Harris Down to +0.1% in WI in Latest RCP Average

If this holds up, it's a landslide.

Martin Gurri: I Refused to Vote in the Last Two Elections; Now I'm Voting for Trump

Gurri has written some really good stuff. (I tried to read his book, but it ostentatiously failed to grip me.)

   I think he's 100% right about this: the real danger is the CTRL-left (though he doesn't use the term).

Trump says a lot of incoherent and alarming-sounding stuff. And he was wildly out of bounds after he lost in 2020. But the totalitarian, Orwellian left is, by far, the bigger danger. Trump says stuff that might indicate authoritarian tendencies, but it's usually not clear what he's saying. Also, he doesn't do those things. The left is in the midst of a thus-far-successful campaign of radical leftist cultural domination. Down to the imposition of obvious falsehoods as official "truths."

   Like Gurri, I think the choice is clear, though, also like him, since I find both party-plus-candidate complexes unacceptable, I expect I'll be neither ecstatic nor despondent whatever the outcome.

Democrats Sue to Allow Noncitizens to Vote in VA

It's more complicated than that...but it's part of the motive, IMO.

They can, of course, say that they don't want citizens accidentally purged from the rolls--and I expect that's part of the motive.

My guess is that it comes down to perceived costs and benefits, as so many things do. Dems think that the cost of noncitizens voting is minimal compared to the benefits of making voting easier for minority citizens. Pubs think the opposite.

I side with the Republicans on this one--and always have. This isn't something I changed my mind about when I became more conservative / left (or was abandoned by) the blue team.

Fox News Harris Interview

From the beginning Harris was evasive and Baier was combative. One excuse for the latter goes like this: she got there late, cutting the interview short, and was excessively evasive, so he had to press her. Could be.

   Harris is completely full of shit about immigration, of course. She's got nothing--if you don't count lies, evasion and ORANGE MAN BAD. The Biden administration was a train wreck, and nowhere more than at the border. Responsibility for the border disaster lies squarely on the shoulders of the administration. And the party. And Harris...

   I almost don't blame her for lying and evading about this--she's got no rational defense.

   Baier, however, seemed overly combative to me. And I though the use of the clip of Jocelyn Nungaray's mother was questionable. I understand that there are good reasons to put a face on the statistics. OTOH, almost any policy is going to be a tragedy for someone. Administrations have to think in terms of the statistics--or so it seems to me. Either side in the Obamacare debate can, for example, probably produce stories about someone whom the other side's policies killed, crippled or immiserated. 

   Re: the "trans" surgeries for inmates, she really had nothing. She actually reverted to the boilerplate ad hominem: Trump is trying to scare people. Nonsense. The point is that your apparent policy preference is objectively surreal. The intention of the party informing people about your surreal policy preference is irrelevant.

Anyway.

   In general, I'd say that this was not a good interview for Harris. (Though I'm not neutral, of course.) Not so much because she's an empty suit but because she had to defend bad policies. She's not wily enough to give a rhetorically effective defense of such terrible policies. Few are. But she did what she had to do: she kept saying words. That's enough to keep her from losing support, and to maybe at least keep undecideds undecided.

   Her best line of attack continues to be the unfitness argument; it has the virtue of being sound.

   The "enemy within" argument is part of that strategy, though it seems to me to be more of the same sort of thing we've seen over and over: Trump says something incoherent, the left puts the worst interpretation on it. To repeat myself: they pretend he said something terrible even when he's on video saying the opposite--see e.g. the "very fine people" hoax. So, when he says something unclear--as he usually does--they have a field day. The left can take even the most innocuous utterance and produce a line of gibberish "proving" it to be racist. This is their forte. And Trump is such an inarticulate dumbass that he causes alarm even among reasonable people.

   And this "enemy within" stuff...that's a phrase no one should want to get within a hundred miles of. Rather like "enemy of the people." It's objectively alarming. WTF does he mean by it? Some say he means illegal alien gangs, some say he's talking about radical rioters... I can't freaking tell. It sounded pretty bad to me. Also it's perfectly reasonable to think: no acceptable candidate repeatedly says unclear-and-possibly-authoritarian things. Say enough such things and the smart money says that you're an authoritarian...

