Is It Just the Economy, Stupid?

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The polls seem to indicate that the Democratic Party is going to receive the equivalent of a good stiff knee to the groin on Tuesday night.  Of course, that’s wonderful news and no surprise.  But analyzing the reason why is important too.  If this is completely explained by the double-digit inflation and the skyrocketing crime wave engulfing the cities then it’s still good news.  But I hope it’s more than that.

What I’m hoping is that it is partially explained by a large chunk of independent voters reacting to the Democrats’ behavior during the lockdowns.  Being bullied for two years and then finding out that the bullying was all for nothing should have a lot of people really angry.  And now that more people are realizing how dangerous the side effects from these unnecessary and ineffective drugs are I can imagine that adding to the anger and the desire to get some payback.

You might ask why it matters if it’s more than just a reflex action by people unhappy about inflation and crime.  It’s simple.  If there’s any hope of this country returning things to sanity (never mind normalcy) it will depend on a solid majority rejecting the Democrat party categorically.  They have to stop seeing the two parties as legitimate alternatives.  We’ll only start fixing things when the Democrats can be kept out of power for a couple of cycles.  Enough time has to pass that laws can be passed to repair the damage that’s been done to the institutions of government.  All vestiges of the programs and policies that the Democrats have promulgated must be flushed down the drain and reasonable policies adopted.  And that will only happen when a stable majority that rejects their madness has emerged.

Of course, that assumes that such a majority exists.  I often wonder whether there are enough sane people among the Millennials and their younger brethren to allow this country to recover.  I think it’s far from certain that there are that many normal people in the next generation.  But we’ll get a chance to find out starting Tuesday.  And we’ll need to run the table from now on until things improve.  2022, 2024, 2026, 2028, 20230, 2032.  That’s a really long time to hold onto power in Washington.  The last time that happened was during the Reagan era.  The Republicans held the White House for twelve years.  Of course, Bush Senior was a RINO who single-handedly handed the country over to the Clintons by lousing everything up.

It would take an extraordinarily savvy politician to manage the fickle American electorate for that amount of time.  Basically, it’ll take a miracle.  And the Stupid Party doesn’t do miracles.  They do stupid.  But stranger things have happened.  The exact right man may appear at the exact right time and save us from the miserable fate that seems to be pursuing us.

But one thing’s for sure.  We’ll never have a more compelling case for kicking the Democrats out of power than we have right now.  Inflation, recession, crime, culture war madness, COVID fascism, you name it.  What happens after that is a matter of political savvy and determination.  And of course, a large dollop of luck.

The Reality of Crime is Racist, According to the Left

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I read this long emotionally fraught article about Republicans using election advertising on crime as a dishonest but very effective tactic against Democrats in the mid-term elections.  So, it went into all of the reasons why voters are swayed by this type of ad.  They mentioned how crime is a visceral subject that elicits fear.  And fear is very powerful.  They admitted that all the large cities actually are experiencing enormous upticks in all crime since 2020.  They even admit that the Democrat candidates are easily linked to things like cashless bail and policies advocating releasing convicted criminals for even offenses like murder.  But finally at the end of the article it fell back on the old refrain that using crime as an election issue is RACIST!  They even went all the way back to 1988 and dug up the Willie Horton ads that Bush Senior used against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis during the presidential election.  And they lament how racist that was.  After all Willie Horton was black.  He was also a murderer who was furloughed on his own recognizance from prison by Dukakis’s program only to flee and then commit rape and other crimes.  But mentioning such crimes is by the Left’s definition racist.

Well, I guess if they claim that black voters are racists because they want to reduce crime then maybe that is a defensible position.  After all New York City voters elected Mayor Eric Adams, a black former police officer, who ran as the law-and-order candidate, because they were alarmed by the skyrocketing violent crime wave that had engulfed the city during and after the George Floyd riots.  Were the majority non-white residents secret white supremacists?  Is Eric Adams a white supremacist because he embraces the dog whistle term “law and order?”  It seems difficult to imagine.

I think what the article was trying to say is that calling it racist is the only hope the Democrats have of defeating the tactic of using crime as a weapon against them.  If they can frighten the Republicans away from using crime then they will deprive them of a very potent weapon.

Back in June the media tried to use gaslighting by claiming that all their research showed that the potent issues in the 2022 elections would be abortion and threats to democracy.  Basically they were telling the Republicans that those were the only acceptable election topics they could use.  Finally, a few months ago they admitted that inflation would be the biggest negative for them but they still contended that crime was a very minor issue.

Well, here we are a week out from election and they’ve finally faced the facts.  Crime is the second biggest issue.  And in some areas, like the suburbs around the most dangerous cities it might be the biggest.  And in a roundabout way this article sort of admits that there’s no way to deflect these attacks because basically they’re true.  And with nothing they can do about those facts all they can do is claim that pointing out those facts is racist.

Very well, reality is racist.  But reality has a habit of rearing its racist head when people who depend on make believe can least afford it to.  If you have district attorneys releasing hardened criminals in cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia and those criminals then commit murders and assaults, it’s not surprising if voters decide to punish your party.

When even cobalt blue New York state might elect a Republican governor then we know that something has gone profoundly wrong.  Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one in the “Empire State.”  Nothing but fear can account for this ideological shift.  And nothing but fear can account for the magazine Vox admitting the truth; that they own the crime problem and it’s going to do them in this year at the polls.  Sucks being them.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 02NOV2022 – Affirmative Action

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In 2003, Sandra Day O’Conner (Herself, a beneficiary of affirmative action) cast the deciding vote in Grutter vs Bollinger and cemented racial discrimination as the law of the land.

