Choosing to lose.

Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic candidate for President.  He was honest, and Catholic, which made him unelectable.

Kamala Harris says when she talks to parents on the campaign trail, one of their top concerns is that their daughters won't have access to abortion in college

Charlie Spiering, summarizing a recent Kamal Harris interview.

I come from a sufficiently well-educated family such that my grandmother, Agnes, on my mother's side, had attended and graduated from university.

If you consider that she was born in 1891, that's quite the feat.

Now, I'll admit that my father was the first one to attend university on his side of the family, but his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, had all been successful businessmen at a time at which you didn't need a college education to be one, or even a high school education for that matter.  My father's father, who I never met, was universally regarded by those who knew him as extremely smart.

Indeed, I once was stopped on the sidewalk by an elderly lawyer who knew my father and his father, who asked about the family.  My son must have been in high school at the time, and the odd question "is he extremely smart. . . " like all of the members of the family.

I often, frankly, feel that I'm on the bottom end of the family intelligence pool compared to my own father and my kids.

No real college parents anywhere have, as one of their top concerns, that their daughters won't be able to commit infanticide, unless they've drunk so deeply of the left wing Kool-Aid they're perusing brochures from The Young Pioneers.

Democratic campaigns for the Oval Office, or Democratic campaigns in general, are not smart.  

They're about as dumb as can be.

From 1914 until 1980 the Democrats were masters at coalition building.  The party kept hardhat workers, urban Irish Catholics, Hispanics, and the entire South together, which was frankly quite a feat.  It supported unions and working class families, and generally was pretty pro farmer.  It had a left wing, but it also had a conservative one as well.  Starting in 1968, when it embraced American battlefield defeat to a degree, and then in 1973, when it took the bloody abortionist hand, it took a turn toward the left, and as it did that, it dumped democracy like a hot rock in favor of an imagined Platonic body of robed elders who would tell the people what to do, and they'd like it.

Absolutely everything about the current Democratic message is wrong, including some things that shouldn't be regarded as wrong, but which are in the current political atmosphere.  One thing that's definitely wrong is the concept that infanticide is a winning ticket.  It isn't. The Democrats have read single issue matters on ballots here incorrectly.  Maybe in that'st the only thing on a ballot, you get the voters only concerned about that to come out.  Otherwise, people aren't going to vote that way.

Moreover, if Harris is really being told this by the parents of college women, it's because she's talking to the most liberal parents imaginable, and they're going to say crap like that no matter what.  Moreover, the college educated are largely voting for Biden already.  Biden/Harris need to get votes that they don't already have.  The college educated have largely already left the GOP.

What's left of the electorate that is in the GOP is made up of the working class, small business owners (some college educated), and residents of rural regions (including quite a few well-educated ones in those areas).  They don't believe "diversity is strength", they aren't interested in tolerating non "Judeo-Christian" religions, or gender mutilation, and they feel that their lives and livelihoods are threatened by out of control illegal immigration.  They love their regions, but they're largely incapable of believing in climate change in spite of the evidence.  They quit listening to scientist and social scientist of all types because they were lied to about some things, and therefore don't believe any of it.  They listen to Evangelical pastors who tell them what they want to hear, and who make their massive departures from Christian doctrine irrelevant by not mentioning them (ever hear any of them criticize Trump for living in an adulterous relationship, which by conventional Christianity he is?  Or of an Evangelical Church refusing to marry two people who have been married before?)

When I first started practicing law, a firm partner, a true Christian gentleman, told me about litigation that "this isn't a nice game".  It isn't.  Politics is even less so, and you have to be smart about it.

There's 0 reason that the Biden/Harris ticket needs to mention abortion at all.  Where that's been an issue, they had no role in it. And they're driving Democrats away right now who are Catholic, which includes the Hispanic voters they imagine they'll be gaining.  And their absolute incompetence on the border is in fact a good reason to vote against them.  A competent ticket would shut up on abortion and would make a very serious effort on the border.  

Obama, it might be noted, had a very controlled border.  And while he was President before Dobbs, he didn't say much about abortion either.

He won twice.

Pointing out that more IRS agents punishes the wealthy, not the middle class, would help too.  Pointing out that Trump has been a personally immoral man, might as well.  Pointing out that he was the one who surrendered to the Taliban would as well. 

And parking Harris somewhere would be a good idea, if not dumping her entirely.

And that's where you have to say thing that re uncomfortable.

Al Smith was the Democratic nominee for President in 1928.  He would have won, but he was Catholic.  Yes, that meant a lot of the electorate was bigoted, but it also meant that the Democrats weren't smart in running him.

They would be now, but Smith wouldn't be a Democrat any longer.  He'd likely be an independent.  He wasn't willing to compromise on his Catholicism, like Joe Biden has, and he wasn't a liar of any kind either.

Kamala Harris is like Al Smith in one fashion.  She reminds bigoted voters who they hate.  She's a lawyer (regular people hate lawyers), she's the child of two immigrants (MAGA people don't like immigrants), one of whom was Indian and the other Jamaican, making her a "person of color" (a lot of MAGA people really don't like people of color, let alone immigrant people of color), she's married to an entertainment lawyer (oh, oh) who is Jewish (again, MAGA people like Israel, but Jews. . . ) and the children of the couple are from his first marriage, meaning she has low parent street cred.

Are any of those items a reason not to vote for Harris?  Absolutely not.  Her policies are a reason not to vote for Harris.  But will some MAGA people vote for Trump for these reasons? You bet they will, and in a race this close, in a handful of states that matter, that's a problem.

