Tag: Politics

What Do the Poll Numbers Tell Me?

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For decades I’ve noticed that political polls in the United States had a very noticeable bias.  Depending on whether they were ridiculously partisan polls or just slightly biased they would skew more or less to the Left.  They were able to produce this bias by overestimating the percentage of the population that is Democrat and underestimating the Republican share.  And it was just assumed by me that we had to throw our own fudge factor in when trying to make sense of the actual political situation from these flawed measures.

But look at Joe Biden’s approval ratings on RCP now.

Polling Data

Poll Date Sample Approve Disapprove Spread
RCP Average 1/10 – 2/13 — 40.6 53.8 -13.2
Rasmussen 2/9 – 2/13 1500 LV 42 57 -15
Reuters 2/7 – 2/8 1005 A 43 51 -8
YouGov 2/5 – 2/8 1255 RV 41 51 -10
Susquehanna 2/3 – 2/9 800 LV 42 52 -10
Politico 2/5 – 2/6 2005 RV 41 55 -14
IBD/TIPP 2/2 – 2/4 1355 A 38 48 -10
CNN 1/10 – 2/6 1257 RV 42 57 -15
Monmouth 1/20 – 1/24 735 RV 38 55 -17
Insider Advantage 1/21 – 1/23 850 LV 40 59 -19
Harris 1/19 – 1/20 1815 RV 39 53 -14

 

These are horrible numbers.  And they’re close to accurate.  Rasmussen is one of the few pollsters that doesn’t favor Democrats.  He’s got Dementia Joe at 42 – 57.  CNN which is perpetually in the tank for the Dems has 42 – 57.  That’s not an accident.  Those are real numbers.  And why are they doing this?  Because Biden’s numbers with Democrats are terrible too.  Or in another way to look at it, a lot of the people who voted for Biden have switched parties.  The proportion of voters who claim to be Democrats has shrunk.  They’ve shifted to the Republicans or at least to Independents.  And they mean that they’ll be voting for Republicans even though they don’t want to be called Republicans because they’re women and they don’t want their friends to judge them harshly.

All this tells me that the midterms are going to be very bad for the Dems.  They will lose the House and the Senate.  I think that’s a given.  Does it mean anything more?  Only maybe.  It’s completely within the control of the Republicans to do what they typically do and blow this golden opportunity.  They can use their control of the Congress to collect fees from the donors and lobbyists, as usual.  They can ignore their duty and not thoroughly investigate and document for the American people the blatant and systematic voter fraud that happened in 2020.  Or they can for once act like the leaders of a free people.

Normally I’d say the chance of them doing the right thing was zero.  But things are significantly different this time.  Donald Trump refuses to let sleeping dogs lie.  He continues to rally the people to support efforts to investigate the 2020 election.  He continues to call out the RINO’s like Liz Cheney who support Democrat lies like the “Insurrection.”  And some of the state leaders are making the right noises too.  They are attempting to safeguard their election processes.

Putting all this together I’d say we’re at about a fifty percent chance of something good coming out of the present situation.  Admittedly that’s not a glowing prospect but compared to how things have gone for most of my life, it’s a reason to hope.

The polls actually give us good information for the first time in decades.  The people are pissed off.  Now it will take the politicians to get their act together.  Let’s pray that some actual leaders will emerge and use the opportunity.

Wanted: Local Political Contributors Part 1 – War Pig on Ohio Governor’s Race

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As the Primary and General Off-Year Elections creep up on us I’m interested in getting posts from readers about their local political scene.  Places like Texas, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Illinois, Minnesota are represented by readers here.  Even Canada and Australia have local political stories that some of our readers might want to provide.  So if you are interested in sharing your perspective on your local politics, get in touch.  Either leave a comment or send an e-mail to orionscoldfire at charter dot net.  Anonymity is, of course, perfectly fine and if you prefer to discuss local cultural issues instead of or in addition to politics that also is encouraged.  I’ll add this want-ad to the footer of the posts for a while to see if I can entice any readers to write.

 

War Pig:
I believe you’re an Ohioan. Do you have any thoughts on the Mike DeWine vs Jim Renacci governor’s primary? I think I’ve heard DeWine has made himself unpopular over COVID but it’s all third hand info as far as I know.

photog

 

DeWine, or as many call him, DeSwine, is very unpopular over covid policies, many of which were overturned by the Ohio Supreme Court. I would not be surprised to see Renacci make a very strong showing but DeSwine has the backing of the ones who made the most money during the pandemic
. He has the money and he runs the machine. I hope he is soundly defeated but I have so little faith in the current electoral system that I am doubtful.

