally dig trying to find some way to lower the burden on the poor, but blanket removal of bail requirement was going to have that effect: petty criminals would feel invincible. They wouldn’t even have to spend the night in jail. And people of low moral character would be encouraged to start engaging in crime – especially theft – for that same reason: no real sanction. They can figure: how likely is my trial for stealing $500.00 worth of stuff from CVS even going to happen? And that is if they even bother making an arrest. After all, what cop is going to bother arresting someone – taking that risk and that extra work – just to see the guy walk out of the precinct before the cop has even written up the complaint?

On and on like that, all across the nation and in every aspect of our lives we are burdened by the results of policies imposed by people who are sure they are right, but clearly never thought about what they believe. Sowell has been writing about this for decades. I’ve read those books but only just now am I fully understanding what his main complaint was and is: nobody is thinking. It is all very mindless what goes on. All of our problems – our lack of industrial capacity, or lack of energy production, our food shortages, our crumbling infrastructure, our crime rate, our collapsing education system, our drug addiction, our homelessness, our open border…all if it, every last bit, the result of the ruthless imposition of policies nobody thought about. Nobody sat down and said, “so, what will happen if we do this? It was all just done.

And people like Tom Nichols want us to stick with that. And for a long while I thought that it was, perhaps, pettiness or some other normal, human emotion preventing his like from seeing that Trump really isn’t all that bad (I mean, my goodness, compared to Joe Biden!) and that some good things come from ruthless rejection of Liberal/Left certainties. But then you see that Tweet and you remember that people like him are all-in on fighting Putin over Ukraine and then it really hits you: they’ve never thought about one darned thing.

We have to defend Ukraine!

Why?

To save Democracy!

If Ukraine falls I’ll lose my right to vote in the USA?

Putin stooge!

No matter what what way you ask about it, you won’t get an actual answer. We’re backing up Ukraine – at the risk of WWIII – to save Ukraine from Russia, or NATO from Russia, or Democracy from Russia…and blah, blah, blah. But no explanation of how, say, changing the Russian flag over Donetsk for a Ukrainian flag will actually benefit us. We just have to do it! Russia is bad, don’t you know! Don’t you remember Reagan!

Yeah. As I recall what Reagan wanted was to stop the USSR from expanding outside the USSR via proxy wars and, of course, to get a real nuclear arms reduction treaty with them. He got that. How is that similar to stopping Russia from taking over ethnic Russian territory governed from Moscow prior to 1991?

You’ll never get an answer to that. Nor to why we would, say, defend Germany from Russia rather than Russia from Germany. I mean, on the whole, the Germans are working against us in foreign affairs. They are also major economic competitors who don’t have to pay for an army because we’re there for them. Any chance we should reassess this situation?

No! You Putin Nazi Puppet!

Note that I’m not saying that defending Ukraine is wrong – I’m merely saying that no thought is happening behind our efforts and any attempt at thought is immediately shouted down. And the shouts are led by the people who supposedly have the superior education and thus can think things out better than us.

Until we clear all these people out – not just the politicians but the corporate bosses, the bureaucrats, the generals and admirals, the professors – everyone in charge, we’re not going to fix this. I would seriously expect better results at, say, Defense if I randomly selected some sergeant and made him Chief of Staff. I’d have some confidence, that is, that our four star sergeant might think about things before he made a decision…you know, like what might be the long-term effects of lowering physical requirements so that girls can be in combat outfits. Same with everything – put a plumber in charge of Harvard’s Department of Philosophy and there’s just that chance he’d crack open some of the books and think about whether or not what they’re saying is worth any human being knowing. They really do all have to go. I don’t care what they do, but they must leave. Anyways, might be fun to watch them try to tackle a job which requires results. But, more importantly, once they’re gone, we might be able to openly think about what we want.

Red Wave Inbound

Mark Noonan23 Comments

This is how the MSM is covering the White House preparations for Tuesday:

Even before senility Biden was incapable of admitting error – his whole life has been the ceaseless crafting of Narratives where he’s always the hero. The fact that the Democrats are about to get wiped out as a direct result of his actions just won’t compute in that musty thing he uses for a brain.

