Posts Tagged ‘under the fedora’

Unremembered Gratitude, Gatez Misdemeanor, Occam on Iran, Manslaughter vs Murder Williamson goes under the fedora

Posted: January 11, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, elections, News/opinion, politics, primaries
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There is a running gag in the TV show Maverick when both Brett or Bart Maverick after a long trip in a stagecoach or horse or whatever invariability when they get to a hotel they want a tub and hot water. As soon as it’s drawn invariability whatever lady they are paired with whether it is Connie Stevens or Kathleen Crowley appropriate the full bath from this which angers them to no end as a bathtub of water costs a dollar (the equivalent of $21.18 today) for it since someone has to haul the water, heat it and then haul it again to the tub one bucket at a time.

While California is doing it’s best to return their state to a land where a hot bath or shower is a luxury that most people can’t afford, which has been the norm the rest of us can be grateful that we live in an age and a land where such comfort is so common that it never occurs to be grateful for it.

Rep Matt Gaetz is getting a ton of flack for his vote with the Democrats on their Iran resolution in the house.

I can’t see the point of it, this resolution was symbolic, has no chance of becoming law and was about as meaningless as any that Pelosi has pushed.

After all we don’t throw Rand Paul or Mike Lee off the bus because their principles on foreign policy are different, perhaps Gaetz believes that on principle congress should not cede this power to the executive as a rule.

When he abandons the President or the Pro-life movement on something that actually matters I’ll worry but for now I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. After all people have the right to be wrong.

Had a bit of a twitter debate with a fellow who was insisting that we shouldn’t trust the US government info on the downing of that Ukranianian jet.

While there is nothing wrong with doubt Occam’s razor suggests that this was all about some panicked at the thought that Donald Trump would follow through almost at once, a perfectly reasonable explanation made more reasonable by Iran’s ducking and dodging on the investigation. Particularly with Iran doing all it can to obscure the site.

I’m wondering if those who are seeing a conspiracy here think that the pickets who shot Stonewall Jackson were actually Union spies under deep cover, after all they had the most to gain by removing him before Gettysburg…

One more thing about the jet business. I object to the use of “Murder” in describing what happened. Manslaughter or involuntary homicide would be more accurate. I suspect if the gunners knew it was a passenger jet they would not have shot it down, but given the situation it was irresponsible for Iran to let the jet go up.

Of course if you subscribe to the idea that Iran tipped us off and knew we weren’t hitting back because of it the command might have assumed they gave the battery folks a heads up. Very bad idea if so.

Finally Marianne Williamson has dropped out of the presidential race. A lot of people laughed at her but I am very relieved that she is gone.

In my opinion she was one of two candidates who had an actual chance against President Trump, not a great chance, but a chance.

You might ask why, and once all the candidates I think have a shot are gone I might give it, but until then I’ll just be satisfied that the President’s chances have improved considerably.

Quaint things: Covington Toobin, Erickson, Gabbard, and the California Press Under the Fedora

Posted: January 9, 2020 by datechguy in education, News/opinion, politics
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A couple of nights ago the word came that CNN has just made a settlement with the Covington High School Kids that they painted as a bunch of racists on the network. Fortunately for the MSM the Iran “attack” gave them a reason to ignore it.

Alas for Resa Aslin the MSM pretending it didn’t happen didn’t keep things from moving along as he, along with several “friends” were now served with suits as well.

The real comedy? It was only then after it cost CNN eight figures and he was served that he deleted his tweet from a year ago suggesting the joy that would come from assaulting a young man who did nothing wrong, as it a year later it would make things all OK.

How Quaint

One of the things that makes both nostalgia and children so quaint is are the innocent assumptions involved here are a few examples:

Jeffrey Toobin in Impeachment:

The House inexplicably refused to seek to compel key impeachment witnesses in court, burning months in which it could have secured not just key decisions in its favor but actual testimony. Indeed, a year ago, I appeared before the Judiciary Committee and encouraged it not only to hold a vote on impeachment but to go to court to force the testimony of figures such as former White House counsel Don McGahn. While refusing to trigger its impeachment powers with such a vote, it did take McGahn to court. It won that case shortly before its impeachment vote. The case will be heard by the appellate court this week, even without being expedited for the impeachment investigation.

When faced with the embarrassing timing of the McGahn ruling after the hurried impeachment vote, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff insisted there was no time to waste in getting the case to the Senate and that “it has taken us eight months to get a lower court ruling” to compel McGahn to testify. He was wrong on both points. After key members claimed there was a “crime spree in progress” and no time to delay a Senate trial, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi immediately blocked any submission to the Senate to demand the witnesses that the House unwisely omitted in its investigation. It seems time is no longer of the essence.

How quaint of Toobin to think that the point of impeachment was to secure a conviction rather than to appease a base for political reasons.

Our next contestant in our quaint exercise in innocence comes from Erick Erickson who is responding to those who ridiculed the VP for pointing out Iran’s & Soleimani 9/11 connection:

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Mr. Erickson is sincere in being offended which is in a sense so cute, as if in 2020 and the years prior the foes of this administration actually still considered obtaining facts and evidence over the possibility of scoring a political point over a hated foe, when in reality as John Adams reminded a young journalist over 200 years earlier that this has ever been the norm.

I really laughed when I saw this one from the Tulsi Gabbard campaign

Just when you thought that Democrats couldn’t possibly play it any dirtier they prove that they are, in fact, capable of just that. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the so-called progressive left is really labeling their fellow party members Russian stooges… and that’s only because those fellow Democrats have the audacity to disagree with the foreign policy establishment. “Roving journalist” Michael Tracey reports on Twitter that Tulsi Gabbard volunteers claim they have found “dozens of signs around New Hampshire defaced with a hammer-and-sickle logo.”