War Pig

Wanted: Local Political Contributors

photog Current Events, OCF ,

As the Primary and General Off-Year Elections creep up on us I’m interested in getting posts from readers about their local political scene.  Places like Texas, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Illinois, Minnesota are represented by readers here.  Even Canada and Australia have local political stories that some of our readers might want to provide.  So if you are interested in sharing your perspective on your local politics, get in touch.  Either leave a comment or send an e-mail to orionscoldfire at charter dot net.  Anonymity is, of course, perfectly fine and if you prefer to discuss local cultural issues instead of or in addition to politics that also is encouraged.  I’ll add this want-ad to the footer of the posts for a while to see if I can entice any readers to write.

Some Thoughts on What to Expect in the Mid-Terms and the Middle Term

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The short term of our world is becoming clearer.  COVID is limping off, stage left, along with what’s left of Dementia Joe’s credibility.  Inflation is taking center stage and appears to be finishing off what’s left of the Democrats’ legislative agenda and their hopes of holding onto the House and possibly the Senate.  Putin and Xi are waiting in the wings to slap Dopey Joe around and strip the last vestiges of his foreign policy and military reputation.  In a very few weeks the Democratic Congress will scatter to the wind doing their utmost to try to save their jobs.  In the short-term, wreckage and wrath are swirling around Washington.  And experience says there’s just about nothing that Biden can do to make things any better this year.  The Mid-Terms will be a rout for the Democrats.  They’ll lose 40+ seats in the House and odds are they’ll lose three or four seats in the Senate and thereby lose both Houses to the Stupid Party.

What I wanted to talk about is where do we go from there?  Let’s take the best case.  The Republicans take the House decisively and end up ahead in the Senate 54 /46.  That ends any chance for Biden’s radical agenda, period.  And it also allows the stoppage of more Democrat federal judges.  McConnell did that last time too and it was effective.  But now the Republicans own the Congress and they take the blame whenever Biden can convince the stupid public that something the Congress should legislate doesn’t happen.  It’ll be unemployment benefits or extending the federal budget or something equally dumb.  So slowly over time they’ll take damage and look bad.  This is the inevitable progression.  Now what would be different and interesting is if the House takes the initiative to investigate and impeach Biden over the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop.  Now that might be exciting.  Forcing Hunter to testify and exposing the tawdry details of the Biden crime family sounds like the perfect way to tar the Democrats with a very dirty brush.  Do I think the Stupid Party has the smarts to do this?  My guess, probably not.

Now, there is a lot going on besides Congress.  The Supreme Court has been very active of late and has been touching on substantive issues.  The abortion decision coming in the fall is huge and the 2nd amendment and affirmative action cases are even bigger.  These cases could have enormous consequences in the real world.  And in fact, the abortion case can itself be the only event that could save the Democrats from losing the House and Senate.  If the Court were to rule Roe v. Wade unconstitutional it could galvanize women to vote for the Democrats.

Then there’s the Red States.  Florida and to a lesser extent Texas and a few other states have begun resisting the bullying by the feds.  There has even been talk of coordination across states to strengthen the resistance.  Things like cracking down on illegal aliens and protecting citizens’ first and second amendment rights are at the top of this agenda.  But it could spread to other aspects of life.  It might involve industrial policy and even educational reform.  We’ve seen a little bit of that in Virginia where a parents’ revolt against the teachers catapulted Youngkin into the governor’s mansion.

I see these things going on in parallel with the jockeying for position for the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary.  DeSantis and Trump are going to have to either broker an agreement or go to war with each other.  I prefer an agreement.  Even if Trump gets the nomination, he’s a one term president so he needs DeSantis to be his successor.  They should obviously form a ticket.  Now how soon this plays out depends on a bunch of things.  If the Republicans win the House, then all the nonsense about the January 6th stuff ends and we’ll start to see real campaigning happening early in 2023.

And all of this stuff is boilerplate.  It’s already written in stone.  What I’m interested in knowing is the wild card.  Will Putin annex the Ukraine?  Will one of the Red States go to war with the feds in a really spectacular fashion?  Will the feds blink?  Will the Supreme Court outlaw affirmative action?  Now, these are things that could change the world in a big way.  But in each case it still will take a courageous man to seize the opportunity presented and push things to a new reality.  And that’s the real wild card, the appearance of a leader. brave smart

A Gang of Turkeys

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Camera Girl with her hawk eye spotted a group of turkeys walking through the forest.  So, I took my trusty Sony A7 IV and my Minolta 200mm f/4 macro lens with Sony LA-EA5 adapter and flashed off fifty shots of the uncouth looking modern dinosaurs.  I’ll work on them later but here’s a representative jpg.

