The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘ActBlue Is Killing Us’

Posted on | November 3, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘ActBlue Is Killing Us’

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Last night, a Republican source here explained to me how the Democrats’ fundraising advantage in the midterm campaign is creating nightmares for GOP House candidates trying to resist the “blue wave.”

“ActBlue is killing us,” the source said, referring to the online fundraising tool that “bundles” small contributions for Democrat candidates. “Normally, the incumbent has the money advantage, but this year you have the Republican with $1 million and suddenly out of nowhere his Democrat opponent has $3 million. It’s very tough for us.”

This is essentially a reversal of the situation in 2010, when the grassroots activism of the Tea Party enabled Republicans to recapture the House in a landslide (see “The Republican Mandate,” Nov. 24, 2010). In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election, the backlash frightened a lot of House Republicans into announcing their retirements. Trump’s unfavorable poll numbers in 2017 made it seem GOP congressmen would have difficulty being re-elected, so there was a wave of retirements and Republicans had difficulty recruiting candidates. Meanwhile, Democrats were building up a huge money advantage, and the ActBlue program helped “progressive” candidates to prevail in Democrat primaries.

Ironically, of course, by summer of this year, with the economy roaring at unprecedented levels, Trump’s poll numbers improved and the situation for Republicans in the midterms looked more favorable. So if some of those GOP House members had decided to stick around instead of retiring, their re-election might have been easy. As it is, however, the GOP must fight to hold on in “open” races without the advantages of incumbency, with newcomer candidates with little name recognition in their districts, and Democrats pouring money into the key races at levels unheard of in any previous midterm cycle. In the FEC reporting quartet that ended Sept. 30, Democrats piled up a huge cash advantage:

The Democrats’ campaign arm says 110 House Democratic candidates outraised Republican incumbents or the GOP nominees in open seats. At least 60 Democrats topped $1 million in fundraising during the quarter, according to a party analysis, with several posting eye-popping hauls in excess of $2 million and even $3 million.

Imagine a House Republican candidate facing a Democrat opponent who is raising money at the pace of a million dollars a month on average. According to Mother Jones, ActBlue has “directed more than $1 billion to Democratic candidates this cycle.” One billion dollars.

Question: While Paul Ryan and other GOP leaders were pouting over Trump’s election, what were they doing to help elect Republicans to Congress? What did they do to help counter the Democrats’ billion-dollar online money machine? Isn’t it fair for conservative voters to suspect that Ryan and other members of the Republican establishment essentially decided to take their ball and go home, because they were butthurt that their favorite candidates didn’t win the GOP nomination? 

Well, it’s still possible — just barely, a longshot — that a strong turnout by Republican voters can hold off the “blue wave” Tuesday. But we wouldn’t have been in this desperate coffin-corner situation if GOP leaders had not been so childish, so selfish and so cowardly. Pray for a miracle.

UPDATE: Some of the comments would seem to suggest that my authorial purpose has been misunderstood. My first purpose, of course, was to inform the reader of what my source told me, i.e., how the midterm campaign looks from the perspective of someone “inside” (how far inside, I am not at liberty to divulge). I think most armchair conservative observers of this campaign, following it via Fox News or Drudge headlines or whatever, do not recognize (a) how large a money advantage Democrats enjoy, (b) the role that ActBlue plays in creating this advantage, or (c) how unprecedented this actually is. Yes, ActBlue has been around since 2004, and played a role in the Democrats’ win in the 2006 midterms, but this year the Democrat small-donor effort has surpassed all previous metrics. It’s Godzilla stomping Tokyo.

Second, while I still hope for a Tuesday surprise (more on that later), most analysts agree that a Democrat takeover of the House is likely and we (i.e., conservative communicators) have to prepare to explain why this happened. You know doggone well that the liberal media and the #NeverTrump crowd would explain a Democrat victory as a negative verdict on Trump, and what I’m telling you about the money situation is a counter-argument to such claims. That is to say, if Democrats are outspending Republicans in so many districts (and sometimes 3-to-1), the money factor alone creates enough of an advantage for Democrats that trying to blame an anti-Trump backlash is foolish.

