Category: Politics

GOP split on alternative to Greitens in Missouri Senate race

Report: Trump won’t rule out Greitens Senate endorsement

C’mon, man. Although it’s been years since I was active in the party, I’ve seen reports that the former governor (was he the governor? it was so brief, and so long ago) is polling way, way down, maybe even lower than the St. Louis attorney who faced off with protrioters in his gated community whilst holding a gun.

Back in the day, the media piled on Greitens, especially when a Sorosecutor brought shaky charges against him (dropped after he resigned), and watchdog after watchdog filed spurious ethics complaints against him.

Now, the media wants us to believe he’s the Trump man? That the other qualified candidates are but alternatives to him?

One suspects the media wants this flawed candidate to win the primary so he can lose the general (a la Claire McCaskill’s pumping Todd Akin (which she later admitted in a piece for Politico magazine)).

I have my ranking of candidates for the primary, and Greitens is not listed. Even if Trump does eventually endorse him.

I was going to make a long title with a clever pun on “Drift Away” by Dobie Gray, but, c’mon man, ain’t nobody got no time for that, and, besides, it probably would not have been that clever.

But, c’mon:

Messenger: Beer Hall Project aims to counter Jan. 6 disinformation, protect American democracy

Yeah, that’s some mind-changing grassroots right there. Let’s see, it’s:

• A former executive director of The Lincoln Project;
• A former campaign worker for Claire McCaskill;
• Founding an organization that explicitly calls people who disagree with its point, purpose, or mission Nazis
• Starting with a video called “Parallels” narrated by that one guy who played the Hulk in one of those Hulk movies no one watched (no, he did not play Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, that was some other guy)
• Of which Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch glowingly approves.

That’s some straight-up Republican grassroots there.

I am pretty sure that we can all see that it’s an organization (non-partisan, or Republican, in future reporting!) designed to get money from left wing donors, pay its founders and employees and consultants, and irritate Josh Hawley, although I am not sure how many people it will persuade.

Hopefully enough left wing donors to keep the founders in kibble for a couple of years until the next one comes along (or springs fully formed like Athena from the founders’ heads).

Oh, and in Parallels news, The Ominous Parallels, the book by Ayn Rand’s intellectual heir Leonard Piekoff, which very carefully explained how modern American politics and governance is just like Nazi Germany is going to be 40 years old this year.

R. Kelly for School Board.

I’m not sure it’s a good ring to it. All I know is I would not have used the first initial on my campaign materials, but I suppose that’s bound by what is to appear on the ballot.

(Information on the notorious R. Kelly on Wikipedia, you damn kids.)

Does anyone else here remember gas over $4 a gallon and high unemployment during the last administration? Remember how the former president said we could not drill our way out of high gas prices?

I mean, I saw a Biden ad during a football game that said he was going to “punish” corporations and bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Kind of like what has been happening over the last couple of years minus the “punish” part.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills over here. By remembering.

So someone on Facebook shared a series of images called HELPFUL REBUTTALS FOR RACIST TALKING POINTS.

Yeah. you can tell how HELPFUL they are by the fact that they are flashcard right answers you can give to RACISTS who are just people who apparently don’t agree with the sentiments and CORRECT POLITICAL BELIEFS of the people who made the graphics. Not differences of opinion based on different experiences, interpretations, or statistics. THE WRONG OPINION BECAUSE THEY’RE EVIL!

This sort of thing is not designed to foster communication or to try to reach a shared understanding or even to convince. These flashcards are designed for the mis-educated who are used to getting the proper result (good grades, up twinkies on the Internet) for OWNING the bad thinkers.

Not to inform, but to rebutt. Which means to be an ass again, I suppose.

In the world in which we live, you can find models, studies, and statistics to pretty much provide whatever you already think is true. It would be best to filter what you’re told or what you read through your own life experiences to try to get closer to reality. And, maybe. listen to other people. Unfortunately, we’ve raised up a generation or two whose only life experiences are indoctrination and slap-fighting on the Internet. So we get flashcard answers that are probably wrong, but are awful damn pat.

Kendall Qualls is running for Congress in Minnesota, but he’s got a bio I can understand:

I am also going to tell you that in spite of spending part of my childhood in a crime and drug-infested housing project in Harlem, in spite of spending the other part in a trailer park in rural Oklahoma, and in spite of having to work nights and weekends to put myself through school, I made it.

The projects and the trailer park? I know where he’s coming from.

The rest of the piece argues against his opponent’s Statement on Racism/White Privilege/Etc.

(Link via Powerline.)

So yesterday was the primary in Missouri, and I took the Democrat ballot.

Which I’ve been known to do when a Republican incumbent is relatively safe. In 2004, I probably voted for Joe Lieberman.

It’s not so much an Operation Chaos sort of thing, but rather I like to vote for the person whom I would think would make the least bad Democratic president.

So I voted for Tulsi Gabbard yesterday.

I mean, amongst the people remaining in the Democratic primary race, she’s the least crazy. Also, she could probably beat me in a push-up contest.