   Anyway.

   I haven't watched the end of the interview yet. I can't deal with that much stupid right now.

Entire CNN Panel Has Never Heard of the Ferguson Effect, Refuses to Believe in Social Science

I've started at the relevant bit, but the whole segment is progressive cluelessness on parade:

Girdusky is incredulous that none of them has even heard of any of this.

Then they get down to utterly clueless accusations and abject misconstrual of everything he says. 

Harris/Walz, Panicked, Pander to Black Men With Free Money and Legal Weed

As somebody else (I can't remember who) said: now this is how you buy votes: $1,000,000 "fully forgivable" loans!

The Dems are done pussyfooting around with ordinary gibs. Now they're coming as close to just saying "We'll give you $$$" as they think the law will allow.

Oh and: legal weed!

Patronizing as hell.

Which is a generally-applicable description of progressive racial politics...

And this on top of free money to Millennials in the form of (illegal) loan forgiveness.

Throw in some free cats and box wine for that one other demographic and they might pull this out yet.

Trump: On Track to Win?

The Once and Future POTUS leads in all swing states other than Wisconsin, where RCP shows him with a 0.3% deficit. His lead has (unless I missed something) been growing in them all other than GA, where it's fallen slightly. He's up by 0.3% in PA and a whole percentage point in MI. The RCP betting markets averages stand at Trump 56.5 Harris 42.5 57.7-41.3. Polymarket says 56-39 58-38.

   It's still a tight race.

   And there's plenty of time for him to blow it.

   There are losing cues on the blue team. 

   But they seem to have switched to emphasizing the Trump's unfit to govern angle...which, IMO, is the only good angle they really have. And it's sufficiently powerful.

   Or would be.

   If the Democrats had not gone insane.

   Now it really doesn't matter so much that Trump's personally unfit to govern. He's basically sane, with basically sane policies, and a proven record of success and good governance. And there are lots of rails in place to keep him between the ditches. The Dems are just cracked. They've adopted the wrong values, a deranged worldview, and some unhinged philosophical ideas. They are now the Orwellian party. If Trump lives up to his promise, he'll do well. Should the Dems live up to their promise, it will be a disaster.

   But...

   The fitness argument is a powerful one, and it's certainly the one I'd lean hard on if I were the blues.

Violent Crime Rates Likely Still Increasing; FBI Stealth-Edits 2022 Numbers

John Lott

   Not from the Lott thing:

Violent crime rates shot up in 2020 as a result of the Ferguson Effect, police defunding, "decarceration," Soros DAs refusing to enforce laws (against nonwhites, anyway). The left, using its reality distortion powers, chose to believe that...somehow...it was COVID...

(Narrator: It was not COVID...)

   Now, with crime rates still higher, and Dems still pushing policies to keep it that way, crime reporting has become sketchy. The more reliable National Crime Victimization Survey numbers are unaffected, but those in the Uniform Crime Report are.

   Crime spiked so acutely in '20 that I wouldn't be surprised if it were dropping...but it doesn't seem to be.

   So weird.

   Stop enforcing the law and you get more crime...

   Reminds me of the (NYT? Atlantic?) headline, roughly: Despite drop in crime, prison populations remain high...

I&I: Noncitizens Will Vote in November; the Only Question Is: How Many?

Dems and the media are still mostly at the It's not happening stage of the now-familiar It's-not-happening-It's-happening-but-it's-a-good-thing-It's-happening-and-you're-a-racist-if-you-oppose-it cycle. Some leftier progressives think noncitizens should be able to vote--and have changed some state and local laws to allow it in some state and local elections. There's virtually no doubt that some have also started working for it at the national level. Nor is there much doubt that such folk would think it a good thing for noncitizens to vote illegally now in national elections.

