Two top candidates he endorsed—Mehmet Oz for U.S. Senate and Doug Mastriano for governor—went down in flames in a state critical for any presidential candidate.
In 2016, Trump won Pennsylvania and its electoral votes by a hair. In 2020, Biden won.
What’s discouraging about the election is how mediocre the Democrat candidates were.
John Fetterman makes Bernie Sanders look like a right-winger. He served as a mayor in a small town near Pittsburgh and somehow became lieutenant governor. He suffered a stroke earlier this year and has had problems understanding questions and providing answers.
Still, he beat TV personality Oz by more than 100,000 votes in a 50-48 percent vote. Oz wasn’t a great campaigner, but he talked an excellent conservative line.
In the governor’s race, Democrat Josh Shapiro, the state attorney general, won handily despite Mastriano being a true conservative and solid Trump supporter.
Shapiro won by more than 600,000 votes in a 55-43 percent landside.
Fetterman and Shapiro outpolled Biden’s 2020 results in both races, particularly in the crucial suburbs around Philadelphia.
With party hack Bob Casey not up for reelection until 2024, the Democrats hold all the top positions in Pennsylvania for the first time in decades. Moreover, the U.S. House contingent will likely favor the Democrats, 9-8.
Fortunately, the Republicans will hold onto both houses of the state legislature. Unfortunately, the GOP doesn’t have enough votes to override vetoes.
The Pennsylvania results are worth dissecting because the state mirrors almost every aspect of the national electorate. Two major cities—Pittsburgh and Philadelphia—vote primarily Democrat, with a sprinkling of other outposts in the state. Almost every county, including mine, votes heavily Republican between the two coasts.
Alas, the votes in Pennsylvania flyover country weren’t enough to counter those in the cities.
Republicans have some significant issues ahead if they couldn’t break through in places where inflation, crime, and COVID chaos have dominated the conversation over the past few months.
Posted: November 8, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized
Yesterday Gateway Pundit linked to a story which perfectly illustrates the Dem game plan.
“[Republican candidates’] leads will dwindle, or crumble completely, after perceived “dumps” of votes are recorded by state election officials who count mail-in and absentee ballots in the days — or even weeks — following Election Day.” ABC News said.
Oh a Mirage? You mean the votes are really there?
“[The Red Mirage is] likely to occur in some of the same states where the phenomenon presented itself last cycle — in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — battleground states that also happen to feature some of the most hotly-contested races of the election season.” ABC News said.
This kind of fraud is as old as elections themselves. Fund out how many votes you need to create and then create them, even if it takes days or weeks.
Never mind that until the last 5 years we managed to get results on election night in just about every election we’ve had over the last 60 years. Suddenly magically it’s not possible to get the vote counts done on election day, but only in key swing states and districts that Democrats control
I have advice for GOP candidates who find themselves in this situation tonight.
Declare victory!
Don’t wait for the Dem machines, don’t wait for the media. Declare victory loudly and establish the narrative. Put THEM in the situation where they are overturning an election, make THEM prove that any “magic ballots” that suddenly appear are legit.
Put them on the spot and don’t worry about what the MSM says, they’re not going to treat you well anyways so get off your duff and make the call.
It is very hard to predict anything particularly the future and it’s even harder to predict the results of an election when you know the other side is going to be counting the ballots in key precincts without being watched but there is one prediction I can make with complete certainly.
I guarantee you that after the new GOP majority congress comes in. Whether that majority is large or small the MSM and the cable networks will suddenly decide that the opinions of the minority leaders of the house and senate will be will not only newsworthy and relevant but worth plenty of screen time and air time for their viewers, listeners and readers and said opinions will be advanced with the greatest possible reverence and spin.
Of course if the left manages to hold the senate then only the House’s minority leader will be relevant enough to air.
Late October arrived with what I thought would be a pleasant surprise, a new Netflix horror and suspense series, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Del Toro, known for the superb art direction in his films, is an Academy Award winner for directing The Shape of Water, that film contains a controversial scene which we’ll discuss shortly.
There are eight episodes, set either in the early 20th century or the latter part of the century. Oh, for balance, there’s one set around 1950. All but one of them are based on short stories, two of them by del Torro, and two by H.P. Lovecraft, a horror and fantasy writer, the bulk of his work was published in the 1920s and 1930s.
First the good. The acting is superb and not surprisingly, so is the art direction and cinematography. The bad–well, the stories aren’t very good, and in what is becoming common with Netflix, the episodes are too long, each one of Cabinet of Curiosities‘ segments could be trimmed by anywhere from ten to twenty minutes. The episodes run from 38 minutes to slightly more than an hour. And like many Netflix original series, funding doesn’t seem to be an issue. That was not the situation with the low-budget horror movies that I grew up with and enjoyed, such as Vincent Price’s American International Picture films. Netflix needs to focus on the basics of entertainment, not the frills.
Del Toro, just as Rod Serling did with The Twilight Zone, introduces each episode. The titular character of Alfred Hitchcock Presents performed the same duty, and there is a Game of Thrones-style cabinet animation device as the opening credits run. Del Toro doesn’t direct any of the episodes.
