Archive for the ‘Media Watch’ Category

Maureen Dowd Talks About Maureen Dowd (And A Little About George H. W. Bush)

Monday, December 3rd, 2018

If you want to know why the rise of Donald Trump (or someone like him) was all-but-inevitable, this Maureen Dowd piece about how Maureen Dowd was so very, very chummy with George H. W. Bush provides several clues. On the surface its a lighthearted memoir about how a Republican President and a New York Times reporter were fond of each other and stayed in touch even after Bush41 was out of office. But what it’s really about is how both came out of a stratified eastern coastal elite where everyone’s brother knew someone else’s cousin at Yale or Harvard, and everyone knew their place.

And, being a Maureen Dowd piece, it’s mostly about Maureen Dowd.

Note how Dowd’s memoir is filled with praise for the same Bush patrician qualities the media so savagely attacked when actual elections were on the line. “The most polite man who ever lived” of Dowd’s gauzy memories is the one the media dubbed “wimp” and “waffle” back before he was safely out of office.

There’s really only one quality our Democrat Media Complex really respects in any Republicans: Being a gracious loser.

George H. W. Bush: Passing Reaction Roundup

Sunday, December 2nd, 2018

Here’s some news, tributes, roundups and reactions to President George H. W. Bush’s death:

  • Bush’s body to lie in state in the capitol rotunda. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The Other McCain:

    Former President George Herbert Walker Bush will be universally praised in the wake of his death because it is always the policy of liberals to celebrate the dead Republicans they formerly defamed, as a means to impugn the living Republicans they currently defame. Those of us old enough to remember how liberals hated Bush when he was president (and before that, as vice-president under Ronald Reagan) will not be deceived by their panegyrics to his “civility” and “bipartisanship.”

    Snip.

    Bush was one of the leaders of the GOP’s effort to break the Democrat stranglehold on the “Solid South.” He defeated the powerful Texas Democrat machine to win two terms in Congress, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1970, and served as Ambassador to the United Nations (1971-73) and later as director of the CIA. In the interval, Bush was chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973-74 when it fell his duty to inform President Nixon that he would have to resign, as the Watergate revelations had destroyed his support within the GOP. In all of these roles, Bush was a man of honor who did what duty required, as a patriotic servant of his country.

  • Scott Johnson at Powerline: “He led an almost impossibly full life, capped by his election to the presidency as Ronald Reagan’s successor in 1988. A good man and a good president, he was perhaps more than anything else a great American of the old-fashioned variety that is passing from the scene.” Plus a reminder of how the New York Times fabricated stories about him.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, hails Bush as the man who ended the Cold War. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Tweets:

    Finally, America’s journalist class in action:

    LinkSwarm for November 30, 2018

    Friday, November 30th, 2018

    Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!

  • Trump Derangement Syndrome is breaking up marriages as “woke” women leave their sane husbands. “Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away.” Golly, can’t imagine why their marriage isn’t a Hallmark movie.
  • Texas speaker-in-waiting Rep. Dennis Bonnen will speak at the Texas Public Policy Foundation orientation in January. “One of the open secrets about the capitol in recent sessions has been the degree to which the Straus/Gordon Johnson team despises TPPF. The Straus/Gordon Johnson team loathes TPPF more than any conservative organization. That includes Empower Texans.” That’s some bold talk…
  • MSBNC in action:

  • Hamas is still freaking out over that Israeli raid a few weeks ago. “Hamas officials suspect Israel has been operating a base inside Gaza, and Hamas is turning itself inside out trying to figure it out.”
  • ESPN has lost 14 million viewers over seven years. How’s that “all social justice warrioring, all the time” format working out for you? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Deutsche Bank offices raided:

    In what appears to be the latest in a string of financial crimes and scandals that have generated some $18 billion in fines since the financial crisis, prosecutors are investigating whether two employees in the bank’s wealth management division helped clients set up accounts in offshore tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands, and possibly allowed criminals to move money through these shelters, some of which may have flowed through accounts at the bank (other employees may also have been involved, prosecutors said). According to Frankfurt prosecutors, the investigation, which stems from revelations contained in the ‘Panama Papers’, covers behavior that stretched through this year, meaning that it could become a blemish on the performance of the bank’s newly-installed CEO Christian Sewing.

  • Another jihad attack against Jews the media won’t label as a jihad attack:

  • GM’s destructive subsidies:

    General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now. Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.

    Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.

  • The Second Amendment was always an individual right.
  • Detecting a stealth aircraft is one thing, but shooting it down during the terminal tracking phase is another.
  • Don’t be Dick’s.
  • Things to be thankful for:

    The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour.

