Democrats say that Americans will lose their democratic rights and be subjected to “fascism” if any Republicans are elected to positions of power today. Here’s an example from the Tyrant of Tallahassee’s opponent:
18 days left to protect abortion rights. 18 days left to stop fascism in our state. 18 days left to defeat Ron DeSantis. 18 days left to save democracy.
By implication, if Ron DeSantis wins Florida will be plunged into fascism and there won’t be any more democracy in Florida (it is almost gone and could be “saved” only via a Democrat victory). Surely Mr. Crist himself wouldn’t wish to stick around and live in a fascist state, right. Just as those who didn’t want to be subjected to school closures, lockdowns, mask orders, vaccination papers checks had to move to Florida in 2020-2021, won’t those in Florida who love Democracy and oppose fascism have to move to a Democrat-run state, e.g., California, New York, or Maskachusetts?
I assume that the same rhetoric is being ladled out by Democrats in other states. Let’s check in with neighboring Georgia:
Georgians are afraid to drop their kids off at school, attend a religious service or even go to the grocery store.
It is not normal to live in fear. I will do everything I can to make Georgia a safer state, particularly for Black and Brown communities.
Suppose that the hated Republican who has made Georgia unsafe is reelected. Georgians will continue to be “afraid to drop their kids off at school, attend a religious service or even go to the grocery store.” Wouldn’t it be logical for Stacey Abrams to move out of Georgia and into a safe state?
If Republicans, supporters of the January 6 insurrection, are as bad as Democrats say, nobody can be safe after this election in any state where Republicans control either the legislature or the governorship. Any Democrat who is physically able to move, therefore, should immediately flock to comfort in a state where there is no possibility of Republican political influence.
Update: In Charlie Crist’s concession speech, he opened with a “good congratulations to Governor DeSantis on his re-election” (YouTube). Instead of describing his plans to move away from fascism, in other words, he actually congratulated the fascist!
Alcoholics, at least in movies, like to say “I’m 5 years sober” or “I’m 8 months sober” or whatever, referring to their last drink that mean people would prohibit altogether.
We see some of the same behavior with the COVID-19 “shots”. Some people can’t stay away from CVS and get one needle stick after another while others are able to abstain for months or years and some brave peer-pressure-resistant souls are teetotalers (sad victims of the conspiracy theory that the immune system is capable of doing the job that it evolved to do). Would it be useful to adopt the language of alcoholics? Rochelle Walensky, our CDC Director, for example, when talking about her COVID-19 infection and then her rebound-after-Paxlovid COVID-19 illness could have said “I’m one month sober” (her mouse-tested bivalent COVID-19 “vaccine” shot was a month earlier).
Someone who was gulled into the first two could say “I’m 18 months sober”. A person who got the first booster, but refused to Follow the Science for #4 and #5 could say “I’m one year sober”.
Let’s look at a more recent example. Here’s the Biden Administration’s top FDA official on September 9 getting the shot that worked well for the mice (or at least didn’t kill any of them?):
Safely spending time with loved ones this holiday season means remaining current on #COVID19 vaccinations and boosters. Yesterday, I received the updated #COVID19 bivalent booster, which is targeted to the currently circulating variant. pic.twitter.com/DQCeVtYirF
Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf tested positive for COVID-19 over the weekend while traveling on official agency business. He is up to date on vaccines against COVID-19 and is experiencing mild symptoms.
Will the use of the phrase “mild symptoms” become an easy way to recognize the Followers of Science?
Readers: I like to follow Science so of course I’ve had 5 shots. That doesn’t mean I’m going to walk to CVS for the 6th, though. I can quit any time that I want.
There’s a sports car dealer next to our favorite taco place here in Jupiter. Their lot was jammed with cars, seemingly twice as full as in the summer. From their perspective, the car market turned about 30 days ago. They’re now paying only MSRP for nearly-new (500-mile) C8 Corvettes. What do they turn around and sell them for? It’s a little unclear because they say “We haven’t had a call for a Corvette in 3-4 weeks. The interest rates have killed demand.” (Note that this is contrary to my theory that we have enough deficit spending and inflation-indexed spending to have inflation even if nobody does any borrowing; see Can our government generate its own inflation spiral? and Economist answers my question about high interest rates and high deficits.)
How about real estate? There’s a house in our neighborhood (built by the MacArthur Foundation for middle-class and upper-middle-class people!) whose $3.35 million asking price in April 2022 seemed aggressive, particularly since there was no pool and the new owner would have to lease it back to the sellers until October when the sellers expected their new-built house to be ready.