   I&I:

Yet just this weekend, ABC News ran a piece titled: “In South Texas, the myth of noncitizen voting takes center stage.”
But it’s the media that’s peddling the myth. Voter rolls are criminally outdated and error prone. Some states are so eager to register voters that they don’t put up needed safeguards. When election officials do bother to audit their registration rolls, they keep turning up thousands of noncitizens.
Consider these recent examples: 

• Virginia’s attorney general recently announced the state moved 6,303 noncitizens from its voter rolls in 2022 and 2023.
• Arizona admitted a massive error in its voter rolls resulted in 218,000 registered voters who lacked proof of U.S. citizenship.
• A suit filed in Nevada asserts that as many as 11,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in the state and nearly 4,000 of them voted in 2020.
• An Oregon audit found nearly 1,300 noncitizens registered to vote in that state.
• Ohio’s secretary of state found nearly 600 noncitizens registered to vote.

Meanwhile, a local news investigation found mailers sent to noncitizens by their union – LIUNA – urging them to “Stop the Steal” and vote for Kamala Harris in November.
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project gathered video evidence of noncitizens in Arizona and Georgia admitting on camera that they are registered to vote. They also found fliers in an illegal immigrant staging area in Mexico urging them to vote in November.
Dozens of lawmakers are pressing Attorney General Merrick Garland about what he is doing to stop noncitizens from voting. “Clearly, there is a non-negligible amount of voter participation by noncitizens in federal elections,” they say, “which is not only a serious threat to the integrity of our elections and the democratic process they represent, but also has the potential to reduce Americans’ trust and confidence in election results.”
But the Biden-Harris Justice Department appears more interested in preventing states from cleaning their voter rolls of noncitizens.
Last week, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued a statement:

“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls.”

And Democrats blocked a bill – the SAVE Act – that would have simply required some proof of citizenship in order to vote.
It’s almost as if Democrats want to let noncitizens vote.

Bill Ackman: Why Support Trump?

A number of my good friends and family have been surprised about my decision to support @realDonaldTrump for president. They have been surprised because my political giving history has been mostly to Democrats, my voting registration has typically been Democrat (in NY, you must…

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) October 11, 2024

DoJ Tells Four Police and Fire Departments That It's Racist to Expect Employees to Know Basic Math

We're going to get more of this from progressive bureaucrats no matter what...but way more of it if Harris wins.

*Science* Promotes Bogus Claims of Racial Discrimination in Academia

link

Joy Reid is Losing It

I mean...the little bit of it she has remaining...

Psychopath Who Tied Couple to Anchor and Drowned Them to Get Money for "Sex Change"...Gets a Taxpayer-Funded "Sex Change" in Prison

Behold, the left.

Conservatives Pounce! on: Kamala Harris Plagiarism. NYT: Only 500 Words! Not the Worst Kind of Plagiarism! Criticizing Plagiarism is Racist!!!!11

LOOOOOOL

My favorite part is about how it's not the bad kind of plagiarism! Because it...and here I want to emphasize that I'm not making this up...doesn't involve stealing somebody else's ideas...

   Now...this is a "rule" I've never heard before in my (broadly construed) forty years in academia.

Harris clearly plagiarized whole, huge passages from e.g. Wikipedia.

   Word for word.

   Now, people unconsciously pick up ideas here and there and eventually forget that they got it from somebody else. This happened e.g. to Thomas Nagel with respect to the central example of "What is it Like to Be a Bat," IIRC. Honestly, I'm surprised that doesn't happen more often.

   If there is a worst kind of plagiarism, it's the kind in Harris's book, word-for-word stealing of entire passages from elsewhere and misrepresenting them as your own.

   The New York Times is a gigantic piece of shit. It has pretensions of intellectual seriousness, but it is just making up bullshit rules about scholarly work to save its favored empty-suit candidate.

   Ripping off someone else's ideas might be more harmful to the wronged scholar, but it is Harris-style plagiarism that reflects most badly on the plagiarist--there's no excuse for it. It couldn't have been a mistake. It shows that you're a lying, stealing, lightweight jackass.

