Tag Archives: conservative

My President!

I’m sure some of you have wondered why I have not posted daily on the “results” of the election. Well, I’m having a tough time right now. Emotions are mixed and running high. I’ve even thought about why I want to live in a country that in the 21st century is unable to conduct a legal, valid, verified election while some third world crap holes can do it.

My bride sent me the below article this morning as I was busy answering a plethora of emails, and still have many more pending. In case you are unaware, today is the Marine Corps’ 245th birthday, so it is a very busy days with emails, texts, and phone calls from all over the world — literally! To all my Marine brothers and sisters on here, Happy Birthday!

Anyway, I scanned the article, then read it twice. The author raises some valid points, but nothing he says dampens in any way my respect and admiration for our current president. He was what we needed at the time, and has accomplished much during his term, and if he could have one more term, I feel certain he would turn this country around and into something I would be proud of and glad I served. But right now, I am depressed beyond words.

You read, decide for yourself, and comment if you will.

Semper Fi;

Jim

 

President Trump is projected to lose a close election.

This being modern America, nothing is final until the courts have spoken (particularly the Supreme Court, which has been too timid to say much). That process must be allowed to play out. To my knowledge, there is no hard evidence at this point of anything so monumental that it could change the result, but disturbing anecdotal reports merit investigation. And Biden’s margin of victory is so razor-thin in some states that recounts may be warranted if the president chooses to press the matter.

Undoubtedly, post-election litigation would be pursued if the shoe were on the other foot. Democrats, after all, went straight to the litigation mat when they lost a close one in 2000, even though Al Gore had been on the cusp of conceding. And “the Resistance” spent three years not accepting the outcome of the 2016 election, on the basis of a bogus “Russia collusion” narrative ginned up by the Clinton campaign. In this era, we take matters far less consequential than the election of our president to court. I’m not suggesting that this is a good thing, I’m simply stating a fact.

Let’s take a deep breath and let matters play out. There is no crisis of the regime. Joe Biden is presumptively President-elect Biden. He will be my president and the president of all Americans — even as many of us vigorously oppose much of what he wants to do, as we surely will. He should get the chance to be a good president that Democrats never gave Donald Trump. For Biden’s sake, and especially for the country’s, the departments and agencies of government should prepare for a smooth transition of power.

Meanwhile, the states do not need to certify their results until December 8 (really, they have until December 14, the day states must report to Congress). Biden has so far struck the right tone in urging patience and calm through the tense days of ballot-counting. It will boost his standing as a legitimate president to encourage an orderly process of court challenges while, of course, pressing his rights in that process.

For those who supported the president’s reelection (including me), the result is hard to swallow. It was not, however, hard to see coming.

In 2016, Trump barely won a close election against a historically weak and deeply unpopular Democratic candidate for whom there was little enthusiasm. In 2020, Trump faced a very weak but not nearly as unpopular Democratic candidate – and while there was little enthusiasm for Biden, the desire to defeat Trump was rabid in the Democratic base. Given the statistical miracle of Trump’s 2016 triumph, he was going to have to do more than marginally better this time in order to win. He outperformed expectations, but he did not outperform 2016.

The power of the presidency can mask a lot of deficiencies. Yet the hole in which the improbable Trump presidency began is worth revisiting. In her endless “I wuz robbed” dirge, Hillary Clinton never tired of saying she’d won the popular vote. That was not just irrelevant in constitutional terms, since the state races (translated by the Electoral College) decide the outcome; it was also Clintonian spin to deflect attention from the fact that she did not win a popular majority. But what does that say about Trump?

The popular vote is a useful snapshot of the then-new president’s standing on January 20, 2017. He got 3 million fewer votes than someone who herself could not crack 50 percent. He’d somehow won what was essentially a two-way race with just 46 percent of the vote. Out of nearly 140 million votes cast, 54 percent of Americans voted against him. If a statistically negligible number of voters in a handful of states had gone the other way, there would have been no talk of a populist revolt. The story would have been that Clinton, a Washington-establishment eminence, cruised to the victory the Smart Set and all the polls had predicted. The New Yorker would gleefully have published its ready-to-run cover.

The right way to look at Trump’s unlikeliest of triumphs was as a gift . . . and an opportunity. It was a chance to appeal to Republican skeptics and the vast middle, to do the hard work of changing a 46–54 deficit into 54–46 support, and beyond. Trump had the policies to do that, along with a unique way of appealing to voting blocs who’d tuned out traditional Republicans.