Here’s the “value history”:
In June 2022, there actually was a greater fool who agreed to pay $3 million for this albatross. But then it seems that this person disappeared or wised up and the closing price was $2.4 million (last week):
If you’re depressed because you forgot to sell all of your assets in March 2022, this message from the taco place might be useful:
If you’re depressed because you were dumb enough to buy a house early in 2022 at early-2022 prices (looking in the mirror is painful!), you can be comforted that you don’t live in San Francisco, which MSNBC uses as shorthand for a truly crummy and crime-plagued urban environment (the MSNBC interviewer says, regarding a higher-crime Manhattan, “We’re worried this could be San Francisco”):
Even MSNBC is calling out Democrat Kathy Hochul.
"Here's the problem: We don't feel safe…I walk into my pharmacy, and everything is on lockdown because of shoplifters. I'm not going in the subway. People don't feel safe in this town." pic.twitter.com/JUKhxXCk4c
This is an “Epidemiologist and federal disaster medicine team member” in Proudly Scientifically Governed Minneapolis (lockdowns and school closures followed by the martyrdom of George Floyd; pre-coronapanic the city’s police perpetrated the Killing of Justine Damond).
My big question after reading “If I were forced to be infected by either HIV or COVID, I would choose HIV without hesitation”: Why can’t he collect all three (including monkeypox)? Why is he forced to choose?
Readers: Where could Olesen go right now and get HIV, COVID, and monkeypox all in one evening? I’m thinking that it would have to be in New York City.
(My source for this tweet from the epidemiologist/Scientist is, of course, one of my medical professor friends. On seeing Fauci on TV in March 2020, and nothing that nobody on the planet could possibly have the knowledge that Fauci was claiming to possess, he predicted, “this guy is doing to do more damage to the public perception of science and medicine than anyone in the history of humanity.”)
In case the fired Twitter employees take this tweet with them, a screen shot:
Kvinder vælg Kvinder. If your Norwegian is a bit rusty, the museum provides an English translation of this 1916 poster:
Related:
“Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It” (NYT, 9/3): Especially since the ascension of Donald Trump, numerous tragedies and extreme policies have been met with little political consequence: schools targeted by mass murderers, immigrants treated as subhuman and autocratic regimes around the globe affirmed as allies. … In the weeks following the leak of a draft ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which all but guaranteed the end of abortion protections under Roe v. Wade, it initially seemed this pattern would hold. … But once the actual Dobbs decision came down, everything changed. For many Americans, confronting the loss of abortion rights was different from anticipating it. In my 28 years analyzing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed. … In the six months before Dobbs, women outnumbered men by a three-point margin among new voter registrations. After Dobbs, that gender gap skyrocketed to 40 points. Women were engaged politically in a way that lacked any known precedent.
Before heading into a community center for a campaign rally the other day, President Biden stopped to speak to the overflow crowd …
Faith has been Mr. Biden’s calling card in his nearly two years in office — faith in the system in which he has been a fixture for more than half a century, faith that he could repair the fissures of a broken society, faith that he and he alone could beat former President Donald J. Trump if they face off again in 2024.
Biden is a man of faith and draws overflow crowds.
The presidency he envisioned, one where he presided over a moment of reconciliation, is not the presidency he has gotten.
Saying that anyone who votes for a Republican is traitorously ending our democracy did not work for reconciliation?
To whom can this greatest of living men be compared?
Like other presidents in stressful moments, he has turned to Abraham Lincoln for inspiration.
Abe Lincoln had only a battle to fight…
“One possible lesson for President Biden, who’s engaged in a profound battle to preserve the Constitution and the rule of law, is that moral commitment matters and can prevail, no matter how difficult the struggle,”
Noble Joe has a profound battle against the enemies of the Constitution and the rule of law (who might those be?).
But if he takes a licking on Tuesday, aides said, he will own it and move ahead. In a life of falling and getting back up, it would be one more stumble, not the end.
What would it mean for Joe Biden to “own” the Democrats’ defeat in some House, Senate, and Gubernatorial races? Surely he would not admit doubt in the Rainbow Flag religion. Would he unforgive everyone’s student loans? Would he say that some abortion care for pregnant people is not reproductive health care?
Circling back to the headline, does it make sense to characterized Joe Biden’s life as one of remarkable struggle? If so, why couldn’t he have used his white male privilege to avoid that struggle?
