That was USA Today’s reporting of the Trump assassination attempt yesterday. (I haven’t checked to see if it has been changed.)
The sub-head is a non-sequitur unless the reader is supposed to conclude that there is a causal connection between Trump’s Truth Social post, Vance’s provocative comments on Sunday Morning TV, and the later assassination attempt.
There is no defending such blatant partisan hackery from a news source. The fact that this nonsense could make it to the USA Today site without a sane professional putting a stop to it is damning. Are we supposed to conclude that the shooter was an offended Taylor Swift fan? USA Today might as well have written, “The incident occurred that same day that Trump had hush puppies for breakfast.”
Again, this is how you try rig an election, at least if you’re aiming at the moron vote—which is, sadly, considerable.
Walz, speaking at a Harris rally in Wisconsin, told the faithful that the key to a Democratic victory was their “trying to have that hard conversation in the produce aisle, with the person you saw there at the grocery store, and ask, ‘have you voted yet?”
Observations:
1. If someone I didn’t know were to ask me that “in the produce aisle,” my first response would be, “Who the hell are you?” and my follow-up would be “Bite me!”
2. If someone I knew asked me that as anything but incidental chit-chat preceded by “How’s the family?” and “Are you too disappointed in the Red Sox?,” I’d answer, “No, because I believe everyone should vote on election day unless it’s physically impossible to do so.”
3. The political Left’s fondness for trying to bully or harass people into accepting or adopting their political views is a marker of the totalitarian turn the whole port side of the political spectrum has taken. Maxine Waters urged Democrats to confront Trump officials when they were with their families or walking down the street. Black Lives Matter activists intimidadted diners to profess support for their racist scam “or else.” Starbucks briefly tried to get its barristas to engage customers in debates over social issues. Democrats also have issued guides to haranguing one’s family at Thanksgiving dinner. Has anyone on the political Right advocated this obnoxious and offensive strategy? If so, I missed it.
4. Several wags have noted that the grocery store should be the last place Democrats try to recruit voters…
5. Wow, is Harris-Walz really using “A New Way” as a slogan? How generic and clichéd can you get? In Robert Redford’s “The Candidate,” about the packaging and disillusionment of a Kennedy-esque Senatorial candidate, he was saddled with the fatuous “There’s got to be a better way” as his empty mantra. That movie was made in 1972. Using an old slogan doesn’t exactly make “A New Way” seem very sincere or genuine.
[WordPress wants me to tag this post “Marcel Walz” and “Frightfest.” Huh?]
Were it not for the apparently huge number of women willing to make a radical incompetent, Kamala Harris, the leader of the nation because she favors allowing mothers to kill their unborn children at will, the Democrats would be facing the prospect of a landslide loss come November. Almost every other major demographic group has moved toward Trump and for a very obvious reason: the Biden Presidency has been a disaster, and the Democratic Party has abandoned any fealty to American values, principles and democracy in pursuit of unbridled power. Yet a growing number of voters now say abortion is their top issue in 2024. Amazing. Amazing and indefensible morally and ethically.
Think about that. Abortion—killing unborn human beings—is the most important issue for millions of voters. This isn’t a virtue or a process embraced by admirable cultures: the Soviet Union used abortion as a primary form of birth control, and so has China. These are nations that do not value human life as our founding documents declare that our unique society does. Abortion doesn’t make America stronger economically, or keep the world safe from ruthless foreign regimes, or help small businesses thrive, or make the nation energy independent; it doesn’t make our public education any better, reduce crime, drug addiction and disease. In the vast majority of cases, abortion accomplishes two objectives: it allows women an extra level of protection if their sexual activity results in an inconvenient pregnancy, and it lets mothers employ medical professionals to kill their unwanted children before the law protects those innocent lives.
During the (one hopes) final 2024 Presidential Debate, GOP nominee Donald Trumpstated that “Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof.” Since Democratic appointee Kamala Harris was indicating disagreement, ABC moderator David Muir rushed to her aid, saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
As you know, Muir believed his role in the debate was to”factcheck” Trump while letting Harris declare outright falsehood if she chose to. This time, Trump tried to rebut Muir, saying “…the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.”
