Category: Trump

By My Accounting Antifa Just Lost Biden the Election

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So long COVID-19, hello domestic terrorist manhunt.  The electorate is a complicated jigsaw puzzle of competing priorities.  Race, ethnicity, age and sex factor into the calculations that parties and candidates have to make as to where to invest time and money trying to pick up votes and where not to bother.

As I mentioned yesterday, I think Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey just threw Minnesota firmly into the Trump camp.  Going beyond that I wouldn’t be surprised if we pick up a House seat or two.  I’ll explain why I said that.  President Trump has always had a difficult time garnering the votes of upper middle-class women.  The women I mean are office workers and middle managers who have families but also have feminist friends at work who constantly harangue them on the evils of President Trump.  And so even if they themselves are not man-hating harridans, they are sympathetic to the narrative of the evil patriarchy keeping down the virtuous and brilliant women of the world.

Because of this the President’s numbers have always been skewed toward men.  It is true that in 2016 he did win the white-woman-vote.  But in 2018 the republicans lost a number of seats because the white women’s vote turned sharply against them.  That was why so many women were in the 2020 Democrat Presidential field.  And that is why someone as crazy as Elizabeth warren is still in the running for Democrat VP.  Warrren is catnip to the angry woman’s vote.  I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if Warren was selected, although all things considered I still consider it more likely that another woman, Kamala Harris, will be the pick.  And that’s because Kamala also ticks off that exciting African-American box that is also so important to the Democrat coalition.  In this sense she’s a twofer.

And up until the COVID-19 debacle the Democrats had the added headache of an economy that was dropping African-American unemployment to all-time lows and boosting paychecks too.  Despite the recent public cases of celebrity African-Americans embracing President Trump such as Kanye West there is no danger of that vote shifting decisively to him.  But if there is no particular anger toward the President the danger for the Democrats is that the African American vote won’t show up in large numbers at all.  And that would more or less cook their goose.

But now we have a new wrinkle.  The rioting that Antifa has sparked after the death of George Floyd looks like it might cause the black vote to come out strongly for the Democrats.  But what it also will most probably do is push the white-woman-vote to the Republicans.  And the reason is quite simple.  No matter how you feel about President Trump’s relations with women if you’re a woman who works in a city or suburb seeing the rioters burning, looting and beating the inhabitants of your local metropolis and promising on social networks that they’re headed out to your suburb to finish the job you are probably plenty scared.  And since this is all going on without your local Democrat Mayor or Governor stopping it, you’re probably looking for a man who will.  And guess who that is?  That’s right, America’s most reviled patriarchal alpha male President Trump.  And all of a sudden, his strutting and posturing doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.  When that loser Mayor Jacob Frey abandoned the local police precinct to the looters and the arsonist and the area devolved into bedlam President Trump said that if the Governor didn’t bring in National Guard troops right away then he’d have to do it instead.  That probably sounds pretty reassuring to someone in St. Paul who hears that the rioters have crossed the river and will be in striking distance that night.  So that’s it in a nutshell.  The race riots will probably throw the black vote to Biden but it almost surely will throw the white-woman (and hispanic-woman) -vote to President Trump.  That’s a trade the Democrats can’t afford.

Combine that with the some of the revelations that are probably going to come out of the Russia-gate investigations and the improvements in the unemployment numbers that should begin to unfold in the third quarter and it looks difficult for Creepy Uncle Joe to keep up.  And one other thing should be interesting.  What will come out of the Antifa investigation?  Antifa is a guerilla organization that has been causing great harm but getting a free ride.  If some of their members are linked directly to the violence in Minneapolis that will make them Public Enemy Number One.  Antifa gets funding from Left-Wing sources such as George Soros.  If any of these sources turn out to be friends of Joe Biden or even Obama that would truly cook their goose.