This headline makes it sound like I was somehow cheating: Missourians will need to declare party affiliation for Tuesday’s presidential primary, but that’s not the case. You just ask for the ballot. You don’t declare yourself affiliated with the party or anything.

It must have been the first time I’ve voted for a woman for president since Michele Bachmann wasn’t on the ballot here in 2012.

Regardless of who wins in November, I’ve inoculated myself against all criticism as I can say, “Don’t blame me; I voted for Tulsi.”

(Explanation of “chowse” here.)

All the cool kids are doing it, so I thought I would mention how I voted this year:

• I voted “No” on all ballot initiatives.
  I can understand the pithy and simple power-to-the-people reasoning behind the ballot initiative principle. You want a way to get around legislators who are in the pocket of Big Business or Big Whackadoodle, so you get a number of people to sign onto your petition, and it gets put on the ballot, and if the majority of Missourians vote for it, it becomes law.

  Except that’s not how it really works. Instead, you get a powerful interest group that can’t get their laws passed in the legislature to pay a lot of people to go a lot of places to try to squeeze out enough signatures on a petition after all the fakes are knocked off it to get the petition on the ballot. Then, if you have a friendly Secretary of State, it doesn’t get rewritten and gets put onto a ballot with a low turnout that your passionate partisans will turn out for to ensure it gets passed and then it gets written into the state constitution and is therefore almost untouchable, or you get an unfriendly Secretary of State that obfuscates it and puts it onto a ballot where your partisans will be overwhelmed by the other side.

  The point is that the ballot initiative process is as open to as much gimcrackery as the normal legislative process, but it carries with it a fake veneer of democracy, but really it’s more of “One Man, One Vote, Once.”

  Thanks, but I’d rather leave it to the actual legislators who can monkey with the laws and then unmonkey with the laws.

• I voted “No” on all judge and justice retention.
  Here in Missouri, we get to vote whether judges and justices should continue to serve in office. Unless one does something particularly egregious, voters will retain them on the whole, but I don’t ever want it to be unanimous, so I vote against it on principle.

• I voted straight ticket Republican except for the auditors.
  I voted for the Democrats in the state and county auditor positions because, if elected, they’ll hound the Republicans as a matter of course and act as a check to make sure the elected Republicans do things properly, without impropriety or else face embarrassment or a primary loss the next election. I’m not generally afraid of Democrats in state and local positions, as they’re accountable to the local or state voters, but when they go national, they’re beholden to the national party. For example, not all auditors make good senators.

And now that I’ve voted, I’m not going to spend the evening watching the election results.

And when the morning comes, no matter the results, life will go on much as it has before.

I don’ know what it means, but we’re, what, four weeks out from the election, and we’ve got a contested Senate race (I can tell it’s contested, because I cannot listen to the radio because the incumbent and her allies are spending an awful lot of money to oversimplify things and impress upon me that the other candidate wants to cut health care costs by smothering senior citizens with pillows and reselling their medications) along with local and state races, and I have not seen many Republican yard signs.

As one drives through the city of Springfield, one sees the occasional signs for local candidates identified by only a single name and, frankly, no indicator of what the singularly monikered person is running for, signs for that one guy who’s always running for office and losing (no, not that other guy who’s always running and losing–he got himself on the Republican primary ballot this year because he knows the only way to win down here is to be on the Republican line), and a couple others, including one or two for the former educator and more recently former legislator running for presiding commissioner probably in the “let’s put a tax increase on every ballot” mold of the outgoing Republican office holder who lost in a primary because at the local level, at least, Republican voters don’t want raising taxes as a platform plank. I don’t see many, if any, for the incumbent senator, either.

The dearth of Republican signs, though. How to read those entrails? It’s probably not apathy. The people who casually follow politics and might have picked up a sign from the election office or gotten one from a friend who was passing them out watch the news. They’ve seen that elephant regalia can invite vandalism or worse. How engaged are they? I would bet very. Because there are no signs.

Joplin megadonor is workers’ ‘No. 1 enemy,’ McCaskill says at Springfield Labor Day event:

A Joplin businessman and megadonor is the “No. 1 enemy of working labor” in Missouri, Sen. Claire McCaskill said Monday while urging pro-union supporters to give her a third term in Congress.

Group gives $3 million to Missouri minimum wage campaign:

A Washington, D.C.,-based nonprofit donated $3 million during the weekend to a political action committee supporting an effort to increase Missouri’s minimum wage to $12 an hour.

. . . .

Supporters of U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, are hoping the issue will increase her chances in a tight race for re-election.

Sweet Christmas, she is a plucky heroine, ainna?

I was out working in my garage over the holiday weekend, and another group was running “educational” spots every commercial break about how Josh Hawley wants to suffocate type 1 diabetes sufferers with a sofa cushion or something.

It’s certainly a good time for me to have discovered streaming music from my phone instead of listening to the radio.

On Facebook, a fellow I’ve known for over a decade posted a link to an article about graffiti with the swastika as the T in Trump and asked someone to justify it.