I don't know who would be a better VP candidate.  Amy Klobuchar strikes me as one who would be better in every fashion.  If you could find an American Christian Levantine politician (and there definitely are some) they'd be absolutely perfect, particularly if the choice was a woman.  But what I am saying is that in a race with democracy itself on the ticket, choosing to go with a candidate this old for President, and a VP who is so disliked, is just dumb.  And emphasizing the aspects of your campaign that the populist right hates, even if they do so wrongly on some of them, and the nervous middle aren't comfortable with, isn't very smart either.  Having the disliked person, even if the dislike is immoral, who people fear might end up President isn't very smart, either.

This isn't a nice game.  Sometimes choices have to be made in the candidates and the strategy that aren't very palatable.  A lot of Republicans will do what Cynthia Lummis admitted to doing in 2016 as to Trump, and "hold her nose and vote".  The Democrats should hold their noses and make some smart choices.

But they will not.

Whigs and the GOP. A timely lesson.

Log cabins and cider were the symbols of the Whigs.

The Whig party formed in 1833, making it just a few years younger than the Democratic Party.  It was a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, although most articles will claim it was a "conservative" party.

It opposed populist Andrew Jackson, a Democratic populist.

William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachery Taylor and Millard Fillmore were members of the Whigs.

A lot of its policies were very reasonable in a modern conservative context. What it couldn't adjust to, however, was slavery, and the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise, broke it up in 1856.  Those members of the party who came down as solidly anti-slavery formed the new Republican Party, which was also a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, with anti-slavery added to it.

The GOP went from birth to the White House in just four years.

The Whigs drew from the Democratic Republican Party that preceded it, but it drew from other camps as well.  Not only did the old Democratic Republicans come into it, but Democrats did as well as that party became increasingly populist.

Note that.  

The Whigs were a major center left American political party.  The Democrats were a conservative, populist party.  The Whigs of the 1850s would have recognized the Republican Party of the 1950s as their successor.

Note what happened, and perhaps more importantly, how quickly it can happen.

The classic bromide of American politics is that third parties don't succeed.

Some do.

The Whigs came out of a prior political party's period of turmoil. They consolidated around solid, government backed, economics and a policy of what would amount to anti discrimination for the era.  As a result of that, it attracted businessmen, quasi liberals, and (immigrant) Catholics.  It won several elections before spectacularly breaking up.

The GOP has been around much longer, but at least in its early periods up to the Great Depression, and then again from 1950 on, up until Ronald Reagan, it was much like the Whig Party it had replaced, but with civil rights added as an element. Ronald Reagan, as much as he is admired by conservatives, began to dismantle that when the Democrats incorporated civil rights into its makeup starting in the 50s and 60s.  The Democrats had been struggling with its southern membership, which very much reflected the views of the traditional party, since the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt.  Southern Democrats stuck with the party as they had nowhere else to go, until Reagan cynically offered them one.

Now that element has taken over the party.

The GOP nearly cracked up in 1912 when the Theodore Roosevelt wing of the party, which wanted to take the party much to the left, and make it much more liberal/populist, bolted.  That same year, the Democratic Party began its evolution into a liberal party by running Woodrow Wilson, drawing in disaffected Republican populists.

Note that.

It took twenty years, but by 1932 TR's cousin FDR put the liberals in the Democratic Party permanently in control, Wilson's bid having transformed the party permanently.  It took roughly 30, but Ronald Reagan did the same thing with the Dixiecrats he incorporated into the GOP, that having also transformed the party permanently.  It took the Democrats 40 years to start shedding the Dixiecrats.  It took about 40 years for the Dixiecrats Reagan invited into the Republican Party to start a GOP civil war.

Conservatives gush about Reagan, and with some good reasons.  He was the country's one and only really conservative President.  Prior Republicans had fit more into the Whig mold.  Those who came after him sort of recalled it, like the first Bush, or fit into a new Neo Con mold that real conservatives tended to despise.  Reagan's Presidency was transformational, however, in that it inserted certain conservative strains of thought into government, while it never got a hold of the nation's budget, which has become increasingly out of whack due to the tax cuts he and Republican successors introduced.

But what he also introduced, Dixiecrats and Rust Belt Democrats, infected the party and now has killed it.  The "Republican" Part of today is the Dixiecrat Party/Rust Belt Democrat Party in a very real sense.  It's populist, but not conservative.

There are holdout Republican elements within it, but they have no hope of taking it back.  The past three years have proven that. Trump Populists don't care that Trump tried to seize power illegally.  They see class enemies everywhere which justify their positions, something Democrats just don't grasp.  Democrats like Robert Reich run around wondering when they'll wake up, not realizing they're wide awake.

When the Whigs broke up, it took the GOP only a few years to become successful.  The Whig collapse in 1856 was followed by the Republican success of 1860.

That's lesson number 1.  New parties can succeed quickly when the old one dies.

Lesson number 2 is that opposing parties become complacent.  The Democratic Party after 1912 didn't worry about its southern base and allowed it to go into the Republican Party, which briefly helped the GOP, and then killed it.  The Whigs took not only from the collapsed Democratic Republicans but also from the Democrats themselves.

The current Democratic Party is the legacy of 1912 the same way that the GOP is the legacy of 1980.  Just as the GOP has gone Dixiecrat/Rust Belt Democrat, the Democratic Party has gone Ivy League Pink.  It's nearly as enfeebled as the GOP is right now, it's just not as obvious.