The Long Hot Summer Begins

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The riots, looting and arson in Minneapolis have spread to other Democrat cities.  It’s a tricky proposition for the mayors and governors in those jurisdictions in terms of how far they let it go.  The Mayor of Minneapolis was willing to let the closest police precinct burn to the ground along with all the stores and even banks in the area.  Now that the anarchy has spread to nearby St. Paul it’s probable that state officials are in a panic to put a stop to the chaos.  I don’t know enough about Minneapolis politics to know if the Mayor there is immune from voter outrage.  But even a city like New York back in the late eighties with a very large minority population finally reached a point where law and order problems created a backlash that brought in Rudy Giuliani.  Whether Minneapolis is simply too liberal to ever retreat from the appeasement of crime approach is about to be seen.

And all the usual suspects are on tv stirring the pot.  The Mayor of Chicago somehow blames the President.  It should be interesting to see whether Lori Lightfoot’s city ends up burning down too.  To her credit the Mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Bottoms, addressed the senselessness and stupidity of the rioters destroying their own city.  In a small ironic twist, the rioters have smashed some parts of the CNN headquarters in Atlanta.

The manufactured nature of the riots is so blatant that even the left-wing press has acknowledged it.  The inner-city population is looting the stores but wherever the damage is worst you can see some blond-headed twenty something at the center smashing a store window or lighting a Molotov cocktail.  This is Antifa’s show.  They ignited it and they’re keeping it going.

The bigger picture is what will be the political fallout from a spasm of violence and lawlessness running through the cities of the United States during an election year.  President Trump has to very carefully choreograph his response to the events on the ground.  He’ll profess anger for the death of George Floyd but he’ll have to condemn in the strongest terms the evil madness of the rioters.  And if finally, the governor in Minnesota fails to take control of the chaos the President will have to step in.  Taken all together I think this chaos will hurt the Democrats.  It’s reminiscent of the street violence in 1968 that helped elect Richard Nixon president.  Even voters in Democrat controlled states fear the violence and destruction that a mob unleashes when it riots.  It wouldn’t surprise me if this increases President Trump’s margin when he flips Minnesota in November.  And looking down the road it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that both Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey get the boot in a few years when they’re up for re-election.

And one last consequence of this madness is what it will do to the COVID-19 situation.  I predict that we’re going to hear a lot less about the “pandemic.”  I noticed that a lot of the rioters weren’t social distancing as they looted the various stores and offices and I assume that when you’re running from a mob or a National Guard riot squad that a face mask will be too hard to breathe through.  A lot of citizens may figure if it’s good enough for the mob it’s good enough for them.

The Glorious Paradox That is Biden

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In 1 Corinthians 9:22 St. Paul says “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.”  To some extent, a presidential candidate must do that.  He must be all things so that all the various special interest groups can buy into his story.  And for a Democrat candidate that’s a very diverse group of special interests.  He’s got the black vote and the feminist vote and the Latino vote, the gay vote and the lesbian vote and now he even has the trans vote.  Well, that’s their shtick after all.  But this year threading that needle is going to be extra tricky for Creepy Uncle Joe.  Take for instance the feminist vote.  Tara Reade has made that sale interesting.  Although several feminists have openly said that even if they believe Joe Biden sexually assaulted Reade back in 1993, they would still vote for him in November.  Columnist Katha Pollitt puts aside all doubts about whether morality is involved in her election calculus.  She stated, “I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them.”  Well that’s refreshingly honest.  Another woman, Lisa Bloom, flatly states that she does believe Reade’s claim but she’s endorsing Biden anyway.  And she’s a women’s rights attorney!  Ain’t that a kick in the head!

What all this tells me is that Joe is not going to energize the feminist vote.  And if the feminists aren’t feeling it, they’re not going to be very effective proselytizing their less strident sister in the next cubicle over.  I mean how persuasive is an argument that ends with, “So you see Joe Biden has many fewer rape allegations against him than his opponent.”  I think a lot of women will feel that argument leaves them a little underwhelmed.

