I Could Bend The Rules For This One

Usually I have a policy of not voting for squids.  The navy has a very different culture than what I'm used to, and in general I'd rather vote for someone who isn't navy over one who is.

This guy, though, would get my vote if I lived in his state:

The Best Political Ad of the Season Has Just Been Released

They Lie, And Pat Themselves On The Back For Their Creativity

Do lefties "exaggerate", or do they just lie through their teeth?

Remember the old children’s story about Chicken Little? An acorn falls on Chicken Little’s head, and she surmises that “the sky is falling” and the world is coming to an end. As a result, Chicken Little creates mass hysteria among the barnyard animals.

Chicken Little whipped the other animals into a frenzy with her histrionics, which makes her the perfect metaphor for today’s leftists...

Democrats act as if every Republican proposal is an existential threat to life in one way or another. Fossil fuels will destroy the planet. Efforts to secure elections will prevent minorities from voting. Measures to keep young children from irreversibly damaging their bodies amount to erasing transgender people. You get the picture.

The Biden administration has turned progressive melodrama into an art form. We’re talking about the people who compare anyone who didn’t vote for Joe Biden to violent extremists and who promised a “winter of severe illness and death” to anyone who didn’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.

A Wall Street Journal editorial by Barton Swaim demonstrates how bad the left has gotten when it comes to histrionics.

“President Biden’s re-election announcement video warned that ‘MAGA extremists are lining up’ to repeal ‘bedrock freedoms,'” Swaim begins. “Uh oh—what freedoms? The extremists plan on ‘dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love, all by making it more difficult for you to be able to vote' "...

“The other threats on Mr. Biden’s list—’banning’ books, ‘telling people who they can love’ and voter suppression—are literally nonexistent,” Swaim points out. “Mr. Biden isn’t engaged in the time-honored political craft of exaggeration. He’s seeing things that aren’t there.”

I'm going with "lying to sway the low-information voter", of which there are unfortunately too many.  Remember the blatant lie Harry Reid told about Mitt Romney?  "Romney didn't win, did he" was Reid's reply when called out, so the ends justified the means.  It always does for lefties.

Unlawful Trespass

I never considered the January 6, 2021 incursion into the Capitol to be an "insurrection".  (Usually when people intend to overthrow their government, they do so when armed.)  To me, rather than an "insurrection", at most the people were guilty of unlawful trespass.  That so many have been sentenced to years in prison, well, I never thought I'd live to see the day that we'd have political prisoners in the United States.

I have nothing to add to this:

ROGER KIMBALL: Tucker Carlson bulldozes the January 6 ‘insurrection’ narrative.

Tucker Carlson showed how the anti-Trump battalions had lied about January 6. Liz Cheney and her Kangaroo Court lied about what happened. So did Nancy Pelosi and the regime media.

Jacob Chansley, the behorned and painted veteran who became the face of the protest because of his outlandish getup, was not a violent insurrectionist. He was a mannerly protestor who prayed publicly in the Capitol and was politely escorted through its halls by several Capitol police officers. Why, many people will wonder, has he been sentenced to five years in jail? Schumer and the media charged that Carlson “sanitized” what happened that day by “cherry-picking” the video. But it was clear to anyone who watched Carlson’s presentation that it was the J6 Committee that did the cherry-picking.

Back in September 2021, I gave a talk on what I called “the January 6 insurrection hoax.” The anti-Trump lobby did not like what I had to say. It is delicious to be vindicated so publicly.

A hurt dog barks. I expect to be surrounded by a lot of howling as the public digests what Carlson aired. It’s going to be an effervescent election season.

As a result of Chuck Schumer’s meltdown, last night, “Fox News had more total and 25 to 54 year old demo viewers than MSNBC, CNN, Newsmax & NewsNation combined.”

Yeah, what he said.