    We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.

    Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.

    No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.

    Centuries ago, it required something like 750 hours of human labor to produce a simple tunic; today it requires minutes of human labor. Almost no one is capable of truly internalizing this change. The shirt on your back once was a valuable capital good requiring four months of constant labor to produce. Now it’s not even worth repairing if it tears, it’s too inexpensive to replace it. Because of this change in productivity, even quite poor people in developed countries own many sets of clothing.

    Centuries ago, there was barely enough food to go around, and often far too little, as a result of which starvation was common. It required constant labor by most of the population to produce enough food. Then, mechanization of agriculture set in, and the production of synthetic fertilizer, and pest control, and improved breeding methods; today, it requires very few people to grow more than enough food for everyone. There is so much food, in fact, that obesity has become a disease of the poor, an unprecedented development in human history.

    So it is across the span of consumer goods. The amount of labor it requires to produce enough light to read at night has gone down by orders of magnitude, and the quantity of light produced by an ordinary lightbulb is 100 times greater than that of a candle at a tiny fraction of the price. Many goods didn’t even exist before; in my father’s youth there were no televisions, and now people can buy 4k 130cm flat screens.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • The case against carbohydrates gets stronger.”

    People have a hard time believing that weight control isn’t just a matter of calories eaten and calories burned. But there is an alternate hypothesis about obesity, which is what my group studies. The carbohydrate-insulin model argues that overeating isn’t the underlying cause of long-term weight gain. Instead, it’s the biological process of gaining weight that causes us to overeat.

    Here’s how this hypothesis goes: Consuming processed carbohydrates (especially refined grains, potato products and sugars), causes our bodies to produce more insulin. Too much insulin, one of the most powerful hormones, forces our fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. These rapidly growing fat cells then hoard too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. So we get hungry, and if we persist in eating less, our metabolism slows down.

    Snip.

    We started the participants on a calorie-restricted diet until they lost 10%-14% of their body weight. After that, we randomly assigned them to eat exclusively one of three diets, containing either 20%, 40% or 60% carbohydrates.

    For the next five months, we made sure they didn’t gain or lose any more weight, adjusting how much food they received, but keeping the ratio of carbohydrates constant. By doing so, we could directly measure how their metabolism responded to these differing levels of carbohydrate consumption.

    Participants in the low (20%) carbohydrate group burned on average about 250 calories a day more than those in the high (60%) carbohydrate group, just as predicted by the carbohydrate-insulin model. Without intervention (that is, if we hadn’t adjusted the amount of food to prevent weight change), that difference would produce substantial weight loss — about 20 pounds after a few years. If a low-carbohydrate diet also curbs hunger and food intake (as other studies suggest it can), the effect could be even greater.

    This result could explain in part why U.S. obesity rates have been going up for decades. Individuals have a sort genetically predetermined weight  —  lighter for some, heavier for others. Despite this, the average weight for American men has gone from about 165 pounds in the 1960s to 195 pounds today. Women, likewise, have gone from an average of 140 pounds to about 165.

  • “Half As Many Google Employees Protested Building Chinese Surveillance Tech As Protested Pentagon Project.”
  • Evidently Creepy Porn Lawyer is considered a crook even by his porn star client.
  • Actual headline, not from The Onion or The Babylon Bee: “PETA Defends Graphic Animal Mutilation In Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built.”
  • “Aides Force Ocasio-Cortez To Watch Entire Run Of ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’
  • Ricky Jay, RIP.
  • Dispatches From the Twitter Wars

    Wednesday, November 28th, 2018

    Twitter’s war on conservative users continues apace.

    First, they’ve kowtowed to the radical tranny brigade in declaring that you can’t refer to trannies by their birthnames (“deadnaming”) or sexes. So you’re not supposed to point out that:

  • Bruce Jenner is still a man
  • Bradley Manning is still a man (and a traitor)
  • Stephen Krol, AKA “Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt” was a man, and a fraud
  • Jonathan Yaniv is a man, and a pervert who sues women who refuse to wax his genitals.
  • Jesse Kelly was mysteriously banned, then just as mysteriously unbanned. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took a break from his busy schedule of destroying shareholder value to get asked by congress why he’s been lying to them like they’re Montel Williams.

