The Other McCain

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

Rule 5 Sunday: Well Rounded

Posted on | October 14, 2024 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Some people, most famously Sir Mix-A-Lot and Lt. Vincent Hanna from Heat (played by Al Pacino) like their women with callipygian butts, while others like our friends at Flappr, prefer women with huge tracts of land. Me, I prefer the happy medium: a gal with a nice rack and a decent butt – everything in moderation, and nothing to excess. Like, for example, this young lady posted earlier this week by kbdabear an X.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule 5 Kamala Screws Up Again Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, Isabella I of Castile, Citadel Diana, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, MAGA Unburdened Kamala Harris, Ethel Kennedy RIP, The Egg & I, Hargrave, We Will Dance Again, Notorious Robophobe Matt Yglesias Is Sexbot Curious, Wow Platinum, Killer Heat, and Jennie Garth

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Nina Cola, Fish Pic Friday – Sophie Monki, MDDNR Announces New Oyster Sanctuaries, Thursday Tanlines, The Wednesday Wetness, Forget It Jake, It’s Baltimore, DeSantis Dodges Kamala’s Calls, Paint It Black, Virginia Juggling Blue Catfish, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Random Celebrity News, Palm Sunday and Kamala Offers $750 to Hurricane Helene Victims

FLAPPR: S.M. & U.T. for October 11

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

 

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Annual Admiral Of The Ocean Sea Appreciation Post

Posted on | October 13, 2024 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

It’s two! Two!! TWO!!! awesome posts in one! Since it is the actual Columbus Day (as opposed to the fake & gay Federal Columbus Day on Monday) today we’ll not only celebrate the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (and link to some excellent books on the topic, previously covered here) but also do the usual FMJRA stuff.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

FMJRA 2.0: The Pleasure Is To Play
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Happy Birthday to Me
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Rule 5 Sunday: But First, Coffee
Animal Magnetism
Flappr
A View From The Beach
EBL

Death by Online Misadventure
The Daley Gator
Flappr
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 10.08.24 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 10.08.24 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Democrats ‘Increasingly Worried About a Number of Issues Plaguing’ Kamala
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 10.10.24
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 10.11.24 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

We’re All Shocked — Shocked! — to Discover ‘Men for Kamala’ Are Fake
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 10.11.24 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

Top linkers for the week ending October 11:

  1.  EBL (11) 
  2.  A View From The Beach (10)
  3.  357 Magnum (9)

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Category: FMJRA Award

What Counts as ‘Misinformation’? (Hint: It Depends on Who Does the Counting)

Posted on | October 12, 2024 | No Comments

There IS a teleprompter!

Right-Wing Influencers Falsely
Accuse Kamala Harris Of Using
A Teleprompter At Town Hall
— Forbes

Posts falsely claim Kamala Harris
used teleprompter during town hall
— AFP

Harris Town Hall Moderator Debunks
Crazy New Teleprompter Claim
— Daily Beast

That’s just a small sample of what you’ll find with a Google search for “kamala univision town hall teleprompter,” and you won’t find anything except headlines like that — how it’s “false” and has been “debunked” — on the first page of search results. Or the second page, or the third page of results, for that matter. This is certainly not accidental:

Last week, MRC researchers found that Google buried US-based right-leaning news outlets on the 14th page of search results. It appears that the tech giant is still at it, as it continues to hide right-leaning outlets in the depths of search results.
On Oct. 8, MRC researchers once again used AllSides “right” and “left” bias classifications and found that Google search results for “kamala harris presidential race 2024” and “donald trump presidential race 2024” were stuffed with leftist, legacy media sources. The results featured outlets like CNN and The New York Times as well as publications of leftist billionaires like Jeff Bezos’s The Washington Post and Marc Benioff’s Time. When searching for the aforementioned Harris search prompt, researchers did not find any U.S.-based media outlets that AllSides rates as “lean-right” or “right” until Fox News appeared as the first result on page 11 of Google search results. Likewise, Google buried the first U.S.-based “lean right” or “right” result for the aforementioned Trump prompt as the sixth result on the 23rd page, as Google featured a Fox News video in this spot.

