Tag Archives: news

Joe Biden’s presidency: “Hold my beer and watch this!”

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Question: What do the following have in common?

  • Stupid pet tricks
  • Bungee cord jumping
  • Abolishing the borders that define a country
  • Making oneself a human cannonball
  • Commuting the duly imposed death sentences of convicted murderers and rapists
  • Setting oneself on fire
  • Surrendering Afghanistan to barbarians from the 11th century
  • Jumping Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle
  • Closing all the schools to prevent transmission of a disease that barely affects children.

Answer: What these have in common is that all are stunts. They are designed to attract attention, and they succeed in doing so. But that’s all they do.

If you tell me you’ve taught a poodle to mix a martini and serve it to a parakeet, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Wow, that’s something!”

And it is indeed something, in the sense that it’s unusual. It gets attention. But it’s not consequential, other than to make a spectacle of two otherwise dignified animals.

If you tell me you plan to tie a bungee cord to your ankle and jump off a high bridge such that the bungee cord stretches almost to the breaking point as it catches you a few feet above the ground, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Huh, that’s something you don’t see every day.”

But, as in stupid pet tricks, it’s inconsequential, other than to demonstrate a certain daredevilry. There are good reasons not to issue dares to the devil for the mere purpose of getting clicks on YouTube.

To understand Joe Biden, you have to understand a few immutable traits about the man. First, he’s not very bright. A person who finishes near the bottom of his class at a fourth-rate law school is not very bright.

Second, he knows it. A person who plagiarizes five full pages of a law review article, “borrows” the family story of another politician, invents fabulations about standing up to a bully named Cornpop, and claims he finished in the top half of that law school class where he actually finished near the bottom, is aware that his real story comes up a bit short.

Third, there’s his relationship with his boss. Barack Obama was widely worshipped by liberals. Although Joe stood next in line for the presidency upon the completion of Barack’s papacy in 2016, Barack spurned him in favor of another candidate, was ambivalent about him running in 2020, and finally pushed him to the curb altogether in 2024 – for being too old and stupid.

Ouch. “Old” doesn’t hurt so much even though this is a guy who went to the trouble of hair plugs and tooth caps, but “stupid” hits close to home.

Joe has gone through life feeling that he had a lot to prove about himself. He was right about that. What he was wrong about was the way he went about that proof.

He decided to prove he was a greater leader than his intellectual superior, Barack. But why stop there? He then set his sights on proving he was the greatest Democrat since FDR, or since, I dunno, maybe Abraham Lincoln. (Half of Democrats think Lincoln was a Democrat. No joke!)

The problem is, Joe has never really thought enough about philosophy, government, religion, or the human condition (I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Joe hasn’t thought about) to have a coherent platform from which to govern.

He had no bold policies; he had only boldness.

Much like Evel Knievel. History has largely forgotten that Evel’s rocket-powered motorcycle jump of the Snake River Canyon landed not on the other side of the canyon, but at the canyon bottom. But they do remember the stunt and the name.

Early in Joe’s term, he decided to pull out of Afghanistan. Never mind that the pullout left a strategic crossroads utterly unguarded. Never mind that we squandered a 20-year investment of time and thousands of American lives. Never mind that we left behind billions in high-tech weaponry for the barbarians. Never mind that we could have instead pulled out in an organized manner, as Joe’s generals urged.

What was important to Joe was that he make a bold statement. And he did. Just like Evel Knievel.

It was a bold “Hold my beer, and watch this!” stunt.

The world did watch Joe’s bold stunt. They were impressed with his boldness. With his common sense, not so much.

But Joe didn’t care if they thought badly of his common sense. In the world of stuntmen and carnival barkers, all publicity is good publicity.

It’s like setting oneself on fire. It might not be productive, but it’ll get you plenty of clicks on YouTube. Probably more clicks than Barack gets, at least on that particular day.

When the conflagration is over, proclaim through charred lips that it was an “extraordinary success.” That’ll get even more clicks.  

That was the pattern of Joe Biden’s presidency. He didn’t so much try to destroy America. He’s too stupid to accomplish that, and too self-centered to try.

Joe’s defiance of the Supreme Court, his commuting of the death sentences of rightly convicted murderers, his transference of college loan debts onto the backs of blue-collar Americans, his takedown of the southern border, his inflation-inducing handouts – they were all designed not so much with policy in mind. Joe’s mind is too small for policy to live there.  

No, Joe’s stunts were designed simply to draw attention to Joe. He succeeded. Joe’s stunts did draw attention to Joe.

But not in the way Joe expected. We’re now seeing his anger in learning that attention does not equal achievement, that infamy does not equal fame, that notoriety does not equal greatness.

These four women destroyed the Democratic Party with race

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Four young Congresswomen – not even Senators – accomplished something that eluded years of Democratic Presidents and their woes.

Jimmy Carter in his malaise, Bill with Monica and his cigar, Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War – none of that was able to accomplish what these four young Congresswomen accomplished.

They destroyed the Democratic Party.

