Aspen Journalism uses riots for self-congratulatory money solicitations

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Last summer, criminal mobs stormed federal buildings in an attempt to intimidate our elected officials and overturn our democratic republic. “Burn it down” and “No USA at all” were their frequent chants. Some demagogic politicians egged them on. People died.

Fast forward to last week. Another criminal mob stormed another federal building in another attempt to intimidate our elected officials and overturn our democratic republic.  “Stop the steal” was their frequent chant. Some demagogic politicians egged them on. People died.

The media accurately reported last week’s riot as a riot, but they reported last summer’s riots as “mostly peaceful protests.” The reason for the disparate reporting is of course that the media sympathized with last summer’s criminal mob but not with last week’s criminal mob.

Never willing to let a crisis go to waste, an outfit here in Aspen called Aspen Journalism promptly sent out an email yesterday congratulating themselves for their “truth telling and the free exchange of ideas.” They went on to portray themselves as victims of the DC riot 2,000 miles away: “As journalists we were alarmed by the violence and menacing rhetoric directed at the media.”

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Go away mad or go away sane, Mr. President, but do go away

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A month and a half ago, the GOP had a lock on keeping the Senate. Polls suggested Dem wins in places like Maine and Iowa but, when the votes were ultimately counted, GOP Senators Susan Collins and Jodi Ernst won handily.

In Georgia, the two GOP incumbents did well, but didn’t quite exceed 50% in a multicandidate race. Under Georgia law, that meant a runoff was necessary between them and their Democrat challengers.

The GOP – and the oddsmakers and pollsters – thought the GOP incumbents would win easily. Georgia hasn’t elected a Dem senator in the last generation. Moreover, both Dem candidates were fairly weak. One was tied to China and the other was a Reverend Wright wannabe, Fidel Castro sympathizer and wife abuser. 

But the Dems won today. The Senate goes to the Dems along with the House of Representatives and the Presidency. So what happened in the two month interval between the time it seemed the GOP had a lock on the Georgia runoffs and the runoffs themselves?

Trump happened, that’s what.

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Bitchin’ on Facebook is not “fighting for the cause”

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I’d love to see President Trump somehow get a second term. He’s done a lot of good, I voted for him twice, I actively campaigned for him and I predicted he’d win.

But I see now – in fact, I’ve seen for over a month – that due to a combination of bad luck on COVID, bad campaigning, bad personality and bad fraud, he won’t serve a second term after all.

I’m disappointed, but that doesn’t make me a traitor. I have not turned against Trump, but simply recognized that he has lost.

Manifesting my disappointment through denial and fantasy will not help. Reality cares nothing about my feelings of disappointment. What reality cares about are my real actions to obtain a different outcome in the future, not my fervent wishes for a different outcome in the past.

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Is that all ya got, 2020?

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Pfizer has sold $25 billion worth of Viagra and now they’ve raised the bar even higher. To keep their Viagra customers happy, healthy and horny, they invented a vaccine against COVID.

The FDA approved the vaccine for emergency use this month, years after approving Viagra for “emergency” use (isn’t all use of Viagra an emergency?). Viagra will of course retain its preeminence in the company, and so the vaccine will likely become known as “Pfizer’s Other Drug.”

Some say this medicine comes too soon, that it needs more testing, more time to get acquainted, more foreplay, more cuddling. I say baloney. Viagra comes not a moment too soon. Same with Pfizer’s Other Drug. If only they had come at the same time.

It was indeed a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of year. It’s with proper social distancing, mind you, which can cramp one’s style among other things and attenuate both the whams and the bams. But in sex, Americans and all other people are resourceful.

Sadly, however, there appears not to be the pregnancy surge we often see after a city blackout. Although sperm are ingenious in navigating their way through the kind of person who identifies as a woman because she is one, they cannot navigate across a room or through a Zoom teleconference lens.

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Might we have a Republican president — in 2023?

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Yes, and that’s 2023, not 2024. Here’s how.

It all starts with Joe Biden’s truculently delinquent and pathological son, Hunter. You know, the guy who was and apparently still is a cocaine addict and was drummed out of the Navy. The deadbeat father who denied paternity and avoided support obligations to the mother whom he met at a strip joint.