The papers covering it handily as though this is pro-Trump graffiti, quoting all sorts of anti-Trump people hoping Trump will disavow this:

Philadelphia’s Anti-Defamation League chapter quickly condemned the vandalism, referencing its eerie coinciding with Kristallnacht, a coordinated Nazi attack in 1938 during which hundreds of Jews had their storefronts smashed throughout Germany.

“Swastikas and the Nazi salute send a message of intolerance and hate to the entire community,” Regional Director Nancy Baron said in a statement. “While we view this as an isolated incident, we cannot allow this behavior to become routine. Everyone has a role to play in combating bigotry — we must advocate, educate and investigate until hate is no longer welcome in our society.”

One damn minute, Admiral.

What we have here is a piece of unattributed graffiti comparing Trump to Hitler. The articles present no evidence that the vandals were Trump supporters. NONE.

But of course the vandals must be Trump supporters, because people in the media and on the social media have said so.

Pay no mind to those on the left have equated Trump to Hitler.

• Cher Doesn’t Mince Words When She Compares Trump To Hitler On Twitter
• Trump-Hitler comparison seen in New York Times book review
• Media ethics writer compares Trump to Hitler

Come on, that’s three examples from relatively high profile Internet locations or celebrities. You know it’s been all over your Twitter feed and Facebook feed and everywhere else for six months. “Trump is Hitler!”

Ergo, graffiti comparing Trump to Hitler must be in support of Trump as Hitler. Ergo, somehow.

It’s not just Trump that the left has called Hitler over and over.

Scott Walker is Hitler

George W. Bush is Hitler

Clearly, these protestors and their supporting iconography were not the work of Walker and Bush supporters, but the Trump graffiti is because, what? That was then and this is now?

So we’ve got an incident of graffiti, but clearly it is a symbol that fits into and reinforces a specific narrative. The apex of mid-century American Existentialist thought that sixties thinkers could only dream would become mainstream.

Regardless of the actual realities of the incident, including the vandal and his or her motive. Concrete details are not the point. The narrative and the meme are the point.

WikiLeaks Bombshell: Clinton Relied on Trump Primary Win, GOP Obliged.

Back in December, I said:

And I can’t help wonder if we’re not seeing a McCaskill Manipulation strategy at work here.

As you might remember, gentle reader, back in 2012 I highlighted a pre-primary strategy by Claire McCaskill to run ads claiming that Todd Akin was too conservative for Missouri. Her organization did this because they felt that Akin would be the weakest candidate to face Claire McCaskill in the actual election.

It worked, of course; Akin was nominated and then said something that everyone could pile on, and Akin lost and we have Senator McCaskill for a couple more years.

. . . .

Now, I don’t want to go all JournoList / Conspiracy Theory here (although the mere inclusion of the word JournoList and the aforementioned boasted McCaskill Manipulation should indicate that conspiracy theories might often involve actual conspiracies), but could we be seeing something like it in the Trump candidacy?

So, yeah.

#LetWhorfinDebate

I saw this ad on the television accidentally for some reason, probably when I couldn’t hit the fast forward button fast enough:

And I thought a couple things, being someone in rural Missouri:

• Thousands of acres? That’s hardly a lot, especially to incite fears of an invasion. This ad must be written by someone in the city.
• So someone is buying a farm. Which means someone is selling a farm. There are many reasons to sell acreage or your farm, but if you want to or need to sell it, you need someone to buy it. Apparently, the producer of the advertisement would prefer that the acreage remain unsold and that the seller continue to drown in mortgage payments, that the seller not capitalize for another opportunity, and that the land go underworked and/or unused.

It’s wrong to put this on Josh Hawley. Apparently, the ad was produced by Tea Party Patriots, which is not even a Missouri organization. But it does have “Tea Party” in the name, so I guess that means it’s Tea Party. Or it’s an organization named that way to capitalize on the sentiment in the country six years ago.

You know, I read a lot of stuff where people who disagree with the Tea Party call it racist or xenophobe, but that doesn’t track with my beliefs or the beliefs of the Tea Partyish people I’ve known. However, it does seem to track with what the consultants are selling.

Right on cue:

A coalition of Asian-American businesses and organizations in Missouri on Sunday criticized what they called racist and xenophobic political ads in the state attorney general race.

Good on ya, consultants! You’ve sold tar and feathers to people who would rather talk about this sort of thing instead of core issues.

Accepting the Republican nomination for President, Donald Trump announces his running mate: Hillary Clinton.

Juxtaposed headlines on StLToday.com:

Trump sometimes speaks out the your own lyin’ eyes formulation when the press asks you who do you believe.

It’s an election year, so Democrats try to de-legitimize voter ID laws by trotting out a World War II veteran who cannot vote with his veteran ID.

In 2012, it was a vet in Ohio.

In 2016, it’s a Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice.

The twist this year is that the Supreme Court Justice is one of the dissenting minority on the court that upheld the measure.