I was at a major Catholic Shrine today frequented by devout Catholics and noticed something interesting.
They had a large book section in their gift shop and a very small clearance section for books. All the clearance books there were either by Pope Francis or about him.
It seems that Ron DeSantis is about to form an exploratory committee for a presidential run.
He seems to be moving slow, I think this is smart as his foes keep making mistakes that can only benefit him, the longer it’s drawn out the more missteps they’ll make.
RFK is still making news which is causing trouble for Biden, and as much as this is amusing to us we should not forget that RFK for all his straight talk on some subjects is still a liberal, still a climate change fanatic and is not going to be a friend.
While enjoying all of this we should not forget these facts.
Oregon is getting ready to legalize tents camps.
That they haven’t figured out what this will do to their state amazes me, or maybe they just don’t care.
Perhaps some conservatives simply need to make camp on the property of prominent liberals in the state. That will change a few minds.
Apparently Ukrainian drones have been targeting Russian Command Posts, This would account for the large amount of General officers among casualities.
High ranking officers had better get used to this as this will become standard operating procedure for any country at war. The old days of getting promoted high enough to get out of the firing line are gone.
I remember sitting next to Ace of Spades at the Scott Brown Victory Party in the press area. Even then he was a person who did not mince words nor had any patience or qualms about saying what was on his mind and what is on his mind about Trump is that he’s finally crossed the line:
This frankly is Trump’s nature. He has always fought like a Democrat and it’s a lot of fun when his target is a Democrat, but right now he sees Ron DeSantis as the greatest threat to his campaign to return to the White House so anything goes. Ace concludes thus:
I’d also point out that we know for a fact who is the most uncomfortable with the Culture War — cultural liberals like the The Bulwark Boyz and The Dispatch Boyz. They hate the Crazy Christians fighting all the time with their gay frenz, and they want them to stop.
Well, guess who else is cultural liberal who doesn’t want the Crazy Christian fighting the trans extremists.
Is this True Conservatism, Trump-style, now? Is this “populism” — adopting all the cant and tactics of the leftwing, trans-crazy Ruling Class?
And he’s going to be the one to take on The Regime? LOL. He’s repeating every single point of their catechism!
This frankly is Trump nature and you can’t have the good problem solving Trump without putting up with this one but read the whole thing anyways any more than you could get the pragmatic Bill Clinton without the womanizing or the Politically savvy Lyndon Johnson without the temper and corruption.
On the same subject let’s compare and contrast two tactics in “support” of the Donald Trump campaign. A stupid one that relies on falsehoods:
This is a foolish move by @realDonaldTrump as people continue to vote with their feet to get there.
The question is: Is this foolishness the product of bad advice or in opposition to good advice?
Why not just campaign on the best record of any president in the last 125 years?
When you’ve got the best record of any president in the last century and a quarter why not run on that record?
At Town Hall Brad Slager has written a must read post which should be posted on the wall of every marketing division of every corporation that considers caving to the woke agenda:
I found Kristin Kroepfl, chief marketing officer for Quaker Foods North America, stating that in the year 2020, the Aunt Jemima brand had $350 million in sales. Okay, this gives us something of a baseline.
Throughout 2021, the Quaker Foods division saw the pancake mix and syrup sales plunge. The period following the introduction of the name switch that summer reported “a double-digit decline in pancake syrup and mix.” This was matched in the final quarter of that year – when the name change had gone into full effect – with “double-digit declines in pancake syrups and mixes.”
Ever hear how compound interest grows wealth, well compound losses takes it away
This downward trend continued through last year. Quarter 1 delivered another “double-digit decline.” In Q-2, Quaker saw unit volume grow 2% across all of its products but was weighed down by another “double-digit decline in pancake syrups and mixes,” something also seen in the Q-3 reports. The only glimmer of positivity is that the former Aunt Jemima brand saw its bleeding slowing in Q-4, as that line only saw “a high-single-digit decline in pancake syrups and mixes.”
Considering the vagueness of these reports (since “double-digit” can range anywhere from 10 to 99%), even applying the rosiest measurement, by only counting a ten percent decline in each of those six quarters, the former Aunt Jemima brand declined by at least -50% since the name change. It is very likely much worse.
Small bit of advice to Bud Light and all those other who cave to the woke, don’t cave to people who aren’t your customers anyways.
And for the record I haven’t bought “Pearl Hill pancake mix” since the name change.
