Please note that you can leave a comment on any of our posts at our Facebook page.  Subscribers can also comment at length at our Angel's Corner Forum.

OCTOBER 31,  2018

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

DECENCY – FROM FOX:  Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has reportedly turned down nearly $600,000 that had been raised in his name after sexual misconduct allegations were leveled against him during his confirmation process.  A GoFundMe page through which the funds were raised had a message saying Kavanaugh would not accept the money in order to avoid judicial ethics violations, the Washington Examiner reported.  “I've spoken to a former clerk for Judge Kavanaugh who told me that Kavanaugh’s supporters loved the outpouring of support from this GoFundMe," said conservative blogger John Hawkins, who launched the page Sept. 24. "Judicial ethics rules caution judges against permitting the use of the prestige of judicial office for fund-raising purposes. Justice Kavanaugh will not accept any proceeds from the campaign, nor will he direct that any proceeds from the campaign be provided to any third party."  Obviously, the correct decision.

OUR BRILLIANT COLLEGE STUDENTS – FROM DAILY CALLER:   Students at American University in Washington, D.C., tried to guess who said what about immigration to The Daily Caller News Foundation.  Most of the students guessed the quotes read to them came from President Donald Trump. The quotes actually came from former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.  Many students were surprised to find today’s Democrats speaking with such enthusiasm when it came to cracking down on illegal immigration only two decades ago.
“Negative immigration quotes are only associated with the Republican administration or Donald Trump administration,” a young woman told The DCNF.  I never thought we should ever have lowered the voting age to 18.  I advocated raising it to at least 25.  And you can see the reason.

LEFTIST JOURNALISTS ARE SHOCKED, SHOCKED – FROM DAILY CALLER:   MSNBC reporter Mariana Atencio traveled to Houston to interview voters in a hotly contested congressional district.
...However, in interviews with Latino voters Atencio was stunned to find that they were voting Republican and had a bad opinion of the migrant caravan heading to the U.S. border... “I do believe that if somebody wants to live in the United States, they should go through the official process. So as a result, I tend to ally myself with people who agree with that,” a Texas Latino voter said.  “When you see images like the migrant caravan and President Trump talking about the caravan, does that motivate you to want to vote in a certain way?” Atencio asked.  The voter responded, “Yes, it makes me want to vote Republican. I think if you want to live in this country, you need to abide by its laws.” “That blows my mind,” the MSNBC host said after the segment.  Maybe talking to real voters occasionally would lower the incidents of blown minds.

October 31, 2018       Permalink

THE PRESIDENT DOUBLES DOWN – AT 9:30 P.M. ET:  The president has a way of keeping his promises.  He is toughening his stance about protecting our borders.  The laws of the United States must be obeyed.  From Reuters: 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday the United States could send as many as 15,000 troops to the border with Mexico, as he hardens his stance against a caravan of migrants fleeing violence and poverty in Central America.

The numbers cited by Trump are significantly higher than defense officials have disclosed. The Pentagon said on Monday it was deploying more than 5,200 troops to the border but that the number would rise. On Wednesday, it said more than 7,000 troops would support the Department of Homeland Security along the border.

Several groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have accused Trump of politicizing the military ahead of next week’s congressional elections with his plans to use active military personnel to buttress border patrol efforts.

“As far as the caravan is concerned, our military is out ... We’ll go up to anywhere between 10 and 15,000 military personnel, on top of Border Patrol, ICE and everybody else at the border,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

COMMENT:  Th opinion of the ACLU is insignificant.  It stopped being a civil-liberties organization years ago, and is now part of the amen corner of the American left.

The purpose of the military is to protect the nation and its borders, and to do so by carrying out the lawful orders of the president.  Sending troops to our souther border to back up the work of the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies is not politicizing the military.

October 31, 2018       Permalink

THE CONTEST – AT 10:16 A.M. ET:  Six days to election day.  The president is at 49% in the Rasmussen poll, meaning that all that has been thrown at him in the last week by the Trump-hating press has made almost no difference, at least in this poll, which is the only daily tracker left.

RealClearPolitics is predicting a net gain of two seats for the GOP in the Senate.  The crushing disappointment is Arizona, where it is now widely assumed that Krysten Sinema, who has been described as the best actress in politics today, is overcoming true American heroine Martha McSally for the Senate seat being vacated by Jeff Flake.  Arizona may be the only Republican loss in the Senate. 