Google is running a Democratic Party propaganda operation, deliberately suppressing access to any information source that might contradict the preferred political narrative. Some stories — the ones most damaging to Democrats — are literally impossible to find using Google, and the only way anyone knows about these stories is because they go directly to the source (e.g., the UK Daily Mail, Gateway Pundit, etc.) or because they see it via social media. What does Google’s search-result suppression do? It divides the country into two groups — those who only know what Google wants them to know, and those who, for whatever reason, actively seek out alternative media sources. And this is a bad thing for democracy, because it breeds contempt and hostility between the two groups. Those who passively cooperate with this censorship regime (liberals, in general) look at the rest of us and think we’re a bunch of dangerous dimwits — “How can they possibly believe this stuff?” — while, at the same time, many on the right side of the digital divide become paranoid, or fall victim to genuinely dangerous peddlers of falsehood.

It’s the little boy who cried “wolf,” you see. When the self-appointed arbiters of truth — including Google — promote a one-sided narrative, and hurl accusations of “conspiracy theory” at anyone who disputes the narrative, why should anyone trust warnings about “misinformation” even if the warnings are valid? You can point to the “Russian collusion” hoax and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and if the thing you’re excited about now happens to be false, who can you trust to warn you against it? The media have forfeited their credibility, and the consequences are that we don’t know who to trust anymore.

So, now about that Unavision town hall with Kamala:

Kamala Harris got caught using a teleprompter during Thursday night’s Univision town hall in Las Vegas.
Harris pandered to Latina voters by participating in a town hall hosted by Univision.
The internal polls for Harris must be horrific.
Of course, Kamala Harris had to use a teleprompter because she has no clue what she’s talking about.
Univision panicked after they realized they showed Kamala Harris’s teleprompter live on air. As soon as the camera panned behind Kamala Harris, the teleprompter went black.

There clearly is a teleprompter in front of Kamala as she’s speaking, and the screen does go black shortly after it appears on camera. Univision claims that the words on the teleprompter were actually for the introduction by the host of the town hall, Enrique Acevedo.

However, if you listen to what Kamala was saying during that segment, it is word-for-word the same stump-speech line included in her TV ads about how, when she was a prosecutor in Californiam, she never asked the victim of crime if they were Republican or Democrat: “The only question I ever asked is, ‘Are you OK?'” So if she’s not reading a script off a teleprompted, why does she sound completely scripted? (Just incidentally, not to get off on a sidetrack, that’s a dumb line. A prosecutor’s job isn’t to give crime victims sympathy, it’s to get criminals convicted in court.) Another video clip from the same event shows an audience member simultaneously mouthing the same words Kamala was speaking (about how Trump “filed for bankruptcy six times”):

Quite obviously, the audience was a fake as Kamala herself — the Harris campaign brought in “plants” for what was supposed to be a town hall with regular voters and, whether or not Kamala was actually reading from a teleprompter, her message was sufficiently scripted that some of her listeners already knew it by heart. So what the media are doing, by accusing “right-wing influencers” of promoting a “crazy” and “debunked” narrative is . . . Well, for lack of a better word, it’s misinformation.

In conclusion, consider what Hillary Clinton said a week ago in a CNN interview about social media platforms, “if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.” This seems like a confession that Democrats want “total control” of what we’re allowed to say, what we’re allowed to read, what we’re allowed to watch. One of the ways that in which that control is exercised is by Democrats (and the media, but I repeat themselves) arrogating to themselves the authority to decide what constitutes truth, and what counts as “misinformation.”



