RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-taxes-that-must-not-be-named-11667581288?mod=hp_opin_pos_6#cxrecs_s
The Taxes That Must Not Be Named James Freeman

More than a decade after former Gov. Scott Walker signed into law reforms to protect Wisconsin taxpayers from the increasingly expensive burdens of government employee unions, Democrats still can’t stop talking about him—even if they can’t bring themselves to mention his name.

Mr. Walker left office almost four years ago and isn’t on the ballot this year. But at a Democratic rally in Milwaukee County’s West Allis on Thursday, several speakers angrily referred to “he who must not be named.” Mr. Walker’s signature law, Act 10, was described in tones one might reserve for a description of a heinous crime. After enacting this sensible 2011 reform that limited the collective bargaining power of government unions and made public employees cover more of the costs of their expensive benefit plans, Mr. Walker further enraged the left by making Wisconsin a right-to-work state. This also explains why he was a favorite villain on Thursday at the event hosted by the United Steelworkers at a local union hall.

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As for the event’s headliner, Democratic Senate candidate Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, it seems there are also a few other things he isn’t eager to mention.

Mr. Barnes is challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson and there is no race in the country that offers a sharper philosophical contrast. The New York Times recently reported that helping Mr. Barnes get elected is the top priority of Vermont’s socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has generously assisted with fundraising. During the Democratic primary, Mr. Barnes received endorsements from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and other prominent advocates for government expansion.

Mr. Johnson, on the other hand, is perhaps the most spirited and effective defender of the taxpayer in Washington—a town where there aren’t many of them. An accountant who used to run a manufacturing company, Mr. Johnson habitually annoys his congressional colleagues by pointing out the destructiveness of their spending habits.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/11/03/protester-assaults-republican-u-s-senate-candidate-in-new-hampshire-n1642451

Don Bolduc, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, reportedly avoided an attacker’s punch just before taking the stage for Wednesday’s debate with Democratic incumbent Sen. Maggie Hassan.

Bolduc, 60, a retired Army brigadier general, was unharmed during the incident. Police identified the assailant as Joseph Hart, 37, of Greenville, R.I.

“Prior to that debate, dozens of supporters were on hand for both candidates,” local police said in a statement. “During that time, St. Anselm College instructed a male party that they were no longer welcome on their property.”

“A short time later, a disturbance occurred when Mr. Hart approached Mr. Bolduc who was greeting his supporters,” the statement continued. “Officers converged on the area and all parties were separated. Following that disturbance, Mr. Hart was taken into custody by the Goffstown Police Department and charged with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.”

The Bolduc campaign said in a statement the incident was proof that it’s “time to lower the temperature of the political discourse in this country” and expressed gratitude towards local law enforcement for their quick response.

Incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan has led in the polls for most of the campaign, but two recent polls have shown Bolduc ahead, and RealClearPolitics now projects him to win the race.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/11/03/democrats_face_historical_headwinds_in_tuesdays_midterm_elections_148415.html

Regardless of all that wispy smoke Democrats and their allies in the news media are blowing, key polls suggest Republicans are still likely to win back control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections and have a better than even chance to take over the Senate.

Historically, one of the strongest indicators – perhaps the strongest indicator – of how a party will do in midterm elections is the job approval rating of the incumbent president. Parties of presidents who are down in the polls usually lose congressional seats. Parties of presidents up in the polls generally gain seats in the midterms.

In other words, how a president is doing a reliable predictor of how Americans will vote in congressional elections.

The latest October Gallup Poll has President Biden’s job approval at 41% among registered voters. Among voters dissatisfied with how things are going in the country, three of four disapprove of Biden. With numbers like that, most Democrats on the ballot should be running scared.

Key indicators suggest Americans are in a sour mood over a slew of issues.

