How America Ends

 

Doomsday prophecy:  Mike Adams predicts “How America Ends” at America First.  These are frightening predictions, but they square with many of the developments since the coup d’etat in 2020-2021. Here’s an excerpt:

. . .The era of Western Civilization is coming to an end. It will be characterized by the collapse of the dollar, a global repudiation of the petrodollar status, a collapse of the rule of law across the United States, a collapse of the stock market, pensions, bond market and crypto markets, a collapse of the food supply chain, and a collapse of the fuel and transportation infrastructure. This will, in turn, take down the power grid in many areas, leading to a Mad Max-style scenario from which a few capable survivors will attempt to flee.

Before the end of 2025, as I have publicly predicted for at least the last five years — America as you know it will cease to exist. This has been the plan all along from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and plenty of RINO neocons, too (the Cheneys, Bushes, etc.). They needed to take down America in order to achieve one world government under the fascist United Nations, with universal gun control, universal vaccine mandates, abortion “rights,” engineered global starvation and total control over all speech and elections.

Their agenda is failing at many levels, however. Roe vs. Wade was just struck down by the US Supreme Court, for example, and there are elements at work that are looking likely to achieve key indictments against deep state players. However, any state that wants to exist after the dollar collapses must be ready to roll out its own gold-backed currency on an emergency basis. Texas is largely prepared to do this, but few other states are ready. The re-establishment of trade and commerce (following the dollar collapse) is going to be the key to surviving the demise of the dollar. . . .

Read the rest here.  I am posting this even though I am not able to say whether it's a realistic prognosis, a long-shot, or way over the top.  But even if some less drastic version of this is likely . . .  BTW, this is not the first time I've read about the "global repudiation of the petrodollar," which could indeed be catastrophic.

# # #

An assessment of morons

 

I have always been a fan of Alicia Colon.  Her most recent column at Jewish World Review is Part II of her assessment of morons. Here’s a big chunk:

No one likes to be called a moron, an imbecile or just plain stupid but if you're a conservative, as I am, you will eventually regard that appellation as a badge of honor for speaking the truth.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton called me deplorable for daring to vote for Donald Trump and consequently that word's meaning has changed from a negative to a positive as it now means someone who disagrees with the left.

I did not vote for Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or Joe Biden but when they won, I certainly didn't fall apart like the Hillary supporters after Donald Trump won in 2016. Their anguish and screams are on perpetual view on YouTube. When I first watched the compilation of this post 2016 election hysteria, I found it very amusing at first then it just seemed sad.

Wouldn't it be interesting, however, for someone to interview that poor soul, shown screaming in agony, and ask her to compare the four years of Trump's presidency to the current disaster that belongs to Biden. Then I'd ask her why she believed that Hillary Clinton would be a good president as she mentions her beauty and her potential?

This is what I do not understand and why I've resorted to categorizing such behavior as moronic. Anyone who has vetted Ms. Clinton's past in depth would come away conceding that Trump was right. She deserved to be locked up. She was my Senator for eight years but didn't do much except vote against George Bush's tax cuts. But she has been linked to scandals since her days in Arkansas as the governor's wife. Do these Hillary acolytes ever Google the words, Whitewater; Benghazi; Uranium One; Haiti and the Clinton Foundation? I think not and suggest that they read the book [Peter Schweizer's]  “Clinton Cash” to learn how the Clintons got rich from foreign governments and why they are both totally corrupt.

…

I previously wrote how the media has conned its readers on the global warming hoax and the Clintons but the most egregious harm these mechanisms caused was to the black community. Under the guise of liberal concern, the lamestream press salivated over every edict issued from Democrat politicians and found that using the charge of racism against conservatives was very successful.

Black Lives Matter was founded on a lie. One that ignorant NBA players fell for while they raised their arms imitating Michael Brown's supposed surrender to the cop that fatally shot him. Michael Brown was killed because he was stoned on pot and went to grab the cop's gun. A Washington Post columnist, Jonathan Capehart, himself a black man, was demonized for telling the truth and wrote: "We must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative," he wrote in his final paragraph. "And when we discover that we have, we must acknowledge it, admit our error and keep on marching." No one listened and the rest is infamous history.