A new party must emerge to replace the GOP, and frankly it now will.  Conservatives have no home and need to find one.  Centrist, however, have no home as well.  People who believed in Reagan's social conservatism aren't the same people who vote for serial polygamist and icky Donald Trump.  Democrats that voted for a guy like Harry Truman aren't comfortable with Joe Biden, at least in the expression he's manifested himself.  49%, at least, of the electorate are independents who have already dumped the GOP or the Democratic Party.

The one, and only, thing the Democrats and the Republicans agree on is that you absolutely must not vote for a third party, as that helps the other guy. That thinking insures that the extremes of those two parties have a free ride.

Well, the party is over and on the GOP side, the people have gone home.  This election, or the next, a new center right party must form, and will form.

If it formed now, with a Manchin or Christie at its head.  It'd take the election, and the GOP would completely collapse.  Quite a bit of the Democratic Party would defect as well.

It should happen.

Blog Mirror: Why liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds

 

Why liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds

The business of progressives and conservatives.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

G.K. Chesterton

Why specific movements on the left always end up being disregarded. Sense and Solidarity. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 51st edition.

As a climate justice movement, we have to listen to the voices of those who are being oppressed and those who are fighting for freedom and for justice. Otherwise, there can be no climate justice without international solidarity.

Greta Thurnberg.

And, now Thurnberg, having sided with murder, has jumped the shark.

There's no connection whatsoever, and even less than that, with the situation in the Middle East and the climate,

But this is typical. In the 20s and 30s the American left came around to supporting Stalin in many instances. Why?  Well, um, solidarity?

And this is why, in the end, that such movements lose their steam.  Here a man joined the stage to protest the diversion of the protest.  His actions were wrong, but his point was correct.

Of course the point will be made that being concerned for the Palestinians as a people, isn't the same as support for Hamas, and at least on an intellectual level, that's true. And as much as possible that can be done should be done to ease the humanitarian crisis that has come about.

But, by the same token, we should note, the East Prussians were not the same thing as the SS.  They were displaced, permanently, in 1945 and nobody, outside the East Prussians, has shed a tear about. Hor's de combat.  

Moreover, you can't really cross over from poster child for a cause, and frankly that's what she did, to left wing general agitator all at once and in this fashion.  It discredits the movement you came from, particularly with the nonsensical effort to link the two.

But, never mind.  The American left (and of course she's not part of that) supported every left wing cause of the 20s and 30s before burying their history of doing that in the late 40s and 50s.  It didn't help them in the end, and they've never been able to really wash the blood off.  

Solidarity is one thing.  Sense is another.

Last prior edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 50th edition, the Synod Edition.

Lex Anteinternet: D'uh

Lex Anteinternet: D'uh: “This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down,” Mr. McCarthy said on Thursday. “It doesn’t work.” ...

In fairness, far left Democrats joined in with far right Republicans to bring the defense measure down, with the "progressives" voting against the Republican bill as it had eliminated social programs within the Defense Department which they favored. 

And so the extreme right, and extreme left, joined, to shut down the government.

The 2024 Election, Part VI. The 14th Amendment Edition.

AMENDMENT XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.

 

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of

 

President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.

The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

It is increasingly clear that the 14th Amendment is going to be used as a legal basis to challenge Donald Trump's ability to be a Presidential nominee this election.   

And legal scholars, weighting in, have read this language to bar his ability to do so.  Two non-profit legal groups have made it known that they are going to be filing suits.

I suppose we should list running, at the present time, in this sad show.

President.

Democrats:

Joe Biden; the incumbent.  

While a majority of Democrats and voters in general are disenchanted with the aged President, he will take the nomination absent something unexpected occurring.

Marianne Williamson.

Gadfly. Williamson mostly serves to remind voters that there are some real wackadoodles in the Democratic Party.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  

As if Williamson wasn't enough of a wackadoodle. Kennedy is receiving attention, but his candidacy isn't likely to go anywhere.  Known for some unconventional views.

Republicans.

Donald Trump. 

The former President, who is facing multiple felony charges, but who has a large number of fanatic followers in spite of having nearly every deficit as a candidate imaginable.

Nikki Haley

In a normal election cycle, we could expect Haley to do well.

Vivek Ramaswamy.  

Youngest candidate, oddly tacking to the right of Trump on some things, and getting increasingly extreme as the election goes on.

Perry Johnson,

largely unknown businessman.  Age 75.  Because we need more old people to run for this office.

Larry Elder 

Conservative African American radio host.  71 years of age, and first time candidate.

Asa Hutchinson. 

Former Governor of Arkansas and conventional, non MAGA, Republican. Age 72.

Tim Scott.

African American Senator from South Carolina.

Ron DeSantis

Governor of Florida.

Chris Christie

Former Governor of New Jersey. Blunt anti Trump candidate.

Mike Pence.

Boring, if briefly heroic, former Vice President.

Doug Burgum

Governor of North Dakota who can't muster up enough courage to discuss Trump's coup.

Will Hurd 

Congressman from Texas.

Steve Laffey 

A politician you've never heard of but who is apparently on the New Hampshire ballot.

Ryan Binkley 

A Texas businessman and Protestant Pastor.

Green Party

Cornel West.  

West would be familiar to watchers of news shows and PBS from the late 20th Century, but his candidacy here nearly reduces him to gadfly status.