It is hard to believe that the state of John McCain will turn to a hard leftist who parades as a moderate.  What is happening to our country?  To Arizona?  In fact, Arizona has been trending from solid red to purple in recent years.  A huge influx of immigrants is probably the main cause.  These folks are subjected to major-league fear tactics, told that if they vote Republican they'll be sent back to Mexico.  In addition, much has been made of Martha's vote against Obamacare.  Arizona has many retirees. 

In the House, RealClearPolitics predicts 204 Dems, 199 Republicans, but with 32 toss-ups.  Almost all the toss-ups are currently held by Republicans, but in districts won by Hillary Clinton.  The Dems may well take the House, but, if the RCP numbers are correct, it won't be by much.  Remember that there are in fact moderate Democrats in Congress.  They are not going to fall on their swords for Maxine Waters.  What we may have is an odd situation in which the moderate Democrats hold the balance of power, and where the House is actually run by Republicans and those moderate Dems.  It's happened before.

In governorships, we have an outside shot at blue Oregon, but I wouldn't put money on it.  The frightening race is Florida, where-hard left and Soros beneficiary Andrew Gillum is running neck-and-neck with so-so GOP candidate Ron DeSantis.  If Gillum wins, he instantly becomes a national ticket possibility, and we may have someone to the left of Barack Obama.

Another fright is Georgia, where Oprah Winfrey is coming in to campaign for leftist Dem Stacey Abrams.  She is not as leftward as Gillum, but she's left enough to bring concern about the future of Georgia. 

We'll keep you informed, but I caution that what we have at this stage is educated guessing.

October 31,  2018     Permalink

OCTOBER 30,  2018

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

AMERICANS AREN'T BUYING IT – FROM HOT AIR:  I’m not sure if having a quarter of the public blame the president for an attempted domestic terror attack is a “good” result. But since the media seems nearly unanimous in its belief that he does, if only as an (im)moral inspiration, this is worth noting.  The topline numbers: 24 percent say he bears a “lot” of blame, 15 percent say he bears “some,” 10 percent say he bears a “little,” and a full 50 say he bears zippo. All told, then, it’s 49/50. Say, I wonder if those divides fall along partisan lines.  These are the results of a poll for Huffington Post.  They deal only with the attempted bombings of Democratic figures last week, not with the horror in Pittsburgh on Saturday.  The attempts to blame the president for the "atmosphere" in the country are reminiscent of the attempts to blame George W. Bush for almost everything after he won, by a whisker, the 2000 presidential election.  The real story here is the hatred directed toward conservatives and Republicans.  That is the scandal.

WE'LL BUY YOU A TICKET – FROM FOX:   Barbra Streisand is once again thinking about leaving the United States for political reasons.  In a Tuesday interview with The New York Times, the 76-year-old star admitted that she's considering moving to Canada if the Democrats don't win a majority in the House of Representatives in the midterm elections next week.  "I want to sleep nights, if we take the House I’ll be able to sleep a little bit better," Streisand told the outlet, adding that if they don't take control she's been "thinking about" a potential move.  "I’ve been thinking about, do I want to move to Canada? I don’t know. I’m just so saddened by this thing happening to our country."  "It’s making me fat," she continued. "I hear what he said now, and I have to go eat pancakes now, and pancakes are very fattening. We make them with healthy flour, though — almond flour, coconut flour."  I'm so glad we have the recipe.  As for Barbra, we will provide her with a plane ticket, an extra baggage allowance, a newly washed rental car, and a motel room near a psychiatric facility that serves low-calorie pancakes.

AND THE POMPOSITY ROLLS ON – FROM FUTURE OF CAPITALISM:  Just in time for the midterm elections, Ben & Jerry's ice cream has launched "pecan resist," a flavor the company says is meant to convey that "we can peacefully resist the Trump administration's regressive and discriminatory policies and build a future that values inclusivity, equality, and justice for people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, refugees, and immigrants." Also, that "we cannot ignore the Trump administration's attacks on our values, our environment, and our very humanity."  I may buy an eyedropper full.  No more. 

October 30,  2018   Permalink

THE DEMOCRATIC CRACK-UP – AT 2:08 P.M. ET:   The Democratic Party may do reasonably well next week, but the fact is that it is a divided, embittered party that is primed to split apart over basic values.  From the Politico, the finest piece I've read about the Dems recently:

Perhaps the most dramatic new development on the left has been the rise of the “democratic socialist” banner, a once-fringe political label embraced by Bernie Sanders, which increasingly has drawn enthusiasm from college-educated voters since the 2016 election. Socialism in its serious form involves significant changes in society—in theory, much higher taxes on the rich, which are paid out in the form of much more generous welfare programs for the less well-off.