It was a perfect storm that began around the year 2020. China leaked a bioengineered virus from its biowarfare lab – probably accidentally – to produce worldwide mass hysteria and lockdowns of billions of people.

It gathered steam when a thug died in the hands of a white cop. Protests and riots ensued, weirdly exempted from the lockdowns.

At the time, the country was already weary of Donald Trump and his often productive but typically provocative antics.

These four Congresswomen seized the moment. Never great fans of America, they seized that time of weakness to destroy her, or at least act out their anger at her.

The death of the thug became emblematic of white police brutality. Never mind that this particular thug probably died of drugs, not a chokehold. Never mind that more Blacks die at the hands of Black police officers than at the hands of white ones. Never mind that the leading cause of death among young Black men is other young Black men. Never mind that the murder rate among Blacks is seven-times that of whites, and nearly all Black murders are at the hands of other Blacks.

Led by these Congresswomen, the Left decided that sticking to those inconvenient facts was . . .

RACIST!

The narrative was more important than any dumb facts. To disagree with their false narrative or their false charge of racism served only to prove you’re a . . .

RACIST!

Your only salvation was confession, and then they might let you off easy with just a few hundred hours of DEI training.

Oh yes, DEI. The Left’s long-standing reverse discrimination called “Affirmative Action” had failed, and their effort to sustain their failed discrimination was also failing.

So, the Left did what they do when their policies fail: They rebranded it. (See, e.g., communism rebranded as socialism, rebranded as liberalism, rebranded as wokeism, rebranded as progressivism.)

The new brand for “Affirmative Action” was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” This new brand was the same as the old brand, except, this time, it was coupled with brainwashing.

You had to not only engage in reverse discrimination; you had to believe in it. You had to believe that the company (or college or whatever) was stronger if the guy down the hall had dark skin.

Painting the skin of employees a la Justin Trudeau blackface was not Kosher, but almost. You could hire into a company or admit into a college a privileged Black kid (or ¾ Black kid like Barack Obama’s daughters admitted to Harvard) and get full DEI credit.

The problem was that DEI, like Affirmative Action, tended to conflict with a meritocracy. But the DEI supremacists had a solution to that problem: Do away with merit. Merit became a code word for . . .

RACIST!

The only content of your character that mattered was the pigmentation of your skin. If that meant Boeing planes fall out of the sky because 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of the skin color of engineers who would like to say otherwise, well, that’s . . .

RACIST!

The planes are just . . .

RACIST!

While we’re at it, they thought, let’s do away with sex. A nominee for the Supreme Court announced rather proudly that she could not define “woman.”

That proved to be a slippery slope. Next thing we knew, people that everyone else defines as not women – you know, people with a Y chromosome, high testosterone levels, a penis and testicles – were calling themselves “women” and competing in women’s sports like swimming and even boxing. Unsurprisingly, in view of their testosterone levels and male musculature, they usually won. By a pool length or a knockout.

At which time they joined the women in the showers. If you complained, you were the sex equivalent of . . .

RACIST!

You were alphabet-people-phobic. For that, you get another few hundred hours of DEI training, and then you get cancelled. No soup for you, and no career either.

Two more things. Bear with me.

They spent taxpayer money like drunken sailor-ettes. The Orwellian-titled Inflation Reduction Act threw a trillion dollars in borrowed fuel onto an inflation inferno. That was after previous boondoggle bills literally paid people not to work.

So . . . you pay people not to work at producing goods, and then you wonder why demand seems to be outpacing supply to produce price inflation.

Ah, they knew that would be the effect. But it was worth a little inflation to get money out of the hands of people who earned it and into the hands of people who voted for them.

Speaking of people who vote for them, they opened the southern border. A gazillion people came. All were illegal, many were criminals, some were murderers.

But almost all had darkish skin. So, if you don’t like them illegally entering our country, and some of them committing criminal acts here, and many sponging off our welfare state, well, then you’re a . . .

RACIST!

It all worked for a little while. But reality has a way of intervening. Systems that disregard merit tend to become unmeritorious. They get reputations for that, and there are consequences. People get turned off by planes falling from the sky, applicants being evaluated on the basis of their skin, illegal immigrants whom we can’t call illegal, prices going through the roof, lockdowns keeping the kids in the damn house all day, teachers who won’t teach, and all the rest.

In the end, the Squad’s passion to destroy America failed because America is, even now, very powerful and basically sensible.

But they did destroy the Democratic Party. The people voted the bums out. Not the Squad – most of them are in safe Democrat districts – but their Democrat colleagues. Especially their senile President and his smiley, witless, joyless VP.

So far, the judgment of the people has been without regrets. My sense is that if the election were held today, the Democrats would lose even more resoundingly.

It won’t be easy for the Democrats to recover. In theory, they can change their policies, but it’s hard to abandon a position when you’ve already announced that to do so is . . .

RACIST!

It’s one thing to argue that your position is the better one on the merits. That argument allows for negotiation and compromise. It’s another thing to climb down from a moralistic perch where you shout that your opponent’s focus on merit simply proves he’s a . . .

RACIST!