The toadies in the blue states knelt before the BLM god, defunded the police and let the anarchists destroy the cities while the media ignored the havoc.

For a few years, common sense was on board with Donald Trump in charge. He opened the pipelines, lowered taxes, did more for Israel than any other president and made America once again the number one superpower. Every Trump success has been steamrolled over by the Biden administration and we now have rampant inflation, exorbitant gas prices, and a real possibility of a WWIII. Notice- I said a Biden administration not Joe Biden because Joe Biden isn't even in charge. We don't know who is for sure but it's clear to anyone that Biden is not operating on all cylinders and the global community is terrified.

…

What now? Polls mean nothing if massive fraud is still on the table. . . .

Lots more here.  And it includes a video of that crazy lady (same as the one in photo above) screaming at the sky when Trump won in 2016.

# # #

Vaxx Refusers are like terrorists

TITLE:  ‘Experts’ Claim Vaxx Refusers Need to be Deradicalized or Reeducated Like Cult Members and Terrorists.   If you declined to take the jab, you must be a domestic terrorist and need to be re-educated.  At NOQ Report, Matt Agorist explains:  

. . . The Independent interviewed one of these so-called experts who is advocating for “deradicalizing” folks who refuse the jab and his comments are certainly shocking.

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, chair in cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol, thinks that those who refuse to take the jab are akin to batsh*t crazy tinfoil hat-wearing loons, who think Hilary Clinton is a lizard. Seriously.

“They’ll refuse anything – ‘I’m not going to wear a mask’, ‘I’m not going to get vaccinated’, ‘I don’t think climate change is happening’, ‘Covid is a hoax’, and, you know, ‘Hillary Clinton is actually a reptilian shapeshifter’,” he told the Independent, adding, “You’re getting to people who hold a cluster of very exotic beliefs – now, they’re very difficult to reach.”

Lewandowsky called this faction of folks who choose not to take the jab, “hardcore refuseniks” who cannot be reached through conventional means — so, they need to be treated like cult members or terrorists.

“In the ideal world, time and money permitting, you can engage even those people in a very slow, long-term process where you affirm their right to have those beliefs… rather than telling them something about themselves they don’t want to hear, let’s put it that way,” he said.

“So you tell them something positive, and then engage in what is effectively the same as a deradicalization process for former terrorists, or cult members.”

By this logic, Joe Rogan and others — who have had covid-19 and choose not to take the jab because they trust their natural immunity — are akin to terrorists or cult members.

. . .

NOTE:  For the record, I do not think that Hillary Clinton is, literally, a “lizard.”  At any rate, read the rest here.

# # #

Scott Adams: Are Things Really That Bad?

 

This past year has been overwhelming to patriots everywhere – and not in a good sense.  Is it as bad as we think?  Dilbert creator Scott Adams apparently thinks so;  he recorded a podcast, and since I rarely listen to podcasts, I was grateful to see that Mark Wauck at Meaning in History transcribed some of it.  Here’s what Mr. Wauck posted:

A reader sent me a link to the Scott Adams podcast from yesterday. It’s nearly an hour long, but I’ve transcribed a brief portion of it. Adams is talking about the feeling he has that people have had enough, that there’s a growing sentiment of: We’ve had enough. He goes on a mild rant about the way he—and we—used to think just a few years ago, compared to where we’re at now. Of course it’s subjective, but I think it can be supported by a wide range of events that speak to public sentiment:

I think a lot of people have hit a wall.

...

We used to think that official data from government and big companies was probably mostly honest and sufficiently accurate, even if it had some problems. Do you believe that anymore?

I think now we believe that all data is fake. Because it mostly is. Maybe not intentionally, but there's always some context left out or something. I think we're now more likely to think that all data is fake as the default assumption. Whereas, it used to be the opposite. Just a few years ago.

Just a year ago a lot of people--smart people!--would have said the Second Amendment doesn't protect you from your government, because the government has better guns. Do you believe that now? Today, does anyone believe that guns are NOT the only thing keeping us from being Australia? I think Australia gave you all the learning you needed on that. The lockdown that Australia is experiencing, that can't happen here in America--because of the Second Amendment.