Plus, Team Biden has to start looking over its shoulder – things are not likely to get better for the USA any time soon and no major legislative efforts will happen. There are already – because, likely, Team Obama and/or Team Clinton authorized it – MSM stories highlighting Biden’s obvious physical and mental decline. Pudding Brain’s people only keep their cushy positions as long as The Senile One occupies the Oval Office…as soon as he’s gone, they’re gone. And a lot of Democrats are going to want Joe gone come Wednesday.

Democrats are looking forward to 2024 with fear in their hearts…if Biden is the nominee and things haven’t 180 improved by then, they’ll get beaten in a 1932-style landslide. No matter who the GOP nominates. They probably don’t want Harris, but they also can’t get Joe out without her active cooperation…and if she’s in any way smart (debatable) she wouldn’t agree to it unless the power people agree to grease her skids for the 2024 nomination.

It is at long last even starting to dawn on the most ardent Democrats that things are going poorly – here in Nevada, they’re hoping a blizzard in Washoe County will save the day for them. In a way, I feel sympathy for them – the MSM (on orders from the DNC) has been playing them for suckers. Four months ago the MSM was all happy talk about Democrats winning Senate seats and maybe even holding the House. It was absurd from the get-go: the GOP only needs 5 House seats for a majority. They’d get that even if Joe was popular. As for the Senate, in 2021 there was some chance…but by late Spring of 2022, that had vanished and it never returned. Now they’re backs to the wall hoping they can save their seats in New Hampshire and Washington and so keep the GOP below 54 seats so that 2024 doesn’t award the Republicans a filibuster-proof majority. Rely on it Democrats, you were never going to do very well in 2022…and the messaging presented just made it all worse. They really thought that abortion and January 6th would trump concerns about shortages and high prices. I want to give the GOP mole who convinced the DNC to do that a medal.

Now, how big a wave? Don’t know. And there’s even the usual caveat that anything can happen. But my guess at the moment is a net 30 seat gain in the House and 3 in the Senate plus some really big gains at the State level. But, we’ll see. On Tuesday!

Open Thread

Mark Noonan43 Comments

On the whole, rather be a Republican at the moment than a Democrat.

If we do get to 54 GOP Senators, then its better than 50/50 we wind up with 60 or more after 2024. So, fun!

Later today Pudding Brain is going to give an emergency speech telling us that Democracy is at risk. Whatever. What is really notable is that yesterday’s speech finally got some MSM notice on how he’s, well, senile. Grandpa said, once again, that his son died in Iraq…but also went on to say that he went to an historic black college and that he met the man who “invented” insulin…except insulin was discovered rather than invented and the guy who discovered it died before Joe was born. I think that now the Red Wave comes into view, the Democrat power people are setting up Joe’s exit. Won’t happen before January 21st because Harris won’t sign off on it before then (she will – sensibly – want to retain her two-term viability). And what a crushing mistake the Democrats made – pushing Joe to run because they thought he had blue collar appeal, then frauding him into office when that didn’t work…and now it looks like they’ll get crushed next week, and likely get it even worse in 2024 because, guys, the economy gets worse from here (and just watch the MSM suddenly call it the worst recession ever as they try to pin it on the new GOP Congress). If they had just let Trump enjoy the victory he had earned, none of this would be happening.

Whom the gods would destroy…

Open Thread

Mark Noonan46 Comments

There are two realities about the status of Campaign 2022 at the moment:

  1. Nobody knows what will happen.
  2. What will happen is already happening.

I’ve seen lots of election Experts changing their race ratings over the past few days – from “leans this” to “tilt that” and so on. It is all drivel. Only marginal changes in voting intention take place in the last couple weeks. When we talk about “late deciders broke thus and such” what we really mean is “these people were 99% going to go the way they did, we just didn’t know it until it was over”. It is hard to get granular with polling – they try to make it seem like they can, but in a sample of 1,001 people the sample you get which represents the “late deciders” is tiny and, therefore, useless except by accident. You might get some marginal changes in the vote – and in a very tight race, that may make the difference. But for most races which will be decided by 1 or more percentage points, its already over: the votes are being cast and the winners and losers are almost all baked in by this point.