Now let’s look at the black vote.  A few days ago, Biden had a video interview with a black social media personality who calls himself, and I kid you not, Charlamagne tha God (CTG).  On his radio show called the Breakfast Club he tried to pin down Biden on what gimmees he would promise to the black community.  But Biden resisted saying “You got more questions, but I tell ya, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Now this comment raised howls of anger from the African Americans on both the Left and Right.  But Biden’s supporters aren’t actually offended by the patronizing remark.  But they want him to know they haven’t signed on the dotted line.  They want a black woman as his running mate and they want money.

CTG stated, “If you created legislation that hurt [the black community], then you have to create legislation that helps. It’s just that simple. Like, the whole system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt,” McKelvey said in a Friday interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett. “He’s been a very intricate part of that system, whether you’re talking about in ’84 with mandatory minimum sentences for drug dealers, or you’re talking about ’86 with crack laws that gave you more time for crack cocaine than powder cocaine, or you’re talking about the ’94 crime bill, like he really was one of those people on the front line when it came to the war on drugs and mass incarceration.”  “If he wants to be president, he needs to fix that. He needs to really, really help the people that have helped Democrats all of these years,” he added.  And on another interview, he added he wants details on Biden’s “slavery reparations” stance.

To me it’s pretty clear that Biden’s support in the black community is extremely conditional.  To tie it up he will have to promise some extremely expensive programs.  And chances are he really can’t deliver on those.  And even more problematic, if he makes those promises it is going to jeopardize his support from other parts of his fractious coalition.

Now the final piece of the puzzle has less to do with the special interest groups and more to do with self-preservation.  Over the course of the last six months Joe Biden has made so many verbal gaffes that everyone including the republicans has stopped paying attention to them.  He not only commits factual errors like forgetting what state he’s in or what office he’s running for but he has on occasion lapsed into spouting gibberish in an attempt to finish off some thought that he’s lost the thread of.  It’s gotten to the point that even his own constituency has stopped denying that he’s becoming senile.  So, if you’re an independent and even if you’re not a Trump fan you’d have to hesitate before voting to put a man as intellectually compromised as Biden in charge of the largest thermonuclear stockpile on the face of the Earth.

So, there we have it.  The Democrats had to anoint Biden because otherwise Bernie Sanders would have been the candidate and he’s a Communist Loon.  But Joe is essentially a lying, plagiarizing, sex predator suffering from advanced senile dementia.  Oh, and he allowed his son to cash in on his political connections to the tune of about a billion dollars from China and the Ukraine.  It seems to me even taking into account the equivalent of the Great Depression descending on us after the COVID-19 debacle it’s going to be mighty hard to lift Joe Biden into the White House.  Even in these benighted times that may be too much to expect from the American people.  We’re nuts but we’re not Biden nuts.

14MAY2020 – Boosting My Morale

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I remember how much fun it was to watch the compilation videos of the 2016 election and the reactions of the Left.  To hear them go from arrogant assurance to nervous uncertainty to shocked disbelief and finally crash land into wallowing misery was a comedic masterpiece on par with the best of Seinfeld or Monty Python.  The loopiness of the lefties both famous and unknown was marvelous.  Their gob-smacked stuttering shock was music to my ears.  In every way it was poetic justice.

And I’ve missed that experience.  It’s a great tonic to see your enemies driven before you in panic and derision.  At the very least, it’ll be six months until the election and even the debates, if they happen, are months away.  So, what’s a deplorable to do?