    Instapundit announced that he deactivated his Twitter entirely, because it sucks:

    It’s the crystal meth of social media — addictive and destructive, yet simultaneously unsatisfying. When I’m off it I’m happier than when I’m on it. That it’s also being run by crappy SJW types who break their promises, to users, shareholders, and the government, of free speech is just the final reason. Why should I provide free content to people I don’t like, who hate me? I’m currently working on a book on social media, and I keep coming back to the point that Twitter is far and away the most socially destructive of the various platforms. So I decided to suspend them, as they are suspending others. At least I’m giving my reasons, which is more than they’ve done usually.

    Meanwhile, conservative Tweeter BigGator5 remains suspended.

    Maybe Twitter could start following their own rules. I hear that works for a lot of companies…

    LinkSwarm for November 23, 2018

    Friday, November 23rd, 2018

    Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I for one am stuffed…

    For those freaking out about Chief Justice Roberts saying there are no Democratic or Republican judges…¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He’s the head of a co-equal branch of the United States federal government, of course he’s going to defend the institutional independence of the court, no matter the evidence to the contrary. It’s pretty much required for his position.

    Now here’s a LinkSwarm to enjoy before girding your loins to do battle over a $99 stereo marked down to $69…

  • “Is this NYT article really about how people are exhausted or is it about how the Democratic Party needs to admit it has a problem? The end of the article sounds like a loud wake-up alarm for Democrats.”
  • I’m so old I remember when the American Civil Liberties Union actually cared about Civil Liberties:

    Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.

    First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.

    Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”

    Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due process protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”

    The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Reminder: The Rev. Jim Jones was a big wheel in San Francisco’s far-left Democratic party establishment:

    Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.

    Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.

    Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.

    Snip.

    Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.”

  • Another day, another Antifa riot in Portland. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Iran threatens U.S. bases and aircraft carriers within missile range.” Boy, could Obama pick him some partners for peace or what? (Hat tip: Patrick Poole on Twitter.)
  • More than a quarter-million French take to blocking roads to protest high gas prices.
  • Reminder:

    So Jamal Khashoggi – a former Saudi intelligence agent, a man who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a sworn opponent of MBS’ reform program– was in the process of setting up a centre to promote the ideology of the MB. He was setting it up in Turkey with Qatari money. The Saudis wanted to stop him. In September they offered him $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia and to live there unhindered. They wanted him out of play. Khashoggi refused and the rest you know. The Saudis killed him.

    Let me make two points. First, there is no justification for murdering Khashoggi. Secondly, this man wasn’t some Western-oriented liberal brutally murdered because of his passion for freedom. This man was a player.

  • Five more MS-13 members deported from Houston by ICE. (Hat tip: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Twitter feed.)
  • Old and busted: “Believe in science.” The New Hotness: “Social justice Astrology is so cool!
  • Laura Loomer banned from Twitter. I have had zero interactions with Ms. Loomer, and she sounds like quite a piece of work, but banning her for criticizing a Muslim politician for supporting female genital mutilation is asinine.
  • 1. Become head of ABC programming. 2. Cancel Roseanne. C. Become ex-head of ABC programming.
  • Divorced Texas woman blows up wedding dress with twenty pounds of Tannerite.
  • “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to disappear.”
  • The DB Cooper hijacking mystery: solved?
  • I had more links planned for this LinkSwarm, but they got eaten along with the turkey…

    Dan Crenshaw on Face the Nation

    Tuesday, November 20th, 2018

    Texas Republican Congressman-elect Dan Crenshaw appeared on Face the Nation, and calmly, rationally made the case that the ideas that President Donald Trump is “attacking Democracy” and “attacking the press” is utter nonsense.

    Dan Crenshaw Slays On SNL

    Sunday, November 11th, 2018

    Following Saturday Night Live player Pete Davidson foolishly goofing on the eye Navy SEAL Lt. Com. Dan Crenshaw lost to an IED on his third deployment in Afghanistan, now Republican Congressman-elect Crenshaw came on SNL to get him back.

    A lot of pundits were predicting this year’s elections would make one Texas candidate a star, they just got who it was wrong. (Previous posts about Crenshaw can be found here.)

    And thanks to the universe for providing easy Veterans Day content for lazy bloggers…

    LinkSwarm for November 9, 2018

    Friday, November 9th, 2018

    Texas election analysis is coming next week. Meanwhile, Democrats appear to be in the midst of voting fraud in Broward County, Florida.

