Posts Tagged ‘Bernie Sanders’

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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Minecraft makes gaming great again

Posted: December 28, 2019 by ng36b in Uncategorized
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Best economy ever, for villagers of all professions!

When I tell people that I play video games with my kids, I almost immediately get asked about what my Fortnite character looks like. If you watch TV at all, you’ve probably seen ads for Fortnight, Grand Theft Auto, and a variety of other video games. Almost all are first person shooters, featuring oversized weapons, gratuitous violence, and at least some partial nudity. Given the number of ads on TV, you might think these games are extremely popular.

I don’t play Fortnite, nor do I let my kids play it. While I like my violent video games (Skyrim belongs to the Nords!), my kids and I play Minecraft. You’ve probably seen it at some point. Blocky graphics. Diamond swords. Green and black monsters called creepers. You might think it looks dumb, but its the best selling video game of all time. Plus, rather than teaching your kids to brainlessly slaughter other people, it provides a lot of lessons about the real world.

Prepare to become compost, ISIS wannabe!

A quick Minecraft primer, in case you haven’t played it. It’s a sandbox game, meaning there isn’t really a story or quest to complete. You get dropped into a generated world where you gather blocks (dirt, stone, iron, etc.) and build…whatever you want. There are all sorts of enemies called mobs that can attack you. You can plant farms, cage off and breed animals for food and supplies, and even find villages, where computer controlled villagers will trade with you, using emeralds as the form of currency. There is sort of an end game in that you can find a place called “The End” and fight the Enderdragon, but even after that, the game has no real ending.

Maybe later this iron golem will write a tell-all book about being in the Minecraft special forces

The first thing you learn is that the world is a pretty cruel place. Not unlike our actual world, there are monsters that are content to watch the world burn. Homeless zombies poison you and turn friendly villagers into more zombies. Creepers act like ISIS suicide bombers, sneaking up and exploding, both hurting you and destroying whatever you happened to work on. Endermen, giant black creatures that teleport, will suddenly flip out when you look at them scream and attack you like a triggered college student protester. Especially at night, it feels like you might be safer walking down the streets of San Francisco…wait, never mind, its not quite THAT bad, but its still unnerving.

Minecraft cows chanting “Build the Wall!”

To combat this, you have to care and build defenses. That means you build walls. And you make Minecraft pay for it! You also build a military by creating iron golems, who roam your village and kill attacking bad guys. If you don’t, for some misguided peace loving reason, your villagers will be massacred by either zombies or pillagers, roving bands of characters that destroy any villagers they find. Those walls need gates though, to let in legal immigrants and let you go about your business. Despite threats to the contrary, most of your villagers don’t actually move to Terraria or Canada after you build walls.

Apples and carrots, the backbone of any Minecraft economy

Once your village is protected, spurring the economy is key. Farmers are key villagers that get little respect. Not unlike real America, farmers don’t get a lot of love until there is a shortage. Your villagers can’t breed and create new villagers unless they have enough food and beds, and your farmers will constantly hand food to them at various intervals, without you doing anything. My kids caught this once and it started a conversation about how important farming is overall to our country. Not bad for a game with 8 bit graphics!

The best economy ever, all through trade schools. Why aren’t we funding those instead of “free” college again?

Now you can go and harvest and build everything yourself. You can mine down and find diamonds, which make the best armor and weapons in the game. But its really time consuming, and as my kids are discovering, its far easier to pay an armorer for a diamond chestplate. But that villager doesn’t just start selling diamond armor from the outset. You have to build that villager’s business, buying and selling with him until he is leveled up sufficiently. Once your villagers are leveled up, it becomes quicker to rebuild after a setback. The first time my character died, it took me an hour to build back all the stuff I had lost. Now, it takes a mere ten minutes of trading to be ready to take on the world again.

Even Minecraft has Bernie supporters :(

There is one final, sad character I’ve discovered in Minecraft: the Nitwit. He wears a green shirt and roams around your village like every other villager. The Nitwit wakes up later than other villagers and stays out at night later than others. Most importantly, he doesn’t do anything. He can’t trade with you. He doesn’t work a field like a farmer. He doesn’t sell leather, or buy paper, or make maps, or build swords. Nope, he literally walks around, breeds, and takes up a bed. If you go to kill him though, you’ll make the other villagers mad, and your iron golems might attack you.

