‘Progressive Rock Star’ Katie Porter Spends $24 Million for Reelection

Posted on | November 11, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘Progressive Rock Star’ Katie Porter Spends $24 Million for Reelection

Apologies for the lack of blogging Thursday, but because today is Veterans Day, my day job required me to do two days of work in advance, blah blah blah. Anyway, I happened to click on a Hot Air item by John Sexton, toward the end of which, this part caught my attention:

Finally, another race I’ve been watching is the one to decide who will be my representative in California’s 47th district. At the moment, progressive rock star Katie Porter leads GOP challenger Scott Baugh by a slim margin of 1,552 votes with 58% of the total vote counted. That’s a pretty impressive showing for Baugh so far who was massively outspent in this race. Porter ran ads nonstop for weeks spending over $21 million dollars to save herself.

For a “rock star,” she’s kinda fat, isn’t she?

Southern California used to be all about “the beautiful people,” and I can’t help but think that the election of this pudgy dumpling to Congress was somehow symbolic of how the Golden State has fallen into ruins in the 21st century. Porter’s district includes some of the most beautiful (and expensive) beach towns in Orange County, and it was once a Republican stronghold. The congressional districts have been redrawn three times since GOP Rep. Christopher Cox represented the 47th in 1990s. Katie Porter was first elected in 2018 to represent the 45th District, another former Republican stronghold that once sent the likes of Duncan Hunter and Dana Rohrabacher to Congress. After the most recent redistricting, Porter sought reelection in the 47th District.

Although I was vaguely familiar with Porter — I recognized her name — I didn’t know much about her, so I clicked onto her Wikipedia page:

Porter . . . grew up in the small farming community of Fort Dodge, Iowa. . . .
After graduating from Phillips Academy . . .

(Whoa! Stop right there! Phillips Andover is one of the most elite private schools in America, where the cost of attendance is currently $61,950 a year. How does a kid from small-town Iowa end up in this posh East Coast boarding school? But never mind . . .)

Porter attended Yale University, where she majored in American studies, graduating in 1996. . . . Porter also interned for Chuck Grassley during this time.
Porter later attended Harvard Law School . . . She studied under bankruptcy law professor and future U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, and graduated magna cum laude with her Juris Doctor in 2001. . . .

(Again with the expensive elite East Coast schools, you see.)

Porter was a law clerk for Judge Richard S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Little Rock, Arkansas. She practiced with the law firm of Stoel Rives LLP in Portland, Oregon . . .
Porter was Associate Professor of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law. In 2005, she joined the faculty of the University of Iowa College of Law as an associate professor, becoming a full professor there in 2011. Also in 2011, she became a tenured professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. . . .
In March 2012, California Attorney General Kamala Harris appointed Porter to be the state’s independent monitor of banks in a nationwide $25 billion mortgage settlement.

This is why people spend big money to send their kids to elite schools, to put them on the fast track to wealth and power. I don’t know if you kept track there, but Porter was already a law professor at UNLV prior to joining the faculty at Iowa at age 31, and six years later she got tenure at UC-Irvine. Become a tenured law professor before age 40? Man, you got it made in the shade. Porter is fiendishly clever. According to this article, she went to Phillips Andover as some sort of psychology research project about gifted kids after she got a perfect score on the SAT in seventh grade, but I don’t know if that’s actually true, because Porter is so fiendishly clever that I suspect some of her life story has been embellished, or at least dramatized, for the sake of presenting a useful narrative. For example, this article says, “The daughter of an Iowa farmer-turned-banker, Porter grew up during the farm crisis, watching ‘the entire economy around me go to hell.’” Wait a minute here — “farmer-turned-banker”? How common is that career track?

Then I check that against the other story, which says that, in attending Yale, “Porter broke away from a family tradition of going to Iowa State University.” Oh, so there was a “family tradition” of university education? How many generations of college-educated Porters were there before Katie broke the “family tradition” by choosing Yale over Iowa State? Because I’m guessing that her “farmer-turned-banker” father wasn’t just some random rural clodhopper, y’know? Anyway . . .

The battle for Congress could be decided in Southern California as Rep. Katie Porter is locked in an unexpectedly tight race. https://t.co/GZlhdYfvpN

— CBS Los Angeles (@CBSLA) November 11, 2022

As an expert in bankruptcy law and a “consumer advocate,” Porter made a point of not accepting PAC money in her 2018 campaign, but I’m looking at her reelection campaign and she’s spent $24 million.

Man, I remember when even $1 million was considered a lot of money for a congressional campaign, but now Democrats — you know, The Party of the Working Man™ — are rolling in so much big money that Porter’s Republican opponent raised $2.7 million and was outspent 9-to-1 by the incumbent Democrat. That’s not counting whatever “dark money” outside groups may have spent to defend Porter’s California seat. And this pattern of Democrats vastly outspending their GOP opponents has been repeated in many races across the country. It has been said, for example, that the race in Michigan’s 7th District is the most expensive congressional campaign in American history. The Democratic incumbent, Elissa Slotkin, raised more than $9 million while her Republican challenger raised about $2.5 million, but that’s just a fraction of the total spending in MI-7. In the second week of October, more than $27 million had been spent on the race, more than half of which was from outside groups. The most recent count shows outside groups spent about $12 million on each side in MI-7, including spending by the party national campaign committees, so that the final tally is going to be more than $35 million for this one House seat. Meanwhile, in the eight most competitive Senate races (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio and New Hampshire), a combined total of $858 million was spent by outside groups, and in none of those states did the Democrats get outspent by the Republicans.