  • Man who vandalized NYC synagogue was a gay black Democratic activist.
  • Another Obama-era intelligence failure resulted in dozens of deaths China. Thanks, Obama… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Jeff Sessions resigns as Attorney General, replaced on at least an interim basis by his chief of staff Matthew G. Whitaker. Very early on in the Trump Administration, I decided that there were two things I wasn’t going to pay much attention to: 1. Reports of dysfunction or “chaos” among White House staffers, and 2. Trump tweets slamming various people. (See any of my previous posts on Trump persuasion techniques.) I have no particular insight into intra-White House squabbles, and reporting on this issue is so bad or overblown that there’s too much noise for me bother to extract signal from. So go elsewhere for how Sessions fits into the “Deep State vs. Trump” narrative. (Over at Powerline, they put up both anti-Sessions and pro-Sessions pieces.)
  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer wants House Democrats to impeach Trump. I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly backfire on them…
  • Nine more Hidalgo County voter fraud arrests:

    Nine individuals were arrested Thursday for their alleged roles in a 2017 voter fraud scheme involving the municipal election in a Texas border town.

    These arrests were part of an ongoing investigation into a coordinated effort by political workers to recruit people who would fraudulently claim residential addresses so they could vote in specific races and influence the results of the Edinburg city election held last year, according to information provided by the Office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

    “Illegal voting, particularly an organized illegal voting scheme orchestrated by political operatives, is an affront to democracy and results in corruption at the highest level,” said Paxton in a prepared statement.

    “Each illegal vote silences the voice of a law-abiding registered voter,” added Paxton. “My office will continue to do everything in its power to uncover illegal voting schemes and bring to justice those who try to manipulate the outcome of elections in Texas.”

    The nine Hidalgo County residents arrested were Guadalupe Sanchez Garza, Jerry Gonzalez, Jr., Araceli Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, Cynthia Tamez, and Ruby Tamez. Online jail records show bond was set at $20,000 for both Garza and Ruby Tamez. A $10,000 bond was set for Gonzalez, Gutierrez, Belinda Rodriguez, Brenda Rodriguez, Rosendo Rodriguez, and Cynthia Tamez. Felisha Yolanda Rodriguez’s bail was set at $1,000.

  • “Number of migrants, refugees from Venezuela reaches 3 million.” Or one out of twelve Venezuelans. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • More harassment of a conservative heretic at Sarah Lawrence College. (Hat tip: Amy Alkon on Twitter.)
  • 85-year old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg breaks three ribs in a fall.
  • After expressing approval of Antifa attacking Tucker Carlson’s house, Matt Yglesias deleted his entire Twitter timeline. Sadly, he’s started up again.
  • “Leftist Protesters: “If Tucker Carlson Didn’t Want To Get Mobbed In His Own Home, Then Why Did He Disagree With Us?'”
  • Mike Ward journalistic fraud follow-up: “Of the 275 people quoted, 122, or 44 percent, could not be found. Those 122 people appeared in 72 stories.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) (Previously.)
  • Dead pimp wins in Nevada. (Previously.)
  • In Tweet form:

  • Super-genius falls through the ceiling of an Alabama Waffle House, proceeds to fight the patrons on his way out the door. Bonus: He left his pants in the restroom…with his ID. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Hong Kong film pioneer Raymond Chow of Golden Harvest, dead at 91. You may not know his name, but he was instrumental in launching the careers of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and dozens of other Hong Kong film icons.
  • California marijuana delivery man says he was robbed by ninjas.” Old story, but how can you turn down that headline?
  • 2018 Election Day Post

    Tuesday, November 6th, 2018

    Happy election day, everyone!

    1. Go vote, if you haven’t already.
    2. A list of Williamson County voting locations can be found here.
    3. A PDF of Travis County voting locations is here.
    4. A list of my endorsements for Round Rock ISD and other down-ballot Williamson races can be found here.
    5. I will be live-blogging/live-tweeting the election results tonight around 7 PM.

    Now some links:

  • “Early Voter Turnout Surges As Republicans Hold Lead In Battleground States.”
  • Last week: “Voters were told that DeSoto is a Democratic voting location only and if voting for any Republicans or write-ins they need to go north to Dallas.”
  • Borepatch covers the 2018 midterms as an exercise in game theory:

    The Middle Class has been playing cooperatively for decades, as the Progressives have been pushing and taking advantage of that cooperation. It’s worked very well for Progressives, and very badly for the Middle Class. As I said in that post (almost a year before the 2016 election) it led to the rise of Donald Trump.

    The last two years has been a series of Trump victories where he has shown the Middle Class that you can push back against the Progressives and win. I believe that this is a fundamental shift in American politics, as the “deplorables” have not only had enough, but have seen that they can win.

