Donald Trump quipped something to the effect that if his endorsed candidates won on Tuesday, he should get all the credit…..

The Absurdity of the Blame Trump Campaign

Posted Thursday, November 10, 2022   |   By AMAC Newsline   |  225 Comments

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AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan

In an Election Day interview, Donald Trump quipped something to the effect that if his endorsed candidates won on Tuesday, he should get all the credit, and that if they lost, he should get none of the blame. As Trump surely knew when he made the joke, what would actually happen on election night was always destined to be the exact opposite. From the moment the polls closed, the media pundits and establishment Republicans eager to dispatch the former president from the stage were working frantically to ensure that where Trump’s endorsed candidates lost, he would get all of the blame—and where they won, he would get none of the credit.

But this predictable attempt to make Donald Trump the scapegoat for closer-than-expected midterm election results is highly misleading, and an oversimplification in the extreme.

The results of Tuesday night’s elections do not tell an easy story for those looking to pin the blame on Trump.

Many Trump candidates—including J. D. Vance, Ted Budd, almost certainly Kari Lake and Adam Laxalt, potentially Blake Masters, and possibly (after the runoff) Herschel Walker—will have won their races in highly competitive swing states despite most being outspent by tens of millions of dollars.

Where Republican candidates faltered, it was not just those who were chosen by the former president: numerous strong House candidates handpicked by Kevin McCarthy lost races the consultant class had expected to win, including Yesli Vega running against vulnerable Democrat Representative Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, Rhode Island Republican Alan Fung, Mayra Flores and Cassy Garcia on the Texas border, and many others.

If Washington, D.C. consultants and establishment leaders are truly looking for someone to blame for the lack of a red tsunami on Tuesday, there are far more suitable candidates than Trump. First among them would be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose allies appear to be behind much of the Blame Trump campaign.

Whatever virtues McConnell may have as a legislative tactician and fundraiser—and they are evidently considerable—the fact is that McConnell failed to use his power over the past two years to shape the political terrain in ways that would support an overwhelming Republican victory. Even worse, he actively undermined Republican candidates at critical junctures.

At no point in the past two years have Americans seen McConnell and other top Republican leaders in Washington pick real and effective fights with the Biden administration. At no point have they managed to focus the nation on controversies that would be politically advantageous to their party. In Trump’s absence, the GOP establishment has reverted to McConnell’s preferred style of opposition, one of passivity and accommodation.

Time and time again, the Senate Minority Leader has proved fundamentally unserious about opposing the overreaches of the radical left. If establishment Republicans believed that the border crisis was the existential national security disaster they claimed in their speeches, nothing about McConnell’s actions in the Senate would suggest they actually believed it. There were no threats of a government shutdown if the border was not restored. There were no real conflicts over spending bills. There was no significant effort to block key nominees or exact a price for the Biden administration’s extremism. Worst of all, there was virtually no effort whatsoever to use McConnell’s considerable power in a 50-50 Senate to set up strategic fights—to force Joe Biden to finish the wall, or to stop the Department of Homeland Security from trying to censor free speech.

Instead, in a Senate that routinely needed Republican votes to pass Democrat priorities, McConnell ensured that Democrats routinely got them with as little fanfare as possible.

Since January 2021, McConnell’s Senate minority has greenlighted some of the left’s most unpopular legislative and foreign policy initiatives—from the $550 billion “infrastructure” package to emptying out America’s arsenals and sending them to Ukraine. Even if he intended to pass the tens of billions for Ukraine, an effective Republican opposition leader would have insisted on including provisions to secure America’s own border in the process. The American people would have rallied to the Republicans’ side.

That would be the kind of leadership that could have forced the media to give some coverage—any coverage—to Congressional Republicans doing something useful.

Instead, McConnell’s theory appears to have been that he could win the Senate majority by default. When asked what Republicans would do if given the Senate majority, he famously replied that he would tell us after they had won. When NRSC Chairman Rick Scott attempted to put forward a positive vision for the party to rally around, McConnell slapped him down.