But Cabinet of Curiosities, rather than emulating The Twilight Zone, harkens back to Steven Spielberg’s mid-1980s NBC anthology series, Amazing Stories. It should have been called “Stories,” because that heavily hyped series was anything but “amazing.” The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents were rebooted around this time, both fell flat. As the saying goes, if Hollywood ever had an original idea, it would die of loneliness.
I’ll briefly sum up each Cabinet of Curiosities entry, in the order of their release. If you are running out of time with my post, or if you are running out of patience, I have this message. Just two of the eight episodes are worth viewing, “Pickman’s Model” and “The Murmuring.”
Lot 36: Nick Appleton (Tim Blake Nelson) is a bitter Vietnam veteran who is physically and emotionally damaged from that war. This entry is set just as the First Gulf War is breaking out. Appleton, who makes his living by buying abandoned storage units, is a racist who listens to conservative talk radio. The implied message of course is that everyone who listens to what liberals call “right-wing radio” is a bigot. But everyone I know who listens to conservative talkers do so because they are tired of government overreach and they don’t like high taxes, among other things. Appleton purchases a storage unit owned by a Nazi who recently died. Get it? American bigot, Nazi, white supremacy. I’m stupefied that the director of this bit didn’t dye Nelson’s hair bright orange here. “Lot 36” is based on a del Toro short story. I hated this segment.
Graveyard Rats: And this episode is based on what? Okay, the answer to that question is easy. Masson (David Hewlett) is a formerly well-to-do man who is now struggling along as a graverobber in a town known for the macabre, Salem, Massachusetts. There’s plenty of plot build-up here, as is the case with much of Cabinet of Curiosities, but little payoff.
The Autopsy: Minor spoiler alert: Just as with surgeries, autopsies are never solo projects. F. Murray Abraham, who never gives a bad performance, portrays a dying coroner, Dr. Carl Withers, who is investigating a mysterious accident at a Pennsylvania coal mine. Again, the set-up doesn’t match the ending of this episode. Watching the autopsies got me wondering. Why weren’t twenty minutes of this segment sliced off?
There is also an age-restricted YouTube video available here.
The Outside: Set in the late 1970s, as was “The Autopsy,” Stacey (Kate Micucci) is an unattractive and socially awkward bank teller surrounded by pretty but shallow female co-workers. Her hobby is taxidermy. Stacey’s life is altered as she becomes enamored with commercials touting a facial cream; the ads are subtle parodies of the faith healers who were often found on late night television at the time. Some of the facial cream comes to life. There is an erotic scene, an homage to Amphibian Man getting it on with a woman in The Shape of Water, in “The Outside.” I hated this episode too.
Pickman’s Model: Although this offering is extremely disturbing, “Pickman’s Model” worked for me. Will Thurber (Ben Barnes) is a wealthy art student at a Boston area college. All is well for him–until he sees the nightmarish paintings and sketches of Richard Pickman (Crispin Glover). A well-known lesson from the life of Vincent Van Gogh is that the boundaries between creativity and insanity are narrow. Oh, one little correction. Pickman tells Thurber that one of his ancestors was burned at the stake during the Salem Witch Trials. In fact, all of the executed accused witches in Salem were hanged, save one who refused to enter a plea. He was pressed to death.
Dreams in the Witch House: After his twin sister dies, a now-middle-aged Walter Gilman (Rupert Grint) is attempting to reconnect with her by way of spiritualists. There is a kissing scene with Gilman and a witch–she has been burnt to a crisp. Eww. There’s a lot of other weirdness here too. And while for the most part it is visually striking, “Dreams in the Witch House,” plot-wise, is vacant. As with “Pickman’s Model,” this segment is based on an H.P. Lovecraft story.
The Viewing: An eccentric wealthy man, Lionel Lassiter (Peter Weller), invites five seemingly unconnected celebrities to his mansion to view a mysterious object. To place them all on the same mental plane, they snort high-grade cocaine. And while there is a lot of action, it’s impossible to ascertain what it all adds up to. Nothing, is what I think. At nearly an hour in length, there is plenty of time for the scriptwriters to present their message. But they don’t. Perhaps the writers were on drugs when the produced the script. This piece was too boring for me to despise.
The Murmuring: Two married ornithologists, Nancy (Essie Davis) and Edgar Bradley (Andrew Lincoln), are devastated by a tragedy. They travel to a remote Canadian island to study the murmurations, that is, the cloud-like flocks of a wading bird species, the dunlin. But the crumbling old house they are staying in offers them plenty of distractions from their work. As a nature lover, I particularly enjoyed this entry–and I could easily see it fitting in as an episode of the original Twilight Zone. Not so with the other seven segments. “The Murmuring” is the other episode based on a del Toro short story.
Each entry is a stand-alone, you can watch one of them, two of them, or all of them. If you choose the last option–you’ve been warned.
Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities is rated TV-MA for violence, disturbing themes, nudity, drug use, vivisection, and gore.
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