And then, of course, the Russian Collusion Hoax taught us that there's no limit to government corruption. I honestly thought there was a limit. ... When the people on the Right were first talking about the Russian Collusion Hoax being a Hillary Clinton paid operation with the Deep State behind it, CIA was part of it, and all that--do you know what I thought? I thought, well, there's certainly something sketchy going on here, but it's not THAT bad. It's not like collusion between Intel agencies and Democrats. It's not THAT. But it was. It was every bit of that. The worst thing you can imagine that anyone could do to this country? They were doing it. It's the worst thing your government could have done to you--and they were doing it HARD.

So my understanding of how far my government would go to retain power and screw the citizens is way different than it was a few years ago. Now I know they'll do ANYTHING. I didn't think that before. And they'll tell any lie because they can get away with it. I didn't think THAT. I didn't think anybody would lie in public if it was easy to fact check them. Wrong. WRONG. You can lie all you want in public, cuz you've got your own fact checkers. ...

I have to say, that’s about where I’m at now. Not that I was gullible before, or slow to catch on to the various hoaxes that have been perpetrated by the Power Elite, but I guess—a bit like Adams—I resisted the notion that it could be THAT bad.

Source link is here.  Most of us can add to Adams's list:  election fraud; foot-dragging on election audits (thanks, GOPe); “infrastructure” spending (thanks, GOPe); “vaccine” mandates; an occupant of the White House who has some brand of dementia;  the dangerous pull-out from Afghanistan, esp. leaving behind billions of dollars in equipment for our enemies;  opening the borders;  illegal immigration;  and now, all-too-predictable inflation.  All of it THAT BAD.

# # #

Alicia Colon on the 2016 and 2020 elections

 

Alicia Colon brings some historical perspective to the 2020 election fraud:

Most of us, however, were definitely against Hillary Clinton and the idea of Bill Clinton ever being in the Oval office again. Clinton was the first president I’ve ever regarded as treasonous. It was very clever of the Democrats to frame his impeachment as due to an improper sexual incident rather than one of high treason.

According to David Horowitz of Front Page Magazine, as president, Bill Clinton essentially wiped out any strategic advantage the U.S. had by selling advanced U.S. missile technology to our enemy, the People’s Republic of China. His administration took in millions from the military and intelligence services of at least one hostile foreign power. All of this was done in exchange for illegal campaign contributions from a massive totalitarian country determined to eclipse the U.S. as a world superpower. Don’t take my word for it. Google the word China Gate 1996 or read about Johnny Chung and his many visits to the White House. “One of the key technological breaks China received, without having to spy to get it, was the deliverance of supercomputers once banned from export for security reasons,” writes Horowitz.

. . .

The Trump supporters or the Deplorables as we are called, love our president for what he has achieved in the last four years and we don’t give a whit for what he was before. What we do know is that everything he has done has been for all Americans and to save our great nation from the enemy within. What we all believe is that Trump won reelection in a landslide. This is the only fact that makes sense. Compare the millions that attended all his rallies to the empty parking lot Biden events that were held when he infrequently left his basement. What happened on November 3rd, Election Day was that the counting stopped and the Deep State minions had to switch to Plan B. Why? The original theft was supposed to be confined to the Dominion computer program switching Trump votes to Biden but the algorithm was set to handle fewer votes than the Trump landslide. Plan B depended on the phony mail in ballots that would be counted as valid because Democrat election officials had unconstitutionally changed the rules to allow massive voter fraud. We know this because there are videos, hundreds of signed affidavits by witnesses, many patriotic whistleblowers, and yet the Never Trumpers, Rinos, the SCOTUS and the lamestream media are “the none so blind, they will not see.”

Never Trumpers, Rinos, the SCOTUS and the lamestream media are not so much blind as they are complicit.  Read the full column here.