 

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Category: Election, Kamala Harris, Media Bias

In The Mailbox: 10.11.24 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | October 12, 2024 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

What this Cybertruck really needs is a ring-mounted M2 HB.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Deadspin to Face Defamation Suit From Young Chiefs Fan
EBL: Kamala Harris Will Ban All Fracking, Ethel Kennedy RIP, Kamala Will Raise Taxes , Kamala Harris would not change a thing from Biden, and MAGA Unburdened Kamala Harris 
Twitchy: So About That Being Man Enough To Vote for Kamala Ad, Kamala Appears on the Cover Of Vogue & The Memes Are Brutally Glorious, and “Got My Period Listening To It”
Louder With Crowder: NYT writer demands men get therapy over ridiculous thing she claims Trump is “recruiting” them for
Vox Popoli: Carthago Delenda Est, Flawless Victory, and Always Fake, Usually Gay
According To Hoyt: Sunrise, sunset, From Afar, and When Death Comes Below The Cross
Defending The Wood Perilous: Gypsy Princess Effie’s Diary #13 & #14
Stoic Observations: The New Pandemic Normal

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Court Applies Environmental Law to Biden-Harris Border Disaster, also, Ireland’s Immigration Crisis Comes to a Head
American Greatness: ‘She has no role in this process’, FEMA Says Disaster Relief No Longer About Emergency Response, It’s About ‘Disaster Equity’, How the Biden/Harris Admin Helped Iran Get to the Brink of a Nuclear Bomb, Political Analyst Says Private Polling Spells Disaster for Kamala Harris, and Vance Shows the Power of a Silver Tongue
American Thinker: Communists Out of the Closet, Jack’s ‘October Surprise’ is a Dud, Could the Hurricane Response be Election Interference? and Is 2024 America’s Last Election?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News, Animal’s Red Thursday News, and Rule Five Kamala Screws Up Again Friday
Babalu Blog: Cuban dictatorship creates VIP lounges in airports accessible only to those who have cash, Video of the Day: Cuba’s upscale Vedado neighborhood now a garbage dump, and Not even the hospitals in Cuba are spared from blackouts
BattleSwarm: Democrats Want To Dismantle The Constitution, Getting Out The Ten Foot Pole To Talk About UFOs, and LinkSwarm for October 11
Behind The Black: Monitoring a changing spot on Mars, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot appears to jiggle like Jello on a 90-day cycle, EPA to NASA: We intend to regulate how you dispose ISS, and that’s only the start, NATO to issue new space strategy to address growth in commercial sector, Fringe activists in Texas sue SpaceX to prevent further launches of Starship/Superheavy, California officials insist SpaceX shouldn’t be allowed to launch from Vandenberg because we hate Elon Musk, and Study proves that more than a decade after passage the promises of Obamacare were all a pack of lies
Cafe Hayek: Pleading With Oren Cass to Pay Attention, also, Are Falling Prices of Heat Caused by Corporate Altruism?
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Chicago Boyz: Redefining Hypocrisy, CBS and Objectivity, and They Have Their Exits
Da Tech Guy: DaTechGuy at the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge Mass., Election 2020, Election 2024 Donald Trump and Mysterious Ways, The Ten Best Robert Heinlein Novels, 1972 Dynasty League ALCS Milwaukee at NY Yankees, and 1972 Dynasty League NLCS NY Daytraders (Mets) at San Francisco Giants
Don Surber: Another polling day
First Street Journal: We should never release murderers until their victims come back to life, Waging war against Israel, from the safety of Morningside Heights, and Killadelphia: Did Teryn Johnson ever have a chance?
Gates Of Vienna: Persona Non Greta, Israelis Free Yazidi Girl Enslaved by Muslims, Kamala Plays for the HAMAS Team, A Different Kind of Bullet Train, and It’s Easy For You to Say
