Observations on Tim Walz’s Advice On How Democrats Should Go About “Winning the Battle” of the 2024 Presidential Election

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?]

The Legitimate and Important Ethics Conflict Behind the Springfield Cat-Eating Controversy

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…

…as you can see.

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Open Forum: Think, Write and Reveal…

…and I’ll be over here coughing.

Usually I introduce these Friday fora with some reference to current events, but I woke up sick for the second straight day, and this time I feel too foggy to focus.

So I’m counting on you while I have two cups of Italian roast and some DayQuil. Yum.

A Crazy Argument With A Trump-Deranged Friend Made Me Post This….

…so don’t blame me. Not too much, anyway.

I told my freind that I bailed on the debate when the ABC Axis hacks didn’t factcheck Harris’s repeating the Big Lie about Trump praising the Charlottesville white supremacists. My freind, who is about as Trump-Deranged as one can get, argued that yes, it’s true that Trump didn’t mean that and that the insinuation that he did had been debunked repeatedly, even on CNN and by Snopes. But, she said, Harris accurately quoted Trump, so she was technically accurate.

I reminded my freind, a lawyer who should know better, that using a fact out of context to mislead is called “deceit,” and that deceit is a variety of lie. Her response: “Well, Trump speaks imprecisely, so it’s legitimate to call attention to that.” But, I said, calmly, that wasn’t Harris’s purpose in using the quote. To that, my friend replied, “Then Trump should have explained what he meant.”

“So,” I said, “your theory is that it was Trump’s job to factcheck Harris, while the moderators factchecked him! That seems fair…” She also told me that her extreme-Left daughter saw the debate and thought that the moderators were clearly trying to help Trump.

Wow.

All of this leads me to quote Ann Coulter, whom I have scrupulously ignored for years once it became clear that she is a performance artist who concocts her opinions in order to get the most headlines and the most campus speaking gigs, and has no integrity whatsoever. I have no idea what she really believes, and I certainly don’t care. Ann is, however, not stupid. She has also credibly (to some) posed as a Never Trump conservative, so I found her observations about the debate interesting, and, as they appear to dovetail with mine, astute:

Trump is Trump, a known quantity. His scattershot delivery isn’t going to shock anyone. If you already detest the man, your view was confirmed. But if you don’t hate him, Trump put a lot of points on the board, while Harris said nothing, and said it smugly.

The debate sure didn’t give undecided voters what they wanted from Harris. As has been widely reported, they are waiting breathlessly for some hint of what she believes and what she would do as president. After the ABC debate, they’re still waiting. About all they learned is that Harris comes from a middle-class family…

But they know that life was better under Trump. And they know that Harris, like Clinton, is a nasty woman.

Who IS This Woman? Why Does CNN Let Someone This Dishonest Appear On A Panel? Do CNN Viewers Realize What the Significance of Her Argument Is?

There are so many frustrating aspects of this clip from CNN’s Newsnight, but let’s get to the main issue: what the Harris surrogate/Democratic Party mouthpiece/shameless gaslighter said:

I find it ironic where, in 2020, Republicans were screaming at the top of their lungs when people were changing rules because we were in a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic and we needed to do it to accommodate voters …I want to remove politics from this and talk about people being actually able to exercise the franchise. And it is disenfranchising North Carolina voters right now that they believe they can start voting today and they are not. That is how confusion is disseminated in communities. That is how mis and disinformation starts, that is how you start to see narratives that our system is not working, when you start to let politics play into the role of when people should be able to start voting. Follow the rules. He was on the ballot, he wanted to run, he decided he didn’t want to run, he should have made that decision 6 months ago, but disenfranchising voters is not right.

The issue being discussed is a Democratic Party that was once fighting to keep Robert Kennedy Jr. OFF the ballot in states where the party thought he would draw votes away from Biden is fighting to stop him from removing his name from the ballot because he has dropped out of the race and endorsed Donald Trump. NOW they want him on the ballot because they think he will take votes from Trump.

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Ethics Alarms Is Ready To Predict the Winner of the 2024 Election…

And it is...Abraham Lincoln!

It’s just one poll, but it’s a New York Times poll, and if any left-leaning, biased polling result is likely to try to bury bad news for the Democrats, it’s this one. The New York Times/Siena national poll was released this morning, and showed Donald Trump starting to regain the edge he had before Joe Biden was forced out and the news media joined the Democrats in a “She Isn’t What She Is” campaign of excitement, joy, and virtually no substance whatsoever.

Trump now leads Kamala Harris nationally among likely voters by a 48–47 margin, and Trump hasn’t received as much as 48% at the ballot box yet, not in 2016 or 2020. Though Newsbuster’s analysis shows Harris getting over 80% positive press coverage in this period (for doing nothing but repeating boilerplate, non-substantive speeches off teleprompters and avoiding any one-on-one interviews with even friendly journalists), and though she has reversed many of her most radical positions (more on that in a second) while saying that “her values haven’t changed,” whatever that means, “the ruse isn’t working,” as Jeff Blehar says at the Never Trump National Review:

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Unethical Quote of the Month: President Biden

“We should have named it what it was.”

