Archive for the ‘elections’ Category

2025: The Hal Chase Election

Posted: November 5, 2025 by datechguy in baseball, elections, elections, politics
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“First we must cross the river,” Benito was saying.  “Do you believe me now when I tell you that you must not attempt to swim it, or even get wet from it, or must you try that too?”

“What happens if I just dive in?”

“Then you will be as you were in the bottle.  Aware and unable to move.  but it will be very cold, and very uncomfortable, and you will be there for all eternity knowing that you put yourself there.”

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle Inferno 1976

Looking at the results of last nights elections in VA & NJ and particularly NYC two truths are apparent.

The first was expressed at Instapundit last night from Stacy Campfield a former state rep from Tennessee:

“Republicans can’t be surprised that they aren’t winning races in places that they are also leaving in droves.”

Before I list the 2nd and more important quote you need some background:

The quote comes from the SABR site, a baseball analytics group which reprinted a piece about first baseman Hal Chase by Jacob Pomrenke about Hal Chase, a first baseman who played from 1905 to 1919.

Chase was universally considered the best defensive first baseman anyone to that time had ever seen. Both Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson named him the best first baseman of all time.

But Chase was also known from the very start of his career as a man who fixed games. For years in every city where he played allegations had been out there that he threw games or arranged them to be thrown. Allegations that he loudly denied. Then in 1916 he joined the Cincinnati Reds managed by Christy Matterson the great pitcher considered one of the gentleman of baseball. A man so honest that umpires would consult him on close calls. Matterson suspended Chase for trying to bribe players to fix games, as Pomrenke noted:

The suspension by Mathewson was the first time any baseball official had seriously punished Chase for his transgressions. As usual, it didn’t stick. NL president John Heydler reluctantly exonerated Chase after Mathewson joined the military and could not testify against Chase while serving overseas.

Chase would go on to have a part in the fixing of the 1919 World Series. When He heard about this Mathewson said the quote I find relevant to this election:

 “Damn them, [baseball officials] deserve it. They whitewashed two players after I caught them with the goods.” 

The swearing was VERY out of character for Christy Mathewson but he was pissed.

And that brings us to the night after the 2025 elections in California, Virginia, New Jersey and New York:

In California I didn’t expect better after all this is the man the state keeps backing:

In New Jersey the Democrat running for Governor was involved in a scandal concerning her time at the Navel Academy. It didn’t matter, the state that Trump lost by only 5 points elected her by 13 points.

In Virginia not only did Abagail (duck and run) Springer win by double digits but the man made famous for wanting GOP kids dead won by over six points.

But the real thing is New York City:

You have a open socialist, an open communist, an open antisemite. A person whose opinion on all these things have been well documents and are even available in his own words online for years. A rich kid who never did or ran anything in his life and he not only won the election in NYC but he took over 50% of the vote in a three way race.

What’s the bottom line? Just this: In all of these elections particularly in NYC people in their respective states KNEW who and what these people were and what they supported and STILL not only voted for them, but voted for them overwhelmingly winning margins, with apologies to Sarah Hoyt, well beyond the margin of fraud.

Now it’s very possible that this might hurt the Democrats nationally in states where people have not gone insane as Scott Jennings notes:

I think we’re at the point where we have to stop pretending that Democrat voters don’t understand what Communism is, or antisemitism is or violence is or corruption is. I think we have to stop pretending that they are being decieved.

This is what the Democrat/left is. This is what they believe in and what they support this is the government that they want and by golly they’re going to get the government they deserve.

The only question left in my mind is will they be surprised when they get it?

How Bad Was Kamala? The Left Preferred Playing Weekend at Joey’s for a year to Her in the White House leading the party

Posted: May 16, 2025 by datechguy in election 2024, politics
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There are two critical stories concerning the fitness of Joe Biden for the presidency that are both critical and being almost completely ignored.

The first is a question that some people like Dwayne Patterson are asking: Who was in charge during the Biden years?