The larger problem, as I have indicated, is that many influential Republicans were dismayed by Trump’s winning the GOP nomination in 2016. So when the anti-Trump protests erupted in early 2017, and polls showed Trump was deeply unpopular, these Republicans retreated to the sidelines and sulked, thinking that Trump was destined to fail, and wishing to distance themselves from that failure. What happened instead, of course, was that Trump’s policies succeeded, with the result that his popularity rebounded; however, by the time this became evident as a fact, it was too late for the GOP to build a fundraising effort that could match what the Democrats are bringing to the midterm campaign.

If it had not been for the take-my-ball-and-go-home tantrums of the #NeverTrump crowd, how much more hopeful might the situation be for congressional Republicans now? So if the GOP loses on Tuesday, don’t blame Trump — blame #NeverTrump Republicans.

Ah! But winners don’t need blame, do they?

Go to church Sunday and pray hard, folks, because there might yet be a miracle. On Friday, Rasmussen Reports published this:

Is Another Silent Red Wave Coming?
Just as in 2016, Democrats are more outspoken about how they’re going to vote in the upcoming elections than Republicans and unaffiliated voters are.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 60% of Likely Democratic Voters say they are more likely to let others know how they intend to vote this year compared to previous congressional elections. This compares to 49% of Republicans and 40% of voters not affiliated with either major political party. . . .
n August 2016, 52% of Democrats were more likely to let others know how they intended to vote in the upcoming presidential election, compared to 46% of Republicans and 34% of unaffiliated voters. Some analysts before and after Donald Trump’s upset victory suggested that most pollsters missed his hidden support among voters fearful of criticism who were unwilling to say where they stood.
Similarly when asked now about family, friends and co-workers, 60% of Democrats say they are also more likely to tell others how they intend to vote, but only 46% of Republicans and 45% of unaffiliated voters agree. . . . .

Read the rest of that. The point is that these “silent” Republican voters might be evading pollsters in such a way as to completely skew the results of public polls, and thus deliver a surprise on Tuesday.



 

Category: Democrats, Election

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | November 2, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

READ PART 1 OVER AT Victory Girls

When the mob came to the power plant, that Master’s Degree in Improvisational Propaganda came in to focus for Stevens.

“My friends, I have struggled against the weight of Ungeheuer’s greedy capitalist inclinations for years. His oppression killed Carl Simmons outright, and drove both Henry Jones and Tom McTaggert away.

He swindled the community out of the maintenance money that should have kept us warm.

Now the plant has ground to a halt.

If you are cold, you know who to blame.”

None of which was even vaguely true, mused Stevens, as he tried to count the pieces of Ungeheuer.

Category: Friday Fiction

ROAD TRIP!

Posted on | November 2, 2018 | Comments Off on ROAD TRIP!

No time now to explain where I’m going this evening, another one of those UNDISCLOSED LOCATION missions, but before I rattle the tip jar for the Shoe Leather Fund, let me update you on Wombat. Our fearless co-blogger, wielder of the Mighty Troll Hammer, was hospitalized last week as the result of a serious infection which caused complications with his blood sugar levels and blood pressure (“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Wombat Hospitalized, Could Use Your Help,” Oct. 29). He has now been transferred from the hospital to a “critical care facility” which, he explained to me in a phone call today, is what used to be called a nursing home. He’s apparently the youngest patient there, as they continue treating him with antibiotics and waiting for the infection to clear up. Wombat is now ambulatory, and wanted me to express his thanks to everyone who kicked in to his GoFundMe to help with his expenses. And speaking of expenses . . .

As much as I’d like to tell you where I’ll be this evening, I can’t, and I also can’t tell you why I can’t tell you, but by 3 p.m. today I hope to be on the road, and if y’all want to kick in a little — gasoline is $2.67 a gallon, cigarettes are about $6 a pack — it would help keep my wife happy. Because the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Shoe Leather Fund

Maxine Waters Vows Payback

Posted on | November 2, 2018 | Comments Off on Maxine Waters Vows Payback

 

Is this America or Zimbabwe?