Yet the president could never get over himself.

That was clear from the start. Instead of coming to grips with the low level of support with which he started his term, the president bantered from the beginning about his “Electoral College landslide.” It was an ironic illusion of broad support: Trump had been known to call the Electoral College a “disaster for democracy,” and his EC margin of victory actually ranks in the bottom fifth in U.S. election history. But he talked up the “landslide” nonetheless — while his administration “hit the ground running” by absurdly displaying skewed aerial-photograph evidence bizarrely intended to prove that his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s.

An unpopular president’s surest first step to becoming a reelected president is the realization that he has a lot of work to do with the public, especially with convince-ables willing to give him a chance – which is a lot of people, because most Americans are not hardcore partisans; they like to like their president. Such self-awareness spurred Richard Nixon to reelection in one of American history’s biggest actual landslide victories — in the Electoral College and by every other measure.

Donald Trump never could go there. He was under siege more than he deserved to be, but he brought a great deal of it on himself by gratuitously punching down at non-entities he should have ignored. Just as important, when troubles came, and they came in waves, he would recede into the comfort of his adoring base. They made excuses for his every foible, spun his errors as the shrewd maneuvering of a master businessman, and never demanded that he clean up his act. To the contrary, they found the act irresistible, just as he found his place at the center of the world’s attention irresistible — whether commanding attention for good or bad reasons.

President Trump did many good things. The constitutionalist overhaul of the federal judiciary will be his great legacy, especially if a President Biden revives Obama-era “pen and phone” governance. Trump has shown that the U.S. economy still roars when government removes suffocating regulation, and that its growth can be a boon to Americans at the ladder’s lower rungs. He has given Republicans a workable template for appealing to black and Hispanic Americans. He has reshaped policy toward China in a way more realistic for dealing with a hostile competitor. He has marginalized the Iranian menace and reoriented Middle Eastern policy, achieving peace pacts that were once inconceivable. He has been unabashedly pro-life (and was I ever wrong in thinking this was just a 2016 campaign pose). He has shown Republicans that the culture war is worth fighting without apology, rather than surrendering bit by bit.

Still, how maddening that he never recognized the majesty of the presidency, befitting its awesome duties, as something to rise to, as something worth striving to be worthy of. He never seemed to grasp that the great power of the presidency is that when the president speaks, it means something — and that forfeiting this power is ruinous. He never seemed to understand that, in a country where we like to like our president, when your policies are more popular than you are, you’ve got a problem.

Here, most Americans believe — for very good reasons — that they are better off than they were four years ago under the last president, yet they’ve voted to replace the incumbent with the last guy’s veep. That can only mean Donald Trump’s nemesis wasn’t Joe Biden. It was Donald Trump.

Originally posted 2020-11-10 13:19:05.

Fair and Balanced?

Received this from an Marine brother, Ed “Mac” McCloskey , an 8th & I Alum a few years before me. He got it from a retired US Army LTC. I am in total agreement with Mac and his LTC friend on their  assessments  of the current state of FOX News.  Personally, I gave up FOX earlier this year when it was apparent the Murdoch kids were going to the left. No more “Fair and Balanced  – You Decide,” that’s all gone except for Tucker Carlson, who I still watch. And who knows, they may drop him soon?

What a shame, the last of the holdouts finally gives it. Change the channel, or best just shut the damn TV off, there are none left worth watching. 

I’m going to use his letter as a basis and send one myself, how about you? Or better yet, see who sponsors FOX News, that may be the best approach — money talks.

LOS ANGELES, CA – OCTOBER 21: Political commentator Tucker Carlson speaks during Politicon 2018 at Los Angeles Convention Center on October 21, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Fox and Friends and Fox News:

Please pass this to your corporate bosses.

Like many of your viewers, I think, it is my perception, especially this year, that your news organization has been drifting to the left on the political spectrum.

When Fox News started reporting the news and with evening commentary shows, your motto was Fair and Balanced … We Report, You Decide.”

You have moved from that mission statement.  In particular, your polling, your reporting during the 2020 election campaign has been anything but “Fair And Balanced.”

I did not become a regular viewer and then become a conservative; I became a regular viewer because I am a conservative.  Likewise, I have written to the Republican party over the years that I support the party because, as a conservative, I have nowhere else to go and to have my views respected on the nature of our political system, the role of government at all levels, the importance, in particular, of the Bill of Rights, to the preservation of individual liberties in the face of an ever-expanding Federal Government.

