Open Thread

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

Trump announces for 2024, McConnell gets re-elected as Senate GOP leader, the GOP takes the House.

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about what this means and making their stout assertions of what will happen. Spoiler: nobody has the first clue. If the election we just had didn’t tell you that you can’t predict things, then nothing will. As for me, I predict nothing. I will pay no attention to any poll. I will pay no heed to the Experts telling us how it will go. It will be as it will be and we’ll find out after it is over how it went.

That said, there is still much we can say. And of course I’ll say it!

Trump’s speech last night was rather low key, wasn’t it? I’ve never subscribed to the view that Trump is unscripted: I’m pretty confident that he plans everything out to the last detail. So, that was the effect he wanted to present. Why? Could be because after last week’s disaster, being too rah rah would look ridiculous. Could also be that he’s trying to overall strike a new tone: “look, guys, it is bad: we can fix it, here’s how”. Could also be influenced by the potential GOP field…you know, look weak and see who strikes first and then your response is a counter-attack which, no matter how blistering it is, always seems fair turnabout by regular folks.

As for myself, I have decided not to commit myself to anyone this early on. I’m going to see how it plays out. As we get to the end of 2023 I’ll probably decide who my candidate is but even that is subject to change based on circumstances. I really don’t think anyone is wise to commit this early. Once you start getting invested in a thing, you start to blind yourself to possible alternatives. I’m keeping my powder dry.

A lot of Never Trump is now gleeful thinking that the Bad Orange Man is done. He may be! But don’t count on anything. Certainly don’t count Trump out given what we’re getting in the Senate. The bottom line is that a huge portion of the GOP base despises the GOP leadership – and the Senate GOP leadership in particular. I have had a lot of respect for McConnell but I do believe his time is done and he’s making a mistake by hanging on – and if it starts to look like he only hung on thwart Trump, then Trump’s stock with the GOP base will only grow and solidify. McConnell is very much the past presiding over the councils of the present – and his post election statement about finding ways to work with Biden caused immediate outrage. We didn’t send GOPers to Congress to pull Biden’s chestnuts out of the fire! McCarthy, set to be Speaker, seems to at least understand this a bit. He’s a squish, but he also doesn’t hold the base in contempt the way McConnell does. With Mitch there making deals with Biden, Trump will have the perfect foil for a GOP primary – and his opponents will be faced with the stark choice of denouncing McConnell or being seen as Establishment tools.

I make no predictions but I’m working on the assumption that we’re going to lose 2024. Always hard to pry the incumbent Party out of the White House, no matter. Absent a complete economic meltdown (a 50/50 prospect at the moment), let’s just say we’re gonna lose. This, first off, will make any defeat feel less bad – and it can also impel us to try things. Zeldin is pushing to be RNC chair and he has it right: you fight in every precinct. You don’t resign any of the board to the enemy. I think that if we discard the worn out notions of the past and simply try new things we might get some remarkable results. As we can’t change the early voting laws in Blue/Purple States, use them (it is already being done to great effect in NY and CA – and Newsom, the Democrat’s rising star, is way underperforming what was expected because of it). Find a guy or gal to run in the Deep Blue. Mike Garcia is apparently the Giga-Chad: I guess he won a Biden +8 district in 2020 so the Democrats decided to get rid of him by making his district Biden +12..and he still won easily. While voting in the House like he represents Alabama! One jokester said “its 2032, Democrats redistrict Garcia into downtown Los Angeles and swear they’ll get him this time!”. Mostly what it shows is that if you try and find the right message and messenger, no place is really off the table.

That is the attitude I want us to carry into 2024: lets just fight. Do our best. Try something new. It can’t possibly go any worse than it just did!

What I’m also thinking is that DeSantis should think carefully here. I don’t go with the Trumpsters who think he’s just a GOPe mole. He came out of the GOPe, but his fights against woke Corporations show that he’s learned the lesson. Mitch and Co might think that RDS is their ticket back…but they may find that, as the GOPe did with TR, that they just made that damned cowboy President. My concern is that if 2024 is a loser, then we don’t want to expend RDS in a bruising fight to beat Trump and then have him lose the White House. If I were an RDS advisor, I’d be thinking long and hard about telling my guy to back away from 2024. Or make only a token run and then get behind Trump. It works like this:

If you get behind Trump and work your tail off for him, you’ll build up huge goodwill with the Trumpsters. They won’t forget: they’ll be in your pocket for 2028. This works out even if Trump loses. If, however, Trump were to win then its still just 4 years, Trump can’t run again and you’ve not only got the Trumpsters in your pocket, you’ve got the President clearing your path in the primaries in 2028. Plus if we do win in 2024, we’ll almost certainly be coming in during a time of severe economic pain that will take years to dig out of. Might be better to let Trump tackle that: he’ll be free to piss people off, after all.