If Democrats take over the House in the midterm elections, Maxine Waters has some scores to settle.
The California congresswoman told a group of constituents what’s in store for her enemies, should she gain the chairmanship of the Financial Services Committee.
“We have an election November 6th,” Waters said. “This is big. This may be the most important one that you’ve ever had to experience.
“This is the midterm election and often times people only vote in the presidential election because they don’t think this is important enough. But this is absolutely important,” she lectured.
“First of all, if we take back the House, most of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus will be chairs of the committees of the Congress of the United States of America,” Waters said, waving her fingers as the audience applauded.
“I will be the first African-American, the first woman to chair the powerful Financial Services Committee.
“That’s all of Wall Street. That’s all the insurance companies, that’s all the banks. And so, of course, the CEOs of the banks now are saying, ‘What can we do to stop Maxine Waters because if she gets in she’s going to give us a bad time?’” she said.
“I have not forgotten you foreclosed on our houses,” she warned.
“I have not forgotten that you undermined our communities,” she continued with the tone of a preacher.
“I have not forgotten that you sold us those exotic products, had us sign on the dotted line for junk,” she yelled, “and for mess that we could not afford.”
“I have people who are homeless who have never gotten back into a home. What am I going to do to you?
“What I am going to do to you is fair. I’m going to do to you what you did to us,” she vowed.

This is the politics of envy and the economics of revenge, and it has brought disaster wherever it has taken hold. It’s Venezuela.

 

Democrats need to gain 23 seats to take over the House, and the Cook Political Report now predicts Democrats will gain at least 30. However, at Real Clear Politics, analyst Sean Trende lays out a scenario in which the GOP holds on by a razor-thin margin of one or two seats.

We are now in what can be called the “poll hole,” that final weekend before Election Day where there isn’t enough data (or enough time to analyze and react to new data) to get a sense of which way things are trending. If the election had been held before the Florida bomber and the Pittsburgh shooter, I feel like Republicans had a good chance of pulling this out, but the past week has been brutal for the GOP, and it’s going to take some kind of miracle — a real 110% get-out-the-vote effort and a fired-up Republican base — to stop Pelosi, Waters and the rest of the Democrat gang from taking power. God help us.



 

Category: Democrats, Election

‘Choose the Form of the Destructor’: #GoogleWalkout and SJW Torpedoes

Posted on | November 1, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Perhaps no company deserves to be destroyed by feminists, but if any company does, none deserves it more than Google. Having built the world’s most powerful search engine, the company then developed or purchased a series of other innovations — Gmail, YouTube, etc. After obtaining a hegemonic position in the online world, however, Google then inexplicably sold its corporate soul to “social justice” ideologues.

The extent to which Google has been captured by left-wing totalitarians, and become an active agent of intellectual repression, became apparent last year after the company fired James Damore for writing an internal memo that criticized their “diversity” policies. Damore sued his former emoployer (“Google Lawsuit Exposes Stalinist Climate Protecting Anti-White, Anti-Male Bias,” Jan. 10) and Google was also subsequently sued by a former member of its “technology staffing management team” who said the company implemented illegal hiring quotas. Only female, black or Latino candidates were eligible for hiring at Google, the lawsuit by Arne Wilberg alleges, and recruiters were ordered to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees” (“More Samizdat From the Google Gulag: Company Imposed Illegal Hiring Quotas,” March 10).

As a Christian, it is against my religious beliefs to wish harm on others, but if any corporation has ever invited the wrath of God upon itself, surely Google was the Gomorrah of Silicon Valley:

At Google’s weekly staff meeting on Thursday, the top question that employees voted to ask Larry Page, a co-founder, and Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, was one about sexual harassment.
“Multiple company actions strongly indicate that protection of powerful abusers is literally and figuratively more valuable to the company than the well-being of their victims,” read the question, which was displayed at the meeting, according to people who attended. “What concrete and meaningful actions will be taken to turn this around?”
The query was part of an outpouring from Google employees after a New York Times article published on Thursday reported how the company had paid millions of dollars in exit packages to male executives accused of misconduct and stayed silent about their transgressions. In the case of Andy Rubin, the creator of Android mobile software, the company gave him a $90 million exit package even after Google had concluded that a misconduct claim against him was credible. . . .
On Thursday and Friday, some Google employees said they were dispirited by how some executives accused of harassment were paid millions of dollars even as the company was fending off lawsuits from former employees and the Department of Labor that claimed it underpaid women. . . .
Liz Fong-Jones, a Google engineer for more than a decade and an activist on workplace issues, said in a tweet that judgments over misconduct claims can be clouded by whether a person’s boss feels they can “afford” to lose that person. In the case of Mr. Rubin and others, she said, that put Mr. Page in the spotlight.
“The decision maker must have been Larry Page,” Ms. Fong-Jones wrote. “The buck stops there.”