This year, especially, you have participated in and reported on polls that were clearly out of line with the general mood of the Republic.  Your polling, like in 2016, was wildly inaccurate.  Rush Limbaugh informed us on his Friday radio show that he had had a communication from Brett Bair that Mr Bair had been told that Rush said that President Trump had lost the election.  Rush addressed this immediately at the beginning of the next segment of the show.  He said that he had told Brett that that was untrue and warned Brett against joining the other main stream media outlets in calling the race for Biden.  Rush stated on the show that the reason that CNN and MSNBC were begging Fox to call the race was to complete the humiliation of the President and of Fox News for supporting Conservatives all these years.

About 24 hours later, Fox News did exactly what Rush warned you not to do.

A Roger Ailes-led version of Fox News, with so many eye witness allegations of potential voter fraud, would never have done what you did on Saturday, November 7th.  That Fox News would have been pursuing those stories to determine the truth of the situation.  The Sons-of-Rupert-Murdoch-version of Fox News happily jumped on the “steal the vote” bandwagon and called the race for Biden.

Specifically,

  1. You called the state races for Biden using apparently entirely different standards that for Trump.
  2. When it became readily apparent and easily proven that there were many ballot issues in the battleground states, you called AZ for Biden and left that call in place even in the face of knowledge that there were many ballots to be counted from areas of the state where the President is wildly popular.
  3. You left in place your decision to call MI and PA for Biden when it is clear that there were “shenanigans” underway, including, but not limited to, legally certified Republican poll watchers being denied access to precinct counting areas, the counties in battleground states using a particular counting software were reporting “glitches” involving thousands of ballots in each county, that had been marked for Trump and down-ballot Republicans, were switched to Biden and down-ballot Democrats.
  4. In Democrat controlled county after county, counting of ballots received in early voting and on election day, counting was mysteriously stopped for hours at a time, at the same time that Republican poll watchers were being denied their legally certified opportunity to observe the counting.  Magically, in those jurisdictions, previously unknown ballots were found that, unlike the rest of the state, broke along the same percentages as the previous Trump vs Biden votes, were entirely marked only for Biden.

I could cite many other instances.  However, my deepest disappointment is the general arrogance of the main stream media, which you have joined, to believe that it is your duty to determine who wins and loses these elections.

I am, therefore, declaring my independence from you for the foreseeable future.  I will get my news and commentary from other, less biased sources.  I may be the only viewer you lose because of your conduct this year but I doubt it.  I have already seen on line that there is a growing backlash against Fox for how you have done your job in the run up to this election.  If and when someone advised me that you have returned to your previous standard of “Fair and Balanced … We Report, You Decide,” I may return.

Sincerely,
Ron Kohl
LTC, US Army (Ret)
Former Fox News Viewer

Originally posted 2020-11-09 14:47:23.

Voter Fraud – Already Started.

Received a notice card in the mail telling me my mail-in ballot would be sent to me twenty-five days prior to the election. Hmm, when I applied for my driver's license here in FL I must had applied for a mail-in ballot. Whoops, that "ain't" going to happen. I want to be damn sure my vote is counted, so I called and changed it to in-person voting. Folks, the fraud has already started, I fear this will be the worst election for fraud in our country's history. I fear it will be worse than some of the third world shit holes' elections. These liberal thugs ARE NOT going to allow the linchpin of democracy to play out legally. They simply cannot allow Trump to have four more years.

Pennsylvania: Mailed-In Military Votes for Donald Trump ‘Were Discarded,’ FBI Says

Federal authorities are investigating “discarded” mailed-in ballots in a key Pennsylvania county that swung to President Trump in 2016.

Luzerne County District Attorney Stefanie Salavantis contacted the FBI related to “potential issues with a small number of mail-in ballots at the Luzerne County Board of Elections,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a news release.

The FBI, working with Pennsylvania State Police, has been conducting interviews and reviewing physical evidence since Monday in Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton.

“At this point we can confirm that a small number of military ballots were discarded. Investigators have recovered nine ballots at this time. Some of those ballots can be attributed to specific voters and some cannot,” the DOJ said.

“All nine ballots were cast for presidential candidate Donald Trump.” Is this a surprise to anyone?

The DOJ said the inquiry “remains ongoing.”

The Citizens’ Voice reported County Manager David Pedri said the county “identified an issue and reported it to the authorities.”

“We are confident that it will be successfully resolved so it will not have an impact on the integrity of the election process,” Salavantis told the paper. And if you believe this you know the saying< I have a bridge. . . . . ‘”

In 2016, Trump won Luzerne County 57.9 percent to 38.6 percent, according to published results.