I don’t frankly care if the Beltway media takes me seriously or not. I know what I know. I saw what I saw daily in Biden media appearances, seldom though they were. I heard what I heard. And I can safely say that after 30 years in this business, I have never experienced Beltway media as in the tank as they were. The Trump effect can be seen in trillions so far in foreign investments coming into the United States. The Trump effect also has caused a lot of reporters to throw objectivity out the window because they view Trump as an existential threat. 

My humble, but sincere advice for my friends in media, and I do have dozens of them that are friends, is it’s hard to take them seriously when they won’t admit their failings in coverage of the Biden regency. If you want to regain trust, go where the story goes, not where you want the story to go. And I’m telling you, the story is who was running the country the last four years, and why there was no accountability in government. Why did the 25th Amendment fail as a failsafe apparatus against an obviously incapacitated president? 

I suspect the answer is the government was for sale to the highest bidder and both the Biden family and members of the administration were able to run the Federal Government like Chicago, alternatively or concurrently people with agenda were able to advance them without all that pesky “explaining to voters” stuff.

However for my money while that first question is a critical one it’s the second question that I find most fascinating.

Why didn’t they just use to the 25th amendment at put Kamala Harris in the White House?

Any time after Jan 2023 she would have been eligible for two terms and if she became the first woman president the media would have had a collective organism. All the protection that was given to Biden would have been transferred to her and she would have had time to actually be ready to face Donald Trump, and would have had the power of incumbency and much more time to develop an actual team to run a campaign.

Yet they did not do this.

Why?

There are several possible things. Perhaps they were worried that Harris would want to actually be in charge, perhaps the Biden family threatened to talk about things, perhaps the people who were buying government wanted a freer hand to act, but all of these explanation don’t seem to fly as the media & party apparatus that was willing to prosecute Trump crossing multiple lines were unlikely not to be able to manipulate around such problems.

I think there is a more likely reason, one that nobody wants to admit that while I was writing this piece Ed Morrissey brought up ahead of me:

However, that wouldn’t be the real reason for that reluctance. The real reason is that Kamala Harris is every bit as incompetent as Joe Biden, only for reasons having nothing to do with dementia. [emphasis mine DTG] Harris could not be trusted with the presidency, as voters discovered in 2019 and again in 2024, when in both cycles she couldn’t even be trusted to handle the media, let alone the world. 

If the United States had had a competent Vice President, the Cabinet might have acted to replace a president whose aides and families had isolated for reasons of incompetence. Their lack of action in that crisis is unforgivably cowardly, but also a massive declaration of no confidence in Kamala Harris. And then they stood by while Harris attempted to win office anyway rather than publicly demand an open and democratic process to replace the party’s nominee, compounding their cowardice.

Or to put it simply if the final year of the Biden presidency was the first year of the Harris presidency the prospects for Democrats running for re-election and/or retaining power would be so bad that the actual results of 2024 would have been considered a best case scenario.

Much better to keep the lie up and hope that they could pass Biden off as functional, Democrat donors and media could be counted on playing along because the person who spilled the beans would be blamed for a Trump victory and NOBODY in the media/left would want to be the person responsible for Trump returning to the White House. And if the worst case scenario happened (as indeed it did) Harris could not only be considered separate Joe Biden’s failures but in a short campaign her incompetence could be hidden from the general public and panicked donors desperate to stop Trump would be so relieved that they would open up their wallets which indeed they did.

That is plausible and the most likely conclusion to me but think about that for a second.

If I’m right Kamala Harris is so incompetent that the Democrats and the media thought playing Weekend at Joeys with Biden was a safer option than having her in office running the show.

Simply amazing.

In Cook County, Illinois, the most consequential election in 2016 was not the presidential race

Posted: December 15, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, election 2024, elections, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

We are told, correctly, that it’s the local elections, not the glamorous races such as presidential contests, that effect voters the most.

That was so true in 2016 in Cook County, Illinois.

While Hillary Clinton comfortably won Illinois and Cook County–where I live– over Donald Trump, it was the state’s attorney race in Cook that had the biggest impact on the 5 million residents in Illinois’ largest county.

George Soros-funded Democratic candidate, Kim Foxx, resoundingly defeated her Republican opponent, Christopher E.K. Pfannkuche. Four years later it was much closer for Foxx, she gathered only 54 percent of the vote in heavily Democratic Cook County, over Republican Pat O’Brien and a Libertarian candidate.