YouTube may be the Great Satan but it is the lazy man’s answer to any audio-visual search that could exist.  So, I searched under President Trump and Acosta and I found all kinds of comic gold.  It really is remarkable just how much abuse Jim Acosta has absorbed in the last three years.  President Trump has called him a hack, a liar, a purveyor of fake news, an employee for a fake news network.  The only thing he hasn’t done is make fun of his mother.  And then I saw some videos purporting to show the President attacking female reporters unfairly.  More gold.  For them his favorite line is calling their questions nasty.  One compilation claimed that the President especially attacked women of color.  And of course, that was the focus of that video.  But it’s great to see the President doling out equal derision and scorn to all fake news purveyors regardless of race, color or sex.  In fact, I like to think that the President would be proud to give the same messages of scorn to a tall muscular man in a sun dress as he does to a petite Chinese woman or a plain old doofus like Jim Acosta.  His message is one of egalitarianism.  No matter who you are and what you look like all it takes to qualify as a purveyor of fake news is a bedrock lack of honesty and an IQ of about 85.  In a way the White House Press Corps has become a sort of Ellis Island or mixing pot of dishonest talking heads.  Probably the biggest distinguishing characteristic is just how rude any particular reporter is willing to be to the President of the United States.  In this competition women have without a doubt taken the lead.  And this is another area where women’s rights could advance.  I have always harbored the hope that one day in the middle of one of Acosta’s rude outbursts against the President that he would instruct the Secret Service to drag Acosta out by the arms and legs and hurl him out the door.  If they tossed him just right, I always thought that he might bounce a couple of times like when you skip a flat stone over the surface of a lake.  The move could be nick-named the “Acosta.”  What would be great is if someday a woman could be acosta-ed just like a man without any sexism about how women aren’t just as capable of two or even three bounces on that polished White House floor.  That is my dream.  That a reporter not be judged by the choice of its pronouns but rather on the basis of its aero dynamicity and bounce elasticity.  Kinda chokes you up, don’t it?  I can almost hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic playing somewhere in the background.

13MAY2020 – OCF Update

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Looking around it looks like we’ll be hearing about the same issues for the foreseeable future:

  • The Blue and Red States will be touting their opposing strategies for weathering the COVID-19 epidemic. Currently the Blue States have selected as their strategy of inflating the death toll to include anyone who dies in their states.  Along with this they are dragging their feet on re-opening their businesses.  The Red States are moving ahead with normalizing life in their states.  Interestingly they are not seeing large numbers of deaths like we see in New York and New Jersey.  And even with the death toll inflation in the Blue States it appears they haven’t been able to hide the fact that the epidemic is receding.  I’ll predict that in a couple of more weeks even the blue States will be anxious to declare victory and start opening up their businesses and try to salvage their economies.
  • The Flynn prosecution will spawn a controversy with the Right touting the DOJ investigation into the illegal basis of the Russia-gate prosecutions and the Left condemning Barr and Durham as partisan hacks motivated by allegiance to the Trump administration. With Durham releasing information about the scope of the conspiracy this may quickly turn into the most interesting story of the summer and fall.  If the DOJ decides not to prosecute the conspirators but instead expose and embarrass them through publication of their dishonest actions it could have the effect of vindicating President Trump and vilifying Obama and his whole administration.  And that would be very bad for a Biden candidacy.
  • The Trump and Biden campaigns will spar ceaselessly over any and all issues. What you will hear endlessly is that Joe Biden is ahead by some number of points, between 5% and 10%.  It’ll never be explained how someone as universally disdained by even the Democrat voters as Biden could manage to remain perpetually popular and ahead but that is their story and they’ll be sticking to it.
  • Currently the Tara Reade story will be a lightning rod allowing the Republicans to brand anyone who condemned Justice Kavanaugh on the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford but disbelieves Reade about Biden as hypocrites. If Reade begins to gain traction with women voters, I think we’ll finally see the Democrat party either convince Biden to step aside or begin the process of selecting an alternate candidate.  And that will be a difficult process.  Bernie Sanders will be bypassed again and that is bound to alienate his many staunch supporters.  If Bernie is left waiting at the altar again the Bernie Bros will stay home in droves, or even worse, a bunch of them will vote for Trump.
  • Nancy Pelosi has assembled a three trillion-dollar bill that would allow the bankrupt Blue States to stick the federal government with the cost of the public sector union pension funds. The Senate Leader Mitchell McConnell isn’t interested in funding this.  But President Trump may be interested in additional relief for small businesses that have been crushed by the long shutdown.  He may try to broker a deal between the House and Senate.  I know that the President also favors some kind of public works projects.  This will be a large story in the fall.
  • The China story will be a continuing saga for the Trump re-election campaign. The President has indicated that he holds China responsible for the outbreak and the subsequent damage to the American economy.  It remains to be seen if this translates into a specific policy or policies.  You could imagine some kind of incentive for American companies that relocate industrial capacity from China to the United States.