American Solidarity Party

Peter Sonski  

Sonski is a businessman who is the ASP's choice for President this year. The party is a Christian Democratic Party that ought to receive more attention, and would in a fairer system.

Lurking on the outside of all of this is No Labels, which in spite of the existence of third parties, threatens to launch a non-party third party run at the Oval Office.  Joe Manchin is continually mentioned as its potential candidate, although the Democrats desperately hope he'll stay in the Senate.

In terms of more local races:

U.S. Senate

Republicans

John Barrasso, maybe?

The long serving Senator has not announced if he's running or not.  Right now, because it's pretty obvious that Mitch McConnell is headed on to the next realm, he stands to potentially be Senate Majority Leader.

Reid Rasner.

Rasner has announced and is running essentially as a far right populist.  If Barrasso stays in, his campaign will be forgotten within days of the primary election.

September 3, 2023

The Heritage Foundation and others have worked out a Project 2025 as a plan to radically reshape the Federal Government should Trump come to power.

As the Heritage Foundation would have it:

The fourth pillar of Project 2025 is our 180-day Transition Playbook and includes a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency.  Only through the implementation of specific action plans at each agency will the next conservative presidential Administration be successful. 

Pillar IV will provides the next President a roadmap for doing just that.  To learn more about Project 2025’s vision for a conservative administration, please read our recently published book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.

September 7, 2023

Six Colorado voters have filed an action seeking to bar Donald Trump from running for election under the 14th Amendment.  The complaint is a phenomenal 115 pages long and is effectively a brief.

The relief sought is as follows:

This is the second such lawsuit that's been filed. The first was dismissed, although I haven't researched why.  Lack of standing would be my guess.

One of these suits is going to hit home and succeed.  Some might note that Trump is not likely to prevail in the general election in Colorado anyhow, but this would mean that Colorado's primary votes would go to another GOP candidate, should it succeed.

As noted, somewhere it will, and depending upon when it happens, this issue will have to go to the Supreme Court rapidly.  While predicting the ultimate outcome is hazardous, my guess is that there's a fair chance that the Supreme Court will ultimately hold that Trump is not qualified to run.

cont:

So on the same day a lawsuit was filed in Colorado, Secretary of State Gray wrote to the SoS of New Hampshire, stating:

How much sway Wyoming has with New Hampshire, or for that matter any state's SoS with another's, is an open question, but the direction of this seems clear.  Some state is going to find Trump can't be on the ballot and this will have to go to the Supreme Court.  That will determine the issue for every state.

Gray touches upon, but doesn't really answer, an important issue here, that being, how is it to be determined that a person was in an insurrection?  Being convicted of having been in one, under a statute that could give rise to that determination, is one thing, and in fact odds are good that Trump will have been by November 2024.  But that clearly isn't, I think, required by the 14th Amendment for the reason that Secretary Gray notes, the Civil War example.  Nobody was tried for the crime of having engaged in a treasonous rebellion against the United States following the Civil War.  Clearly at the time the mere presumption of Confederate service was enough.  As that's the only example, it would seem that presumption would operate here as well such that, if a SoS determines that Trump aided and abetted an insurrection, it would be up to Trump to prove that he did not.

The lawsuits will work differently, of course, as they have that as part of their allegations, and therefore That issue will be for them to prove at trial, or perhaps by motion.

September 11, 2024

Latest polls put Trump ahead of Biden in the General Election.

That presumes, of course, that they both win their nominations.  Democratic spokesmen fielded to the weekend shows are trying to brush it off by noting that the economy is strong, unemployment low, and there are 14 months left to go.  But it's a bad sign for Biden, no matter what.

This would suggest that both Democrats and rank and file (not populist) Republicans need to wake up.  If Trump takes the Oval Office, it will complete the conversion of the GOP into a right wing populist party which will have huge impacts on the country for the foreseen future, and certainly during the next four years.

If Republicans are to take him on, what they really need to do is to meet at this time and determine that those leaning into Trump should get out.  They're not going to do anything.  They need to get their field down as small as possible.

For the Democrats, they need to meet with Joe and propose a moderate substitute.  

September 14, 2023

Legislators have criticized a ballot initiative to limit property tax in Wyoming, noting that it would strip funding for schools.

They're correct.

A lot of the local anger over property taxes is frankly ironic. For decades, Wyoming communities have encouraged relocation into the state, which ipso facto brings in wealth and raises property values overall.  Indeed, many relocatees upgrade their dwellings by doing so.  Meanwhile, local government and infrastructure needs remain, if not in fact grow.

The solution is more distributist, localist and involving subsidiarity and solidarity, which was the case all along.

Vivek Ramaswamy vowed to cut the federal workforce by 75% by the end of his term if elected, which is frankly absurd.\

Mitt Romney has announced that he will not be running for reelection. This brought out the predictable assortment of Trump trolls condemning Romney for not being a Trump troll.  It also brougth the following comment from the former President:

There is something deeply weird about comments like this coming from Trump.  With all the attention to Biden's mental status, there's little with Trump, but something is off with him.

September 19, 2023

President Trump was interviewed by the new host of Meet The Press.

The interview is revealing for the way in which Trump has become so proficient at lying, he sounds credible while doing so, helping to provide some insight to why his followers believe him.  He spouts lies with such routine blandness that they sound like somebody repeating what he believes to be the truth.  If people only listened to Trump, you may well be convinced that the falsehoods reflect reality.