We’ve never seen a political climate quite like the current one. The Democrats went way out on a race limb, sawed it off, and are now surprised that they and their limb – not the tree – have fallen.

Increase legal immigration

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Guess what these people have in common:

  • Albert Einstein
  • Enrico Fermi
  • John Audubon
  • John Muir
  • Elon Musk
  • Nikola Tesla
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Irving Berlin
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • Levi Strauss
  • Dikembe Mutombo
  • Liz Claiborne
  • Mariano Rivera
  • Melania Trump
  • Andrew Carnegie
  • Audrey Hepburn
  • Yo-Yo Ma
  • Ayn Rand
  • Elie Weisel
  • Sergey Brin
  • Bob Marley
  • Sammy Sosa
  • Carlos Santana
  • Henry Kissinger
  • Rupert Murdoch
  • Alexander Hamilton

You’ve probably guessed it – each was born outside the United States, and immigrated here. Most became full, legal American citizens after undergoing the citizenship process, including passing history, civics and English language tests that most American college graduates would flunk.

The list could go on for thousands of pages, but you probably get the drift.

And by the way, you can add to the list a full quarter of the American winners of scientific Nobel Prizes. American technological prowess owes a lot to immigration.

Legal immigration is a strength of America, and always has been. America has been the most attractive place on earth for immigrants for a long time – due in part to the role of immigrants in making it so.

Do build the wall. Do secure the Mexican border. Do deport at least the illegal aliens who are criminals. Do require businesses to check the immigration status of employees, and do impose substantial fines on those who hire illegal ones.

Illegal immigration over the last generation became a tool of the anti-American left. Leftists intent on destroying Western Civilization used it to import the tools of destruction. Only slightly less bad are Democrats who used it to recruit a Democrat constituency.

The rest of America has finally seen the destruction wrought. And ironically, the leftists misread the political sentiments of the only immigrants who can vote legally – the legal ones. Those immigrants who worked tirelessly to come here legally – and vote legally – tend not to sympathize with illegal ones who want to cut the line, and tend not to vote for leftists or Democrats who want to help them do so.

One of the most racist assumptions of the Democrats was that legal Hispanics favor illegal immigration simply because many of the illegal immigrants have brown skin.

OK, the Democrats overplayed their hand. But let’s not overplay ours. We would be foolish to turn away the brave, the entrepreneurial, the smart, the industrious, the legal.

Trump’s powerful America will produce a safer world

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Henry Kissinger argued that geopolitical negotiations are successful only if they are backed by an implicit or explicit threat of force. In that argument, he echoed Teddy
Roosevelt’s quip a century earlier that America should “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

The contention that adversarial negotiations are successful only if you have some leverage to exert is an obvious truism. But American leaders need to re-learn this truism every so often. They naively – and sometimes malevolently – come to believe that the way to get along with the bad guys is to kowtow to them.

Our latest example began with Barack Obama. He was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism – a basic American tenet which goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s empire of liberty, Abraham Lincoln’s almost-chosen people, and Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill. Obama answered,

“Yes, there’s American exceptionalism, but I suspect the Brits also believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In other words, Americans are exceptional in the same way that everybody else is – which is to say they are not exceptional at all. Moreover, implicit in his answer is that the only true exceptionalism in American is their conceit in believing in it.

Poisoned by his distaste for American civilization, Obama went about his stated task of “fundamentally transforming” it. His first act in this transforming was to go around the world apologizing for American misdeeds of the preceding two centuries.

Forget about America winning the Cold War; helping to win two World Wars; delivering billions in gifts to countries around the world; taking the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free; rebuilding Japan and Germany from totalitarian ashes; putting a man on the moon; spending a trillion dollars to create a well-intentioned but failed Great Society to pull up its underclass; and inventing Silicon Valley.

Forget all that. It is time, Obama preached, for America to apologize to the world.

And so, he did. For eight years, he did what he could – and that was a lot – to reduce American power and prestige in the world. He thought a smaller, weaker, apologetic America would result in world peace.

Barack Obama is nothing if not insincere. I suspect his peace-through-weakness approach was not designed so much to achieve peace, but to achieve his fundamental transformation of America. His vision had less to do with Liberty Gleaming, and more to do with Workers Uniting.

Obama’s reign of pusillanimity – his war on America – continued for eight years before briefly yielding to a four-year interruption. But the interruption was too brief, too chaotic and too sabotaged. Obama then returned in the form of his hand-picked puppet and eff-up in chief, Joe Biden.

Joe was too shallow to grasp Obama’s scheme of fundamental transformation, but he certainly knew what side his bread was buttered on, and he knew who knew about the skeletons in his closet.

Joe did what he was told, willingly and even eagerly. By golly, the man from Scranton was determined to outdo his teacher. With that eagerness, combined with a degree of plain incompetence that bordered on its own kind of exceptionalism, Joe took another step toward the fundamental transformation of America.

And the world. From Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza to the Mexican border and to everywhere else, Joe succeeded in projecting American pusillanimity and incompetence to produce worldwide chaos, violence and death.

