Answering John Nolte’s Point

Posted: February 2, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Yesterday I discovered John Nolte’s piece: Nolte: Impeachment Proves Nancy Pelosi Is an Idiot which is in stark contrast to my piece yesterday titled: The Left is Damn Lucky to Have Pelosi.

I read the Nolte’s piece and thought his points needed to be answered if I was going to dispute them.

First: Impeaching the President with No Crime

Impeachment wasn’t Pelsoi’s idea. With the Mueller report being a dud and the progressive caucus insisting on impeachment the idea is to glam onto something fast. This was it

Second: Impeaching the President for Asking for a Judicial Ruling

Pelosi not only knew that impeachment was a loser, but knew that the longer it went on the worse it would be. Litigation would only drag out the damage.

Third: There Was No Quid Pro Quo

This is true but irrelevant, when you’re making it up the point is just to make the argument and let the media carry it. They could have impeached him for a nosebleed in the capital, as long as it was impeachment.

Fourth: Rushing Impeachment

The question assumes the goal was to remove Trump Pelosi knew it would not happen (See #2) That impeachment will be done one day after Iowa give the candidates a reason to ignore it as old news.

Fifth: Sitting on the Impeachment Articles for a Month

I’ve got to admit this one confused me too, but again this move was driven by the big brains using twitter and was glammed onto by the base. Once the media was all into this she was too. This was all about appeasement of them.

Sixth: Demanding the Senate Do What She Refused to Do

This actually made a lot of sense. Given that all of this was a joke it was necessary to cast blame on something other than the house case for Impeachment failure. John’s fallacy here is the same one that many Nevertrumpers make. The audience for this pitch was not average people, it was the far left people who insisted on impeachment. Pelosi needed a scapegoat and this plan plus she had the media to push it.

Seventh: Terrible Choice of House Managers

This is again where John missed the mark this was the perfect pick for house managers. You needed managers who were hyper partisan who would satisfy the loony base from districts that are safe. What you didn’t want was to put a serious congressman from anything remotely resembling a swing district or a congressman who had the potential to be a national face of the party to try and justify this shit storm.

This wasn’t about raging incompetence, or age or even uninforced errors. Unlike the impeachment managers in 1996 who still believed that we had a shared set of values, Pelosi knew that this was a loser from day one. She held it off for as long as she could and when she figured out that the damage to her caucus from a divide would be greater than the damage from failure and there was always a million to one shot that the President’s team would do something stupid enough to make things work.

So she did it as fast as possible to minimize the damage to the party as a whole and to the members with the most potential in the future. Furthermore as I noted in yesterday’s piece she could have gone full “I told you so” and used this as a platform to destroy the progressive left who put her in this spot.

Instead she was amazingly the adult in the room. She is taking the hits from the Nolte’s because she knows that she can absorb those hits while others in the party, who deserve them considerably more, can not.

That’s old fashioned leadership reminiscent of an earlier era, granted leadership in a bad cause but leadership nonetheless.

Wishcasting for California

Posted: February 1, 2020 by julietteochieng in Always look at the bright side of Trump, elections, elections, News/opinion, politics, primaries, primaries
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Bernie won’t win

by baldilocks

In two days, it begins.

Californians start voting Monday in a high-profile Democratic presidential primary that has no clear front-runner and could take longer to count than any previous election in a state already notorious for slow ballot counting.

For the first time, Californians can register to vote all the way up to and including election day wherever ballots are cast, which could mean a surge of last-minute ballots, including last-minute provisional ballots that take longer to count.

Sanders, Warren and Biden are all jockeying for first position here to go against President Trump in November. Our primary used to be on the other Super Tuesday in June, but this year – going forward, I presume – it’s on the first Tuesday in March.

Fifteen counties, including Los Angeles, will replace traditional polling places with “vote centers” where people who live anywhere in the county can vote early, drop off ballots or register to vote. (…)

California has previously allowed same-day voter registration, but only at county elections offices. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation last year requiring all polling places and vote centers to offer the option until 8 p.m. on election day.

But with change comes the potential for hiccups.

You better believe it. For the past few decades, voting in California has been one gigantic hiccup.

If you think that we got this was through some pristine voting process, you are delusional. As I implied here, California’s Organized Left has built the electorate it wants, with massive voter fraud as complement.  But I wonder about something.

I wonder if California can be flipped.

What has me thinking about this is CA AB5. Enacted by the Democrat Super-majority in the California Assembly and signed by Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom – who has also allotted $20 million to enforce it — it has nearly every self-employed Californian wondering when their next dollar is coming from.

Remember: CA’s Political Left wants only three kinds of people in the state: the rich, the dirt poor, and the illegal. AB5 is just another winnowing tool in a long line of them.

So, all the actors, film crews, artists, musicians, hairdressers, costume designers, set designers, and whatnot who have been contracting out their talent for decades have seen  all their livelihoods nearly obliterated by AB5 — the handiwork of politicians put into office by many to most of them.