Anyways, that is mostly where my thinking is right now. I will add one last thing: the only people I’ll pay no attention to at all are those who say they won’t back the GOP nominee unless it is their choice. Such people – and there are Trumpist and Never-Trump people like this – are not only useless, they are destructive. I’ll vote in 2024 for whomever is on the GOP ticket because that person will always be the moral and intellectual superior of the Democrat. If a person can’t commit to that, then get out: we got better things to do.

Open Thread

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

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!

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

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.

Open Thread

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

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

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.

Open Thread

Here is Kari Lake hammering the MSM on “election denier” accusations. It is how it is done – and we need ever more of this. She takes their stupid lies and just shoves them right back in their faces.

It is crucial that we understand the MSM is nothing but propaganda for the DNC. It is all Pravda, all the time. Everything they say which in any way relates to politics is a lie. It is either a complete fabrication or so twisted in presentation that the kernel of truth in there is entirely obscured and you can’t from their report connect it to the actual situation. They don’t make mistakes – everything they say is off a script provided by the DNC. Some day the full truth will come out and it will be shown that those who set the tone for the MSM – the movers and shakers of it who decide what is a story and how it will be covered – received direct orders on it from DNC operatives. Rely on it: I am absolutely right about this.

But how can you be sure?

Because they are always on the same page – at most a word or two is changed. They all say the exact same thing – and such uniformity is only possible on command, it cannot develop spontaneously.

I’m confident of an Oz victory in Pennsylvania mostly on the fact that there’s been no recent polling on it – which means the pollsters, even with D-heavy samples, are finding an Oz surge and they don’t want that to get out this late in the game as it would crush Democrat fundraising down the stretch.

As I’ve said for years, none of us can know the future – it is all up for grabs and in an infinite universe, literally anything is possible. But the fundamentals of 2022 started with the fact that Pudding Brain is in the White House. Depending on who you ask and how it is calculated, the President’s party loses an average of about 30 seats in the first mid-term when the incumbent is having popularity problems – and they usually are because even people who were popular when elected suffer a bit of buyer’s remorse. This is just the natural ebb and flow of politics, guys. W bucked the trend in 2002 because that was a year after 9/11 and we were all happy and united at the time – Bush’s popularity was still sky high. Given that the GOP only needs 6 seats to win a majority, the House was gone pretty much the minute they installed Uncle Grandpa into the Oval Office.

There was an outside chance for the Democrats in the Senate. With a 50/50 tie going in and a friendly map for the Democrats, if Biden maintained about a 46% average popularity and if nothing bad happened, the Democrats might have come out even or maybe even got a net gain of 1. But Biden sits around 42% (and it is likely 38% when you account for, once again, D-heavy samples) and we’ve got inflation and shortages and crime and border problems and a general feeling that everything sucks. A good Democrat candidate who runs a great campaign can probably run 4 points or so ahead of Biden’s approval…so, if this was a good year, Biden at 46 means some Democrats can make it. Biden at 42…they’re doomed. Biden at 38 – extra doomed.

Given the fundamentals, we can expect a pretty good November 8th for the GOP – the only question is, how good? We talking a solid night of, say, 30 House and 3 Senate seats, or a wipe out with a net GOP gain of 50 in the House and 5 in the Senate? That is the only question – I think there’s a larger chance of the wipe out: Democrats are already engaging in triage and abandoning various races…while GOP groups are looking for long-shots (I saw an ad against Dina Titus here in Las Vegas – she sits on a D+12 House district: that’s a stretch, but that someone is willing to spend some GOP money on it means it is in the realm of the possible).

The next thing to consider is, what next? With a GOP Congress being likely come January, what do we do with it? It is pretty clear that at the moment, McConnell doesn’t want to have a MAGA fight against the Democrats. McCarthy, over in the House, is making some noises like he’s willing to have that battle. But that is the crucial thing – we aren’t electing a GOP Congress to work across the aisle…we’re electing a GOP Congress to engage in unrelenting war on the Democrat party. We’ve learned that all bi-partisanship gets us is slightly slower surrender. We do want Hunter indicted, Biden impeached, the government shut down until the 87,000 IRS agents are gone and the border is secured. We know that the GOP leadership largely lacks the stomach for such a fight…but the incoming Congress will be more MAGA than any past Congress: we might successfully hold some feet to the fire.