Election Fraud

I'm posting this just so it's easy to find this link, and to remind everyone that the Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database exists:

But election fraud is not a myth. In fact, 1,412 confirmed cases of election fraud have been documented in the Election Fraud Database maintained by the Heritage Foundation’s legal center. According to the Heritage Foundation, the database “provides a sampling of recent election fraud cases, demonstrates the vulnerabilities within the electoral process and the need for reforms to secure free and fair elections for the American people.” Of the 1,412 confirmed cases they’ve documented, there have been 1,219 convictions.

As bad as this sounds, it’s not even the entirety of the problem. “The database doesn’t list potential fraud discovered by election officials and others that is never investigated or prosecuted, and it obviously cannot list fraud that goes undetected when states with poor security don’t have the tools in place to even realize such fraud is occurring,” Hans Von Spakovksy of the Heritage Foundation explains.

This Man Is Mental

Governor Newsollini, who clearly wants to be president, thinks that the 7 Republicans left in California are the cause of all the state's problems:

With the state suffering under a plague of hundreds of thousands of homeless drug addicts living on the streets, a serious spike in violent crime and theft, highest-in-the-nation taxes and cost of living, failing public schools, a state-created water shortage, and hundreds of thousands of California businesses and residents fleeing to friendlier states, Newsom made his second inaugural speech all about him – and he attacked the toothless GOP in this Democrat one-party state...

Newsom played a victim of the Covid time period, in denial of his decisions to lock down school children and businesses, force vaccines on millions of Californians, and mask the population indoors and outdoors, while he went about his life unmasked, attending events and parties, and while his children attended private school...

Newsom played the game of “I know you are, but what am I?” described by the Urban Dictionary as, “quite simply the most retarded comeback someone makes when they’ve completely lost the argument. This statement signifies that the argument has gone to a completely immature level.”

He continued attacking the right, GOP, and red states...

That last statement is really rich coming from the Governor who still clings to his Covid State of Emergency powers three years after the order, and ruling by fiat, locked down 40 million people during Covid, issued more than 70 executive orders containing 561 provisions, and killed off half of the businesses in the state.

What strange things are in this man's head.

The Media Aren't Fickle--They're Always On The Same Side

The media will like you as long as you spout the leftist creed.  Dare depart from it, though, and they'll turn on you on a dime.

Take Elon Musk, for instance:

The media used to love Elon Musk. They adored his “eco-conscious” business ventures because it fit their Green agenda. Musk, being a manufacturer of electric cars powered by the highly flammable pollutant lithium and a seller of worthless pieces of paper called carbon credits, made him the media’s golden boy. But now, everything has changed….

Now, Musk is hated by the media and other Democrats as much as Donald Trump, and they are seeking to destroy him. Why? Well, because Musk bought Twitter and he’s been on a rampage of transparency and truth, exposing the massive corruption and collusion of the media and government officials to silence dissenting opinions and to interfere in elections. Musk is doing the job they should be doing...

Thank goodness Musk is showing the public the dangers of a government colluding with the media. Sadly, most media outlets are burying that story just like they continue to bury the truth about the massive corruption of the Biden family, and sadly, the media will never forgive Musk for doing their job as they seek to pull out every stop to discredit him now he’s their enemy.

Voter Suppression

 

The BBC Knows Not What It Writes About

They totally don't get it. Our governmental system is designed to ensure that passions are moderated, not enshrined into law:

It's notoriously hard to get new laws passed in the US and few believe the looming election reshaping Congress will solve that. Could the Swiss "people power" model help?

The US political system seems designed to create gridlock. The two chambers of Congress are frequently controlled by different parties.

The Senate has longstanding procedures that allow the minority party there to block most major legislation that doesn't have the support of at least 60 of the 100 senators.

And anything passed by Congress can be vetoed by a president (overriding that requires a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate).

All this means that the political stars have to align for the federal government to get things done - even overwhelmingly popular laws will wither on the congressional vine.

Policies like raising the minimum wage, enacting gun control legislation or immigration reform have substantial support but go nowhere in Washington.

Leave it to the BBC to suggest that minimum wage laws and gun control have substantial public support in this country.  They don't.