Here is a twitter image

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Is there anything more quaint than the idea that there is still at least one Democrat candidate who thinks being associated with the hammer & sickle might be considered an insult to them. I suppose it’s a mark in Gabbard’s favor that she doesn’t want to be associated with the murderous philosophy responsible for the murder of over 100 million people in the previous century and the enslavement of millions more.

But how naive can one be to think that when running for the Democrat nomination for president in the Year of Our Lord 2020 that there is the slightest possibility that an association with communism would not be considered a great incentive for the current party base to pledge their undying support.

One of the things about the far left is that when you give them power they invariably take it regardless of what you think. Nothing is more illustrative of this than this story out of California:

I’m not sure how I feel about this,” said anchor Jessica Holmes to her co-anchors. “You’re not going to be allowed to shower and do a load of laundry in the same day.”

While that may sound insane, what California Attorney Richard Lee breaks down the hypothetical figures.

“Doing a load of laundry takes about 40 to 50 gallons of water. Taking a shower for about eight minutes uses about 17 gallons of water. Well, there’s a limitation of your daily use of water, 55 gallons per day. So that means if you’re taking a shower and doing a load of laundry, you can’t do both without being in violation of the law.”

How quaint. the News media have been an ally of the left forever and now they are finally discovering that this left isn’t just interested in turning places like Venezuelan into 3rd world hellholes they are interested in importing third world conditions, complete with blackouts and water shortages to America so that folks coming from the 3rd world can feel right at home.

Oh and a note to KTLA, taking down the video doesn’t end the law.

Inconvenient Guests, attacks, voters, numbers and signs under the fedora.

Posted: January 4, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, middle east, News/opinion, politics, under the fedora, war
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Saw a tweet by old friend Erick Erickson that jumped out at me

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Nothing is more inconvenient for leftists on television that a person who critiques Donald Trump regularly but still intends to vote for him.

A close second are regular attacks on jews in NY by Blacks who do not support Donald Trump in any way shape or form

The fact that black people are responsible for this “dramatic increase” cannot be denied, but as Ace of Spades points out, the media keep trying to blame Trump for these crimes committed in Democrat-controlled cities by people who certainly don’t seem like MAGA-hat types.

Consider this “argument” by Jay Michaelson at The Daily Beast:

“New York is reeling from a wave of anti-Semitic attacks, and speaking as a Jewish parent who lives in Brooklyn, I can tell you that it’s terrifying.
It is also confusing. The vast majority of anti-Semitic attacks in this country are carried out by right-wing white supremacists. But most of the recent New York-area attacks have been carried out by people of color expressing very different grievances, or none at all. So is this the same phenomenon, or a different one? Hate, yes, but what kind of hate?
The answer is not simple. The recent street violence and acts of terror are based, in part, on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories similar to those on the Right. And yet, it is dangerous and misleading to see this as the same phenomenon, because the social contexts, the dynamics of race, and the relationships to power are all quite different. . . .“

See? Michaelson is a liberal, and therefore “the dynamics of race” must be considered, as if a machete-wielding black psycho in New York deserves sympathy in a way that, say, Dylan Roof does not. In fact, he claims, “it is dangerous and misleading” not to employ a double standard:

Perhaps the left will shortly argue that these attackers while black opponents of Donald Trump define themselves as White Supremacists? That argument is a lot more convenient that dealing the with reality on the ground.

A while back I wrote about the anti-anti’s who tended to side against America’s enemies because they hated the anti-communists more than they hated communists. Victor Davis Hanson has found an inconvenient version of this meme just in time for election 2020:

Many who voted for Trump were quite aware that Trump’s rhetoric often bothered them. They now weigh that discomfort against his achievements and the shrill Democratic alternative — and find the latter far scarier. Few on the left ever contemplate the effect on the general public of the 24/7, 360-degree pure hatred of Trump on network and cable news, public TV and radio, and late-night TV talk shows, as well as print media. The silent disdain many people have for the progressive media nexus is especially potent when the haters so often fit a stereotypical profile in the public mind: counterfeit elite as defined by education, zip codes, careers, or supposed cultural influence; smug in their parrot-like group-speak and accustomed to deference.

This paradox was brought home to me not long ago when I asked an unlikely Trump minority supporter why in the world he would vote against his family’s and community’s political heritage. He answered at once, with simply, “I hate the people who hate him.”

Translated, I think that means we often are missing a cultural element to Trump Agonistes, exacerbated by the latest toxic impeachment episode.

That’s got to be very inconvenient for the left come November.

Speaking of inconvenient facts for the media there are few things more inconvenient to the media’s narrative than this one.

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13 hours vs 13 minutes, talk about an inconvenient number.

Finally one of the problems with making predictions and decisions about the future based on iffy data is that when they don’t come true you might be left with some inconvenient signs:

The centerpiece of the visitor center at St. Mary near the east boundary is a large three-dimensional diorama showing lights going out as the glaciers disappear. Visitors press a button to see the diorama lit up like a Christmas tree in 1850, then showing fewer and fewer lights until the diorama goes completely dark. As recently as September 2018 the diorama displayed a sign saying GNP’s glaciers were expected to disappear completely by 2020.

But at some point during this past winter (as the visitor center was closed to the public), workers replaced the diorama’s ‘gone by 2020’ engraving with a new sign indicating the glaciers will disappear in “future generations.”

As Rush Limbaugh taught Al Gore with his Goremageddon clock you don’t make predictions about the future within a time span when they can be proven false because it might turn out to be a tad inconvenient.

“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.

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