Well, guess what? Money matters: “Of the House races called so far, 96% were won by the biggest spender, a new OpenSecrets analysis found.”

Every conservative blogger and pundit is pointing fingers of blame for the failure of the GOP to produce a “Red Wave” this year. Some are blaming Trump and others are blaming the Republican establishment, but the reality is that the “Red Wave” was stopped by a Democratic “Green Wave” of campaign cash. And, by the way, I noticed something almost immediately after Joe Biden was “elected” (nudge, nudge), namely that the liberal media started talking about the 2022 midterm before Biden was even inaugurated. That is to say, having seen big losses in the 1994 and 2010 midterms, Democrats and their media friends knew very well what they’d be facing this year, and one of the things they did — it is now obvious in hindsight — was get an early start feverishly raising money for this year’s midterms, and organizing “dark money” operations to help support their effort to stem the anticipated midterm backlash.

It now appears that the progressive pudgeball’s $24 million has bought her another term in Congress, and while the Super Genius™ Pundits are busy with all their big-brain “What Does It Mean” post mortem analyses of the midterms, I didn’t ace the SATs in seventh grade, so my dumbass guess is that maybe we should start trying to figure where Democrats are getting all this money? Because it seems strange to me that a political party grimly determined to strangle capitalism and install a Weimar America regime would be so popular with big-money fat cats.

Is this some kind of kinky BDSM thing? Corporate CEOs kneeling before leather-clad Mistress Katie, begging her, “Demonize me in your rhetoric! Destroy my business with regulations! Tax me more, please!”

Meanwhile, please explain to me how somebody in Iowa with a “family tradition” of university education becomes a “farmer-turned-banker,” because that story seems too weird to be true . . .

 

In The Mailbox: 11.10.22

Posted on | November 11, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.10.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

There would have been a post last night, but as I mentioned on Gab & MeWe, the site was being difficult and I was drunk anyway. Doubt I’ll get caught up, even with two posts tomorrow, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #1896
EBL: What the hell happened last night? , also, Look On The Bright Side
Twitchy: Kari Lake’s War Room Roasts Katie Hobbs For Doing A Shit Job, Julie Kelly Shares a J6 Bombshell That Got Lost In The Election Noise, and Anti-CRT Candidates Dominate Elections For Texas Board Of Education
Louder With Crowder: Say goodbye to 2022’s two biggest losers, Conservatives sound off: It’s time to move on from Trump to Ron DeSantis, and SNL’s ‘comedy’ writers are boycotting over Dave Chappelle hosting 
Vox Popoli: The Least Shocking News Ever, On Suicide, Red on Red, and A Limited Steal
Stoic Observations: The Prawn Story