   All the more so when you're plagiarizing Wikipedia and advertising brochures...my God...

Harris Plagiarized Extensive Parts of Her Book *Smart on Crime*

We can begin with a passage in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited AP/NBC News report: pic.twitter.com/pZv5mD3m5t

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 14, 2024

Trump Babbles; James Carville and Jen Psaki: HE'S LITERALLY HITLER

Behold, our options.

The State of the Race

I'm pretty calm about it, largely because I dislike both options, but largely because I'm pretty confident that the less-bad one is going to win. There seems to be some loser-talk showing up in blue-team chatter, along with rumors of panic and bad internal polling data (and good data on the other side). The turbo-cringe Harris ads aimed at men seem to me to be destined for the American political loser hall of fame...alongside e.g. Dukakis in the tank. RCP puts Trump up by at least a little bit in all the battlegrounds except for Wisconsin.

   With a little luck we can soon go back to merely worrying about Trump. On the whole, a less-unsatisfactory state of affairs, IMO.

"White People are the Problem"

To whom to attribute this? Well, the post seems to be by Nia-Malika Henderson. I don't know whether people still generally write their own columns when they achieve a fair-to-middlin' state of notoriety--but either she wrote it or at least endorsed it by putting her name on it. But columnists, we're told, don't generally write their own headlines. So she may well not have written the sub-headline...which isn't even all that bad:

African American men aren’t the voters the former president should be worried about. It’s White men and White women.

Then there's a tweetquote from Wendell Peirce:

The party has to stop scapegoating Black men. Black men aren’t the problem. White men and White women are. No other group votes at 87-90% for Dems but Black folk.

Here's the two most important 'grafs from the body of the essay: 

As a candidate, this type of condescending approach to Black voters, who overwhelmingly backed him and still adore him, was a balm to White people, who saw in Obama a figure who could fix the problem that Black America has supposedly posed to the body politic. Columnist Jonathan Alter wrote in 2008 that Obama’s “most exciting potential for moral leadership could be in the African-American community.” Because, of course, Black Americans needed this the most. (Speaking of moral leadership, fast forward eight years to when the majority of White Americans would cast their ballots for Donald Trump, something they are poised to do again.) 

But as Harris, who has run a nearly flawless race in a compressed timeline, tries to take her turn at history, it is Black voters, specifically Black men, who are being scapegoated. Remember that in a state like Michigan in 2020, Black men were 5% of the electorate, and 88% of their ballots went to Joe Biden. White people were 80% of the electorate. Are there any lectures for them on racism or sexism from Obama? It’s true that Obama, at times, was speaking to all men, but he landed most harshly on Black men, the most pro-Kamala group and one of the smallest voting blocs of the electorates.

Now, I can't help but ridicule the bit about Harris running "a nearly flawless race." You've got to be deeply enchambered to even be able to type that sentence. And the compressed timeline is to her advantage. It's not some burden she is overcoming. Without it, she'd be in even worse shape.

   But the point I've been building up to is this: 

   It's not really clear how bad the claims of this essay are, nor who's really responsible for them. To some extent NMH, of course. To some extent someone else's tweet. To some extent an anonymous headline-writer.

   And Real Clear Politics shows its rightward lean (IMO) with its inflammatory headline: 

"Dear President Obama: White People are the Problem."

Nice work, RCP. Way to help calm everybody down.

   Not sure it's even worth moving on. But I will anyway.

   This is part of the whites suck and men suck projects of the left. The overlap ('intersection' being another handy word ruined by the left) of the two classes is a group they really love to hate...but to avoid stepping on their own faction's toes, they really want/need straight white men as the enemy. But NMH doesn't shoot for the trifecta here.

   The particular way we suck, according to this post, is: 

(a) We don't vote overwhelmingly for Democrats

(b) (Too) many of us are voting for Trump.

   No doubt these are in addition to our other myriad flaws.