As you can see these are interesting times but currently all of these issues will be moving forward in fits and starts.  Right now, none of them has a blockbuster event occurring so there will be a lot of opinion stories producing a lot of smoke and heat but little light.  I’ll try to restrain myself from piping in on every little ripple in the pond.  What I’m hoping to see is something from Durham.  As I’ve said, I don’t think we’ll get anything too spectacular.  But I would like to see something before summer.  Failing that I’d like to see the President formulate an economic rescue plan for small businesses that is more comprehensive and fairer than the halfway measures we’ve seen so far.

So, there’s my update.  Stay tuned for whatever is breaking next.

What’s the Lesson from General Flynn’s Case?

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The information that has been released from the FBI files on the Flynn case and the House Investigation of the Russia probe is surprisingly clear.  When subjected to the light of day there is no way to disguise the fact that federal law enforcement personnel at the highest levels deliberately conspired to railroad President Trump’s National Security Advisor out of office and into a criminal conviction.

There was no legal justification for this but they figured out a way to blackmail Flynn into it.  And they did it because they figured once they had stripped Flynn away from the new President, they could use the Russia hoax to get a special prosecutor appointed and use that office to attack the new administration in concert with the press and the deep state.  If that isn’t treason, I don’t know what is.

Contemplating that the Justice Department of the United States felt no hesitation to commit these acts during the commencement of a new Presidential Administration surely should give any American pause when considering whether his own constitutional rights are secure in the United States.  Other than unimportance what makes me think that the FBI would hesitate for a millisecond before dragging me down to one of their interrogation rooms and providing me with an even less favorable choice than the one they gave General Flynn.  Imagine that an unaccountable government goon tells you that either you will plead guilty to a crime you didn’t commit, that could earn you ten years in prison or your son will be prosecuted and imprisoned for an even longer period.

In the last twenty years we have grown accustomed to the diminution of our freedoms in the name of greater security.  In an alleged effort to keep Islamic terrorists from blowing up our planes every old grandmother in a wheelchair is subjected to indignities and all of us have to submit to complete surveillance of our every financial transaction and personal communication of all kinds.  Of course, that hasn’t stopped obvious foreign terrorists from striking at every level of American life.  And when it happens, we have to listen to harangues explaining how it’s our bigotry that inspired the violence.  But we acceded to the indignities and accepted the surveillance.

But now we find that the security apparatus is our new master.  All pretense that we are free men has been ended.  The FBI has the means to incriminate us using these new extra-constitutional powers.  And worse, they have the will to do it too.  Well, I’m sorry.  I no longer care whether the FBI is protecting me from Islamic terrorists or roving bands of cannibals.  I want them gone.  I want the President’s highest priority to be firing every last idiot with the letters FBI emblazoned across his stupid windbreaker.  I don’t even care if the Russians, the Chinese and the North Koreans steal the gasoline out of my gas tank and the chimney off my house.  At least they won’t be able to haul me off to the gulag for failing to genuflect to Comrade Obama and his dictatorial thugs.

The FBI from its beginnings has spied on the American people.  It has spied on our leaders and it has used this spying to blackmail and coerce the government into doing its bidding.  That is too dangerous a tool for our country to possess.  It seems to me that the Justice Department already has plenty of employees.  It needs to be dismantled.  It needs its fangs pulled.