# # #

Sleepwalking to the Revolution

 

Destruction, from The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole (1836).  Image via Wikipedia 

The great Victor Davis Hanson published a piece at National Review Online, a site that I don’t generally visit. However, his essay, “The Fragments of A Civilization,” was linked on some of the aggregators, and it is worth a read.  He takes on Hillary, the Russia hoax, the Mueller investigation, the 2020 debates, Joe Biden’s virtual campaign, and more. His essay closes with:

To paraphrase Sophocles, 2020 saw many strange things and nothing stranger than peak Trump derangement syndrome, COVID-19, a self-induced recession, our first national quarantine, and riots, looting, and arson, all mostly unpunished and uncontrolled, in our major cities.

So we are in revolutionary times, even as we snooze about a recent systematic effort, hidden with great effort by our own government, to destroy a prior presidential campaign and transition, and now a presidency.

We are asked to vote for a candidate who will not reveal his position on any major issue of our age, because he feels to do so would enlighten the undeserving electorate and thereby cost him the election. So we continue to sleepwalk toward a revolution whose architects warped our institutions in 2016–2020, and they now plan to alter many of them beyond recognition in 2021.

Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.

And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again.

The full article is here.

# # #

Devin Nunes, a deplorable dairy farmer

photo credit: impactlab.net

Historian Victor Davis Hanson always comes up with insights on today’s headlines, and in his latest, he offer perspectives not only as a scholar and professor, but also as a California farmer. His column at American Greatness on “Counterfeit Elitism” starts off:

Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:

Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.

Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.

Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.

Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.

The rest of his article is here. It’s a long look at the insulated elites who know better than the basketfuls of deplorables.

# # #

Sparta Report’s Biggest Fools Of The Year

cartoon credit: joyofjello.com

Sparta Report announced its Winners Of The 2017 Fools Of The Year Contest, determined by over 1,000 of their readers. My kind of contest.

The big winner is NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. The other winners were CNN’s rudest moron, Jim Acosta (includes video of his arrogant and unprofessional meltdown in front of President Trump and President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan; and Hillary “Felonia von Pantsuit” Clinton.

Fun commentary / photos / video are here.

###

Spot the Media Bias

Following FLOTUS fashions may not be a top priority, but the coverage provides such a vivid illustration of the dishonesty corruption in the media today. This screen shot from Philly.com was posted recently by a reader at Conservative Treehouse; I had missed it.

The headlines are bad enough. But if you cannot embiggen the image to actually read Fashion Editor Elizabeth Wellington's captions below the two photographs (by tapping on the image itself), click to see it on your screen here.

Related: Remember last week’s media meltdown over Melania’s stiletto heels as she walked from the White House to the chopper en route to boarding Air Force One to fly to Texas?

Oh, the horror of it all. Where is her respect for the job at hand? Smelling salts, please. Er, she is showing her respect for the White House and her role as FLOTUS.

Behold the media’s double standard:

 photo retrieved from Tradition in Action

Do you remember seeing this image of FLOTUS disembarking from Air Force One? It's easy to access on your search engine, but this photo did not exactly make the media rounds at the time. (Sorry if you can't find your Eye Bleach.)

Gif source here.

# # #

A Chance Encounter on MLK Day

art credit: CertainlyHer

Jeffrey Tucker’s report on Fee.org with a Lyft driver on MLK Day:

The media narrative on American politics has become so tedious you don’t have to listen anymore. Every story seems to follow a formula, and never more so on than on the Martin Luther King holiday. Every headline proclaims how black Americans are horrified at Trump’s insensitivity to the historical plight of blacks in the civil rights movement. After all, he attacked Rep. John Lewis, which apparently violates some canon of the civic religion.

I had no interest in engaging this debate, but I did call a Lyft car this morning and my driver, a black woman raised in poverty, was very interested in doing so. The news was on and blaring how Trump was attacking the CIA, which made me laugh, and I said, “I’m no Trump supporter but that’s funny.”

She immediately shot back, “What do you not like about Trump?” I said a few things about his trade policies, but she was having none of it.

“Here it is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I’m supposed to be all upset that Trump attacked John Lewis, but Trump is right. Lewis said he is not a legitimate president, so yeah Trump got upset. What exactly is Lewis doing to improve the lives of the poor in this town? Nothing. At least Trump has some ideas. He seems to care.”