The Geller Report: Far Left Democrat Icon Ta-Nehisi Coates Says He Wouldn’t Have Been Able to Stop Himself From Murdering, Kidnapping, Raping, Sexually Mutilating Jewish Women and Children on Oct. 7th
Hollywood In Toto: January 6: The Most Deadliest Day Blisters the Left, Anti-Trump Apprentice Bombing at Box Office, Caddo Lake Delivers a Cinematic Shrug, Terrifier 3 – More Gore, Less Fun, and Does Teacup Serve Up One Mystery Too Many?
The Lid: Here’s the List of How House Members Voted to Fund FEMA’s Spending on Illegals, 3/4s of Americans Struggling to Pay Bills Thanks to Biden-Harris Economic Destruction, and Despite Billions Spent, More than Half of Calif. Students are Failing
Legal Insurrection: Think Tank Study Finds Over 150 Anti-Israel Groups on College Campuses are Pro-Terrorism, DOJ Sues Virginia for Purging Voter Rolls Too Close to Election, Arizona State U. Under Fire After Harris Campaign Accessed Data to Text 70,000 Students, Doug Emhoff Doesn’t Address Story About Hitting Ex-Girlfriend, Calls It a ‘Distraction’,  and Kamala Harris’s ‘Real Men’ Ad is Nothing But Cringe and Desperation
Nebraska Energy Observer: Waiting, Scattershot Friday, and Conspiracy theory?
Outkick: San Jose State Troon Blaire Fleming Delivers Vicious Spike To Opponent’s Face, NFL Teams Ranked As The Most Insufferable, Gaslighting, Deranged Media Stars Who Used To Be Normal, The Clark Effect: WNBA Announces HUGE Regular Season, Playoff Format Changes To Grow League, Dodgers Break More Postseason Narratives, Shutout San Diego Padres To Win NLDS, and Lori Loughlin Didn’t Age A Day In Prison, Kay Adams Squeezes Into A Dress & My Town Got Hammered By Tornadoes
Power Line: The View from Martha’s Vineyard, Man Enough to Vote For a Lousy Candidate [Updated], Crime: Spike or decline? and Thoughts from the ammo line
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Mental sorbet
Shark Tank: FSU Faculty Tilts Heavily Left, Has No Republicans In Most Departments
Shot In The Dark: This Should Fix Kamala’s Problem With Male Voters, Berg’s 7th Law In Action – Getcher Speech Permits, Why We Call Berg’s 7th Law A Law, Compare & Contrast, Your Tax Dollars At Work, When Vibes Aren’t Enough, Speaker Points, and Stuck On Stupid
STUMP: Chicago Watch  – Prior School Board Out, Funding Postponed To Chicago Public Schools
The Political Hat: Pale Pastel Politics, Quick Takes – Fantasy Make Believe, and Free to Choose Friday, Revisited (Part 7)
This Ain’t Hell: Developing: Afghan man planned to conduct a terrorist attack in the US on Election Day, Valor Friday, Military retirees and disabled veterans to receive 2.5% monthly pay increase, Military Recruitment Success in 2024, and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel accused of lewdness with a child under 18
Transterrestrial Musings: Debt Doom is Coming, Hezbollah Wants A Ceasefire Now, The EPA And NASA, and The “National Security Leaders For America”
Victory Girls: When Stupidity Is No Different Than Malice Go With Malice, Ana Kasparian Of The Young Turks Now Politically Homeless, and Democrats Have A Man Problem They’re Trying To Fix By Scolding
Volokh Conspiracy: The First Real Judicial Filibuster
Watts Up With That: Unraveling the Nuclear Fusion Confusion, DeSantis Savages Reporter Who Questions If Hurricanes Are Tied To Global Warming, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Presents Master Class on Hurricane Milton and Climate Misinformation
The Federalist: Kamala Harris Is Too Stupid To Be President, After Pledging To Dial Back Left-Wing Activism, Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Elevates First-Ever ‘Trans’ Clone Trooper, Neocons Imported The Afghan Man Who Plotted An Election Day Terror Attack, Democrat Ad Featuring Beta Males For Harris Gets Universally Mocked Online, and Campaign To Repeal Alaska’s Ranked-Choice Voting System Reportedly Being Outspent 100 To 1
Mark Steyn: Kamala’s Belt & No Road Initiative, “An Affront to Humanity”, The Approaching Whirlwind, Live Around the Planet: Awaiting Milton, and An Act of War, One Year On