In retrospect, these appear to have been grievous mistakes. Republican leaders in Congress succeeded only in making themselves effectively invisible and allowing Democrats to drive the subject of national conversation to other issues—abortion, “democracy,” January 6th.

To make matters worse, McConnell actively attempted to sabotage pro-Trump Republicans on the general election ballot, presumably because he believed they would not back him as majority leader, and concluded that he’d rather be leader of a Republican minority than part of a Republican majority with someone else at the helm.

At a pivotal moment of the campaign, just as voters were tuning-in late in the summer and many were evaluating the Republican nominees for the first time, McConnell—who over the years has forced upon us any number of losing milquetoast clunker candidates—decided the time was right to publicly attack the Republican Party’s nominees. He baselessly called into question the competence and credibility of candidates like Masters, Vance, Walker, and Oz—thus advancing the left’s narrative that the GOP’s candidates were weird, fringe, and extreme, doing immeasurable damage to their prospects just as countless voters were forming their impressions. In fact, all of these candidates were remarkably impressive and accomplished people in their own ways. The “candidate quality” deficit is a convenient self-serving and blame-deflecting myth. But voters got the message: even Mitch McConnell didn’t think they deserved to win.

For all the venom hurled at Donald Trump by establishment Republicans since Tuesday night, perhaps the most selfish and shocking act of the cycle was when, in the closing weeks of the campaign, McConnell poured $9 million into the state of Alaska, saturating the state’s airwaves not in an effort to ensure that the Republican Party’s candidate won, but that she lost. McConnell spent those precious resources to bolster RINO Lisa Murkowski against Trump-backed Kelly Tshibaka. Murkowski, a McConnell ally, has repeatedly insisted on running in the general election after being roundly rejected by Republican primary voters, and was personally responsible for the imposition of the ranked-choice voting system that foiled Republican voters’ desires this year in the state’s House race as well. McConnell spent big on Murkowski’s behalf, despite the fact that she recently voted to confirm Biden’s radical Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, after she had voted against Brett Kavanaugh. If any Republican candidate deserved to lose, it was her.

What might those $9 million McConnell spent against Kelly Tshibaka have done instead for Blake Masters, Herschel Walker, or Mehmet Oz—all of whom were drastically outspent by their Democratic opponents?

Nor is it at all clear that the candidates McConnell ostensibly preferred would have fared better this week. Many people have attacked Trump for endorsing Oz over establishment favorite David McCormick, ignoring that McCormick was a hedge fund CEO who would have been savaged in the general election campaign and played right into Democrat Fetterman’s fake working-class image. In spite of Oz’s imperfections, he may well have been the best of the available options—and those blaming Trump for Oz’s loss are neither honest nor sincere. Likewise, Trump’s endorsement of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano—a subject of great derision on Tuesday night—was not made until Mastriano had the nomination already all but secured. Trump didn’t really push Mastriano on Pennsylvania primary voters—if anything, the opposite occurred. The same was true in New Hampshire, where Trump did not endorse Don Bolduc until after he had already won the primary. Would McConnell’s establishment stalking horse in New Hampshire have won where Bolduc fell short? There is little reason to think so. Bolduc won the primary because he was the best of the candidates who actually ran.

Meanwhile, there is little doubt that the Senate candidates who did win on Tuesday embraced a Trumpian brand of politics and Trump’s America First platform in ways that look likely to serve the party well in the long term. Whether every bet turns out to pay off or not, Trump should be thanked for making a serious attempt to infuse the party with new life, energy, and appeal in the form of genuine talents such as Vance, Masters, and especially Lake, as well as outsider figures like Walker. Kevin McCarthy, to his credit, also made serious efforts in recruiting for the House and put forth many fine candidates. The fact that not all of these candidates won their races is not proof that the GOP would have been better off reverting to the country-club Republicanism of Mitch McConnell.

