Tag Archives: election

Current Events, Recent Posts

Election Therapy

Election Therapy From My Basket of Deplorables

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By Maureen Dowd

WASHINGTON — First I had to deal with the president-elect scolding.

During his interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, Donald Trump chided me twice for being too tough on him.

Sitting next to our publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Trump invited everyone around the table to call him if they saw anything “where you feel that I’m wrong.”

“You can call me, Arthur can call me, I would love to hear,” he said. “The only one who can’t call me is Maureen. She treats me too rough.”

Then I had to go home for Thanksgiving and deal with my family scolding me about the media misreading the country. I went cold turkey to eat hot turkey: no therapy dog, no weaving therapy, no yoga, no acupuncture, no meditation, no cry-in.

deplorablesThe minute I saw my sister’s Trump champagne and a Cersei figurine as the centerpiece — my brother, Kevin, nicknamed Hillary “Cersei” during this year’s brutal game of thrones — I knew I wasn’t in a safe space.

My little basket of deplorables, as I call my conservative family, gloated with Trump toasts galore, and Kevin presented me with his annual holiday column with an extra flourish.

My colleague Paul Krugman tweeted Friday that “affluent, educated suburbanites” who voted for Trump are “fools.” What else is there to say, he asked.

Well, here is what Kevin, an “affluent, educated suburbanite,” has to say in his column, titled an “Election Therapy Guide for Liberals”:

Donald Trump pulled off one of the greatest political feats in modern history by defeating Hillary Clinton and the vaunted Clinton machine.

The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships.

The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The Dems’ answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust.

Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion. This did not go down well in the Midwest, where Trump flipped three blue states and 44 electoral votes.

The rudeness reached its peak when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by attendees of “Hamilton” and then pompously lectured by the cast. This may play well with the New York theater crowd but is considered boorish and unacceptable by those of us taught to respect the office of the president and vice president, if not the occupants.

Here is a short primer for the young protesters. If your preferred candidate loses, there is no need for mass hysteria, canceled midterms, safe spaces, crying rooms or group primal screams. You might understand this better if you had not received participation trophies, undeserved grades to protect your feelings or even if you had a proper understanding of civics. The Democrats are now crying that Hillary had more popular votes. That can be her participation trophy.

If any of my sons had told me they were too distraught over a national election to take an exam, I would have brought them home the next day, fearful of the instruction they were receiving. Not one of the top 50 colleges mandate one semester of Western Civilization. Maybe they should rethink that.

Something for some members of the Dowd family to celebrate their candidate’s victory, and at least one to drown her sorrows.

KEVIN DOWD

Mr. Trump received over 62 million votes, not all of them cast by homophobes, Islamaphobes, racists, sexists, misogynists or any other “ists.” I would caution Trump deniers that all of the crying and whining is not good preparation for the coming storm. The liberal media, both print and electronic, has lost all credibility. I am reasonably sure that none of the mainstream print media had stories prepared for a Trump victory. I watched the networks and cable stations in their midnight meltdown — embodied by Rachel Maddow explaining to viewers that they were not having a “terrible, terrible dream” and that they had not died and “gone to hell.”

The media’s criticism of Trump’s high-level picks as “not diverse enough” or “too white and male” — a day before he named two women and offered a cabinet position to an African-American — magnified this fact.

Here is a final word to my Democratic friends. The election is over. There will not be a do-over. So let me bid farewell to Al Sharpton, Ben Rhodes and the Clintons. Note to Cher, Barbra, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham: Your plane is waiting. And to Jon Stewart, who talked about moving to another planet: Your spaceship is waiting. To Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, thanks for the free concerts. And finally, to all the foreign countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, there will not be a payoff or a rebate.

As Eddie Murphy so eloquently stated in the movie “48 Hrs.”: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And he is going to be here for 1,461 days. Merry Christmas.

 KEVIN DOWD

Originally posted 2016-11-27 17:34:13.

Current Events, Recent Posts

Alice’s Restaurant

Nearly fifty years ago Arlo Guthrie produced a song that is appropriate to this day for two reasons. First it’s Thanksgiving and secondly, the sorry state of our society.  If you have never listened to the original recording of Alice’s Restaurant, you should. There is a link at the bottom should choose to do so — and you should. Warning, like most of his songs, it is long, but worth the time to sit back, listen, and learn. 

This post is so unbelievable I had to do some research to find out what college, town, city, state, and country would do something like this and here’s what I found. Edgewood College is a private “institution of higher learning” in Madison, Wisconsin which:

continues to be one of the least expensive private colleges and is committed to providing our students:

·         Challenging and engaging educational experiences

·         Small class sizes and personal attention from dedicated staff and faculty

·         An educational experience that connects learning, beliefs, and action.

