The Other McCain

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

Biden Loses Ground in Latest Poll

Posted on | May 6, 2020 | Comments Off on Biden Loses Ground in Latest Poll

Twenty years ago, part of my job at The Washington Times was compiling the weekly round-up of election poll data, and I learned a good bit about the polling business in the process. First, as pollsters say, what they seek to provide is a “snapshot” of public opinion, which is not a prediction of future results. For this reason, early polls should always be interpreted cautiously. You can’t look at polls six months ahead of an election and predict the outcome in November. Since the days when I was searching the Internet and wire services to find the latest numbers, it has become easier to find polls. Everybody interested in polls goes to Real Clear Politics for up-to-the-minute numbers, and a veritable army of online pundits offer their interpretations of the latest trend, like Roman augurs examining the entrails. This has made it a dull game.

One of the no-no’s in polling is to take a single survey as proof of a trend. You need to follow the numbers over time to see what direction public opinion is taking, and yet there is this:

Joe Biden’s advantage over President Donald Trump in popular support has eroded in recent weeks as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee struggles for visibility with voters during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.
The opinion poll conducted on Monday and Tuesday found that 43% of registered voters said they would support Biden in the Nov. 3 presidential election, while 41% said they would back Trump. That makes the contest essentially a toss-up, as the results are within the poll’s credibility interval.
Biden led by 6 percentage points in a similar poll last week and by 8 points in a poll that ran April 15 to 21. . . .

Is this significant? We don’t know. It’s too early. Six months is a long time in politics, and there’s no telling what might happen to shift opinions between now and November. But the fact that Biden has suffered a net loss of six points in the space of two weeks tells, among other things, that Biden’s support is “soft.” He suffers from a lack of what the pundits call voter “intensity.” Of course, the vast majority of voters are more or less firmly partisan — about 40% will always vote Democrat and 40% will always vote Republican, so that elections are determined by the persuadable 20% of undecided voters in the middle.

The establishment Democrats who pulled out all the stops to help Biden clinch the nomination did this because they believed Biden to be the most “electable” candidate, especially in terms of winning back the working-class white voters who had defected to support Trump in 2016. This involved a calculation as to what the fall election campaign would be about, and what kind of candidate would be best able to beat Trump. But if Biden seemed like the “safe” choice for Democrats in March, there was always a downside risk that, by running a 77-year-old white man as their candidate, Democrats risked a loss of voter intensity, especially among their minority/female voter base. In other words, like Republicans nominating Mitt Romney in 2012, the “safe” candidate for Democrats is not necessarily the best candidate. We cannot predict what this will mean in November, however, but this poll does offer evidence — a data point — indicating that beating Trump will not be easy for Biden.




 

Category: Joe Biden, Polls

Why Gallup, New Mexico?

Posted on | May 5, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Over the weekend, I saw reports that New Mexico Gov. Lujan Grisham had invoked the state’s Riot Control Act to shut down traffic in the city of Gallup. The coverage didn’t provide the context to understand why this community of 21,678 people was such a COVID-19 incubator:

Gallup is in McKinley County, which has 1,027 positive cases of Covid-19 as of Thursday. The county has more than 30% of the state’s 3,411 cases and the most positive cases in the entire state, the governor’s statement said.
“Its infection trend has shown no sign of flattening,” according to the statement. . . .
“The spread of this virus in McKinley County is frightful,” Lujan Grisham said. “And it shows that physical distancing has not occurred and is not occurring. The virus is running amok there. It must be stopped, and stricter measures are necessary.”

Having seen many stories in which the media promoted the idea that rural America would soon be afflicted by this disease, I wondered if somehow this prophecy was coming true. But why here? Of all the places, why was the virus “running amok” in this particular town?

 

So I checked the map, and noticed that Gallup is on I-40, where it intersects with U.S. 491, leading north to the Navajo Nation. If you live on the reservation and want to go shopping, Gallup is where you’d go, and the Navajos have been hard-hit by COVID-19. Such was my deduction Saturday, and now the New York Times follows up:

The lockdown comes as state and local authorities grapple with one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the United States on the nearby Navajo Nation, the country’s largest Indian reservation, and a surge in detected cases in places near the reservation.
As of Sunday, the Navajo Nation had reported a total of 2,373 cases and 73 confirmed deaths from the virus. . . .
The refusal to follow social distancing guidelines by some residents of Gallup and other so-called border towns near the reservation has emerged as a source of tension, as tribal authorities say the behavior is undermining their attempts to control the virus.
The Gallup area had the third-highest rate of infection of any metropolitan area in the United States as of Sunday. . . .
Before the lockdown, tribal leaders complained that their attempts to curb infections on the reservation by setting curfews and creating checkpoints were being undermined when Navajo citizens ventured into Gallup.
Residents of Gallup also groused that many people were ignoring social distancing guidelines by crowding into vehicles and food stores. . . .
Native Americans account for 53 percent of New Mexico’s confirmed coronavirus cases, while making up about 11 percent of the state’s population. . . .
In the nearby town of Grants, also located near tribal nations in western New Mexico, the mayor openly defied Ms. Lujan Grisham last week by telling businesses to reopen. (The state Supreme Court has ordered the mayor, Martin Hicks, to obey the state orders.)
Mr. Hicks has asserted that Navajos were to blame for spreading the virus, openly expressing an unsubstantiated position that seems to be gaining traction in towns near Native American reservations.
“We didn’t take it to them, they brought it to us,” Mr. Hicks said in a telephone interview, without offering any proof. “So how are we going to spread it amongst them when they’re the ones that brought it to us?”

Oh, no! He said what you’re not allowed to say!

The question of who is infecting whom is not supposed to be openly discussed. Viral outbreaks just randomly happen, we are supposed to believe, never questioning if demographic disparities in infection rates are anything more than accidental, unless we want to blame racism. The possibility that behavioral differences between groups might help explain these disparities is not permitted, because that might lead to “victim-blaming.” You can’t ask who was “ignoring social distancing guidelines” in Gallup, and the way the New York Times reports the story, you don’t get a clear answer, except when Mayor Hicks expresses his “unsubstantiated” opinion. Well, we might ask, how was it that this disease from China became rampant among the Navajo? One would not suspect that there was a lot of international travel by reservation residents. My hunch was that this might have something to do with the numerous casinos (including the Fire Rock Casino near Gallup) operated by the Navajo Nation. Maybe tourists brought the virus to the casinos, infecting Navajo employees who then spread it on the reservation?

Imagine my surprise, then, at discovering the real cause:

Navajo officials . . . have traced the surge in the reservation’s coronavirus cases to a March 7 rally held by an evangelical church . . .
Infectious disease specialists say the virus is thought to have arrived on the reservation later than in other parts of the United States. It began spreading rapidly after it was detected among members of the Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical congregation in the outpost of Chilchinbeto near the Arizona-Utah border.
Families traveled from far-flung parts of the Navajo Nation to attend the rally, which included a prayer service in response to the pandemic already spreading in parts of the country.

You can read more background about that at the Navajo Times, and I confess it never would have occurred to me that an evangelical rally was the event that triggered this pandemic outbreak. So I’ll have to ask readers to accept my sincere apology for my un-Christian suspicion.




 

Category: Health Care, New Mexico, Racism

Blame Trump? Store Guard Murdered After Confronting Customer Without Mask

Posted on | May 5, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Friday, a security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigian, was shot to death after he confronted a customer who was not wearing a mask. Liberals on Twitter rushed to blame President Trump, claiming the shooting was inspired by Trump’s criticism of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“This is another Trump inspired murder,” one Twitter user declared. “This is what the rabid hosts on Fox and Trump have done,” said another. “A direct result of Trump’s cry to ‘liberate’ Michigan,” said yet another as the torrent of Trump-hating messages spewed forth.

Then details of the killing, and mug shots of the suspects, emerged:

Three people are charged with the murder of a Family Dollar security guard in Flint, who was enforcing the store’s policy requiring face masks.
Two men remain at large while a woman has been arrested and is awaiting arraignment in the Genesee County Jail.
The male suspects are 44-year-old Larry Edward Teague and 23-year-old Ramonyea Bishop. Teague’s wife and Bishop’s mother, 45-year-old Sharmel Teague, has been arrested.
All three suspects are facing a charge of first-degree premeditated murder, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole if they are convicted.
Larry Teague and Bishop also are facing several weapons charges while Teague faces an additional charge of violating Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s order to wear face coverings in enclosed public spaces.
Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said Sharmel Teague and her daughter went in the Family Dollar at 877 E. Fifth St. in Flint around 1:40 p.m. Friday. Teague was wearing a mask, but her daughter was not.
While inside, security guard Calvin Munerlyn confronted the daughter about not wearing a face mask.
Whitmer issued an order in April requiring everyone entering an enclosed space to wear a face mask or covering over their nose and mouth to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Family Dollar has adopted that as a store policy for customers.
Sharmel Teague and Munerlyn got into an argument about the policy. Leyton said Sharmel Teague spit at Munerlyn, who then ordered her to leave the store and told the cashier to refuse service to her.
Surveillance video showed Teague and her daughter leaving the store in a red GMC Envoy and enter the nearby River Village Apartments complex. Minutes later, cell phone records show Sharmel Teague made a phone call to Larry Teague, Leyton said.
About 20 minutes after Sharmel and her daughter left the store, Leyton said Larry Teague and Bishop drove the same GMC Envoy back to the store.
Leyton said surveillance video shows Larry Teague and Bishop enter the store and start an argument with Munerlyn. Witnesses reported hearing the suspects ask Munerlyn who had disrespected his wife.
During the altercation, Leyton said Bishop pulled out a handgun and shot 43-year-old Munerlyn in the head. He was rushed to Hurley Medical Center, where he died later Friday.

