The Other McCain

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

No ‘Wave’ for Democrats; GOP Gains in Senate; Some Races Still ‘Too Close to Call’

Posted on | November 7, 2018 | Comments Off on No ‘Wave’ for Democrats; GOP Gains in Senate; Some Races Still ‘Too Close to Call’

Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections, but their gains were not enough to called a “wave,” and Republicans managed to expand their Senate majority, while also winning key gubernatorial races. The anti-Trump backlash in the House was smaller than the anti-Obama backlash of 2010, when Republicans gained a whopping 63 House seats in the “Tea Party” election.

As my friend John Hoge points out, #MeToo was a loser — Democrat senators who voted against Justice Brett Kavanaugh were defeated in Indiana, where Mike Braun beat Joe Donnelly, and Missouri, where Josh Hawley beat Claire McCaskill. The only Democrat who voted for Kavanaugh, Joe Manchin, survived in West Virginia.

Three “rock star” candidates for Democrats — Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Andrew Gillum in Florida, and Stacey Abrams in Georgia — all went down to defeat, although Brian Kemp’s margin in the Georgia gubernatorial elections was close enough that some networks still considered the race “too close to call” as of Wednesday morning. In Florida, Republican Rick Scott’s victory over Sen. Bill Nelson was another slender win rated “too close to call” by the networks. Out west, Republicans lost the Nevada Senate seat of Dean Heller, but were leading in Arizona and Montana, both still rated “too close to call.”

UPDATE: Among Tuesday’s winners was Montana Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte who, uh, body-slammed his Democrat opponent by a margin of about 37,000 votes.

UPDATE II: One of the House races I had called attention to was Texas 23, where Democrats nominated a Filipino-American lesbian against Rep. Will Hurd, the only black member of the Texas Republican delegation. It appears Hurd survived that challenge by a margin of 700 votes. Democrats flipped two Texas House seats, defeating Pete Sessions in the 32nd District and John Culberson in the 7th District.

UPDATE III: Two of the early indicators that Tuesday would not be a “wave” election for Democrats came in Virginia 5 and Florida 18.

In the Virginia race, Democrats nominated far-left journalist Leslie Cockburn (her father-in-law was literally a Stalinist) in a largely rural district where the incumbent Republican had retired, citing personal problems with alcoholism. Cockburn’s daughter is actress Olivia Wilde, and the Democrat got a lot of Hollywood money. Unfortunately for the Hollywood Commies, Republicans nominated businessman Denver Riggelman, and he won by about 20,000 votes.

In Florida, incumbent Republican Rep. Brian Mast faced a challenge from former Obama administration staffer Lauren Baer, a lesbian who is married to a Federal Election Commission lawyer, Emily Meyers. Between them, Baer and Meyers have four Ivy League degrees (Harvard, Yale Law, Brown and Columbia Law). “It’s a breakthrough race for our community,” one Florida gay activist gushed in a September interview, calling Baer “one of the most exciting and qualified candidates running for Congress in Florida this year.” Democrats used to be the “party of the working man,” but now they’re the party of Ivy League lesbians. Florida voters said, “Hell, no.” Mast was re-elected by a 30,000-vote margin.

By the way, I wish to apologize to readers for the lack of blogging on Tuesday. What happened was this: In July, my 17-year-old son got a speeding ticket in southern Virginia, while he and a friend were coming back from a trip to North Carolina. He had originally been scheduled for an October court date, but that conflicted with one of his soccer games, so he rescheduled it for November, without noticing that the date was Election Day, and I had to accompany him to court.

So I thought, OK, we’re going to drive four hours for this early-morning court appearance, and then turn around drive back in time for me to blog the election. However, the plan was changed and I didn’t realize it until we were leaving out Tuesday morning with one of my older sons driving. The trip was extended so that we could drive down to Fort Bragg, hang out with my Army son and his wife, then bring back his wife and new baby for a visit. So it was about 7 p.m. before we got on the road, and past 2 a.m. before we got back home. Because I hadn’t anticipated this, I’d left my laptop at the house, and the only way I could follow the results Tuesday night was on my phone.

As to my teenage son’s ticket, the judge liked him, and agreed to continue the case for six months. If my son goes without any further driving infractions between now and May, the charges will be dropped. Otherwise, I’ll be the one going to prison, because I’ll strangle the boy. Make me miss an Election Day? That’s justifiable homicide!



