The President’s party always loses seats in the midterms.

Trump is a polarizing figure who will drive Democrat turnout like nothing since Obama’s first election.

The GOP is doomed, and Triump will be a lame duck starting in January.

We’ve all heard it.  Truth be told, while I think the GOP has a great chance to pick up congressional seats in Minnesota this fall, I  – as naturally pessimistic as any other Scandinavian-American and urban Conservative – have been mentally buckling myself in for a brutal, 2006-like night on election night.

Much as I was about this time two years ago.

We know how that went.

And while I don’t get sanguine over much of anything, Conrad Black says there’s room for hope in the wake of the Democrats’ Kavenaugh show trial and Trump’s canny, intensive campaigning:

Just as he calculated that by speaking for all those who despised the entire incumbent political system he could win the Republican nomination, and that he could win by designing a campaign to exploit the possibilities of gaining a majority in the Electoral College rather than the popular vote (as five of his predecessors did, by design or otherwise), he is now exploiting the fact that there is no leader of the opposition in the American system, and between presidential elections he has no rival. The likely outcome is the most favorable midterm result since Franklin D. Roosevelt won nine additional congressional districts and gained nine senators in 1934. Even now, though the bunk about impeachment has subsided, Trump’s enemies have little idea of how profoundly hated the OBushinton era, 1989 to 2017, had become, as a time of sleaze and incompetence and stagnation. Now, in what is practically a full-employment economy, wages for the least well-paid are rising. Amazon and other retailers grumble about $15 an hour for unskilled work, but it is the first time people in that economic bracket have had real increases of purchasing power and the lack of fear of joblessness in more than 20 years.

Time will tell — and not much time, as luck would have it.

… at the subject line of this email:

Well, no.

MoveOn.org was made for moments like 20 years ago, when an aging lothario was facing impeachment, and Democrats with deep pockets wanted to defend his administration and power from his own arrogant excess.

Glad we could settle that.

How much of our nation’s current political, social and moral impasse traces directly to the changes Barack Obama wrought on both policy and social levels, especially in his effect on the American Left?

It’s open to debate (a debate that’ll never happen in our nation’s media or academy), but the answer might appear to be “lots and lots”.

A friend of the blog writes:

Bloomberg makes it clear:
“guns need to be kept out of the hands of minorities in order to keep them alive.” -M. Bloomberg

Since 1968 the left has pushed gun control measures for the primary purpose of disarming minorities. Til now they have always couched their arguments in broad neutral terms so it wouldn’t be obvious to the low-information citizens that their target is and always was to make sure minorities, especially blacks, would not have access to firearms for self defense.
Now Bloomberg is making it clear who he is intending to deprive of their civil rights:
Michael Bloomberg suggests disarming minorities to ‘keep them alive’: report

Michael Bloomberg suggests disarming minorities to ‘keep them alive’: re...o go ahead vote for gun-control politicians, its only blacks who will be affected.
They don’t even bother to hide their racism anymore!

“Hiding” has never been the word for it; gun control has always been about disarming black people (before they added working class whites to the target list).

In 1932, when the leadership of the German parliament decided to try empaneling a cabinet under the leader of the largest party in the Reichstag, one Adolf HItler, one of the groups that lent the new idea strong support was…

…the German Kommunist Party.

This bit of cognitive dissonance startles a  lot of modern Ameircans, with their exceedingly pat, linear understanding of political history.  In the context of the times, it made perfect sense.  And not without reason.  The Communists believed that a coalition run by a Nazi would drive everyone in the middle to one extreme or the other – which would redound, conventionally, to their benefit.  They stood to gain from the violence they believed would ensue.

And barring a major change in German political life, it might have worked.

But Hitler outmaneuvered them Commies, and everyone else.   He promised Germans an end to politics – and, numbed by a decade and a half of depression, political violence and fractiousness, Germans bought it.  And he got the allegiance of the German Army, which allowed him to sustain his seizure of complete control of all the levers of German government.