So while Google was actively discriminating against white males with illegal hiring quotas, and firing James Damore for raising questions about the company’s “diversity” agenda, Google executives who sexually abused female employees were grabbing multimillion-dollar payouts.

Or so we are required to believe, because #BelieveWomen, right? This is why hiring on the basis of “social justice” and “diversity” is always a bad idea. Whether or not Andy Rubin was guilty of doing what he was alleged to have done, no heterosexual white male could expect to survive in the climate created within the company by the feminists, LGBTQ activists and racial grievance-hustlers Google has hired in recent years.

Today, a group of Google’s hate-filled feminist employees staged a walkout to “demand an end to the sexual harassment, discrimination, and the systemic racism that fuel this destructive culture.” And here’s the thing: The more Google tries to appease these totalitarian monsters, the more accusations of harassment and discrimination the monsters will make. Any male employee at Google who so much as smiles at a female co-worker is apt to be labeled a predator, and as for the male managers and executives at Google, well, they might as well turn in their two-week notices and cash out their stock options now, because it’s only a matter of time before they’re named as defendants in a class-action lawsuit.

Google ‘workplace activist’ Liz Fong-Jones.

“Choose the form of the Destructor,” as Gozer commands in Ghostbusters. Google chose “social justice,” and now they’re being destroyed by it. Or like Richard Fernandez says about Trump’s Democrat enemies, the torpedoes Google executives put in the water have circled back on them. By hiring a bunch of SJW busybodies to impose a “diversity” policy on their workforce, Google’s multimillionaire bosses created an environment where actually doing work — you know, the stuff that produces profit? — mattered less than demonstrating adherence to “progressive” ideology. Google’s decision to hire SJWs like Liz Fong-Jones (whose Twitter profile reads, “Trans+queer as fuck”) might have seemed harmless at the time to a highly profitable tech company, but how are you going to manage a workforce where such lunatics wield the destructive power of “equal opportunity” laws against their employers?

The more SJWs you hire, the more potential hazards you import into the company, with everyone forced to tiptoe around and watch their words lest they say or do something that might be deemed “offensive” by feminists, LGBTQ activists or other workplace grievance collectors.

The Destructor has arrived, and it’s not the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Expect more bad news for the Gomorrah of Silicon Valley.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

Make the World More Beautiful

Posted on | October 31, 2018 | Comments Off on Make the World More Beautiful

 

 

 

 

This afternoon was beautiful. The fall colors are so brilliant now, and I’m sorry that the pictures above (click to enlarge) don’t do justice to the intensity of the yellow-orange of the hickory trees and the nearly fluorescent red and yellow of the maples. On Facebook, I suggested:

People wondering what they can do to make the world a better place, all I can say is, PLANT MAPLE TREES. For a couple of weeks every fall, the world will be more beautiful.

There is so much ugliness in the world, and people waste too much time and money on things that do nothing to improve the quality of life.

Today, I was bragging on how cute my grandchildren are — I’ve got four of them now — and they, too, make the world more beautiful. Why do you think my wife and I had six kids, anyway? Well, we had the first one, and she was excellent in every way, so we decided to continue improving the overall quality of human life, and had five more excellent children. Given the obviously superior quality of our offspring, the future will be a better place as a result of our, uh, reproductive generosity.

Readers will have to excuse my philosophical and aesthetic mood. After watching CNN for two days, I felt a need to get out this afternoon and enjoy myself a little bit. Speaking of ugliness . . .

CNN isn’t commenting about Don Lemon’s statement that white men represent the biggest terrorist threat in the country. . . .
Lemon said that, “we have to stop demonizing people and realize that the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them.”
A CNN spokeswoman said Wednesday neither Lemon nor the network would speak more about it.