 

Category: Congress, Election, Senate

Who Democrats Really Are

Posted on | November 5, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

If you’re watching CNN — and I have no idea why you would, unless you’re trapped in an airport — you have no idea who Democrats actually are, and what they actually intend to do if they get elected. On a CNN panel last night (I watch CNN so you don’t have to), there was a lot of discussion about college-educated suburban white women as the anti-Trump “swing voters” Democrats are targeting in this midterm election.

In a column at CNN’s website last week, the network’s “senior political analyst” Ron Brownstein offered this assessment:

A CNN analysis of the demography of the most competitive districts in the House of Representatives, almost all of which are now held by Republicans, shows that the outcome in 2018 appears poised to reinforce the divides familiar from Trump’s election in 2016.
Democrats’ top opportunities to capture Republican-held seats are concentrated in well-educated, higher-income and preponderantly white districts. Most of these seats are centered on economically thriving suburbs around major metropolitan areas where Trump faces widespread resistance among white-collar voters, especially women, on cultural and personal grounds.
With only a few exceptions, Democrats face more uncertain prospects in Republican-held House seats centered on the blue-collar, exurban and rural communities where Trump remains popular, the analysis found.

You can read the rest of that, but my point is that the Democrats and their media allies know whose votes they need to win Tuesday, which is why their propaganda messages (both in the liberal media and in Democrat campaign ads) are stressing certain themes, and ignoring any facts that might tend to alienate their targeted audience. Unless you seek out alternative news sources on the right — Fox News, Breitbart, etc. — there are some facts you simply don’t know about Democrat candidates and their policy agenda. For example, in Florida:

The 2012 slaying of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin ignited both the Black Lives Matter movement and the political career of Andrew Gillum, whose campaign against Florida’s “stand your ground” personal defense law was instrumental in elevating him to Tallahassee mayor.
Mr. Gillum is now on the cusp of winning Florida’s governorship — but BLM activism has been mostly disarmed as a political movement.
The demonstrations that dominated the 2016 election, cowing presidential contenders and dominating cable television shows, is missing in action in this year’s campaigns. . . .
Mr. Gillum, who would be Florida’s first black man elected to statewide office, invoked Martin’s name during a Democratic candidates debate before clinching the nomination in an upset. Since then he repeatedly accused his Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis, of racism.

Did you know that Gillum was part of #BlackLivesMatter and had made opposition to a homeowner’s right to self-defense a central focus of his 2014 campaign for mayor of Tallahassee? You probably didn’t, and I doubt most Florida voters have been reminded of this fact, nor have they been encouraged to think what this might mean for public safety in the Sunshine State if Gillum wins the gubernatorial election Tuesday.

Did you know the murder rate in Tallahassee is worse than Miami?

Sometimes I feel bad about having to constantly report unpleasant truth like this, almost as bad as I feel watching CNN to research how the “news” is being reported by the Democrat propaganda machinery.

UPDATE: Who’s campaigning for Democrats in Georgia?

Nothing to see here. Move along.



 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Election, Florida

Another ‘Incel’ Weirdo: Tallahassee Shooter Was Public School Teacher

Posted on | November 5, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Scott Beierle was weird. He was from upstate New York, graduated from SUNY-Binghamton in 2002 and later got a graduate degree at FSU:

Kristi Malone, who had a graduate class with Beierle, said in a Facebook message that she did not interact with him outside of the classroom because of “his odd leering, inappropriate comments and general demeanor.”
“I know that myself and several of my female colleagues made a point to never be alone with him even at school because of his odd behavior,” Malone said. . . .
Court records show that Beierle was charged by police with battery in 2016 after he slapped and grabbed a woman’s buttocks at an apartment complex pool. Records show that the charges were eventually dismissed after Beierle followed the conditions of a deferred prosecution agreement.
Beierle was also charged with battery in 2012 for grabbing women’s buttocks in a university campus dining hall. A FSU police report shows that Beierle told police he may have accidentally bumped into someone, but denied grabbing anyone.
In 2014, Beierle was charged with trespassing at FSU. He had been seen following an FSU volleyball coach near the campus gym and was told that he was banned from campus. A month later police found him at a campus restaurant.