So you tolerate the nitwit. You hope that maybe someday that person will grow up, attend trade school and be a functioning member of society. Sadly, this is where Minecraft departs reality, because while you can stop supporting Bernie Sanders in real life, Minecraft coding prevents nitwits from changing into something useful. They do provide a convenient moniker whenever your kid’s liberal teacher talks about the “greatness” of liberal ideals. Who knew that Minecraft, created in 2011, could be so predictive of America’s future.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, Mojang, Microsoft Corporation, the Enderdragon, or any other government agency.

“Beyond Normal” “Running on the Economy” “peace and security” “congressional approval” “we become morons” Under the Fedora

Posted: December 20, 2019 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, elections, politics, primaries
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Because I have a busted shoulder and am currently on disability instead of doing my share to advance Christmas eCommerce, I am watching a Democrat debate.

It simply amazes me that people think these folks are serious and there was a lot of stupid on that stage but I want to point out just a few things that were said by various candidate in particular that were, well….interesting

Joe Biden: “We have to move beyond normal”

This was in response to how to win republicans back in a post Trump era. It has to be one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard. If I was Team Trump I would be making fun of that line for the rest of the campaign and in a debate with any democrat I’d ask how many genders they are.

Tom Steyer: “Trump is going to run on the Economy”

There was a question asked about how the Democrat field will deal with the economy. Every single democrat then went on and on about how bad the economy actually is for the majority of people. Yet Tom Steyer stated bluntly that Donald Trump is going to run on the economy.

If the economy is so bad, and the majority of voters know it, why on earth would Trump run on the economy?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Bernie Sanders: ” Israel has the right not only to exist, but to exist in peace and security”

Now in fairness of all of the statements that were said on the stage this is one of the sanest and most rational things said, but the revealing moment was the reaction to those words.

The night was full of loud applause to the words of candidate but of all the audience reactions of the night the most significant was the single solitary lonely clap that was heard in the audience when these words were said.

If you are a Jewish Democrat who supports Israel that should speak volumes

Joe Biden: “you had to have Congressional approval.”

Joe Biden was asked why Gitmo was not closed during the Obama years and he quickly pivoted toward Israel, but before he did he stated that to close gitmo “you had to have Congressional approval”

In 2008 a new congress was elected with Barack Obama and Joe Biden, that congress gave the Democrats majority in the house of 256-178. In the Senate they had the majority of 55-41 with two independents who caucused with the Democrats and that number at once point was 60-40.

That being the case how can Biden claim that congress was to blame for Gitmo not being closed?

Andrew Yang: “If you get too many men alone and leave us alone for a while, we kind of become morons”

It’s often commented that there is a gender gap between men and women in elections with men favoring the GOP and women favoring Democrats. If you want to know why just look at this response to the question concerning President Obama’s statement about how much better the world would be if women were running it.

The obvious statement that calling half the electoral population a bunch of morons is a bad idea when you want to win an election but it’s worth noting that Donald Trump did better than Hillary Clinton among Married couples.

Married couples would include a mother and a father and likely a son or two. I suspect that a lot of mothers don’t appreciate having some stranger tell her their fathers, or husbands or sons are a bunch of morons.

This type of thing might play with the Democrat Debate audience but it’s not going to play with the general public outside liberal universities.

In fairness only one of the Democrat nominees will be running for President ( I say it will be Biden on the 2nd ballot) and the great saving grace for the Democrats is that most of the voters they need to win in 2020 were not watching. But if I was the Trump Presidential campaign I would be tagging this entire field with all of these statements and dare them to run away from it.

Welcome to the Age of Criminals

Posted: November 24, 2019 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, elections, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

“Just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints,” Mick Jagger first sang in 1968. The late 1960s were a period when many people believed that society, not individuals, was responsbible for crimes. There was a predictable backlash which led to the “Get Tough on Crime” movement that benefitted the political careers of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and countless other politicians. In 2016, Donald Trump once referred to himself as “the law and order candidate.” He should have stayed with that meme, in my opinion.