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Our Sweet Victory over Science, Pondering Pontius Pilate, and A slight counter argument to those on our side who took the Vaxx and seem to have a small issue with those of us who didn’t
American Conservative: Remember What the Democrats Did, also, The Red Wave That Wasn’t
American Greatness: Florida and Missouri Tell Biden DOJ its Federal Election Monitors Are Not Welcome in Their Polling Places, DeSantis Is the Night’s Big Winner, and Republican John James Wins House Seat in Michigan’s Newly Created 10th Congressional District
American Power: Maybe America Hasn’t Suffered Enough, Slaves to Leftist Authoritarians, and Republican Voters Deserve Answers and Accountability
American Thinker: The Establishment Is Trying to Divide and Conquer MAGA, also, Welcome to Pennsylvania, America’s Capital of Stupid
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Election Day News, also, Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Gay marriage in Cuba will not absolve the Castro dictatorship of its gay concentration camps, Bye-bye Beto, Beto goodbye, and Cuban engineer shows world how little she can purchase with her salary
BattleSwarm: Liveblogging the 2022 Election, also, A Red Trickle
Behind The Black: Bad news for Branson, Virgin Orbit’s first launch from UK delayed by red tape, India about to do first drop test of its home-built version of an X-37B, Time for another Wuhan panic update, and Pushback: Doctors sue to kill California law making it illegal to disagree with government
Cafe Hayek: Protectionists Are Shielded From Embarrassment By Their Formidable Ignorance of Economics, also, It’s All Banditry
CDR Salamander: LaPlant Goes Salamander, also, Welcome to my Post-Fall of Kherson JOPG
Chicago Boyz: No Joke, also, The Midterm Election
Da Tech Guy: Review: Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, The #Unexpectedly Chronicles One Post Election Prediction that I GUARANTEE Will Come True, Pennsylvania: A bad night for Trump and the GOP, and Very Very Sick
Don Surber: What Republicans got right, ‘Never surrender to the woke mob’, and Life after Trump
First Street Journal: Ho hum! Another mass shooting in Philadelphia, There can be no negotiated peace with the ‘Palestinians’, and Missing the elephant in the room
Gates Of Vienna: The Shock Troops of the Great Replacement, The Dirty Laundry of the Great Reset, Election Fraud in Brazil, It’s Gone Beyond Gaslighting, and Out of Gas
The Geller Report: Covering For Election-Rigging, also,NY’s Lee Zeldin Refuses to Concede As Well Over A Million and a Half Votes Are Still Uncounted [and a lot of election night shenanigans posts]
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, A Sampler of Simulations, The Good, The Bad, and The Interesting, and Further Post Mortem Rumblings
Hollywood In Toto: Jimmy Kimmel’s Problematic Past Completely Ignored by Team Oscar, Tim Dillon: ‘Making Woke Garbage Might Be Over’, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Can’t Recover from Star’s Absence, and The Lost King Recalls a Story Too Good to Be True (But It Was!)
The Lid: BUSTED! Duplicitious Dems Admit Their Hidden Agenda Doesn’t Match Their Talking Points, Six Takeaways From The 2022 Midterms, and The 2022 Harold Stassen Awards For Special Political Losers
Legal Insurrection: U. Illinois Paying Trans Students to Write About Their ‘Toilet Experiences’, U. Delaware Prof Says Asking Questions About a Candidate’s Stroke is ‘Ableist’, Red China Sending Mixed Message on Ending “Zero Covid” Policy, “It’s Time to Say Goodbye to the ADL”, Cato Institute Files Lawsuit to Stop Biden’s Student Loan Bailout, and 2022 Midterms: Not A Tsunami, But Some Real Republican Gains
Nebraska Energy Observer: Thoughts, also, Red Ripple
Outkick: Mitchell Miller Receives Career-Long NHL Death Sentence For Bullying Incident At Age 14 While Deshaun Watson Nears NFL Return, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling Return To Baseball Hall Of Fame Ballot, Lamar Jackson Visits Young Fan With Heart Condition, Brittney Griner Being Moved To Penal Colony Used For Exiling Prisoners, and Woke NYT Columnist Has A Problem With LSU Gymnast Olivia Dunne
Power Line: Goodbye, Donald, Wot Happened?, and Dark night of the coal: The light of KJP
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Election Day Shrapnel 
Shark Tank: Gaetz Blisters GOP Leadership. Dubs Them “McFailures”
Shot In The Dark: He Knows What Matters, The Biggest Losers, and Tuesday’s Gone
The Political Hat: Word To Remember When Voting
This Ain’t Hell: Student dresses as “Nazi”, Principal suspended, Cruz beerbombed, Jackson issues first opinion. NON-election news, Post-Election Day News, and JR Majewski rides phony pony to defeat… Continue on into the sunset?
Transterrestrial Musings: Doing Good Science, also, How The Democrats Lost Their Way
Victory Girls: Voting Machine Snafus Across Multiple States, Florida Has Red Storm, But It Doesn’t Spread, and Four Villains Who Blighted The Elections For Us
Volokh Conspiracy: Conservative Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw Says Republican Leaders’ Election Denialism was “Always a Lie”, also, Data on Mass Murder by Government in the 20th Century 
Watts Up With That: Matt Ridley: Green Zealots are Threatening Real Conservation, Turbine Manufacturer: Don’t Expect Renewable Energy to Always Get Cheaper, and John Kerry Accused of Proposing US Companies Buy Their Way Out of Climate Action
Weasel Zippers: Biden Admin Put Illegal Immigrants In Hotel Suites, Complete With Room Service, Democratic Think Tank Torches Dems Prospects In 2024, “Out Of Touch”, Occasional Cortex Blames The Police For Higher Crime Rates, CNN Exit Poll: 73% Of Americans Are “Angry” Or “Dissatisfied” With The Way Things Are Going Under Biden, and CBS: Florida “Is No Longer A Swing State — Florida Is Red”
The Federalist: 3 Takeaways From Ron DeSantis’s Blowout Win For Every GOP Governor In America, Media Can’t Fathom Why ‘Democracy’ Wasn’t A Top Concern For Voters Who Spent Their Day Doing The Whole Democracy Thing, 3 Years After Covid Started, Why Don’t We Have Answers About The Likely Lab Leak?, Here’s A List Of Major GOP Wins From Last Night That Legacy Media Won’t Tell You About, and Mitt Romney Hardest Hit By Mike Lee’s Win In Utah
Mark Steyn: Light My Fire, Cover Up, The End of the World – A Generation On, “Climate Reparations”?, and Not Red Waving But Drowning

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Seeking Light Amid the Gloom: Thoughts on the Brain-Damaged Election Results

Posted on | November 9, 2022 | Comments Off on Seeking Light Amid the Gloom: Thoughts on the Brain-Damaged Election Results

What kind of people would elect John Fetterman? Short answer: The kind of people who live in Philadelphia, a city that has become America’s Mos Eisley, a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

PENNSYLVANIA:

Fetterman (D) …. 2,638,537 (50%)
Oz (R) …………….. 2,458,756 (47%)

MARGIN: D+ 179,781

PHILADELPHIA:

Fetterman (D) …. 364,007 (82%)
Oz (R) ………………. 74,738 (17%)

MARGIN: D+ 289,269

Do you see my point? Philadelphia controls the whole state.