That is a tall order.  It’s doubly so because the Attorney General, Bill Barr wouldn’t dream of extracting the jewel in the crown of his department.  I’m not even sure he’ll clean out the viper’s nest that is responsible for the outrage they perpetrated against this country.  If Barr and Durham had any sense of proportion, they would know that their precious FBI is a worse curse than the COVID-19 epidemic or the September 11th Attack.  What he should do is have a press conference where he apologizes to the American people for the organized crime cartel that he’s perpetrating on the rest of us.  He should fire everyone in the bureau from the top down until he finds someone who’s willing to expose the plot that we’ve lived through for the last four years.  That’s what he should do.  And then the President should demand Congress draft legislation to revoke the Patriot Act.  And if they won’t he should have his Solicitor General petition the Supreme Court to find it unconstitutional.  If the Congress squawks about that tell them to work on a constitutional amendment.  That should keep them busy for about twenty years.

Anyway, this rant is to say that it’s clear we now live in a police state.  It’s run by the FBI with additional surveillance provided by the tech companies.  In 1984 Orwell named the security agency in his dystopia “The Ministry of Love.”  If we know what’s good for us, we’ll make eliminating the Ministry of Love our highest priority.  At the very least, prosecuting all the Obama apparatchiks should be a survival reflex for the Trump Administration.  These people are hell bent on destroying a free society.  With them having a strangle hold on our government this truly is an Orwellian nightmare.  I think I’d prefer to live under a simple dictatorship.  At least it would be easier to figure out the rules.

The DOJ Drops Criminal Case Against General Flynn

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Finally!  Let’s hope the idiot judge has brains enough to know the jig is up and drops the case. In the article they mention Flynn is over $4 million dollars in debt from legal bills and had to sell his house.  His lawyer is going to have a field day.  Hey maybe Peter Strzok is a good target for a law suit.  How about Comey and McCabe?  Man, do I hate those creeps.

Who is the Next Donald Trump?

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President Trump has been a seismic event in American politics.  For the first time in generations a man dared to speak the truth about like illegal immigration, off-shoring of American jobs and even whole industries to China and malign neglect of the working class in this country.  You have to go all the way back to Ronald Reagan to find someone who challenged the status quo and rallied the country behind a Pro-American platform.  And even though he’s been attacked relentlessly by every aspect of the Elite centers of power he managed to revive the economy and give conservative voters hope that things could be fixed.  And despite the apocalyptic appearance of the COVID-19 epidemic I fully expect him to be re-elected in November and do even more to turn this country around on the social and economic aspects of life here.

But in 2025 there will be a new president.  Maybe Mike Pence will be Vice President in 2024 and that may provide him with presumptive front runner status in the Republican primary race.  But what I’m interested in is who is out there right now that possesses the instincts and talents that could rival the kind of success that President Trump has demonstrated when squaring off against our enemies?

One guess might be another businessman.  In fact, let’s look at the essence of Donald Trump’s background.  He was born into wealth accrued by his father as a real estate developer in New York City.  So, you have a wealthy businessman who isn’t part of the Wall Street crowd.  Later he took some of his business interests public like the casinos, with decidedly disastrous results for his stockholders.  What that tells me is that he is an outsider of the corporate establishment.  His business is based on his family ownership of real estate assets in New York City and the connections with government and local business communities that he has built up over the course of his life.  In my mind that may be the kind of man we might expect to possess the skills we need.

Another possibility is someone like Tucker Carlson.  He apparently has decided that he wants to take on the elites on behalf of the working class, Christians, straight white men and other despised groups who fall into the category of deplorables.  Having grown up as one of the elites, he has quite a lot of information about them and he seems to have a convert’s zeal to repair the damage done by his former comrades.  Does he have the grit it takes to stand up to the kind of dirt they would throw at him?  It’s hard to say.  Having been part of the media for many years he may have all kinds of dirt they can expose against him.  Could he endure something akin to what Billy Bush did to Donald Trump during the campaign?  I think that’s hard to say.  But we may find out.  I have a feeling that Carlson has an interest in politics.