I found that tuition is quite reasonable  at $13,765/semester , but what does your child get for that? Read the post and you decide.

‘Suck it up p***ies!’ sticky note mocking anti-Trump students being investigated — as a hate crime

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Following the election of Republican Donald Trump to the presidency, one of the ways students at Edgewood College expressed their emotions was by placing sticky notes on a designated table in the commons of the Madison, Wisconsin, campus.

But Vice President for Student Development Tony Chambers informed the campus that someone took that idea and perpetrated “an act of cowardly hatred.”

Seems a sticky note with the message “Suck it up, pussies!” — along with a winking smiley face and a stuck-out tongue — was placed on the inside window of the school’s Office of Student Diversity and Inclusion (what? Someone actually gets paid to run this office, hell I could do that). Chambers called it a “targeted act of intimidation and cowardice” in a three-page letter, which includes an embedded image of what appears to be the sticky note in question.

“A great deal of fear, sadness, and anger among students, faculty, and staff resulted, especially for those that gather in the OSDI space,” Chambers continued in his letter. “The message was hateful and harmful toward members of our community. It violated every value that this institution considers to be at its core.”

With that, Chambers said representatives from campus security, student conduct, human resources, Title IX enforcement and diversity and inclusion gathered to decide “how to address the hateful message.”

“The group determined that the message constituted a Hate Crime, based on guidelines from the Jeanne Clery Act and state law,” Chambers wrote, adding that the school reported the incident to Madison police and that it’s “currently being investigated as a hate crime.”

Chambers also observed that “covert micro-aggressions and overt macro-aggressions appear to have taken on new fervor in higher education since our national election” and that the “frequency, boldness, and severity with which hateful acts have been occurring has, for many, signaled a new era of intolerance, fear, and mistrust in higher education.”

“Let me be clear: These types of acts will not be tolerated at Edgewood College,” Chambers’ letter concluded. “They are inexcusable, and those who have been identified as perpetrators of such acts have no place in our community.” (OMG, the audacity of such people, hang the interlopers, )

 

 

Originally posted 2016-11-24 09:48:45.

Current Events

Last Shot

11 Comments

For the life of me, I cannot understand how someone with a brain they aren’t sitting can be for this woman. The only reason I can think of is that they hate Trump so much they’d vote for for a squirrel to be president. Which means their  voting for a negative reason, not a positive. They simply do not give a hoot about what is good for America. I honestly feel that if the majority of Americans eligible to vote do so for her, I’m living in the wrong country.

On the Brink                                                                          By: Greg Maresca

Tomorrow’s election cannot be overstated as America’s prosperity and global influence lie in the balance making every ballot essential.

Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that one in five claim they need to learn more about Vice President Kamala Harris. In our fingertip world of unending media, this is hard to fathom. This is the consequence when many get their political acumen from edited sound bites, Tweets and commercials.

Harris’ horizontal climb to headline the Democrat presidential ticket came by not earning one primary vote. Harris and Hillary Clinton both navigated their paths to power primarily through relationships rather than achievement. Harris is the DEI presidential candidate – the turtle on a fence post as there is no way she could have gotten up there on her own. Harris checks more boxes than the token U.S. Customs’ drug dog at the southern border.

Harris likes to claim the one freedom that unlocks all other freedoms is the freedom to vote – when no one voted for her.

Harris’s mother was Indian, her father is a half-white, half-Jamaican, she was raised in Canada and married a Jew. No word if she ever had an abortion but given her ardent support of the gruesome procedure, it gives one reason to pause.

For all the word salads Harris tosses together on the issues, she is clear and concise about abortion. Inflation, illegal immigration, crime – none matter to those who are obsessed with abortion. And no one is more fixated than Harris who flatly rejected any religious exemptions.

As someone who served as an attorney general, Harris knows but won’t admit that there is a fundamental freedom, enshrined in the First Amendment, that guarantees religious liberty, and conscience rights that are the soul of the abortion argument.

Every honest person knows that abortion kills the most innocent among us. Baby showers are proof. Harris is so thoroughly secular that religious liberty means nothing. Harris underscored this at a recent campaign stop when she informed those who yelled out “Jesus Christ is King,” that they needed to find another rally. Harris claims to champion women’s rights, but the facts, which the media purposely obfuscates, tells another story – from rampant sex trafficking at the border to forcing girls to share their bathrooms with boys.