Ok, now I’m listening.

“I’m glad Lewis marched in the protests so long ago,” she continued, “but you have to do more than march. That’s all these people do is march. Meanwhile, there are sections of Atlanta I’m afraid to drive in. And I say that as a black woman! It’s not even about race. Many blacks in this town live better than white people anywhere in the world. But there’s whole communities that have been forgotten. They are paid off with welfare checks but they don’t have skills or jobs, and they fear for their lives on their own streets.”

She was just getting going, so I wondered how far I could push this. What about Obamacare?

Explosion.

“Don’t get me started. My premiums are through the roof. I can’t afford it. Because I drive all day and night making money, I’m not poor enough to get any subsidies. So this year I’m going to have to pay $750 on my tax return because I can’t afford to buy insurance. But I can’t afford the health care either! And have you seen those deductibles? If anything should happen to you, you go bankrupt. I’ll tell you who benefited from Obamacare. Not the poor. It’s the insurance companies and the government.”

I pointed out that Hillary Clinton said she would try to improve it.

“You kidding? The whole campaign, she defended all this #@#$!. She is just like the rest of these people, all talk, no action, just like Trump said. She has been pushing a pen for 30 years. She is not affected by high premiums. Her health care is covered. She has no idea what the rest of us are going through.”

But, I said, Trump is rich and well-covered too.

“Yeah but he starts businesses and has to pay workers. He knows how to create jobs. People say he went bankrupt sometimes. That’s what you do if you are hardworking and trying to try new things. Bankruptcy is just part of business. You win and lose but at least he knows how to learn and respond. The rest of these people don’t do anything but give speeches and defend the way things are.”

 Read the rest here.
Meanwhile, over at PJ Media, Walter Hudson shared some thoughts about why we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr:

Whoever King really was, whatever he sincerely believed, the image of King worth celebrating was presented in that 1963 speech. We aspire toward a world where children "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." That vision of racial reconciliation, of judgment according to merit, speaks to each and every human being. It's something we can and should get behind. It evokes the American spirit, a point emphasized when King cited the Declaration of Independence. Ninety-four percent of Americans came to favor King because they associate him with that dream, not because they support whatever radicalism he later embraced.

More here.

# # #

Fake News and the Propaganda Media

Bill Whittle's Firewall video says it all (and in just over 5 minutes):

Via YouTube

According to Newt, today's "propaganda media . . . has no relationship with the news. It’s aligned with a Washington establishment which is corrupt and dishonest” (via Gateway Pundit).

And the mainstream/lamestream media wonders why President-Elect Trump is bypassing them so often by using Twitter.

# # #

Post-election exploding cigars

art credit: The Hockey Writers

Following the Trump win six weeks ago, the Democrat party and its supporters have been apoplectic. And they have been employing all sorts of  tactics to undo the results.

First, the strategy was to claim Hillary won the popular vote, so the electoral vote was not a true measure of the winning campaign. But nobody knows how many illegals voted in California due to Motor Voter laws, and some estimates go as high as 3 million. Without those and other potential illegal votes elsewhere, nobody can say whether Hillary or Trump won the popular vote. (Two short essays on the Electoral College are here and here.)

And when that strategy didn’t get any traction, the Democrats (presumably backed by the Clinton campaign and her financiers) got Green Party candidate Jill Stein to demand recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That blew up in their face, too. Pennsylvania denied Stein legal standing, Wisconsin’s recount yielded an additional 100+ votes for Trump, and the Michigan recount was discredited when something like a third of the tallies in Wayne County (Detroit) showed more votes counted than were actually cast.

So now the Clintons et al are coming out with two more strategies to attempt to either change the results of the election or to de-legitimize to the maximum extent possible, the Trump win. Now, Hillary is blaming Vladimir Putin for hacking the election, even though what is hackable is the emails exchanged within the DNC, not to mention Hillary’s own email server that was notoriously exposed and unprotected. She and Podesta also continue to blame Comey and the FBI. And the lamestream media is repeating this baloney despite the fact that there is NO evidence for these claims. (Anything but the obvious problem of an unlikeable and flawed candidate with a long list of alleged criminal activity who didn’t campaign much in the months leading up to the election…)

DNC supporters are now doing everything they can to intimidate duly chosen electors who will cast their votes in the Electoral College on Monday; many Trump electors are on the receiving end of everything from death threats to mail/telephone/social media pressure to withhold their vote or cast it instead for Hillary, even when many states have laws that require electors to vote for the winning candidate in their respective states.