Fetterman’s margin in Philadelphia alone was nearly 110,000 voters more than his statewide margin, so that in the rest of the state, 51% voted Republican and 48% voted Democrat — a margin effectively nullified because Democrats got 82% of the vote in Philadelphia.

Say what you will about Oz’s qualities as a candidate, but the fact is that any Republican running in Pennsylvania begins with a 300,000-vote deficit caused by the Philadelphia Factor. If you want to understand the phenomenon of “election deniers,” this is a good place to start, because it’s not just Pennsylvania. This type of urban political domination is the rule in practically every state where Democrats hold a majority.

Without their disproportionate share of the urban vote, Democrats would seldom win any statewide election, yet they currently hold half the seats in the U.S. Senate because, in state after state, something akin to the Philadelphia Factor is at work. This is why Joe Biden is in the White House, and yet most Republicans are ignorant of these geographic/demographic realities, which nobody can be permitted to mention because “RAAAAACISM!” So never mind . . .

Difficult as it is to resist my urge to expend 3,000 words ranting about the stupidity of people who vote Democrat without considering that they are thereby empowering the worst elements of society — and nothing is worse than the scum of Philadelphia — nevertheless I must resist that urge, or my mood might become even bleaker than it already is.

John Hoge and I were here in the bunker doing The Other Podcast on Election Night, with Dianna Deeley phoning in from Valdosta, Georgia, when I switched the TV over to CNN to see what they were saying on the news channel with lower ratings than Spongebob Squarepants reruns.

Because you never watch CNN — don’t worry, almost nobody else does, either — you probably don’t know who David Chalian is.

He is an obese, bespectacled Armenian homosexual, and I say that without wishing to offend any of my gay friends. Or my fat friends. As for any offended Armenians — well, if David Chalian were typical of them, you could probably more or less forgive the Turks, but I digress . . .

After switching the TV to CNN, I noticed that David Chalian was smiling, which is when I knew we were utterly and hopelessly doomed. Anything that makes David Chalian happy is bad for America, and as the election results piled up on CNN, while that blubbery Armenian poofter kept grinning with sadistic pleasure, I began to feel a profound sympathy toward the authorities of the Ottoman Empire . . .

No, wait — I went off on another damned digression. Blame it on the sleep I lost because of that wretched election, but I should have known better than to let myself hope that the millions of decent people in Pennsylvania might somehow overcome the scum of Philadelphia.

In my Monday column for The American Spectator, I’d warned that Pennsylvania would be “too close to call” for most of Election Night, and had specified the Senate race in New Hampshire as the best early bellwether of whether Republicans would have a true “Red Wave” election. If GOP challenger Dan Bolduc could knock off incumbent Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan in the Granite State, I predicted, we’d know we were surfing the giant crimson tsunami.

About 11 o’clock, CNN called New Hampshire for Hassan, which confirmed the evidence I’d been seeing in other races — no “Red Wave.”

Despite the general disappointment, which produced such happiness for David Chalian and his CNN friends, there were nonetheless many bright spots across the electoral map, especially in Florida, where Ron DeSantis stomped Charlie Crist into tiny brown smithereens. As the liberal Sun-Sentinel newspaper editorialized, the “19-point blowout victory” by DeSantis had turned Florida into a “crimson hellscape”:

He carried 62 of 67 counties, including Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, leaving Broward isolated as a blue island surrounded by red. Besides Broward, the only counties that Democrat Charlie Crist carried were Orange and the medium-sized trio of Alachua, Gadsden and Leon, a sea of red reflecting an epic Democratic collapse.
DeSantis’ solid showing of 41% in Broward was 10 points better than four years ago. Statewide, he got 530,000 more votes than four years ago, and Crist got nearly 1 million fewer votes than Andrew Gillum in 2018.

Charlie Crist: Less popular than a bisexual Negro.

.@RonDeSantisFL won Florida by a bigger margin than @GavinNewsom won California ?

— Christina Pushaw ? ?? (@ChristinaPushaw) November 9, 2022

In addition to obliterating whatever political career Charlie Crist had left, Republicans in Florida also flipped three congressional seats — defeating Democrats Al Lawson, Eric Lynn and Karen Green — while winning the newly-created 15th District, turning Florida’s House delegation from 16R/11D to 20R/8D. Oh, and Sen. Marco Rubio was easily reelected, defeating Democrat Val Demings by a 16-point margin.

In Virginia’s 2nd District, Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, a member of Nancy Pelosi’s J6 witch-hunt committee, got beat by Republican challenger Jen Kiggans. According to Reuters, Republicans also flipped GA-6, MI-10, TN-5, TX-15, WI-3, AZ-2, IA-3, NE-2, NJ -7, NY-3, NY-4 and, perhaps sweetest of all, NY-17. That’s where Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chairman Sean Patrick Maloney found himself in an unexpectedly competitive race after New York Democrats bungled their redistricting map, and GOP challenger Mike Lawler pounced and seized after Maloney suggested that people should cope with inflation by eating Chef Boyardee.

Lol. A Commie telling New Yorkers to eat canned pasta was pic.twitter.com/cx3SV8VRfq

— Stacey – Restorationist (@ScotsFyre) November 9, 2022

There were many places where Democrats who should have lost — as all Democrats should — ended up winning instead. However, among the list of winning Democrats, one famous name was missing Tuesday.