COVID and its disruptions of everyday life still have people anxious. High cost of groceries, gasoline, and mortgages are straining family budgets. Rising crime and murder rates in cities have people fearful. And the relentless tide of illegal immigration at the southern border poses serious physical and financial challenges to communities struggling to absorb migrants.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-hollywood-power-brokers-mugged?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“This is like a breaking point,” said Nicole Avant, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under Barack Obama and is the wife of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos. We were talking about Los Angeles, where she was born and grew up and met her husband. “Who is in charge here? How is this happening? It’s the drug addicts in front of people’s houses, it’s people naked in the street—there’s so much chaos, and Rick is the opposite of that, and we just need to reel things in and do things in a different way.” She was referring to Rick Caruso, the billionaire real-estate developer running for mayor of the second-biggest city in the country.

Avant is black Hollywood royalty. Her father, Clarence Avant, now 91, was a legend in the music industry, managing the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Freddie Hubbard and Bill Withers. They called him the Black Godfather. 

So you might think that Avant would be supporting Karen Bass’s bid to be mayor of Los Angeles. Bass, who is black, is a six-term Democratic congresswoman. In 2020, she was on Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist. Days ago, Obama, Avant’s old boss, endorsed her.

But Avant is backing Bass’s rival, Caruso—who was a Republican for years, and then, in 2011, switched his registration to “decline to state,” and then, in January of this year, switched to Democrat, just in time to run for mayor in a city overflowing with Democrats.

To Avant, to any number of Caruso supporters, all that is beside the point. Los Angeles, they say, is heading toward a cliff and everything is at stake in this election.

Avant said she found it “very insulting” when Bass supporters told her she had an obligation to support Bass because she’s a black woman. “I don’t ever vote on race or gender,” Avant said. “I’m a free thinker. People told me not to support Barack Obama and to support Hillary Clinton for the same reason, because she’s a woman. You can’t win.”

“The concept of hiring the best person for the job, especially in a situation like this, is not gone,” Bryan Lourd, co-chairman of the Creative Artists Agency and a Caruso supporter, told me. “I don’t think this city survives with more of the same old ideas about leadership.” (CAA is the biggest shop in town and represents, among many other celebrities, Scarlett Johansson, Steven Spielberg, Ava DuVernay and Reese Witherspoon.)

https://victorhanson.com/how-the-projectionist-game-is-played-part-two-election-denialist/

Think of any recent leftwing accusation against the Right. Then automatically assume that it is evidence of the accuser’s own culpability for the very charge he levels against others. In other words, the Left projects upon its opponents exactly what it fears is most incriminating among its own ranks. As a general rule, leftwing projectionism is a sign of culpability.

Donald Trump did deny the integrity of the 2020 election and does to this day. While he is probably wrong that the final and “real” popular vote count would have given him a popular vote victory, he is right to lodge legitimate objections to the way the balloting was conducted in some states on the following bases:

a) The Left funded a massive effort to change balloting laws in key pivotal states under the cloak of the Covid pandemic in spring 2020. The effect of liberal state court decisions or administrative edicts was often to nullify the state legislatures’ laws and rights to establish voting procedures. More practically, they changed state laws on the books that governed the rejection rate of non-Election-Day ballots. The result was the rejection rate dropped in many states even as they were flooded with historic numbers of non-Election Day ballots, most of them for Joe Biden.

A normal 3-5 percent rejection rate fell, depending on the state, to between 2.0 and 0.5 percent—despite more than 102 million ballots not cast on Election Day. Ballots that did not match registrars’ lists, that had incomplete or wrong names, that did not have full addresses, or that did not have signatures or signatures that matched the printed names, were often accepted. And there may have been many millions of such ballots that in prior elections would have been summarily rejected.

Otto von Bismarck reputedly said: “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” Never having gone hunting or been in combat, I assume that the “Iron Chancellor” was correct about those events. However, having watched elections for seventy years, I know he is right about politicians who give speeches that exaggerate past accomplishments, denigrate opponents, and fabricate plans for the future. But, as the author-poet Benét is quoted in the rubric above, doing so is “an American custom, like eating corn on the cob.” The difference today, though, is that elections don’t end on election day: witness Hillary Clinton in 2016, Stacy Abrams in 2018, and Donald Trump in 2020. 