In the Senate races, the Democrat money advantage almost certainly made an enormous difference. Governors Ron DeSantis in Florida, Brian Kemp in Georgia, and Mike DeWine in Ohio had huge victories Tuesday night. Not to detract in any way from their impressive wins, but one likely reason is that being an incumbent governor of a major state where your party also controls the legislature confers certain advantages—not the least of which is money. This is especially true in states with more permissive campaign finance laws than those that apply to federal candidates. As a result of these factors, neither DeSantis nor Kemp nor DeWine was assaulted with anything like the $65 million spending differential unleashed upon Blake Masters in Arizona. DeSantis raised an estimated $200 million for his reelection, obviously far more than was needed given his margin of victory. Yet while Trump has been subject to constant criticism for amassing his own $100 million war chest (even after relentlessly raising money for candidates across the country), no one seems to blame DeSantis for not diverting his millions to help elect a Republican Senate.

Ultimately, the naysayers trashing Trump for supposedly hindering Republicans in the midterms are precisely the same voices who have desperately wanted to get rid of him for years—and they predictably seized on any unmet expectations Tuesday to go after him again.

When all is said and done, Republicans won control of the House, still have a strong chance to pull off a Senate victory, and have a handful of genuine new stars who now form the basis of a serious national political bench. This comes despite not only the money deficit, but the overwhelming environmental headwinds that Republicans unfairly face in every election. As lawyer Ron Coleman observed Tuesday night: “At no point in US history has every single cultural institution – press, entertainment, academia, unions, public employees, the massive public employee sector, the professions, law enforcement, federal agencies, major corporations, Wall Street, non-profits, mainline Protestant denominations, the military – I could go on – been so profoundly and explicitly aligned the way they have been behind the Left in the last five years.”

With so many powerful forces arrayed against conservatives, Tuesday night was far from the calamity many doomers on the right insist. But if they truly want to know why election night didn’t go as well as they had perhaps expected, rather than trying to exile the one man who has ever successfully resisted the full gale of these forces, the GOP establishment should look back at all the opportunities they have refused to take, and all the fights they have refused to have over the past two years.

The ultimate irony is that as the midterms begin to be seen with perspective, Trump may once again emerge as a hero to the Republican rank-and-file and conservative independents, while those who seized on the moment to indulge their anti-Trump obsession will be left gnashing their teeth that Trump has once again exposed their lack of professionalism as journalists and political operatives.

In the closing days of the campaign, the former president stood in the pounding rain at one of his many large and boisterous rallies, this one in Miami, energetically making the case for the party in an election when he was not even on the ballot. With time, voters will see that Trump truly has transformed the party, most importantly by teaching Republicans how to fight. That realization will only grow, notwithstanding the ridiculous campaign against him this week.

….the right to kill your baby has been around for 50 years now…

NOVEMBER 11, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

THOUGHTS FROM THE AMMO LINE

Ammo Grrrll has a few thoughts ABOUT LAST TUESDAY…She writes:

Good night, everybody. John Fetterman has won in Pennsylvania. And the voting machines and ballot printers did not “work” in Arizona, although I think they worked exactly the way they were intended. A judge ruled against allowing the polls to be open for three more hours or for hand-counting the ballots. Awesome. And the person responsible for the mess was herself running for a higher office. Suh-weet! That kind of sums up where we are as a country in 2022. Our anticipated tsunami obviously did not materialize.

Decades of wretched miseducation in the government schools have done the electorate no favors. Biden himself — a toxic, corrupt, senile, prevaricating, girl-sniffing Tarbaby of disaster — was urged to stay the heck away from anyone who hoped to have a snowball’s chance in Hades of victory. The polls were all breaking our way right up until they didn’t. Were the polls manipulated to make us overconfident? Who knows? In the prophetic and inspiring words of Hillary Rodham Clinton: “What difference does it make?”

I hate to appropriate a Carter-era word, but I feel a heavy sense of “malaise” out there. A sense that we are being asked to clean the Augean Stables with just a whisk broom. Democrats had no choice except to run on a toxic stew of over-the-top fear-mongering and platitudes. They could hardly run on either their openly anti-American, racist, treasury-draining bribery programs or any “accomplishments.”