BREAKING: The President of United Earth will not be Georgia's next governor. https://t.co/dGJdw8yNUe

— The WJJ Hoge (@wjjhoge) November 9, 2022

https://t.co/dDBrJWxMaT pic.twitter.com/eWwzINxgF3

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) November 9, 2022

.

In addition to The President of United Earth, there was also the predictable defeat of three-time loser Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke.

So we have cause for cheer amid the general disappointment of a hoped-for “Red Wave” that turned out to be a minor splash. Many races have yet to be decided — e.g., Republican Neil Parrot leads in the 6th District of Maryland, but there are thousands of mail-in ballots that won’t be counted until Thursday — and if I had to guess, the final tally in the House will be somewhere around 226R to 209D, give or take a couple of seats, but that would be a bigger majority than the one Nancy Pelosi had when Democrats voted to impeach Trump, so let’s hope Republicans can get plenty of committee investigations rolling, subpoena a lot of administration officials as witnesses and, if they don’t cooperate, prosecute them for contempt of Congress. Payback time, baby!

Maybe we can’t do anything much to stop the Biden administration from wrecking the country, but we can make their lives miserable. I want to see David Chalian openly weeping on the CNN set, after Republicans vote to impeach Biden for . . . Well, whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Grind ’em into dust and call it “social justice.”

Philadelphia delenda est.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

In The Mailbox: 11.08.22

Posted on | November 9, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.08.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

If you aren’t listening to The Other Podcast’s Election Night Special, why not?
Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg & Rising Crime
EBL: Kathy Hochul Doesn’t Get Why Crime Is A Big Deal For New Yorkers, also, Astronomers have detected another ‘planet killer’ asteroid 
Twitchy: John King Urges Viewers To “Stay Off Social Media” & Trust CNN For Election Reality Checks
Louder With Crowder: Kid Rock UNLOADS on ‘fraud’ Oprah’s support of John Fetterman, also, Get the popcorn: Elon Musk makes a MAJOR midterm endorsement that leftists are gonna go berserk over
Vox Popoli: The Importance of Maneuver, You Are Not Alone, Winds of Change, and The Free Money Stopped
Stoic Observations: Pissy Itches, also, The Struggle Is Real