Joe was the anti-Midas; everything he touched turned to shit. Sometimes, as in the border, it was on purpose.

Now there’s a new boss in town who’s not the same as the old boss. He was elected a month ago, and won’t assume office for another month, but already he’s making waves, and not the pusillanimous kind.

In response to his threat to impose steep tariffs that would decimate their economies, Mexico and Canada have already promised to clamp down on illegal immigration from their borders into the United States.

In response to his candid support of Israel and his no-nonsense threats against barbaric terrorists, a fragile truce has emerged in that forever conflict. Jefferson, who forcibly subdued the Barbary pirates, would nod.

Nearby, in response to his tough stance against Russian imperialism, rebels in Syria were emboldened to reclaim their country from years of a Russian-sponsored dictatorship.

In response to his muscular defense posture but unwillingness to write blank checks forever in an unwinnable war of attrition, Ukraine and Russia are quietly negotiating peace. Kissinger would approve.

In response to his indefatigable populism, the people of France are once again inspired by the people of America. Those people yearning to be free are demanding a government that represents . . .  wait for it . . . people yearning to be free.

Those people of France begged him to attend the re-opening of their Lady of Paris – the Notre Dame – while Joe Biden mumbles and stumbles around in the swamps of Brazil.

His enemies in America say this guy who supports the Jewish nation of Israel is just like Hitler. Other enemies say he’s too volatile to be in charge. Still others say he has surrounded himself with stupid yes-men (like Elon Musk?). But his American enemies mostly disbelieve their own rhetoric – they’re just bad sports and sore losers.

In the rest of the world, his enemies are lying low like rats in the basement. They’ll stay there – but only for so long as they see America as an unabashed empire of liberty, a strong and chosen people, a shining city on a hill.

Donald Trump and his progeny have an opportunity unseen in two generations. They’re off to a good start.

The Denver mayor is an illegal unrepentant insurrectionist

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Denver mayor Mike Johnston, as I imagine him in his insurrectionist get-up

Resistance 2.0 is upon us, and it’s getting ugly.

The latest is from the formerly-mediocre and now-failed city of Denver, of which I am an embarrassed alum. The mayor promises to forcibly thwart the United States government’s enforcement of the United States immigration laws. He says he’ll send Denver police and 50,000 moms to head the feds off at the pass.

This valiantly woke mayor even promises to personally break laws and go to prison if necessary.

Here’s the back story:

Denver declared itself a “sanctuary city” back when liberals could make such feel-good declarations without any adverse consequences. But over time, the adverse consequences came good and hard, as did the illegal immigrants.

Armed with the knowledge that in Denver they would receive a hearty Mile Hile welcome and armed with the knowledge that they would not be deported (and, in many cases, armed with drugs and guns, too), the illegal immigrants came by the thousands.

Over 40,000. Denver now hosts the highest illegal immigration population per-capita of any city. Denver might not be a great city, or a great place to live anymore, but, as the host with the most, it’s a great haven for illegal immigrants.

Providing services for these illegals has strained the city budget to the point that the city has cut back on police and other emergency protection as well as basic services like street repair and snow plowing.

In a splendid exercise in irony and hypocrisy, Denver has tried to foist some of its illegals onto neighboring towns and cities. The libs of Denver thus pat themselves on the back for “welcoming” illegals into the city while simultaneously re-shipping them to cities that don’t.

The mayor declares that the city should continue to welcome illegal immigrants because it puts the city on “the right side of history.” As if history proves that illegal acts by illegal immigrants typically produce good and legal outcomes, so long as you express that conclusion in a flowery cliché. 

I have a question for these “right side of history” Democrats. Now that history has recorded that Republicans have won control of the Presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, a majority of state governorships and a majority of state legislatures, how’s that “right side of history” argument working out for you?

Back to Denver. The mayor’s latest rhetoric goes a step beyond the “sanctuary city” status that is common in our Blue cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and so on – you know, the toilet towns. Those so-called sanctuary cities had merely announced that they welcomed illegal immigrants, and would not help the feds enforce the federal immigration laws against them.

The Denver mayor now goes a step further than that. He promises war. He says he will send armed local Denver police to intercept the federal law enforcement personnel at the town limits, and will recruit moms from local Denver neighborhoods to help. He promises to personally go to jail if that’s necessary to stop the United States government from enforcing the United States immigration laws.

He boasted that his rebellion would be like Tiananmen Square where anti-communists were run over by tanks.

But wait! Democrats like communism – Karl Marx, Mao, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, the whole gang. The Democrats aren’t anti-communists, they’re anti-anti-communists. If the Democrats had been at Tiananmen Square, they would have been in the tanks, not under them.

And double but-wait! Didn’t the rebels lose in Tiananmen Square?

Ponder all this. The mayor of Denver says he personally will commit crimes for the purpose of preventing the United States government from enforcing United States laws; promised to enlist tens of thousands of armed local policemen and a citizens’ militia of 50,000 moms to join his rebellion; and promised to lose.

I wonder, will the mayor wear a buffalo horn hat?

