Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Why the Seattle City Counsel Election Result is bigger than the Virginia Statewide Results

Posted: November 10, 2019 by datechguy in elections, politics
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There has been a lot of fuss about the election in Virginia which gave the Democrats all three houses in the state and to be sure, they are significant but for my money the bigger story if the city council election in Seattle.

Virginia is propped up by national politics and by Democrats winning despite scandals involving both the Democrat Governor (Blackface business) and Lt. Gov (Sexual Assault). We are already seeing memes of Virginia becoming California west.

But this is still early and if the Democrats majority is not huge. All it will take is a little overreach and there is every possibility that voters, even anti-Trump one will look at these results in four years and decide the left is a bridge too far.

Seattle is VERY different.

We have already seen story after story of Seattle surrendering it’s streets to the mob, of it’s business’ closing or fleeing because of the environment for them and people not being safe in their own city.

Well they had a city counsel election recently, an election where quite a few folks had been crying “enough” and guess what happened?

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant has nearly completed a stunning turnaround in her quest for a third term Friday evening, recovering from a deficit of more than 8 percentage points and taking a 1,515-vote lead over her opponent, Egan Orion — putting her up by 3.6 percentage points. 
At that margin, Sawant will almost certainly retain her seat.
After a disappointing result in the initial ballot drop on election night, Seattle’s most famous socialist has cleaned up in the votes tallied in subsequent days, winning around 60% of ballots that were either postmarked or left in drop boxes on election day.
Washington’s vote-by-mail system means some last-minute ballots take several days to count. With the late trend strongly favoring Sawant — part of a pattern in Seattle of late-counted ballots tilting left — and relatively few ballots remaining, her reelection is a near lock.
With Sawant’s apparent comeback win, an election that was cast by many as a referendum on the leftward lean of Seattle politics has almost completely backfired on the business groups and mainstream Democrats who spent millions in their effort to rein in the city’s progressives.

Now I have some shall we say doubts about the mail in systems and their integrity but even given that consider the following.

The decline of Seattle has not been a secret. It’s been a national story and actually reached the point where not just business but even local media had taken sides against the left:

The left loves to make Amazon the face of any opposition but it wasn’t just Amazon and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce pushing for a more moderate City Council. As I pointed out this week, the Seattle Times editorial board was campaigning to oust the far left members as well, including Sawant.

Yet despite all of this Seattle has decided to stay the course.

This tells me that liberalism is such a religion for the People of Seattle that not even the realities of life under liberalism and it’s costs can counter their loyalty to it. They have achieved a San Francisco level of wokeness and will likely have to go far beyond that level of danger and insanity to get out of it. I instantly thought of Bill James description of Hal Chase after managed to get MLB to take his side on allegations of him throwing games.

“He was free, then. It had all be brought out into the open, and he had gotten by with it. This seems to have had a liberating effect on Chase’s activities”

What this means for Seattle in general and Kshama Sawant in particular is that they can rightly claim a licence by the voters most affected by their policies to go farther left. Seattle has gotten the government they deserve and the left is going to give it to them good and hard. If that doesn’t scare the hell out of every normal still living in the city it ought to.

If You’ve Ever Wondered Why I Never Got a Job in What Some Call “Actual Media”

Posted: November 6, 2019 by datechguy in dablog, elections, media, News/opinion, politics
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…It’s likely because I was willing to write about Jeffrey Epstein while stuff like this was going on.

Amy Robach, ‘Good Morning America’ Co-Host and Breaking News Anchor at ABC, explains how a witness came forward years ago with information pertaining to Epstein, but Disney-owned ABC News refused to air the material for years. Robach vents her anger in a “hot mic” moment with an off-camera producer, explaining that ABC quashed the story in it’s early stages.  “I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts (Now Virginia Guiffre) [alleged Epstein victim]. We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told “Who’s Jeffrey Epstein.  No one knows who that is.  This is a stupid story.”
She continues, “The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”
Robach goes on to express she believes that Epstein was killed in prison saying, “So do I think he was killed? 100% Yes, I do…He made his whole living blackmailing people… Yup, there were a lot of men in those planes. A lot of men who visited that Island, a lot of powerful men who came into that apartment.”
Robach repeats a prophetic statement purportedly made by Attorney Brad Edwards “…[T]here will come a day when we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known,” and Disgustedly Robach states “I had it all three years ago.”