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Stuff of Revolutions, also, I need your help on my next book
American Conservative: Bjork, Avant-Garde Reactionary, also, The Coming Storm Over The Trans ‘Tuskegee Experiment’
American Greatness: Democrats Are Failing the Democracy Test, The Pathetic Democratic Pantheon, and COVID Amnesty? Hell, No!
American Power: The Democrats’ Insurrection Flop, The Collapse of Biden’s Woketopia, and ‘We Are Moving Backwards’
American Thinker: A Voter’s Primer: The Seven Health Policy Habits of Insanely Progressive People, The Constitution Is A Treasure That Is Worth Saving, and ESG Boomerangs on BlackRock
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Castro dictatorship gives Cubans ‘tips’ on how to get by with just 3 hours of electricity a day, ‘The people who are really working will remain in Cuba; they won’t be able to escape’, Cuban dictatorship pretends to oppose rampant prostitution, pedophilia, and human trafficking, and Violence south of the border
BattleSwarm: Turkey Bitchslaps Russia, Californians Hit The Gun Range, and LinkSwarm for November 7
Behind The Black: One of two solar panels on Cygnus capsule fails to deploy, Hurricane threatens SLS on launchpad, November 7, 2022 Quick space links, and Midnight repost: How the localized nature of Democrat vote tampering will influence the 2022 election
Cafe Hayek: Opponents of Globalization Continue to Offer Only Weak Arguments, also Certainty is Dangerous
CDR Salamander: NATO’s Next Leader: Serious Times Need Serious Leaders
Chicago Boyz: What is the Purpose of a Senator, also, What is the Purpose of Holding & Expressing Political Beliefs?
Da Tech Guy: Under the Fedora Sports Thoughts, The Navy chose death over life, and A Leftist Trope Finally Challenged After Four Years
Don Surber: Affiliates should dump Kimmel, De-Sanctimonious? Really?, also, Welcome to post-Twitter hell, lefties
First Street Journal: Maybe Larry Krasner ought to consider the possibility that not all of the juveniles he treats leniently will turn out to be good guys?, The plague of public-sector unions, and How can the American left so blithely want to increase the chances of a nuclear war?
Gates Of Vienna: Christianity Must Be Erased From Münster, If I Had a Hammer, How Our Military Crumbles, and Streamlining the Great Replacement in Germany
The Geller Report: “Widespread Outage” in Pennsylvania Voter Database As Election Day Nears, Judge allows lawsuit by Pennsylvania moms over first-grade transgender lessons to move forward, and Fetterman Sues to Have Illegal, Undated, Misdated Ballots Counted in PA
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, The Remnants of a Dead Star, and A Galaxy On Edge
Hollywood In Toto: How To Blow Up A Pipeline Pushes Free Speech Boundaries, Panic Time? Oscar-Bait Movies Keep Tanking at Box Office, and Oscars Flip Bird to Red State USA, Name Jimmy Kimmel 2023 Host
The Lid: Remembering Kristallnacht -The Night Of Broken Glass, Russian Troops Stand Up Against ‘Incompetent’ Generals in Latest Mutiny, and Fetterman Bragged, American Flags Fell Over: “Perfect Metaphor”
Legal Insurrection: Academics Join Failed Petition to Cancel Book by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, The Democrat Circular Firing Squad Begins Ahead of Anticipated Midterm Election Drubbing, Charlie Crist Slammed for Calling Florida Surgeon General a ‘Quack’, and Ninety-Six Percent of Political Donations From Ivy League Go to Democrats
Nebraska Energy Observer: Change is good … and scary!, also, The Eve of Reconstruction
Outkick: NFL Ratings Are Down Thanks To Amazon Prime And Thursday Night Football, NBA Referee Allegedly Referred To Mavs Guard Spencer Dinwiddie As A ‘B*tch *ss Mother F***er’ After Technical Foul, Tennessee Reign As #1 Short-Lived, Gets Humbled By Defending Champion Georgia, Houston Astros Win the 2022 World Series, Celebrate Manager Dusty Baker, and LSU’s Tradition Of ‘Respecting The Tiger’ Creates Extremely Cool Image During Epic Field Storm After Win Over Alabama
Power Line: Can the FBI Be Saved?, Thought for the Day: The Idiot Vote, and NBC deep-sixes Pelosi story
Shark Tank: Crist Slams Religious DeSantis Ad, Despite Previously Comparing Himself to Christ
Shot In The Dark: Open Letter To All Minnesota DFLers, also, Why I’m Voting Republican
STUMP: SUMOvember: the tournament is coming!
The Political Hat: 2022 Election Predictions
This Ain’t Hell: Quick updates, USCG Recruitment Woes, Yet Another Politician: Legit Veteran or Photoshop Warrior?, and Clyde Shavers, a veteran that Republicans are attacking
Transterrestrial Musings: The Faux Climate Crisis, A Tragic Anniversary, and The Sad State Of Boeing
Victory Girls: Democrats: Misinformation Will Flourish On Twitter After Layoffs, The Pudding President’s Insults Continue, NY Dem On Inflation: ‘Let Them Eat Chef Boyardee’, and Abrams: Blame Voter Suppression And Misinformation If I Lose
Volokh Conspiracy: November 7 as Victims of Communism Day—2022
Watts Up With That: Biden Says Coal Plants “All Across America” will be Shut Down, Replaced by Solar and Wind, also, “No More Drilling”: Climate Crusader Joe Biden Announces the End of Oil and Gas
Weasel Zippers: Stacey Abrams: My Poll Numbers Are Low Because Black Men Are Too Stupid To Support Me, Biden Has Given Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan Over $1 Billion In U.S. Aid Since Botched Withdrawal, Biden’s Approval Rating Among Independent Voters Sinks To 28%, All-Time Low, and Dem Rep. James Clyburn: Republican Win Means “End Of The World”
The Federalist: Black Celebs Don’t Hate Herschel Walker’s Privilege, They Hate His Ideas, My Family Can’t Afford To Recycle Thanks To Democrats’ Obsession With ‘Environmental Justice’, Planned Parenthood’s Support For California’s Abortion Amendment Is About Cash Flows, Not Health Care, Corporations And Advertisers, Stop Falling For The Left’s ‘Anti-Hate’ Scam, and Democracy Isn’t At Risk, Democrats Are
Mark Steyn: Krill or Be Krilled, Whipped at the Yard, A War to Render All Wars: All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix, and Diversity Is Where Nations Die

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MIDTERM ELECTION RESULTS HQ: ‘Not a Red Wave, That’s For Darn Sure’

Posted on | November 8, 2022 | 1 Comment

UPDATE 6:30 a.m. ET Wednesday: The headline quote is from South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, summarizing the results in which it appears that a runoff in Georgia will decide control of the Senate, while GOP gains in the House will probably be enough to take a majority, but by a disappointingly narrow margin.

UPDATE 6:55 a.m. ET: A bright spot in western Maryland:

Neil Parrott (R) ……. 102,669 (51%)
David Trone (D) …….. 98,122 (49%)

Parrott is the state senator from Washington County whom I knew from 2010, when he was first running for the state legislature. His narrow victory over Trone, a billionaire incumbent Democrat, demonstrates the power of a strong grassroots “shoe leather” campaign. There was no way Parrott could compete in television ads, where Trone vastly outspent him, but the Republican challenger had plenty of volunteers on the ground and his green yard signs were everywhere.

*** PREVIOUSLY ***

For weeks, Democrats have been solemnly warning of impending authoritarianism: “DEMOCRACY IS ON THE BALLOT!” But when I went to vote today, neither democracy nor authoritarianism were actually among the choices, and instead I voted for Republicans, which is what I think they really meant: If Republicans win control of Congress, there will be no more “democracy,” as far as liberals are concerned.

So now, nearing 7 p.m. Eastern, polls are about to close in six states and I’ll be compiling results here, while also bitching about the slowness of the vote-counting on a special six-hour edition of The Other Podcast.