Friday, Beierle walked into a yoga studio in Tallahassee and shot seven people, killing two women, before committing suicide. It turns out Beierle had been posting stuff online identifying as an “incel” (involuntary celibate), praising Santa Barbara killer Elliott Rodger, and recording punk rock songs with titles like “Homicidal Impulse” and “American Massacre.” He wrote lyrics like this:

If I cannot find a decent female to live with,
I will find many indecent females to die with.
Finally, I find that if I cannot make a living,
Then I will turn, to be successful, I will make a killing.

Did I mention he had been working as a substitute teacher?

At Deltona Middle, he earned a reputation among students for being lazy, detached and downright strange.
“He just gave off a psychopath vibe, like someone crazy,” said Samantha Mikolajczyk, 14, who had Beierle as a sub in her history class about a dozen times last year when she was in eighth grade. . . .
“He would never really smile, never gave off much except a really weird aura, I guess,” she said. “He would put you on edge if he was talking with you or you were alone with him. A lot of the students in my class used to make fun of him.” . . .
Mason Roberts, a 13-year-old eighth grader at Deltona and a friend of Samantha, said Beierle showed up as a substitute teacher in her language arts class once last year.
“He was very quiet,” she said. “He seemed just out of it, I guess. He seemed very lazy. And even when we asked him a question, he seemed not to care. He was really creepy. He didn’t do things like a substitute would normally do.” . . .
Mason’s mom, Allison Roberts, said she was shocked Beierle was ever allowed to teach. Beierle had a history of arrests, but not convictions, for grabbing young women around the campus of Florida State University, where he earned graduate degrees. She found out about Beierle on Saturday night, after her daughter mentioned it at dinner.
“I was very upset,” she said. “Someone with charges like that? How in the hell did he get in the classroom with my daughter? Anyone that’s got a history of being arrested for things such as that should absolutely not be around teenage girls or children period.”
Beierle also taught high school English and social studies in Anne Arundel County in Maryland from 2005 to 2007, according to WTOP of Washington, D.C. He resigned at the end of the 2006-2007 school year, district officials told the news station.

Left-wing sites describe Beierle as a “far-right misogynist”:

In one video called “Plight of the Adolescent Male,” Beierle named Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 in a shooting in Isla Vista, California. Rodger is often seen as a hero for so-called incels, or those who consider themselves “involuntarily celibate.”
“I’d like to send a message now to the adolescent males … that are in the position, the situation, the disposition of Elliot Rodger, of not getting any, no love, no nothing. This endless wasteland that breeds this longing and this frustration. That was me, certainly, as an adolescent,” Beierle said. . . .
Unlike the YouTube videos, Beierle’s songs on Soundcloud were all uploaded in the last few months. Shortly before Friday’s shooting, he uploaded one song called “Fuck ’Em All,” with the lyrics: “To hell with the boss that won’t get off my back / To hell with the girl I can’t get in the sack.” . . .
In a punk song he made called “Don’t Shame,” Beierle sang of walking into a girl’s locker room and going on an “ass-grabbing rampage of underage girls.” He also spoke about grabbing women in the song “Handful of Bare Ass.” . . .
“I have no shame, but this is to blame. I would do anything. I just don’t care. I have no fear of any consequences,” he sang.

So, you’re a 40-year-old loser can’t get laid, who has been twice arrested for sexual battery against women and, in your twisted mind, this justifies shooting random strangers? Identifying this loser as “far right” might serve some political purpose for the Left, as a guilt-by-association smear, but it does nothing to help us understand the psychology of weirdos like Scott Beirle. “He was very quiet. . . . He seemed just out of it,” as one of his former students described him. His “demeanor” was unsettling, as a former FSU classmate said. He recalled his adolescence as an experience of “not getting any, no love, no nothing.” He complained he could not “find a decent female to live with.” Shouldn’t reporters ask why?

When I was in school, our teachers taught us that a journalist should seek answers to six questions: Who, what, when, where, why and how?

Not everything can be explained in terms of partisan politics or ideology. The fact that Beierle expressed some “far right” opinions is enough to cancel any journalistic curiosity on the part of liberal writers who only care about constructing a political narrative, but it doesn’t explain how someone like Beierle — a once promising young man who was an Eagle Scout and football player in high school — ended up as a sexual pervert full of frustration and rage: “He was very quiet.”