But that was all in the future.  In the fall of 1932, the Commies beheld the spectre of (more) political violence, and chortled merrily.   Division – in the form of a low-grade, cold-to-warm state of conflict – was in their interests, or so they thought.

To the best of my knowledge, Dennis Prager was the first to call our current national impasse a “civil war”.   It’s a cold one – so far.

I despair, occasionally, of it staying that way;

He notes the propensity of today’s left toward violence:

Today, we watch leftist mobs scream profanities at professors and deans and shut down conservative and pro-Israel speakers at colleges. We routinely witness left-wing protesters as they block highways and bridges; scream in front of the homes of conservative business and political leaders; and surround conservatives’ tables at restaurants while shouting and chanting at them.

Conservatives don’t do these things. They don’t close highways, yell obscenities at left-wing politicians, work to ban left-wing speakers at colleges, smash the windows of businesses, etc.

Why do leftists feel entitled do all these things? Because they have thoroughly rejected middle-class, bourgeois, and Judeo-Christian religious values. Leftists are the only source of their values. Leftists not only believe they know what is right — conservatives, too, believe they are right — but they also believe they are morally superior to all others. Leftists are Übermenschen — people on such a high moral plane that they do not consider themselves bound by the normal conventions of civics and decency. Leftists don’t need such guidelines; only the non-Left — the “deplorables” — need them.

Like the Communists of 1932, they are hoping with every Antifa outrage, with every clogged freeway, with every mob scene in a store or restaurant or place of business, to provoke a response.   It will, they think, redound to their advantage.   Given that they control the means of information distribution in this country every bit as thoroughly as the Nazis did 86 years ago, it’s not a bad plan.

My kids were a little older – probably 9 and 7, which was not long before I started this blog, now that I think about it – when I first encountered “Kidz Bop”, an endless series of current pop songs, sung by a rotating but always identical-sounding group of pre-teens, bowdlerized for a pre-teen audience.

It always annoyed me – and made sure I never got any for the kids.  I figured that’d come early enough.

Now that my kids are in their twenties, it’s really not .an issue for me; the loathsome nature of modern pop music became one of the lesser problems, although the laothsome pop music of the day was the soundtrack to the worst of the teenage years.

But others did buy them – enough to put several of the compilations on the Billboard Hot 100 Albums over the past decade and a half.

This piece in Vox (motto:  “The WaPo Libsplains America!) has issues with the series – for similar reasons to mine, but not at all the same.

A 2017 study on the effects of censorship in Kidz Bop found that replacing phrases does not actually wipe lyrical recognition from children’s minds if they have already heard the original song.

I’m trying to imagine anyone who thought it might.  Given the way kids – and kidz – pass on information they;re not supposed to know about the grownup world, it’s pretty inevitable, at least among people who have, or have been, actual kids.

Even if it did, what Kidz Bop is enforcing is also not kid-appropriate: The study says the music perpetuates the sociological phenomenon of “kids getting older younger” (KGOY), which claims that marketing is pushing kids out of their childhood earlier and earlier. The study says that repackaging adult music as kids’ music doesn’t eliminate the adult messages, even though some words and phrases are changed.

One source quoted in the study is Christopher Bell, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs who is an expert on how race, class, and gender intersect with children’s media.

Of courses he is.   Else, he wouldn’t have been in Vox.

He has hosted a TED talk on female superheroes, is currently consulting on an upcoming Pixar movie (which he cannot talk about because of a very long NDA), and is an avowed Kidz Bop hater.

He sees the product as both lazy and emblematic of our mistaken views on what censorship accomplishes. Kids’ media may take out “bad words,” but it doesn’t fix the problem of violence and oversexualization of women in media and pop culture.

They – the author and Mr. Belll – come periliously close to an insight in the rest of the article (which is worth a read, sort of);

Censorship doesn’t fix the problem of “over-sexualization of women in media” – because children themselves are over-sexualized.    Eight is the new thirteen…

…thanks, largely, to the popular culture that Vox (and the WaPo, which holds Vox’s leash) have been promoting and profiting off of.