That’s via James O’Keefe and Project Veritas who had hot mic info that was so explosive that he actually activated a “dead man’s switch” to make sure that this came out in the event of his death.

It was so big that for once the MSM didn’t ignore what he was saying. ABC responded thus:

ABC News executives say their journalists were simply not able to corroborate the details of the reporting sufficiently for broadcast.
“We would never run away from that,” Chris Vlasto, head of investigations for ABC News, tells NPR. The network has filed approximately two dozen digital and broadcast stories on Epstein since early 2015, when ABC started talking to the accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre

For the sake of the few who might actually buy that argument let me remind you of something I wrote in 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.

And a piece I wrote during the 2016 campaign:

as I was watching Jake Tapper on Monday discussing this and the security implication of blackmail for the husband of a top aide of Hillary Clinton my head started spinning.
We are seriously talking about the security implication of Anthony Weiner due to his sexual peccadilloes when we are talking about letting Bill freaking Clinton back into the White House?
I know the MSM is still trying to pretend that this is no big deal but I have two words to say to such people:
Jeffrey Epstein

Along with some video from MSNBC at the time with this key exchange

Video that MSNBC suppressed once the Free Beacon linked to it

Maybe it’s just me but given how often we see stuff at mediaite et al it seems rather unusual for a news network to make a copyright claim over a clip from a news story that used as “fair use” by another news organization. Could this suggest that NBC wants to keep this clip out of the public view because it might hurt Hillary?


I can see the NBC reaction now: Nonsense, we’re not censoring the clip at all. The seven minute clip IS available IF you

  1. Go to the Morning Joe site
  2. Hit search taking you to the MSNBC search engine
  3. Search for Donald Trump
  4. Narrow the field to Morning Joe
  5. Narrow the field to May 16th 2016 and sit through all the videos till you find the right one.
  6. And skip ahead to the 12 minute mark on that video.

If you do so you CAN find the clip

Incidentally the clip does not work from the MSNBC site anymore as but the Free Beason has since found another Youtube account with it that is no longer suppressed as the election is long over and the Epstein Story is now public knowledge.

Apparently they aren’t so worried about their copyright after all.

So when ABC tells you they didn’t have the story, look at the faces around that Morning Joe table who all knew what was being said and then try to make that case.

I suspect writing about this type of thing when everyone wanted it suppressed might have something to do with me not making it bigger in the business but then again if I was bigger and writing about it perhaps it might have lead to a sudden heart attack.

Net Rules, Hill Photo Blues, Beto bye Bye, Kamala Conventional Wisdom & McDonald’s Unconventional One, Under the Fedora

Posted: November 5, 2019 by datechguy in business, elections, oddities, politics, primaries, under the fedora
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There is only one thing that amazes me about the Katie Hill story. It’s the idea that she really believed that she could have nudes on the net and that nobody would notice.

Now I grant you, if she just thought nobody would care, she might have gotten away with it, but the concept that it would stay quiet is just silly.

Never forget that the internet is forever and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool.

It’s been really funny watching the media try to spin Rep Hill’s resignation as a GOP hit job as if the party made her pose for those pictures and put them on the net. They forget that while folks in the bubble still might buy it, the actual story and the pictures are only a click away and that the sole narrative is no longer theirs.

I would have thought Matt Drudge would have taught them that decades ago but they’ve never gotten over it.

There are a lot of people who are laughing about Beto departure from the Presidential race, I’m not.

First of all Beto was extremely useful in that he said aloud the thing we all know and the left didn’t want said. With him out the left/media will do their best to pretend that others do not think like he does and such questions will not be in the debate. With him in the race that wasn’t possible.

But most important of all in the end every single democrat running for the nomination is going to lose except for one, so until it’s down to 3 or 4 candidate, the individual failures don’t mean a thing. So I don’t get excited about it, with one exception…

…that exception is Kamila Harris. Watching her fail has been an absolute pleasure, not just because she is a huge phony who slept her way to the top, but because she is the perfect illustration of the truth about conventional wisdom.

For a very long time everyone who “mattered” told us that Kamila Harris was the future and a lock for the nomination. the day she was elected it was considered Presidential prep. Her folding like a cheap suit demonstrates that conventional wisdom is always correct…right up until the moment that it’s not.