 

Look, I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but Hillary Clinton carried Flint, Michigan, by a wide margin in 2016, and if you were looking to find violent Trump supporters in Flint, you probably wouldn’t pick Larry, Ramonyea and Sharmel as the most likely suspects.




 

Category: Crime, Michigan

Kirby’s Birds

Posted on | May 4, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

My brother Kirby has found a way to make the COVID-19 lockdown amusing. He’s put up bird feeders behind our house and, as spring brings a return of our migratory feathered friends, he captures them in photos. You can click on any photo to see it full-size. Above, we see the brilliant plumage of the indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea).

 

This lovely creatures is the rose-breasted grosbeak (Pheucticus ludovicianus) which is a member of the cardinal family.

And here, behold — the red-bellied woodpecker!

 

 

Melanerpes carolinus ranges as far south as Florida and as far north as Canada, but now that it’s enjoying the fruit treats that Kirby provides, I think its future habitat will be our back yard.

If you want to see more of Kirby’s photography, you can follow him on Instagram or check out his Facebook account. Of course, to help offset the cost of birdseed, etc., you can hit Kirby’s tip jar.

Category: Family

Joe Biden’s Historic Gibberish

Posted on | May 4, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Great leaders known are known for their quotes, like FDR’s line “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall.” Here’s a quote destined for the history books:

“You know, one of the things, uh, every morning — this morning I didn’t — I get a brief from medical docs on the status, the status of where things are, and uh, you know, uh, the former head of the, uh, anyway.”

What does that mean? It means that Joe Biden is losing his marbles. Not to exacerbate anyone’s paranoia, but here’s a question that has occurred to me: What if the Joe Biden sex scandal is not what it seems to be?

Tara Reade claims to be a loyal Democrat, and she might be doing her party a huge favor. Her accusation that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 gives Democrats a plausible excuse to ditch the former vice president as their 2020 presidential nominee, thus sparing themselves a likely disaster in the fall campaign. To put it as bluntly as possible, Biden’s mental decline is so obvious as to be an embarrassment, as he stumbles in every interview, even with the most friendly journalists. Democrats and their friends in the media attempting to push Biden’s candidacy forward resemble nothing so much as the cast of the 1989 comedy Weekend at Bernie’s, hauling around their dead boss’s corpse and trying to pretend he’s still alive. . . .

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




 

Category: Joe Biden

Study: The Internet Has Made It Harder to Ditch Your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Posted on | May 3, 2020 | Comments Off on Study: The Internet Has Made It Harder to Ditch Your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Glenn Reynolds highlights a study from Florida Atlantic University:

Defined as using technology to repeatedly harass a love interest, partner, or crush in order to coerce, control, intimidate, threaten, or just plain old annoy, digital dating abuse has developed into a disturbingly common phenomenon. The research team analyzed over 2,200 U.S. middle and high school students, and 28.1% admitted they had been subjected to a form of online dating abuse over the past year.
Perhaps surprisingly, the study also noted that boys (32.3%) appear to be experiencing this type of abuse more often than girls (23.6%).

This finding would seem to contradict what feminists say about abuse generally being something that males inflict on females, but of course, women often don’t recognize their own abusive behavior as abusive. Rollo Tomassi has talked about solipsistic tendencies among women, their inability to view any situation objectively, instead making everything about me! me! me! I don’t wish to generalize too broadly, but I have noticed that women tend to regard their emotions — their personal likes and dislikes, their hurt feelings — as if they were a concrete reality.

Any man who wishes to succeed in relationships with women has to learn to negotiate this typical aspect of the female personality. Boys are raised (or perhaps I should say, boys were once raised) to disregard or restrain our emotions, to shrug off pain, never to pout over disappointment, and thus often find it difficult to cope with female irrationality.

The Internet, smart phones, social media and dating apps have added a new aspect to this problem. Ask any young man today what it’s like when a girl starts “blowing up your phone” with messages to which she expects answers. A guy may be busy doing something — work, school, whatever — and if he does not immediately respond to his girlfriend’s messages, she attributes malign motives to his non-answers: “Why are you ignoring me?” He hasn’t done anything wrong, but try telling her that.