As much as society’s institutions – the media, bureaucracy, the academy, the educational-industrial complex and so much government at so many levels – seem to be boarding the left’s crazy train, it’s good to know that when push comes to shove the Free Market is still utterly  A VIrginia tourism board notes with alarm that tourists are “Unexpectedly” staying away from the restaurant that refused to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders – and the entire area around it:

The Roanoke Times reported Sunday that a regional tourism board is pulling together emergency funds to boost its digital marketing campaign.

The Red Hen incident in June prompted thousands of calls and emails to the tourism office. They’re still coming in. The office received a letter on Thursday from a Georgia family that wrote to say it would never return because of what happened.

Why, it’s almost as if there’s a majority out there who…doesn’t get heard much.   Who are indeed silent.

Wonder what we can call that group?

People ask me “Mitch, why are you a Second Amendment supporter?”

And I respond “Because of the logical end result of the rhetoric of so many of our fellow citizens“.

A friend of the blog writes:

And here we have an example of a liberal who chooses to not believe someone when they are accusing a Democrat. I wonder what reaction the blogger would get if she wrote this about Kavanaugh?

But, maybe the blogger is not too far from where we all ought to be. I mostly roll my eyes when I hear about a new accusation against a politician. These accusations certainly all seem set up to distract from real issues. Let’s vow not to be distracted. Let’s vow to make sure accusers have solid evidence before we hear about it night and day.

Perhaps the real movement should be to encourage people to report incidents when they happen and investigate then, rather than when they are politically expedient.

Of course, counter to what the blogger writes, I have heard reports that Karen Monahan did try to report it at the hospital. If true, this is far more evidence than we get from most accusers and this is one woman we ought to believe.

The blogger at the link would seem to be a reliable relater of Democrat party chanting points. But as my correspondent correctly notes, I laud the (late breaking, selective’ sudden) concern for facts as a better arbiter of justice than raw, focused emotion (dutifully applied by a biased media).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Why the vicious fight over the Kavanaugh nomination? Because there’s so much at stake.

When the Constitution was written, the Supreme Court did not have the power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. The Court grabbed that power in Marbury v. Madison, 1803.

For the first hundred years, everyone assumed the Supreme Court would interpret the Constitution according to the original intent of the people who wrote it. If the public didn’t like what the original Constitution said, they could amend the Constitution as they did after the Civil War. The Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the 14th Amendment extended the constitutional limitations on federal government action to state governments.

Starting in 1912, Woodrow Wilson promoted the idea that government must grow and develop, must evolve with the times but without Constitutional limitations and without going through the cumbersome formal Constitutional amendment process. The idea caught on with judges who liked the thought of being the ultimate guardians of good sense and civic virtue, a check on excesses of state legislatures, philosopher-kings. That’s how we got abortion-on-demand and gay marriage: Supreme Court justices decided the time was ripe for those new ‘rights’ to be discovered and imposed nation-wide. The four Liberal justices on the court are committed to this method of Constitutional interpretation. Whatever is popular today, is the law.

Kavanaugh follows the Original Intent method which, indeed, is the standard applied to every document in every lawsuit by every court except the Liberal justices. If your mortgage company wants to double your interest rate, the case will turn on what was intended in the original documents – fixed rate or adjustable rate – regardless of the economic conditions at the time of the lawsuit.

Applying Original Intent to the Constitution, ask yourself this: what do you think the Founding Fathers would have thought of homosexual marriage? Of women wanting to abort their unborn children? Would the Founders have considered these as fundamental rights like the right to choose your own religion, the right to speak up about politics, the right to a trial by jury? I don’t think so.

And what would the Founders have thought about the right of ordinary citizens to carry firearms to protect themselves at home, on the roads, and against a tyrannical government? Remember, the Founders weren’t always the graceful statutes and paintings you see in museums, they were the people who planned and carried out a revolution to overthrow their own government. I suspect they thought the people’s right to own military-grade weapons was essential to protecting the rest of the people’s rights from encroachment by the government.

