Archive for the ‘elections’ Category

Andrew Yang

by baldilocks

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,

so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

— Matthew 6:1-4

But, then, there are other schools of thought on this matter.

New York entrepreneur and Democratic 2020 [POTUS] candidate Andrew Yang wants to implement a system in which a government-run mobile app rewards Americans with “digital social credits” (DSCs) for good behavior.

Americans would receive DSCs under Yang’s system for things such as “participating in a town fair,” “fixing a neighbor’s appliance” or “tutoring a student,” his presidential campaign website explains.

“As individuals rack up DSCs, they would have both a permanent balance they’ve earned over their lifetime and a current balance. They could cash the points in for experiences, purchases with participating vendors, support for causes, and transfer points to others for special occasions,” Yang states on his website.

“As their permanent balance gets higher, they might qualify for various perks like throwing a pitch at a local ballgame, an audience with their local Congressperson or meeting their state’s most civic-minded athlete or celebrity.”

What could go wrong?

Yang’s social credit plan bears some similarities to the social credit system implemented by China’s authoritarian government.

Every citizen in China is assigned a social credit score that determines whether they can buy plane or train tickets.

Unlike the Chinese system, Yang’s plan does not include using digital social credit for punitive measures.

Emphasis mine. Such an app probably wouldn’t have the ability to dish out the type of punishment that the Chinese government does. However, wouldn’t it be interesting for such an app to contain a shaming measure for “bad behavior” — eating at Chick-Fil-A or supporting a pro-life organization, for examples?

Bad behavior could earn the offender a shame-swarm on Twitter or, perhaps, a visit from that chapter of ANTIFA which last seen paying call at Tucker Carlson’s house.

Surely, such a feature bug would never be built into this app. Surely not. (Insert side-eye here.)

Leave it to a Democrat politician to creep us all out. And, unlike Representative-elect Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, this one appears to have more than a few IQ points. Even creepier.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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Trump is God and the Devil

Posted: December 3, 2016 by julietteochieng in elections

by baldilocks

This morning I posted two statuses on my Facebook page that received a lot of reaction. The one I want to discuss is this one.

There are two types which are the opposing sides of the same coin: “Trump-worshippers” and “Trump AntiChristers[i].” The first group is much more vocal than the last one (coined by me), but they have the same MO. One group says that you will go to Hell if you didn’t vote for Donald Trump; the other says that you will go to Hell if you did. And both groups can take scripture and twist it into something unrecognizable to prove their respective conclusions.

Prophets[ii], all–according to them–and for such people, there is no middle ground.

Both types are rooted in denial of the sovereignty of God, to put it mildly. They invert this admonition.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

–Proverbs 3:5-6

This type of thinking is the result of an erosion of our civic education and the resultant erosion of the separation of powers. Because the executive and judicial branches have become so powerful and the legislative branch so craven, we accept that power imbalance without thinking it over too much or at all.

Thus, we unconsciously inculcate the presidency with God-like authority—an authority which it was never meant to have. Many think that the abdication of legislative powers started when Barack Obama became President, but that’s very wrong.

The erosion of biblical education has run parallel to that of civics. Trump worshippers have called Donald Trump the New Nebuchadnezzar or the New Cyrus—both biblical foreign kings who held ancient Judah in captivity after the dissolution of the United Kingdom of Israel and the first sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple.

Is Trump foreign? Is he a monarch? Has America been razed and all Americans been carried off into a foreign land? Has Washington, DC been sacked? Does America have a singular Temple/Church building? You get the point.

As for Trump AntiChristers, they say, because of his political flip-floppery and his moral flaws, that anyone who votes for him is damned by God—not just the worshippers. Anyone.

I recall one criteria for human beings to be eternally saved and two commandments from my Lord and Savior; none of them have anything to do with voting. And I don’t even believe that Christians who voted for Clinton will be damned. Corrected by listening to God, but not damned.

Do these people not recall what the Accuser of the Brethren is up to at this very minute?

So, it is that many are driven emotionally—driven by fear of things other than God–when presidential elections come around. They view their candidate as the savior from the last ruler, the like-minded as fellow believers, the opposing candidate(s) as the Devil, and skeptics/political opponents as unbelievers/heretics. Corresponding reactions follow.

It’s always about God. When He’s missing in the soul of anyone, that person will allow something or someone else to fill the void and they will call it “God.” And that goes also for many who say they are Christians.