But there are some indications of how it is going. Early voting can be useful but it is also flawed: it can never tell you how many people will vote on election day, nor the partisan makeup of that bloc of voters. Rule of thumb (which has so far been correct) is that Democrats vote early, Republicans vote late. That trend will continue until it doesn’t. Will 2022 be the year it breaks down? We won’t know until the votes are counted. But, so far, early voting has not given Democrats much to cheer about – if Democrats are voting early (and are voting Democrat: just because a Democrat returned a ballot does not mean it is 100% for certain a Democrat vote), they aren’t voting in the numbers you would expect if this was to be a purple year, which the Experts have been telling us it will be (based on anger over Roe and Democrats distancing themselves from the toxic Joe Biden). But there are other places you can look.

For instance, you can look at the House race for NY-25. It is a D+8 district which Pudding Brain won 60-37 in 2020. So, pretty solid Democrat, right? GOP doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance, right?

Except the Democrats House Majority Pac just earmarked $275,000 in ad buys for the district.

D+8

Joe won it by 23 points.

The incumbent Democrat got 59% of the vote in 2020.

Whatever else is said, when cash is put on the line, there’s a reason for it – and the only reason they’d lay down this cash is because they’re desperately afraid that a Democrat +8 district is slipping away.

What does it mean? That Democrats are in trouble. A lot of trouble.

We’re supposed to be sympathetic to Paul Pelosi – 80 year old guy. Whacked with a hammer.

Yeah, no. He’s fabulously wealthy due to his political connections and while he did fall victim to a crime (so we think), the fact of the matter is that the policies he backed while raking in his millions have caused untold numbers of assaults, rapes and murders among the poor of America’s cities…and, so, my sympathy is a bit limited.

It was revealed that the suppression of dissent on line in 2020 was fully coordinated between federal law enforcement and the tech giants – also revealed is that the government is going to heavily focus on preventing we, the people, from seeing “toxic narratives”. Rely on it, they are also working with the major news outlets. I honestly lend more credence to stories at World Socialist Web these days than I do from CNN or the New York Times – they’re commies, but at least not owned (so far).

Open Thread

Mark Noonan46 Comments

For the second time in recent months, Paul Pelosi is in trouble because he got hammered.

It is a very strange story – supposedly, this weirdo in his underwear managed to gain access to the Pelosi’s manse in a heavily guarded area of San Francisco…nobody saw the guy in his underwear coming in! Then both underwear-guy and Paul got hammers…and then it gets a little foggy. Police reports indicate that Paul called about the man but said he was waiting for Nancy to get home and then the police show up and only then does underwear-guy attack…supposedly severely injuring Paul.

The Capitol Police have been called in…which makes no sense as they lack any jurisdiction…but if you want to control the investigation, having a police force tied to your office is really cool.

Gay lover spat? Mere political set up so they can blame the GOP? Who the heck knows.

Elon Musk owns Twitter – so far, nothing much has changed except for one thing: for the first time since I created my account in 2015 the things Twitter suggest to me are relevant. And I mean it: not once in the past 7+ years has a Twitter suggestion been anything remotely interesting to me. And not just the fact that for politics they’re always pushing liberals my way…for sports I get soccer, which is just so similar to hockey, I guess. For food I get Vegan stuff…which might go well with my pot roast. I get super-hero movies suggested when I’m more of a bio-pic/war drama kind of guy. On and on like that – and all wasted effort as I’ve never clicked a suggested link. Until today: when miracle of miracles, a video from Kari Lake was suggested to me. If this is all Elon does, then it is worth it.

Now, as for the permanently banned: Musk is saying that is under review. Already Corporate America is warning they’ll pull advertising if Trump’s account is restored. I doubt that Musk would really care. The only account everyone is saying must be restored is Gay Patriot’s. He went through about a score of them before he gave up. We want his original account back – Twitter just isn’t the same without his acid takes on the issues of the day.