I wonder if the Democrats are going to lose even some of their elite support in this week’s election (or maybe we should say “last week’s election” because so many people voted early?). Elites own stock and the S&P 500 is down nearly 2% in nominal terms compared to January 20, 2021 (closed at 3,799; compare to 3,771 today). We don’t have official CPI numbers for October yet, but this is down more than 15% if adjusted by official CPI. If we adjust for inflation in the prices of goods and services that elites buy, e.g., houses, cars, travel, etc., the S&P 500 is down 20-25%.
Democrats have been running the White House, the House, and the Senate. Unless they can claim that a reduction in abortion care for pregnant people at reproductive health centers has resulted in the losses suffered by investors, it will be tough to blame those losses on Republicans.
Speaking of early voting, here’s an epic line in Austin, Texas:
Don’t let anyone tell you young people don’t show up to vote.
We are — and we will continue to show up these last five days until Election Day, including on campus at UT Austin! pic.twitter.com/h2AW1JDIRb
The city of Austin and Travis County, which is essentially the same group of people, is overwhelmingly Democrat (72% Biden and 27% Trump in 2020). Every elected official in Travis County seems to be a Democrat (to the point that most run unopposed by any Republican). Democrats say that Republicans are guilty of voter suppression by making it difficult to vote, but how can Republicans be responsible for the long lines and inconvenience in Austin/Travis County?
(This is not to say that Democrats are incompetent everywhere. I early-voted by biking over to the Abacoa “honors” campus of Florida Atlantic University (next to Scripps and Max Planck) and, thanks to the Democrats who run Palm Beach County, was voting within about 2 minutes after parking the bike. Then it was time for a Cuban sandwich at an outdoor table at the nearby cluster of restaurants in our fake downtown (shops, restaurants, bars, mini golf, escape room; no trash, pit bulls, unhoused people, pit bull poop, sidewalk tents, and the rest of the features that make California cities so vibrant and exciting).)
Late-night political thought… If prices are guaranteed to keep spiraling upward due to everything the government spends being indexed (see Can our government generate its own inflation spiral?), might Republicans be better off losing all of the Senate and House races on Tuesday? Even if the Republicans earned majorities in both sides of Congress, Joe Biden would likely veto any legislation that cut spending or removed inflation indexing from spending. So the Republicans have no realistic chance of reducing inflation, any more than the Inflation Reduction Act. If they’re totally out of government, only the Democrats will be blamed for the next two years of inflation and maybe that would help Republicans win the White House as well as Congress in 2024.
If we ignore the government inflation spiral-from-indexing effect, how much pent-up inflation is there? I remarked on the price increase for frozen peas (Peaflation at Publix). On a more recent trip, the supermarket shelves were entirely bare for all brands of frozen peas. The market-clearing price for peas is obviously higher than even the new high-ish prices. Similarly, canned pumpkin was sold out. Our 42-inch-wide built-in fridge is dying. Is a Sub-Zero a ripoff at $14,000? Actually, it is underpriced and should go up further according to Econ 101 because it will take a year (a year!) for them to build and deliver one. The company is giving away fridges right now for way less than the market-clearing price.
Isn’t there a good chance that Americans will become disenchanted with whoever wins in 2022? And some might remember Republicans’ absurd campaign promises. Here’s a medical doctor promising to “fix” inflation, which is as plausible as a Scientologist being significantly helpful at a car accident scene (Tom Cruise video; go about 1 minute in).
Inflation is an economic and health crisis – a doctor can help fix it. As PA's next Senator, I'll keep us safe, cut your taxes, and protect our jobs.
Even if Dr. Oz was in possession of an economic policy that would Whip Inflation Now, Joe Biden would surely veto it. Sprinkling a few Republicans into Congress isn’t going to turn around the policies that got the U.S. into this inflationary mess. Will Republicans truly gain by promising to stop inflation and then not stopping it?
Here are the House Republicans implying that voting for them will somehow stop “the highest inflation in 40 years”:
WATCH 📺@GOPLeader slams the Biden administration and House Democrats for their Far Left agenda that has created the highest inflation in 40 years:
Here’s a promise from the Republican House leader to “lead the way” on inflation:
Democrats: —> Defunded the police and made our cities less safe. —> Spent $9 trillion dollars and increased inflation. —> Cut our energy production, and made you pay more at the pump.
It’s time to chart a better course. Republicans are ready to lead the way.
The big story of the year is the worst inflation in almost 40yrs. It is a tax on Americans. Families have had to spend $3,500 more than they did last year just to tread water. It is directly attributable to Democrats' multi-trillion-dollar inflationary spending earlier this year. pic.twitter.com/NgwT9Q70qB
But Congress has never been able to cut spending (which spirals upward with inflation automatically). And the Republicans won’t support tax increases. So the deficit spending will continue even if Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans can win a majority.