One wonders if they, like the NYT or MSNBC, even recognize what a leftie outlet they are.

Let the Swiss have their system, if they like it.  I prefer ours, thankyouverymuch.

Democratic Soul-Searching After The Upcoming Election

Rest assured, I’ll never be a Democrat. And after the upcoming midterms, I suspect the party will have to do some soul-searching because Republicans have closed the gap in more races where Democrats have been heavily favored to win.  link

Never gonna happen.  They’ll lose, howl louder, and do more crazy stuff the next time they “win” an election.  That’s how the parties work, both of them.  There’s no “soul-searching”, just plotting to win the next one.

Another (Democratic Myth) Bites The Dust

Democrats always squeal that Republican desires to clean up the voter rolls, to ask for ID at the polling station, to clean up Democratic cheating shenanigans--these are all attempts to squelch the vote of minority voters.  I don't hear any Republicans complaining about this result:

It was already clear after Georgia's primary election set new turnout records this spring, but it bears repeating once again: Democrats don't tell the truth about voting rights...

With this much-maligned law, Georgia's legislature had actually made voting more accessible to its citizens than it had been previously. They also made voting more accessible than it is in New York, New Jersey, Biden's Delaware, and a variety of other states that Democrats would never try to pretend are Jim Crow states. Georgia legislators had actually expanded early voting and made it easier for almost anyone in the state to cast a valid vote...

And now, once again, the results are speaking for themselves. Raffensperger announced on Tuesday that Georgia voters just set a new record for first-day early voting in a midterm election, with nearly twice as many people voting on Monday as had done so on the first day of early voting in 2018. Georgians are on pace to set a new record for midterm turnout in 2022 and are voting at levels that rival turnout for the 2020 presidential election.

If anybody is trying to suppress the vote, they are doing a pretty lousy job of it. But of course, this was also true in 2018, another extremely high-turnout election whose results Democrats still deny. 

They lie so shamelessly.

An Election Prediction

 

Strange Bedfellows Have Made My Feet Cold

Did that title get your attention?  😆

I'm filling out my mail-in ballot--sadly I only get one, unlike others in California, and since I'm a Republican none of my votes will count anyway.  Anyway, I'm reading up on the ballot measures.

California's voter information guides include information about each ballot measure, and then have a feature I really like--four submitted attempts to sway your vote:  Argument in favor of Proposition #whatever, Rebuttal to argument in favor of Proposition #whatever, Argument against Proposition #whatever, and Rebuttal to argument against Proposition #whatever.  It's a pretty good bet that I can tell which way to vote just by looking at which individuals and organizations have signed on to each of those four arguments.

But not this time, not for Proposition 30.

Here's how the Attorney General's office summarizes Proposition 30:

Increases tax on personal income over $2 million by 1.75% for individuals and married couples and allocates new tax revenues as follows: (1) 45% for rebates and other incentives for zero-emission vehicle purchases and 35% for charging stations for zero-emission vehicles, with at least half of this funding directed to low-income households and communities; and (2) 20% for wildfire prevention and suppression programs, with priority given to hiring and training firefighters.

Isn't that quite the mix of goals!  And we're only going to tax "the rich"!

I've seen one commercial dozens of times for this proposition, and we're told none of that.  All we're told is that California has the worst air quality in the state, and that our bad air quality is caused by car exhaust and fires caused by global warming.  Voting for Prop 30 will change this.  

Yeah, right.  I already leaned against Prop 30 before opening the voter information guide.

The Argument In Favor of Prop 30 was signed by the president of the CalFire State Firefighters (shocking, I know), a doctor in the American Lung Association, and the vice chair of the Coalition for Clean Air.  The Rebuttal to the Argument Against Prop 30 was signed by the CEO of California Environmental Voters, a Senior Attorney on Climate and Clean Energy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and a/the senior climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Yes, I leaned harder against this proposition.