RELATED: Trust the Lord with most your heart, and lean on your own understanding(For the satire-challenged, this lady is making one side of my same point–though our actions during the election were probably different. Our point: don’t act on fear of anyone other than God.)

[i] Trump “AntiChristers”: those who believe that anyone who voted for Donald Trump is a Trump worshipper, i.e. that they put Trump over God’s Word.

[ii] Moses was the only prophet who beat God’s people over the head—literally—with the Word of God. As a result, he broke it and some heads along with it.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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Mr. Grenville: There is a small matter of you misinforming her in regard to your intellectual aptitude it might better for Miss Romana (I) to be appraised as to the extent of your family’s property before she learned of the deception.

Reginald Basset: Of course she might not mind being manacled to a chap who was mentally negligible once she’s seen the size of his country estate!

Mr. Grenville: I have observed that this is often to be the case with young ladies sir.

Doctor Who the Auntie Matter 2012

I woke up Saturday morning to the breathless headline that Ladd Ehlinger’s predictions concerning opposition research concerning Donald Trump had come true as per this headline:  Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005.

I suspect the specific phrase that has made folks like Paul Ryan cut and run is this as quoted by Allahpundit:

“And when you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s.

“Grab them by the p—y,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

Stacy McCain has declared this game over

This election is over. Write “–30–” at the bottom and file it.

and Allahpundit says this:

If Clinton can’t win the election after this, she was never going to win the election, period.

And in any standard election year with any standard pol as the standard bearer of a party this would be true.

However there are two basic reasons why this isn’t necessarily true

  1. this is not a normal election year and Trump is not a normal candidate.
  2. His Opponent is Hillary Clinton.

Now I concede this is bad, not only in terms of what was said but what it implies.  I strongly disapprove of it as I suspect many others like me do.

And that’s why I’ve chosen this moment, Catholic Blogger that I am, to double down and re-endorse Donald Trump for President of the United States!

Why would I do this?  Quite simple, I’m not going to let myself be played.  Let me explain.

To those who have endorsed Donald Trump, the idea that he is both boastful and vulgar has been a given, it has been factored into the equation concerning him.  Furthermore his public persona has been out there for decades and he has never pretended to be anything other than what he is.  I further suspect the voting public has already factored this into their image of Trump and it is unlikely that this revelation is going to move those who haven’t made up their minds one way or the other despite the shocked faces at CNN.

Furthermore the base reasons why many of us decided to endorse Trump have not changed:

…I know that there will be times that Donald Trump will disappointment me just as I expected Mitt Romney to disappoint me on social issues and John McCain to disappoint me on immigration and George W Bush who disappointed me on spending and the bank bailouts.

But while Trump will occasionally disappoint me (when he does I’ll call him on it) I am convinced he will neither persecute me nor strip me of my rights for holding my Conservative Catholic beliefs and acting on them.

I am very sorry to say I can not make that same statement about Hillary Clinton, and I’m even sorrier to see the day when I would say this about a presidential candidate.

Nothing on that tape changes these truths.  Clinton is going to persecute me, Trump is not.

Furthermore in terms of electability there is one thing that still favors Donald Trump,  Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton is the worst candidate for any office that I have seen since Martha Coakley.  There is nothing at all likable about her.  She is disliked and distrusted by the public by huge numbers, including many of those who will eventually vote for her.

Moreover the factor that I mentioned in my Trump endorsement still remains the same

I think that the sight of women and gay men being beaten by leftists because they support the presumptive GOP nominee, having it happen in full sight of police ordered to do nothing AND SEEING THOSE OFFICERS CHOOSING TO LET THEM BE BEATEN means that they can not count on the authorities to obey their oaths of office if they think doing so might cost them their jobs.

Even worse than this is the obvious question it raises: If leftists are willing to resort to violence and boast about it before an election when it might hurt their ability to persuade the people to vote for them, how much more willing will they be to violently suppress their political foes when such behavior is rewarded with electoral victory by the people?

What will that tell a populace that has already been arming itself nonstop for the last 4-6 years?

And that not even counting the basic corruption, the wholesale theft, the selling of the office of the president of the united states and the enabling of both islamic terror and our enemies in Russia, Iran, North Korea and China that will take place and the subsequent nuclear arms race that will follow.