September 21, 2023

The Natrona County GOP invited WyoRino to a meeting they held to debate him/her/they.  Some members of the county's Republican Party have been in the crosshairs of the anonymous blogger.  Predictably, he didn't show up to the event, and so conservative Cowboy State Daily's not so conservative Op Ed columnist Rod Miller had nobody to debate.  From reading about it, some other populists did show up, however.

Now, one of the non Natrona County GOP legislators, Larry Craigo of Johnson County, is the subject of an anonymous mailer.  He's called that person/persons cowardly.

There's something interesting going on here.

Whoever is behind these efforts, and it of course may be a collection of people has spare money to devote to this effort.  I've seen a large vinyl WyoRINO banner locally, and WyoRINO bought a billboard here as well.

Spare cash, far right wing, those are the clues really.

Trump has announced that he's going to Michigan rather than the next debate.  This will likely be pretty scripted, as the UAW isn't exactly pro Trump, even if many of its rust belt employees share many of his non labor views.

Of course, Bernie Sanders has weighed in. . . 

Last Prior Thread:

The 2024 Election, Part V. Wooing the primary voters.

Related Threads:

The Post Insurrection. Part VII. The Insurrectionist.

This is why we can't have nice things. "You can't vote for a third party". Oh yes, you can.

Blog Mirror: Not everyone who disagrees with you is a closet right-winger I guess we have to do this: A high-level overview of my political views.

 

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a closet right-winger

I guess we have to do this: A high-level overview of my political views.

This is why we can't have nice things. "You can't vote for a third party". Oh yes, you can.

This view is precisely why American democracy is so screwed up

No Labels, no fables, no third-party betrayals

All Americans who believe in democracy must unite behind Joe Biden.

Robert Reich is here to tell you, along with every other Democratic pundit, that if you aren't voting for Joe Biden, you are a traitor to democracy.  Indeed, he states:

Let me be absolutely clear. Third-party groups such as No Labels and the Green Party are in effect front groups for Trump in 2024, and should be treated as such.

That's BS.

Let's be frank, the Democratic Party's love of democracy was rediscovered during the insurrection.  At that point, it suddenly realized that anti-democratic forces are bad.  Prior to that, and even now, what it really is for is rule by Liberal Ivy League Educated Judges. 

The Democrats regard voters as besotted fools.  They have for years, with it really becoming apparent following 1973's Roe v. Wade decision. They still feel that way. They hate the thought that courts can't descend from wooden walls and tell the peasantry what to think.

One of the things that they hate the most about recent years is that the Supreme Court has torn down some totally defective prior decision and told the people that they'll just have to figure things out for themselves. The Court, for example, hasn't "taken away" a non-existent "right to abortion". There was never one. The Court could have decided, on natural law principles, that abortion is contrary to the laws of nature on an existential basis and declared a right to life, but it didn't do that, in spite of all the howling.  It just said that people, through their state legislatures, have to figure this out for themselves.

The Democrats hate that thought, and for good reason.  It means that in many places, if left to their own devices, people would decide all sorts of things that Democrats regard as individualistic rights aren't. And the reason is plain. The driving force of the Democratic Party essentially believes that if you regard yourself as a feline asexual Bhutanese princess, you should be able to force everyone else to agree with you.  Most people just don't think that way, however.  

That doesn't mean that Trump should be elected, either. The GOP has abandoned democracy in favor of authoritarianism, and that always leads to disaster.  The dirty little secret as to why Trump has so much support in the rank and file of the GOP isn't because most Republicans believe the election was stolen, no matter what they say, but rather than they've grown so disgusted with the Democratic Party and establishment Republicans that they no longer regard Democrats or establishment Republicans as legitimate, and therefore don't think they should count.  Indeed, we have gotten to where we are at as the Democrats regard voters as unwashed vulgarians who should merely be entertained with the thought their votes mean something, the country club Republicans regard the electorate as mindless consumers whose opinions don't count, and a certain section of that electorate just has  had enough of it. 

In other words, the Democrats viewed the electorate as too stupid to influence anything, and the Republicans viewed them as Walmart customers only.

That this may mean the end of American democracy is both parties' fault.

That either of those parties would now have the gall to suggest that parties that actually reflect people's views shouldn't be voted for is maddening.  If we'd had parties that actually reflected people's views all along, we wouldn't be here now.  And the thought that the diversity of political opinion can be summed up with two choices is flatly bizarre.

The argument, by either party, that "you must vote for us or else it's Trump" is an argument of last resort.  The challenge for the Democrats isn't to present Biden as the only choice to Trump, but to give the voters somebody they feel comfortable with. Somebody who isn't 80 years old and hasn't gone so far to the left.  The challenge for Republicans, which may be a party that is now too far gone, is to give us somebody who will really do conservative, but not fascist, things rather than just say they will.

And frankly, the challenge for American democracy is to make a choice between Republicans and Democrats much, much less important. Why aren't there members of the Green Party and the American Solidarity Party in Congress?   Why do the Paul's run as Republicans when they're really Libertarians?  Why does Bernie Sanders "caucus" with the Democrats when he should be looking for a Socialist to join him? These are questions that shouldn't have to be asked.

On toleration.

We posted this the other day:

Lex Anteinternet: A Sorority (Fraternity) lawsuit, and a subject who...: Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent's faith is to sa...

In it, we noted this:

But in our political purity of the age, we're not doing that.  And that's destructive for the people making the declaration, who could have been helped.

We might, before concluding, stop to ask two questions. Does it really matter, would be the first.