If she loses the election, this will be one of the major reasons why. Harris is not only acting immorally, but irrationally.

There is not a genuine bone in her body and with her incessant eye-rolling, phony accents and nonstop cackle she is best suited as America’s ex-wife than our next president. Harris continues to flip on the issues she could easily find work as a circus acrobat.

Harris chose to be Biden’s vice president after suggesting on multiple occasions he was a racist before she was the first to flame out of the Democrat primary four years ago.

Her campaign went full bore with Biden’s strategy by setting a trail of wine bottles leading to the basement making her a charter member of the Democrats’ Candidate Protection Program.

Harris only qualification is that she is not Biden but will be just as easily manipulated. Harris is being propped up and supported by a complicit and corrupt national media that hates the foundational values and history of the nation she wants to lead.

Democrats called Bush Hitler, then McCain. Romney, and now Trump Hitler. In an election between Harris and Hitler, keep in mind that the Washington Post and the L.A. Times both declined to endorse Harris. The difference between Hitler jokes and a cow is, you can’t milk a cow for more than a generation.

During Trump’s presidency inflation was low, while under Biden-Harris it has soared. Illegal immigration has exploded as has crime. Biden’s record is a catastrophe, and Harris is co-owner of this disaster as vice president. Yet, Harris’ campaign’s number one issue is – abortion. Recently, when questioned on “The View” on what she might do differently over the last four years, Harris was unapologetic saying, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Harris claims she is going to solve the problems she helped to create.

Harris is the most unqualified candidate to run for president in your lifetime, if not ever.

Current Events

Federal Reserve

3 Comments

Another good one from Marine Greg.  As you read this, remember a couple of things. One is the economic definition of inflation in layman’s terms: “Too much money chasing too few goods.” And secondly, one of the truisms I learned in Econ 101 is: Put five Economists in a room and ask them a question, and you will get six answers, all different. Why is that? Because Economics is a social science, not a hard science

 

A Binging Pivot                                                                      By: Greg Maresca

It was one of the most anticipated announcements of Joe Biden’s presidency that was nearly on par with him dropping out of the presidential race and fading to irrelevance.

For the first time since 2020, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by half a percentage point making the range between 4.75% and 5% with anticipation of more to come.

“The U.S. economy is basically fine,” claimed the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, who made the cut regardless and seemed unconvinced about anything else. To no surprise, the stock market approved following up with record highs.

When deciding on rates, The Fed has always been a reactionary institution that relies on historical data and models like the Phillips curve that was debunked two generations ago. Cutting rates will grow the money supply and bring some relief from higher interest rates. The Fed is putting pressure on inflation to bring down interest rates as the way to manage our exploding deficits.

The rate cut will only fuel inflation – an unwritten and unrestricted tax on everyone – no exceptions.

The interest rate was at a historical average, but the national financial sector and the Washington bureaucratic swamp are addicted to cheap money that makes $50,000 cars and $300,000 homes seem affordable. Over time this money infusion will make those cars and houses even pricier. Believing cheap money is the driving force of economic prosperity is as counterfeit as they come. Such behavior increases demand without an increase in supply – the root cause of inflation. Keep in mind that both food and fuel are excluded from inflation calculations.  This, my friends, is unknown to most Americans. Should food and fuel be added to the inflation number, you would be shocked.

Interest rates are The Fed’s dependent drug.

“When is the next cut coming and how big?”

A half of a percent reduction suggests the economy and its capacity for job creation is not nearly as good as Powell or any other entrenched government bureaucrat will admit.

There was no need for the cut, but lower rates produce lower mortgages and pacifies the masses making them feel better about the current political and economic situation.

The Fed, “a nonpartisan agency,” put its thumb on the scale during a presidential campaign begging the question: Is The Fed an impartial and independent agency or beholden to politics and Wall Street? Lowering rates at the expense of higher inflation seems self-serving in the run up to a presidential election that is less than six weeks away.

Powell, who served as carnival barker for the Biden administration’s highest inflation rates in over 40 years, told us inflation was “only transitory” is doing his best to foster a post-inflation merry go round.

The Fed’s decision is analogous to the hangover coming the morning after a Friday night binger. This economic hangover, however, will conveniently occur after November’s election, so make sure you start your Christmas shopping early as none of this bodes well for glad tidings.

Typically, The Fed cuts rates in response to economic downspin, not because of a supposed stable and growing economy. Provided the economy goes south with rates already low, this only serves to dig the hole deeper.

The real issue that is ignored, dismissed or unacknowledged is the ever-increasing federal spending. Every dollar spent, pilfers a dollar through taxes, borrowing or money-printing. Unless there are cuts to spending and debt reduction, nothing changes diminishing even further the fading American dream.