    Sure, the hard core Democrats hate Donald Trump with the fire of a thousand suns and will turn out heavily to vote against Republicans. But the rest of their party doesn’t seem to feel that way: Blue Collar/Union Democrats are making more money now, Blacks and Hispanics are making more money now, everyone has better employment prospects, Trump’s favorability numbers are up.

    There’s a split between the core of the party and the rest of the party.

    At the same time the Republican base has been energized and united – the Kavanaugh hearings in particular seem to have been a huge blunder for the Democrats. Sure, it energized the Democratic base, but it seems to have united the GOP base against them.

    And so we’re seeing big turnouts in early voting, and Republicans out voting Democrats pretty much everywhere. I don’t think that any of the election models predicted or planned for this, and so none of the polls or predictions carry any weight. Like I said, we’ll see tomorrow but I think it will be a glum evening for the Democrats.

    But I said earlier that this gives me hope for the Republic. The reason is that tit-for-tat results in a game theory stable outcome. If Republicans stick to push back, but also keep the Middle Class “we’re all in this together” spirit from the last few decades, game theory suggests that the Democrats may have to adjust to a less confrontational style of politics (if for nothing other than preventing the evaporation of the non-rabid part of their party). We’ll have to see how that plays out. As I said in my post 3 years ago:

    Tit For Tat is essentially a reputational game – get a bad reputation by screwing your opponent and you pay the price. The mathematics is unmistakeable on that.

    The Middle Class finally has an option to play against their opponent. An opponent who has a deservedly poor reputation.

    No wonder Trump’s support seems rock solid. The mathematics is unshakeable.

    If the Blue Wave disappears in the face of an enraged GOP base, then the Democrats will have to change their tactics – or keep losing elections.

  • “A reporter for a Michigan newspaper called Michigan Senate Republican candidate John James’s campaign looking for an interview and thought she hung up the phone before leaving a voicemail saying ‘fucking John James…that would suck.'” Note that polls show James within two points of Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow. (Update: The reporter has been fired. Good for the Huron Daily Tribune upholding basic journalistic standards. Meanwhile, racist Sarah Jeong is still employed by the New York Times…)
  • Heh:

  • Willie Horton, Willie Horton

    Sunday, November 4th, 2018

    Ann Althouse links a Washington Post piece that declares “Trump revives ‘Willie Horton’ tactic with ad linking illegal immigrant killer to Democrats” based on this Trump tweet containing a (NSFW) ad:

    What can we learn from this?

    1. GOP ads talking about illegal alien crime must be working, or the Post wouldn’t be complaining about them. Remember, the Democratic Media Complex hates any advertising that’s effective for Republicans, so they seek ways to stigmatize them to deter Republicans from using them. That’s why they turned “Swift Boating” into a verb, because the Swift Vote Veterans for Truth ads were so effective at turning John Kerry’s self-mythologizing “Reporting for Duty” facade against him.
    2. They’re doubly effective with migrant caravans filled with criminals making their way to the U.S. border and Democratic campaign staffers illegally diverting campaign money to help them. All of which helps tie into the “Jobs Not Mobs” theme of the midterms.

    3. That’s why Democrats hated the various Willie Horton ads, because they were effective at painting Michael Dukakis as soft on crime. In the modern era, Democrats are congenitally soft on crime, due to victimhood identity politics. That’s why canny, centrist Democratic politicians went out of their way to inoculate themselves by way tough stances on crime. Hence Bill Clinton’s “superpredators” and him leaving the campaign trail to oversee the execution of convicted cop killer Ricky Ray Rector in 1992. That effectiveness is why the Democrat Media Complex tried so hard to label Willie Horton ads as racist in order to discourage future Republicans from using similar ads against soft-on-crime Democrats. It’s important to note that while third party ads showed Horton, George H. W. Bush campaign’s own “Revolving Door” ad never mentioned Horton by name:

    1. Hence the need for “racist dog-whistle,” which means “Republicans have come up with an effective tactic, so we need to call it racist.”
    2. All of which explains why Democrats have resurrected the ghost of the still-living convicted murderer Willie Horton, who committed rape while given one of Dukakis’ ill-advised “weekend furloughs” from prison. But the question remains why any of them think this tactic would be effective, as the race it was an issue in was 30 years ago. Anyone who was of voting age during the original Willie Horton controversy is at least 48 years old now. Do they think invoking Willie Horton is going to change the mind of anyone who was around at that time? Why not decry Douglas Stringfellow or Teapot Dome while you’re at it?

    Democrats know they’re losing the crime and border control debates badly, and are desperate to keep Republicans from using the issue against them. Judging from the volume of direct mail advertising I get mentioning the issue, they’re failing badly.