Clearly, at least in America’s big cities, the law enforcement philosophic pendulum is swinging back to the liberals. A big part of the reason is the left-wing political monoculture in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco. The Democrats are the only effective political force in these places, and the two-party structure, such as it is, consists of the left and the far-left. It was the far-left, aided by the uninformed who only vote for candidates with “D” next to their names, who elected Kim Foxx the state’s attorney in Cook County, Illinois, where I live, as well as Larry Krasner as district attorney of Philadelphia, Rachael Rollins as district attorney in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which is dominated by Boston, and earlier this month, Chesa Boudin as San Francisco’s district attorney.

Boudin takes us back to the 1960s. You probably haven’t heard of his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. Both were members of the terrorist group the Weather Underground, which was founded in 1969. Dad is serving what is effectively a life sentence for murder for his role in a deadly 1981 suburban New York Brinks truck robbery, done in conjunction with the Black Liberation Army, one that saw a security guard and two Nyack police officers shot to death. One of those slain cops was the only African-American on the Nyack force. Mom was released from prison in 2003, she is now an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Getaway cars for the heist were rented using personal information taken from customers who shopped at a New York boutique, Broadway Baby. The manager of that store, using a phony name, was Bernardine Dorhn. She was also a member of the Weather Underground but was never charged in Brinks case.

Since Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were unable to raise Chesa, who was a toddler at the time of the heist, they chose their radical pals, Dohrn and her partner, Bill Ayers, who of course was another Weather Underground member, as his guardians. Dohrn and Ayers’ home in Chicago is where Barack Obama began his political career in 1995. Ayers and Dorhn, now retired professors, are rarely mentioned in the generally sympathetic mainstream media reports about Chesa. As for that younger Boudin, he did well by attending an elite private school, then Yale, then Oxford. Prior to becoming a public defender in San Francisco, Boudin worked as a translator for the Venezuelan government at the time Hugo Chavez was running that once-prosperous nation into the ground.

Next year voters in California will vote on an initiative to eliminate cash bail there. Boudin doesn’t want to wait that long. The district attorney-elect told NPR last week that his first act in office will be to tell his prosecutors never to ask for cash bail, “Because we shouldn’t be putting a price tag on freedom, because we shouldn’t be determining incarceration based on wealth, and it’s what I intend to implement as policy on day one.” In place of prison time, Boudin, with victims’ consent, supports something called “restorative justice,” even in cases involving murder, kidnapping, and rape.

Not surprisingly, the local police union opposed Boudin in the election, spending $700,000 and calling him “the No. 1 choice of criminals and gang members.” Boudin has called for the prosecution of cops and ICE officials for, wait for it, doing their jobs. 

Bernie Sanders endorsed Boudin in the DA race.

Back in Cook County, Illinois, where Boudin was raised, Kim Foxx is the top law enforcement official. She endorsed Chesa, as did those leftist district attorneys in Philadelphia and Boston. Nationally Foxx is best known for her bizarre–unless you are a leftist–decision to drop all of Jussie Smollett’s charges involving staging the phony “racist” attack on him in Chicago earlier this year. But there is more to dislike. The Illinois threshold for charging shoplifters with a felony is stealing items worth $300. Foxx, with the snap of her fingers, raised it to $1,000. Not surprisingly, retail theft is on the rise in Chicago. Who pays? The store owners? Not exactly. To recoup their losses, prices for their unstolen merchandise goes up. So honest people suffer. Now there are reports of roving bands of shoplifters in Chicago. Retail theft can be a career choice, it seems. Presumably the swiped goods are resold by these bandits on the black market, at a cheap price, undercutting the sales of legitimate merchants. And Chicago doesn’t collect its whopping 10 percent sales tax on these transactions. Crime is indeed expensive. Yet for some people it pays.

When Foxx took office three years ago, shoplifting was the second-most prosecuted crime in Cook County. Now it’s the eighth-most prosecuted one. The long term implications for society are dire as shoplifting is viewed by some as a gateway crime to more serious offenses.

In her video regarding announcing her run for reelection in 2020, Foxx admitted she botched the Smollett case, but she also attacked Chicago’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, which in a spring protest outside of her office called on her to resign. In a July letter to Foxx, the FOP cited that a “deep mistrust now exists between your office and ours. We no longer believe that your office will treat our members fairly either in the arrests they make or when they are victims of crimes.”

It appears that the Age of Criminals, at least in some big cities and their inner suburbs, is upon us. Supporting law abiding folks are the cops. Leftist prosecutors are on the other side.

The crime gateway is open.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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