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Category: Linkagery

We’re All Shocked — Shocked! — to Discover ‘Men for Kamala’ Are Fake

Posted on | October 11, 2024 | No Comments

So after I’d started working on another post about “misinformation,” I saw this story (via Twitchy via Stephen Green at Instapundit) and decided that it was obviously relevant to the topic I was discussing:

As many of you know, Jimmy Kimmel’s writer, Jacob Reed, directed an ad for the Kamala Harris campaign titled ‘Men for Kamala.’ The ad features what are presented as everyday male voters explaining why supporting Kamala Harris is the masculine thing to do. However, none of the men in the ad are actually regular voters—they are paid actors.
Moreover, their real-life circumstances differ significantly from the individuals they portray in the ad. Here are their stories:

– Wayland McQueen is a far-left, pro-Antifa comedian and actor who has, until now, found limited success. He does improv gigs at the Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles. In a Twitter post from 2022, he explains what white privilege is and tells you why you need to acknowledge your white privilege. As of 2024 he is single.
– Lanre Idewu is an immigrant from Nigeria. He is also an actor who works at the D.C.-based OCTET Productions. He has many intimate pictures with the Obamas and the Bidens. Idewu, who is bisexual, has done gay-for-pay movies and nude solo shoots. In the “Men for Kamala” ad, he says he is “man enough to f-ing braid his daughter’s hair,” but the only problem is that he doesn’t have a daughter. Idewu isn’t braiding anyone’s hair.
– Mike Leffingwell, a gay man, also works at the Upright Citizens Brigade, where McQueen works. He is an acting coach, cartoon writer for Netflix and DreamWorks, and an actor in TV commercials. On his public Instagram page, he showcases his participation in his latest project—the “Men for Kamala” ad.
– Winston Carter, the heavyset fellow in the ad who claims to be a mechanic and rancher, lives in Los Angeles signed with Taft Broadcasting Company. He has found limited success in the acting world, mainly as an extra in films and as a character in the low-budget superhero film Spaghettiman.
– Tony Ketcham, the tough, rugged, bearded grandpa in his garage in the “Men for Kamala” ad, is also an actor. He now mainly does low-budget independent films like Car Botz, where he played the role of PePaw. Tony is unmarried in real life. In 2001, he played the extra role of “alcoholic consumer” in the movie Ghost World.

So, 100% of them are actors, at least 40% are gay, and none of them are mainstream middle-class “swing state” voters, which is who the ad was probably supposed to be persuading. Right?

What this reminds me of is the MTV series Catfish. In case you don’t know it, to “catfish” someone is to use a fake Internet persona to lure them into a romantic encounter under false pretenses. A few years ago, I binge-watched several episodes of Catfish and noticed a pattern — in what seemed like 90% of the cases they investigated, the perpetrators were either (a) fat, (b) gay or (c) black, but sometimes all three. Why was this? The gay factor usually involved a lesbian pretending to be a heterosexual male in order to attract the interest of a heterosexual female. The fat factor in catfishing, I suppose, stems from the general unpopularity of fat people, who engage in online impersonation — using a skinny person’s picture as their avatar — to get romantic attention that would otherwise be out of their reach. As for the disproportionate number of black perpetrators in catfishing, usually they were also either fat or gay (or both), and so they were impersonating a much-more-attractive white person in an effort to expand their options.