One fo the things I’ve noticed over the last few months at Hotair are the interesting Notes that Ed Morrissey adds at the end ofo posts by various authors commentating on their point. This one on Abortion and the states is so good that it bears listing here:
The problem for both parties is that the end of Roe also means the necessity of governance on the issue of abortion. That means applying principles in an effective manner and garnering the broadest support for those principles without having to compromise too much on them. While much of the scrutiny of this issue has fallen on Republicans, Democrats have the same issue with their commitment to the extremist position of legalized abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. The side that figures out how to engage the center most effectively will win, but that requires real patience and risk taking — and neither quality is in large supply in American politics. — Ed
That’s it in a nutshell. SCOTUS has forced states to actually make real world decisions, forcing political animals to actually do the job that they’ve begged the voters for and that involves making some people angry.
You can’t go wrong reading Ed Morrissey, ever.
Finally I noticed that the media has done all it can to marginalize RFK JR. in his run for the Democrat nomination, suggesting he is a fringe candidate, however I think they are terrified of him.
USA Today’s confident use of the word “debunked,” however, can’t mask a growing suspicion among an increasing number of Americans that the authorities aren’t being honest with us. The COVID vaccine debacle, with what was originally touted as a single shot that would protect you from a deadly disease becoming multiple shots and boosters that carried side effects that were often worse than COVID itself, only fueled that suspicion. So the establishment media’s confidence that voters will dismiss Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because they dislike this vaccine skepticism may be whistling in the dark.
Kennedy also said something extremely interesting in his announcement that he was running: “My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency, will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now – threatening now – to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.” Well, yes, and no one else is talking with this kind of clarity and consistency about the kind of collusion that we saw in the Twitter Files between the massive corporations and the government. Not even Donald Trump.
Robert Spencer is a smart guy and thinks it’s pretty much done
They’re going with Biden for reelection, and they know that he can only hurt his own chances by standing toe-to-toe against a man who can actually articulate a coherent sentence and defend his positions, as well as against a woman who, however loopy she may be, looks like Madame Curie next to Old Joe.
And so despite the fact that RFK, who has never been a national figure, immediately jumped to 14%, there will be no real Democrat race. There will just be a coronation. No one should have ever expected that anything would be different. After all, these people have made it abundantly clear that they don’t really like disagreement and want to silence dissent. Why would they allow it within their own party?
I’m not so sure, while changing the primary schedule will certainly help I suspect that RFK Jr. will do a whole lot better than anything thinks in the primaries because he doing what Trump was doing in 2016, saying forbidden truths aloud and promising to address the problems they bring and while the activist class that gets it’s funding from the machines are unlikely to be with him I suspect normal democrats who would never vote for Trump might just decide to hitch their wagons to a Kennedy.
“I heard my momma cry, I heard her pray the night Chicago died.” The Night Chicago Died, Paper Lace, 1974.
Any doubt in my mind that Chicago would be the next Detroit evaporated last Tuesday night as election results came in showing that far-left Democrat Brandon Johnson would replace the disastrous Lori Lightfoot as mayor of Chicago.
It was the night Chicago died.
There are serious lessons from this Democrat battle for Republicans.
Moderate Democrat Paul Vallas, a policy wonk who can produce a white paper as easily as quickly as a Kardashian can upload skanky pics on Instagram, offered a commonsense solution to Chicago’s crime epidemic: hire more cops.
Woke triumphed over wonk.
Johnson, whose political career is a creation of the neo-Marxist Chicago’s Teacher Union, has a “roots cause” outlook in regard taking back Chicago. He favors sending social workers to domestic disturbances instead of police officers. And almost as if on cue on the day after the first round of voting for mayor, Andres Vasquez-Lasso, a 32-year-old cop, was shot to death responding to a domestic disturbance call.
Six months ago, few Chicagoans had heard of Johnson. He’s been a Cook County commissioner since 2019, a rubber stamp body, for the most part, is controlled by Toni “Taxwinkle” Preckwinkle. She is also the chairman of the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization, aka, the Chicago Machine.
Well, it was Chicago’s Machine.
The new machine in the city is the Chicago Teachers Union, which is aided by a couple of key allies, two other public-sector unions, SEIU and AFSCME.
Johnson, after a few years as a teacher, where he admitted he never assigned homework, moved on to be a CTU organizer. In fact, he kept collecting about $100,000 a year from the union even though he was an elected official.
And despite Johnson’s “defund the police” rhetoric from 2020, which be backed off of as his campaign gained traction before the February runoff, Johnson is Chicago’s mayor-elect.