There is also the whole business of Trump’s words vs the Clinton’s actions, my post from August really applies well here: (new emphasis here)

Our friends in the press and in culture say we should judge Donald Trump unacceptable by his words. They don’t like what he’s said about the border, about Rosie O’Donnell, about Kahn, about Islamic Terror etc etc etc. By these words in their eyes Donald Trump is unacceptable as president of the united states

These same people however do not want us to Judge Hillary Clinton / Barack Obama by their deeds. From paying ransoms that finance terror to Iran for hostages (It’s not really ransom), for exposing classified data to the russians and lying directly about it repeatedly, Hillary Clinton actually left people to die in Benghazi, actually blamed a video for it, actually imprisoned the person who made said video.

Clinton’s actual policies turned victory in Iraq into defeat, Syria into a mess, created ISIS, destabilized Libya, enabled Russia in the Ukraine and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

And that’s not even going into using the Clinton foundation for payola or protecting Bill Clinton from the consequences of his actions when it comes to sexually abusing women.

That also gives a clue as to how Trump should deal with this business, but that for a follow up post.

Those two factors along American’s uncertainty in the Obama economy  mean that this tape notwithstanding this race isn’t over and anyone who thinks it is hasn’t been paying attention for the last year.

Closing thoughts:

  1. The irony of course is the truth of Trump’s statement. There is nothing that increases a person of the opposite sex’s tolerance for bad behavior, mediocre looks, advanced age or disgusting habits as wealth power and fame.  It’s the equivalent of beer goggles and has culturally acknowledged as a factor in woman’s selection of a mate since time immemorial.
  2. This release isn’t about convincing the general public that Trump is unacceptable.  If this was the American Culture that I grew up in then Stacy McCain would be absolutely correct, however it not.  Thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the left and the media we no longer have the culture that I grew up with that would have rejected Trump en masse over these remarks.  We have a coarser, more vulgar culture where right and wrong are flexible things and standards are not what they are.  One might even say that the left has enabled the conditions that will allow Trump to get past this with minor if any damage to his prospects.

No this is about convincing those who still have to values to allow the election of someone who not only is directly opposed to all you hold dear but will persecute you on every level.  This is about tricking you into letting go of your one chance to stop your own destruction.  They want you to lose your nerve. Furthermore they want the GOP to lose their nerve and the press will do all they can do enable it.

In other words they are counting on you to be suckers.

I’m still voting Trump and I’m still encouraging you to keep your nerve and do the same.

Update:  It’s clear that many in the GOP are cutting and running in public and urging Trump to pull out of the race, that is sheer idiocy is self evident for three reasons.

  1. No matter how much you dislike what Trump said on that tape, he won the primaries.  He was legally and legitimately chosen as the nominee of the GOP.  Unless he drops dead or has a stroke or something it would be an illegitimate act to replace him on the ticket, particularly with someone, however qualified, who did not draw a single vote in the primaries.
  2. No matter how much you dislike the Trump voters, if you are a GOP incumbent or candidate in any state or country but the most red, you will need their votes to win an election.  Going after Trump is not going to win you any liberal leaning voters and is going to cost you conservative ones, you would be much better off saying something like this

    “I am happy to accept Donald Trump’s apology to America’s women for his intemperate private remarks on that tape and in that same spirit I invite [insert opponent’s name here] to demand that Secretary Clinton apolgize to American people, to america’s women to the woman abused by her Husband and defamed by the Clintons and their surrogates for political gain.”

  3. Finally do you really think the Democrats are going to allow Trump to be replaced on the ballot at this stage?  There will be lawsuits in 50 states challenging any attempt to pull him and the Bob Torricelli precedent notwithstanding you aren’t going to see a judiciary upholding such a move.

Update 3:  For the 2nd time since deciding to support Trump after he clinched the GOP nomination a person I know and respect has asked to be pulled from my email list because of a post.  That’s their right of course and I’ll respect it but I suggest rejecting my opinion is not going to make reality any better for conservatives, particularly under a Clinton administration.

Update 4: I respect Jonah Goldberg whose point is valid:

Either way, this video is not an aberration. It is not a special circumstance. It’s him. There’s no pivot in him. There’s no “presidential” switch to flip. He’s Donald Trump all the way down.

However given the reality that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States I ask Jonah this question:

If we concede that Donald Trump’s character is bad, Would it be better for the country to have a President of poor character who will be under intense scrutiny by the press, pols and law enforcement agencies (Trump) or to have a President of poor character who will be given a pass and or defended by the press, the pols and apparently the FBI regardless of what they say or do (Hillary).