After all, if somebody wants to drink themselves into oblivion, does it matter, if that's their choice?  Or more particularly, if somebody wants to present as a woman, who is a man, what does it really matter to me or anyone else?

Well, it does matter if your view of humanity is that we are our brother's keeper.  Oddly enough, in our contemporary world, it's the political left that claims that we are, while the political right, as exhibited by Jeanette Ward in a common in the last legislative session, feels we are not.  But most decent societies, and all Christian societies, feel that we are.

So there's a duty to the individual to help them live an ordered life. We know that living a disordered one leads to unhappiness.

There's a wider duty, however, to society.  Assaults on individual natures are assaults on nature in general, are destructive to us all.

And, additionally, telling a lie to yourself is one thing. But demanding, even with the force of law, that everyone else adopt the lie is quite another. That's completely destructive to the social structure, as enshrining lies as part of them inevitably leads to decay.

And finally, and more particularly, it's damaging to women in the extreme. Real women, that is.  Women know that they aren't men.  We all know that the biological life of a woman is radically different from a man's in nearly every sense.  Psychologically, it isn't the same either.  Reducing womanhood to appearing to have boobs is the most Hefnereque position of all, and an insult to women in every fashion.

After posting it, an irony occured to us that is another reason the entire transgender fantasy, as society approaches the topic, does damage to society.

It's extremely logically inconsistent.

A consistent drum beat in this are by the progressive left is that "tolerance" and "acceptance" are all that's required here, and that this all is a straight line from earlier civil rights movements, with the most common analogy being it's a straight line to "transgender rights' from 1) civil rights for blacks, or 2) civil rights for women, or 3) civil rights for homosexuals.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as none of those other movements requires suppressing reality and acceptance of self definition.

The civil rights movement that brought political and societal rights on par, almost, with whites in the US very much demonstrates this.  The oppressed class were African Americans, or as Martin Luther King would state at the time, "Negroes".  Skin color is actually a secondary feature of our appearance and an evolutionary adaption to intense sunlight, which means that the entire concept of "race", as we've noted before, is a patently false one. Race really doesn't exist, but ethnicity and culture do, and nobody could rationally argue that African Americans in general have a culture in the country which reflects their long presence in it, and the origin of that presence being rooted in the crime of slavery.

But here's the thing.  You don't sense your self to be black.  Your ancestry either goes back to Africans or it doesn't.  Under the "one drop of blood" silliness of American culture, you are an African American if you are of mixed ancestry, and almost all African Americans are (lots of "white" Southerners are as well), which is a social construct, but it's one based on a reality. Somewhere, and for the rule to apply somewhere relatively recently, you had an African ancestor.

If you don't, and you claim you feel your self black, you will be justifiably socially derided.  And that's because you really haven't endured what African Americans do on a daily basis, and growing up.  

In other words, if you run around claiming to be black, and aren't, you are going to be despised by everybody as a fake.  Indeed, the proposition is so absurd, it was used as a running joke in the movie The Jerk, with Steve Martin, whose obviously not black, giving the lines "I was born a poor black child" in the opening scenes of the movie.  More seriously, Jessica Krug, a professor at George Washington University who claimed to be black, had to resign when it was revealed she wasn't.  In fact, over time, Krug to be an Algerian American, a German American, and an Afro Boricua, when in fact she was a white American of Jewish ancestry.

Nobody tried to justify this on the basis that she "self identified" as black.

And nobody demands that you accept her claim, as she feels herself to be black.

Let's turn, then, to homosexuality.

Whatever a person feels the origins of male or female same gender attraction to be, it is.  That is, nobody really doubts that there are men sexually attracted to men, or women sexually attracted to women. The question may be why, and what that means, but people aren't faced with claims of "I feel myself to be attracted to the same gender".  We know that occurs.  That doesn't actually change the fundamental nature of a person's genetically determined gender, however.  Homosexual men are men.  There's also no doubt about that, and in some odd way, that's the point.  The same is true with homosexual women. They may be attracted to other women, but that doesn't mean they aren't women, they are.  Therefore, when a person reveals themselves, or is revealed by others, to be homosexual, it isn't as if you have to accept that their morphology and nature is different.  It just all remains the same.

Transgender claims, however, are radically different, in that the man claims he's a woman, or vice versa, just like a white person claiming they're black. And that not only doesn't have to be accepted, it can't be.

Indeed, hearkening back to that example, if a white person deeply and sincerely asserted that they were black, when they weren't, it not only would be pointed out, but if it persisted, at a bare minimum the person would be regarded as odd.  For most people, it probably wouldn't be so odd that it would be socially destructive (in some cases it could be), but it would definitely be odd.  But pretending you are a woman, if you are not, is destructive by its very nature.

We've already pointed out why, but the physical and psychological natures of women are radically different, which is the main reason.  It's also, however, deeply offensive to the nature of women, and reduces them to mere attributes, which is insulting in the extreme.

Finally, there's a certain intolerant insistence on tolerance here.  Toleration really means that I put with your nature, no matter what I think of it.  We do that in order to make society work.  For some things it should be obvious that it isn't really toleration that is required, but acceptance, ethnicity being one, but for many things that's not the case.  In American society, for example, there are many religious groups and all should be tolerated, but that doesn't mean in any way shape or form individual acceptance is required.  A person is free and should be free to disagree with the tenants of a religion, and even vehemently disagree with them.

That's toleration.

Toleration here, however, means accepting a person's self definition, no matter how deluded.  We ask that of nothing else.  