   Now, the obvious response is that it is a matter of some disagreement, and less than perfect clarity, whether (a) and (b) are bad or good. I think that the preponderance of evidence indicates that (a) and (b) are good...

   And imagine that I wrote a piece for a national opinion outlet titled something like: White women, black men and black women are the problem.

   That'd go over great.

   I don't like that kind of shit, but I do have to admit that, if I'm right about our current cultural and political strife...well...white dudes would get credit for voting mainly for the lesser evil. If we're eligible for blame here we should also be eligible for credit. Though I'd rather we not play that game.

   To repeat myself: Trump doesn't belong anywhere near the Oval Office.

   But Trump, together with his agenda, is a lesser evil than the progressive/Democrat agenda together with whoever their candidate is. Harris is largely irrelevant, IMO...though she is a bit of an extra negative given that she seems to be (a) a hard-core lefty at heart and (b) a minimally competent DEI candidate at best. (Though one could argue that she's better than a much-diminished Biden, I suppose.)

   Finally, Obama's alleged concern--that black men not voting for Harris is caused by sexism--well, bullshit. There are clear and cogent reasons for not wanting to vote for the Democrat ticket. Those are sufficient to explain such a decision. Undoubtedly some people are motivated by racism and sexism...some people are motivated by just about any motive you can think of. But there's no reason to take the left seriously about this anymore, given that it's boilerplate for them now: anyone who disagrees with them about anything is motivated by one or more components of the Standard Litany of -isms and -"phobias". It's a joke at this point. It was a joke 40 years ago when this nonsense was mostly limited to academia. If you're still taking them seriously, that's on you, bud.

   And probably Obama's just trying to apply rhetorical pressure to get more votes for Dems. Does he really believe that sexism is a significant factor? Maybe. I don't know. But it's at least as likely to be campaign-season bullshit as it is to be a serious claim. I still have certain fond feelings for Obama. And to some extent I want to excuse him thusly: don't hate the player, hate the game.

Obama Speaks to Black Men re: Kamala, and: Two Leftist Pathologies: (a) No One Disagrees with Them for Good Reasons; (b) Obsession with and Fabrication of Hidden Motives

link

Well, like the title says.

   The postpostmodern left thinks that it's impossible to reasonably disagree with them. This meshes well with their obsession with the fabrication of hidden motives--if you do disagree with them, no matter how cogent your arguments, it must be because of some hidden prejudice (here insert The Standard Litany of -isms and -"phobias").

   This tendency to freestyle speculation about motives may be partially grounded in Freud--a hero of recent Continental philosophy. That's always been my guess, but I really don't know.

   It's not quite true...but it's almost true...that they only have one argument: You're a ____ist/phobe.* They simply repeat the same nonsense over and over and over... It shouldn't work, but it does. We've turned things like racism etc. into such horrible moral crimes that people are terrified to be accused of them, no matter how preposterously. As long as this remains true, they'll keep making ungrounded accusations, and they'll keep winning.

* The incidental joke there is, of course, that that isn't even an argument...

Big WSJ Poll Pretty Good For Harris

Not great news.

Kamala Harris's Disastrous Town Hall

I've only seen some clips...but they are catastrophic

E.g. her answer to the guy who was skeptical about the process by which KH became the Democrat nominee.

I almost could not believe what I was hearing.

It's like the Republicans got ahold of her teleprompter controls and set out to make her sound as dumb as possible.

Oh and: did she use a teleprompter?

Dunno. 

Of course the wingnut echo chamber goes from zero to religious conviction about such nonsense in like a minute and a half...

Oh and: now she's saying that she was "working class..." Middle class was one thing...that term is used very broadly. But now her Stanford academician/scientist parents were "working class"...

She actually makes Trump look good.

Which, antecedently, I would have thought impossible.

Christopher Steele Still Believes

link

And a fair number of true believers on the left agree, actually.

John Nichols at The Nation is Whistling Past the Graveyard

I don't understand how Democrats can be comfortably smug given the current shape of the race...but here we are...