UPDATE 8:10 p.m. ET: Ron DeSantis has been reelected in Florida.

UPDATE 8:05 p.m. ET: Almost everything is still “too close to call.”

UPDATE 7:20 p.m. ET: Sen. Rand Paul is reelected in Kentucky, Sen. Tim Scott reelected in South Carolina and Sen. Marco Rubio reelected in Florida.

UPDATE 7:05 p.m. ET: In the Indiana Senate race, incumbent Republican Sen. Todd Young is trouncing Democratic challenger Thomas McDermott by 20 points. Young has already been declared the winner, with fewer than 4% of precincts reporting.

UPDATE 6:50 p.m. ET: CNN has been going through their own exit poll numbers and — whoa! — democracy is completely dead:

CNN’s Dana Bash reading their exit polls:

"You know what's missing from this one, two, three, four, five, top five issues? Democracy." ???
pic.twitter.com/7q73VJLJCQ

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 8, 2022

CNN EXIT POLL: 73% of Americans are either “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the way things are going under President Biden
pic.twitter.com/fnzYyF3u2C

— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) November 8, 2022

 

The Other Podcast: Special Election Night ‘Let’s Vote to Kill Democracy’ Episode

Posted on | November 8, 2022 | 2 Comments

Tonight, John Hoge, Dianna Deeley and I will be running a special six-hour episode of The Other Podcast, which will run in two parts:

PART ONE — 7 p.m.-10 p.m. ET

PART TWO — 10 p.m.-1 a.m. ET

So that’s the schedule, and you can tune in to hear us wondering the same thing you’re wondering: WHAT’S TAKING SO LONG?

I’ll be updating the results here.

UPDATE:

PART THREE — We’re now live on this one!

UPDATE:

PART FOUR — We’re now live on this one!

 

Category: The Other Podcast

A Cliché of a Stereotype: Kathy Griffin and the Pathetic Fate of Liberal Cat Ladies

Posted on | November 8, 2022 | 1 Comment

Which comes first, the liberal politics or the envious bitterness?

It’s one of those chicken-or-the-egg questions of causality that psychologists should spend more time researching. It’s not that all liberal women are doomed to be lonely and unpopular spinsters, nor even that every cat lady is a Democratic voter. Yet there is an observable correlation of traits that cannot be dismissed as a random coincidence.

If a woman is both physically attractive and emotionally capable of forming durable relationships, it is likely that she will get married while still young, and remain married. Even if such a woman should experience a breakup — because anybody can be afflicted with bad luck — she should not have a problem finding another partner and, having learned the lessons from her earlier misfortune, will try to avoid whatever mistakes caused her previous breakup. A certain level of humility is required to be able to learn from your mistakes, however, and one notices that people who can’t ever seem to make relationships work are reluctant to admit that they are the problem. No, no, no — they’re always the victim, and somebody else is always to blame. And the tendency to seek scapegoats is, I would argue, more aligned with the liberal worldview.

The Victimhood Mentality is just not conducive to happiness.

Kathy Griffin was past 40 before she married for the first time, but was divorced five years later. She then bounced around for about 10 years before ending up with another guy whom she married in 2020. She is, needless to say, childless. One may attribute Griffin’s fate to mere bad luck, but is it really just a coincidence that she is also a particularly obnoxious liberal? Or is “the personal the political,” as feminists tell us?

Probably not just a coincidence, I’d say. Kathy Griffin is not just a liberal, but a stereotype of everything that makes liberals unpopular. And obviously, though she was typical in the way she succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome, it wasn’t just about Trump.

Griffin is an insecure popularity-seeker, and will therefore reflexively jump onto any passing liberal bandwagon in a pathetic effort to grab the spotlight as The Most Attention-Worthy Liberal Celebrity:

Comedienne Kathy Griffin earned herself a Twitter suspension on Sunday when she impersonated billionaire Elon Musk as a stunt for Democrats.
Changing her profile name while employing Musk’s exact profile picture, Kathy Griffin then asked her thousands of followers to “Vote Blue” in the coming midterm election.
“Hey complainers and activists. Want to see real activism? Watch this. RT w #VoteBlue,” Griffin tweeted.
Twitter suspended Griffin’s account within an hour.
Though Elon Musk did not address the Griffin situation directly, he issued a clarification that Twitter will immediately suspend impersonating accounts that do not specifically label themselves parody.

Kathy Griffin fucked around and quite promptly found out pic.twitter.com/ceFJAQKdj5

— Mike The Mad Scientist ™? (@MadMikeOfficial) November 6, 2022

She desperately wants to be relevant, see? And if that kind of relevance is all you’ve got to live for, your life must be pretty empty.

My wife likes to relax in the evening by binge-watching reruns of Seinfeld, and it just so happened that one of the episodes she was watching Monday was “The Cartoon” (Season 9, Episode 13) with Kathy Griffin guest starring as Sally Weaver, the former college roommate of George’s deceased fiancée Susan. One of the subplots of the episode is about Kramer’s inability to keep his mouth shut. The show begins with Jerry and Kramer walking down the street:

Jerry: Oh, no, it’s Sally Weaver. . . . She moved to New York a few years ago. She’s trying to become an actress. . . . Untalented. She’s always inviting me to see her in some bad play in a tiny room without ventilation. . . . She should just give up. . . .
Sally: I’m on my way to an audition. Still waiting for that big break.
Kramer: Why don’t you just give up?
Jerry: Kramer!
Kramer: At least that’s what Jerry says. Now face it, if it hasn’t happened, it’s not gonna happen.