In 2012, President Obama won the county 51.5 percent to 46.7 percent, the county reported.

Absentee ballots have not been mailed out to general voters yet. Pedri said that should happen the first week of October.

The Postal Service is investigating after three trays of mail, which included mailed-in ballots, were found thrown in a ditch in rural Wisconsin.

The mail was found “near the intersection of highways 96 and CB, near the Appleton International Airport” and was turned over to the postal service.

“The United States Postal Inspection Service immediately began investigating and we reserve further comment on this matter until that is complete,” USPS spokesman Bob Sheehan said.

The post office did not disclose how many ballots were discarded in that instance.

Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. He is also host of “The Kyle Olson Show,” syndicated on Michigan radio stations on Saturdays. Listen to segments on YouTube or download full podcast episodes. Follow him on Twitter, like him on Facebook, and follow him on Parler.

Originally posted 2020-09-25 09:42:58.

Cultural Suicide Is Painless

For those of you who do not know who Victor Davis Hanson is, here is what Wikipedia says about him:

“Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets. ”

For someone born, raised, and educated  in California he certainly has his stuff all in one bag — as we used to say in the Corps. He will be 63 in a week

The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities go on with their ritual self-destruction.

n February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.

When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.

You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.

You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.

Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”

Old Liberal Ideas Are Being Destroyed

We are living in the most racially polarized climate since the 1960s. America’s past, present, and future are in the process of being recalibrated entirely through the lens of one’s skin color. Columbus is reduced to nothing more than another racist white Italian sailor of a half-millennium past. Grant might as well have fought for slavery in the mind of today’s campus ignoramus. Apparently, the Antifa thug thinks he could just as easily have written the Gettysburg Address or sculpted a statue of Frederick Douglass.

The old liberal ideas of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are being destroyed by the Left under the specious doctrines of cultural appropriation, or “acting white” or “how we look is who we are.”

A new fuzzy Jim Crow returns with racially segregated campus safe spaces and theme houses or the race-based reeducation and training sessions in the workplace—all predicated to stop racism! Somehow selecting strangers on the basis of their race to bully in a restaurant, or targeting old anonymous men and women to beat up in the street by their race, or singling out suburbanites by their race for racial taunts and profanity is redefined as reparatory justice or overdue payback—on the assumption that no one would dare say that the arson, looting, and rhetoric are descending into ever more hate-filled nihilism.

Our collective future of nationalized tribalism will become what always results when citizens identify by superficial appearance or shared religion. Just go to Lebanon, the Balkans, or Iraq to see what is in store first hand.

Tribalism Rising

To survive, all groups will self-identify, at first quietly, but eventually unapologetically. Some will form alliances of self-preservation, others will war with each other. Tribal gangs, as they already do now in our streets of fire and looting, will assume they are exempt from consequences; and so will their antitheses of vigilantes who band together to guard their stores in the absence of a defunded police.

Liberal elite whites themselves are now uneasy, since the abstract doctrines they so nihilistically advocated, from defunding the police to recalibrating looting as “redistribution,” are now becoming reified and closer to home. They see that when BLM protestors jam a restaurant to demand fealty or lecture on “white privilege” or march into a suburb to wake up the commuter to apprise him of his immorality, the racialists will not qualify their agendas with “except for woke whites.”

When tribalism is distilled to its innate and terrifying essence, there are never exemptions for individuals: you are reduced to what you appear superficially as to strangers. The white felon is no different than the white Harvard president, the black shoplifter is the same as the black physicist. We are all condensed to a sort of collective nothingness, or rather a racial “allness.”

The Self-Immolation of Pro Sports

Professional sports, once an integral part of American life, appears to be nearly in ruins. Professional baseball, basketball, and football might have survived the virus, the lockdown, and the recession—and then maybe they might not have. After all, millions of the bored more quickly than expected got acculturated to the idea of soon not listening to a boring rant from LeBron James or the sad confessionals of Drew Brees.

But what the NBA and NFL, and perhaps MLB won’t survive is cultural suicide as players fragment into causes. The NBA existed on the premise that billionaires were willing to pay multimillionaires to lose billions as a prestige lark—as a franchise became a sort of a huge, showy Louis Vuitton bag. But even billionaires have limits. Snobbery and appearing cool do not always trump losing the equivalent of a Ferrari every hour or a Gulfstream each week.

The NBA, we are told, is a woke industry.