I guessing the turkeys are looking for food before the big freeze down happens tomorrow.  We’ll be dropping thirty degrees down into negative single digits tomorrow night.  This should be a good test of the supposedly repaired heating system we live with.  A really annoying aspect of the “repair” is that the suction fan has a vibration that is very audible in the living room.  I’ll have to become an acoustical engineer and figure out where some fireproof acoustical insulation will solve that problem.  Oh, the joys of owning a very unorthodox house.

I looked up the name for a group of turkeys.  It’s called either a gang or a rafter.  A rafter sounds like an architectural term whereas gang captures some of the disreputable and disorganized facets of the behavior of a bunch of dopey birds.  And that immediately got me thinking of the Republican lawmakers.  They’re a gang of fat, stupid and disorganized bird-brained followers who couldn’t shoot fish in a barrel.  I think of them because things are going so horribly for the Democrats and Biden that it must be about time for those losers that are supposedly on our side of the fence to help the Democrats out by missing some opportunity to kick them while they’re down.  Already that dope Cruz was yapping about how the January 6th farce was a terrorist attack.  I used to like him but what is wrong with him if he says something stupid like that.  It’s the unforced errors that drive me crazy with these “friends” of ours.

The biggest surprise of 2021 was Joe Manchin stabbing the Dems in the back.  It was wholly unforeseen and miraculously potent.  Combined with the COVID revolt, it has poleaxed Biden’s presidency good and proper.  But I’m waiting for our Manchin.  I’m assuming it will be Romney.  He’s a sniveling coward who loves to play the principled man of honor when he knows it will get him the spot light.  But with the disarray on the left maybe we’ll be spared until the midterms when with any luck they’ll lose the Senate along with the House.

I wonder how long it will take the Supreme Court to make up their minds about the vaccine mandates.  I confess I’m pretty excited about a win there.  That also means I’ll be very disappointed if they fink on us and throw in with the Fauci fascists.  But things seem to be going our way on this in the public opinion field.  People are waking up to the fact that these vaccines are at best useless and at worst a very dangerous thing to do to young and healthy people.  Anyone with children and grandchildren should be paying close attention to the information on both efficacy and safety.  These drugs would never have been approved on a normal testing basis by the FDA.

So, stay warm this week.  The Polar Express will be coming through and providing a good excuse to stay warm and watch some old movies or read a good book.  I’ve been managing to put the time to good use writing.  I produced about five thousand words of prose in the last two or three days.  Not bad.  Of course, I’ve still got seventy or eighty thousand words to go.  But Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Watch out for those turkeys, winged or otherwise.

The Absurdity of Republican Governors in Blue States

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The linked article describes how Andrew Cuomo’s refusal to resign following his twin scandals of killing off all of New York State’s old people with COVID and groping all the women who work for him has opened up an opportunity for a Republican to be elected as Governor next year.  Oh, joy.

I lived for decades in a state that typically goes through a cycle of one or two terms of a Democrat governor followed by four or five terms of Republican governors.  How it works is that a Democrat governor does so much fiscal and public safety harm during just a few years in office that even the ideologues in the blue state population realize that their livelihoods and lives are at risk.  So, they allow a Republican to come in and right the ship.

But the Republican governor is so grateful to be allowed to fix their mess that he bends over backward to be indistinguishable from a Democrat on social issues.  The state I refer to is Massachusetts and they brought in William Weld and his two subordinates and then Mitt Romney to clean up the Mike Dukakis mess.  Then after they let the Barack Obama Mini-Me (Deval Patrick) crash the Massachusetts Miracle for eight years they had to bring in Charlie Baker to stop the hemorrhaging and allow the state to revive.

Why exactly Blue State Republicans are willing to fulfill this role for their progressive constituencies is a mystery to me.  I suppose they are attached to their homes and always hope that a permanent equilibrium is possible.  But this is a fool’s hope.  Just looking at Massachusetts, or even more vivid, New York City’s mayoral history will demonstrate that the fiscal and public safety sanity that a Republican leader provides will eventually convince the progressive population that they have nothing to fear by installing a lunatic like Deval Patrick or Bill de Blasio.  And once the inevitable happens they still only grudgingly accept the prescription that a Republican reformer brings to them and chafe at its requirements to hold people accountable regardless of favored racial and sexual status.

So, you get this predictable oscillation, up and down, for crime and poverty and chaos.  The question remains why the Republicans bother.  It will never get better and they will never get credit for keeping their constituencies from destroying themselves.  Places like California, New York and New England should be allowed to destroy themselves without interference from the people they so obviously despise.  This is the accelerationist argument and over time I’ve come to adopt it wholeheartedly.  It will only be after one of these places crashes completely that the people who are left might learn enough to know that the things they believe in are irrational and unsustainable in the real world.