Anyway, the fakery of “Men for Kamala” is a sort of political catfishing scheme, with actors pretending to be Regular Manly Men, in a desperate bid to get Regular Man Men to vote for Kamala Harris. But some clever person was clever enough to do what Nev Schulman always did in the Catfish series, namely use Google image searches to identify these “Men for Kamala” fakers, thereby exposing the fraud. And yet it is supposedly us right-wingers who are promoting “misinformation” — but that’s the subject of another post, which I’ll now get back to writing.



 

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Category: Election, Kamala Harris

In The Mailbox: 10.11.24 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | October 11, 2024 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up. – Bruce Schneier

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

This meme implies a level of competency that Deanne Criswell conspicuously lacks.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Don’t Like the Swill Produced by Hollywood? Then You’re a Bad Person (Part 3)
EBL: Harris Walz Media Hurricane, also, Hurricane Milton Hits Central Florida
Twitchy: Just A Photo-Op! “You And Kamala Disagree?”, and Kamala’s Univision Town Hall Scooped In A Big Way
Louder With Crowder: , also, Watch: Biden throws Kamala under the bus AGAIN over Ron DeSantis feud. Does he realize what he’s doing?
Vox Popoli: The Value of Awards, The Invasion is No Accident, 200+ Videos, The Movable Rock, and Sold Out
Upstream Reviews: Why Aren’t Men Reading? Why Are People Reading Less? also, Pack Dynamics
Postcards From Barsoom: Hector Saves His Dad
Ammo.com: Mass Shootings & Prescription Antidepressants

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: The Houthis’ Issue Isn’t Really With Israel
Dana Loesch: The Harris Campaign Tries Baiting Voters With WoW, 
Michele Catalano: you gotta have faith

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Category: Linkagery

In The Mailbox: 10.10.24

Posted on | October 10, 2024 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

As of yesterday, I am 65. Never thought I was going to live anywhere near this long.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: When Politicians Pretend They Know Anything About High Tech
EBL: We Will Dance Again
Twitchy: Politico Fantasizes That Kamala Is Riding A Dream Economy Into The Election, Internet Archive Taken Offline Weeks Before The Election, Making A Lot Of People Suspicious, and Did Sleepy Joe Forget He’s POTUS?
Louder With Crowder: Anti-Woke Athletic Brand Calls Out Nike For Not Standing Up For Girls In Powerful Video
Vox Popoli: No Place for SJWs, No Flags for Lebanon, Not Much News, He Never Did Nothing to Nobody, and The Terrifying Decline
Upstream Reviews: Eighty-Six

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: 2023 INSURV Report, Finally In 1Q 2025
Dana Loesch: Last Week In Legal – The Jack Smith Filing Special Edition
Don Surber: Polling only today
Glenn Reynolds: Debt Doom Is Coming
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Humpday Shrapnel

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Eighty-Six (manga)
Eighty-Six (anime)
Best Sellers – Food & Beverage Gifts
Best Sellers – Snacks & Sweets



 

Category: Linkagery

Democrats ‘Increasingly Worried About a Number of Issues Plaguing’ Kamala

Posted on | October 10, 2024 | No Comments

Remember what I told you in mid-September? “Kamala Is Underperforming” was the headline, at a time when the newly-minted Democratic presidential nominee was still riding her post-convention “bounce.” A careful comparison of Harris’s poll numbers to Joe Biden’s numbers in 2020 and Hillary Clinton’s numbers in 2016 showed that she was weaker against Trump than either Joe or Hillary.

Ace of Spades highlights the troubling trends that have Democrats hitting the panic button, with the quote in my headline from a story in The Hill which quotes one Democratic strategist thus:

Democratic strategist Anthony Coley, who served in the Biden administration, acknowledged the trepidation, pointing to the stagnant poll numbers in the weeks following the Democratic National Convention, when Democrats were making comparisons between Harris’s campaign and former President Obama’s run in 2008.
“Now that the sugar high is gone, people have realized what Kamala Harris has said from the start, which is that she is the underdog,” Coley said. “This is going to be a fight. … These numbers are just so stubborn.”