But those are the least of his troubles. Hunter’s “business” is to monetize his dad’s political position. He did so in the Ukraine where Hunter was paid millions by an oil and gas company, though he probably doesn’t even pump his own gas. The payors of these millions thanked him for introductions to dad.

The Bidens admit that the son’s payments from the Ukraine were because he was Joe’s son – they couldn’t possibly deny that – but contend that the payments did not affect U.S. policy toward the Ukraine. In other words, they say they accepted the payola but it’s OK because they cheated the Ukrainians out of getting anything for it.

It’s a little like Hillary’s pay-to-play speech schemes. She demanded and received $250,000 payments for one-hour speeches from connected people who wanted political favors, but denies that she ever gave them the favors they paid for.

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Having lost their boogeyman, the Dems will lose their evil radicalism

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I voted twice for President Trump. But he has indisputably been a polarizing figure. He doesn’t seem to mind; he basks in his opponents’ hatred.

The Democrats are more than happy to oblige him. The last Republican they hated with this fervor and fever was Abraham Lincoln.

At least in the case of Lincoln, the Dem hatred was on the basis of policy, not personality. The Dems hated Lincoln for his policy against slavery. (An aside: many millennials think Lincoln was a Dem and the southern slave owners were Republicans. It’s possible they are taught that.)

In the case of Trump, the Dems originally hated him not for his policies but for his existence. They hated him because he denied the presidency to their anointed one, Hillary Clinton.

That hatred grew, as hatred does. The Dems went from a party a decade ago that preached love and compassion – though their talk was always better than their walk in that regard – to one that openly hates people who disagree with them. They cancel, censor, shout down and name-call. And they seem to delight in doing so.

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“Experts” want to kill placebo-takers in order to gather more data

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I’m a volunteer in the clinical trials for the Pfizer vaccine. I knew there was some risk in volunteering to take an unproven medicine. But I hoped that my participation might help me do well against the virus, and might also help me do good for humanity. My efforts to do well and do good have worked out fine, until now.

Understand that these studies are conducted with two distinct groups. One group gets the vaccine. The other group gets a placebo. The placebo is not medicine. It’s a simple saline shot that does nothing at all.

The reason for these two groups is to establish a placebo-taking “control group” against which both the efficacy and side effects of the vaccine can be measured in the vaccine-taking group. The study is “blinded,” meaning that the patients themselves don’t know whether they got the vaccine or the placebo. That’s to avoid tainting the results with “placebo effect” and “reverse placebo effect” symptoms.

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After the lefty Aspen Times fired me, their readers and Karma voted me “Best Columnist” of Aspen

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I was the token conservative columnist for seven years at the Aspen Times, the local lefty newspaper of Aspen, Colorado.

Despite Democrats outnumbering Republicans in Aspen by about a three-to-one margin, the clicks on my column dwarfed the pack of liberal columns and their predictable progressive pusillanimous pattering. In fact, my column was often the most popular thing in the entire newspaper, sometimes drawing more clicks than frontpage news.

I was occasionally picked up by national outlets like Real Clear Politics, Powerline, Lucianne, American Thinker and Instapundit. I drew clicks to the little Aspen Times from around the country.

But I was supposed to be a token, not a success. Last Christmas Eve without warning or discussion, they fired me via an email. They said my “values” were contrary to theirs. They also took some parting potshots at my writing, apparently forgetting that without complaint they’d published hundreds of iterations of that very writing.

They offered no thanks for my service, nor for my performing that service without compensation (the Aspen Times ordinarily paid its columnists, but I’d always declined any compensation).

Readers flooded the newspaper with letters objecting. It made no difference. The newspaper published only a small fraction of those letters.

It all worked out fine for me. My blog at theAspenbeat.com took off and I increased my readership nearly ten-fold. National outlets now link to my site more than ever.

Meanwhile, the Aspen Times is being smacked around by a sassy bitch named Karma. The internet is undermining their biggest source of revenue, namely real estate ads. Layoffs loom. They’ve been reduced to begging for charitable donations. They may need to change their name to Aspen Hard Times.