I also wonder, won’t the mayor’s criminal interference with the United States government’s enforcement of the United States immigration laws within the United States (1) cause Denver’s the illegal immigrant problem to continue unabated and (2) worsen it by drawing even more illegal immigrants to Denver from other cities and towns?

The mayor later walked back his comparison to Tiananmen Square, perhaps because it dawned on him that the Democrats are on the side of the tank-riding communists, not the tank-crushed anti-communists. But he didn’t walk back his threat of secession or rebellion or insurrection.

Democrats, are you OK with this?

Aspen newspapers bury Aspen Skiing Company’s hateful diatribe against Trump

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Democracy dies when it gets buried

Right after the election, the CEO of Aspen Skiing Company, which runs Aspen and Snowmass resorts (known as “SkiCo” locally), was grieving. And he wanted everyone to know.

He sent a memo to all 1,500-some employees instructing them on “the gravity of what just occurred.” (This is all he knows about gravity, believe me – I’ve seen this guy ski.)

The memo CEO-splained that the election decision made by over half the nation was “openly at odds” with SkiCo’s values of:

“Equality, democracy, civility, compassion, tolerance, sustainability, open-mindedness, gratitude, freedom, integrity, and justice.”

When the biggest company in Aspen and the surrounding area, serving the public on public lands under favorable Forest Service leases, condemns over half of America – including many of its own employees and customers – for their purportedly undemocratic, uncivil, intolerant, unsustainable, close-minded, ungrateful, tyrannical and unjust election decision, that seems like news.

But the local newspapers didn’t report it. So I wrote a piece about it. My piece received significant attention.

I also sent a letter to the editor of one of those local newspapers that allegedly reports the news (in those few pages that are not devoted to real estate ads). It’s called the Aspen Daily News. My letter strictly observed their word limit and other rules.

They’ve been brimming with Trump-is-Hitler letters ever since the election, and before then too. I figured they might strike a bit of balance by publishing my letter calling out SkiCo for condemning as fascists half of America along with many of its own employees and customers.

I was wrong. The Aspen Daily News utterly ignored my letter.

 In their defense, their refusal might have been for reasons of money – it might have been because they’re whores to SkiCo as one if their biggest advertisers (apart from the ubiquitous real estate ads).

But it’s more likely that they’re just whores to the political left. Pitkin County went 71% for the Democrat, which is approximately 28% less than the political composition of the Aspen Daily News.

If it’s any consolation to me, and it is, the circulation of my piece far exceeded the circulation of the Aspen Daily News. But still, it rubs me wrong that a so-called newspaper is so blatantly biased in burying news.

And so, I’ll publish my letter here, where it will get substantially more readers than in the Aspen Daily News. (Now if I can just figure out how to accept real estate ads.) Here it is: 

In the wake of last week’s election, the CEO of the SkiCo companies circulated a “For Internal Distribution Only” memo to all 1,500-some of its employees bemoaning “the gravity of what just occurred.” He went on to complain that the election result was “openly at odds with some of the values [SkiCo] stands for.”

Those SkiCo values with which last week’s free and democratic election is at odds, the CEO said, are “equality, democracy, civility, compassion, tolerance, sustainability, open-mindedness, gratitude, freedom, integrity, and justice.”

SkiCo easily employs the largest number of people in the Roaring Fork Valley, its payroll is the largest in the Valley, and its customers are the Valley’s biggest source of revenue. Moreover, SkiCo enjoys leases of public lands at very favorable rates for the purpose of serving the public – all of them, regardless of race, color, sex, religion, or political beliefs.

Like anyone else, the CEO is entitled to his opinion that a majority of the country does not share his vaunted “values.” But foisting that opinion onto 1,500 employees that he has the power to fire, and onto hundreds of thousands of customers to whom he can deny lift tickets, is a tad heavy-handed. To use his own terminology, it’s not particularly tolerant.

I should mention that an esteemed friend who is prominent in the Aspen area also sent in a letter to the editor – to the other Aspen newspaper, the Aspen Times – objecting to the CEO’s coercive memo to his employees. (No, there’s not enough news in Aspen to support two daily newspapers, but there’s certainly enough real estate to advertise.) Her letter was similarly civil, and similarly unpublished.

Next time you drop $20k for a week in Aspen, consider where that money is going.

Here’s why Trump will win – it’s pretty simple

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Political pundits have too much data, and they overanalyze it. There’s a lot of data available, a lot of pundits to analyze it, and a lot of clicks to corral.

But the disengaged American middle doesn’t pay attention to nuances like last month’s job figures or the latest inflation report. They couldn’t find South America on a map even if you showed them where North America is.

To the American middle, abortions are something other people get – and they’re usually a different kind of people. Less than a quarter of Americans are biologically eligible for an abortion, and I’m guessing that more of them are trying to start a pregnancy than end one.

In any event, the votes of those people who are fixated on terminating pregnancies are not up for grabs. They’ll always vote for Democrats.

More important to the undecided American middle is the personality of the candidates. Many candidly admit this. They choose candidates based on whether they like them personally. That category of voters is the worst.