I’d sure love to see President Trump address how California’s Political Left has betrays them – preferably doing it while holding court the Rose Bowl. Yes, I want to see a Trump rally in Southern California.

Anyway, the California Primary is about to drop off and we will see which one of the Democrats will likely face the president.

I hope it’s Biden because … who doesn’t?

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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Why Agnostics Hate Prayers

Posted: February 1, 2020 by ng36b in Uncategorized
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What people would pay for prayers, from PNAS study by Linda Thunström and Shiri Noy.

Would you pay someone to pray for you? That was the focus of a recently published study, which asked this very question to almost 500 people in the wake of Hurricane Florence. The study separated Christians from atheist/agnostic people, and presented each person with the option to pay for prayers and/or thoughts from different people. On average, Christians would pay more for prayers, and specifically from prayers from a priest, while atheists and agnostics would pay for Christians to NOT pray for them.

While we might comically imply there is a new income source for priests, the paying to not pray is disturbing and highlights two issues. First, atheists don’t believe in the power of prayer. While that’s not a surprise in itself, it does mean we (specifically Catholics) have done a terrible job advertising how prayer works. The second, and more troubling side, is it highlights that atheists and agnostics simply don’t like Christian people.

Contrary to what the media would tell you, prayer does in fact change things. The Catholic Church has been rigorously testing for miracles, and especially for medical miracles (the ones most people think of), most don’t survive scrutiny. For the Catholic Church to declare a miracle, prayers have to be offered to one Saint or person, the condition has to have no chance of healing on its own, and the condition must quickly be cured (as in, it can’t take a long time to heal). A good recent example was the miraculous curing of Dafne Gutierrez, who prayed to St. Charbel and had her sight restored.

I bring examples of these up with my friends who are agnostic, and it surprises them, which means that Catholic media is failing to promote these instances. How do we not have a repository of images, miracle stories and the like? How do we not have social media accounts pushing these stories out for the world to read? Catholic miracles are called out in our Catechism to inspire us, and yet we act like the man who buried his master’s talents. Given the prevalence of platforms like Twitter and Facebook, this is inexcusable.

Worse still is the image that agnostic people have of Christians in general. Ask an agnostic person what their image of a Christian is, and you will likely get some flinching. The media has been bashing Christianity forever, and while Christians might ignore it, the effects are playing out now. More people than ever are identifying as atheist or agnostic, and worse, more agnostic people say they won’t associate with Christians. This, despite the fact that many of the same people know lots of good Christians that they see every day. We are, again, poorly advertising ourselves and our lives, allowing the media to make us out to be the boogey man for atheists and agnostics everywhere.

Christianity, and specifically Catholicism, can in fact die out if we don’t fight for it. The media will gladly hide our miracle stories so that prayers become nothing more than good thoughts in most people’s minds. Worse still, the media will continue to incite violence against Catholics, like the attack on St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989. It’s not enough for us to live good lives, but we must also show those that have no faith that our lives are worth living.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, the Catholic Church, or any other government or non-government agency.

The Left is Damn Lucky to Have Pelosi

Posted: February 1, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized
Tags:

This is going to shock a lot of people but I’ve gained a bit of respect for Nancy Pelosi over the last couple of months.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think she backs some of the worst policies that the nation could consider and her pretense of wearing her Catholicism on her shoulder while embracing the intrinsic evil of abortion is an abomination that I wouldn’t want to have to explain to St. Peter, particularly if I was at an age when I’d be likely to meet him sooner rather than later.

But despite all this I’ll say this for her, she’s damn loyal to her party even when they’re not loyal to her.

For months she tried to restrain the impeachment hotheads, trying to explain to these loons that it was a bad and losing strategy, that it would only embolden the President and weaken the party at a time when they needed a better strategy to have a shot at victory in 2020.

For this she was pummeled by the left and the Democrats until finally she relented.

So now here we are, with the President about to be acquired, and the state of the union about to take place where he can rub their face into it and the whole lot of them being made into fools and what is she doing?

  • Is she disavowing impeachment as a mistake that wasn’t of her making?
  • Is she publicly blaming the media and the left for pushing her in the wrong direction?
  • Is she loudly proclaiming to all “I told you so!”?

Nope.

She’s is still on the attack on the President and pretending that all of the disasters that she predicted didn’t happen.

Or put simply she’s showing more loyalty to the party than they’ve shown to her and making the best use of the bad hand she was dealt.

Given the backstabbing nature of DC that’s pretty damn impressive, but I doubt she will get any gratitude from those leftists for getting out front of a cause she thought was foolish instead of letting them take the blows.

Her pals on the left might not be impressed by I sure in hell am.

Update: John Nolte disagrees, his piece is here, I’l answer it tomorrow.

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