Well, as usual Trump misused the word “fraud,”the FBI didn’t issue the jobs report, and if you think he is Satan, or Hitler, or Godzilla, you are not inclined to believe anything he says, but Trump was right and Muir was wrong in addition to being a biased and unethical debate moderator. Newly released data from the Dept. of Justice this week backed Trump. Okay, the crime didn’t literally break through any roofs, so I’m sure that characterization by Trump goes into the Washington Post’s Trump lies database, but still… This was DOJ’s survey from Bureau of Justice statistics that includes crimes that may not have been reported to police. The annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showed total instances of reported violent crime — including rape, robbery and aggravated assault — is up from 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.
The highest recent rate of violent crime during the Biden years was in 2022, when the survey counted 9.8 instances per 1,000 people over the age of 12 being victims, Rape increased from 1.2 incidents per 1,000 in 2020 to 1.7 in 2023. Robbery rose from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 2.6 per 1,000 in 2023. Aggravated assault rose from 2.9 per 1,000 in 2020 to 4.5 per 1,000 in 2023. As Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott tried to explain in a piece published after Muir’s deliberately misleading “factcheck,”
Here’s the full report, and like so many statistics, one can spin and arrange the numbers to make various points, some contradictory. What you can’t do with them, at least ethically, if you are an alleged journalist is interrupt a Presidential debate to make one candidate look dishonest in front of a national audience because you and your employers want his opponent to win the election.
Muir and ABC should suffer serious consequences for their conduct, but they won’t. At very least, both should correct the false impression left by Muir and apologize to the public, and not just in a quiet tweet. That won’t happen either.
How Orwellian of CNN! When former Trump administration official Tricia McLaughlin explained why residents of Springfield, Ohio was being “overrun” by Haitian immigrants, “CNN NewsNight With Abby Phillip” host Phillip insisted that using words like “overrun” was “part of the problem.” Part of what problem? The problem of letting the American public know exactly what is happening in their country as a result of Biden Administration open border policies? Yes, that is a problem for Democrats, and I can certainly understand how our Big Brother party wants to eliminate words that can accurately explain the situation.
What is the nice word for what’s going on when 20,000 recent immigrants from a third world country and hopelessly messed up culture descend on a struggling town of just 60,000? That’s a 30% influx of completely unassimilated foreigners in a town that is having trouble caring for the people living there already. Is the town being “visited”? No, these arrivals are planning on staying: Springfield must seem like Disney World to someone from Haiti. Are the Haitians enhancing the town? No, because such a large group of new residents lacking familiarity with English and other cultural norms can’t avoid causing serious problems, and they are. “Overrun” is as good a word for what’s happening as I can think of.
As he does so often, Donald Trump accepted something he read or heard as gospel truth and repeated it as fact, this time in a Presidential debate, and was promptly ‘factchecked” and subsequently ridiculed. The back-ground: a large number of Haitian “migrants,” who may or may not be here legally, seem to have ended up in Springfield, Ohio. One resident complained that they were eating pet geese and cats, her claim went viral, and the meme-makers have had a field day…
Yikes. A performer who did this in one of my shows would have to enter the witness protection program, because I would be hunting her down. With a crossbow.
South Korean tenor Alfred Kim, responding to uproarious applause, was performing an encore of “E lucevan le stelle,” a famous aria in the third act of Puccini’s “Tosca” at an opera house in Seoul. His co-star, celebrated soprano Angela Gheorghiu who was singing the title role, marched onstage and demanded that he stop.
Without intense preparation, without biased and complicit moderators helping her along, without being able to shift focus to an adversary, this is what Kamala Harris is. Here we have just a ten minute interview featuring soft-ball questions from a friendly Philidelphia journalist, and the result is evasiveness, gibberish and vacuous non-answers.