In her ruling, she said “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”

That is a mind-blowing statement coming from a Supreme Court Justice. To paraphrase: “This thing is constitutional now but won’t be in the future.” Talk about your living documents! Are there any other rights that fade in and out like that?

 

Now there is another case before the SCOTUS regarding AA.

Some of the back and forth looks really interesting:

Justice Thomas asked Ryan Park to describe the actual benefit of a diverse classroom.

Park responded that in studies involving stock trading results, “racially diverse groups of people … perform at a higher level.”

“The mechanism there is that it reduces groupthink and that people have longer and more sustained disagreement, and that leads to a more efficient outcome,” Park said.

Thomas responded, “I guess I don’t put much stock in that because I’ve heard similar arguments in favor of segregation, too.”

Boom!

And then there was this exchange between Waxman and Roberts: (Waxman is the lawyer defending Harvard’s racial discrimination policies.)

  1. WAXMAN: No, I know. I’m –I’m attempting to answer your question.

There is no doubt that for –as the testimony showed, that for applicants who are essentially so strong on multiple dimensions, so extraordinarily strong on multiple dimensions that they are sort of on the bubble, that they might –they have a real candidate for admission, African American –being African American or being Hispanic or in some instances being Asian American can provide one of many, many tips that will put you in.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, people say that, yes, but you will have to concede, if it provides one of many, that in some cases it will be determinative.

  1. WAXMAN: I do. I do concede that.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. So we’re talking about race as a determining factor in admission to Harvard.

Kaboom!

 

Waxman tried to recover and said that “Race, for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor, just as being, you know, an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip,”

“We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players,” Roberts replied. “We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination, and that’s why it’s a matter of considerable concern.”

 Atomic Boom!

 

It would seem that the 25 years Justice O’Conner was speaking of was not until society matured past the need for affirmative action (That will never happen as long as one group benefits at the expense of another.) but that it would take 25 years before we got a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

It looks like it will be 19 years and not Sandy’s full 25.

Trump can mean tweet all he wants in return for this Supreme Court.

A Day in the Life – photog Interrupted

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I’m back, I’m back!  I was in election jail.  I was being trained.  Oh, the horror, the horror.  Please pity me.  I will live to regret getting involved in this flying circus.  No power in the ‘Verse will be able to make this turn out right.  But I’m committed and the wheels are in motion.

That was last night.  Today I was out of state and helping out a friend.  It involved travelling through rush hour traffic on an alternate route with too many lights and not enough lanes.  Just my luck the main highway had a major accident and copious amounts of traffic spilled onto the road I was on.  I watched in horror as my remaining time and gasoline trickled away into history as I sat in crawling traffic.  The magical E mark on the gas gage and the digital clock on my dashboard competed for my attention.  Finally, the gas gage won and I exited into a station.  Imagine my horror when the gas pump refused to work!  It would deliver about eleven cents worth of gas and then the valve would bang shut.  Like some pre-technological savage, I mumbled some kind of incantation to the gods of petroleum and performed mysterious wrist turns to put the gas nozzle at some undefined angle to align the earth and the flow mechanism to ensure a sacred resonance that would grant me more gas.  After ninety-nine cents of gas had been delivered (or more likely, had been falsely charged) I gave up.  As a beaten man I returned to the road and its molasses-like flow.

My anger was increased when I observed that there had been no increase in the remaining milage in my tank according to the gage’s wisdom, none at all.  Those eleven cents-es were completely false.  If any of the people on the road were watching me at that point, they would have seen someone screaming to himself and gesticulating like a demented idiot at his dashboard and this witness might have been tempted to call the police for my own good.

When I finally reached my destination, I was a half hour late and below E on the gage.  Luckily, the time limit turned out to be either incorrect or a ruse to get me there sooner.  This caused very mixed feelings in my soul.  But eventually I saw the humor (somewhat).  And once the race was over the rest of the errand became suddenly stress free and enjoyable.  It was another one of those beautiful fall days that inexplicably appear out of the teeth of typical drab New England clammy cold.  It was sunny and in the mid-sixties.  I had a nice snack and very good cup of coffee before heading home and at the next Mobil station I filled the tank with no other pain than the usual financial outrage that is now the standard reaction to life in Creepy Uncle Joe’s America.  Now with the needle on the right side of the F, I drove with a smile in my heart and a country song on my car’s music system.  It was Tobey Keith’s “Red Solo Cup.”  And in my new-found joy I sang along with Tobey and suddenly I hadn’t a care in the world.

When I got home Camera Girl saw what a good mood I was in so she told me to empty the mouse bucket traps in the sheds.  Well, that brought me back to reality.  Nothing like bloated soggy rodents to put things in perspective.  But still.  It was a bright warm day and the crows looked happy to see my dead mice down by the swamp.  The circle of life, and all that.  And I saw some good comments on the site and I was reminded that Senator Murkowski is about to be fired in favor of someone on our side of the fence.  And that cheered me up quite a bit.  And tonight, is split pea and sausage soup which is a very hearty and savory delight.  So even though the day was interrupted, I feel that life provided the right ingredients for a successful foray into the world.  Life is good.