How about less government and regulation and more innovation and investment to drive the economy.

The cut is all about the election and The Fed’s preferred outcome. It is nothing short of a lame attempt to prop up the incumbent executive branch that would certainly preserve Powell’s job. No need for the bureaucrats to fret as it is always the working class that takes the brunt of the foibles of incessant government intervention.

The cut also implicitly implies The Fed overplayed its hand and is concerned about a recession.

Prematurely cutting interest rates is the perfect recipe for an increase in inflation. The dollar lost 20% of its value in just three plus years turning greenbacks into proverbial toilet paper.

The Fed’s rate cut in a supposed stable and growing economy only kicks the inflation can farther down the road until after November’s election.

How politically expedient.

Current Events

Hope Endorses Joy

3 Comments

By: Greg Maresca

The Democrat presidential ticket’s watchword is the thematic term: joy. When the news broke, I thought of an episode of Hogan’s Heroes where Col. Klink was reminiscing about his pre-war outings with the Nazi program: Strength Through Joy. The program was pure propaganda that promoted Nazism and monitored dissident and anti-state behavior.

Who said you couldn’t learn anything from a sitcom?

Einstein said, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

Barack Obama was once the Democrat’s hope candidate, while Kamala Harris is now their joy nominee. Democrats wouldn’t know this, but hope and joy are not campaign slogans but Christmas.

What is there to be joyful about?

Let’s count the ways.

Joy is someone else paying your student loan and your mortgage down payment. Joy is universal income and not having to work with free healthcare. Joy is more debt, inflation with increased oversight and regulation. Joy means high energy prices and power outages. Joy is eliminating the filibuster and packing the Supreme Court. Joy entails public school indoctrination and unrestrained illegal migration, no police or prisons. Joy is knowing Planned Parenthood has a mobile bus offering free abortions and vasectomies. Joy is higher food and gas prices, tens of millions of illegals, terrorists and drugs flooding the border. Joy is taxing unrealized capital gains while supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax. Harris is much like Warren; except she is a real Indian (when not playing the Black card).

What’s not to like?

The most memorable Democrat Convention moment was opening night when Joe Biden angrily yelled for all to embrace joy that you could bottle and even wash your dishes with it.

Harris’s campaign slogan might surprise her innumerable staff members who through the years left her employ overdosing on all that joy. Perhaps the media should interview them. Then again, that is not their job. The media’s job is to get Harris elected. Democrats plan to ride the wave of obfuscation into the White House as their media buddies work the oars and sails.

Three months ago, if someone said Harris would own the top of the Democrat ticket without earning one primary vote, they would have been laughed at Kamala style on steroids. The worst president in modern history has passed the baton to an even worse candidate. Her meteoric rise is totally fabricated, forced, and fake. Yet, this inept, and awkward vice president is somehow the most qualified, the most wonderful, and the most inspiring figure in American politics.

The media made Obama a celebrity whose accomplishments, intelligence, and work ethic were irrelevant. Now, they have Harris, who will save democracy despite not winning one primary for the office she seeks. It’s all counterfeit, resembling a high school popularity contest, but few care. All the while, the mindless masses continue to digest this narrative hook, line, and joy.

Making joy a virtue of frivolity was the highlight at the Democrat’s latest kumbaya of a convention. Subsisting on vibes rather than substance. The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio used another sitcom (Seinfeld) to juxtapose the convention to “a show about nothing,” and he was hardly alone.

The last thing Democrats want is the issues front and center believing the formula: personality – policy = joy is enough to keep the White House. Moreover, as Robert Kennedy, Jr, recently said, “Who needs policies when you have Trump to hate.”

Those who believe Harris is making the calls on policy are the same who believe Biden has full mental acuity. Biden was “sharp as a tack” before “they” (including Harris) couldn’t hide it anymore.

Yet, Kama-chameleon and her cheerleaders joyfully run away from everything they have stood for.

Ignorance is bliss. It is also Harris’ foremost strategy.

Accepting the nomination as a cackling caricature of the Wicked Witch of the West dressed in mournful black does not project joy but is a ghoulish facsimile underscoring a campaign that is out for blood. Harris’s constant crackling does not perceive optimism, but of mental limitations – the notorious giggling fool – the epitome of style over substance.

Can you feel the joy?

Rather, that is your wallet being emptied.

If you haven’t figured it out, the Harris/Walz campaign of J.O.Y. is precisely an acronym:

Joke’s On You.

PS. I love it; the new theme is now “JOY.”