Did I mention that CNN’s ratings are lower than Nickelodeon? Don Lemon works for what is unquestionably the worst cable new network, and he is personally a huge part of what’s wrong with CNN. So when the wheel turns — ratings matter in the TV business — and Don gets fired, and he’s spewing his opinions on some YouTube channel, whose fault will that be? Oh, he’ll probably blame it on racism. But I digress . . .

It was a beautiful autumn afternoon, sunny and warm, and I needed a new pair of dress shoes, since I’ve got a speaking gig this weekend. On the way, I stopped by McDonald’s and had a McDouble, small fries and a chocolate milkshake — $5.91 for lunch. Americans don’t appreciate McDonald’s as much as we should. Because our nation has so many great fast-food chains, we tend to take McDonald’s for granted, but it’s a huge success story, and the food is actually quite good. I mean, the McDouble goes for $1.79, and it’s a tasty burger in its own basic way. Pickles, ketchup, mustard and onions — nothing fancy, but a good burger, really.

After lunch, I went to the outlet mall, but the prices were crazy. Sorry, I’m not paying $80 for a pair of loafers. Also, I had a song stuck in my head, which I’d heard on the piped-in music while eating at McDonald’s. It was a newer song, but the chord progression was the same as Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” and I couldn’t make out the lyrics enough to figure out the title. It was driving me crazy, like this election campaign.

Same Media That Claims Trump Is
Responsible For Pittsburgh Shooting
Freaks Out Over Suggestion That Democrats’
Catch-and-Release Open Borders Policy Is
Responsible for Criminal Alien’s Cop-Killing

That’s a headline from Ace of Spades, and it goes to show why Americans hate the media so much. They’re so one-sided, so nakedly partisan in their allegiance to the Democrat Party, yet pretend to be objective, while condemning as “extremists” anyone who disgrees with them. How are we supposed to have a public-policy debate — about immigration or anything else — while the journalism establishment is constantly smearing anyone who opposes the Democrat agenda? And yet if you complain about the media’s bias, they’ll characterize your criticism as “harassment,” implying that this is evidence of why you’re a far-right neo-Nazi who wants to kill Jews, poison the environment and put black people back in slavery. (Remember, Joe Biden?) But I digress . . .

Having refused to pay $80 for those shoes, I headed over to the big mall and was happy to find a nice pair of tassel loafers for $24.99, which came to $26.49 with sales tax. Congratulating myself on finding this bargain, I decided to go get a cup of coffee at Starbucks and while I was there, I asked the barista, “Hey, there’s this song . . .”

No luck. She didn’t know which song I was talking about, and I felt silly for having asked, but I figured a young person might know.

Did I mention what a beautiful day it was? Despite the annoyances of politics, and this song driving me crazy, I was in a good mood. So I decided to swing by the Goodwill store, where I was able to score a nice gray herringbone tweed sports coat for five bucks. Since I don’t do as much on-the-road work as I used to, my wardrobe’s gotten kind of shabby — who cares what I look like while I’m blogging in the basement? — and a gray sports coat with gray slacks is a sharp look for a speaker. The topic of my speech will be the late Mel Bradford, and here’s a great article he wrote in 1984 for the American Spectator about the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill, the start of our present-day immigration problems.

“The first law of every society, even the condition of its gestures of generosity, is that it put the needs of its own members ahead of the needs of outsiders.”
— Mel Bradford, April 1984

That would probably be considered “hate speech” by CNN. How dare you refer to that caravan from Honduras as “outsiders”? But of course, Professor Bradford was making a general observation about the principles of government, and this is what gets lost in the emotional noise that surrounds the issue of immigrations as it’s now delivered to us by the pious liberals preaching sermons on CNN. The very principles upon which our nation was founded — i.e., the right to self-governance, the protection of the citizen’s life, liberty and property — are ignored by liberals who claim that America, because we are a successful nation, has an obligation to admit anyone from a less-successful nation who wishes to come here. Their open-borders agenda negates not only the interests of Americans, but also their right to make their own laws and to see these laws enforced by the government they’ve elected. When the pious preachers of liberalism at CNN condemn the President for attempting to keep his promise to voters by cracking down on illegal immigration, it is the voters themselves who are the target of this condemnation. It is wrong for you — you lowly ignorant serf, unworthy to shine Don Lemon’s shoes — to wish to protect yourself and your family from the consequences of an open-borders policy. Or such is the underlying premise of the attacks on the President’s policy. But I digress . . .