Then I looked at the Rebuttal To Argument In Favor, and it was signed by the president of the California Teachers Association and the former State Superintendent of Public Instruction.  The Argument Against Proposition 30 was signed by the president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the president of the California Small Business Association, and the President of United Latinos Action.

Those are some strange bedfellows, so strange that Hell itself must have frozen over.  In between their shivers and chattering teeth, they remind us that California has a huge budget surplus and thus we already have plenty of money to hire more firefighters.  They also remind us that our electrical grid is already so delicate that the state suffers blackouts every summer, and more electric cars isn't going to help that situation.

Despite the fear of frostbite on my feet, I'm voting NO on Proposition 30.

California's Genius Governor, Part 2

It was just a couple days ago I wrote about Gavin Newsollini's lack of knowledge about economics.  Well, that was then, this is now, and nothing has changed but the date:

Whatever billions California Governor Gavin Newsom hands out to voters right before Election Day he’ll take back — with interest — almost as soon as he’s won his four more years running one of the nation’s worst-run state.

Just as voters are getting their mail-in ballots — and even a few (!) non-voters — Newsom is sending out inflation relief checks of up to $1,050. That’s nearly enough to fill ‘er up twice.

“Relieving” inflation with free money is like treating a headache with a ball-peen hammer...

Newsom is handing out “free” funny money while inflation is raging, and then he’s going to raise taxes on gas, income, and who knows what else during what looks to be a nasty recession.

This guy is going to end up making Joe Biden look like King Solomon.

And there’s a non-zero chance that Newsom will be our next president.

There is a famous quote, various attributed to many different people but not appearing in print before the 1950s, along the lines of "A republic can only exist until voters realize they can vote themselves money from the public treasury."  I wonder how close we are to that point.

Highly Inappropriate

Today, in all our staff members’ mailboxes, was a flier for an incumbent school board member who is running for reelection.  I could not identify this person in a lineup, and neither do I know anything about the positions this person takes, so this isn’t a personal or political issue, but it just seems wrong.  I’m not sure what the applicable law or policy is, but it doesn’t seem right to have political materials placed in our work mailboxes.  Seems shady to me.  And since the person is a current and a prospective school board member, it’s possibly a conflict of interest.

What do you think?

California's Genius Governor

Newsollini is such a genius, he thinks a new tax on oil companies will bring gas prices down!

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday he will call a special session of the state Legislature in December to pass a new tax on oil companies as punishment for what he calls "rank price gouging."

Newsom told reporters on Friday that the special session will begin Dec. 5 after all the votes have been counted from the November elections and newly elected lawmakers are sworn in...

Kevin Slagle, vice president for the Western States Petroleum Association, said "a better use of the special session would be to take a hard look at decades of California energy policy and what they mean to consumers and our economy."

"If this was anything other than a political stunt, the Governor wouldn't wait two months and would call the special session now, before the election," Slagle said. "This industry is ready right now to work on real solutions to energy costs and reliability if that is what the Governor is truly interested in." 

I'd wonder if a class in economics might help our executives and legislators, but Donkey Chompers, a representative from New York, supposedly has a degree in economics and it obviously hasn't helped her.

If we get the government we deserve, we in California are getting it--good and hard.

One Surprise, One Not So Much

She's from Oregon:

Betsy Johnson is not running for Miss Congeniality. The longtime Democrat now running for governor of Oregon as an unaffiliated candidate is more likely to drop a swear word than a political platitude. When voters asked if she would repeal Oregon's drug decriminalization law, she responded, "Hell yes." On education, she declared, "Let's not worry about pronouns. Let's worry about mathematics."

So far, I like her. 

This comes, not at all surprisingly, from California:

A football player at a high school in California has been forced to stop carrying a pro-police flag as the team rallied onto the field, as critics said it made them feel "unwelcome and uncomfortable."

Some others compared the "thin blue flag" to a Confederate one, forcing school administrators at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita to tell the player to ditch the controversial symbol...

The school's principal also reiterated that the decision was not to signal a shift in support for law enforcement — especially after officers assisted the school during a mass shooting in 2019.