“Trump is not as nice as me,” they sniff self-satisfyingly to themselves. It’s like they’re voting for Homecoming Queen and the ballot reads something like:

  • __Donald J. Trump
  • __You

So, put aside the Nate Silvers of the world (though Nate is very good), their hard drives of mostly accurate data, their algorithms, and their punditry. Here are the basic reasons why Trump will win.

He’s not Joe Biden, and Kamala is

As the sitting Vice President, Kamala is tied to Joe Biden. (Don’t try to picture that.) She’s done nothing to untie herself, for fear of alienating her hard-left base who thought Biden was just swell – in his policies if not his persona.

The only time in modern history that a sitting Vice President ascended to the Presidency was when George H. W. Bush did it after the Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Joe Biden is no Ronald Reagan, and Kamala Harris is no George H. W. Bush.

Reagan left office with an approval rating at 63%. Biden’s has been in the 30s. (In a final humiliation, it’s now crept up to 40% as people have decided to approve of him going away.)

Bush had been a naval aviator, war hero, Yale graduate, Ambassador to the United Nations, and Director of the then-respected Central Intelligence Agency. Kamala has been . . . not.

Trump is almost a Cool Kid

Trump is much more “popular” in comparison to his opponent than he was in both 2020 and 2016. He still won’t win that Homecoming Queen crown, and people who decided long ago that they hate him for his vulgarity, his hair, and his tendency to say things in public that Bill Clinton did in private, are not likely to change their minds. But the disengaged American middle is seeing a more likeable guy than before.

Surviving endless “lawfare” and two assassination attempts doesn’t hurt him either.  

The Border

The left almost succeeded in branding Americans who wanted American borders as “racist.”

But they didn’t quite succeed. The indefensible chaos at our undefended border spreading to our police-defunded cities defies common sense.

Indeed, it goes beyond nonsense. Americans – including and perhaps especially the disengaged middle – see this as pure insanity.

Blacks don’t see Kamala as Black

Let me preface the following discussion with stating that I discuss “Blackness” only because the leftists have demanded that we not be colorblind. So here goes.

Black America is uninspired by Kamala, and it shows in both the polls and in early voting. This is despite her promises to send them free money.

As for why she’s unable to buy the Black vote, a comparison is instructive.

Barack Obama was our first Black president (unless you count aforementioned Bill Clinton). Obama was actually born of a white woman, and his private school upbringing in Hawaii was not exactly life in the ghetto.

But he was married to a woman who was clearly Black and he himself looked pretty Black. He had hair that was both black and Black.

Kamala, too, was born of a mother who is not Black (she is Asian Indian) and grew up in a relatively privileged setting (both Kamala’s parents were professionals).

But unlike Obama, she doesn’t really look Black. Her skin tone is lighter than Obama’s. Her hair is black but not Black. She has not perfected the Black accent that flowed from Obama when he condescended to audiences that were Black.

And here’s Kamala’s biggest liability in being Black. She’s married to a lily-white corporate lawyer who had a fling with his nanny in his previous marriage.

From Detroit to Baltimore to Chicago to East St. Louis, they shrieked:

“Wait a minute! Who has a nanny ?!?!?”  

Sorry, Democrats. Blacks think black Kamala ain’t Black.

Prices are much higher

Prices are nearly a third higher than when Biden took office. People don’t need to wade through the dense detritus of Politico or RealClearPolitics to know that. They’re reminded of it several times a week when they go to the grocery store.

The fact that inflation has almost returned to normal levels around 2-3% a year does not resonate with many people. In fact, many disbelieve those figures because they erroneously believe that declining inflation must mean declining prices.

There you have it. I’m guessing the election will be called for Trump by Wednesday morning.

Bonus prediction: Republicans will pick up two to four seats to re-take the Senate. The eminent Justice Clarence Thomas will retire from the Supreme Court next year to enable Trump and the Republican Senate to replace him.

That won’t change the political composition of the Court much, since Justice Thomas is a conservative. But the follow-up departure of Justice Sonia Sotomayor will.

This has been corrected to make clear that the fling with the nanny was when Kamala’s husband was married to his first wife, not to Kamala.

Staffers quit and 200,000 subscribers cancel after WaPo says its role is to report the news

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Official slogan of The Washington Post

The venerable Washington Post may or may not have been a force for good, but it certainly was great.

They brought down Richard Nixon for crimes that were only modest by today’s inflated standards but serious at the time. They helped lose the Vietnam War – a war that was criminal, or just, depending on your view of history, but the losing of which was certainly a tragedy for the conquered South Vietnamese and most of the rest of the world.

They won the Pulitzer Prize 76 times, and many of those times were back when the Prize rewarded true excellence.

They were everywhere. Few newspapers today bear the expense of foreign bureaus; the Post still has a couple dozen.

For most of their century-and-a-half of existence, they tried to report the news, and they succeeded. It’s certainly true that toward the end of the 20th century they focused on news that made Democrats look good and Republicans look bad (such as the Watergate story) but, still, it was news. It was factual. It was true. It was important.