So it was all hair-on-fire rhetoric all the time. Popular ads here in Arizona featured three unattractive people with their alleged names and “Lifelong Republican” underneath their visages. The narrative went: “I’m a lifelong Republican but I’m voting for Katie Hobbs because Kari Lake is just too EXTREME. Her Extreme Extremism means she will end Social Security, — a good trick for a state governor! — ban all abortions AND birth control and bring back chastity belts and those bonnets from The Handmaid’s Tale.” Then there would be three women of varying degrees of color looking very sad as the voiceover shrieks, “Our RIGHTS!! Our Rights to ‘Reproductive Freedom’ have been taken away!!!”

True, the right to kill your baby has been around for 50 years now, with plenty of time to get accustomed to it. The original Roe v. Wade was meant for the first three months with the next three months for medical reasons and banned after that. But it has ratcheted ever upward. Before the Dobbs decision, you could dispose of your baby up until the labor pains were three minutes apart and for ANY reason.

It’s awful when a RIGHT you were used to just gets snatched away after only half a century and 50 million dead babies. You know what else was a right prized by many? The right to own human beings as chattel property! For 250 years, give or take, slave-owning was a RIGHT, goshdarnit! And in January of 1863, that right was taken away by the “racist” Republican Abraham Lincoln! Boohoohoo.

The Democrats were really upset, Boy Howdy, just like they are now with the unfettered right to kill babies possibly getting modified a bit when it’s thrown back to the states! Here’s an idea ‘bout how to preserve “the right to control [your] own bodies,” ladies. Why not, I don’t know, control your own bodies? Or at least the ACCESS to your own bodies. Maybe refrain from unprotected sex with anybody you don’t want to make a baby with? Especially strangers?

I am virulently opposed to the right to own slaves. And I feel exactly the same about the right to kill babies. Oh, and just by the by, up until October of 1913, it was also a RIGHT not to pay Federal income taxes. Yeah, I’m still upset about it, often shrieking into the sky like the unhinged loon in the popular meme.

I thought for sure that our quality of life was on the ballot and would be decisive: The right to secure borders; the right to be safe in our homes and vehicles. The right to ride inside a subway car – and not on the third rail. The right to afford groceries and gas for your car. The right not to have illustrated how-to fellatio manuals foisted on kindergartners. But apparently too many Americans are just fine with all that.

I thought we had reached maximum insanity and the country would demand a reboot. A friend in Southern Indiana – Southern Indiana! – had a kid whose classroom was forced to include a litter box because a demented child “identified” as a cat.

With Veterans Day today – God Bless every one of our vets — Americans realized that between abandoning Afghanistan, raiding the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, and being unable to fill recruitment quotas for any branch but the Marines, the U.S. is no way prepared to fight anyone except possibly soccer hooligans in the UK.

The Milleys and other woke brass have hauled out another stupid platitude – that “the military should look like America.” No. It absolutely should NOT “look like America.” The military is not just another woke corporation. It is a fighting force.

America has tens of millions of unfit fatties and geezers. We do not have unfit fatties or geezers in the military, at least not in the ranks. The U.S. military should be made up of smart, tough, fit, strong, young, competent warriors of any color and either of the two sexes that can pass every single rigorous test and make the grade. If you cannot qualify physically, then you can’t be a Ranger or a Seal. Period. “Equity” don’t go ‘round here.

These warriors should be able to read maps and operate sophisticated equipment. They should be able to improvise, adapt, and overcome. In other words, they should be not me. In fact, the un-me!

True, America LOOKS like me – old, short, overweight, lost without glasses, sometimes forgetful, technologically as left behind as our equipment in Afghanistan – but the military should look the OPPOSITE of me. Seriously, it won’t hurt my feelings at all. And most definitely it should not include men in dresses who have joined up for the free sex change operation. Seriously, has the leadership gone daft?

We need to clear out the asylum, one corrupt lunatic at a time. Tuesday was a very small and disappointing start. It was not the decisive turn toward sanity for which we had hoped. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” (To which my five-year-old responded, “If I had to go 1000 miles, I would take a plane.” Point taken.) There is much more work to be done. We’re demoralized now, but we really have no choice. It’s continue fighting or just give up and “love Big Brother.” We have two years to read up on Valley Forge and find the courage to emulate it.