President Obama piled onto the most recent why-Hillary-lost “narratives” before flouncing off to Hawaii for his final Christmas vacation on the taxpayer’s dime. FLOTUS is already complaining that America now understands what it is like to be “hopeless” – as she joins her family in Hawaii to vacation on the taxpayers’ dime (“Hopeless In Hawaii”).

Despite all the interference in and attempts to undermine the election process, despite all the phony baloney accusations, it is likely that the results of the Electoral College votes on Monday will lead to the Jan. 20 inauguration of Donald J. Trump.

# # #

The Electoral College and the popular vote

Michael Ramirez cartoon (via Bookworm Room)

"The US Election Without the Electoral College"

William Sullivan at The American Thinker has a good article on the subject, well worth reading in light of the ongoing temper tantrums we are seeing:

By now, you’ve heard the disgruntled leftists parroting the sentiment that the Electoral College is an archaic relic that is either racist (what else?), or has obviously outlived any usefulness it may have once had.  Therefore, in the interest of progress, it must be abolished.

Outgoing California Senator Barbara Boxer has recently introduced a doomed-to-fail bill meant to do just that.

This argument is, of course, painfully dim and tiresome.  The Electoral College is one of many safeguards against what de Tocqueville would later describe as the “tyranny of the majority” that our Founders feared, or more specifically, the threat of a concentrated majority in a state that happened to be more populous than another.  After all, it’s doubtful that Rhode Island would have chosen to ratify the Constitution and join these United States if they believed that their state’s unique desires at the federal level would be perpetually overruled by the much more populous New York, for instance.

In the simplest terms, the United States was conceived as a voluntary union of sovereign states which were unified under the limited federal government which bound them -- one which could only act within the very strict guidelines enumerated in our Constitution.  It is very much by design that the prerogative of each sovereign state is influential in the election of our president, and the Electoral College helps to ensure that. 

But I won’t beat that dead horse.  There is ample reading material to inform interested parties about the wisdom of the Electoral College, in contrast to a strictly popular vote where highly-populated urban strongholds located in a minority of states might disenfranchise the will of the large majority of other states in presidential elections. 

Read the rest here.

# # #

The popular vote and the Electoral College

graphic credit: XaniaTube

Mr. Instapundit comments:  

THE NARRATIVE CHANGES TO FIT THE NEEDS OF THE MOMENT: “I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue ‘wall.'”

Dems were praising the Electoral College just before the 2000 election, too, back when they thought Al Gore might win the electoral vote but lose the popular vote. They turned on a dime when the reverse happened, of course.

Not all the votes are tabulated, and not all of them will be, but even if Hillary does win the popular vote, Trump won by a yuge margin in the Electoral College. I was interested to find something of a refresher course in a column (“Hillary wins the Popular Vote – Not”) at American Thinker, by Steve Feinstein. Here are some extracts:

Okay, let’s address this “Hillary might win the popular vote, isn’t that Electoral College situation just awful” thing head on.

No, it’s not awful.  It’s great, and it protects the importance of your vote.  It’s also uniquely American and demonstrates yet again the once-in-creation brilliance of the Founding Fathers.

First of all, she’s probably not going to win the actual number of votes cast.  She may win the number of votes counted, but not the votes cast.

States don’t count their absentee ballots unless the number of outstanding absentee ballots is larger than the state margin of difference.  If there is a margin of 1,000 votes counted and there are 1,300 absentee ballots outstanding, then the state tabulates those.  If the number of outstanding absentee ballots wouldn’t influence the election results, then the absentee ballots aren’t counted. [UPDATE 11/12: this paragraph proves to be incorrect. Absentee ballots ARE counted, but often not until after the Election is called. IOW, the popular vote totals will change.] 