While there are issues that concern us all, we have politicians today, as one pundit put it, who have even bigger issues – ones of excessive egos and acute sensitivity to criticism. Nevertheless, issues are plentiful: abortion and a woman’s right to choose; inflation, which is hitting the pocket books of everyone; the economy – while third quarter preliminary GDP (+2.6%) was a welcome relief after two quarters of negative growth, rapid inflation and escalating interest rates portend stagflation; a surfeit of jobs and a decline in labor participation rates suggest a dearth of willing workers; education, where the drop in test scores accelerated during Covid, but the decline began earlier; immigration, where a needed increase in legal immigration is being held hostage to a flood of illegal immigrants; crime, which has increased across the country, but disproportionately in inner cities; discrimination against Asians and Jews, reminiscent of the anti-Semitism of the 1920s, scare mongering over climate change by radicals with little understanding of history and climatology; and the teaching of a false narrative regarding the founding of the United States, along with the cancellation of ideas that do not conform to progressive ideology.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_hands_off_our_kids_election.html

It is often said that good political campaigns are forward-looking.  Obama sold “hope and change.”  Trump promised to “Make America Great Again.”  With control of Congress and the presidency heading into the 2022 midterm elections, what future are Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats offering to lure voters toward their side?  It appears to be one in which boys are celebrated as girls, education is reduced to political indoctrination, and Green New Deal policies continue to exacerbate food and fuel costs.

What is the Democrats’ argument for re-election?  Despite staggering inflation, crime, and illegal immigration, things could be much worse?  If you loved masks and lockdowns, get ready for more?  You’ll forget about the pain at the pump once war with Russia officially begins?  Celebrate the future by mutilating and aborting the children of today?  Whatever future Democrats are selling voters, it is bereft of hope, is riddled with pain, steals from Americans’ depleted savings, and leaves those growing up today with little but spare change.

Should the midterm vote end up going decidedly in Republicans’ favor, perhaps it will be remembered as the “Save Our Kids” election.  More than any other issues, Democrats are enthusiastically vocal about their support for unrestricted abortion and gender reassignment surgeries for confused children.  Their rallying cry could be, “Vote for us, and we’ll help you dispose of unwanted children or at least redesign them according to taste.”  Those might feel like winning issues to a gaggle of champagne socialists imbibing w(h)ine spritzers over brunch, but to Americans who cherish marriage and family life, they seem downright ghoulish.  Once you throw in video footage of Creepy Joe Biden, whose senility remains unobservable only to the White House press corps, regularly invading the personal space of young girls squirming in distress, the Democrats’ midterm message looks like little more than a grim promise to sniff, maim, and murder America’s children on demand.  If you hate children, that’s some future!

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/01/the-democrats-deserve-a-drubbing-in-the-midterms/

With about a week to go until the US Midterms on 8 November, pundits are predicting a ‘red tsunami’ – that is, huge Republican gains across the country. Democrats know it and are ‘[bracing] for a red wave in the House’, according to the New York Times. They are even having to spend resources defending formerly safe seats.

So, in a sign of things to come, Democrats have already begun the blame game. As a sorry Politico headline has it: ‘Democrats debate themselves: why do we suck?’ Some Democrats say it is their messaging. For others, it is a lack of focus on jobs and inflation. Barack Obama believes the Democrats’ problem is that they have become too woke. The former president warns the Democrats not to be ‘buzzkills’, saying that political correctness makes people ‘feel as if they are walking on eggshells’. Everyone is looking to blame something.

Whatever the cause, the Democrats are right to be worried. At stake in the Midterms is control of Congress, as well as many state governorships and legislatures. Right now, the Democrats have effective control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate (the latter is split 50-50, but vice president Kamala Harris casts tie-breaking votes). The Republicans need to flip only five Democratic seats to retake a House majority, and polls indicate they will do so handily. In the Senate, the Republicans need only one seat from the Democrats, and their chances look promising in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Controlling both the House and Senate would be a huge win for the Republicans, meaning they could block president Joe Biden’s agenda for the remaining two years of his term.

It is true that, in terms of the election cycle, the Democrats are swimming against the tide. Since the Second World War, the party holding the White House has lost an average of 28 House seats in the first Midterms of a new presidency, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.