Put another way, we don't demand that Christians accept that Mohammed was a prophet, and we don't demand that Muslims accept Christ as the Son of God and part of the Trinitarian God.  We don't demand that blacks accept Jessica Krug as black.  We shouldn't demand that people accept men as women.

Toleration would really mean that if you see a man in a dress, you don't harrass the perseon about it.  It doesn't mean you have to pretend the man is a woman.

Wyoming on California's no travel list.

This comes as a surprise.  I only learned of it due to Twitter (or as Elon Musk, Twitter's owner would like us to call Twitter, "X", rather than Twitter).

California has banned travel to Wyoming by state employees, except unless it's necessary and an exemption has been first obtained.

PROHIBITION ON STATE-FUNDED AND STATE-SPONSORED TRAVEL TO STATES WITH DISCRIMINATORY LAWS (ASSEMBLY BILL NO. 1887)

1. Home
 
2. PROHIBITION ON STATE-FUNDED AND STATE-SPONSORED TRAVEL TO ST…

In AB 1887, the California Legislature determined that "California must take action to avoid supporting or financing discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people." (Gov. Code, § 11139.8, subd. (a)(5).) To that end, AB 1887 prohibits a state agency, department, board, or commission from requiring any state employees, officers, or members to travel to a state that, after June 26, 2015, has enacted a law that (1) has the effect of voiding or repealing existing state or local protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression; (2) authorizes or requires discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression; or (3) creates an exemption to antidiscrimination laws in order to permit discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. (Gov. Code, § 11139.8, subds. (b)(1), (2).) In addition, the law prohibits California from approving a request for state-funded or state-sponsored travel to such a state. (Gov. Code, § 11139.8, subd. (b)(2).)

The travel prohibition applies to state agencies, departments, boards, authorities, and commissions, including an agency, department, board, authority, or commission of the University of California, the Board of Regents of the University of California, and the California State University. (Gov. Code, § 11139.8, subd. (b).)

The law also requires the Attorney General to develop, maintain, and post on his Internet Web site a current list of states that are subject to the travel ban. (Gov. Code, § 11139.8, subd. (e).)

States Subject to AB 1887’s Travel Prohibition

The following states are currently subject to California’s ban on state-funded and state-sponsored travel:

1. Alabama
2. Arizona
3. Arkansas
4. Florida
5. Georgia
6. Idaho
7. Indiana
8. Iowa
9. Kansas
10. Kentucky
11. Louisiana
12. Mississippi
13. Montana
14. North Carolina
15. North Dakota
16. Ohio
17. Oklahoma
18. South Carolina
19. South Dakota
20. Tennessee
21. Texas
22. Utah
23. West Virginia
24. Wyoming

Exceptions

The Legislature created exceptions in AB 1887 that allow travel to banned states in certain circumstances. (Gov. Code, § 11139.8, subd. (c).) These exceptions only apply if travel to a subject state is "required." (Ibid.)

Specifically, AB 1887 does not apply to state travel that is required for any of the following purposes:

1. Enforcement of California law, including auditing and revenue collection.
2. Litigation.
3. To meet contractual obligations incurred before January 1, 2017.
4. To comply with requests by the federal government to appear before committees.
5. To participate in meetings or training required by a grant or required to maintain grant funding.
6. To complete job-required training necessary to maintain licensure or similar standards required for holding a position, in the event that comparable training cannot be obtained in California or a different state not subject to the travel prohibition.
7. For the protection of public health, welfare, or safety, as determined by the affected agency, department, board, authority, or commission, or by the affected legislative office.

   (Gov. Code, § 11139.8, subd. (c).)

This is silly and stupid.

It's also one state shy of half the country, and if you consider that you obviously can't include California in the tally, it's actually half the remaining states.

The first thing that I wondered is what law Wyoming actually had that put us on California's Purity Ban list, but then I read an article about high school sports and realized it must have been the ban on male athletes competing against female athletes in high school sports under the guise that they identified as girls.  The opposite is also the case.  That law was new from the last session.  And looking at it, we only recently were put on California's ne'er do well list.  That probably explains the neighboring states of Utah, South Dakota and Montana as well.  I can't think of anything else that would have.  Wyoming has no other laws in this area at all.

Transgenderism is already turning out to be the eugenics of the 21st Century, with Europe recoiling from the ideology driven mutilation of young people and making it illegal.  Ironically, for a state which obviously prides itself on its equality purity, pushing transgenderism is deeply anti woman as well.  Indeed, in regard to California, this was recently noted by a commentator in regard to transgender surgeries, in which he observed:

And what shade is this? A Venezuelan friend of mine claims to have experienced a future in which tyrants can rule a country for decades thanks to their easy access to enormous wealth lying just beneath the surface. Something similar is happening in California. Instead of oil and gas reserves, Californians sit atop the world’s greatest technology companies. There’s no turning back from the future, but have not some of Californians’ social innovations reached the limits of their bounty? Could it be that America respects the freedom of women so much that some of us can now afford to take them for granted? And does not the removal of her breasts to affirm her right to be a man mean that a woman is nothing but her breasts?

It does appear that we can in fact take the freedom of women, real women, for granted and that in fact, we're back to the Hefneresque proposition, "a woman is nothing but her breasts".

Shameful.