What Americans want is “domestic tranquility,” one of the great objects of government that our Constitution aimed to secure. We want to be free to enjoy the beauty of our country, and all it has to offer, without being disturbed by angry mobs or being lectured about how “racist” we for wanting to be able to live in peace and safety — “to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” Of course, I had no tranquility this afternoon, because that song kept burning a hole in my brain, and I didn’t know what it was called or who sang it. So I drove home and had pizza for dinner and tried to forget about it, just like I’d like to forget about this damned election. What I needed was a distraction, like some crime reports from Gwinnett County, Georgia:

Leonardo Ramos (left); Leo Escudero-Olivares (right).

Gwinnett County police are searching for a man accused of rape and other “serious sexual crimes.”
Warrants have been issued for Leo Escudero-Olivares on charges of rape, aggravated sodomy and aggravated sexual battery.
The charges are related to an incident involving a woman who told police Escudero-Olivares physically and sexually assaulted her in a Lawrenceville home.

Six men are wanted on outstanding warrants by the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office on charges including aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, kidnapping and false imprisonment.
The department regularly releases wanted posters featuring suspects with active warrants for their arrest. The latest poster was released Friday afternoon.
The suspects are:
• Leonardo Ramos, wanted on charges of kidnapping and battery
• Avery Ceasar, wanted on a charge of felony probation violation for aggravated battery
• Darius Devonne Parker, wanted on charges of felony probation violation for possession of cocaine, possession of a firearm during a crime “and more”
• Christopher Tamark Arnold, wanted on charges of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer “and more”
• Antonio Tyrone McClure, wanted on charges of aggravated assault, theft by shoplifting “and more”
• Christopher Anthony Riley, wanted on charges of felony probation violation for aggravated assault, false imprisonment “and more”

Gosh, I wouldn’t want to demonize any of these guys, because Don Lemon assures me white men are the biggest threat to the country.

All I want is to make the world more beautiful. Is that wrong? And what is more beautiful than a great love song? Yes, I finally decided to Google it — “chord + progression + marvin + gaye + new + song” — and found that Marvin Gaye’s estate is suing Ed Sheeran over his 2014 Grammy-winning song “Thinking Out Loud”:

 

Ed Sheeran is facing a $100 million lawsuit accusing the singer-songwriter of copying Marvin Gaye’s 1973 hit “Let’s Get It On” on his 2014 song “Thinking Out Loud,” TMZ reported.
The suit was filed by Structured Asset Sales, a company that owns one-third of the copyright to “Let’s Get It On.”
“According to the lawsuit, Sheeran’s song has the same melody, rhythms, harmonies, drums, bassline, backing chorus, tempo, syncopation, and looping as ‘Let’s Get it On,'” TMZ reported.
Sheeran was also sued over “Thinking Out Loud” in 2016. The family of Ed Townsend, a cowriter on Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” sued Sheeran, arguing that “Thinking Out Loud” lifted the melody, harmony, and other rhythmic components from Gaye’s track.
Sheeran responded to the 2016 suit in documents obtained by TMZ last week. He reportedly claimed that the chord progressions and drum patterns of the two songs were “extremely commonplace” and that similar elements in “Let’s Get It On” were in the public domain and unprotectable.

It is a fact that you can’t copyright a simple chord progression, otherwise everybody who ever wrote a 12-bar blues tune would be paying royalties to the estate of W.C. Handy or Robert Johnson. The melody of Ed Sheeran’s song is sufficiently different from “Let’s Get It On” that I think any copyright infringement suit would be difficult to win, but c’mon, Ed — fair is fair, and the inspiration is pretty damned obvious. A settlement, giving some percentage of the royalties and songwriting credit to Gaye and his co-writer would be fair. Maybe you give up 15% or 25% of what you’ve made from the song, but your conscience would be clear, and I might even forgive you for making me spend all afternoon wondering what the heck that song was, just six days before a crucial election.