. . .

Getting back to the “win the popular vote/lose the Electoral College” scenario: Thank G-d we have that, or else California and N.Y. would determine every election.  Every time.

. . .

That means that the vast majority of 48 states and their populations will be subject to the whim and desire of just two states.  If those two states have similar demographics and voting preferences at any particular point in time (which they do now), then those two states call the shots for the entire country.

But the Electoral College brilliantly smooths out the variances in the voting proclivities among states and regions.  Farmers in the middle of the country and importers and exporters on the shore get roughly equal say, as do Madison Ave. execs and factory workers in Tennessee.

Shortcomings?  Sure.  The E.C. can make an R vote meaningless in a very few heavily D states or vice versa.  But without the Electoral College, the country’s entire population is subject to the disproportionate voting preferences of the few most populous states.

The entire article is here.

# # #

Hillary, Doug Schoen, and the FBI investigation(s)

photo credit: RT.com

Over the weekend, Democrat pundit Doug Schoen stunned TV viewers when he went wobbly on his support of Hillary Clinton. He's concerned about the fallout from the FBI investigation. From his follow-up column at The Hill:

However, in good conscience, and as a Democrat, I am actively doubting whether I can vote for the Secretary of State. I also want to make clear that I cannot vote for Donald Trump as his world view and mine are very different.

So, it would seem that Mr. Schoen will either vote third party or not vote for any presidential candidate. Either way, that’s more bad news for Mrs. Clinton.

On a related subject, Andrew McCarthy raised some interesting points concerning the FBI Director’s decision to re-open the email investigation. From PJ Media:

I have never been a fan of the notion – at the Justice Department, it is the received wisdom – that the election calendar should factor into criminal investigations.

Law-enforcement people will tell you that taking action too close to Election Day can affect the outcome of the vote; therefore, it should not be done because law enforcement is supposed to be apolitical. But of course, not taking action one would take but for the political timing is as political as it gets. To my mind, it is more political because the negatively affected candidate is denied any opportunity to rebut the law-enforcement action publicly.

The unavoidable fact of the matter is that, through no fault of law enforcement, investigations of political corruption are inherently political. Thus, I’ve always thought the best thing to do is bring the case when it’s ready, don’t bring it if it’s not ready, and don’t worry about the calendar any more than is required by the principle of avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

A problem arises, however, when you start bending other rules. FBI Director James Comey bent a few of them when he decided to (a) make a public recommendation against prosecution, (b) nevertheless make a public disclosure of the evidence amassed by the FBI, and (c) include a public announcement that the investigation was closed.

McCarthy had more to say about Director Comey’s decisions and his bending of the rules at NRO here.

It is fair enough to say that Director Comey should not have started down the wayward road of making public comments about pending investigations in which no charges have been filed. Such comments inexorably lead to the need to make more comments when new information arises. Not that the director needs advice from me, but at this point, he ought to announce that — just as in any other investigation — there will be no further public statements about the Clinton investigation unless and until charges are filed, which may never happen.

As for the election, Mrs. Clinton is under the cloud of suspicion not because of Comey but because of her own egregious misconduct. She had no right to know back in July whether the investigation was closed. She has no right to know it now. Like any other criminal suspect, she simply has to wait . . . and wonder . . . and worry.

There were other worthy Democrats, but the party chose to nominate the subject of a criminal investigation. That is the Democrats’ own recklessness; Jim Comey is not to blame. And if the American people are foolish enough to elect an arrantly corrupt and compromised subject of a criminal investigation as our president, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Read the rest here.

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Happy Halloween

 

Happy Halloween!

Trump and Hillary campaign rallies in Cleveland

The Saturday Oct-22 rally at the IX Center for Trump/Pence was Yuge. Estimates went to about 10,000 - looked bigger than the summer rally.

photo via Conservative Treehouse

The day before the Trump rally, Hillary campaigned in Cleveland:

Not so yuge.