Later in the show, Kramer has been checking Jerry’s phone answering machine messages and says Sally called to say that she’s quitting show business because Jerry “ruined her life.”

Jerry: What? You’re the one who ruined her life.
Kramer: Well, that’s not how she remembers it.
Jerry: Well, I got to talk her out of this.
Kramer: I thought you said she stinks?
Jerry: She does stink and she should quit. But I don’t want it to be because of me. It should be the traditional route — years of rejections and failures till she’s spit out the bottom of the porn industry.

“She does stink and she should quit.”

As a summary of Kathy Griffin’s career, that’s perfect.

 

Category: Celebrities

The ‘Blood Moon’ Eclipse and Other Cosmic Portents of a ‘Red Wave’

Posted on | November 7, 2022 | Comments Off on The ‘Blood Moon’ Eclipse and Other Cosmic Portents of a ‘Red Wave’

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr. Raymond Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr. Raymond Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… MASS HYSTERIA!

Someone could have added, “Democrats losing in New York!”

The polls in the contest between Gov. Kathy Hochul and her GOP challenger Lee Zeldin are all over the map, and either way it turns out, some pollsters are going to have a lot of explaining to do. But the fact that there’s even a possibility of a Republican winning in a state that Joe Biden carried by a 23-point margin gives you an idea of how bad things are looking for Democrats on the eve of Election Day.

There will be a lunar eclipse in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday and, according to my source for all things space-related, John Hoge: “This is the first Election Day total eclipse in the history of the United States.” Make of this celestial omen what you will; my job is merely to report the facts, not to interpret the cosmic significance of such things. Sunday morning, I cranked out a 1,500-word column for The American Spectator, which got linked today by Instapundit, with this excerpt:

“Probably the smartest thing to do on election night would be to take a nap early in the evening — when the chatter on TV will be mostly speculation — and set your alarm for 11 p.m. or midnight, by which time 90 percent or more of the precincts will have reported in most Eastern states. The earliest tip-off to which way the night is heading will be the Senate race in New Hampshire. If Bolduc can score an upset there, it would portend a massive ‘Red Wave,’ in which Republicans win 240-plus House seats and 52 or more Senate seats. If, on the other hand, Hassan manages to hang on in New Hampshire, the GOP will likely win between 225 and 235 House seats and fall a couple seats short of a Senate majority.”

The meaning of this four-sentence passage seemed clear enough to me, but as I skimmed the comments at Instapundit, a couple of things became obvious: (a) most of the people commenting hadn’t bothered to click the link and read the whole column, and (b) some of the commenters had serious deficiencies in reading comprehension.

If you read the entire column — as I certainly hope you will — my main point is that it will be very late on Election Night, probably past midnight on the East Coast, before we know whether this is a true “Red Wave” election, with Republicans winning even in long-shot races. For most of Tuesday evening, we’ll watch the cable-TV personalities pointing at maps and declaring that the key Senate races are “too close to call.”

As I further explain in the column, practically everybody concedes that Republicans will win a House majority, because they only need to flip six seats to take the gavel away from Nancy Pelosi. So the two real questions — the source of deep mystery to serious political observers — are how big of a GOP majority Kevin McCarthy will get in the House, and whether Republicans can score a net gain of Senate seats, to give Mitch McConnell a majority there, as well. These two questions are linked, because if it is truly a “wave” election for Republicans, it can be expected that they will win majorities in both chambers. On the House side, McCarthy’s GOP currently holds 212 seats, and needs 218 to claim the majority. Getting to 225 House seats (a net gain of 13) seems to be the low-end estimate of how Republicans will fare on Tuesday, whereas a true “Red Wave” would mean the GOP scoring a net gain of 25 or more House seats.

The reason I chose the New Hampshire Senate race as the bellwether is because (a) the polls close there at 7 p.m. Eastern, and (b) unlike some other states with key Senate races, New Hampshire doesn’t have the kind of blatant corruption and/or incompetence that causes delays in reporting election results. Like, if you’re on a pins and needles about the Pennsylvania results, you’re going to be in hours of agony Tuesday waiting for them to count votes in Philadelphia. Ohio? No early decision there — Cuyahoga County will still be counting votes past midnight. Georgia? Fulton County won’t finish counting before Wednesday afternoon, if that soon. But there’s nothing like Atlanta or Cleveland in New Hampshire. Most of the state is still fairly rural, and even in Manchester, they’re usually pretty quick with the vote-counting. So by 10 p.m. ET, we can expect that 90% of the vote will be counted in New Hampshire, which will give us a good idea of whether Dan Bolduc has pulled an upset victory — which, I believe, will be the biggest early indicator of whether this is going to be a real “Red Wave” year.

Some of the commenters at Instapundit, however, didn’t seem to get my point, which either means (a) they’re dumb or (b) I’m wrong.

But maybe it’s just too close to call . . .

 

Category: Election

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