The liberal melt-down about it has been wonderful, as you might expect. And with the fear of banning fading, people are back to their old tricks…one of the MSMers reporting from Twitter headquarters got trolled by two people claiming to be fired Twitter employees. Their names? Ligma and Johnson (I’ll give you a minute).

What has been most funny is the liberal insistence that Musk breaking the shackles of Twitter censorship is fascism. I’m deadly serious here: that is exactly what they’re calling it. Lots of them are saying they are leaving but I doubt that will happen, or last long for those who do. For people who like fast-paced, topical social media, Twitter is king. It really is a clever system when you get down to it. Truth Social and others do ok at it, but even as they improve their product, they simply can’t get around Twitter’s head start in users. Musk says it will become part of a comprehensive social media platform – which may or may not wind up being a good thing, but as he’s taking it private, only he gets to say what will be what.

The Democrats latest hopium is early voting numbers out of Clark County, Nevada. The nutshell: Democrats are doing well with mail-in votes and this presages a Democrat resurgence in front of November 8th. Two flaws in the theory: Clark County turnout is down massively…the other bit is that rural Nevada hasn’t reported a single early vote. So, the Democrat stronghold is depressed and we don’t even know what the most GOP part of the State looks like.

The Oz-Fetterman debate seems to have finished off Fetterman. In every poll taken since the debate, Oz has been in the lead. The official word is that ticket splitters will award Oz the Senate seat and the Democrat the governorship. The Official Narrative being that the GOP candidate there is just too extreme. I guess we’ll find out. But Oz was “too extreme” until a couple days ago. Meanwhile, Democrats are now pouring resources into New Hampshire…which has been officially in the bag for the Democrats since June or so. I think NH and WA will be the GOP upsets. But, we’ll see!

Oh, and Democrats: the GOP looks certain to win at least 52 Senate seats. Could go as high as 55 if they get the breaks. But, as they say, there’s more! In the 2024 cycle Democrats will be defending seats in (are you ready?) Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Yes, as a matter of fact, I am pointing and laughing at you. That is 10 – count ’em, ten – vulnerable Senate seats. But, don’t feel too bad…after all the GOP will be backs-to-the-wall defending seats in Alabama and Wyoming.

To make it clear to you: you’re screwed. If you’re lucky then by 2025 you’ll be looking at a Senate which only has 60 GOP Senators. It could be as high as 65.

And here’s what will really grind your gears: if you hadn’t cheated to win in 2020, then this year you’d probably be getting a net-gain of 4 and in 2024 your loses probably would have been in the 3-5 range.

Was Trump really that bad?

Open Thread

Mark Noonan39 Comments

There is a meme out there – and you may have seen it – which basically says, “how can a generation raised on Family Guy get so easily offended?”. The underlying assumption is that Family Guy is avant-garde. Speaking Truth to Power. Taking on the Ruling Class. So, why can’t these people take a joke?

The answer is simple: shows like Family Guy (and The Simpsons and even South Park) are not avant-garde. They don’t speak Truth to Power. They are yet more Ruling Class propaganda. They wouldn’t be allowed on the air if they weren’t. You think the bosses would really pay someone to make fun of them? Ain’t gonna happen – at least, not very often and when it does it is usually by mistake. You know: something like Fritz the Cat. That really did poke fun at 60’s radicalism..and it was granted an X rating for that (don’t try to sell me that sex scenes between cartoon characters caused the X rating).

I admit to never having seen a full episode of Family Guy though from time to time I do see clips of it posted here and there on line. Some of them are really funny but most are pretty conventional modern comedy (ie, vulgarity). But one clip I saw recently illustrates my point about the show being Ruling Class propaganda. In the clip, two of the characters have some sort of device which allows them to transit between parallel universes and one of the universes was predicated upon Christianity never existing – and so everyone is going around in their flying cars and other advanced tech…because you see, without Christianity to impose the Dark Ages, we’d be far more advanced. Yuk, yuk, yuk! There are two things to draw out of this – first off, the religion they insult is Christianity and that is, of course, the only religion the Ruling Class allows to be insulted. Secondly, the Ruling Class lie that religion is opposed to science. How would any person watching such a show develop the healthy skepticism necessary to step outside the approved Narrative? No chance of it – regular consumers of such fare will, of course, be able to parrot “Christians hate science” at the drop of a hat…but there is no possibility that such a person, confronted with, say, “men can get pregnant” would be able to refuse the lie.