So, I wholeheartedly agree with ridiculing the people who run these states and highlighting for everyone to see how awful the outcomes of their policy choices are.  But I object to the Right, such as it still exists in these places, pulling their chestnuts out of the fire.  Things need to get so bad that even the elites that formulate these nonsensical polices are made to suffer the consequences.  Probably, from my point of view, the perfect outcome would be for the inhabitants to revert to cannibalism and eat Bill Gates and Nancy Pelosi off of a spit.  In that way they could see the racial justice they strive for brought to fruition and also do their part for sustainability.  After all, in California there is an almost inexhaustible supply of white progressives and I can think of no higher use to put them to than as entrees on a community barbecue menu.

No Predictions for 2020, Just Some Thoughts

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2019 was a momentous year.  We saw the Mueller investigation fizzle out hilariously.  All the progs were so mournful and confused.  Where was their Russian collusion?  Where was the smoking gun?  Ah, so sad.

We saw a new Attorney General state on the record that the Trump campaign was spied on.  And we saw him assign a special prosecutor to find out whether criminality was involved.  And now that prosecutor, John Durham, has answered that question, a criminal investigation is in process.  The Coup is upset that Durham hasn’t toed the line that Inspector General Horowitz followed when he said mistakes were made but he couldn’t prove criminality.  Durham has followed a bunch of threads back to the guilty and their bosses and it looks like we’ll see some indictments soon.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that Kevin Clinesmith will either turn state’s evidence or be indicted very soon.  If he turns, then we should hear about an indictment of some of the bigger fish within a month or two.  So, either way at least one indictment by March 1st.

We’ve had a chance to get to know the Democrat Presidential Candidates both the minor players and the bigger names.  It is truly a remarkable collection.  And it’s not clear whether the most notable fact is the mediocrity of their intellects or the lunacy of their platforms.  Can you imagine Joe Biden or Kamala Harris on the same stage with Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon?  Can you imagine Dwight Eisenhower debating foreign and domestic policy with Fauxcahantas and Butt Pete?  Even FDR, the man who introduced social security would laugh Bernie Sanders off the stage.

Initially I was sure that Creepy Uncle Joe Biden would be the nominee.  But when he was slapped around by Harris and eclipsed by Warren in the early state polls and after the Ukraine stuff started coming out, I figured his goose was cooked.  Well months have gone by and even though he’s trailing in Iowa and New Hampshire he still leads in the Super Tuesday races and in the national poll so at this point I won’t say who will emerge from the clown car as victor.  But it truly has been a wonderful experience to see just how awful the Dem candidates truly are.  Sure, they reflect the values and priorities of the far-left vanguard of their party but even the moderates are so out of step with the mainstream that even the center left independents will be horrified at what will be their alternative to President Trump.  And forget about the Rust Belt.  That will be ours.  So, I look forward to continued comedy and optimism watching the Democrat train wreck.

And even the Pelosi Impeachment has been an encouraging sight.  The Rust Belt has shrugged it off or even used it as a justification for voting for the President.  The rest of the country basically is where it always has been.  Our voters are unimpressed with the spectacle Crazy Nancy has created and in fact it looks like the thirty House seats with Democrat incumbents in districts that voted for President Trump are in a lot of trouble.  The potential to flip the House is real.  That is something to consider.

Several big court cases are in front of the SCOTUS.  It should be instructive to see if Roberts really is an honest constitutionalist or a ringer for the left.  We’ll probably find that out pretty soon.  Also going on in the Supreme Court is the status of Justice Ginsburg.  She is presently suffering from metastatic cancer.  She has had cancerous tumors removed from her colon, lungs and twice from her pancreas.  It doesn’t mean she will succumb from this condition any time in the next few years but it is extremely debilitating for even a young person to stand up under the side effects of the treatments these conditions require.  It would not be surprising for her to step down very soon to spend her remaining time with her loved ones.  In that event, a replacement of Justice Ginsburg by President Trump would definitively put the Supreme Court beyond even Roberts’ ability to swing left.  That would be worth seeing.

We will be able to follow the Brexit process and I fully expect that Boris Johnson will cut a desirable deal with the EU that frees Britain from the irksome legislative control of Brussels and puts immigration control back in Parliament’s hands.  I fully expect Johnson and Trump will find plenty of common ground in a trade deal between their two countries.

And finally, we will have the spectacle of the Presidential General Election.  I expect that President Trump will demand a better debate landscape than his predecessors agreed to.  He should refuse to allow only the usual leftists to ask the questions?  Wouldn’t it be a hoot if some of the good guys were given a spot on the panel.  How about Tucker Carlson and Michael Anton?  Honestly, I expect the President to win with a larger electoral vote count than in 2016.  I think he’ll add Minnesota to his tally and maybe even Nevada.

So, you can see 2020 will be a chock full of drama, comedy and consequence.  Stay tuned.

04AUG2018 – Quote of the Day

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“Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking – actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. …. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.”

H. L. Mencken