What he means by those “stubborn” numbers is that Kamala got to a certain level in the polls, and can’t get past it. She’s reached her ceiling, and it’s not high enough to give Democrats confidence that she can win. Trump’s numbers are solid — his voters aren’t going anywhere, and the number of “undecided” voters is very small. And then you start looking at polls for the battleground states and . . . Uh, oh. Internal polling by Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s campaign shows Harris losing by three points to Trump there, and Democrats are also starting to worry about Michigan. If both of those Midwest “blue wall” states are shaky for Harris, we could be looking at 300+ Electoral College votes for Trump. And the signs of trouble multiply from there.

It’s a simple arithmetic problem: How does she get to 270 Electoral College voters if, for example, Trump wins Pennsylvania. Do the math and you realize that, if Trump wins Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, that’s the whole ballgame — Wisconsin and Michigan become irrelevant. As matters stand now, Georgia looks pretty solid for Trump, Harris has no better than a 50-50 chance in Pennsylvania, and whatever’s going on in North Carolina, it’s a state that Trump won twice, so that flipping it to Harris would appear to be a rather desperate hope.

What, therefore, are we to make of this headline from NBC News? “Harris and Democratic allies descend on Arizona in all-hands push before early voting.” The obvious inference is that Team Harris is worried enough about some other state (or combination of states) that they find it necessary to expend resources trying to get 11 Electoral College votes from Arizona, a state where practically every poll shows Trump leading. If you are a Democrat worried about Kamala’s chances, this ought to be a flashing red light, the trigger that turns your headache into a full-blown migraine. Look, if CNN’s aggregation of public polls has Harris +1 in Pennsylvania, that almost certainly means Trump is winning Pennsylvania, and perhaps by as much as 4 or 5 points.

Do I trust those polls? Not really, but there is a general consensus that, as a candidate, Kamala is not all that and a stack of pancakes. A former Democratic Party fundraiser puts his finger on the fundamental problem — the Democrats are ignoring the demos:

Consider the long-time friendship between Kamala Harris and billionaire donor Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs. The New York Times described the women as being so close that they’ve gone on vacation together and consider each other family. Powell Jobs sat in Harris’ exclusive friends and family suite at the DNC last month. She was also instrumental in getting Biden to step down to clear the way for Harris; one of her top aides circulated a polling memo to other key influential donors that allegedly showed Biden’s inability to win.
It was another example of a megadonor overcoming the will of the people — and making things worse for voters. Now that the Kool-Aid from the DNC is wearing off, people are waking up to the realities of an untested candidate. Harris is barely beating Biden in key swing state polls, dodges questions from the press, and continually gaffes answers on significant policy issues. She can barely answer basic questions about her plans for regular people in friendly encounters with people like Oprah.
This is what happens when a candidate is anointed by donors and not selected by voters.

Exactly. Harris was never as popular as Biden. She flopped in the 2020 primaries, exiting the race in 2019 before a single vote was cast. If Biden had announced in 2019 that he would not seek a second term, that would have allowed Democrats to choose their candidate in an open primary, and how likely is it that Harris would have won such a primary against, e.g., Gavin Newsome, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, et al.? What happened instead was that Biden decided to run again, despite his increasingly obvious cognitive impairment and then, after his debate meltdown in June, was forced off the ticket, with Harris anointed as the nominee.

Kamala didn’t win the nomination, it was handed to her, gift-wrapped on a silver platter, and many voters who might not be eager to see another Trump presidency are neverthless reluctant to vote for this ill-qualified woman who reminds us that “DEI” stands for Didn’t Earn It. With 26 days until November 5, the Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this unforced error. The party’s billionaire donors got what they paid for, but voters won’t endorse this corrupt bargain.



 

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Category: Donald Trump, Election, Kamala Harris, Polls
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