The biggest economic decision a woman will make in her lifetime is whether to have children. We need to give women the freedom and autonomy to make these critical decisions for themselves. We must protect access to safe, legal abortion.
— Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) August 3, 2022
I’m not an expert on reproductive health care, of which we are informed that abortion care is the most critical component, but I had a thought while viewing Love and Birth at the Musée D’Orsay (Georges Lacombe, circa 1895):
Where is the abortion-care-themed art for Democrats who own Hunter Bidens and want to demonstrate their passion for this most important aspect of reproductive health care?
Separately, a Hero of Faucism at the jammed art museum fights an aerosol virus with a humble surgical mask…. worn over a beard:
A masked Follower of Science in front of a sculpture titled “Redneck and Alligator” (well, maybe it is actually a crocodile scene set in Africa):
Here’s an overview of the converted train station:
The ceiling of the museum restaurant:
This prompted our almost-9-year-old to say “Hey look, there’s a peacock. Dad, you need to give me a shotgun and then…. problem solved.” (Readers: If you are having problems with ornamental peafowl on your estate, let me know and we’ll send the youth over to deal with the birds directly.)
Speaking of problems, like most of Paris, the museum is afflicted with gender binarism:
On the other hand, they do give a lot of floor and wall space to Kehinde Wiley:
Here’s part of an email from the Harvard president, sent on Halloween:
When Harvard assembles a class of undergraduates, it matters that they come from different social, economic, geographical, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. It matters that they come to our campus with varied academic interests and skill sets. Research and lived experience teach us that each student’s learning experience is enriched by encountering classmates who grew up in different circumstances.
Harvard is not alone in believing that we are more than our test scores and that our unique perspectives bring a wealth of educational benefits to a high-quality educational enterprise.
See if we can guess an ethnic group that is less than its members’ test scores…
The legal battle we have waged, which reaches its apex today, is as important to other colleges and universities, and to society, as it is to us. Educators and scholars, civil rights organizers, historians, and education advocates stand with us. Leaders in business and technology stand with us. Former military officers and the heads of the nation’s service academies stand with us. Their voices—ringing out in amicus briefs—are part of a chorus that has risen across our campus and throughout our country in defense of forty years of legal precedent, as well as the history of the 14th Amendment.
Today, individuals of great skill will argue in favor of our cause inside the highest court in the land.
Mediocre individuals were apparently scheduled to argue against Harvard’s Great Cause.
We now await the final decision of the court with earnest anticipation. Whatever it is, we will honor the law while also remaining true to our values.
Translation of “remaining true to our values”: “We will find a workaround so that we can continue discriminating against these Asian nerds without running afoul of the law.”
This academic bureaucrat is proud of the work that he has done for decades in sorting student and faculty applicants by skin color. Suppose, however, that the Supreme Court rules that the sort-by-skin-color policy is unconstitutional. By inference, then, Harvard and its bureaucrats have been depriving applicants of their constitutional rights to be judged by factors other than skin color. The big question for today: Will the president of Harvard and lesser bureaucrats offer an apology?
Speaking of unconstitutionality and appeals, what happened to the Biden administration’s appeal of Judge Kathryn Mizelle’s finding that the CDC’s mask order was unconstitutional? Joe Biden never apologized for violating Americans’ constitutional rights, I don’t think. The appeal was filed in April (heritage.org). In the meantime, it looks as though Joe Biden actually could legally order Americans to #MaskUpSaveLives. The courts seem to agree that this can be done via the TSA if not the CDC. “Supreme Court leaves TSA mask requirement ruling in place” (The Hill, Halloween):
The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a ruling that allows the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to require mask-wearing on planes, trains and other forms of transport.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found no merit in Corbett’s claim and affirmed the TSA did have the agency to maintain security and safety within the transportation system, including imposing the masking requirement.
Biden has the power to keep us safe and secure! But why didn’t he reimpose the airport-and-airline mask order on November 1 after the Supreme Court failed to intervene? Even if most airline passengers are vaccinated we don’t want people gathering unmasked and breeding a vaccine-resistant superbug that will be deadly to the unvaccinated, as happened with Marek’s disease. Even if Democrats can control the entire United States and force everyone to get accept COVID-19 vaccinated there will still be billions of unvaccinated and/or unboosted folks in poor countries who would be vulnerable to the superbug that we created via our policy of widespread vaccination followed by mass gatherings.
Is Joe Biden following the Science, but waiting until after the election to bring the masks back?