That’s what’s at stake in this confirmation. Kavanaugh will be the fifth Original Intent seat on the Court. He’ll give the traditional, conservative method a majority. Roe v. Wade is at risk of being overturned, as it should be, being entirely made up law with no historical support at all. And Obergefell v. Hodges is such a perversion that Justice Kennedy should hide his head in a bag.

That’s why Democrats are being savage. They see their path to subverting the nation blocked. They can’t win at the polls if they declare their goals honestly, they can’t win in the courts with Kavanaugh on the bench, the next step in fomenting revolution is violence. Assassination is not out of the question. Whoever provides security for Republicans in Washington should double their details.

That last bit seems like it’s more and more likely ever week.

Michael Moore’s ex-wife Suing the filmmaker for allegedly squirreling away profits from movies on which they collaborated:

Earlier this month Glynn filed a lawsuit against Moore in Manhattan Supreme Court claiming that he was stiffing her on profits from their joint movie projects.

Moore’s lawyer, Kenneth Warner, wrote in court papers filed Friday that Glynn sued in order to publicize information that would have remained sealed and confidential if their case had stayed in the Michigan court.

Of course, this is not The kind of “abuse”, much less “assault”, that’s been in the news lately.

But it does, perhaps (very, very perhaps), highlight another fact that the social justice pimps would just as soon not I have us talking about; a lot of what is reported as “abuse” – and what the heck, let’s call this “alleged financial abuse”– Is actually maneuvering in court.

That court might be a court of law, or a court of public opinion, but the tactic is the same.

Ben Shapiro scored one:

I can’t wait until this week is over.

Of course, that’s why Democrats are always chanting “believe survivors” these days; Ted Kennedy was smart enough never to leave any.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Got this in the mail.  Not going.  Annoying.

 

“Give back.”  To whom, the beneficiaries of this fundraiser?  The county bar association and the local Legal Aid office?  The phrase ‘give back’ implies I once received something of value from them, for which I did not pay on the spot.  The phrase ‘give back’ implies an obligation, a debt.  Searching my memory (insert Star Trek computer voice: “Working. Working.”).  Nope, can’t think of anything either of them ever gave me for free.  Don’t see that I have any obligation to give either of them anything in return.

“Pay it Forward.”  Cute movie, silly slogan, worse reasoning.  Somebody once did something nice for me, so that burdens me with an obligation to give money to someone else.  And lucky for me, they’ve pre-selected the people I’ll be paying, all good Liberal Democrats, no doubt.  At $85 a plate, plus having to sit through do-gooders giving each other feel-good awards to signal their virtue?  I don’t think so.  If that’s the cost of people doing nice things for me, stop doing nice things for me, I can’t afford it.

This is not an appeal for charity, it’s shaming.  I’ve been shamed enough.  I get it every day.  I’m an old White male.  We’re the bane of society.  Racists.  Sexists.  Rapists.  We didn’t build anything, we never accomplished anything, we’re oppressors who stole our ill-gotten gains and don’t deserve to keep them.  So Give Back the money or Pay it Forward to our pet programs so we can work to further shame old White men.

You know what?  That argument doesn’t motivate me to give money, doesn’t inspire my generosity.

If you want me to give you money, convince me you deserve it.  Offer programs I want to watch (Dr. Who on public television).  Give me something I want to have (salvation, from my church).  Show me you’re helping people I want to help and give me a little reward (Girl Scout cookies).  Hell, stand at the stoplight in the pouring rain holding a cardboard sign to make me feel glad I’m not you.  I keep a dozen ones in the center console for precisely those people.  But not for Legal Aid lawyers.  And not because I’ve got some fake obligation that I should be ashamed I haven’t paid.

The hardest part of establishing an entitlement is convincing those who’ll pay that you are in fact entitled to their money.

It seems MN Democrats have done a fine job of this.