Which one surprises you?

California Is Withholding Test Results

They wouldn't withhold them if they made Dems look good. On the other hand, this is a one party state, and the Dems would will be reelected even if, in LBJ's terms, every one of them was found in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.  So why the shenanigans?

The state of California is delaying the release of test scores to the public, potentially pushing the release until after Election Day. Coincidentally, those test scores may not reflect well on Democratic leaders across the state.

According to EdSource, the California Department of Education is withholding the scores from its Smarter Balanced tests so that they can be released at the same time as other data on the California School Dashboard. There is no good reason for this, and in fact, it is a break in precedent. EdSource notes that since the department began releasing those results in 2015, it has been consistently released before other dashboard data, ranging from releases in the last week of August to the first week of October...

It isn’t hard to see why Democrats would want to stall the release of test scores until after Election Day. The school closures and restrictions handed down by Democrats at the state and local levels dramatically set students back, and all the data show this. The 2020-21 test results found that scores “declined significantly” after “five straight years of gradual improvement,” according to EdSource. The achievement gap between white and Asian students on the one hand and black and Hispanic students on the other also widened thanks to closures, which affected students in poorer communities the most.

A Difference In Treatment

Remember how the press reacted when candidate Todd Akin said that women who had been raped couldn't get pregnant?  Yes, of course it was a stupid comment, and they were right to lambast him for it.

Why don't they do the same when Stacey Abrams says something equally stupid?  Is it because she's black, because she's a woman, or because she's a Democrat?

MSNBC opinion columnist Dr. Esther Choo defended Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ recent claims that there is "no such thing" as a fetal heartbeat six weeks into pregnancy, arguing the heartbeat at six weeks is "a social construct that has more to do with the anticipation of future outcomes and little to do with what is actually present."

On Thursday, a clip of Abrams denying that an unborn baby’s heartbeat is present at six weeks went viral on Twitter, shocking pro-lifers. In it, Abrams said, "There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks. It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman's body."

The ultrasound machine manufactures the sound?  

The bias in the press is stunningly obvious.

Update, 9/25/22:  You want more?  Here's more:

We’ve seen 41-year-old Shannon Brandt, who purposely struck and killed 18-year-old Cayler Ellingson. Brandt claimed he thought Ellingson was a “Republican extremist” and admitted to murdering the teenager over a political dispute. Still, a brief search of the websites of CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS yielded no returns for the name “Shannon Brandt,” and save for conservative media, the story has evaded coverage by national outlets.

The next incident involved the murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative journalist Jeff German. German had been investigating abuse allegations against Public Administrator Robert Telles. Telles had lashed out at German’s reporting several times on Twitter. Shortly after German’s murder, he was arrested and charged with the killing. Yelles, a Democrat, was also an enthusiast for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), attending her CNN town hall during the 2020 election.

Again, however, Telles’s party identification has all but been erased from national news stories. The media have settled on simply describing Telles as an elected official. In a detailed write-up of the crime and the charges Telles faces, the Associated Press completely omitted his party identification. Top line: Members of the national media are going out of their way to protect a person charged with the murder of one of their own colleagues. It’s a level of professional shamelessness rarely seen for an industry already well known for protecting Democrats.

Still, these are two specific and exceptionally serious incidents that occurred after the sitting president called for a full-frontal press against his political opponents — opponents, it should be noted, whom he openly described as unpatriotic extremists. But neither Biden nor his administration has been made to answer for this dark rhetoric. Either targeted political rhetoric leads to violence and even death, as our media dutifully warned for years, or it doesn’t. But it cannot be both.

If it weren't for double standards they'd have no standards at all.

This Is What California's Governor Wants California To Be Known For

Remember when even abortion supporters said that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare?  Wow, those were the days, weren't they?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced Thursday that his reelection campaign had paid for billboards in seven other states promoting abortion tourism to the Golden State in protest at those states’ conservative policies restricting abortion.

Some of the billboards are adorned with a passage from the New Testament: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31).