Trouble In River City?

November 11, 2022

Three Primary Factors Stopped That Red Wave

By Cassandra Smith at American Thinker:

After watching the debacle on Tuesday night, I did my own post-mortem of what happened. I lay the blame on three major factors: The Republican elites, the American public, and early voting.

The Republican Elites

By far the most important factor is the Republican elites. In 2020, the GOPe was almost as glad as the Dems to be rid of Donald Trump, so they ignored and denied the massive vote fraud that swept Joe Biden into office.

After Biden’s many undistinguished years in the Senate, they convinced themselves that he was their friend and would work with them, in other words, “he’s one of us….” With a few notable exceptions, they went along with the Dems’ “insurrection” claptrap hoping it would vanquish Trump from the national scene for good. The GOPes ignored the effect these actions had on the Republican base, which was far more loyal to Donald Trump than to the Republican party.

My husband and I are pretty typical conservatives, and we were outraged at the Republican elites long before the 2020 election. Even though I changed my registration to “independent” after the Romney disaster, I continued to contribute regularly to the Republican Party and Republican candidates. That stopped cold in January 2020 after the GOPe rolled over and denied the 2020 voting irregularities and chastised anyone who questioned the results. No one penny of our money has gone to Republicans since and probably won’t ever again in the future.

Trump’s biggest accomplishment was exposing the Uniparty in D.C. Unfortunately, he was unable to break it up. There are limits to what one man can do when he must fight his “allies” almost as hard as his opponents. For the most part, Republican elites were embarrassed when Trump fought back against Democrat attacks and falsehoods. I can’t count the number of times they criticized Trump for being “coarse” and “unpresidential.” After working so hard against Trump, the GOP elites are reaping the consequences—less loyalty and enthusiasm from the base.

Image: Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy. YouTube screen grab.

What response did the Republicans make to the Dems’ constant drumbeat about Republican fascism leading up to the election? As far as I can tell, it was mostly crickets. They were overconfident and complacent. They spent three weeks beating their chests about the “red wave” and talking big about what they’d do when they took control of Congress. While they were doing that, the Democrats and their media allies were scaring the bejesus out of their base and, as a result, they turned out in droves.

When I read that Mitch McConnell called Joe O’Dea, a Colorado Senate candidate, “the perfect candidate,” I shuddered because conservatives dislike McConnell almost as much as they dislike Nancy Pelosi.  That statement probably cost O’Dea support among rural conservatives.

O’Dea compounded his problems by saying he didn’t want to see Trump as president.  That unforced error gained him nothing and lost him votes in the red part of Colorado (most of the state besides the Front Range and the ski resorts), contributing to his humiliating loss to Michael Bennet. With the Californication of Colorado, O’Dea always had an uphill slog but might have performed better if he’d kept his mouth shut about Trump.

I haven’t seen the statistics on turnout, but I know that if I’m disgusted with the Republican party, then a lot of other people are as well.

The American Public

The American public, having been fed a steady diet of leftism and dumbed-down curricula from nursery school through graduate school, no longer understands civics or economics, and sees our form of government as somehow inferior to European socialism.  European socialism is only made possible by the U.S. Defense umbrella in the form of NATO, but few understand that distinction. 

As a result, Americans don’t see the threat to our freedoms that vaccine and mask mandates and lockdowns were and are. They also don’t understand that someone must pay the bill for government handouts, either directly as confiscatory taxes or indirectly as rampant inflation or hyperinflation.

As a result, they tend to vote for the person who promises them something for nothing.  Many are mush-heads who will be gobsmacked with the business failures, job losses, foreclosures, bankruptcies, shortages, and other chaos that will inevitably result from the Biden administration’s policies.

Early Voting

Early voting is the sleeper contributor to last night’s losses.  It gives both parties an advance detailed picture of how many people voted, who voted, who is likely to vote but hasn’t yet, and what party voters support or belong to. With all the massive databases out there and modern computers, they have a pretty good idea of how many votes they need to produce to win an election and where to go to get them, days before election day.