The legality of such travel bans strikes me as problematic, but overall I'd have a difficult time stating why, really.  Perhaps more problematic is the entire concept that one state unhappy with another can basically put it on a boycott list.  It seems almost as childish to me as Wyoming's occasional lawsuits against other states it's unhappy with on policy grounds.

California would no doubt note that it's been in the forefront of a lot of social movements that spread across the country, and it has.  It thinks of itself as a pioneer in that regard, but it was also a pioneer in ways that it would just as soon forget, including bigotry against Asians.  On transgenderism, what's going to occur is that it will end up being regarded as a horrific anti-female and anti nature left wing social movement, of which it wouldn't be the first.  Eugenics, already mentioned, was popular with the left and the right at one time.  Margret Sanger's birth control movement partially got its start as Sanger was worried about African American birth rates.  The trend in the U.S., like U.S. laws on abortion, are way behind the curve in a world in which most societies, including liberal Western ones, have pulled way back.

It's interesting how Wyoming hasn't taken note of this at all.  The State has had more than its fair share of really right wing political discourse dating back all the way to the Clinton years, and you'd think this would be something that California-born Chuck Grey would be crying about or that Frank Eathorne would be making a big issue out of. The out-of-state imports making up the Freedom Caucus have been pretty quiet.

Maybe they just didn't notice.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLVIII. Library withdrawals.

From the Cowboy State Daily:

Montana Quits American Library Association Over Marxist President, Wyoming Noncommittal

Oh heck, Wyoming, go ahead and pull out.

Here's the Tweet:

An actual Marxist woman. . . who probably has little use for the head of the American Library Association and its head.

I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity! 

And my mom is SO PROUD I love you mom.

First of all, I don't know if she's a Marxist, or a lesbian, but anyone dense enough to claim an association with British Library butt sitter Karl "look at the massively screwed up mess my children were" Marx is a twit.

And screaming "I'm a lesbian" right now is the functional equivalent of screaming "I'm whatever seems to be edgy and unpopular but really isn't". If Tucker Carlson came out with a blistering rebuke of Cocker Spaniels tomorrow, about half the people in the Progressive camp would come out as Cocker Spaniels.

Maybe she's a lesbian, which maybe is a social construct, or maybe not, but it doesn't have much to do with this role.

Or maybe right now it actually does, if her claim to be a "lesbian" is much more of a social construct of identification, rather than a weird declaration of sexual attraction orientation.  One of the things that is truly gross and disgusting has been the insertion into public school library of books that basically amount to homosexual sex manuals.  Efforts to remove them, and they should be removed, meet with "only the Nazi's burn books", which we have to assume would mean that if Public School No. 9 purchased a subscription to Playboy, it'd be okay.

That ties in with the Marxist claim, as even though actual Communist regimes quickly abandoned it in their own administrations, revolutionary Marxism, following Marx's written lead, had the personal sexual morality of alley cats.  The association of Marxism with radical sexual views isn't simply an item of right wing condemnation, but a feature of actual revolutionary Marxism, if not of actual governing Marxism.

And what does Marxism really have to do with "collective power".  Marxism was based on the theory that library butt sitters and smelly café debaters had a right to tell workers what to think, organize them, and then tell them what to do or have a bullet put in their head.  If you really want Marxism, there's a place left espousing it, and the Kim's may love a visit from you, although I doubt that Yo-jong, who is the Marxist functionary she'd probably draw, would really approve of her attraction declarations.

And Solidarity is an anti-Marxist position.  It comes from Catholic Social Teaching.

Why does everything have to involve screaming politics and gender raging in Western Society anymore?

Truly, Radical Self Centeredness and Narcissism is the Zeitgeist of our times.

Last prior edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLVII. Eh?

There's no such thing as debt "forgiveness", existentially, and why do we never discuss the morality of economics?

I'm continually amazed by how liberal economists actually don't understand economics at all.  It's bizarre. 

Consider this, brought about by the Supreme Court's determination that the President cannot forgive student loans by executive fiat (which is actually what it decided):

Robert Reich

@RBReich

·

Jun 30

Total student loan debt that would have been erased for millions of Americans: $400 billion Total cost of the Trump tax cuts that largely benefited the wealthy and corporations: $1.9 trillion This is what I mean when I say the system is rigged.

Debt isn't really "erased".  It's transferred.  Debt that is forgiven is transferred to whomever extended the credit.

In this case, the student debt would have been passed on to the public, which already is heavily in debt with; 1) personal debt and 2) the debt the government has already imposed upon it.

Which raises this question. Would transfer of this debt have been moral?  

This hardly ever comes up in the context of this sort of discussion, but would it have been?  The general population of the United States would have acquired the personal debt of students, largely unknown to them, for what reason?

Well, the reason is that most student loans are bad investments, not yielding a sufficient return to pay for themselves.  That can indeed be a personal tragedy.  It is one that is encouraged by the student loan system, which no longer makes any sense.  Loans should be subject to more criteria than simply somebody wants one, but that is about it.

The Government indeed has some culpability in this, and perhaps that provides a basis for "forgiveness", but only if the Government seeks to address the underlying problem, for which there is no evidence.

At any rate, all the Court said is that Congress has to do this.  Part of the Court's ongoing reminder to Congress that it has a job to do, and to the general public that it's up to it to elect people.  Liberals hate that as, by and large, the public isn't too keen on stuff like this, and they know that.

As for tax cuts, I agree with Mr. Reich that taxes should be raised, but the President can't do that by fiat either.  Hence, why these two items cannot be compared, and the "rigged" accusation here is subject to a logic failure.