 —President Joe Biden,  speaking Thursday at an event in Westby, Wisconsin this week, crowing about the “progress we’ve made together by our ‘Investing in America’ agenda.” Biden then said, “I’m proud to announce that my, uh, my investments, that through my investments, the most significant climate change law ever. And by the way, it is a $369 billion bill. It’s called the — uh, we, we should have named it what it was.”

Did you know Donald Trump lies all the time? Ah, but you can trust President Biden, Kamala Harris and the Democrats to tell the truth—you know, like deceptively naming a bill that had literally nothing to do with inflation (except to potentially make it worse) “The Inflation Reduction Act” because the regime was under fire for exploding inflation since it took over from the Trump Administration. “See?” the bill’s title was supposed to convey to members of the public with IQs below 90, “We’re fixing the problem!” Admitting that what was stated to the public as fact was really false after the goal of the lies has already been achieved is an example of how telling the truth can be almost as unethical as the lie itself. It is rubbing salt into the wound, like shouting “Sucker!” at the victim of a scam.

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Unethical, Illegal…But Clever! The Pop Music Streaming Scam

Every technological advance creates opportunities for the far-sighted, creative and clever to achieve great things, or, at very least, make great profits. Artificial Intelligence is one of the most significant technological advances we have experienced in quite a while, and the good, the bad and the ethically ugly are just beginning to see all of its possibilities. Michael Smith, 52, seems to have been ahead of most of them. He is in the last category.

The enterprising con man [time for “allegedly” here] used artificial intelligence to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs, attached them to imaginary bands, then put them on streaming services where he had them downloaded by non-existent listeners. This resulted in a very real haul of about $10 million, according to a federal indictment that was unsealed this week.

Smith, who is a trained musician and who knows a bit about computers too, used A.I. to create music and assigned it to computer-generated artists with names redolent of the sillier band names in the Sixties, notably “Strawberry Alarm Clock”: “Callous Post,” “Calorie Screams,” “Calvinistic Dust.” The songs had equally nonsensical titles, like “Zygotic Washstands,” “Zymotechnical” and “Zygophyllum.”

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KABOOM! “The Ethicist” Enables Voting Fraud…

My head exploded because I cannot imagine how someone who calls himself an ethicist could possibly answer this question…

“My Grandma Has Dementia. Should I Help Her Vote?”

…any other way but “NO! Of course no. What the hell’s the matter with you?

Incredibly, Prof. Appiah, an NYU philosophy professor, answers in part,

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Thoughts On An Unethical Meme…

The meme above appeared this morning in Powerline’s usually amusing and occasionally brilliant “The Week in Pictures.” It was also used to illustrate “Tucker Carlson’s bad history,” an excellent essay by The Washington Examiner’s Dominic Greene on the same topic as the recent EA post about Tucker’s slobbering endorsement of a Hitler apologist and Holocaust denier.

Greene wrote in part,

The latest imbecile to visit Tucker’s virtual shed is Darryl Cooper. Cooper’s eccentric rambles through the thickets of history have won him virality on X. Unfortunately, the virality is akin to intellectual syphilis. Once you’ve convinced yourself that the truth is hidden, nay, occulted by dark forces, you can mask the worst symptoms of infection, but the mind rot is hard to cure. Cooper has convinced himself that Winston Churchill was a “terrorist” installed in power by “Zionists” and “financiers” so he could be the “chief villain” of World War II. Cooper also claims the Holocaust was an accident and that prewar Europe really did have what Hitler called a “Jewish problem,” rather than a problem with Jews.

Carlson introduced Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper blew it by admitting that he’d prepared for his interminable podcast series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by reading six books and then recited a medley of baseless suppositions, false generalizations, and open “secrets” about the origins of World War II. Had Carlson attempted actual journalism, this tissue of lies would have disintegrated like cheap toilet paper. Instead, Carlson toggled between his customary facial expressions (frowning as if struck by a bolt of historiographical lightning, slack-jawed and mindblown as though he’s still following the Grateful Dead) and failed to question any of it.

In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the kingdom of the illiterate, Mr. Six-Books is a regular Arnold Toynbee. If your “research” skips primary documents and foreign languages but convinces you that Hitler was misunderstood (he wasn’t), that Churchill was a “terrorist” (he wasn’t), that the Germans invaded Poland without a plan for what to do with prisoners of war (they didn’t), and that the Holocaust was accidental (it wasn’t), you might have an ax to grind — perhaps a double-headed ax with runic symbols. But why is Tucker fawning over a poor man’s Pat Buchanan?

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