The introverted boy who fails to attract any girlfriends as a teenager can very easily end up as a permanently frustrated loser like Beierle and nobody seems to care about this kind of social failure unless and until the loser becomes a dangerous criminal. Why don’t educators care about the developmental problems that are so apparent in the lives of guys like Scott Beierle? Why did no one intervene in his life when he was a teenager “not getting any, no love, no nothing”?

The why and how questions here aren’t necessarily political, although it would be very easy to blame feminism’s influence, as our educational system nowadays seems to care only about “empowering” girls. Our schools do not merely ignore the problems of boys, but rather appear to be systematically causing male failure, as evidenced by the declining levels of scholastic achievement among male students. We must also wonder what’s going on with the parents of these boys.

If your teenage son has never had a girlfriend — a total loser — shouldn’t you become concerned? I’m certain I would, because I understand that adolescence is a sort of game of romantic musical chairs. Teenagers naturally start “pairing up” into couples in high school, and kids who aren’t part of a couple are regarded as social misfits. It may seem cruel and unfair to adults that, in high school, the boys without girlfriends and the girls without boyfriends are labeled “losers,” but this harsh verdict reflects an underlying reality. The teenage loser has failed a crucial test of adolescent development, i.e., the ability to attract and form a romantic relationship with a member the opposite sex, and adults are behaving irresponsibly if we fail to recognize this kind of teenage social failure as a sign of potential trouble in later life. Beware of rationalization:

In psychology and logic, rationalization or rationalisation . . . is a defense mechanism in which controversial behaviors or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner to avoid the true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable — or even admirable and superior — by plausible means. . . .
Rationalization encourages irrational or unacceptable behavior, motives, or feelings and often involves ad hoc hypothesizing. This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly unconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt or shame).

The rationalizations of teenage losers often take the form of disparaging the opposite sex, and casting aspersions on more successful rivals. The unpopular fat girl dismisses the romantic success of her more attractive classmates by blaming boys for being “superficial” in their pursuit of pretty girls she considers vapid, ditzy airheads. The nerdy boy disparages as “sluts” the girls who chase after popular jocks. All such blame-games are merely a rationalization of failure. The homely girl who can’t get a boyfriend engages in rationalization when she explains that she’s just “picky” and doesn’t want to “lower her standards” by dating any of the ordinary boys who might actually be interested in her. She thereby indulges an unrealistic fantasy that, at some future point, the good-looking popular boy will stop dating pretty girls and instead prefer her.

It is considered cruel — an assault on the precious “self-esteem” of these teenage losers — to point out the delusional nature of their rationalizations. How dare you tell the truth? How dare you identify the most obvious and realistic explanation of their adolescent failure? We are not supposed to throw cold water on the fantasies with which these losers comfort themselves, but there’s a sort of magical thinking involved in these rationalizations — “wishcasting” — and if they are never compelled to confront reality, they will never learn effective ways of coping with their problems. This avoidance of reality is dangerous.

By the time he was in his 30s, Scott Beierle had been failing with women for so long that he exuded the unmistakable vibe of creepiness (“odd leering, inappropriate comments and general demeanor”) which is so characteristic of the desperate loser. Perhaps if someone had intervened in his life when he was 15 or 16, Beierle could have corrected his problems, but like so many other introverted losers, he drifted along silently for years and, by the time the warning signs started to become evident — grabbing women’s butts on the FSU campus — it was probably too late for him to recover from his loser habits.

Most journalists don’t want to dig too deep into the how and why of this problem. It’s easier just to label Beierle a “far right misogynist” than to attempt to understand the social processes that produce these mass-murdering monsters. Also, the media’s liberal bias causes them to avert their eyes from a deeper exploration of such cases, because it can be argued that liberalism is itself implicated in the monster-making process. Our public schools are controlled by Democrats, a fact demonstrable by the campaign contributions of teachers unions, and classrooms are experimental laboratories where social-justice cult beliefs (“self-esteem,” “diversity,” “gender equality,” etc.) are the prevalent ideology. Parents shocked that someone like Beierle was hired as a teacher — “How in the hell did he get in the classroom with my daughter?” — should start paying closer attention to the education system more generally.