But it’s also the strangest, most nondiverse, right-wing, money-obsessed woke institution in America. More than three-quarters of the multimillionaire players are African-American. Over 90 percent of the billionaire team owners are white.

Yet the entire industry—players, coaches, owners, staff—lecture Americans ad nauseam about their supposed sins. The monotonous sermons have become transparent medieval redemptions—given the mortal sin that the NBA sold its very soul to a racist, genocidal, and totalitarian China—to recover billions abroad for the billions lost in viewership and attendance at home.

Nondiverse multimillionaires, working for even less diverse billionaires, finger-pointing at middle-class Americans on the evils of privilege, in the pay of the Chinese Communist Party, is not a way to win back fans.

Institutional Crack-Ups

Universities are in for hard times. The federal government eventually will get out of the $1.5 trillion student loan subsidy business, and force spendthrift colleges to accept their own self-created moral hazards. Charging $30,000-40,000 for tuition over Zoom is a bad business model in a recession. And the alphabet soups after the names of professors and deans will not make a bit of difference.

Thousands of college-educated protesters and rioters are not especially good advertisements for the building of lifelong character on woke university campuses. Once undergraduate institutions decided to make students socially conscious rather than educated, and once their graduates seem to be neither, then who really finds their mentors essential?

Our major cities, emerging from lockdown, and on the edge of nightly violence, remind us of what Procopius, the Byzantine historian, saw of Rome in AD 538, once the cultural and political megalopolis of the world: a mostly deserted shell of weeds, deserted streets, collapsed stone, choked fountains, and fortified villas where lawlessness reigned and feuding tribes were what was left of a government that once had enshrined habeas corpus.

No city gets a pass from history, not Athens, not Rome, not Alexandria—not Detroit, Baltimore, or Chicago.

After all, there is no rule that just because Bill Gates and Amazon headquartered in Seattle that its mayor, city council, and state governor will not abandon its signature downtown. What once made Portland great can be undone in a few weeks.

Wall Street may run the world, but it certainly does not run the New York City government. Electronic capital really does still have human legs and when the proverbial suited investor thinks he will be infected, short of toilet paper, or assaulted on the street, he leaves, taking his laptop with him. Bill de Blasio is left to govern, like a horned and bearded Visigoth, over an increasing shell of former grandeur.

To venture into San Francisco is to return in a time machine to 1855, a boomtown based on silicon chips, not gold dust, but one likewise lawless, fetid, and safe only for those with private security guards. To the casual visitor, it appears a lunatic place now recalibrated for the homeless, the looter, the assaulter—and the very rich. Crimes like public defecation and drug use, or shattering the windows of a parked car window to steal its contents are not crimes unless the targets are the well-connected.

The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities to go on with their ritual self-destruction.

So it has begun to seem this endless summer.

My personal view is we have the gun to our head right now. It only has two cylinders, one has a round it it, the other is empty. In November the trigger will be pulled.

Originally posted 2020-09-01 10:33:27.

Repost

This is a re-post of an earlier, and here’s why. I’m sure you read the one titled “A Must Read for every American.” In fact, it has received more hits than any post I have every made since this blog began back in October 2015. It has thus far reached 1,149 hits and is still being viewed as I write this. I am excited about that, and I hope everyone is forwarding it, which I am sure many are thus the reason for so many views.

I believe this to be the issue right now before elections. Americans NEED to understand what is going on with our elected officials, and I am not just speaking of liberals. Many GOP congressman and senators are beginning to murmur words against Trump, and now we all should understand why. He has all but taken away their Golden Egg and if given four more years he will slaughter their Golden Goose for good. 

So I am re-posting this post, which is the Trumps ad for the upcoming election. Keep in mind what you read in the “Must Read” post as you watch this ad again. He talks about what he is doing and why he can do it. The two posts belong together, they enhance one another.

Trump is the only one who can destroy this sad state of affairs within our government. He is beholding to no one, lobbyist, major corporations, Wall Street, Unions, etc. He owes no favors, receives no kick backs let alone his salary. 

Please re-pass this one on to your friends and explain what I am saying here. Folks, fellow Americans, this is important, you must be involved. As I have repeatedly said, the DNC cannot afford four more years of Trump. Trust me, this will be the worse election in the history of America!

The 2020 Election

 

If Trump is not re-elected in November, our legislative system and form of government will be gone forever! This is not a conspiracy theory my fellow Americans, it will happen.

Originally posted 2020-05-06 12:45:21.