Then, all that the parties must do is go round up their laggards and either run them to the polls or lockboxes or collect their ballots. The Democrats have a huge advantage with legions of union foot soldiers who excel at rounding up their lightly-motivated voters and strong-arming them if necessary. My experience with leftist voters is that they’re more emotional than rational, so the Democrats just need to scare them about some issue, and voila! They get their votes. In a close election, this attention to detail will make the difference.

I freely admit that I’m no expert political consultant, but I have observed politics since I was a teenager, and I spent most of my career as an analyst so I can recognize trends and identify root causes. Take my analysis for what it is worth.

Cassandra Smith is a pseudonym.

Are Crooked Dems Causing Trouble in Arizona?

NOVEMBER 11, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN 2022 ELECTION

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH ARIZONA?

I developed a healthy respect for attorney John A. “Jack” Clifford many years ago when we represented adverse parties in an intellectual property dispute. Jack is of counsel with Merchant & Gould. P.C. He sends us this first-hand report under the heading WHAT IS WRONG WITH MARICOPA COUNTY? PLENTY AND IT’S COMPLICATED. The AP’s latest story on the doings in Arizona is here. Jack writes:

I hope you are well. I write from Maricopa County, Arizona, where I have lived, worked and voted since 2014. I write as an individual and not on behalf of any client or my law firm.

First, Maricopa county is huge. The entire state of Arizona has only 10 or 11 counties, compared to a similar-sized Minnesota with 87 counties. You can drive an hour at 70 miles an hour in about any direction to get to the county line, or so it seems. For reasons that are not clear (I think convenience is the excuse), any registered voter can cast an in-person vote anywhere in the county. That sounds great until you realize that because of local school boards, water boards, and other local issues on the ballot this time not all voters have the same ballot.

My school district is only one of about 10 in the Phoenix metro area. More rural areas have their own, too. With school bond referenda in each district, we had something like 64 different ballots in use in the 2020 election in Maricopa county. I have not seen the number for 2022, but you get the idea. The authorities deal with this by printing ballots on site after a voter identifies himself. The plan is to print the right ballot for that voter and send him off to fill in the bubbles as they wish.

The ballots are intended to have registration marks on them to allow the scanner to tell which form is being scanned, and tallied accordingly. I don’t know if you run a printer at your home, but I can tell you I have lots of hiccups and frustration from my little print shop on my desk. Did the polling place use the right paper, the right ink, or give the voter a pen that bleeds through and can be seen from on the other side? What level of QC is going on there? Some voters reported that the felt tip pen they were given bled through. What else could go wrong? I used a ballpoint pen myself.

Anyway, trouble ensued again this year. I think we made the system too complicated to run smoothly. Of course, we made things worse by reducing the number of polling places after a year when we had small turnout and a bunch of bureaucrats saw a chance to save money. Add a layer of CoVid-excused changes and we are certainly now off to the turtle races this year. I suspect the IT guys told them, sure this should work. We got this. What is your experience with a technology fix to make your life easier?

When some ballots refused to go through the scanners, some voters were told just to go to a different polling place and try again. Once they got to the new place they were told that since they had checked in and received a ballot at the prior location they would not be given another ballot. Makes sense, but not if your first ballot was trashed. Which brings me to “drawer 3.”

Apparently some of the unscannable ballots were placed into a “secure lock box” where the authorities essentially said we intend to scan these somewhere else at a time to be determined. Since the ballot would not scan where it was filled in, who believes it will scan downtown? Hand tally anyone?

Don’t forget that our Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, has ultimate supervisory responsibility for running a “free and fair” election, but is herself running for governor and is locked in a very tight battle with none other than Kari Lake. Apparently, the appearance of impropriety is the standard they use there. Plus, the SOS’s office has been closed for two years due to Covid, and the team was working from home via Zoom. Seems unlikely to me all those printers and scanners were checked out via Zoom.

I made a great screenshot of the vote tallies from the SOS’s office this [i.e., yesterday] morning. Katie’s picture is in the upper left corner as SOS, and her picture is also lower down on the same page next to her vote tally. At least it is not the exact same image. Does not seem kosher to me somehow. The optics are bad.