But upper-income Democratic voters, especially older ones, have never shown much appetite for deeply redistributive policies. In 2015, when President Barack Obama proposed ending the deduction for college savings accounts—a tax break whose benefit goes almost entirely to upper-income voters—he was shot down by liberal powerhouses Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. It’s one thing for progressive candidates to call for free college, Medicare for all, a jobs guarantee or universal basic income. Those remain abstractions and don’t touch the lifestyles of the well-off. Propose a new tax on household incomes above $100,000 a year—the top 25 percent of households, a group overrepresented in some of the bluest districts in America—and see how well it goes over.

And, about our little Evita from the Bronx:

Ocasio-Cortez, the young Latina who proudly identifies as a democratic socialist, hadn’t been all but vaulted into Congress by the party’s diversity, or a blue-collar base looking to even the playing field. She won because she had galvanized the college-educated gentrifiers who are displacing those people. “It was the Bernie Bros,” one top Crowley adviser said as he surveyed the wreckage the day after the election. “They killed us.”

“He didn’t lose. New York lost,” says Moin Choudhury, a Bangladeshi immigrant and the president of a local political club, who credits Crowley for intervening several years ago to get a client of his out of immigration detention. “To have somebody in that position, a big leader in Congress, maybe a speaker who could represent us in Congress, to lose in that moment—New York lost. I don’t know what is going to happen next.”

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It is filled with insight and excellent reporting.  Turns out our little Evita is more the darling of the rich than the darling of the "workers."  And that is the fault line in the "new" Democratic Party.

October 30, 2018        Permalink

ONE WEEK TO GO – AT 11:46 A.M. ET:  We vote in a week, and there is absolutely no certainty about the outcome.  I do get a sense, and it's only a sense, that the Democrats have made some gains in the last week.  It is possible, and this is speculation, that the horrible events have worked to the Democratic Party's favor, in part because they have given the tasteless brigades of the journalistic left a chance to bash the president and his party. 

There is plenty of evidence that most Americans are wise to the ways of the press, but some are not, and if the leftist journalists can move the needle only two or three points they can produce a profound effect on the makeup of the next Congress. 

Races are tightening.  From Fox: 

With a week to go until voters cast their midterm ballots, several long shot Senate candidates are catching up in the polls and adding another element of drama to the final stretch.

In Texas, where media darling Democrat Be to O’Bourke is running a well-funded campaign against Republican Seen. Ted Cruz, a Quinn University poll released Monday shows O’Bourke just 5 points behind Cruz in the deep-red state.

O’Bourke has benefited from intense media coverage and colossal fundraising, raking in more than $70 million since entering the race last year (compared with the $40 million Cruz has raised since 2013). Despite that attention, a number of polls have shown him to be as much as 10 points back. The Quinn poll suggests O’Bourke may be more competitive as the election draws closer.

"Forbore is within striking distance, but time is running out in a race that Democrats have hoped would deliver an upset victory that would be key to a Senate takeover," Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University poll, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez is only 5 points ahead of GOP challenger Bob Hugin, according to an Emerson poll released Monday, as the Republican tries to capitalize on the incumbent's ethics problems.

Menendez was found to have broken Senate ethics rules on receiving gifts, though a federal bribery case against him resulted in a mistrial last year. Hugin also has revived allegations that Menendez had sex with underage prostitutes during trips to the Dominican Republic -- allegations that Menendez has adamantly denied.

Hugin has been outspending Menendez by 3-1, with the majority of money going to ads hitting Menendez. But Menendez has been given a boost by the Senate Democrats' super PAC, which announced it would move another $2.8 million to Menendez, on top of another $3 million it recently shifted to New Jersey this month in an effort to keep Menendez in office.

COMMENT:  Losing Texas would be a serious blow to Republicans, especially since the winning Beto is the lightest of the lightweights.  He is a fine candidate for a student government, but not for a real one.

Despite all the hoopla, I expect New Jersey to return to its usual darkness and send Menendez back to Washington.

Other races are both exciting and frightening.  It is hard to believe that Arizona, the home of John McCain, would send a certified leftist wingnut like Krysten Sinema to the United States Senate, and reject Martha McSally, an American patriot who was the first American woman to fly in combat.  But it looks like it's happening.  Two recent polls show Sinema with a growing lead.

We look increasingly good in Missouri and Indiana, and Dean Heller might just hold on in Nevada.  In Florida, the race between great Governor Rick Scott and incumbent Bill Nelson is considered a toss-up.

Turnout is everything. 

October 30,  2018     Permalink