Let us stipulate (and the FAU study shows) that guys also engage in “digital dating abuse,” but apparently women are more likely to do it. And the influence of digital technology has made it more difficult to escape abusive relationships. Your crazy ex-girlfriend can stalk your social-media profile, harass anyone you’re dating, etc. Perhaps worst of all, whether you are male or female, your dating history creates a digital permanent record that may be difficult, if not impossible, to erase. Your past can come back to haunt you in ways that may surprise you. Today’s teenage boy who harbors any ambition toward public life must be extraordinarily careful in his romantic encounters, lest in 20 or 25 years — when he’s running for Congress, perhaps — some crazy ex-girlfriend pops up online to accuse him of rape. Such is the price of “progress.”




 

Category: Sex

Your Low-Rent Friends Are Dead

Posted on | May 3, 2020 | Comments Off on Your Low-Rent Friends Are Dead

 

Glenn Reynolds continues piling up the obscure Steely Dan references, and spotting them is becoming easy: If you see any phrase on Instapundit that doesn’t make sense, Google it, because it’s probably a Steely Dan reference. As for example when, in reference to Joe Biden’s doomed campaign, he drops in a lyric from “Kid Charlemagne”:

You are obsolete.
Look at all the white men on the street!

The professor is educating us here because, even though I vaguely remember “Kid Charlemagne,” a minor hit (#82 on the Billboard chart in 1976) from their fifth album, The Royal Scam, I’d never paid any attention to the lyrics, and had no idea what the song was about. Turns out it’s the story of the downfall of legendary LSD maker Owsley Stanley.

On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean.
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home.

That last line refers to the Merry Pranksters‘ bus, and you can see how, by the mid-1970s, that psychedelic hippie vibe was long gone:

Now your patrons have all left you in the red.
Your low-rent friends are dead.
This life can be very strange.
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint the face
They’ve joined the human race.
Some things will never change.

Yes, we’ve all joined the human race, and some of us have even become Republicans. This life can be very strange, indeed.




 

Category: Music

Death Is a Democrat: Florida Fearmonger Stalks Beaches as ‘Grim Reaper’

Posted on | May 2, 2020 | Comments Off on Death Is a Democrat: Florida Fearmonger Stalks Beaches as ‘Grim Reaper’

 

It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how evil and dishonest the Democrats have become. Daniel Uhlfelder is a Florida lawyer who previously made headlines by suing over a private beach in Walton County where former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee happens to live. Huckabee is just one of 900 beachfront property owners in the county, but his name was invoked as a publicity stunt by Uhlfelder first during the 2018 campaign, and then in launching a super PAC earlier this year. Now, Uhlfelder wants people to believe they’re going to die because of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to re-open Florida’s beaches:

Most Floridians hitting the newly reopened beaches are trading stay-at-home sweatpants for shorts and swimsuits.
But when he heads out, Daniel Uhlfelder dons a raggedy black robe, conceals his face with a black cloth and wields his scythe.
Uhlfelder, an attorney, is haunting Florida beaches dressed as the Grim Reaper to protest their reopening, which he believes is premature.
It’s a macabre plea to beachgoers to stay home.
Uhlfelder is a staunch advocate for public beach access in the state, even butting heads with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, whose Florida Panhandle home is parked on a private beach. But allowing anyone on the beach during the pandemic is a mistake, he said — one that could endanger the community.
“We aren’t at the point now where we have enough testing, enough data, enough preparation for what’s going to be coming to our state from all over the world from this pandemic,” the lawyer told CNN.
Scythe in hand, he traveled to beaches around Walton County, Florida, that have reopened ahead of the state’s planned May 4 reopening. “Phase One” of the reopening will allow restaurants and retailers to open at 25% capacity. Bars, salons and gyms will stay closed for now.
The beaches he visited Friday were “very crowded,” he said.
“I know how beautiful and attractive our beaches are. But if we don’t take measures to control things, this virus is going to get really, really out of control,” he warned.

Except (a) no, he’s wrong, and (b) the media reports won’t mention the highly relevant fact that Uhlfelder is a Democrat activist, and that this isn’t about public health, it’s about partisan politics — falsely smearing the Republican governor. Actual research indicates that there is little or no danger of the virus spreading outdoors in the sunshine. That’s just not how viruses operate. True, some college kids who traveled to Florida for Spring Break in February and early March contracted coronavirus, but that was probably from partying in crowded nightclubs, or perhaps just from being on commercial airlines. Being outdoors in the sunshine is probably the safest place to be, and if Uhlfelder says the beaches were “very crowded,” could he please specify what that means, in terms of people per square foot? Because I doubt very much that any beach was too crowded to observe the six-foot “social distancing” limit.

Facts don’t matter to the liberal media narrative.




 

Category: Florida
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