She did not recuse herself or step down. Maybe she needs the paycheck. She campaigned saying she was an Uber driver and needed the money to support her family. OK.

Are these new problems? Not really, they all happened in 2020, but were mostly swept under the rug as anyone who “saw something and then said something” was tied to the whipping post.

So here we are. My wife and I are on the “permanent mail in ballot list” and get our ballots about a month before each election in the mail. That is allowed here and is very common. I receive ballots for our kids at my house even through they have moved away. What could go wrong there?

Anyway, my wife and I then have to figure out when and where to return our ballots. Do we chance the US Mail? Do we take it to a random unsecured drop box?

You can return them anywhere in the county. If you turn them in too early, you risk a media source reporting “heavy early ballots coming in from Republican areas.” We turned them in at city hall, in a room where early in-person voting was taking place. We put them in the box the poll worker told us to. I hope it was not “drawer 3.” About three days later I received a text that said my ballot had been “signature verified and scanned.” Hopefully that means what it says.

Stay tuned. The “big guys” running things say they expect to have 95 percent of the ballots counted by the close of business on Friday. Will they honestly report what they show, or age them over the weekend?

Late last night Jack updated his report:

The county has about 17,000 “drawer 3” ballots to deal with as of about 7:00 p.m. Thursday. They are now lowering expectations to say that “maybe sometime next week” they will have only a few ballots left to count in Maricopa county. If you watch the online webcam of the counting, it appears to be proceeding in very slow motion.

I also want to clarify that if one votes in person in his hometown the ballot you are given is likely preprinted on suitable paper. The on-demand printed ballots are usually for those voting far from home but still in the county, or for those voting in a polling place that runs out of preprinted ballots.

“In order of importance, were: inflation, abortion, crime, gun policy, and immigration….”

America Needs to Take Immigration 101

While many of our fellow citizens bemoan the decline of the country, there is a frustrating lack of curiosity about why the same problems continue to plague us. 

By Brian Lonergan at American Greatness:

November 10, 2022

If there’s one thing our corporate media loves as much as hyping an upcoming election, it is conducting a days-long postmortem on that election: identifying the winners and losers, who dropped the ball and who is “The Next Big Thing.” Yet, beneath the surface of personality-driven analysis, one can find data that reveals much about what Americans see as the nation’s biggest problems. 

An NBC News exit poll found that the biggest issues to voters, in order of importance, were: inflation, abortion, crime, gun policy, and immigration. After the last two years of Biden-fueled destruction of our border, the idea that immigration barely registers as the fifth-most important issue to voters should be disturbing. 

One of the reasons immigration does not rank higher in importance to voters is the widespread misunderstanding about how immigration works. For all the hand-wringing by cable news talking heads on the need for a “national discussion” of various issues, America desperately needs to talk about immigration. If and when that conversation occurs, it must include these issues:

Border security is compassionate. One of the most effective tactics of the pro-illegal immigration lobby has been to manipulate the instinct of most Americans for compassion. To refuse entry into the United States to anyone seeking it, they argue, is to be mean-spirited to the less fortunate. 

Actually the opposite is true. Surrendering operational control of our southern border, as Joe Biden did on his first day in the Oval Office as chief executive, might be the cruelest thing one could possibly do to those seeking entry. By now there are numerous accounts of how women and children are routinely sexually abused by cartels, who then move them about like cargo and murder family members who cannot pay transport fees.     

Those who do make it across the border are often forced to serve as indentured servants to pay off their cartel debt. Enforcing our borders would threaten the cartels’ human trafficking racket and spare untold numbers of people from its horror. 

Americans need relief from their suffering. Reckless anti-borders policies have caused nightmarish pain to American citizens as well. In addition to its human trafficking operation, cartels at the border have a booming business in transporting addictive drugs into the United States. Chief among them is fentanyl, currently the leading cause of death for Americans 18-45 years old.