What about conventional politicians?  Ted Cruz?  Rand Paul?  Ron DeSantis? Mike Pence?  I think someone like DeSantis might be a possibility.  I favor a governor over a senator.  And DeSantis is showing determination in the way he’s running Florida.  That’s a tough place for a conservative to flourish.

Mike Pence?  If you had asked me back in 2016, I’d have said definitely no.  Seeing him fold like a cheap suit when that weasel George Stephanopoulos grilled him about the pro-religion law that he passed in Indiana was disgusting.  After eight years of working for President Trump he’ll certainly have learned a lot.  But can you learn instinct?  Can you learn grit?  I think Mike Pence would have to prove himself to me and many others before we’d believe he has the right stuff.

Finally, how about going back to President Trump for a successor.  How about Donald Jr.?  This one is intriguing.  A father is always a bad judge of the talents of his children.  I think we’ll have to wait to see if Don Jr. begins acting like a presidential candidate.

One thing I’m quite sure of is that we’ll be best served by having a long series of debates in which the candidates attack each other mercilessly.  I believe 2016 has shown that a gentlemanly discussion is useless for picking a leader.  We need plain talk and hard questions to find out who is strong enough to knock off the Democrat nominee.  I’m very much looking forward over the next few years to see who emerges on the Right as a successor to President Trump.  I only hope whoever it is that he has half the brains and guts of the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Finally, Some of the States Are Waking Up and Even Here in the Gulag, Signs of Life

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Fifteen US states are beginning the process of getting back to normal.  States like Georgia and Arkansas are shedding most of the restrictions while Florida and Texas are selectively and incrementally opening up.  And with the two-week increments proposed to step through the process there may be big chunks of the country completely back to normal by June.  And that will be an important outcome.  Lots of economic opportunities are associated with the summer vacation schedule, so this could allow many small businesses to salvage something from the wreckage of this year.

The next milestone I’m waiting for is when the medical community admits that we’re on the downward side of the daily-new-death curve.  From my reading of it we’re already over the hump.  Even with the Blue States, for the last two weeks, calling every death a COVID-19 death, it looks like we’re about to break through.  The last five days have been steadily lower and lower totals.  So, we may hear them admit it soon.

And in addition to the progress in other parts of the country the folks in the blue states are starting to get tired of this too.  You’ve heard about protests in Michigan, Virginia and California.  Well even in the very heart of cower-in-place New England, folks are starting to ignore some of the rules.  They’re going outside for no reason!  They’re walking around without masks!  And, horror of horrors they’re going to visit relatives without a car window or a wall between them.  I was overjoyed on Sunday when my daughter and her family came over and hung around with us in the yard for a couple of hours.  And I swear I could see how much my grandsons have grown since I saw them last!  It was great.  They came to install some raised beds for Camera Girl’s gardens and they did us both a world of good just seeing and talking to them face to face.  It didn’t hurt that it broke seventy degrees yesterday for the first time this spring.  And right on cue, the road past my house was full of motorcycle riders thundering by in droves.

So, all at once we’re waking up and I can sense that nothing will slow it down.  Not even a spike in deaths.  I think even in blue states people are starting to realize this was a bad idea.  The shutdown didn’t stop the deaths.  It probably didn’t even slow it down.  It was already too late to stop the infections in the larger cities from reaching the elderly in those high-density areas.

The next fight will be over the blue states trying to get the federal government to bail them out from their civil service retirement entitlements.  I’m hoping that President Trump won’t want to do that and instead will concentrate on helping small businesses and restarting the economy.  With the election season upon us he’ll do everything he can to cheerlead the economy and eliminate problems for the people trying to get their lives back on track.  At this point Joe Biden seems to be almost a non-issue in the election.  It’s up to the President to call the shots and give us back our hope in the future.  And I think he can.

Well to paraphrase the Bard, “Now is the winter of our discontent turned glorious summer by this Son of New York.”