A couple years back I got into a little Twitter tiff with John Cleese of Monty Python fame – my point to him was that for all the hilarity of the humor, it only made fun of the defenseless – and often, the dead. You can, after all, poke whatever fun you want at Victorians because they’re all dead and can’t punch you in the nose over it. Never once did Monty Python, or any pop culture fare over the past half century or more, poke fun at whatever was fashionable among the elite (some people bring up the skit in Life of Brian where Cleese’s character makes fun of the desire of a man to be a woman – but that was long before Trans became fashionable. Just see if anyone tries something like that on SNL or some other show in 2022).

What we’ve got is a mountain of propaganda to pierce. And it is everywhere – and very clever of the Ruling Class to simply buy the jesters and make them into mouthpieces.

So, they dredged up another accusation against Walker – anonymous denunciation about an alleged abortion 30 years ago. They really have shot their bolt, haven’t they?

And it does look like a Red Tsunami is developing. The cope among Liberal Election analysts is reaching epic proportions as they try to sift out any data point which would indicate Democrats are doing well. But, sorry: it don’t fly. The Democrats are spending money to defend their Washington Senate seat. Murray got nearly 59% of the vote back in 2016 and here in 2022 Democrats are pouring money into it. They have to. It seems that even for Washington and Oregon, there’s a limit to how much Antifa people can take. The head of the DCCC is also getting money from his own organization as his GOP challenger threatens an upset. Democrats are triaging districts all around the country…in one case moving money from a D+9 district to a D+13 district. Think about that – a D+9 district has been written off two weeks before election day and they’re trying to salvage D+13!

This is all indicative of what I’ve been expecting all year – a fairly uniform swing of 10 points to the GOP. It might be more, but I think that is reasonable. And I don’t think anything has really changed since about March…polling has just been noise and propaganda designed to get money or get money moved around.

But, Mark, what if you’re wrong?

Hey, of course I could be – if I am, then I am. But I think I’m on the right track here.

How Tough Are You Ready to Be?

Mark Noonan44 Comments

Floating across my Twitter TL earlier was a video of a housing contractor having a bad day – the video showed a house deep in the process of being constructed and his complaint was that for three days in a row, nobody showed up for work. The man’s claim was that he could offer $40 an hour and he’d get no-shows. It was very sad to watch.

But it is also something I’ve heard more and more of – work going begging because people simply won’t show up for it. And we all know why: there is so much money floating around out there for people sitting on their butts that butt-sitting is preferable to work even when work pays more. Its like this: you could make 75 grand a year by working hard…or you can milk the system for 32 grand a year and get to stay home or go hang out. It is a lot less money…but it is almost all tax free and you don’t have to work for it. Human nature: when we don’t have to persist, most of us don’t.

The problem is widespread not just in the United States, but all around the Western world. The welfare State is shoving money at people – and no surprise: the Welfare State dies if people are working property owners. If they are forever waiting for their EBT card to reload, then the Welfare State lives forever. An additional benefit for the Ruling Class is that people waiting for their EBT won’t rebel for fear of losing it. In the United States and around the West, there probably total several hundred million people who are a simple drain on the economy – either by directly taking government money or by working in perfectly useless government-funded or subsidized jobs. Needless to say, this is not sustainable.

As I have endlessly yammered on about, real national wealth is only what we make, mine or grow. It isn’t our dollars. It isn’t government spending which is counted as part of GDP. It is what is made, mined or grown – physical things which people need. Write a report about farming and you’ve created no wealth even if someone pays you a million dollars for it. Grow one ear of corn and you’ve created wealth. Make one nail. Dig one ounce of copper out of the ground: wealth is created. But the back end of that is we must have people who will make, mine and grow things.