Given their mission to report facts, the Post generally refused to endorse particular political candidates. Individual opinion columnists of course expressed their support for candidates of their choosing, but the Board of Editors did not endorse those candidates, at least not explicitly.

Only relatively recently, in 1976, did they begin routine endorsements. At that time, they were at the height of their power and could afford whatever ill will their endorsements generated among some readers and staff.

Their endorsements were almost always of Democrats: Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, and so on. It was predictable.

There are several problems with predictable endorsements. The first is that they have no persuasive power. If the Post always endorses the Democrat, then who is going to be persuaded by their endorsement of the Democrat this time?

The second problem is that endorsements predictably favoring one political party risk the reputation of the newspaper as an objective source of news. Readers surmise that the people working at the newspaper are members of that political party. If everyone at the newspaper is of one political party, are they really able to see and report the news objectively?

The third problem – related to the second – is that being predictably in favor of one political party tends to forfeit readers who favor the other political party. This problem has become more acute lately, as the internet has fragmented consumers of news into political parties and interest groups. Consumers today tend to get their news from sites that spin it the way they like, and avoid getting their news from sites that don’t.

That’s a flaw in consumerism, but it’s the reality of human nature.

That means a newspaper like the Post forfeits much of its Republican readers by getting a reputation for being a Democrat newspaper.

Finally, in view of all those reasons, one-sided endorsements are at cross purposes with professional journalism. Real journalists (as opposed to opinion hacks like me) simply report; they don’t opine.

This year, the Post announced that it is “going back to its roots” (their phrase) by not making an endorsement in the presidential election. It’s not clear whether their news page, too, will become more balanced, but owner Jeff Bezos made noises in that direction.

Maybe Bezos is making his decision on the basis of money, not ethics. But I’ll still take it. The two are usually not at odds.

Meanwhile, many Post staffers have quit in protest (good luck to them in finding a newspaper job) and over 200,000 subscribers have canceled. That fact tells a lot about what those quitters and cancelers think a newspaper’s role should be.

They think a newspaper’s role should be to tell subscribers which political opinion is “right.” More specifically, the newspaper should tell people that the “right” opinion is the Democrat one.

What’s curious, however, is that subscribers who pay for the Post are nearly always Democrats already, because they like the Democrat spin that they see at the Post. Therefore, the Post endorsements have no effective purpose.

Moreover, the quitters and cancelers at the Post know that. They know that they’re preaching to the choir (though they certainly would not use that particular analogy).

So why do they do it? Why do the Post quitters and cancelers insist on converting hard-core Democrats into . . .  hard-core Democrats?  

The answer is that they aren’t truly trying to convert anyone. Rather, they’re just flying their Democrat flag. It’s their little virtue-signaling routine.

That’s nice. But it’s not journalism.

Whatever Bezos’ motives, let’s hope he, and the owner of the LA Times who similarly refused to make an endorsement this year, start a trend away from political activism and back to professional journalism.

In that effort, it wouldn’t hurt to hire a few Republicans for a change.

The Colorado Christian baker wins again – but his tormenters will be back

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The left has hounded artistic Colorado baker Jack Phillips for over a decade. It started back in 2012 when a gay couple demanded that he create a “gay wedding cake” with two figurine husbands on top.

Of course, the gay couple could have gotten their gay cake created by many other bakers. They seem to have chosen Phillips not despite, but because, creating such a object was contrary to his religious beliefs.

Phillips politely said he would happily bake a cake for them, but not a gay cake. That’s an important point. Phillips did not simply refuse to serve the couple on the grounds that they were gay. Rather, he refused to create a special “gay cake” for them.

Phillips thus refused to create an artistic expression that was contrary to his religious beliefs.

The gay couple were something like a couple seeking out a Kosher restaurant, demanding that the Jewish chef cook up an elaborate pork dish, and then contending that they’d been discriminated against when told that pork is not on the menu.

It’s actually worse than that. The gay couple thought Phillips’ beliefs were not just discriminatory, but should be illegal. So, they schemed to establish that as a legal matter.  

First, they brought an action against Phillips before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and won. The case then went to a Colorado appellate court, and they won there too.

Phillips finally filed for review in the Colorado Supreme Court, where all seven Justices are Democrat appointees. Those Colorado Justices refused to even hear the case on the grounds there was zero merit to Phillips’ appeal.

Then Phillips filed for an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s the court of last resort in America, and they accept only a few percent of the appeals lodged there.

To everyone’s surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Phillips’ case was worth hearing. Not only that, but after hearing the case they reversed the Colorado decision. They decided that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had exhibited an unfair antipathy toward Phillips’ religious-based actions.

Let that sink in. The U.S. Supreme Court – the highest court in the land – found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and state courts had shown six years of unfair antipathy toward Phillips’ ordinary Christian religious beliefs.

At least they didn’t feed him to the lions. But what happened next was almost as bad, as anyone who’s been a defendant in a lawsuit will tell you.