Karma still wasn’t done with them. The Aspen Times holds an annual “Best of Aspen” competition each fall where locals and visitors cast votes for their favorites in various categories. One category is “Best Columnist.”

Guess whom the readers decided was “Best Columnist” for 2020. Yep, even though the Aspen Times technically fired me as a columnist back in 2019 and so I wrote only a blog in 2020, their readers voted me “Best Columnist” of 2020.  (See page 8 here.)

A friend suggests that the newspaper should throw out those turkey leftovers. They have a full plate of crow to eat.

Best Columnist of Aspen!

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Yeah, the votes are in, the recounts are completed, and the Electoral College hasn’t gone rogue. Over 7,000 locals and visitors, many of which are not illegal and not dead, together with essential help from colluding Russians of course, have named me “Best Columnist of Aspen.”

It’s on page 8 of the Aspen Magazine.

I admit to a certain satisfaction. This lefty outfit that conducted the contest is the same one to which I donated columns twice a month for seven years (I always declined compensation), only to be informed by a Christmas Eve email that they were terminating our relationship because my “values” didn’t comport with theirs.

Biden should pardon Trump

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After four years of “resisting” President Trump with meaningless recounts, rogue electoral voters, groundless impeachment and specious claims of Russian collusion, not to mention unending name-calling and harassment of him and his family, the Democrats now urge the country to heal, to come together, to unify.

Behind them, that is.

In fairness, that’s what the winner always does in politics. The winner smears his opponent right up to election day. Then he forgives the target of his smears for being smear-worthy, and graciously invites him and his supporters to unify behind the smearer. This is politics, after all, where hypocrisy is an art form.

At least they’re mostly competent and honest about their hypocrisy, unlike their intellectual and ethical inferiors in what used to be called journalism.

This time, however, a unique opportunity presents on the political stage. But it will require elements that are missing from both journalism and politics. It will require compassion, cleverness and courage.

Joe Biden should pardon Donald Trump. You say Trump has done nothing to be pardoned for? Fine, I agree. But it would be compassionate, clever and courageous for Biden to pardon him anyway. Here’s why.

It would be compassionate because it would spare Trump and his family the angst of being unjustly prosecuted in the criminal justice system for what are really political matters. Prosecuting one’s vanquished opponents is what they do in banana republics, not in the United States of America.

I know there’s an element on the left that aspires to banana republic status, complete with Mao jackets, bread lines and firing squads. But most of us don’t.

If Biden wants us to unify behind him, what better way than for him to offer the first step? I’m old enough to remember when sports involved sportsmanship. The winner always offered his hand to the loser. It’s what ladies and gentlemen do, or at least they used to.

A pardon would be clever because it would put Trump in a difficult position of accepting or rejecting the pardon. Accepting implies that he did something wrong. But rejecting means he might then suffer a prosecution by politically motivated people. After the bias of the Mueller team which at the time of their appointment were highly regarded professionally, and the incompetent pettiness of Michael Flynn’s judge, no one doubts the existence of such creatures.

And it might indeed serve to unify some Trump supporters behind Biden, or at least serve to convey the message that Biden wants a respected and effective presidency, not distraction, vengeance and blood.

But a pardon would also require Biden’s courage in resisting the clinical hysteria of the hard left. They would protest in the streets, mostly peacefully of course, by setting fires in what used to be called arson, collecting reparations in what used to be called looting, and destroying property in what used to be called riots.

College classes would be cancelled because students would think they’re too distraught to attend, or at least that’s what their lefty professors would tell them to think.

Denied the blood of Trump and his family, the left would go after the blood of his supporters, and they’ve already put together lists. Hell hath no fury like a compassionate liberal who’s angry that he’s been denied his pound of flesh and equally angry that he’s been forced to admit that he wants it.  

The old empty suit that is set to assume the presidency of the United States is a lot of things, or used to be, but courageous is not one of them. He won’t stand up to the leftist mob that now constitutes the Democrat base.

But what a compassionate, clever and courageous move that would be.