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Steyn: Laws are for the Little People

art credit: zazzle

Mark Steyn has been on hiatus for several months, but he popped up yesterday and posted a column before the debate. As usual, he knocks it out of the park. The entire article is here, but here’s a small sampling:

As I've said for years - on radio, TV and in print - for me the overriding issue in American politics is the corruption. In the Obama era, we have seen the remorseless merging of the party and the state - in the IRS, in the Justice Department and elsewhere. Whatever one feels about, say, Scandinavia, they at least come to their statism and socialism more or less honestly. Not so the United States.

It's bad enough that Democrats aren't agitated about this corruption - but then it works to their advantage. Slightly more mysterious is why so many of my friends on the right aren't incensed by it.

. . .

Needless to say, if you get your news from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc, etc, you will be entirely unaware of all this. 

. . .

The present arrangements work for the political class, the permanent bureaucracy, their client groups, and the lawless. But not for millions of the law-abiding. Consider illegal immigration, for example, which pre-Trump was entirely discussed in terms of the interests of the lawbreakers - how to "bring them out of the shadows", how to give them "a path to citizenship", celebrate their "family values" and "work ethic" - and never in terms of the law-abiding, whose wages they depress, whose communities they transform, and, in too many criminal cases, whose lives they wreck.  . . .

. . .

Hillary is the most known known in the history of knowns. And what we know of her is that she's stinkingly corrupt, above the law, and able to suborn entire government agencies in the cause of her corruption. Where do you think we're gonna be after eight years of that?

As Trump says repeatedly. “We will never fix a rigged system by relying on the people who rigged it in the first place.” The full article is on Steyn's website here. 

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Project Veritas video: tactics to disrupt Trump rallies

via YouTube

If you plan to attend the Cleveland, OH Trump-Pence rally this weekend (Saturday at 7pm) at the IX Center next to Hopkins Airport, this Project Veritas video will be of interest. It’s short, less than 2 minutes. It exposes tactics intended to cast Trump supporters in a bad light. Via HotGas:

In this video, the Democratic National Committee’s Rapid Response Coördinator and associate at Democracy Partners, Aaron Black, talks about how they can use verbally abusive and antagonistic women at Trump rallies to incite a “bullying” response from male Trump supporters.

Be forewarned, especially if you are seated in the area behind the speakers, where TV cameras show the crowd. 

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Media tries to discredit James O’Keefe, Project Veritas

So yesterday in prime time, Fox News ran some footage from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas video exposé on dirty tricks implemented by various organizations supporting the Clinton campaign. Then Fox went into overdrive to discredit James O’Keefe. The dismissive remarks of course referenced O’Keefe’s 2010 arrest when he got caught impersonating a telephone company employee (the charge was phone tampering) while working to expose then-Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who was allegedly avoiding any and all calls from her constituents who were upset about Obamacare. O’Keefe’s standards as a journalist were not at issue, yet the Fox narrative claims that he is known for phony and misleading editing.

O’Keefe has made enemies, to be sure. His exposés on Planned Parenthood and ACORN provoked all kinds of attacks on him, his ethics, his editorial bias, and his selective editing. Salon describes him as “best known for selectively editing undercover footage to get people fired.”

Let me say something about selective editing.

I was interviewed for a television documentary a few years ago. I was in front of the cameras for about 2½ hours and appeared in the final cut for maybe 3-4 minutes. Before the documentary was broadcast, somebody asked me how I thought I did. My reply was that if the producers wanted me to look good, I’d look good. If they wanted me to look bad, I’d look bad. Ah yes, was the reply. That ole cutting room floor.

Everything we see on TV or read in the news has been edited. The question is: was the edited final product faithful to the original report? You’ll decide if O’Keefe has/had his thumb on the editorial scale or not.

From where I’m sitting, O’Keefe is doing the investigative journalism that the mainstream media not only refuses to do, but works aggressively to suppress and discredit. Already, the progressives are claiming on Fox that the statements caught on the Project Veritas video were merely hypothetical ideas that were never implemented. Then how come two of the principal players in the undercover videos have been fired or have resigned? That would be Democratic consultant Robert Creamer (who visited the White House multiple times) and Scott Foval, national field director for Americans United for Change. (No doubt they will turn up wearing another hat in another room real soon.) 

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