With crime soaring in Chicago, how did that happen?
That’s easy, it was that new machine, CTU and friends, that got Johnson elected.
“They were brilliant,” former ABC Chicago political analyst Clarence Thomas told Chicago’s Morning Answer Dan Proft last week of CTU. “They did it, they went door to door, they knocked on doors, they found those vote by mail ballots, and said, ‘Hey, let’s fill this out, let’s send this in.'”
Vallas, meanwhile, ran a conventional political campaign, heavy on collecting corporate campaign contributions, big-name endorsements including Dick Durbin, former governor Pat Quinn, recently retired six-term Illinois secretary of state Jesse White, and many Chicago alderpersons. Illinois’ most-read newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, endorsed Vallas.
That was a wonderful strategy–that is, if Vallas was a candidate for mayor of Chicago in 1991.
How many doors did Dick Durbin knock for Vallas? Or Quinn? How many voters did the Chicago Tribune reach out by way of text messaging, reminding them when, where, and how to vote? How many voters did Jesse White contact in regard to receiving a mail-in ballot? How many social media private messages did those pro-Vallas alderpersons send? How many people got rides to polling places from those corporate megadonors?
The answer to those questions is the same: almost certainly zero.
The Chicago Teachers Union game plan that got Brandon Johnson elected will be replicated by leftists nationwide in 2024. Listen, I hate early voting and I despise mail-in ballots, but until the rules are changed–and that is, if they are changed–Republicans have to adapt to the new ballgame.
The CTU looked for voters, found them, and they made sure they voted for Johnson last week–as well as the two weeks prior to Election Day. A low turnout–about 35 percent—clearly upped the odds for CTU/Johnson.
As for that abysmal turnout, shame on you, Chicago.
One more thing about Vallas. When he conceded on election night, he trailed Johnson about 10,000 votes. But that evening there were still around 50,000 outstanding mail-in ballots, and yes, they are still trickling in and being counted. Vallas learned too late that the game had changed. He knew the great majority of those mail-in ballots were from Johnson voters.
Get to work, Republicans. Find out who your voters are, connect with them, stay in touch with them, and get them to vote.
And yes, knock on doors. More people can be found at home now, many people work from there. Times have changed.
I keep reading that the polls for Trump are great since the indictment. I think that doesn’t matter. I think what matters is how Kari Lake’s lawsuit in Arizona is doing, because since the laws are being enforced selectively what is the incentive for the left to not steal the election in the same key districts that they did the last time?
Seriously even if you think the last election was on the up and up what is there any disincentive for the left to try to steal this election, seriously do you see one.
I alluded to this yesterday but let me say it bluntly. I don’t want any help for San Francisco from the feds. Not a single penny and not a single federal officer to help enforce the law.
This city and this state elected the people who made the laws there that bred what they got, let them clean it up.
Until there are consequences for their actions, consequences that require then to act, nothing will change.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Bud Light deciding that Dylan Mulvaney is the perfect face for the brand. Cripes it’s not like there are not a million beer choices out there these days for people choose and doing so a week after a transgender shot up a Christian school speaks volumes.
In fairness to Bud lite I suspect their brand was not high on the Transgender’s customer list before today and in even more fairness everywhere I go Bud lite is the cheep beer offered at a discount. Perhaps they’re figuring that teenagers who want to get drunk cheap are more interested in price then they are politics. They’re likely right but I’d love to see how the distributers are reacting to this.
I wish I had come up with this one but I have to give credit to DaWife who saw this somewhere on facebook:
Ask not why the children shouldn’t see drag queens, ask why drag queens crave an audience of children
In fairness before Christianity took hold, the sexualization of children was the norm so the secular left is just going back to their pre-Christian roots.
Finally in the wake of the WPGA Australasian locking down their twitter account after a biological male won his first WPGA tournament I want to quote swimmer Riley Gaines concerning people’s reaction to her vocal opposition to fake women in women’s sports.
At first, I felt honored when elite (both female and male) athletes thanked me for taking a public stance on having male-bodied athletes in women's sports and locker rooms.
Now I realize these private thanks make them responsible for this continuing and advancing as it has.
None of those people giving thanks had the courage to do what she did, speak the truth out loud against opposition. This is the goal of the left consequences for speaking the truth aloud and no consequences for pushing a lie, but a few people have the courage to fight against it.
It’s those few who prove that courage remains the primary virtue that all others depend on.
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