One of the unstated things about illegal immigration is that very often it isn’t so much that illegals will take less money (though that is a big factor) but that they’ll show up – especially for the hard, dirty work. Some years back I wrote about finding that tens of millions of acres of American farmland lie fallow because nobody would farm it – my solution to that was to import, say, Nigerian farmers…give them the basics and some instruction on American farming (which is different from Nigerian farming for a host of reason; farming isn’t, of course, just putting a seed into the ground and waiting)…and then let them have the land if they farm it for five years. This is Great Replacement in action, I’m afraid, and I’m all-in on it – damn straight I’ll replace a white welfare bum with a Nigerian farmer every day and twice on Sunday (though, honestly, a Mexican or Sri Lankan farmer would do just as well for my purposes).

To carry it further – bring in miners. Bring in construction workers. Not this unvetted surge of illegals. Not the Corporate visa programs which just rip off American and foreign workers – but bring in people who want to work and just need the land, tools and law and order to make it happen. In other words, bring in Americans. We’ve lost a lot of those we had to welfare: so, let’s go find some more.

But even that is just a stop gap; an assist. Because we can’t allow millions of our own to lay around uselessly. It isn’t fair to those of us who work now, and it won’t be fair to any we import to pick up the slack in the hard/dirty but rewarding work. We must get our own people to get back to work. Many things go into making a Republic work but one of the crucial things is that the overwhelming mass of the people be independent, hard-working, law-abiding citizens. It just doesn’t work any other way. And this isn’t new. As the Roman Republic entered its final crisis, many people tried to restore the old Roman ways – various schemes to get people off the dole and into productive work. They were defeated by people who figured, instead, that increasing the dole was the path to power – that dependents would endure a Caesar a lot better than yeoman farmers would. Sound familiar?

What I’m driving at here is that if we really want to save our Republic, then we’re going to have to get a bit hard nosed in our demands upon our people. Right now, I do believe that the majority is still very much American (November 8th will go a long way towards ratifying or falsifying my view, depending on how it goes), but the number who cease being Americans and become dependents is rising all the time – we have to end that sort of thing. The rule must be, as it has been through all time, if you will not work, you will not eat. It is Biblical, after all: 2 Thessalonians 3:10.

This is not to say that the physically incapable should be forced to work or starve – but if you are under the age of retirement and are physically fit, you must work or we will literally watch you starve in front of us. Now, this does mean that there must be work – something to be done by the fit person to earn their daily bread. Yes, this will require some make-work in some cases. But on the other side of that, each of us bears the moral obligation to ensure that our brothers and sisters live dignified lives. We must, if needs be, pay taxes in order to provide work as necessary to those who cannot find employment at any given time.

But make no mistake about it: if there’s a job, the person must take it. If the only job available is cleaning sewers, then sewer cleaner it shall be. Nobody gets the Welfare without the Work. This will provide a massive disincentive to be on welfare and a huge incentive to get off it at the earliest opportunity. But, also, if someone can’t get any other work than welfare work, then at least they’ll be able to hold their head up and say, “I earned my food”. That, I think, is the very crucial thing – the moral thing; that which makes the program an act of love. We’ve been letting people slack off for so long that is has lost its stigma, but that stigma must return. We must retrain people to be ashamed of taking anything they played no part in making. And we must, then, also revive the notion that all honest work is honorable to the worker and everyone who works to earn their daily bread deserves our respect no matter how lowly the sort of work is.

But, as I said, this will take a bit of hardness on our part – an unwillingness to listen to sob stories. You are either a child, an invalid, a retiree or a worker – those are the four things you can be. There must be no room in society for the bum, the hobo, the layabout. People who insist upon not working must find every door slammed in their faces. No help, not even in the least thing. It might sound cruel but if we are honestly providing some sort of work in return for sufficient aid to live, then it isn’t cruel at all – it is, indeed, an act of mercy to the bum. It is his chance for redemption. A chance to join us and contribute, even if in a very small way.

But it will seem like cruelty. And the bums will howl and the Left will give us tear-jerking stories…and we must set our faces like flint, point to the shovel and say, “get to work, ya bum”. Work is ennobling. It is decreed by God as the means whereby we earn our bread. Anything set up to short-circuit the relationship between work and bread is evil and it must go, if we are to survive.