Newsom, who has made abortion a main focus of his campaign as he expands his message to a nationwide audience, has begun to market California as a destination for those denied abortions elsewhere.

He thinks the Biblical reference helps.  He pretends that the "clump of cells" he wants to kill is not a separate human, with its own DNA.

Liberalism is a mental disorder.

Biden's Thursday Speech

It was supposed to be bad, and it apparently met and exceeded expectations.  This struck home with me:

“Dark Brandon,” flanked by Marines and backed by Hellish lighting, mumbled, shouted, and emoted his way through a Hitleresque scapegoating of large swaths of the population. And his call to arms has energized all the woke and virtuous defenders of democracy, who are now demanding a one-party system and the shunning of Republicans as lesser humans. Because, in the same way you sometimes have to destroy villages to save them, sometimes you have to become an unelected Administrative dictatorship to save democracy from the benighted and filthy MAGAts who so frustratingly vote incorrectly. 

President Turnip’s speech — presented with the full backing of the Executive branch and its law enforcement and justice arms — was perhaps the most egregious speech ever given by a US president. It was more than simply divisive. It was tacit permission to treat those who don’t favor progressive governance as enemies of the State. It’s the summer of 2020 with presidential approval. It’s dangerous. It’s unconscionable.

As for what Biden said:

 

Update, 9/5/22:  Hard to disagree with any of this:

Joe Biden gave a speech last week in which he gave lip service to things that Democrats don’t actually believe in, e.g., the Constitution and the rule of law, as a pretext to accuse Republicans — all 74 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump — of being a “threat to our democracy.”

Biden spoke in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, a gesture by which he attempted to identify himself as defending the founding principles of America when, in fact, he and his party are against those principles and are doing everything in their power to destroy America.

Biden does not deceive us. It is Democrats, not Republicans, who spent the summer of 2020 tearing down statues of our nation’s Founding Fathers. It is Democrats, not Republicans, who have denounced the Electoral College as undemocratic, just as it is Democrats, not Republicans, who endanger Supreme Court justices whose rulings they don’t like. Everything good about America, Democrats seek to destroy, and everything bad in America (e.g., drug dealers, cop killers, perverts in public libraries and junkies defecating on city streets) Democrats defend.

The symbolism of choosing Philadelphia as the site of last week’s speech was perhaps more fitting than Biden realized, because Philadelphia is a city that Democrats have absolutely ruined.

If you want to know what the Democrats are doing, just listen to what they accuse the Republicans of doing and you won't be far off. 

Yes, I believe there was rampant cheating in the 2020 election, and the mail-in voting from overwrought 'rona reaction made it easy.  I don't just say it, I have some evidence for my belief.  There were four areas that were going to be close--Georgia, Wisconsin, and I believe Michigan and Pennsylvania.  When I went to bed at 10pm, President Trump was leading in all four of those areas.  When I woke up at 2am, he was still leading comfortably in those areas.  By the time I woke up at 6am, he had "lost".  It's not such a leap to think that shenanigans occurred overnight.

At least I have some reason to believe what I believe.  Bush/Gore 2000?  Stacey Abrams?  Granny Boxwine?  There's no evidence in those, just carping at a loss--but only we Trump supporters are dangers to the country by suggesting one side cheated.  In fact, here is a video showing 10 minutes of Democrats' saying outright that President Trump cheated to win in 2016, that he was in league with Putin of Russia, etc, all without a shred of evidence (or decency).  They're disgusting.

If you want to know what the Democrats are doing, just listen to what they accuse the Republicans of doing.  I don't know about any threat to "our democracy", but I do know about threats to the Republic and what side of the aisle they're coming from.

Update #2, 9/14/22:  Via Instapundit:

Democrats Are Quite Comfortable Being Violent Extremists. “The Democrats’ ongoing fairy tale about the nonexistent right-wing domestic threat is on my last nerve now, especially since we all know that the real dark evil in this country is lurking on the left. It’s not even on the fringes.”