 

Category: Crime, Education

Don’t Mess With Feng Zhu Chen

Posted on | November 4, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

You probably never heard of Feng Zhu Chen, but she is a great American. She works in the restaurant business and was living in Gwinnett County, Georgia. In the wee hours of Sept. 16, 2016, her roommate heard noises and awakened Chen, who grabbed her 9mm pistol and confronted three armed intruders. She opened fire, fatally wounding one of bad guys — Antonio Leeks, 28 — and sending the other two running for their lives.

The whole thing was caught on surveillance video, and one of the criminals ran through a glass door in his haste to escape.

 

Earlier this year, Gwinnett police arrested another suspect:

Bernard Eugene Little, 35, was arrested on March 29 and charged with felony murder and armed robbery for the Sept. 16, 2016 home invasion on Spring Drive, which occurred near the DeKalb County line in unincorporated Gwinnett County.
Police said Wednesday that though Little did not pulled the trigger — a woman who was staying in the burglarized home shot 28-year-old Atlanta resident Antonio Leeks after he, Little and one other man entered her home with guns at around 4 a.m. — Georgia law states that “a person commits the offense of murder when, in the commission of a felony, he or she causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice.”
While the third suspect has yet to be identified, the arrest comes as a win for detectives, who previously deemed the suspects to be “armed and dangerous.”

Imagine that: You and buddies decide to do a home invasion, your buddy gets shot to death and you escape, but you’re charged with murder for being an accomplice in a crime that caused his death.

Don’t mess with Feng Zhu Chen.

 

Category: Crime

Police: Black Gay Democrat Intern Committed Anti-Semitic Hate Crimes

Posted on | November 3, 2018 | Comments Off on Police: Black Gay Democrat Intern Committed Anti-Semitic Hate Crimes

These SJW torpedoes keep circling back around:

The suspect in the vandalism of a New York synagogue was a Democratic activist and former City Hall intern who worked on anti-hate crime issues, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
He is a “queer” black man informally adopted by a Jewish couple, and The New York Times’ charity, the Neediest Cases, helped pay for him to go to college where his focus was African American studies, according to a 2017 New York Times profile.
A political event with two Democratic candidates at the Union Temple of Brooklyn was canceled Friday after attendees found graffiti saying “Die Jew Rats” and “Hitler,” which one of the candidates said highlighted the need to vote out “hate.” Police arrested 26-year old James Polite later that night based on surveillance footage.
A year ago, The New York Times profiled Polite, noting that he was an LGBT foster youth who “could defy the statistics” after becoming the “adopted child of the Quinn administration,” as Christine Quinn, then the speaker of the New York city council, put it. “And it wasn’t just me. It was the entire City Council staff.”
In the 2017 profile, The New York Times said Polite . . . “interned with Ms. Quinn, a Manhattan Democrat, for several years, working on initiatives to combat hate crime, sexual assault and domestic violence. He also took part in her re-election campaign in 2009 and returned to help with her unsuccessful bid for mayor in 2013.” . . .
At 3:46 a.m. on Nov. 1, Polite posted a cell-phone picture of a burning American flag, with the caption “Sometimes things take a lil heat to grow.” Police suspect him of setting fires at “seven shuls and yeshivas in Williamsburg” that same night, before the temple vandalism. Security footage captured that, too. . . .
The Times’ charity, “The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, took over Mr. Polite’s case” as he aged out of the foster care system, and helped him attend Brandeis.
“Mr. Polite hopes to graduate in May with degrees in African-American studies and political science, and took two classes over the summer to stay on pace,” the profile said. . . .
Before it had been known that the suspect was a Democratic activist being paid by taxpayers to work on hate crime issues, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he was asking the state’s Hate Crimes Task Force to investigate the incident, and pointed to “an additional $10 million grant program to help protect New York’s non-public schools and cultural centers, including religious-based institutions. The disgusting rhetoric and heinous violence in this nation has reached a fever pitch and is ripping at the fabric of America.”

This story is so perfect it reads like an Onion parody.

 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Racism

‘ActBlue Is Killing Us’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



 

Category: Democrats, Election

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

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

by Smitty

READ PART 1 OVER AT Victory Girls

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

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

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

Now the plant has ground to a halt.

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

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

Category: Friday Fiction

ROAD TRIP!

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

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

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

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Shoe Leather Fund
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