Finally speaking of the conventional wisdom, I began this piece at a McDonalds speaking with some elderly gentlemen when the manager going home came by to say hi. I struck up a conversation with him and discoveered two things I didn’t know.

  1. A slice of cheese costs them .32 when you factor in all the assorted costs.
  2. The Kiosks have led to him INCREASING rather than decreasing his staff.

That 1st fact wasn’t a big surprise but the 2nd really threw me off, I asked the manager why?

He said 1st of all we needed someone to service the tables because the Kisoks require delivery to the table and second of all the Kiosks, along with the various delivery services, increased business and orders to the point where they needed those extra folks for the cooking etc.

Now I don’t know if this is peculiar to the local McDonalds or not but I think it would be worth finding out, but assuming the manager is not blowing smoke I’d say it’s worth finding out on a larger scale.

Joe Walsh absolutely should not be taken seriously as a presidential candidate

Posted: November 3, 2019 by John Ruberry in Always look at the bright side of Trump, economy, elections, elections, politics, primaries
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By John Ruberry

While Da Tech Guy was technical hiatus, former Illinois Republican congressman Joe Walsh announced his presidential run, which is why I’m only now weighing in.

I’ve had mixed feelings over the years on Walsh, who was part of the GOP Tea Party wave in 2010 but was essentially gerrymandered out of office by Illinois Democratic Party boss Michael Madigan. His triumph, without any Illinois Republican Party financial support over Democratic incumbent Melissa Bean was a shocker, many people viewed his chances of winning as dismal because of a then-ongoing child support dispute with his ex-wife and a lawsuit, since settled, from his onetime campaign manager over fees he said were owed to him.

The only positive thing I heard during that 2010 race about Walsh was from my wife. She was thoroughly impressed by a speech he gave at a Tea Party event where I live, Morton Grove, Illinois. She predicted, “He’s going to win.”

Always listen to your spouse.

During his single term in Congress, for the most part I supported Walsh. I met him at a different Tea Party event and I was impressed that he was familiar with my blog, Marathon Pundit, and what I wrote about him. Still, I always thought he was a bit nutty. But that goes for many politicians of course.

Walsh seemingly found his place in 2013 after when Chicago conservative talk radio station WIND-AM hired him for its coveted afternoon drive-time slot. Early on his show was enjoyable and informative–regularly trashing President Obama on just about everything, including the economy. Salem Radio Network picked up his show for national distribution in 2017, while he was a third-tier talker, his future was still bright.

Then something snapped within Joe. If you are familiar with the 1970s movie, Network, like the mentally unbalanced TV anchorman Howard Beale, Walsh changed. Beale went from decrying big government and big business every night to preaching that the latter wasn’t really bad after all. Then Beale’s ratings dropped. As for Walsh, who was never completely on the Trump Train, earlier this year he began to sprinkle his program with bits of criticism of Trump–which quickly became a flood. I tuned out and so did many of my friends. How many others bailed? I dunno. WIND-AM stopped subscribing to Nielsen in 2016. I listen to other radio shows besides right-wing talkers, it’s a good idea to see what the other side is up to. But like Beale’s later performances, I felt I was being preached at by Walsh, not spoken to. Not fun. So on my way home from work I’d connect my iPod and listen to Mark Levin’s podcasts instead.

Since his announcement, Walsh has been struggling to get noticed, just as the other Republican challengers again Trump have. Those other candidates are another nut-job, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, and former Massachusetts governor William Weld, the vice presidential candidate in 2016 on the Libertarian ticket.

Presumably because last week President Trump made his first appearance in Chicago since his election–not surprisingly he trashed the city–Fox 32 Chicago’s Mike Flannery interviewed him this weekend on his Flannery Fired Up program. Playing devil’s advocate, Flannery mentioned the “booming economy” and Friday’s strong jobs report, Walsh countered on the economy, “It was booming under Obama.” Which one is true, Joe? What you said this weekend about Obama, or your unilateral condemnations of Obama as president, including of course on the economy?

No one should take Walsh seriously as a presidential candidate.

And then there is this Tweet.

And then this one:

But we will still be hearing from Walsh every now and then; the mainstream media, which mocked him for years, fell in love with Walsh after he announced his campaign against Trump, I mean that he is running for president. With the anti-Trump media it’s all about hating the president.

Oh, I did say Walsh was “a bit nutty,” right?

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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