Some highlights:
Asked about the ephemeral “opportunity economy,” Harris says,
“For example, thinking about developing and creating an opportunity economy where it’s about investing in areas that really need a lot of work and maybe focusing on, again, the aspirations and the dreams but also just recognizing that at this moment in time some of this stuff we could take for granted years ago, we can’t take for granted anymore.”
Oh. What????
Here’s Harris filibustering the basic and easy question, “Talk about bringing down prices and making life more affordable for people. What are one or two specific things you have in mind for that?”…
Well, I’ll start with this. I grew up a middle-class kid. My mother raised my sister and me. She worked very hard. She was able to finally save up enough money to buy our first house when I was a teenager. I grew up in a community of hardworking people. You know, construction workers and nurses and teachers. I try to explain to some people who might not have had the same experience, but a lot of people will relate to this.
You know, I grew up in a neighborhood of people who were really proud of their lawn, you know, and I was raised to believe and to know that all people deserve dignity and that we as Americans have a beautiful character. You know, we have ambitions and aspirations and dreams, but not everyone necessarily has access to the resources that can help them fuel those dreams and ambitions. So, when I talk about building an opportunity economy, it is very much with the mind of investing in the ambitions and aspirations and the incredible work ethic of the American people and creating opportunity for people, for example, to start a small business.
The only competent response to that babbling is to repeat the question as if Harris had a coughing fit or something, which the interviewer did not.
Here’s another Harris gem: “My focus is very much about what we need to do over the next 10-20 years to catch up to the 21st century around, again, capacity, but also challenges.”
Right. I do a lot of public speaking, and if I ever hear myself talking like that, I will check myself into the hospital on suspicion of suffering a stroke.
This is the candidate the Democratic Party believed was so superior to all other options that she was nominated by acclamation, without having to face any opposition at all. Here I would typically add, “Democracy!” but “Idiocracy!” seems more apt.
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Can anyone explain this? The WordPress AI bot was apparently completely confused by Harris’s blather and told me to tag this post “Harry Potter,” “Football” “Dreams” and “Fantasy.”
It is amusing, in a mordant way, to hear Kamala Harris tell her rallies that Donald Trump has an obligation to voters and democracy to agree to a second debate with her. She might as well be wearing a giant blinking “I am a shameless hypocrite!” neon sign on her head, as would be her party, if it had a literal head.
Democrats in general are ethically estopped from making this complaint. President Biden and his party rejected debates before the Democratic primaries. Harris was awarded her DEI Presidential nomination without having to test herself against any other potential nominees, in a debate or on a ballot. Trump, meanwhile participated in a training-wheels debate against whom he was assured would be his opposition in November, and when that presumed nominee metaphorically burst into flames, the Democrats demanded and got a Mulligan.
If I were Trump, I wouldn’t have agreed to the last debate.
The way ABC rigged the debate to boost Harris’s chances made Trump’s decision to eschew future public muggings by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) obvious and unassailable. The moderators “factchecked” Trump five times and Harris not at all: now there’s neutrality for you. (Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!) It’s not as if Harris didn’t repeatedly misrepresent facts and repeat familiar Democrat Big Lies, because she did. The decision had apparently been made by ABC brass to “Get Trump!”
In the much-revered 1988 Kevin Costner film “Bull Durham,” veteran minor league catcher “Crash” Davis mentors a raw, talented rookie pitcher (Tim Robbins) and gets him ready for major league stardom. One of the catcher’s most audacious teaching devices is that when the cocky and none-too-bright pitcher insists on shaking off his signs, “Crash” tells the batter what the next pitch is going to be. Resulst: a massive home run and an chastened pitcher. It’s funny in the film.
The Minnesota Twins apparently have no sense of humor. The team released minor league catcher Derek Bender yesterday for emulating “Crash.” Bender was playing for the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels, the Twins’ Low-A affiliate, and in the second game of a doubleheader last week, Bender tipped off several hitters for the Lakeland Flying Tigers, a Detroit farm team, regarding the next pitch starter Ross Dunn was going to throw. Lakeland scored four runs in the second inning and won the game 6-0 to capture the Florida State League West division and eliminate the Mighty Mussels from playoff contention.
Ethics Alarms 