October comes to an end, and soon the leaves will be gone and the chill winds of winter will be blowing. Meanwhile, however, I’ve got to finish writing my speech, and also it’s time to remind readers once again of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

 

Category: Election

Good-Bye, Ms. Abrams: Georgia Democrat Calls for Banning AR-15 Rifles

Posted on | October 31, 2018 | Comments Off on Good-Bye, Ms. Abrams: Georgia Democrat Calls for Banning AR-15 Rifles

 

Well, if this doesn’t guarantee her defeat, I don’t know what will:

In an interview on “The View” Tuesday morning, Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for Georgia governor, called for AR-15 rifles to be banned.
When asked if she supports banning AR-15-style rifles, Abrams said civilians should be banned from using them.
“I do not believe like weapons of mass destruction like the AR-15 belong in civilian hands,” she said. “I think it should be prohibited from civilian use. I have shot an AR-15, and I think you probably have too, and while it’s an amazing amount of power, it also is an amazing amount of destruction, and there is very little that can be done to protect vulnerable communities when the AR-15 is present.”
AR-15s are the most popular gun in America. When asked if she supports confiscating weapons already in the hands of civilians, Abrams dodged the question and repeated talking points about wanting to ban “assault weapons.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) You talk about a get-out-the-vote message for every gun-owning good ol’ boy in Georgia, this is it, buddy. If I were to repeat what the bubbas are probably saying about Stacey Abrams up in Dalton and Dawsonville, the SPLC would accuse me of hate speech. Not that I care about the SPLC’s opinions, of course, but my Mama taught me never to say certain words. It’s ill-mannered and un-Christian. However, if Ms. Abrams thinks she’s going to take guns away from rednecks, she’ll have problems much worse than mere rude language.



 

 

Category: Election, Georgia

‘Hate Speech,’ CNN and George Soros

Posted on | October 31, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Hate Speech,’ CNN and George Soros

Republican campaign ad in Minnesota.

Yesterday, I switched my office TV to CNN, a psychological hazard I try to undertake at least once a week. Yes, it’s a mental-health risk to immerse myself into that bizarre alternative universe — a land where Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon are considered objective journalists — but if I don’t occasionally watch CNN, how can I know what’s going on in the deranged minds of Democrats? As much as we would like to ignore CNN, ignoring them is in some sense as dangerous as ignoring anti-Semitic kooks like Robert Bowers. The third-rated cable-news network is like a fringe extremist cult compound on the outskirts of town, and you never know when the cult leader might decide to start Armageddon.

Hey, has anyone mentioned that CNN has not one but two primetime anchors who are homosexual? Isn’t that odd? Like, you’ve got three hours of programming between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET, and two of those hours are anchored by Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon? Whatever the percentage of the homosexual population, it’s certainly less than 67%, so why this unusual over-representation of gay men on CNN primetime?

We’re not supposed to mention such things — it’s homophobia, I guess — but the fact that we’re not allowed to talk about it doesn’t mean people don’t notice. CNN is gayer than the Castro Street Pride Fair, which may explain why the network’s ratings are lower than Nickelodeon and the Hallmark Channel. Given a choice between Don Lemon and reruns of Spongebob Squarepants, which would you watch? But I digress . . .

Trump’s Embrace of Racial Bigotry Has
Shifted What Is Acceptable in America

That’s the headline on a Slate column by Jamelle Bouie, and what does it mean? Trump’s rhetorical style is abrasive, yes, but he isn’t anti-black. In fact, both polling data and anecdotal information indicate that black people like Trump’s blunt tell-it-like-it-mode of communication more than they like the controlled, scripted GOP talking-points style of most Republican politicians. Trump is a wealthy businessman and guess what? A lot of black people admire wealth and success. Why shouldn’t they?

Trump is a white guy who doesn’t feel guilty about being white, and that’s most of what the “racial bigotry” narrative is about. Liberals believe it’s wrong to be white, that white people should be embarrassed by their whiteness, and Trump refuses to play along with that game.

The other thing is, of course, immigration.