The cost of these pro-alien, anti-American policies is far-reaching. Illegal aliens released into the United States under the Biden Administration will cost American taxpayers an additional $20.4 billion annually. This at a time when our homeless population, which includes many veterans, is soaring. When senators tell us building a wall on our border is too expensive,  we must ask, “How much would a wall save by reducing the number of illegal aliens who consume more services than they pay for?” And can those savings be directed toward helping American citizens in need here in our own communities? 

Lawlessness and societal breakdown. When our government flagrantly refuses to enforce its own laws, more lawlessness inevitably results. Among the most destructive practices in our country today are “sanctuary” policies, whereby local politicians actively recruit illegal aliens to their cities with the promise they will not be prosecuted or deported. 

Where these laws exist, crime and squalor have flourished. It is no coincidence that a list of the most prominent sanctuary communities could double as a list of the areas with the highest incidence of rape, murder, theft, and illegal drugs. The philosophy that endorses sanctuary policies also promotes defunding police, eliminating cash bail and lighter sentences for violent criminals. 

The epicenter of such thinking, California, also famously declared it would not prosecute “victimless” crimes and thefts of under $950 worth of goods. The result has been an epidemic of “smash and grab” robberies at high-end stores in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, many stores closing rather than subject their employees to nonstop plunder. Lawlessness—whether in the form of tolerating immigration violations or street crime—undermines public safety. 

Politicians and media figures continue to push anti-borders policies, knowing their own families will be protected from them. No such protection exists for ordinary Americans, who could become Angel Families at any time. That is collateral damage our “leaders” will happily accept while feathering their own political caps.

While many of our fellow citizens bemoan the decline of the country, there is a frustrating lack of curiosity about why the same problems continue to plague us. Until we start seeing illegal immigration and its related poisonous symptoms differently, the only direction we will continue to go as a nation will be down.

Brian Lonergan is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.

And The Welfare State!

November 10, 2022

The GOP and the youth vote

By Stephen Lamkin at American Thinker:

The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) conducted exit interviews with people under 30 at polling stations in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Sixty percent of people under 30 voted Democrat in 2022 and 62% of people under 30 voted Democrat in 2020.  In 2018, people under 30 voted for Democrats 67% of the time.  So it shouldn’t be controversial to say the GOP is struggling to communicate with today’s up-and-coming generations.

Millennials and Generation Z were born and raised in a welfare state.  Obamacare’s costs caused employers to cut back many employees to under 40 hours a week.  Many young people have no idea what it is to work a steady 40-hour-a-week job with the same employer for their adult lives.  Many young people are forced to live communally with three to five other young people in apartments because rent is so high, and they do not earn enough money to live in a single-family dwelling.  Many young people are forced to rely on government programs (welfare) to survive — or live with their parents.  They have no idea of the ideal free-market/self-determination society that the GOP touts, and the GOP does nothing to educate them about such a society.

Marijuana and other drugs have been legalized by state and local governments.  In addition to being addicted to welfare, many young people are addicted to drugs, which dull their senses, decrease their alertness, and provide an escape from the hard realities of life.  Millennials and Generation Z have been indoctrinated by a left-wing education system to believe in climate change, the evils of fossil fuel and internal combustion energy, and transgenderism.

Millennials and Generation Z consume their news, current events, and entertainment via computers and online streaming services.  They do not consume broadcast TV and cable TV.  They are not going to see campaign ads on cable TV, and they throw mailers away.  They immediately delete spam emails and robocalls, and they don’t answer their doors for “door-knockers.”  And yet these outdated campaign methods are what the GOP relies on.  GOP ads do not make a cause-and-effect illustration explaining why Democrat policies subject younger people to poverty, welfare, drug addiction, and crime.

This election cycle should be a wake-up call for the GOP.  The GOP has to start effectively communicating with the younger generations.  And the GOP needs to explain that young people and minority-race Americans are living an existence one degree removed from the Stone Age due to decades of failed Democrat social and economic policies — policies that have caused a Black Holocaust in America’s big cities.  The GOP needs to field generic ads attacking and exposing the Democrat party — and in Democrat strongholds where most minority-race Americans live (Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, etc).  Until the GOP wakes up, it will always have its “red tsunami” reduced to a trickle.