On the very day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in favor of Phillips, a self-described “devil worshipper” demanded by email that Phillips bake a cake celebrating the devil’s birthday – complete with a dildo on top. (It’s not clear what is bedeviling about dildos.)

As before, Phillips politely explained that he could not bake such a cake because it was contrary to his religious beliefs.

Before then, on the very day that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’ appeal of the “gay cake” case, someone came into Phillips’ bakery and demanded that he create a “transgender cake” depicting transgender stuff.

You can see the pattern.

As before, Phillips refused to create the “transgender cake.” As before, the transgender person brought an action before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. As before, he/she won. And as before, the case eventually went up to the Colorado Supreme Court.

This time, the Colorado Supreme Court took the case (perhaps feeling stung by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the Colorado decisions the earlier time).

But the Colorado Supreme Court dodged a decision on the merits. Instead, they dismissed the case on a technicality.

It was a win for Phillips, but it didn’t establish any precedent for other Christian bakers or anyone else who wants protection for his religious beliefs.

Pity the Colorado Supreme Court. They were faced with either (1) defying the earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision by ruling against Phillips, or (2) defying their woke principles by ruling in his favor.

Ah, they were torn between the law of the land and the law of the woke. They found a clever way to choose neither.

But trust me, they’ll be back. The devil-worshipping transexuals, the kangaroo state courts and “civil rights” commissions stacked with Democrat appointees, and the rest of the totalitarian wokerati – they’ll all be back, lawless as ever.

They want to outlaw religious beliefs that they don’t believe in, and that’s almost all of them.

Kamala is not Biden and she’s not Trump, but she’s still probably Harris

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I predicted Trump would win the 2016 election. On the day of the election, the betting odds on that were 12%. Had I been a betting man, I’d have made YUGE money.  

In 2020, I again predicted Trump would win. On the day of that election, the odds of that happening were 35%.

Trump lost that time, but, given the odds, I would not have lost nearly as much as I would have made four years earlier in 2016. I’d still be way ahead.

My point is that even though I missed the call in 2020, nailing the near-impossible call back in 2016 makes me a frigging prophet.

So, listen to me. Trump will win this year.

Kamala’s campaign had a strategy from the outset. Before talking about it, bear in mind that the “outset” for her was not in 2022 or even 2023 when other Democratic candidates were slogging through the snows of Iowa to visit rural coffee shops and giving interviews to local radio schmucks in New Hampshire and North Carolina.

No, the “outset” for Kamala was a couple of weeks before the Democratic convention last summer when nameless party poohbahs snatched her out of the obscurity of a failed Vice Presidency in the service of a frail, failed Presidency.

They installed her as the Democratic candidate, even though she has never won a single primary delegate, despite – or because of – her best efforts. (By the way, one might wonder exactly what’s in it for the poohbahs.)

Anyway, here’s their strategy. It’s to rest on the fact that (1) Kamala is not that frail, failed President and (2) she’s not Trump either.

That has been almost enough. But not quite.

Although they’ve succeeded in convincing voters that Kamala is not Biden and not Trump, they’ve failed to convince them that she’s not Harris.

They did try. Kamala disavowed her earlier open border policy, sort of. She retracted her position that guns owned by people not named Kamala should be confiscated, kind of. She no longer favors defunding the police, apparently. She seems not to think Joe Biden is sharp as a tack, anymore. She has not advocated taxpayer funding for “gender affirmation” surgery for rapists so they can move into women’s prisons, lately. She doesn’t advocate men competing in women’s sports, for now.

It’s a little hard to state Kamala’s current position on these things definitively. That’s because she herself does not state her position on these things definitively.

She reminds me of the lawyer who is asked “What is two plus two?” The lawyer answers “What do you want it to be?”

Kamala is more shrewd than that lawyer, however. She simply refuses to take the question. She refused all summer to sit for interviews or stand for press conferences after the previous two years when she had no campaign appearances at all because she ostensibly was not campaigning.

Once she did start campaigning in the wake of the poohbah coup, years after everyone else started, she campaigned not with press conferences or position papers or interviews – even with friendly interviewers – and pretended not to hear questions shouted to her. She instead campaigned on “Joy.”

There’s something disconcerting about anonymous poohbahs pulling a behind-the-scenes palace coup, installing a figurehead of their choosing, and instructing her not to give interviews but instead to campaign on “Joy.”

To the poohbahs’ credit, Kamala is definite about a few things. For example, she’s definite that she favors peace in the Mideast.

To their discredit, however, she’s not very definite about how to achieve it. Defeating the bad guys is evidently not on the table. In fact, identifying them is not even on the table.

All this joyous indefiniteness worked for a while. Despite Kamala’s absence at interviews and press conferences and her missing position papers, voters still believed she was definitely not Biden and definitely not Trump.

But as noted, they came to believe she might still be Harris.

As Kamala’s polling numbers have slipped, the poohbahs have evidently finally decided in desperation to put her in front of the media to state definitively that she’s not only not Biden and not only not Trump, but also not Harris.

The voters are saying, “OK, maybe. But then just exactly who are you?”