 

Let’s not mince words here: Democrats want to import Third World immigrants because they believe this will enable Democrats to take over the federal government, the same way they have done in California. Remember that 25 years ago, California was a GOP-controlled state, but as the Hispanic population rapidly grew, Democrats took over. California is now 39% non-Hispanic white, 39% Hispanic, 15% Asian and 7% black, and the white minority is shrinking rapidly. Every year, about 140,000 more people leave California than move there from elsewhere in the U.S., and if you think the exodus of white people from California is good for the people (of whatever ethnic background) left behind there, you’re a fool. The only people really benefiting from California’s demographic transition are the Democrats gaining more and more political power.

California is in effect a one-party state, where Democrats control every statewide office, both houses of the legislature, and the vast majority of elected county and municipal offices. This has consequences.

Have you noticed that Democrats keep reminding us Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016? Why do you think that is? California. What happens if you subtract California’s numbers from the total?

U.S. Popular Vote, 2016

Hillary Clinton ……. 65,853,514
Donald Trump ……. 62,984,828

California Vote, 2016

Hillary Clinton …….. 8,753,788
Donald Trump …….. 4,483,810

U.S. Minus California, 2016

Donald Trump …….. 58,501,018
Hillary Clinton …….. 57,099,726

In other words, the Democrat takeover of California — which is entirely due to the demographic shifts produced by immigration — accounts for all of Clinton’s popular-vote advantage in 2016.

So when you see liberals denouncing Trump for “racial bigotry” because of his outspoken opposition to the Democrats’ open-borders agenda, you understand that this is because cracking down on illegal immigration is a threat to the Democrats’ political power. Democrats want to do to America what they’re doing to California — turn it into a Third World hellhole — and Trump is trying to stop them. That is “racial bigotry.”

 

Maybe the average Trump voter hasn’t crunched the numbers and done the kind of analysis I’ve shown here, but they have an instinctive sense that the Democrats’ immigration agenda is harmful to their interests. Liberals will call this “racial bigotry,” too, I suppose — “How dare those working-class people in Iowa vote to defend their self-interest?”

For many years, the partisan lines in the debate over immigration policy were obscured by prominent open-borders Republicans like John McCain, and by such so-called “conservative” intellectuals as the pro-amnesty editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard. One reason Trump was able to win over working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan was because he didn’t follow that script. Like every other Republican who’s won a presidential election since 1968, Trump is demonized by liberals as Hitler, and anyone who voted for Hitler is obviously a Nazi, so the hate that liberals direct against Trump is actually aimed at you, the Republican voter. And anyone who points this out is, of course, engaging in “hate speech”:

Americans are no longer a free people, if debate on major public-policy issues is effectively criminalized, which is what the Democrats and their allies are attempting to do with regard to our immigration policy. We are now being told in effect that it is “hate speech” to express opposition to the open-borders agenda of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and such of their billionaire donors as George Soros. Democrats and their media allies have recently taken to declaring that it is a “dog whistle” of racism and anti-Semitism for any Republican even to mention the name of Soros in connection with the immigration issue. If you don’t think the United States should throw open its borders to welcome the caravan of Honduran migrants now headed north through Mexico, and if you call attention to how Democrats are cheering on this horde of would-be foreign invaders, well, you must be some kind of Nazi who wants to kill Jews. Or at least that’s the general drift of liberal rhetoric in the final week of the midterm election campaign.
CNN has spent the past few days insinuating that the gunman who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue was incited to this act by President Trump. Republicans are not allowed to object to CNN’s one-sided coverage, however, because Florida madman Cesar Sayoc also hated CNN, and therefore anyone who criticizes the network is deemed a potential threat to public safety. Between the Pittsburgh shooter and the Florida bomber, basically anything said in favor of Republicans (or against Democrats) is now considered “hate speech” in the eyes of liberals. This is especially the case when it comes to immigration. Ever since the migrant caravan set off from Honduras, announcing their intention to march all the way to the United States, Democrats have been accusing the GOP of “exploiting” the issue. What are Republicans supposed to do? Pretend they don’t notice the lawless intentions of these so-called “refugees”? . . .

Read the rest of my latest column for The American Spectator.



 

 

Category: CNN, Donald Trump, George Soros, Immigration, Media Bias, Racism
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