I submit and suggest the answer is clearly the former.

Update 5: instalanche thanks Glenn. If you like this piece check out my interviews with attendees of a Trump rally in Bedford NH here, but I have to disagree with the word use of “Happy” it’s more like necessary.

Right now a lot of people are forgetting that for good or I’ll the only thing standing between us and the financial, military, security, cultural and constitutional rights disaster that a Hillary Clinton administration would be is Donald Trump.

People are in panic and when the line is breaking someone has to pick up the flag and shout “FORWARD”. And if it costs some me some readers then so be it.

Update 6: Hey look at all those democrats in that video lining up behind Bill Clinton to support him after impeachment on 12/19/1998. I wonder how many of them are now saying Trump is unfit for the presidency due to his words?

Update 7: How to Handle the tape at the Debate Tomorrow? Roy Bean the Clintons and Alinsky their surrogates
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the latest in our series of posts noting the bright side of Donald Trump’s nomination for president for unhappy conservatives.

Today’s piece comes from the Morning Joe via the Washington Free Beacon:

MSNBC’s Morning Joe panel had a lengthy discussion Monday about the “uncomfortable” facts of Bill Clinton’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the known pedophile billionaire whose jet Clinton flew on dozens of times.

Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump has been unafraid to level attacks against the Clintons for the former president’s past of sexual misconduct, calling him fair game. Fox News reported last week that Clinton flew on Epstein’s jet, the crudely named “Lolita Express,” far more than previously known in the last decade.

Panelist Donny Deutsch guessed that Trump would have no problem counter-punching with the Epstein connection whenever he was hit for his own behavior with women, as he was last weekend in a piece in the New York Times.

“Here’s the tennis game,” Deutsch said. “Donald Trump kissed a woman in a bathing suit. Trump hits back: Tell me about the president’s relationship with a guy named Jeffrey Epstein. That’s your tennis match.”

Now this story isn’t all that new, in fact I wrote about it two years ago and my own post was derivative of Stacy McCain’s that preceded it.

and you also might wonder why this piece goes under the “Always Look on the Bright Side of Trump” category, well take a look at the video

and two things become immediately clear.

Everybody at the Table knows who Jeffery Epstein is, and what the story is

Nobody at the table wanted to talk about it

Joe Scarborough notes he has been hearing about this for a year and a half but the fact that the viewers of MSNBC are just hearing about it now goes to something I wrote about this story in April 2014

If there is one thing the media that loves to play the War on Women® card doesn’t want to touch it’s a story about people using their own private island to get laid that involves Bill Clinton.

What could the media do if this story involving the former father of the year? They would call it old news, not relevant, dirty tricks from a salacious lawsuit that doesn’t even involve him and an attack on Hillary that crosses the line. In fact the left will deploy a plethora of adjectives to discourage further discussion of this story from antiquated to zany, but there is one adjective that could not come out of their mouth to dismiss this story:

Unbelievable

The last few years have proven that the left can convince a low information voter of a lot of things, but even the full power of the mainstream media and the strongest zealots from the War on Women® brigade would not be able to convince the American public that Bill Clinton would have no interest or business on a private island where orgies took place.

That’s why you didn’t see this story in the news last month and why as the case moves forward you’ll not see it covered period.

It’s very clear that the MSM has been sitting on this stuff for almost two years and had no intention of ever talking about it, and it even clearer that if the GOP voters had elected any other nominee MSNBC’s Morning Joe would have happily kept their viewers in ignorance.

But Donald Trump nomination throws those rules out the windows.  He’s willing to do what Stacy McCain & I Couldn’t do and what Mitt Romney and John  McCain wouldn’t do, force a story like this onto the national stage.

Mind you Trump hasn’t even bothered to say a word about Epstein yet and the table does its best to spin this in a different direction, but the very fact that Trump is who is forced MSNBC to deal with the story even if most of dealing with it was talking about Trump’s willingness to go there.

Take a look at the set of dejected faces on that video, remember those faces are being broadcast on MSNBC to liberal viewers who would never do a web search of the words “Jeffery Epstein + Bill Clinton”

Donald Trump did that and if you’re a conservative it’s a joy to behold.

Closing thought: They mentioned the word “enabler” used in the context of Hillary, would it not that word be better applied to the press who has known about these stories but have kept silent to protect their hero?