Fortunately, unless you are a criminal, Foxx chose not to run for reelection this year.

Immediately after her swearing-in, Foxx raised the limit for felony theft from the state-mandated $300 to $1,000.00. Shoplifting prosecutions in Cook County dropped dramatically, as did narcotics prosecutions.

Murders soared in the last eight years.

While Foxx is best known for the Jussie Smollett debacle, other actions as state’s attorney will have a lasting, and acidic legacy.

If you want numbers, you’ll find some here, courtesy of the fantastic Illinois Policy Institute. But except for murders, they tell an incomplete story.

For instance, for much of Foxx’s misrule, my daughter, Little Marathon Pundit. worked at a nationally known department store in an affluent suburb. On average, once a day, a shoplifter ran out the door–some calmy walked out–with stolen merchandise. Not only were employees at this store told not to prevent the criminal from leaving, store managers never called the police. Not once. Why call the cops? Even if the perp is caught, Foxx’ office, unless the theft was a massive haul, wouldn’t prosecute it as a felony. Or he may not even bother prosecuting at all.

So those were unrecorded crimes. So crime numbers, outside of course of murders, can’t be trusted at all.

As I wrote on X last month, “the liberal media keeps telling us that crime is down. Six months ago when I last visited this Rosemont IL big box store the cosmetics section wasn’t roped off. Stop gaslighting us, ‘journalists.'”

https://twitter.com/Marathonpundit/status/1863256305886023844

Eileen O’Neill Burke, a Democrat, is the new state’s attorney in Cook County. She is already prosecuting accused thieves at the state-mandated $300 level for felony theft.

EOB is not perfect. She supports Governor JB Prtizker’s no-cash-bail SAFE-T Act.

But O’Neill Burke vows to call for more detainments of accused criminals who are charged with violent crimes.

Elections matter.

Including down-ballot races. Sometimes especially down-ballot races.

Sadly, the results of the last eight years of rampant criminality will wreak havoc for a very long time.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Trump will be a great 70% President and That’s OK

Posted: November 29, 2024 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, elections, politics, Uncategorized
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Jon Sable: I get twenty five percent of anything I recover

Sherman: That’s kind of steep isn’t it?

Jon Sable: Depends on how you look at it. I figure 75% of something is better than 100% of nothing

Jon Sable Freelance Issue 8 1984

I was talking to a friend yesterday about the election. This is the guy I mentioned before who had previously been NeverTrump but decided that he HAD to vote for him to punish the left for what the Department of Justice had done to him. There had to be consequences for such horrible behavior.

While he teased me about Matt Gaetz (who he thought was unqualified) and Pam Bondi ( who we both agreed was incredibly qualified) we found ourselves worried about one thing.

Conservatives in general and MAGA people in particularly have been rightly celebrating and some of the meltdowns we’ve seen have been really amusing, but when it comes down to it we have to acknowledge something that a few folks don’t want to hear:

While Donald Trump won 100% of the presidency the reason why he did is because the left was chasing voters away who weren’t 100% pure and Donald Trump welcomed them into the fold.

A lot of those people who joined with us will be expecting to get a portion of the spoils of victory which means there are going to be some people appointed to positions that I wouldn’t choose and some decisions made that I wouldn’t make but we’re likely going to get 70% of what we want. and that’s OK.

Or to put it another way. Would you complain if your Baseball, Football, Basketball or Hockey franchise managed a .700 winning percentage? You’d be tickled pink.

Now maybe over time we will convince them of the advantages of conservatism in both culture and economics and it may in fact be that we will be pleasantly surprised at the effectiveness of some of their ideas toward the common good.

If we want to raise an objection here and there, that’s fine we should make the best case we can for what we believe, but in the end we’re not going to get a lot done if after winning a historic election we take the people who helped us to that victory and chase them back to where they were and remember in four years we won’t have Trump as a unifying force so we damn well better keep them as friends because we won’t want them as enemies in 2028.

Let’s leave the purity tests to the left, after all I already have a religion.

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